Plastic pollution is a global problem, but we all need to be part of the solution.

Take action today, and call on the North Carolina General Assembly to enact a smart plastic reduction bill to reduce our reliance on cheap, single-use plastics and clean up our environment.

There are bills before the North Carolina Senate (SB 451) and House of Representatives (HB 959) that would ban single-use plastic shopping bags, utensils, and styrofoam cups and packaging. Food packaging is a significant source of the plastics that we find in our rivers. If passed, these bills would help us reduce the amount of plastic in North Carolina’s environment.

Why we need to pass this bill

Single-use plastics are clogging up North Carolina’s rivers and streams. These plastic bottles, styrofoam cups, and plastic bags take hundreds of years to degrade, but they never really go away. Instead, they end up as microscopic fragments, films and fibers of plastic that end up in our environment, in our food system and even in our bodies. 

We breathe in and consume approximately one credit card’s worth of microplastics each week. Though the health effects of this are largely unknown, plastics and the additives used to make them can be harmful or toxic to both wildlife and people. Studies have shown harmful effects on our respiratory, reproductive, and nervous systems. 

Plastic Facts

100 billion - the number of plastic bags used by Americans every year.

12 million - the number of barrels of oil needed to produce a year's worth of plastic bags.

12 minutes - the amount of time the average plastic bag is used. 

25 billion - the number of styrofoam cups used by Americans every year.

1 million - the years a styrofoam cup persists in our environment.

345 - the number of local governments that have plastic bag bans.

Every year, plastic production adds as much greenhouse gases to the atmosphere as 189 new coal plants.

Microplastics are everywhere - from dust particles in the atmosphere to the deepest parts of the ocean. We all breathe or consume approximately one credit card’s worth of microplastic each week, the health effects of which are unknown.

A plastic product is effectively recycled — meaning a plastic bottle is recycled into another plastic bottle — only 2% of the time.

Plastic products can usually only be recycled one or two times before they reach a form that needs to be thrown away.

The United States exports much of its plastic waste to smaller, developing nations that don’t have the infrastructure to deal with it, where it ends up in landfills or incinerated.