President Trump Vows to Sign an Executive Order to Bring Back Plastic Straws

President Donald Trump has proclaimed it’s time to “go back to plastic” straws. 

On Friday evening, the President wrote on his social media accounts, “I will be signing an Executive Order next week ending the ridiculous Biden push for Paper Straws, which don’t work. BACK TO PLASTIC!”

The message appears to be Trump’s response to former President Joe Biden’s plan to phase out single-use plastics across all U.S. federal agencies and operations by 2035 and end their use in government-related food service events and operations by 2027. However, Trump did not clarify if he was explicitly targeting Biden’s plan. Still, he appears to be keeping his promise to dismantle the climate policies of the previous administration after receiving more than $14 million in donations from the oil and gas industry in his 2024 campaign. 

In 2024, the Biden administration wrote an 83-page report titled “Mobilizing Federal Action on Plastic Pollution: Progress, Principles, and Priorities,” emphasizing that “plastic pollution has become one of the most pressing and consequential environmental problems in the U.S. and around the globe.” The report has since been deleted by the Trump administration but can still be accessed via the Way Back Machine.

The Biden administration added in a fact sheet (which has also since been deleted) that it was “committed to taking ambitious actions throughout the lifecycle of plastic to end plastic pollution and is working with the global community to do the same.” The sheet explained that the Biden team aimed to meet these goals by “selecting reusable, compostable, and highly recyclable products” instead of single-use plastics. The plan also included decreasing “pollution pathways” by making it easier for federal employees to make eco-friendly choices, such as adding more water refill stations to reduce reliance on plastic water bottles.

It’s unclear how the return to plastic aligns with the administration’s plans to “Make America Healthy Again.” A growing body of scientific evidence shows that microplastics are permeating just about everything we touch. As Food & Wine previously reported, the general public also appears to be concerned about plastic and the chemicals it contains, including per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also known as PFAS or “forever” chemicals, with online searches for “PFAS” seeing a seven-fold jump over the last five years. 

“’I’ve been worried about it, and the science panel has been worried about this being potentially an issue for more people for a long time,” Scott Bartell, professor of environmental and occupational health at the University of California, Irvine, who studies human exposures and health effects caused by environmental contaminants, including PFAS. “I think the health effects [are] becoming more and more clear over time.” 

According to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), potential health effects could include changes in cholesterol and liver enzyme levels, small changes in infant birth weight, and alterations in the immune system and response to certain vaccines. While the science is still developing, experts are growing increasingly certain about these risks.

“One of the main outcomes is suppression of your immune responses after you get a vaccine,” said Dr. Jamie DeWitt, the director of the Environmental Health Sciences Center at Oregon State University, who studies the human immune response to PFAS. “The type of suppression that has been observed from PFAS and other environmental chemicals would be considered clinically to be mild to moderate. It doesn’t mean that people are going to immediately get sick and immediately have problems, but we know from studies of people who are mildly to moderately immunosuppressed that there is an increased risk of infection and there is an increased risk of other types of diseases such as cancer.” 

On February 3, researchers from the University of New Mexico released a study that found “microplastics in human brains at much higher concentrations than in other organs — and the plastic accumulation appears to be growing over time, having increased 50% over just the past eight years.” Matthew Campen, a toxicologist and Distinguished and Regents’ Professor in the UNM College of Pharmacy, noted that brain tissue from people diagnosed with dementia contained 10 times as much plastic as those who did not have the disease. 

“We start thinking that maybe these plastics obstruct blood flow in capillaries,” Campen said in a statement. “There’s the potential that these nanomaterials interfere with the connections between axons in the brain. They could also be a seed for the aggregation of proteins involved in dementia. We just don’t know.”

However, paper straws may not be the answer, either. A 2023 study by researchers from the University of Antwerp reviewed 39 brands of straws made from five materials: paper, bamboo, glass, stainless steel, and plastic. The researchers found PFAS in all the straws except those made of stainless steel — with PFAS found most frequently in paper and bamboo straws. This, they noted, is likely due to the glue that binds these staws, which is made out of water-resistant chemicals known to contain PFAS. As a result, these straws aren’t biodegradable, either. 

This isn’t the first time Trump has gone after paper straws. In 2019, Trump’s campaign website declared, “Liberal paper straws don’t work.” But instead of providing an explanation, the site used it as an opportunity to sell its own branded plastic straws at at $15 for a pack of 10. It added, “Stand with President Trump and buy your recyclable straws today.” But just 9% of plastic has ever been successfully recycled, meaning these will likely end up there, too.