A student from the University of Leeds who refuses the plastic straw has admitted to not giving a shit about leaving their rubbish in Hyde Park.
The student, who wishes to remain anonymous, said they didn’t realise that reducing the world’s consumption of plastic was more than just a fad, and actually a genuine effort to conserve the Earth’s natural environment for future generations to enjoy.
“Of course I always refuse the plastic straw out of principle. And I always make a point of doing so in front of other people. It’s so important to consider how your commercial choices can seriously impact the environment, but it’s even more important to make sure that everybody around you knows that you’re saving the planet. Otherwise, there’s no point.”
The Last Plastic Straw Movement is an American initiative campaigning to reduce the 500 million plastic straws which are used daily in the US, due to the fact that the vast majority of these non-decomposable drinking accessories end up polluting the world’s oceans. It is a trend which increased exponentially in the UK after the release of Blue Planet II, when it took a 91 year old man in cream khakis to tell students that their plastic waste did, in fact, make life quite hard for most aquatic creatures. However, David Attenborough only covered the sea in that documentary, so students are less sure whether dumping their waste in a public field will actually have a negative effect on the environment. Experts are close to a scientific conclusion, but it’s too early to say.
“I see all these people and posters at University telling me to refuse the plastic straw – that’s how I know it’s the right thing to do. So when I looked around me on Woodhouse Moor while smoking a phat bong of Alaskan Thunderfuck and saw everyone else leaving their tinnies and fag ends in carefully constructed piles of rubbish, instead of the designated recycling bins mere metres away, I thought: ‘Well, that must surely be the most ethical thing to do.’”
The recent heatwave enveloping Leeds has seen masses of students heading to the fields of Hyde Park to enjoy the sun’s rays before the stress of exam season sets in.
“I was so happy to see the sun come out. It meant I could give myself a decent break from writing my dissertation about the unethical containment and treatment of animals in the food industry – an issue I’m really passionate about. It also gave me an excuse not to wear my Canada Goose gilet, so that I could remain cool whilst also feeling safe in the knowledge that I wasn’t visibly advocating the systematic torture of Coyotes across the globe.”
After volunteers finally arrived to do their damn job of clearing up countless piles of other people’s rubbish, revellers returned to the freshly cleared fields to continue celebrations, and inform their Instagram followers that the party was still on.
“It was almost like magic. We left a disposable BBQ and three crates worth of Fosters in the middle of the park so that we could remember our spot, and when we returned, they’d all disappeared. Recycling has never been so easy!”
Photographers from The Pigeon were also present, standing around taking pictures of stray bin bags and muttering under their breath about how people nowadays can’t even be arsed to tidy away their mess.
Robert Cairns