Tell Your Representative to Support the REDUCE Act and Prevent Single Use Plastics

From PennEnvironment (http://www.pennenvironment.org):

You try your best, but single-use plastics are nearly impossible to avoid — encasing everything from grocery store bananas to online deliveries, and ultimately polluting our oceans and threatening wildlife.

And yet our country is producing more new plastic items than ever before — generating nearly 46.5 million tons of plastic waste each year.¹

We need to shift the costs of making and dealing with all this plastic waste back onto the companies that make it in the first place.

The REDUCE Act would force companies that produce new single-use plastic items to pick up the tab for this harmful form of pollution. Tell your U.S. House representative to support this critical conservation measure today at https://pennenvironment.webaction.org/p/dia/action4/common/public/?action_KEY=48789.

Making less new plastic is a good thing.

But as our nation shifts away from fossil fuels to more sustainably powered vehicles and energy sources, the oil and gas industry has latched onto plastics to shore up their bottom lines. By 2050, the plastics sector could account for 20% of global oil consumption.²

We can’t let these companies continue to put our planet at risk.

To turn the tide on plastic pollution, we need to tackle the problem at its source and stop new plastic from ever being created.

But we need supporters like you to stand with us. Take action today and contact your U.S. House representative.

Human beings have produced more than 8 billion metric tons of plastic since its invention, and most of it has ended up clogging landfills, littering our open spaces or choking wildlife in our oceans. Even worse, the process of producing plastic emits greenhouse gases that are accelerating the climate crisis.³

We can’t recycle our way out of this problem.

Because less than one-tenth of plastic gets recycled, there’s really only one way to truly protect our wildlife and wild places from this harmful form of waste: Use less of it in the first place.⁴

This bill would place a fee — paid for by producers — on the sale of single-use items, such as plastic bags, utensils, straws and water bottles, made from new, virgin plastic and help ensure the plastics industry bears some of the burden for the environmental damage it causes.

Contact your U.S. representative today and urge them to support the REDUCE Act to stop the flow of new single-use plastics.

1. Oliver Milman, “‘Deluge of plastic waste’: US is world’s biggest plastic polluter,” The Guardian, December 1, 2021.
2. “The New Plastics Economy: Rethinking the future of plastics,” World Economic Forum, January 19, 2016.
3. Julie Cohen, “8.3 billion metric tons of plastic … and counting,” UC Santa Barbara, July 19, 2017.
4. “A Whopping 91 Percent of Plastic Isn’t Recycled,” National Geographic, last accessed July 22, 2021.