Friend,

Our lives are being flooded with single-use plastics.

Some examples seem small, such as the plastic wrapper in the river or the plastic bag caught in a tree in the park. Some examples are mindbogglingly huge, like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.1

All of this plastic sends one consistent message: Enough is enough.

Fortunately, the action and support of people like you are moving our country beyond single-use plastic, one concrete step at a time.

You can help ensure these campaigns have the resources they need in 2023 and beyond. Will you make a special year-end gift before the deadline on Dec. 31 to help PIRG reach our $100,000 goal?

Nothing we use for a few minutes should be allowed to pollute our communities for hundreds of years. But that's exactly what's happening every day across the country, with grocery stores filling their shelves with unnecessary single-use plastic packaging, online retailers such as Amazon delivering piles of plastic waste in their packages, restaurants putting takeout in unrecyclable foam containers -- the list goes on.

Try as we might to put the plastics we use in the blue bin and abide by the recycling symbols printed on them, the fact is that less than 10% of plastic waste actually gets recycled.2

That's why PIRG and supporters like you have been advocating for solutions that will cut off plastic pollution at the source. We have a vision, shared by so many others across the country, of a future where less single-use plastic is allowed to enter our lives in the first place. A world for future generations to inherit that isn't choking on mountains of plastic waste.

Friend, you can help move us closer to that future. Citizen support is what allows PIRG to keep making concrete progress in the fight against plastic pollution.

Will you donate to our End of Year Drive and help us reach our $100,000 goal to keep all of our campaigns going strong in the year ahead?

If you're finding it hard to see how we can achieve a zero-waste future, given how dire the plastic pollution crisis is right now -- I don't blame you. But if we look closer, we can see steady, meaningful action to eliminate single-use plastics happening at the local, state, national and even corporate levels. A few examples:

• This past summer, after PIRG supporters sent thousands of messages to the Department of the Interior calling for plastic-free national parks, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland ordered the phase-out of single-use plastics in these special places by 2032.

• More major corporations are starting to get the message as well. Our advocacy helped convince Coca-Cola to boost its commitment to using recycled materials; Target has committed to designing its packaging to be 100% recyclable, compostable or reusable by 2025; and a growing percentage of Amazon shareholders are calling for the world's largest retailer to reduce its plastic footprint.

• Just this year, we helped lead the charge by passing a producer responsibility law in Colorado, and an important truth in recycling law in California.

Still, we can -- we must -- move faster. As a country, we throw out enough plastic every day to fill one and a half Dallas Cowboys football stadiums.3 Plastic pollution in our oceans is on pace to triple by 2040.4 "Microplastics," the microscopic remnants of broken-down plastic that linger in our air and water, have been found in our bodies and may be putting our health at risk.5

Meanwhile, some in the plastics industry are pushing a new practice deceptively called "chemical recycling," which really just amounts to burning plastic, reclaiming some of the chemicals for other uses but releasing others into our air as toxic pollution.6

Through it all, we'll keep pressing forward to a future where we don't allow wasteful, unnecessary single-use plastics to pollute our world and threaten our future. But we can't do it without you, Friend.

Our End of Year Drive ends at midnight on Dec. 31. Donate today to help power the movement for a zero-waste future into 2023 and beyond.

Thank you,

Faye Park
President

1. "Great Pacific Garbage Patch," National Geographic, last accessed December 9, 2022.
2. "A Whopping 91 Percent of Plastic Isn't Recycled," National Geographic, last accessed December 9, 2022.
3. "Break the Waste Cycle," U.S. PIRG Education Fund, October 28, 2020.
4. "Plastic pollution on course to double by 2030," United Nations, October 21, 2021.
5. Rina Torchinsky, "For the first time, researchers find microplastics deep in the lungs of living people," NPR, April 6, 2022.
6. Holly Thompson, "PIRG to Congress: Reject Burning Plastic," PIRG, September 20, 2022.

Support U.S. PIRG. Contributions by people just like you make our advocacy possible. Your contribution supports a staff of organizers, attorneys, scientists and other professionals who monitor government and corporate decisions and advocate on the public's behalf.

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