Father and son Tony and Anthony Jabar operate Anu Drinkware in Dillon, where they manufacture a more sustainable straw from a facility surrounded by cow pastures for miles in all directions.
How a Father–Son Duo is Rethinking the Plastic Straw
Dillon is known by Montanans largely for ranching and the Patagonia outlet store. Mostly, it’s a cow town through and through. It takes just minutes to drive down the main street. The pace of life feels slower even if ranching and farming are anything but slow work. If you’re a rancher within a few hours’ drive, it’s where you go to buy equipment and stock up on “big city” ranch supplies. If you’re a Bozeman mom, it’s where you go to score a deal on your kids’ puffy coats.
Of course, Dillon is more than these caricatures, and the father–son duo from Maine making plant-based biodegradable straws is just one example.
The journey Tony Jabar Sr. and his son, Anthony Jabar Jr., took to Dillon began with the passage of the 2018 Farm Bill. Before the farm bill, the production of hemp—a variety of cannabis grown for use as a fiber, in food and beverage, and the production of non-psychoactive cannabidiol (CBD)—was heavily restricted under the Controlled Substances Act.
Tony Sr., a plant chemist with four decades of experience, saw an opportunity with CBD. He and a longtime business partner had connections in Dillon, and they started a CBD operation. A local farmer grew the hemp and Tony Sr. and his son converted a hay barn into a CBD extraction facility. A lot of other farmers had the same idea. “It was a market that needed 5,000 acres of hemp.
Farmers grew over half a million acres,” Tony Sr. says. Adds Anthony Jr., “When we started, a liter of pure CBD distillate sold for about $8,000. By the time we were getting it out, it was about $150.” In a saturated market, the economics no longer made sense.
So, the Jabars pivoted.
THE SCIENCE BENEATH THE STRAW
Their first idea was biodegradable plant pots—something you could plant directly into the soil, no plastic needed. But that turned out to be more complicated than the Jabars wanted to take on. Compostable drinking straws were beginning to take off around this time, so they looked into the process of making biodegradable straws.
They bought the machines, learned the process, and by late 2023 had their first line of straws rolling out the door. Anu Drinkware was born. Eco Montana, a regional distributor, picked them up first, supplying coffee shops and small businesses around the state. Next, Sysco’s Northern Rockies division began carrying their products. And this past summer Harrington Pepsi began distributing their straws, which are now used across Yellowstone National Park general stores and gas stations.
What they’re making isn’t a paper straw by another name. It’s a straw made from polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA), a plantbased polymer that can act like plastic without the lifecycle and environmental and health risks of its fossil-based counterpart: single-use plastic.
Tony Sr. explains it: Certain bacteria eat carbon-rich plant material like canola oil or corn sugar and produce and store PHA as an energy reserve. It’s their version of body fat. Those polymers are then collected, purified, and melted into forms for later use, such as the pellets Anu uses to make straws. Unlike traditional plastic, PHA is fully compostable at home, in industrial facilities, and even in soil or the ocean. It doesn’t fragment into microplastics; it simply breaks back down and reenters the carbon cycle.
The straws look and feel familiar too—smooth, sturdy, sip-ready—but when you toss one, it returns to the soil it started from.
What they’re making isn’t a paper straw by another name. It’s a straw made from polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA), a plant-based polymer that can act like plastic without the lifecycle and environmental and health risks of its fossilbased counterpart: single-use plastic.
Right now, PHA straws cost about three times as much as petroleum ones. For small coffee shops or restaurants, that can add up. But the Jabars are finding buyers with a growing interest in a product that won’t sit in a landfill for centuries even if it costs more up front. Plastic straws can take up to 200 years to decompose, according to the World Wildlife Fund.
The true cost of conventional single-use plastic doesn’t show up on receipts. Landfills fill faster. Cities spend millions opening new ones, which are funded by taxpayers. Microplastics seep into the soil, water, seafood, and livestock, creating environmental risks and damage. More and more research is finding microplastics in humans, raising the alarm bells about the potential health risks and costs. We’re ripe for a change from our reliance on traditional plastic, and PHA promises to be a viable and effective solution.
BUILDING SOMETHING IN A COW TOWN
There’s a quiet humor to a father and son from Maine ending up in Dillon, making straws out of “plant plastic.” But it makes a certain kind of sense. The Jabars come from a papermaking state. They understand small towns, hard work, and weather that keeps you humble.
In their small facility just outside of town, it smells like earth and cows. Bins of off-white pellets wait to be melted into form. Prototypes of other single-use plastic are scattered about because straws are just the beginning. The office is humble, with no fuss, just like Anthony and his father. The pair rib each other as they explain the straw-making process. Anthony Jr. is certain he does the lion’s share of the work. Tony swears it’s him.
It’s not a slick tech startup. It’s a father and son with sleeves rolled up, building something tangible, something that could outlast the boom-and-bust cycles that brought them here.
It’s not a slick tech startup. It’s a father and son with sleeves rolled up, building something tangible, something that could outlast the boom-and-bust cycles that brought them here.
Tony and his son bring a sense of humor and lightness to what is often a fraught subject: climate change. Instead of doom and gloom, on their website you’ll find a love story between a worm and a straw who get down in the dirt to illustrate the journey their straws take post latte. The Jabars are serious about climate change and their impact in the single-use-plastic industry, but serious doesn’t mean stiff and boring.
If you grab an iced latte in Bozeman or a huckleberry lemonade in Yellowstone next summer, there’s a good chance the straw between your fingers came from that old hay building in Dillon. It’ll feel like plastic, and it’ll do its job without calling attention to itself. Then it’ll return quietly to the earth.
The Jabars aren’t saving the world, they’re making straws. But they’re doing it in a way that points toward a better kind of ordinary, one where the things we use every day don’t outlive the people who use them.
As Anu Drinkware promises on their website: “No plastic, just fantastic.”
