Eco Friendly Straws Wholesale
Single Use Alternatives are committed to having the UK’s most comprehensive range of sustainable alternatives to single use plastic catering disposables, selling over 400 products like eco friendly straws wholesale to catering businesses across the country.
Who we are
Single Use Alternatives was founded by Adrian and Neil; two brothers who are passionate about enjoying the outdoors and caring for the environment. Concerned about the impact single use plastics are having upon the environment, we decided to offer a range of cost effective high quality, alternative products.
To find out more about our products simply browse through our website. If you have any questions we’d love to hear from you: please complete the enquiry form on our contact page.
Why do we sell Eco Friendly Straws wholesale?
We realise that disposable plastic products like cups and straws became essential for takeaway outlets. But the problem with that is that plastic can take up to 400 years to fully degrade, and we simply can’t keep filling holes with disposable plastic.
Happily, we’ve been able to source some great biodegradable alternatives to standard plastic straws, such as compostable spoon straws made from ingeo <link> which are perfect for slushies and smoothies, compostable bendy straws from ingeo which are great for cold juices, fizzy drinks and drinks to go, and paper straws from Biopac <link>, which are 3-ply making these great paper straws stronger and longer lasting.
What are our environmentally friendly straws made from?
The compostable spoon straws and compostable bendy straws made from NatureWorks’ ingeo are made from plants, not oil based plastic.
Ingeo is made from the starch by-product of purpose grown corn, a product from which all sugar, starch, oil proteins and fibres are utilised. The harvested corn crop is converted in biorefineries into food, feed, materials and fuel.
The corn is milled to extract the starch, enzymes are added, and the mixture is fermented into lactic acid, which in turn is transformed into PLA, a polylactide polymer in pellet form which can be transformed into a wide range of innovative products.
The important difference for these products made from plants, not oil based plastic, is that they can be collected alongside your food waste (where available) composted in industrial composters, and turned into useful fertilisers used by farmers to feed and enrich their soils, naturally.
The PLA first disintegrates under the moisture and heat of the composter, and then it biodegrades into compost and soil as nutrients. The end result of composting is carbon dioxide, water and humus, a soil nutrient.
The UK law on plastic straws
In October 2020, a ban on single use plastic straws, stirrers and cotton buds came into force in England. This made it illegal for businesses to sell or supply plastic straws. Seeing as the population of England were responsible for using an estimated 4.7 billion plastic straws each year, this could only be a good thing for the environment. There were exemptions in place for hospitals and the provision of plastic straws to people with disabilities and medical conditions which require them, but this usage is estimated to be very small.
Whilst single use plastic drinking straws equate to a tiny fraction of the plastic that is disposed of in the UK, this is a step in the right direction.
Buy eco-friendly drinking straws wholesale from Single Use Alternatives
Please visit our drinking straws section <link> to see the full range of straws we offer – we expect to be adding to the range so we can give catering business owners as wide a choice as possible. Remember also that you can buy our products in lower quantities if you don’t have the storage space. Our state of the art website allows you to easily place repeat orders, and as we buy in bulk, we can pass the savings on to you , our customers. We have no minimum order quantities, so you can buy in 100’s, not 1000’s if you need to.