Slovenian farm produces drinking straws made of...straw

Sometimes great ideas hide in plain sight

Drinking straws are commonly referred to when the topic of conversation swings to single-plastic use and its detrimental effects on the planet. You’ve already heard how lethal they can be to sea turtles when they end up in the ocean.

Yet humankind can’t seem to get enough of these rather unnecessary modern utensils, using billions of them every year. Steps have been taken to think of more environmentally friendly options, such as making straws out of more durable compressed paper, cardboard or even stainless steel. Many consumers claim these are hard to get used to because the paper ones change the flavour of the drink being sucked through the straw.

A Slovenian farm, located in Zgornja Kungota near the Austrian border, offers another alternative – a drinking straw made of, well…straw. The dried stalks of grain plants actually gave the name of the drinking utensil thanks to the similarity in shape, so why not use them as actual drinking straws?

Plastic straws are banned in Slovenia

Often the impetus for innovation comes from the force of regulation. It’s been almost three years now that plastic straws have been banned in Slovenia and that got the farmers at the Leber Vračko family farm thinking whether they could do something about this.

So, using an idea they saw in Germany, the farmers began turning the stalks of the triticale, a hybrid between wheat and rye, into organic and sustainable drinking straws. That’s in addition to the traditional production of wine and milk.

The straws are made completely by hand in a zero-waste process. The ears are used as fodder and the stalks are left to ripen. They cut them by hand in late July or early August using sickles and put them in wooden crates. They cut the stalks in two sizes, 15 and 23 centimetres long. As of last year, they are also packed in naturally produced packaging.

The straw project has won co-funding from the European Regional Development Fund.