Peninsula Regional Group

About Us I Programs and Campaigns I Contact Us I Bylaws I Location and Calendar of Events

The Peninsula Regional Group is a regional group within the Loma Prieta Chapter of the Sierra Club. Our members are residents of all of San Mateo County exclusive of San Carlos and Belmont, and northern Santa Clara County, California.

The Loma Prieta Chapter is one of the many chapters that constitute the national Sierra Club. The Chapter includes San Mateo, Santa Clara, and San Benito Counties. We have an active and growing Region and Chapter with something for just about everyone.

We have an outings program of hikes in the local greenbelt, please see the calendar below.

Do you have an idea for something you would like to see our regional group become more involved with? We welcome any and all of your suggestions; email Gita Dev, our Vice Chair at: prg.vicechair@lomaprieta.sierraclub.org.

Peninsual Regional Group Hikers at Half Moon Bay

Programs and Campaigns

For information about our Environmental Stewardship Projects Program and videos of past programs, click here!

Invitation to Join A Cool Cities Team

Governments have the legal authority to fight climate change and protect our environment. While the federal government can pass important legislation, they are not the only change agents. City, county, and state governments are just as important, sometimes even more important. In progressive states like California, local governments can often be trendsetters, influencing policies at higher levels.

Our City Teams work closely with our Education and Environmental Education & Legislative Action Committee (EELA). EELA members work with city, county, and state politicians to pass strong environmental legislation, ordinances, and resolutions.

ELA’s work includes the following and more:

Cultivating strong relationships with local and state elected officials.
Working with city and state officials to pass important local ordinances and state legislation
Organizing chapter members to lobby for strong environmental actions at the local and state levels
Organizing conferences and forums for public officials and the general public.

If you are part of a Sierra Club Cool Cities Team, you will be able to play an important role in combating climate change and saving ecosystems and endangered wildlife. You will also be part of a vibrant local environmental community.

If you are interested in joining a Cool Cities team,
contact Sue at sue2042@gmail.com

Book Group: ESP Reading Club

Our book group is comprised of Sierra Club members who seek to deepen their understanding of environmental issues in order to inform our politicla activism.

Contact Marianna Raymond for more information and to join.

Divestment Campaign

Divestment from fossil fuel companies is a powerful action that all of us can take right now to combat climate change.

Lowering the demand for fossil fuels through reducing the demand for coal, oil, and natural gas is, of course, an important climate action, but reducing the supply of fossil fuels (the goal of divestment) by putting pressure on fossil fuel companies to stop selling planet-destroying toxins is the second key prong of climate actions.

Many people are unaware of how the 10-year old divestment movement has been increasing in momentum--many established institutions have either already divested or have committed to divesting. Even mainstream government entities like New York State and New York City have committed to fossil fuel divestment.

Now is the time for us to turn up the pressure. The state of California as well as California’s cities and counties can no longer profess to be at the forefront of climate actions if they continue to invest in fossil fuel companies.

Plastics: The Problem and Progress

By Kathy Battat

Plastics Manufacturing and Fossil Fuels

The U.S. plastic industry is responsible for over 232 million tons of C02e gas emissions and is on track to exceed emissions of coal-fired power in this country by 2030, according to a 2022 report by Beyond Plastics. The plastics industry would like us to believe in the recyclability of plastics, but less than 9% of plastics were actually recycled, or more accurately “downcycled,” in the U.S. in 2021. This is primarily due to the challenge of thousands of different types of plastics that cannot be recycled together and the fact that recycling is uneconomical compared to the cost of virgin plastic. What’s more, it’s estimated that roughly 50% of plastics are discarded after a single use. “The plastics industry has waged a campaign to perpetuate the myth that [plastics] are recyclable,” says Judith Enck, a former EPA administrator and president of Beyond Plastics.

Damage from Plastics

What happens to plastic that is not recycled? Every year the U.S. burns or buries 32 million tons of plastic, disproportionately affecting frontline communities. Currently about ten million tons of plastics end up in the ocean each year, a number expected to triple by 2040. The amount of plastics that have accumulated in the oceans is unknown but is estimated to be about 150 million metric tons in 2015 and is expected to reach roughly 600 million metric tons by 2040, according to a groundbreaking research project by the Pew Charitable Trusts and SYSTEMIQ.

