Peninsula cinemas and cafes commit to Last Straw project

The Peninsula’s Last Straw project, funded through National Geographic in 2019, began in 2017 and continues through Waste Wise Mornington Peninsula. The project initially recruited 20 cafes in December 2017 in Rye, and 18 are still part of the project today.

The community support for the project provided the workshop location free of charge, resulting in a decrease in the project costs. This enabled PHD student Ana Catarina Serra Goncalves, from the University of Tasmania, to expand the project to other towns with the help of community leaders. The community was able to recruit one of the major sources of plastic straw pollution in the region, cinemas in Rosebud and Sorrento, to be part of the project and swap their plastic straws for paper ones.

The primary goal of the project is to assess the effectiveness of different plastic reduction strategies – known as source reduction plans, or SRPs – to identify the most cost and time-effective strategy. With financial support from National Geographic, 57 new cafes were approached in Mount Martha, Sorrento, Dromana, Mornington, Crib Point, Balnarring, Portsea and Rosebud. Of these, 10 cafes were already using sustainable straw alternatives and one café chose not to take part in this project, resulting in 46 new community partners.

The communities participated in all aspects of the plastic reduction process from conceptualisation to mitigation, including collection of baselines pre-SRP data – for example, beach clean-up data, and inventory data from businesses – identification of plastic straws as a problematic item in their area, development of a targeted SRP, and post-SRP monitoring.

Tangaroa Blue Foundation, which initiated the source reduction plan with the community in 2017, established four other SRPs at this time – plastic straws in Queensland, packing tape from the fishing industry, cigarette butts in Queensland, and cotton buds in Victoria – for which we already have the data in hand. Results are expected at the end of 2022 for our community action to be able to identify SRPs’ common aspects that have been implemented and make this information available to the broader public via guides/resources that will be published on Tangaroa Blue’s online library.

If you know of a café that is still using plastic straws and would like to have them join the program, please direct message The Peninsula’s Last Straw or Waste Wise Mornington Peninsula on Facebook, as we are committed to being a plastic strawfree community on the Mornington Peninsula, protecting our precious marine and coastal environments.

JOSIE JONES Follow me on Instagram @sharejosie