Dear John:

Coronavirus is the crisis of the present moment, but climate change is the crisis of our future.

So while we must act urgently to control the spread of COVID-19, we cannot ease up in our fight for sustainability.

That’s why we fought long and hard to win the citywide ban on single-use plastic bags, which finally went into effect at the beginning of this month.

This law is a big step to reduce waste, keep our environment clean and healthy, and improve the sustainability of our city.

With the first few days of the bag waste reduction law behind us, we wanted to get your thoughts. Can you take one minute and fill out this survey about NYC’s new plastic bag policy?

TAKE THE SURVEY

NYC residents have been throwing away about 10 BILLION plastic bags every year -- usually after using them for an average of 12 minutes.

These bags often ended up in our city’s trees, parks, sidewalks, waterways, and gutters. But those are only the ones you could see -- billions of plastic bags end up in the ocean, causing havoc to ecosystems worldwide and killing 100,000 animals every year.

Each single-use plastic bag is made from petroleum and takes about 500 million years to degrade in landfills. Even then, the bags “photo-degrade” into microplastics that absorb toxins and continue polluting our soil and water.

So it’s great that we are finally getting rid of them.

But I also want to make sure we’re implementing the bag law effectively and moving forward on next steps to reduce plastic waste. Can you take our one-minute #PlanetOrPlastic survey today?

Thank you so much,

-- Brad