A Vietnamese entrepreneur is promoting an eco-friendly way of sipping drinks through the use of grass stalks to provide biodegradable, reusable straws.
Tran Minh Tien, 32, runs his company 3T from a village deep within the Mekong River Delta, west of Ho Chi Minh City, where wild gray sedge grows within the swamps.
During this labor-intensive operation, hired staff work with Tien to reap the grass, cut it to uniform lengths, after which clean the straws before baking them within the oven or leaving them to dry within the sun for 2 or three days.
Tien began the business in 2017 and now produces about 3,000 straws a day, making a profit of $400 a month. Tien said the straws could be used for as much as six months.
But he knows his straws won’t be an enduring solution given limited supplies of grass in Vietnam, the world’s fourth largest contributor to marine plastic pollution, in response to a 2015 study from the University of Georgia.
“I invented grass straws as a temporary substitute for plastic straws to reduce some of the damage they do to the environment,” he said.
Tien says that as demand grows, he must be careful how quickly he can expand his business,
“From the very beginning, I built this concept around the fact that harvests can never exceed the grasses’ natural reproductive rate,” he said.
“Nature also needs to have enough time to recover.”
“I believe switching from plastic straws to grass straws is sort of an revolutionary move, but it is going to take a while for everybody to get used to it,” said university student Le Hong Phuc, a resident of the capital Hanoi.
Source : Reuters
