The snack bar at the Carolina Club golf course is stocked with the hits. Peanuts, packs of Nabs, draft beer and a warming oven packed full of foil-wrapped hot dogs.

Nothing is out of place at the golf course bar in Grandy, half an hour inland from the Outer Banks.

Nothing except the straws, which are paper, not plastic, and stamped with the declaration “Earth Friendly.”

These straws place the course squarely on the razor’s edge of an environmental movement gone mainstream, one that’s finding its way from major cities to the Triangle and North Carolina.

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The rising tide against plastic straws includes Starbucks, which wants to eliminate its plastic straws by 2020, as well as cities like Seattle, which has banned straws and plastic utensils in restaurants.

Though challenges remain to eliminate plastic straws altogether — including municipal infrastructure, costs and the difficulty in changing long-held habits — what was once plopped into a drink without a second thought is increasingly considered thoughtless, as opponents argue a straw’s convenience doesn’t justify eternity in a city landfill.

“I call it being ‘Straw Woke,’” said Crystal Dreisbach, the executive director of local environmental group Don’t Waste Durham, and a crusader against plastic straws for the better part of a decade.

“The problem with typical plastic straws is they cannot be recycled, so you use it once and it lives in the environment forever,” she said.

Dreisbach is so devoted to her home of Durham that she mailed 250 personal letters in 2012 to local restaurants, challenging them to rethink their environmental practices, mainly targeting Styrofoam boxes. She heard back from only one, the Durham bar Bull McCabe’s, which switched to compostable containers.

“Back then it was, ‘Oh Crystal, she’s a tree-hugger,’” Dreisbach said. “Now we’ve reached a point of awareness, and it’s really created a tipping point as consumers. I’m glad I yelled at the brick wall.”

Locally, Durham has led the move against straws, including a “skip the straw” campaign in March organized by the group Keep Durham Beautiful and endorsed by Mayor Steve Schewel. More than a dozen restaurants pledged to cut out plastic straws for the month.

This summer, Duke University’s dining services department announced its on-campus eateries and dining halls had banned all disposable plastics, including cutlery and straws. The Carolina Inn in Chapel Hill announced on social media that it, too, is eliminating plastic straws and stirrers in its restaurant, Crossroads.

WHY STRAWS?

While banning straws could keep tons of plastic out of landfills, even opponents are unclear why straws are being singled out, and why momentum seems to be building this year. Dreisbach said Styrofoam is likely the bigger environmental concern, and plastic cups contain much more plastic than straws.

“Maybe it’s because to drink you need a cup, but you don’t necessarily need a straw,” Dreisbach said.

Dreisbach also considered “The Turtle,” perhaps the patron saint of the war on straws.

The Turtle refers to a moment in 2015, when for the first time, straws seemed like something more than litter. Thanks to a now-famous viral video, they seemed dangerous.

In the video, scientists off the coast of Costa Rica had pulled a sea turtle into their boat, a plastic straw lodged in its nose. Over eight excruciating minutes, they struggled to extract the straw with a pair of pliers, the turtle writhing in pain.

Michelle Paye, the general manager at the Carolina Club golf course, said the video of the turtle weighed on her. The Turtle ended up being one of the driving forces behind their switch to paper straws this May. Customers aren’t crazy about them, she said, and thinking green is far from any branding campaign at the course.

Complaints about environmentally friendly paper cups leaking led to a switch back to Styrofoam, she said, but she wants to stick with the paper straws.