Tom Brady wants you to "suck less", as he hops on the anti-straw bandwagon

To get your bogus environmental campaign off the ground you need three things: cute animals, cute kids, and star power. The movement to ban plastic straws has risen rapidly in prominence thanks to this holy trinity. The outcry against straws started with a viral 2015 video of an admittedly adorable sea turtle with one stuck up its nose. The cause got a boost from 9-year-old Milo Cress, whose Be Straw Free campaign captured the public's imagination with the now-debunked claim that Americans use 500 million straws a day. Cress has been joined by youths like 10-year-old Molly Steer, who fronts the Australian group Straw No More. The roster of celebrities telling you to suck less is also growing. For a couple of years, Entourage actor Adrian Grenier and his Lonely Whale foundation have been pushing straw bans in places such as Seattle and New York City. Yesterday he was now joined by New England Patriots quarterback and five-time Superbowl champion Tom Brady. In an Instagram video made for World Environment Day, Brady brandished two plastic straws, declaring that "the effect of these little guys is posing a huge health risk to our planet."...MORE

I've never cared for straws, they just slowed me down. So, if we all would just "suck less", that would fix our plastic pollution problem, right? Wrong:

 It cannot be stressed enough that plastic straws are a small part of American's plastic waste and that Americans themselves account for a tiny portion of the plastic in the oceans. Judging from coastal cleanups in Canada, California, and the U.K., plastic straws make up 2 percent to 4 percent of beach litter by item. They account for an even smaller portion of this waste when measured by weight. Even if plastic straws were 100 percent of our plastic waste, banning them here, or in most any rich country, would do almost nothing to help the environment. That's because, as best we can tell, the vast majority of plastic waste entering the ocean comes from the poorer nations of the world, particularly in East Asia. China alone accounts for about 28 percent of plastic pollution. Indonesia contributes another 10 percent. For the Philippines and Vietnam, it's about 6 percent each. The United States, by comparison, is responsible for less than 1 percent of global plastic marine waste. Roughly 2 percent comes from the European Union (including the U.K.).

Feel free to suck it up, if that is your preference. And Brady should stick to scoring, not straw sucking.