If you're not worried about microplastics, electronic waste, or our landfills rapidly reaching capacity, you should be.  Supporting Zero Waste legislation locally as well as nationally will be critically important for our futures.  Meanwhile, we'll try to keep you informed about what you can do now.

Maryland Needs a Bottle Bill!

About 5.5 billion beverage containers are sold in Maryland annually. Only about 25% of them are captured for recycling. That means more than 4 billion containers a year, half of which are plastic, are left in the environment–in landfills, on road-sides, in waterways–or incinerated. The number littered is significant: Beverage containers are about half of the trash by volume in the Anacostia watershed’s trash traps (see above).

What can you do?  Besides volunteering to help clean out the trash traps in our waterways like the Anacostia River or picking up containers along roadsides, we can support legislation to require refundable deposits on all beverage containers.  That would greatly reduce the number of containers polluting our environment.

Click this link to read a fact sheet about the proposed legislation for the 2025 Maryland General Assembly, and contact your state legislators to ask them to sponsor or sign the bill when it comes up next session.  You can scan the QR code at the bottom of the fact sheet to sign a petition that will go directly to your legislators.

Or click here to go directly to the page to send your message!