Americans use and throw away 500 million single-use plastic straws every day. That's enough straws to wrap around the entire earth 2.5 times daily.

Nothing we use for 5 minutes should pollute our oceans for hundreds of years. That's why we're calling on the St. Petersburg City Council to ban the straw.

For a bird or fish or turtle, it’s easy to mistake a small piece of plastic for food—especially when there are millions of pieces of plastic floating in our rivers and ultimately our oceans. Scientists have found plastic fragments in literally hundreds of species, including 86% of all sea turtle species, 44% of all seabird species, and 43% of all marine mammal species. Ingesting these fragments is often fatal. Animals can starve when they ingest too much plastic that they can’t digest. When animals ingest plastic waste, it can block their digestive tracts. As a result, they starve. Toxic chemicals in plastic can harm animals’ health—and people can ingest these chemicals as they make their way up the food chain.

Of course, plastic and chemical companies don't like this idea. They're pushing elected officials across the country to keep supporting unnecessary single use plastics.

The tides are turning. Ikea, Sea World, and McDonalds are all getting rid of straws, polystyrene (what a lot of us know as Styrofoam), and other single-us plastics. The St. Pete City Council should do the same and ban the straw.