In this initial study, we aimed to constrain the environmental lifetimes of commercial drinking straws in the coastal ocean, determine the microbial communities assembling on and presumably degrading these items, and assess engineered strategies to minimize persistence. We exposed commercial drinking straws made of cellulose diacetate (CDA), polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs), coated and uncoated paper, industrially-compostable polylactic acid (PLA), and PP to marine microbes in a flow-through seawater mesocosm for 16 weeks. Throughout the experiment, we measured the mass loss of the straws and collected biofilms from the straws at the end of 16 weeks for microbial community analyses.