We’re making progress on getting rid of single-use plastic bags! All the work our Cincinnati Past Plastic group has done for years is paying off. We’ve been invited to present to a subcommittee of Cincinnati City Council, the Education, Innovation, and Growth (EIG) committee, on the negative impacts plastic bags have. We’ll be presenting Tuesday, January 28th, at 2 pm.
To make this presentation even more effective, we need your help. Please come down to give a 2 minute comment about why you want to get rid of plastic bags, or how much you like using reusable bags. We’re looking to build a groundswell of support here, and we can’t do that without you!
The public comment session is Tuesday, January 28, at 2 pm at City Hall (801 Plum St. Room 300, Cincinnati, OH). Please come before 2 pm to sign up to make a public comment. If you can’t make it in person, please take a few minutes and call or email the committee members to tell them how important this is to you. Here’s their contact information:
P.G. Sittenfeld: 513-352-5280, [email protected]
Chris Seelbach: 513-352-5210, [email protected]
Tamaya Dennard: 513-352-5205, [email protected]
David Mann: 513-352-4611, [email protected]
Wendell Young: 513-352-3466, [email protected]
Here are some talking points you can use:
- Only 1% of plastic bags are recycled, meaning the rest end up in landfills, littering our streets, clogging our sewers, choking livestock, and ultimately ending up in our rivers and oceans.
- Plastic bags take up to 1,000 years to degrade. As they do, they release greenhouse gases and turn into microplastics, which can end up in our food.
- Plastic bags are a significant source of ocean pollution, being the 7th most collected item in a recent ocean cleanup.
- Seventy-eight percent of Cincinnati constituent complaints revolve around trash, blight and litter.
- Cincinnati threw away nearly 1,000 tons of plastic grocery bags last year.
- According to data from Keep Cincinnati Beautiful, there is a negative correlation between median income and litter in Cincinnati. So, the higher your median income, the less litter is in your neighborhood, and vice versa.
