Part of me is frustrated that the lie alleging Americans go through approximately 500 million straws per day won’t die, but another part is excited to revisit the original debunking of this myth.
The truth behind this persistent lie is wild.
NBC News official Twitter account tweeted Wednesday morning, “The average American uses 584 straws a year — most of them ending up in our waterways. We can do better.”
The NBC tweet linked to an accompanying article that claimed, “Nationwide, 500 million drinking straws are thrown away each year — enough straws to fill about 46,400 school buses.”
“At an average rate, Americans use 1.6 straws a day, or 584 a year, according to the National Parks Service,” it added. “Environmental groups have targeted disposable drinking straws — that are not recyclable or compostable — for extinction. The ultimate goal: Prevent non-degradable plastic straws from polluting our beaches, waterways and oceans.”
Okay, here’s the first problem: The NPS’ website actually says Americans use 500 million drinking straws per day, not per year. NBC screwed up the number.
There’s an even bigger issue than merely bungling the number, however, and it involves where private companies and government agencies get that 500 million per day statistic. As it turns out, that number comes from a child. I am not making this up.
“The actual number of straws being used is unclear,” Reason magazine reported in January.
“The 500 million figure is often attributed to the National Park Service; it in turn got it from the recycling company Eco-Cycle,” the report continues. “Eco-Cycle is unable to provide any data to back up this number, telling Reason that it was relying on the research of one Milo Cress. Cress—whose Be Straw Free Campaign is hosted on Eco-Cycle’s website—tells Reason that he arrived at the 500 million straws a day figure from phone surveys he conducted of straw manufacturers in 2011, when he was just 9 years old.”
Cress, who is now 16-years-old, told Reason that the National Restaurant Association has endorsed his estimate privately. That’s to his credit, but the problem remains: He appears to be the sole source for this number.
This is not to disparage Cress. In fact, good for him for getting involved. Rather, this is to suggest that newsrooms would do well to, at the very least, get secondary confirmation before repeating a scary sounding statistic. This is to say nothing of the fact that neither NBC nor any other newsroom that has repeated the claim has ever seen his methodology.
If it’s any comfort for NBC, it can take comfort in knowing it’s not alone in is spreading this dubious statistic. On the contrary, NBC is merely latest in a long string of newsrooms to repeat the 500 million straws claim.
They are joined by news organizations, including the Washington Post, Reuters, Time magazine, National Geographic, the Guardian, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times.
