Make Our Enviornment Fantastic
Plastic and its toxic additives pose serious risks to human health at every stage of the plastic lifecycle. Harmful climate-warming emissions and toxic chemicals are constantly released during plastic’s entire lifecycle, from the extraction of fracked gas, to its production at petrochemical hubs, to the disposal of plastic waste and resulting pollution of our rivers and oceans. These emissions damage our health and environment — and threaten our future.
Today, the world is drowning in plastic waste. Plastic bits are in the rain, our soil, our rivers and oceans, our food chain and in us. It is estimated that by 2050 the ocean will have more plastic by weight than fish.
Mini-Challenge and Workshop
- Mini-Challenge: Avoid plastic or extra packaging on Amazon orders
(More here on actions you can take to have minimal Amazon packaging). - Workshop: Turn an old t-shirt into a reusable bag. Instructions for both sew and no-sew versions are HERE.
#BreakFreeFromPlastic Campaign 2019-2020
During our campaign, we had guest speakers, held workshops, provided tips, offered alternatives and encouragement in an effort to help reduce our plastic use. We held mini-challenges encouraging people to demand corporate responsibility and government policy to provide alternatives to plastic.
In our Kick-Off Challenge, we collected a week’s worth of plastic waste. In all, 14 families (28 people) brought in 24.5 lbs. of plastic, filling 3.5 60-gallon trash bags.
Statistics
The world produces 381 million tons in plastic waste yearly – this is set to double by 2034.50% of this is single-use plastic & only 9% has ever been recycled.
73% of all beach litter is plastic.The litter includes filters from cigarette butts, bottles, bottle caps, food wrappers, grocery bags, and polystyrene containers, according to National Geographic.
Plastic is killing more than 1.1 million seabirds and animals every year. Additionally, more than 90% of all birds and fish are believed to have plastic particles in their stomach.
A billion toothbrushes will be thrown away in the U.S. this year, most of them plastic. If you laid out the toothbrushes thrown away in the U.S. in a year, they would wrap around the Earth four times!
The average person eats 70,000 microplastics each year. That works out to about 100 bits of microplastic over the course of just one meal, according to a study published in Environmental Pollution.
Plastic production is projected to triple by 2050. More than $180 billion has been allocated over the next 10 years to build 263 new cracker facilities along the Gulf Coast and in the Mid-Atlantic/Northeast region—both vulnerable to the extreme weather patterns connected to global warming. (5gyres.org)