According to a USA Today article, the movement started in 2011 with Milo Cress, a young boy who started his “Be Straw Free” campaign after he saw diners removing straws from their drinks without using them and felt this was wasteful.

“I thought if restaurants were to offer a straw instead of serving them with every drink automatically, it could really reduce the number of straws that we use,” Cress, who is now a teenager, was quoted as saying in the article published in July.

Cress asked a local restaurant if they would adopt an “offer first” policy which they did, helping them reduce their costs and raising awareness on the impact of plastic straws on the environment as the straws had a lifespan of 200 years.

As he began to speak to more people about his campaign, Cress did more research on plastics and the environment but couldn’t find much data on the use of straws in the US.

So he contacted straw manufacturers for an estimate on the number of straws used in the US per day and some gave a yearly estimate which he divided by 365.

“Others gave an estimate of around 500 million straws,” Cress said.

“That was the number that I stuck to because it seemed to be around the middle of what they were saying.”

This figure that Americans use more than 500 million straws daily has been referenced in straw ban coverage in major publications including The New York Times, National Geographic, USA Today and even reports from the US’ National Park Service.

But this doesn’t take anything away from Cress’ efforts. Kara Lavender Law, research professor of oceanography at the Sea Education Association said in the article that the straw free movement serves as a “public service announcement” for environmental issues.

She estimates that since the mid-1950s, some 8.3 billion metric tonnes of plastic have been produced globally, with 60% of these plastics now found in landfills or natural environment, including the ocean.