Single-use plastics need to be addressed
Single-use plastics have become an increasingly dire environmental threat.
Donated photo
When I began my role as the French Broad Riverkeeper nearly 20 years ago, I was wide-eyed and eager. I was determined to be the person who would finally clean up the French Broad River. The river's story is similar to that of many American rivers; it was so polluted that the author Wilma Dykeman once wrote, "it was too thick to drink and too thin to plow."
Rivers across the country were in a dire state: Lake Erie was considered biologically dead, fish from the Hudson River tasted like diesel fuel and the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland repeatedly caught fire. Understandably, the public was upset. A group of down-to-earth World War II veterans met in a bar along the Hudson River one night and began to devise a plan. The pollution threatened their livelihoods, and they were determined to stop it. While one person suggested floating a mattress full of dynamite into the intake of a power plant and blowing it up and another proposed jamming the drainage pipe of the Penn Central rail yard to flood it with its own waste, a more rational voice eventually prevailed. They decided not to break the law but to enforce it, citing existing laws against polluting their river which had been ignored.
That is the spirit I embraced when I became the French Broad Riverkeeper. I aimed to bridge the gap by identifying pollution problems and using existing enforcement tools to clean up our river. These tools have been very effective in stopping sewage pollution and illegal runoff from farms and construction sites. However, there remains a significant gap in regulations concerning our most visible pollutant: single-use plastics.
Nineteen years ago, I believed we did not need new rules to rid our waterways of trash and pollution. Yet, despite years of organizing river cleanups and removing millions of pounds of trash, the problem persisted. Each cleanup revealed the same types of trash in the same locations, increasingly dominated by single-use plastics.
After any substantial rain, which washes trash into our waterways, plastic bags can be seen littering the bushes and trees along the riverbanks. Worse yet, they never fully degrade but break down into increasingly smaller pieces of microplastics that enter the digestive systems of humans and aquatic animals. In the four years that MountainTrue has monitored microplastics, the quantity in our samples has doubled.
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Our continued use and disposal of single-use plastics at an alarming rate prompted our coalition of environmental and business interests to persuade the City of Asheville and Buncombe County to enact a plastic bag ban. Over 80% of the public and businesses supported this policy, a rare consensus in today’s polarized climate.
Unfortunately, even the sound policy that has worked in over 500 local governments across the country, along with the support of elected officials, the business community, and the public, was not enough. The Retail Merchants Association, representing major retailers like Ingles and Walmart, managed to influence lawmakers in Raleigh to insert a provision in the state budget that prevents local governments from passing common-sense laws to reduce pollution from single-use plastics. Can you believe that? Elected leaders in Raleigh chose to protect the plastic industry over the health of our citizens and our waterways.
The theme of Earth Day this year is Planet vs. Plastics. If the backroom dealings of the Retail Merchants concern you as they do me, then make your voice heard. Our local governments are taking whatever action they can, passing resolutions that encourage businesses and consumers to move away from plastics. We applaud this effort, but until our big retailers work to curtail their plastic waste or state leaders take action to allow local governments to ban polluting plastic bags, we will continue to suffer from plastic pollution. So, visit PlasticFreeWNC.comand take action. It is clear that the only way they will act to reduce plastic pollution is by hearing directly from you.
