I am asking the City of San Diego’s Commission for Arts and Culture to reject the currently proposed public art of two 78 foot tall “giant drinking straws” for the North City Pure Water Facility.
Straws are single-use, disposable plastics used for only a few minutes and then thrown away. Straws adversely impact our food and drinking water, wildlife and fisheries, taxpayer’s wallets for cleanup and our quality of life. Almost zero straws are recycled as they lack a resin code and are too small to be processed in most recycling centers. They end up in our waterways, beaches, and ocean. They overcrowd landfills where they stick around for hundreds of years, litter our streets and sidewalks, and release toxins. Nearly every piece of plastic straw ever made is still in existence.
The 2016 I Love a Clean San Diego Annual Report states that 15,976 plastic straws were collected from our beaches and that “Single-use disposable items are the most common items we found at our cleanup events.” Straws float in water, can look like food and cause untold harm to sea life. A recent Youtube video, with over 19 million views, of a straw painfully lodged in the nostril of a sea turtle has highlighted the negative aspects of straws and helped fuel the “No-Straw” movement.
I strongly object to the building of a monument to a product that has such devastating impacts to our natural environment and urge the Commission for Arts and Culture to reject this bad art project.
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