Happy Holidays from Trash Free MD!
Season’s Greetings!
Trash Free Maryland is very grateful for many things in 2022. Your support and commitment to this shared work is number one!
Another is the terrific work by the City of Baltimore to implement a plastic bag ban to encourage shoppers to bring their own reusable bags. Salisbury and Easton continued this exciting momentum by recently passing their own laws prohibiting flimsy plastic bags and encouraging shoppers to bring reusable bags.
Likewise, the tremendous work of the Coalition we lead to continue to educate and energize the push to bring Extended Producer Responsibility for Packaging to Maryland is inspiring.
We want Maryland to become the fifth state in the nation to adopt this new policy designed to require designers of packaging to reduce the volume and increase the recyclability of packaging!
Mr. Trash Wheel. We love Mr. Trash Wheel! He and his colleagues make so much work on litter possible because they provide an unparalleled source of data to inform policy.
Baltimore City's efforts to hold tobacco companies responsible for some of the costs of cleaning up cigarette butt litter is another effort we are thankful for. The Trash Wheels have collected over 13 million cigarette butts over the past 8 years and that is just a number from a small fraction of the trash that was counted.
Our resolutions for 2023?
We are working as hard as we can to get a statewide ban on flimsy plastic bags in place and a comprehensive policy to reduce the volume of packaging -- 28% of the waste we produce.
Trash Free Maryland works behind the scenes and out front as seen here: coverage on Clean Corps and coverage on Maryland's bag ban.
Please consider donating to this effort. Together, we will get this done!
Wishing everyone a safe, trash free holiday and all of the very best for the coming year.
Shari
