[venning]

> ...Americans use 500 million plastic straws a day ... hundreds of thousands of straws are found littering coastlines around the world each year...

If "hundreds of thousands" means 500 thousand, then this is saying that 0.00027% of those plastic straws are found on coastlines.

I understand that there are problems with both of those statistics, but it still seems a bit odd to publish them like this (there are 13 words between those numbers).

Again, the "500 million" number is likely wrong (as OP references, [1]) and the "hundreds of thousands" number was probably the author taking a spitball at something that there aren't real statistics for, but they still chose to print it.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/business/plastic-straws-b...

EDIT: In reference to [1], being within an order-of-magnitude is pretty impressive for a 9-year-old.