Our ocean has changed quite a bit over the last two decades. We may not notice these changes from the surface or when we look out at the horizon, where its glistening ripples reflect the blue of the sky, but looks can be deceiving.
Three years ago, I had a face-to-face encounter with the ocean’s true “bill of health”—experiencing the tsunami of plastic pollution that has overtaken our beaches and our lives.
I was visiting Bali, Indonesia for the Economist World Ocean Summit and the official launch of the Clean Seas Campaign, representing Lonely Whale alongside the organization’s co-founder and UN Environment Programme Goodwill Ambassador Adrian Grenier, among many other dedicated partners. What was striking about that morning was that the beach was completely clean—not a piece of trash in sight. This is often the case in tourist areas where beaches are combed clean in the early morning hours.
But later that day, as we visited the nearby fishing village of Sanur and walked down toward the beach, my heart sank as I took in the piles of plastic cups, bottle caps, detergent containers, utensils, flip-flops, bags, and more that were forming a two-foot deep barricade where the tide met the dry sand. The amount of plastic was shocking to witness in person. Adrian approached the plastic barricade and stuck his hand into the sand. When he pulled it back out, he looked like Wolverine, his fist weaponized with nearly a dozen straws stuck between his fingers—the majority of them a distinct shade of green, Starbucks green.
The straw was a familiar foe for Adrian and me, an emblem of unnecessary single-use plastic. I met Adrian about a year prior to this trip, when he asked me to come on board to lead Lonely Whale. Over the course of our first few meetings, I noticed that after every drink order Adrian would add, “No straw please.” I finally asked him what it was about.
Inspired by this, we continued to test what happened when you asked a server to stop bringing you a straw in your glass. It turned out that single-use plastics had become so ubiquitous in our daily lives that it was now part of our behavior to reach for a straw and put it in our glass, even if the drink had been served without one. No amount of reminding the server or even talking to the manager was enough.
So with Adrian staring me down on that beach in Bali, his Starbucks straw-spiked fist a visual that I would not soon forget, I knew there was only one way forward. We had to build a stronger bond between people and the ocean, connecting them to this critical ecosystem and empowering them to advocate for its health. And we had to do it fast, because every minute that went by, another garbage truck’s worth of plastic was entering our ocean. With this, the #StopSucking campaign was born.
Kickstarting a new narrative
The straw is by no means the top contributor to ocean pollution. In fact, plastic straws make up only 0.2 percent of the 30 million metric tons of plastic waste generated by the US annually. But zero percent are recyclable and for many people, they are optional. We started to wonder if this innocuous single-use plastic item could kickstart a new narrative.
As a psychologist, I had an inclination that the straw could be an introductory way to get people to care about plastic pollution and start to build a connection with the ocean. By just saying no to a straw, this idea could give people the opportunity to make a public declaration, to be the solution, to start a conversation, and to thereby establish a new social norm. The straw had the potential to be a “gateway plastic”—not the end-game, but just the beginning.
One month after our straw-filled trip in Bali, the Lonely Whale team was preparing to head to Austin, Texas for South by Southwest to test the straw hypothesis further. We were still a small organization at the time, working on a shoestring budget, so we had to get creative with what we would offer at the festival. We landed with a concept that was literally punchy—a photo booth featuring a fabricated octopus tentacle that would “sucker punch” plastic cups and straws out of the hands of participants just as they went to take a sip. The upbeat user-generated content traveled at the speed of light across the internet. We thought we might be onto something.
The stunt led to a full campaign and we launched a PSA—a Plastic Service Announcement—which featured celebrities and influencers pointing out how much they “suck” and challenging all of us to #StopSucking. The campaign developed into the Strawless Ocean movement, engaging an even broader coalition of partners in more than 30 countries around the globe.
Through this experience, we were learning to walk and talk like a brand, applying age-old advertising techniques to promote positive action for our planet. But social engagement wasn’t enough. We needed to demonstrate lasting impact.
Going Strawless in Seattle
At Lonely Whale, we take the perspective that for persistent change to happen you need three things: 1) global discussion; 2) policy change; and 3) market-ready products that replace the item you have targeted. With #StopSucking, we started a discussion and we already knew there were alternatives to the plastic straw. Now we were ready to see if we could influence policy change and adoption of alternatives in a large metropolitan city.
I have spent my entire adult life in Seattle, so I knew of the city’s commitment to sustainability though my earlier work on a sustainable seafood initiative. And, importantly, Seattle is the home of Starbucks, the maker of those iconic green straws we saw on the beach in Bali.
After a summer’s worth of work, and about a week ahead of the campaign launch in September, we got a call from the City of Seattle. Curious about the campaign, they wanted to learn more to see if the momentum it was driving could enable them to move restrictions into place, thereby permanently transitioning the city away from single-use plastic straws and utensils. We had been working with Seattle Public Utilities on plastic straw alternatives, but we didn’t anticipate this move from the mayor’s office. We were ecstatic!
It is important to recognize that the City had been invested in this issue for a long time before our campaign, having banned single-use plastic items back in 2010. However, they had an exemption in place for straws and utensils because there was no readily available alternative for local restaurants, bars, and businesses, like Starbucks, to use. Through the campaign, we were able to get enough restaurants and venues to adopt market-ready alternatives, thereby showing that the city would have the business support needed to lift the exemption and enforce the ban.
At the time, Lonely Whale was a very small team of three plus our co-founders, Adrian Grenier and Lucy Sumner. My teammates Emma Riley and Emy Kane had temporarily moved to Seattle to spend those crucial summer months meeting with restaurateurs and venue managers, and visiting local cafes and bars to convince industry leaders to support the campaign’s launch.
