Photographer Von Wong has highlighted the issues around plastic straws in his latest imagery and an installation. Called “The Parting of the Plastic Sea,” it is in Saigon and features over 168,000 straws which were gathered over six months by clean up groups. These were then cleaned, sorted, and attached to a 3.3m (10 ft+) tall art installation called the strawpocalypse.
The affluent, celebrity studded, seaside town of Malibu recently voted to ban plastic straws, stirrers, and cutlery. The ban goes into effect on June 1st when the 65 restaurants will have to cease using the single use plastic items. Malibu was an early adopter of a plastic bag ban, voting in 2008 to stop using them in stores. 500 million plastic straws are thrown away every day across the country, all of which cannot be decomposed.