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Happy Hump Day, Shit Givers.
I promised you hadn’t heard the last of me.
It’s Lauren again, and I’ve spent a lot of time recently diving into plastic waste. Not literally, of course, just studying how governments, industry and consumers can reduce their environmental footprint.
I learned that it’d be great to find a more viable way to recycle more than a small fraction of post-consumer plastics, or to switch out materials in our shopping bags, but a big part of the waste problem is the widespread culture of throwaway products in the first place. “‘Single-use’ is more problematic than ‘plastic,’” as one UN Environment Programme report put it.
In that spirit, I’ve gathered ways to push local businesses and plastics producers away from single-use plastics.
Let’s go.
— Lauren
APL Positions covered this week:
📦 Extended producer responsibility for packaging
Understand the scale of the problem
Of the roughly 8300 million metric tons of plastic produced between 1950 and 2015, around half was generated in just the last 13 years, according to a 2017 report. Nearly 80% of that plastic wound up in a landfill, and only 9% was recycled.
Here’s what you can do:
Promote reuse in your community
Help local businesses move away from single-use plastics, either by working with owners directly or through policies that encourage everyone to do their part.
Here’s what you can do:
Learn the best strategies for convincing businesses to nix single-use plastics with Upstream’s Reuse Outreach Playbook (go).
Tell your city council to adopt a Skip the Stuff policy to limit single-use utensils and other dining accessories with takeout orders (go).
Tell local leaders to enact a Reusable Foodware for Onsite Dining policy (go).
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Fight for better plastic policy
Promote regulations to keep the plastic industry in check and support alternatives to single-use plastic water bottles for households with lead pipes.
Here’s what you can do:
Push back on greenwashing with the Truth in Labeling Act to create standards for what products can be marketed as recyclable, compostable, reusable and refillable (go).
Tell lawmakers to pass the Plastic Pellet Free Waters Act to ban dumping of pre-production plastic pellets that pollute waterways (go).
Join the Plastic Pollution Coalition’s Filtered, Not Bottled campaign demanding the EPA provide water filters to households awaiting lead pipe replacement, not single-use plastic bottles (go).
Support extended producer responsibility
Extended producer responsibility policies make companies responsible for waste at every stage of their product’s life cycle. These policies are especially key for packaging, currently the largest market for plastics.
Here’s what you can do:
Learn how extended producer responsibility and deposit return systems help divert waste with the Reuse in EPR and DPS guide from Upstream (go).
Tell New Jersey lawmakers to require sustainable Packaging Stewardship Plans from the state’s packaging producers (go).
California already has a great packaging policy in place. A new bill would direct money from this system to a Plastic Pollution Mitigation Fund (go).
That’s all for this week. You’ll hear from me again soon.
Thank you — as always — for giving a shit.
— Lauren
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