Nearly all Walt Disney parks will prohibit the use of plastic straws or stirrers, as early as the middle of 2019.

Walt Disney Company officials estimate that the plastic ban will eliminate the annual consumption of 175 million straws and 13 million stirrers. The company operates parks and resorts around the world; Disney Tokyo is not among the parks participating in the ban.

Disney also announced a ban on single-use plastic bags, saying that its parks and resorts would sell branded reusable bags for customers to use.

Disney joins a number of high-profile companies banning single-use plastic straws and other plastic products. Earlier in July, global coffee purveyor Starbucks said that it would eliminate plastic straws in all of its stores by 2020. McDonald's announced a similar ban in the U.K. and Ireland, beginning in September 2018.

Even more widely, the European Union has proposed a similar ban, on plastic straws and stirrers, as well as cotton buds.

Many companies that have already banned plastic straws have replaced them with paper straws because paper is recyclable. As well, plastic stirrers have been replaced with wood or bamboo stirrers.

The move to ban plastic straws and stirrers and bags is growing across the world, particularly in the wake of widely publicized photos of wildlife struggling against manmade plastics choking the world's seas. The most prominent example of this is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.