The Last Straw: East Valley Company Goes To Paper Products

The anti-straw movement has been booming. Everywhere you turn, companies across the globe are ditching the plastic tubes for more eco-friendly options.

Former Intel engineers, Troy Swope and partner Yoke Chung, saw the opportunity to make a change and took it. Taking everything that they have learned in the semiconductor field, they are focused on creating new paper products. In hope that the products will reduce plastic waste, they founded the company called Footprint LLC.

According to Swope, their 135,000 sq ft  facility in Gilbert will be able to bring billions of paper straws to the market annually. Swope elaborates that, “[they are] building a manufacturing facility that can expand up to about 20 billion paper straws, but we are currently focused on about 5 billion annually.”


Adding this many straws should make a difference, right?

It’s definitely a start. According to the National Parks Service, American use over 500 million drinking straws per day. That’s a lot of soda, and a usage rate of 1.6 straws per person.

With those statistics in place, Swope would like his company to eradicate plastic drinking straws. And so far, with their manufacturing agreements with Walmart, Georgia Pacific, and Foster Farms, they’re off to a good start. 

Footprint says that besides manufacturing, there is are corporate offices and a lab inside the building Germann Road near Gilbert Road. 

Is it a genuine move? Or publicly charged? Only time will tell, but for now we can look forward to more options at the hands of the consumer.