Oregon, New York, Colorado, and Washington D.C. forbid restaurants from giving plastic straws to patrons. When I drink from a paper straw in those locales, the straw routinely collapses before I finish the drink, causing me to curse intrusive regulators. The anti-plastic-straw regulations are one example of the environmentalist fear of the effects of plastic. On Thurs., Oct. 10, 2019, Collin P. Ward, the lead author of a 2019 study, said: “Policymakers generally assume that polystyrene lasts forever. That’s part of the justification for writing policy that bans it” (as quoted in Broad 2019, p. D4). We often hear, for instance from the United Nations Environment Program, that the most common plastic in the environment, polystyrene (used for instance in Styrofoam), will likely take thousands of years to degrade. But is what we hear true?
Ward’s 2019 paper answered the question. It turns out that instead of lasting almost forever, “sunlight can degrade polystyrene in centuries or even decades” (Broad 2019, p. D4). Previous claims that polystyrene lasts almost forever were based on the finding that bacteria cannot consume polystyrene. But previous claimants did not let the sun shine in!
The article discussed and quoted above is:
(Note: the online version of the story was updated Oct. 11, 2019 [sic], and has the title “In the Sea, Not All Plastic Lasts Forever.”)
Ward’s co-authored 2019 academic article discussed above is: