President Donald Trump is trying to bring back plastic drinking straws, reversing efforts to replace them with paper straws that he says “don’t work”.
On Monday, he signed an executive order overturning a move by his predecessor Joe Biden to phase out government purchases of plastic straws, as well as plastic cutlery and packaging.
Over the weekend, he declared Mr Biden’s mandate “dead”.
“Enjoy your next drink without a straw that disgustingly dissolves in your mouth!!!,” Mr Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Instead, the US president wants the government to exclusively move to plastic.
The order tells government agencies to stop buying paper straws “and otherwise ensure that paper straws are no longer provided within agency buildings”.
“I don’t think that plastic is going to affect the shark very much as they’re eating, as they’re munching their way through the ocean,” he said at a White House announcement.
In the run-up to the 2020 presidential election his campaign raised nearly $500,000 (£411,000) from selling plastic straws.
Amid concerns about plastic waste accumulating on beaches and in the oceans, and about the fossil fuels required to produce them, several US states and cities have banned plastic straws, and some restaurants no longer automatically give them to customers.
A 2015 video of researchers removing a straw that had got stuck in a turtle’s nose went viral and helped fuel a shift away from plastic straws and other single-use items, which sometimes are used for just minutes.
Plastic takes between decades and hundreds of years to break down in the environment.
The plastic manufacturing industry welcomed Mr Trump’s move.
“Straws are just the beginning,” Matt Seaholm, president and CEO of the Plastics Industry Association, said in a statement. “‘Back to Plastic’ is a movement we should all get behind.”
Lisa Ramsden, Greenpeace USA’s senior plastics campaigner, said: “Once again, President Trump is pretending to be a populist while siding with his Big Oil buddies over the public interest.”
The move is just one in a wave of actions by Mr Trump to rollback environmental protections. On his first day in office, he withdrew the USA, the world’s second-largest climate polluter, from the landmark Paris Agreement on fighting climate change.
