We all love and depend on clean water. Unfortunately, plastic is polluting our water, across the Great Lakes.
Plastic pollution is everywhere: beaches, rivers, lakes and even drinking water. In the Great Lakes, the pollution starts during manufacturing and continues as single-use plastic items become trash.
For 20 years, thousands of dedicated volunteers have descended on the beaches of all five Great Lakes with a mission: pick up, separate and count the trash and debris that accumulate on the shores of the Great Lakes. Most of the waste ends up in landfills, but the data that has been meticulously collected is stored and analyzed.
In April, the Alliance for the Great Lakes released for the first time the data collected by our Adopt-a-Beach volunteers, and the results are alarming. Over the past 20 years, our beach cleanups removed more than 9.7 million individual pieces of trash and more than 535,000 pounds of litter from Great Lakes shorelines.
Of that litter, 86% was plastic.
Our Great Lakes are not only a source of joy, recreation and respite, they also drive our local economies. They are also the source of drinking water for more than 40 million people.
The Great Lakes region experiences the impact of plastic twice: once from pollution during dirty and often toxic manufacturing, and then when single-use plastic ends up in our lakes. The fear of human health impacts from drinking water with microplastic and contaminants is real, and the burden for families living near or working in petrochemical plants is orders of magnitude greater.
Single-use plastic doesn’t really go away after its use. It breaks down into much smaller pieces — microplastics — which have been found in our drinking water, fish and even in human tissue. The building blocks of plastic are toxic. Once in the water, plastic fragments absorb toxic chemicals and can harbor potentially dangerous microbes.
We’re just beginning to grapple with the human health and ecosystem impacts of drowning in all this plastic pollution. A growing body of research is identifying the health impacts and costs caused by plastic. In particular, the chemicals used in plastics have been described as contributing to disease and disability.
The good news is volunteers, scientists, innovators, business owners and our region’s leaders are working together to advance evidence-based, sustainable solutions. Protecting our lakes is critical, as they provide the backbone for a $6 trillion regional economy.
We can advance a just transition from single-use plastic packaging to sustainable and reusable solutions. We can manufacture those products right here, reducing plastic and petrochemical manufacturing pollution while sparking innovation and sustainable businesses. We know how to do this. Our region is leading the way in the sustainable energy sector, and we can do the same by transitioning away from single-use plastic.
Fortunately, states can help solve this challenge. The Alliance for the Great Lakes is calling for implementing extended producer responsibility policies — holding producers responsible across the life cycle of their products and packaging, from design and materials to end-of-life management.
And momentum is building in the Great Lakes region. Our friends in Minnesota became the fifth state in the U.S. to establish extended producer responsibility legislation for packaging, joining our bi-national Great Lakes partners in the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec, which have been implementing extended producer responsibility policies for years. More recently, extended producer responsibility laws have passed in Maine, California, Oregon and Colorado.
For over 20 years, 200,000 volunteers have participated in over 14,000 Adopt-a-Beach events. Our volunteers will not stop cleaning our beaches or calling for smart, sustainable policy solutions. But wouldn’t it be great if the plastic companies making money from this pollution could give these volunteers a break by taking responsibility for a problem they created?
Now is the time to pass critically needed extended producer responsibility policies across the Great Lakes region.
Andrea Densham serves as senior policy adviser to Alliance for the Great Lakes, a nonpartisan nonprofit.
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