Update: On June 30th, California passed the most sweeping EPR reform in the U.S. to date.
The decision was initially supposed to be made with a state-wide ballot vote later in the year, but state legislators took matters into their own hands and gave near-unanimous support to plastics bill SB 54. The new bill achieves even more than we hoped the ballot voting initiative could, particularly around funding for the environmental justice community, and will: 1. Allocate $5 billion over the next 10 years to protect California’s lands and waters from plastics; 2. Ban chemical recycling, a harmful process that burns plastic to use as fuel; 3. Phase out single-use packaging, and; 4. Make producers fund efforts to reduce plastic production, and increase the collection and processing of recyclable plastic items
We are so grateful for your support and the incredible leadership of The Nature Conservancy, Monterey Bay Aquarium, Oceana, the Ocean Conservancy, CalPIRG, and California Environmental Voters in this effort.
Every year, seven trillion pieces of microplastic flow into San Francisco Bay.
Plastic pollution is wreaking havoc on marine ecosystems along the coast and in communities across California, endangering the health of people and animals. In one example, plastic debris has been found in 25 percent of California's fish, causing injury and death and carrying across the food web, eventually to humans. A recent study found people consume as much as 5 grams of plastic per week, the equivalent of a credit card's worth of toxic material cycling through our bodies.
Companies are creating crushing amounts of plastic pollution, and Californians are forced to bear the costs. But a new ballot initiative could change that and hold manufacturers–not taxpayers–accountable for the pollution they produce.