Plastics in our environment and oceans break down into smaller and smaller pieces and according to United Nations report, roughly 800 species worldwide are affected by marine debris, mostly comprised of plastics. Microplastic particles are so pervasive in our food and drinking water that the average person ingests a credit card’s worth of plastics every week, with the health effects not fully understood.

California Legislative Actions

The plastics problem is starting to gain more traction in California and with added urgency following the recent Supreme Court decision limiting the power of the E.P.A. to protect the environment. On the same day the Court released their decision, Governor Newsom signed into law a sweeping plastic-reduction measure, Senate Bill 54. The new law, negotiated by environmentalists, the plastics industry and lawmakers (with the agreement that a stronger ballot measure that qualified for the 2022 election would be withdrawn) would require all single-use packaging and foodware in the state be recyclable or compostable by 2032. It requires 30% of plastic packaging be recycled by January 1, 2028, 40% by 2030 and 65% by 2032. Plastic industry producers will pay $5 billion over ten years starting in 2027, towards environmental mitigation and to address harms to disadvantaged, low-income, and rural communities.

While SB 54 is the nation’s toughest law on the books for the reduction of plastics, it has some flaws. It does not outlaw Styrofoam. There is also concern that although Styrofoam is not truly recyclable the industry could utilize the practice they’ve termed chemical recycling a process in which plastic waste is broken down using high heat and chemicals to create low-quality fossil fuel. The author of the bill, state Senator Ben Allen of Santa Monica, plans to develop a cleanup bill to address the omission of a stated ban on forms of recycling that “involve combustion and incineration” that produce fuel or hazardous waste.

Actions banning plastics occur at the local level too, so we are not just dependent on state-level actions. Municipalities such as San Francisco and other cities have been leaders in enacting plastic reduction ordinances over the past decade to reduce plastic bags and other single-use plastics such as straws, cups and stirrers. Local laws have often been more stringent than state laws . Furthermore, local ordinances help drive public support and ultimately legislative action on a state-wide basis.

Also of note is the investigation being conducted by California Attorney General, Rob Bonta into the oil and gas industry’s role in climate change and the plastics crisis. Judith Enck from Beyond Plastics called the investigation “very significant” because it has “the potential to finally hold plastic producers accountable for the immense environmental damage caused by plastics.” It will also “address the ongoing deception of claiming that plastics are recyclable when, in fact, less than 10 percent are actually recycled,” she said.

Our youth group, BAYCATS (Bay Area chapter of YCATS, Youth Climate Action Teams), is currently working on lobbying cities in our chapter to ban both single-use plastic foodware, and artificial turf, most of which contain PFAS, forever chemicals. Contact Amanda if you are interested in joining YCATS. amanday1311@gmail.com

Additional Resources:

The New Coal: Plastics and Climate Change, Beyond Plastics https://www.beyondplastics.org/plastics-and-climate

Plastic trash flowing into the sea will nearly triple by 2040 without drastic action, National Geographic https://api.nationalgeographic.com/distribution/public/amp/science/article/plastic-trash-in-seas-will-nearly-triple-by-2040-if-nothing-done

New UN report finds marine debris harming more than 800 species, costing countries missions, UN News https://news.un.org/en/story/2016/12/547032-new-un-report-finds-marine-debris-harming-more-800-species-costing-countries

Plastic Recycling Doesn’t Work and Will Never Work, The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/single-use-plastic-chemical-recycling-disposal/661141/

California lawmakers pass major plastic-reduction measure after years of thwarted attempts, San Francisco Chronicle https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/California-lawmakers-pass-major-plastic-reduction-17277449.php

SB-54 Solid waste: reporting, packaging, and plastic food service ware – text of bill https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202120220SB54

San Francisco ordinance: Single-Use Food Ware Plastics, and Litter Reduction https://sfenvironment.org/reduceplastic#:~:text=As%20of%20July%2C%202019%2C%20the,items%20like%20straws%20and%20cups

Contact Kathy if you are interested in working on the plastics problem at kbattat@gmail.com

Saratoga High School Students Campaign to Remove Artificial Turf

Artificial turf rolls that were found in the Saratoga High School parking lot in the summer of 2023:

Photo courtesy of Pam Bond

By Nicole Lee, class of 2025 at Saratoga High School

Imagine you’re running through a green grass field. Now imagine that instead of grass touching your feet and brushing against your ankles, it’s plastic. This is the reality that my classmates and I faced at Saratoga High School. In our school campus, we have three grass fields, all used for athletic purposes. Each one of these grass fields is made of plastic and filled with plastic and rubber crumbs.

