Business & Tech
Young Ridgefield Inventor Captures National Spotlight
A soon-to-be sixth grader at East Ridge Middle School finds herself at ground zero of the plastic straw ban legislation.
RIDGEFIELD, CT -- The "snow straw," a Ridgefield 10-year-old's contribution to a better global ecology, has tickled the public fancy and taken the media by storm.
The brain child of Sophie Zezula, a soon-to-be sixth grader at East Ridge Middle School, the biodegradable drinking straw made from ice first took the spotlight at a Ridgefield K-12 invention convention during the past school year. Later, it placed second in the fifth grade division and won the Earth and Geosciences Industry Award at the national invention convention. She also won the title of “Recognized Inventor” at the Connecticut convention.
Concerned about plastic persistence and pollution, Zezula set about devising a single-use, biodegradable straw. Ice was her material of choice -- nothing biodegrades quite like frozen water -- but boring a hole through a long length of icicle seemed a non-starter.
What Zezula ultimately devised is one of those screamingly so-simple why-didn't-anyone-think-of-this-earlier designs. As she told National Public Radio, “It’s just a tube with a stopper on the bottom so the water doesn’t leak through the tube. Inside the tube is a meat skewer. The meat skewer is what forms the hole in the ice. And then, to balance the meat skewer in the middle without it tilting to the sides, I take tin foil and wrap it around the meat-skewer so it holds the meat-skewer in place.”
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As of June 1, a number of major metropolitan areas were planning straw-banning legislation, including New York City, Seattle, Monmouth Beach Oakland, Miami Beach, San Luis Obispo and Fort Myers. Closer to home, officials in Stonington voted last month to form a task force that will explore the idea of banning plastic bags, straws and plastic restaurant takeout containers. All this has sent reporters scurrying to the Ridgefield inventor's door for the perfect feel-good new-tech cute-kid human interest story.
Not everyone thinks the snow straw is ready to save the world, however. For the disabled, the affordability, tensile strength, and flexibility of plastic straws far outweigh the soft ecological boosts of Straw 2.0. Others believe that even a global ban on plastic straws would not amount to more than, well, a drop in the ocean, and that our time, energy and legislative efforts were better spent focused on smarter initiatives against industrial producers of plastic bags and micro-plastics.
None of that science and circumstance dampens the momentum of Sophie Zezula. As she told The News Times, "We’ve been working on getting a patent and that’d be really awesome if we could start selling.”
Image via Shutterstock.
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