Strategies for Designing Circular, Sustainable, and Nonpersistent Consumer Plastic Products: A Case Study of Drinking Straws.

ABSTRACT: Drinking straws present a simple form factor for evaluating material design strategies taken by manufacturers to achieve circular, sustainable, and nonpersistent products in response to global restrictions and consumer sentiment. We investigated 13 on-the-market drinking straws of varying formulations, characterizing their physical, chemical, and marine biodegradation properties. These data informed sustainability metrics used for evaluating the effectiveness and trade-offs of design strategies, ultimately arriving at four key conclusions. First, diverting anthropogenic methane as an alternative feedstock to make polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) resulted in the only straw with a net-negative global warming potential. Second, adding biogenic fillers to conventional polymers (e.g., polypropylene

SUBMITTER: James BD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12409878 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature