Plastic pollution costs the City of Houston $21 million to prevent, enforce, educate and clean up litter (1). This figure comes from a study on the costs of litter and illegal dumping in nine cities in Texas.  Texans for Clean Water commissioned this study, and it revealed the City of Houston spends $13 million on litter clean up.  That’s a lot of money that could be spent on other things such as walkable neighborhoods, closing the education gap, or even on solutions to our homelessness.

What if we could do better for not only the environment, but also our our health and our economy?  What if we could prevent litter from clogging our waterways---choking our aquatic ecosystems and persisting long enough to accumulate in the food chain eventually ending up in our diet?

This is a project to ultimately reduce our consumption of single use plastic.  These represent the worst of planned obsolescence; single use plastic is designed to be used once and then deliberately discarded into the trash.  Houston Sierra Club is looking for volunteers to collect data on single use plastic in restaurants. 

All you have to do is go out to eat, get take out, or order delivery.  While you are dining, open the google form to check all the single use plastic items that apply to your experience.  You can rate multiple restaurants.  You use a new google form from the same link.  The data we collect can then be transformed into an app to inform customers which restaurants are using less single use plastic. 

Environmentally concerned customers can make informed, environmental choices!

To find the google form, visit https://goo.gl/forms/tARjfAqfKhJvezn53

Please send feedback to elizabeth.spike@comcast.net.

(1) http://www.texansforcleanwater.com/uploads/1/0/9/3/10936519/cost_of_litter_and_illegal__dumping_final.pdf