Support Berkeley's groundbreaking waste reduction ordinance
Right now, streets, waterways, and coastlines across the San Francisco Bay Area are littered with plastic. Food containers, cups, cutlery, straws, bottle caps, wrappers, and other take-out food packaging have become all too common sights. Packaging waste and plastics designed for single use application and discarded after mere minutes are growing as a significant portion of the waste stream and recycling can’t keep up. According to the EPA, in 2014 over 33 million tons of plastic waste was generated, and only 9.5% was recycled. This plastic waste epidemic is a problem for not only creating blight in our communities from all the litter, but for our streams and oceans too -- 80% of plastics and trash that are in the ocean right now started as trash on the street or in a landfill. If we don’t stop this unnecessary consumption and disposal of single use plastics, there will be more plastic (by weight) in the ocean than fish by 2050.
