In the year 2021, the Faculty of Medicine Siriraj Hospital has initiated the campaign “Say no to plastic straws and single-use of plastic bowls” to reduce the plastic waste in Siriraj Hospital. The campaign was an integrated collaboration between the Division of Facilities and Environmental Management, the Division of Corporate Social Responsibility, CEO Gen.7, and the subcommittee of the Green Hospital project.
We, Siriraj Hospital, would like to call all personnel in the hospital for the cooperation to ban the use of plastic straws, reduce and reuse if necessary.
Plastic straws create a big negative impact on the environment. 8 million tons of plastics flow into the ocean every year, plastic straws merely comprise 0.025% of the total. Straws become a life-threatening danger to marine life and pose a significant environmental threat to our oceans and the world. There are over 100,000 marine lives and at least a million birds dying because of eating plastic.
Moreover, 500 million straws were used in only one country like the U.S. This type of plastic takes almost 200 years to decompose, and despite breaking apart into smaller pieces, the plastic itself will never fully dissolve. This means that even after two hundred years the plastic will still exist in some form, it will just be invisible to the human eye, meaning it will likely be ingested by marine life or potentially by humans.
