President Trump signed an executive order Monday, decrying the “irrational campaign against plastic straws,” and stating that it is “the policy of the United States to end the use of paper straws.”
President Donald Trump said paper straws don’t work. “These things don’t work. I’ve had them many times, and on occasion, they break, they explode,” he said. “If something’s hot, they don’t last very long, like a matter of minutes, sometimes a matter of seconds. It’s a ridiculous situation.”
His new executive order overturns a move by his predecessor Joe Biden to phase out government purchases of plastic straws, as well as plastic cutlery and packaging.
“Enjoy your next drink without a straw that disgustingly dissolves in your mouth!!!,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. Instead, the US president wants the government to exclusively move to plastic.
Trump: Plastic straws will not affect the shark
The order tells government agencies to stop buying paper straws “and otherwise ensure that paper straws are no longer provided within agency buildings”.
“I don’t think that plastic is going to affect the shark very much as they’re eating, as they’re munching their way through the ocean,” he said at a White House announcement.
In the run-up to the 2020 presidential election his campaign raised nearly $500,000 (£411,000) from selling plastic straws.
Amid concerns about plastic waste accumulating on beaches and in the oceans, and about the fossil fuels required to produce them, several US states and cities have banned plastic straws, and some restaurants no longer automatically give them to customers.
A 2015 video of researchers removing a straw that had got stuck in a turtle’s nose went viral and helped fuel a shift away from plastic straws and other single-use items, which sometimes are used for just minutes.
Plastic takes decades and hundreds of years to break down in the environment.
Plastics industry and environmentalists clash over straws
“Straws are just the beginning,” Matt Seaholm, president and CEO of the Plastics Industry Association, said in a statement. “‘Back to Plastic’ is a movement we should all get behind.”
Lisa Ramsden, Greenpeace USA’s senior plastics campaigner, said: “Once again, President Trump is pretending to be a populist while siding with his Big Oil buddies over the public interest.”
“It was never about the straw in particular,” says Jackie Nuñez, founder of the Last Plastic Straw campaign. “It was about single-use plastics, a way to get people to act on it in a simple, tangible way.”
Straws, she says, were a “gateway” issue to get people interested in curbing plastic use. According to one estimate, Americans use, and throw away, as many as a half a billion straws each day.
More recently, the movement to reduce single-use plastic has focused less on wildlife, and more on the negative impact plastics can have on human health, citing a growing body of scientific research.
A study published this month found that human brain samples contained a whole spoon’s worth of tiny nanoparticles. Earlier research found plastic particles in human lungs and in men’s testicles. One study from last year found nearly a quarter-million plastic particles in a typical liter of bottled water.
The move is just one in a wave of Trump actions to roll back environmental protections. On his first day in office, he withdrew the USA, the world’s second-largest climate polluter, from the landmark Paris Agreement on fighting climate change.
Related: Microplastics Widespread in the Seafood We Eat, Study Finds