Dubai restaurateurs are working with marine conservation group Sea Shepherd to eliminate straws and stop plastic from entering the food chain.
Reducing marine debris is one of the main goals of Sea Shepherd's Middle East chapter, which opened in December. To help restaurants cut-out single-use plastic, it has provided re-useable cups to sell to customers.
Restaurants that have ditched the straw include Bikers Cafe, Flow, Freedom Pizza, The Noodle House, Pierchic, Single Fin Cafe and the Yumtingz food trucks.
"The more that retailers in the food industry take these steps, the more people will get behind it and the less plastic that will end up on the ocean and in our shores," said Ms Banks.
It's estimated that 500 million drinking straws are used in the US every day.
Straws are non-biodegradable and their size makes them difficult to recycle. They often end up in the sea, where they are ingested by marine life and break down into microplastics. A 2013 article in the journal Conservation Biology found that half of green turtles had ingested debris, the majority of which was plastic.
Straws are just one part of the equation. Some retailers are switching from bottled to filtered water, cutting out plastic cutlery and looking for other alternatives to single-use plastics that are used for minutes and take hundreds of years to decompose. Straws and plastic cutlery are amongst the ten most common types of sea debris.
Single Fin Cafe has switched to filtered water and uses bamboo straws sourced from Bali. It has eliminated between 450 to 500 plastic bottles a month by switching to glass bottles and almost sold out of Sea Shepherd's re-useable tea cups in the first week they were introduced.
One hitch is that biodegradable alternatives cannot be locally sourced.
Freedom Pizza gave has stopped giving away straws and plastic cutlery. Instead it offers biodegradable alternatives for an additional cost of 50 fils. It has invited other companies to join their #dontsuck initiative, which follows the #stopsucking campaign launched in the US in September.
Bikers Cafe switch to paper straws and biodegradable cutlery a week ago.
Sea Shepherd members are found throughout the UAE and can help businesses looking to reduce their use of single-use plastics. To find out more, go to the Sea Shepherd UAE Facebook page or email uaeadmin@seashepherdglobal.org.