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Abstract
Drinking straws present a simple form factor for evaluating material design strategies taken by manufacturers to achieve circular, sustainable, and non-persistent products in response to global restrictions and consumer sentiment. We investigated thirteen on-the-market drinking straws of varying formulations, characterizing their physical, chemical, and marine biodegradation properties. These data informed sustainability metrics used for evaluating the effectiveness and tradeoffs of design strategies, ultimately arriving at four key conclusions. First, diverting anthropogenic methane as a renewable feedstock to make polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) resulted in the only straw with a net-negative global warming potential. Second, adding biogenic fillers to conventional polymers (e.g., polypropylene) to minimize plastic usage is unlikely to produce substantial environmental benefits compared to using alternative polymers. Third, many marketing claims about circularity, sustainability, and persistence were unsupported, likely magnifying the mismanagement and environmental impacts of these products. Fourth, improper disposal of compostable straws in landfills could increase the global warming potential of the item by up to six times and offset numerous advantages afforded by biodegradable materials, thereby warranting greater investment in waste management infrastructure. The analysis of design strategies and their tradeoffs provided herein should be applied broadly when developing and adopting future consumer products.
Supplementary materials
Title
Supporting Information
Description
Extended materials and methods; details of previously investigated drinking straws (Section S1); interference by the poisoning agent (Section S2); microbial community composition analysis at the family level (Section S3); discussion of non-sustainability-related design considerations for drinking straws (Section S4); discussion of the sustainability of seaweed-based materials (Section S5); plots of relative mass loss data for each straw with curve fit (Figure S1); random samplings of straw thickness, k_d, and projected environmental lifetimes (Figures S2-S6); IR spectra of select drinking straws (Figures S7-S10); photos of Resin 2 in the mesocosm (Figure S11); microbial community compositions at the family level (Figure S12); list of drinking straws on the market (Table S1); properties of previously investigated drinking straws (Table S2); mass loss data (Table S3); relative mass loss data (Table S4); global warming and resource utilization properties (Table S5); short-term microbial respiration rates (Table S6); calculated social costs (Table S7); additional references (PDF).
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