2. Plastic-eating caterpillar (wax-worm caterpillar; Galleria mellonella) 

3. Use stainless steel straw or bamboo straw

 

The plastic straws create a big problem for the environment especially in marine life.The excessive consume of plastic straw each year lead to clog the ocean and killing marine life due to ingestion of it.

 

 

2.0 OVERVIEW

 

Our planet is dying even we are aware of this reality, yet we are doing very little to help save it. Massive use of plastic straw from day to day gives a big impact toward this problems where exposing the realities of the effects of plastic straw in our oceans. Thus for over the past weeks, we already heard about these big companies like KFC, Starbucks and McDonald jumped into this green movement by skip the straw in order to reduce straw consumption. In Malaysia plastic straw end up in the ocean primarily through human error, often left on beaches in coastal communities and seaside resorts as almost state in Malaysia have beaches. Moreover one review of plastic straw waste in the ocean put Malaysia as a moderate plastic polluter and that is the Asian countries are among the highest polluters. 

 

In order to understand the environmental impact of plastic straw, it is important to let us know the difference between biodegrading and degrading. Biodegrading is when an item can be naturally break down and digested by microorganisms and then naturally recycled into new organic molecules. On the other hand, degrading is just the process of breaking down into smaller pieces. However, what’s really the problem that happening is the plastic is breaking into smaller microplastic as the plastic straw take up 200 years to degrade. Thus, one of the major issues with plastic straw is they are too small and lightweight to be captured in modern recycling equipment. Whenever there is an ocean coastline cleanup, plastic straws never fail to make it on the list of one of the most found ocean litter. All these straws and plastic polluting our oceans is having a negative impact on marine life. Take for example for video, where researchers off the coast of Costa Rica remove a plastic straw that had been embedded in the nostril of an Olive ridley sea turtle.It’s likely that the sea turtle accidentally swallowed the straw, and then had it stuck up its nostril while trying to cough the straw out. Straws are also especially dangerous to seabirds, as they can be easily picked up and swallowed, suffocating and choking the bird. In fact, over 1 million seabirds die each year from ingesting plastic.

 

 

1. The following investigative procedures were used to identify the problems and to assess their nature.

A.    Do the Library Research. The article found  in media social(google, youtube, newspaper and journal) to conduct the research regarding the problem.

B.     Six questions(multiple choice) about the problem was promoted to the random people through the google form. The links(google form) was promoted in the whatapps. There is 92 person with different gender and races respon to our survey. 

 

1.      Most articles say a plastic straw polluted sea water and disturbs marine life. 

2.      Regarding to the survey about 88% from 92 responses agree that plastic straw pollute water and damaged our ecosystem. 68.5% agree that the disposal of plastic straw is likely occur at the beach.

1.      from the article, most people in Malaysia threw the plastic straw to the environment and majority of plastic straw found in the beach.

2.      from the survey, 84.3% from 92 responses agree that people in Malaysia always used the plastic straw to drink their cold beverage

3.      from the article found in newspaper(Utusan Malaysia), People in Malaysia lack of awareness about the effect of plastic straw even many campaign were published in media social.

4.      From our observation , customers still choose to pick the plastic straw even they have an opportunity to reject it.