How the story ends

If you’ve been to a Starbucks recently, you might have noticed something a little different about your iced coffee—did it come with a straw? If it did, that won’t be the case for long. Last summer, the global coffee chain announced a plan to eliminate all plastic straws by 2020. To many people, it’s just a straw. To actor, producer and environmentalist Adrian Grenier, it’s an encouraging step in sustainability that could have a big impact on the plastic pollution that plagues our oceans. Well known as the star of HBO’s Entourage, Grenier’s role as an activist might be his most exciting yet. “There have been scientists and humanitarians and environmentalists who have been telling the story of man’s destructive path for a lot longer than I’ve been alive, but have we listened?” asks Grenier. “No.” He wants to tell the story in a different way. “There’s always room for reinventing the way we can reach people—[to] shake them out of their complacency, get them, capture their imaginations—so that they’re not just inspired by consumer storytelling and commercialism, but by stories of the soul.”