Drinking straws are horrible for the environment!!! Think about one day of eating out (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) with a family of four and how many straws get thrown away. Now think about the waste from just one restaurant for one day. The thought is just maddening and if your waiters/waitresses are like some of ours, every time they bring you a refill they also bring you a new straw! Agh!!! Seriously why do we need straws anyways? (OK, I know a few germ-o-phobes who will tell me how dirty cups are but we’re still drinking out of them, right?) Doing this project this month has made me really consider how ‘green’ I am – someone needs to take away my ‘green’ card with all this trash I create every day!
If you want to find something fun to do with your straws consider letting your kids make beads out of them. My daughter made a complete necklace and bracelet set from 3 straws that we saved this week. I gave her a piece of elastic cording and let her practice threading her straw beads. When the string was full we tied the ends together and off she ran with her new accessory!
If you are looking for a way to reduce your waste consider buying a few glass straws like those from Glass Dharma.
This post is part of the Upcycled Crafting Challenge (#freefromtrash) that I’m hosting this month. It’s part of a one month challenge to create from trash. This challenge will hopefully open your eyes to the number of items that we still end up trashing every day that could be used by ourselves or our kids to create fun and useful items.
My girls would love this project!
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hi calley,
i love your ideas. but i have one question concerning your “free from trash”-series: what about NOT producing that trash you have to get rid off?
what about buying milk in glassbottles, about bringing your own cup to starbucks to get it refilled, not using drinkings straws and instead drinking right out of the cup?
it occured to me that this would be much more effective to out environment that creatively reusing some of the stuff. what do you think about this?
thanks for sharing your awesome creativity,
love,
stephanie
Yes, Stephanie that is more of the point of this project is to 1) acknowledge my own weaknesses, and 2) show people that there are ways to reduce our waste. I have eco-notes with these tips on each of the posts of this project. Thanks for your comments. ~Calley
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