Sierra Club Moshannon Group has joined The Last Plastic Straw project. We are reaching out to restaurants in our area asking them to take the last plastic straw pledge. Previous participants reported a 50 - 80% reduction in straw use when they served customers straws upon request only. Its a small step that is having enormous effects. As participants in The Last Plastic Straw we are not against drinking straws, we are against plastic for single-use, and the plastic drinking straw is the poster child for useless single-use plastic. If restaurants simply served straws upon request for those who need them, it would be cost saving, not only for the individual business, but for the community they do business in. Consider the savings in waste hauling, landfill, plastic in the environment, clean up, and the overall pollution that results in every stage of a plastic straws existence from manufacture, shipping, health toxicity, and waste.
Each day, more than 500 million plastic straws are used and discarded in the U.S.alone. Plastic straws consistently make the top ten list of items found, according to Ocean Conservancy's International Coastal Cleanup data. In the last three years, plastic straws have climbed the list to the Number 5 spot. In the long run, this collective engagement around the gateway issue of plastic straws will meaningfully shift the way individuals and businesses think about plastic pollution -and about our society’s disposable culture on a larger scale. Our hope is to start with straws, gain communication with restaurants, and to move on to plastic utensils and styrofoam containers. It is our thought that restaurants have the ability to move independently more easily than a grocery chain or big box store. While we work on passing ordinances to ban single use plastics, we are hoping to effect a more immediate change and demonstrate to municipalities that businesses and patrons will support these initiatives.
WHAT: SCMG’s participation in The Last Plastic Straw Campaign has evolved out of a two year attempt to introduce ordinances at the local government level to end single use plastic in our community. Initially, Steve Lachman, the Co-Chair of SCMG, wrote a single use plastic bag ordinance and sent it to lawyers, the mayor's office, and to the township supervisors who would vote on it's adoption. The process stalled. A Sierra Club member at large then sent around petitions and got the required number of signatures from residents in two municipalities- College Township and Ferguson Township. The township supervisors have been holding fact finding meetings and deliberating the ordinance's language and proposal since November 2018. Our desire to mitigate the single use plastic problem immediately has led to the Last Straw Campaign. Our hope is to start with straws, gain communication with restaurants, and to move on to plastic utensils and styrofoam containers. It is our thought that restaurants have the ability to move independently more easily than a grocery chain or big box store.
WHY: Entanglement, ingestion and habitat disruption all result from plastic ending up in the spaces where animals live. In our oceans alone, plastic debris outweighs zooplankton by a ratio of 36-to-1.Chemicals leached by plastics are in the blood and tissue of nearly all of us. Exposure to them is linked to cancers, birth defects, impaired immunity, endocrine disruption and other ailments.Plastic costs billions to abate. Everything suffers: tourism, recreation, business, the health of humans, animals, fish and birds—because of plastic pollution. The financial damage continuously being inflicted is inestimable. Americans alone discard more than 30 million tons of plastica year; only 8 percent of it gets recycled. The rest ends up in landfills or becomes 'litter', and a small portion is incinerated.There are tens of thousands of landfills across the globe. Buried beneath each one of them, plastic leachate full of toxic chemicals is seeping into groundwater and flowing downstream into lakes and rivers.
Campaign Update:
After two years of working on a plastic bag ban or tax in Ferguson Township the Supervisors adopted a resolution to impose a .05 fee to plastic bags. In a frustrating turn of events, a block on passing plastic bag bans was slipped into the fiscal code for the coming year by the PA legislature. While this may postpone our work is some ways, we can still rally and focus our efforts for next summer when the block will lift. One method we discussed is working with businesses around the borough to have them sign either a petition to install a ban next year or to agree to reduce the plastic bags they use in stores.
To further our goal of reaching other municipalities in Centre County, we're also discussing which townships to reach out to next to pass resolutions and preparing talking points and determining who to approach.