Hometown heroes were at the heart of the campaign. When well-known local leaders including restaurateur Tom Douglas, Chef Renee Erickson, and Port Commissioner Fred Felleman agreed to join in, others were inspired to participate. At the same time, we created a Seattle-specific PSA featuring celebrity athletes from each of the city’s professional leagues. In one video, Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson took the #StopSucking challenge and urged all Seahawks’ fans to join him. As fate would have it, Wilson’s pledge to #StopSucking was released the day after a game where he really did play terribly—he sucked. His fans watched the video, found it funny and commented on his poor performance, and became interested in the campaign.
At the campaign launch in September, more than 150 restaurants had made strawless commitments, and there were a lot of firsts with major venues. Seattle was the first port, and Sea-Tac the first airport, in the country to eliminate single-use plastic straws. Seattle Seahawks’ CenturyLink Field was the first NFL stadium in the US, and SafeCo Field (now T-Mobile Park), where the Mariners play ball, was the first Major League Baseball (MLB) field to take the strawless pledge. The Space Needle was the first iconic landmark to join in. Venues started reaching out to us for help going strawless because their fans and customers wanted it to happen.
On the campaign’s launch day, then-mayor Ed Murray joined us at the Seattle Aquarium to announce the city’s permanent transition, which would go into effect July 1, 2018, lifting the exemption and fully enforcing the previously passed restrictions, thereby enacting policy that was the first of its kind for a large metropolitan area in the US. This was a massive win. As a result of this one concentrated effort in Seattle, we knew that 2.3 million straws were removed during the campaign alone. And going forward, with the lifting of the exemption, more than 60 million straws would be permanently removed year over year.
During and after the Strawless in Seattle campaign, we got calls from restaurateurs asking about ways to get their daily deliveries of oysters and clams in ocean-friendly bags, instead of the non-recyclable plastic bags they had been using for years. Once people were inspired to question the straw, they began to see all the unnecessary plastic in their lives.
From momentum to a movement
Fueled by the momentum and response from our campaign in Seattle, we created the For A Strawless Ocean toolkit to help drive the measurable reduction of ocean plastic pollution around the world. The #StopSucking campaign video was translated into over 20 languages, and wins started to crop up across different industries and geographies. We advised on policy change in San Francisco, Chicago, Washington DC, and New York. The City of Malibu used our For A Strawless Ocean toolkit to support its citywide ban on single-use plastics that went into effect in June of 2018. Live Nation Entertainment, the world’s largest live entertainment company and a manager of over 45 huge venues in the US, joined the campaign and committed to removing all single-use plastic straws in favor of a marine-friendly paper alternative. With the #StrawlessSkies campaign, we worked with Alaska Airlines to become the first airline to dump plastic straw stirrers and plastic picks on all flights.
The broader perception of single-use plastics was slowly changing and both systemic and cultural shifts were happening. But despite all this progress, we still hit some significant roadblocks. Back on that beach in Bali, when Adrian had his Wolverine moment with the green Starbucks straws, I knew that there was one specific market-mover we needed to engage in conversation.
At the time of our campaign, Starbucks was the most ubiquitous consumer-facing global brand on the planet. They were in the process of opening one new store every 15 hours across Southeast Asia, in a place where there’s limited waste management infrastructure. Simultaneously, they released ads across US airports, stadiums, and bars featuring their trademarked green straws.
Our theory of change was that—if we could secure a transition by Starbucks to move away from their trademarked non-recyclable single-use plastic straws towards a sustainable alternative—we could send a signal to the entire supply chain that real change was on its way. In doing so, we could inspire more market innovation and see an expansion of alternatives in the market, a critical element to ensuring a global shift away from single-use plastic straws.
In the months leading up to the campaign launch, our team worked closely with Starbucks’ headquarters to evaluate options to transition away from single-use plastic straws, including paper and biodegradable straws, the sippy cup lid, edible straws, and more. Ultimately they were unable to join the campaign due to a lack of sufficient sources of alternatives to single-use plastic straws.
This story of Starbucks is one of many. Moving entrenched interests takes time, and the industry is constantly pushing back. Nevertheless, public policy continued to change in cities across the country and around the world.
Now amidst the pandemic, industry is trying to roll back regulations on single-use plastics again, using the virus as an excuse. But no straw bans have been successfully rolled back. The cities have already adapted to new ways and, in many places, straws have become socially unacceptable. This campaign, in combination with the multifaceted efforts of other ocean health organizations, has begun to shift social norms beyond single-use plastic, a critical element for ensuring long-term persistence of change.
#StopSucking and #StrawlessinSeattle taught us a lot about what it takes to spark a global conservation movement. And it’s on all of us to keep that progress going. We need to see more demand for recycled plastics, more reductions in the consumption of single-use plastic, and more truly sustainable alternatives.
We have responded to these challenges by launching NextWave Plastics to establish ocean-bound plastics as a commodity, Ocean Heroes Bootcamp and Network to empower young ocean activists, and our most recent campaign, #HydrateLike (it matters) to end single-use plastic water bottles. The Strawless Ocean movement was an attempt to break the mold for conservation communications. We need to break the mold again, and louder, so that we can have a sustainable planet that supports all of us in living full, enriching lives.
Listen to 52 Hertz, the new podcast from Lonely Whale, to learn about leaders across the movement who are rethinking our approach to plastics.