As a former member of my school’s color guard, I used to run on the field during practices at least three times a week for around fourteen hours in total per week — not including the extra time spent during the weeks leading up to major performances. During these practices, we typically warmed up in classrooms for around an hour before heading to one of our three turf fields, where we executed our practices through exercises such as running and dancing across the field. Not only was the field always uncomfortable to move on, but remnants of it would also consistently appear in my shoes and clothes — and it would continue to do so even weeks after the last practice had ended.

Artificial turf is harmful for a number of reasons. Not only is it uncomfortable to walk on, but it also contains toxic polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) known as forever chemicals for their inability to decompose naturally — or for that matter, decompose at all. These PFAS often drain into waterways, polluting the water. It has also been linked to a greatly increased chance for cancer, increases injury rates for athletes (dirt has been shown to be much softer to the body than artificial turf), and exacerbates a heat problem due to the “heat island” effect (according to Safe and Healthy Playing Fields, artificial grass increases temperatures near the turf by as much as 40-70º as opposed to real grass). Furthermore, natural grass just costs less. A study done by Cornell states that “Synthetic infill fields are very costly to install and maintain in comparison to a native soil field.” Not only does artificial turf take money to maintain, it also needs to be replaced every few years, which costs much more than natural grass which basically never has to be reinstalled after its first installation if it is well maintained.

Currently, I am working with two other rising juniors of Saratoga High School: Aiden Chen and Neha Tadikamalla. In our campaign to try to get our school to replace their artificial turf fields with real grass, we have attended and made public comments at the Los Gatos-Saratoga School Board meetings; sent letters to the board, administration, city council members, and PTA; written an article — in addition to this one — about the dangers of artificial turf and our efforts to stop it; and are currently trying to expand our efforts to help the city of Saratoga pass an ordinance banning the use of artificial turf on public property.

A growing number of cities — such as Boston — have already banned artificial turf because of the public health risks and its detrimental environmental effects. In the Bay Area, Millbrae just banned it on October 2023, a month after a new law was passed that restored the power of local governments to ban artificial turf, overturning an industry-sponsored legislation that stripped cities of this authority.

We hope that by replacing the artificial turf on the school fields, we will be able to create a healthier and safer environment for the students at Saratoga High School. We hope that by replacing the artificial turf on the school fields, we will also be able to set an example for other schools that can follow our leads and open the way for more environmentally friendly changes to our environment in schools and neighborhoods. Finally, we hope that government officials at all levels will take stronger action against the serious public health and environmental threats that artificial turf poses.

If you would like to participate in our anti-artificial turf campaign, please contact Nicole Lee.

Sierra Club Honors Bay Area Environmental Champions with National and Chapter Awards

Palo Alto, CA – The Loma Prieta Chapter of the Sierra Club is pleased to announce that three local environmental leaders have been recognized by Sierra Club National. The three awardees are Assemblymember Ash Kalra (D-San Jose), San Mateo County Supervisor Dave Pine, and conservation activist Mike Ferreira.

The historic awards represent the first time three local chapter nominees have been recognized by Sierra Club National - America’s largest and oldest environmental organization. (more)

BAYCATS (Bay Area Youth Climate Action Teams)

Hi! We are the Bay Area Youth Climate Action Team, a group of dedicated environmental activists in middle and high school. Previously, we successfully influenced the Millbrae City Council to pass a single-use plastic ban ordinance. In addition to attending local city council meetings to advocate for better environmental legislation, we utilize our social media platforms to educate the public about important environmental news. Our mission is to connect passionate youth from across the Bay Area in order to spread awareness about our current climate crisis. Together, we will create a lasting impact on our planet, and strive towards a brighter and cleaner future. We hope you visit our website, linked below, to view our past initiatives and join us on our mission!

If you have any questions please email Amanda Yu.