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McDonald’s have announced that they will be sacking plastic straws in all their UK and Ireland stores come September.

The plastic straws will be replaced with recyclable paper straws. The gargantuan chain uses 1.8 Million plastic straws every day. These single-use straws take hundreds of years to decompose.

This action is a result of a customer campaign. The SumOfUs campaign called for McDonald’s to stop using plastic straws as they are an enormous expense to the ocean and marine life.

Their mission statement is:

“McDonald’s uses millions of plastic straws every single day. Used for just a few seconds, then thrown away, many end up polluting our oceans.

Small, light, and hard to avoid, it’s no wonder plastic straws dumped into the sea get stuck in sea turtles’ nostrils, lodged in the stomachs of baby seabirds, and end up in our food chain after being eaten by fish.

If we can get McDonald’s to ditch its dirty habit we can stop millions of plastic straws clogging up our oceans and killing the animals that live in them.”

Whilst there’s been no word as to whether this initiative will be actioned globally, we can only hope that the Australian branches follow suit.