Tell Companies to Quit Single-Use Plastic

What to Communicate

  • Include photos of what plastic products you find littering our communities and environment.

  • Let companies know they must stop plastic pollution at its source. Recycling is not the answer -- less than 9% of plastic produced since the 1950s has actually been recycled. What’s even more concerning, the recycling process is not financially viable, produces its own pollutants, and most plastics can only be recycled once.

  • Reject False Solutions. By focusing on plastic pollution clean up, incineration, bioplastics, and chemical recycling, corporations seek to justify their single-use plastic addiction.

  • Demand that companies:
    (1) Reveal how many single-use plastic items they produce,
    (2) Set clear, measurable targets for reducing their single-use plastic footprint,
    (3) Reinvent how they package their products. They should work together with each other and retailers to develop standardized, reusable, refillable packaging that is convenient and accessible for all. Or even better, use no packaging at all.

Use Facts to Support Your Case

  • 11 million pounds of plastic pollution enter Lake Michigan every year, which is our source of drinking water in Milwaukee and for 35 million people in other surrounding communities.

  • 85% of fish in the Milwaukee River were found to have plastic in their gut. 

  • Plastic pollution contributes to climate change: as plastic lies in landfills or washed up on beaches, it releases methane and ethylene - greenhouse gases known to exacerbate climate change.

  • Plastic is toxic: 144 chemicals or chemical groups known to be hazardous to human health, from solvents to stabilizers, are actively used in consumers’ everyday products. 

  • Plastic is in our bodies: we ingest an entire credit card’s worth of plastic a week and at least 74,000 microplastic particles a year from the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat. 

  • Plastic emits greenhouse gases at every step of its life cycle, from extraction to refinement, manufacture, transportation, disposal, and waste.

  • There are over 350 million tons of plastic produced each year, of which 91 percent is not recycled. 

  • The petrochemical industry and its waste disproportionately affect communities of color, low-income communities and Indigenous communities by polluting their air, water and soil.

  • Plastic is often cleaned up at the public’s expense using tax money, rather than by the corporations who produced the plastic that pollutes lands and waterways.

Tips & Tricks for Posting on Social Media

FACEBOOK

  • Make it personal. Write a little note when you share. Add your take, or make a connection between the issue and your own life.

  • Keep  it short — one sentence max. Most people don’t read beyond what they can see without clicking “read more” (and they call themselves your “friends”…)

  • Tag people you think may be interested, especially friends with big followings on social media, to increase the chances that they’ll actually see your post.

TWITTER

  • When you retweet, add a wee bit of commentary to put your own stamp on it and, hopefully, spark more responses.

  • Tag relevant profiles – this could be anyone from your Member of Congress or a reporter who covers this topic, to an interested friend or that one aunt who retweets everything you tag her in, no matter what it is.

  • Use  hashtags to broaden your reach. Here are just a few options: #PlanetOrPlastic #ThereIsNoAway #PlasticPollution  #BeyondPlastics #BreakFreeFromPlastic #RefuseSingleUse #SingleUsePlastic #PlasticPollutes #OceanPlastic #PlasticFreeOceans #BanTheBag  #SkipTheStraw #StrawsSuck #SuckNoMore #StopSucking #LastStraw #NoPlastic #ZeroWaste #ReduceReuseRepair #ReduceWaste #PlasticPlanet #ReuseRevolution #EmbraceReuse #WildlifeOverWaste

  • Ask people to retweet. Believe it or not, adding “Pls RT” (or “Please Retweet” if you’ve got characters to spare) can help convince others to retweet.

INSTAGRAM

  • Use those hashtags! They’re even more important on Instagram than they are on Twitter and they let you use up to a total of 30 of them so don’t be shy… in addition to all the hashtags we listed above, you may also want to add #regram to the mix.

  • Tag any relevant profiles when you regram.