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Straws
By Alyssa Vidales
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2020 - Division III (Grades 9-12)

My project consists of a homage to the poster to the “Jaws” movie poster directed by Steven Spielberg where the title is replaced by the word straws, the shark is shaped by straws, and the swimmer is replaced by a sea turtle. This is made to represent the epidemic of single use straws being sent into landfills; according to national geographic it is estimated that in the united states more than five hundred million single use straws are used every single day; one study published earlier this year estimated as many as 8.3 billion plastic straws pollute the world's beaches. According to phys.org straws make up about 4 percent of the plastic trash by piece, but far less by weight. Straws on average weigh so little—about one sixty-seventh of an ounce or .42 grams—that all those billions of straws add up to only about 2,000 tons of the nearly 9 million tons of plastic waste that yearly hits the waters. Australian scientists Denise Hardesty and Chris Wilcox estimate, using trash collected on U.S. coastlines during cleanups over five years, that there are nearly 7.5 million plastic straws lying around America's shorelines. They figure that means 437 million to 8.3 billion plastic straws are on the entire world's coastlines. This is important to me because I really like going to the beach and i would hate to swim amongst millions of straws. The straws also affect marine life since the straws get lodged inside turtle’s nostrils making them unable to breathe, sharks are generally considered one of the turtle’s biggest predators, but in my project, I exemplify how those stats are being replaced by straws.