Mission:

Educate West Chester Area residents and businesses about how to reduce plastic use in our everyday lives and how to properly recycles the material we do use according to the neighborhood in which you live. Encourage local food suppliers to reduce the amount of plastic packaging the have on items. See us on Facebook here.

The facts:

The approach:  “Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of of small things brought together” — Vincent van Gogh.

It’s happening around the word, consumers don’t want plastic any more and supermarkets need to start realizing that they play a vital role in consumer single use plastics. Supermarket chain ALDI already took the initiative on what they call “Crack down on plastic waste”.

What can you do:

• Shop with your own reusable bags

• Give preference to products not wrapped or contained in plastic

• Patronize Growers Markets and other venues that do not force plastic wrappers and bags on you

• Help spread the word from our web site and Facebook page to your friends

• Write letters to the editor explaining about he plastic crisis and how we can all help solve it.

Links:

ALDI cracks down on plastic waste.
Aldi has become the latest leading supermarket to unveil wide-ranging new plans to crack down on plastic waste, pledging to ensure all the packaging for its own-brand products is recyclable, reusable or compostable by 2022. See here.

New studies show that alarming numbers of tiny fibers from synthetic fabrics are making their way from your washing machine into the environment and aquatic animals. See here. And here. And here.

Trees can seem like a more benign source material than natural gas or oil. But converting hard wood into paper requires a resource-heavy pulping process, which the UK’s Environment Agency determined in its life cycle analysis (LCA) to be “significantly worse” than plastic in terms of its impact on human health and ecotoxicity (that’s LCA speak for stress on an ecosystem). Please follow this link for more on the Plastic vs Paper discussion.

Fiction:  Many believe that paper bags are more environmentally friendly than plastic bags because they are made from a renewable resource, can biodegrade, and are recyclable. Fact:  Plastic shopping bags outperform paper bags environmentally – on manufacturing, on reuse, and on solid waste volume and generation. See here.

Plastic free July. Imagine a world without plastic waste. That’s our mission – to build a global movement that dramatically reduces plastic use and improves recycling, worldwide. See here.