Plastic single-use straws have been banned from all 900 Wetherspoons pubs as the environmental campaign to raise awareness and stop consumers using them gathers pace.
Disposable plastic straws have recently become the new focus of environmentalists and campaigners to reduce the amount of plastic that makes its way to landfill and into the oceans.
The pub chain JD Wetherspoon has already stopped automatically putting plastic straws in drinks and says it will only use biodegradable paper straws from January 2018. It claims this will stop 70million plastic straws entering landfill or making their way into the world’s oceans each year.
Wetherspoons has joined All Bar One as well as smaller chains Oakman Inns and the Liberation Group, which stopped handing out plastic straws earlier this year.
The announcement comes as US initiative Refuse the Straw gathers pace. It aims to stop pub chains and restaurants handing out plastic straws, which are thought to take up to 500 years to decompose, and hopes that consumer behaviour will shift accordingly.
The Plastic Pollution Coalition backs the campaign, estimating that more than 500 million single-use plastic straws are used each day in the US alone.
