Drinking through Grass: Plant-Based Disposable Straws

Plastic is an incredible material which the vast majority of our ancestors would've gone to great lengths to obtain; imagine being able to store your grain for the winter in water, air, and vermin-proof containers which neither rust nor rot! Unfortunately, that extreme durability becomes a liability when used for products which are intended to be disposable, specifically drinking straws (as the increasing amounts of them ending up in the ocean show). Multiple different types of reusable straws are coming out on the market (and that's an admirable initiative), but they often have issues of their own, such as straws being difficult to wash out and possibly prone to mold.

Looking for another solution, a new company called Equo has created a range of disposable, plant-based straws which biodegrade over a few months or so. They had a Kickstarter campaign earlier this year, I backed it, and yesterday I finally got a chance to try some of their straw out!

The packaging got a little dented in transport, but the straws were all fine.

They offer four different kinds of straws, but I only got two, as I don't really use straws at home much. Or at all, really, I just thought they'd be fun to try out. They offer straws made from rice, coconut, sugarcane, and grass, as seen here. They're each made in slightly different ways, but it basically involves soaking or steaming the plant material into an elastic mush, then forming into straws as it dries. Except for the grass straws, which are simply stems from the grass Lepironia articulata, or grey sedge. They naturally form these hollow tubes, so they just need to be cut to size, sterilized, and packaged! Because they're natural grass stems, they don't go soggy in liquid—I used one yesterday, left it to dry overnight, and used it again today. They're all even edible (with maybe the exception of the grass ones), with Equo noting that you can cook the rice straws down into porridge after use, if you want, and simply eat the others.

I'm a huge sucker for more innovative use of our God-given natural resources, and from personal use I can give these the seal of approval, so I really hope these catch on. They're not yet available for sale generally, but now that they've started production hopefully we'll be seeing them ‘in the wild’ soon. A hui hou!

There's no way to look dignified while sipping through a straw, so I offer this photo of me trying out a sugarcane straw purely from a sense of scientific integrity.