Chicago, IL (September 4, 2024) – Today, the Alliance for the Great Lakes announced an Adopt-a-Beach milestone. In the twenty-one years the Alliance has been tracking trash collected by the organization’s dedicated volunteers, more than 10 million pieces of litter have been removed from the five Great Lakes’ shorelines.
“Our terrific volunteers do the incredibly hard work of not only cleaning the beaches but also take the time to catalog what they find. It may surprise people that instead of finding large items like bikes and tires, it’s mostly smaller bits of plastic trash. Their findings show litter patterns, raise awareness about plastic pollution, and help pass policies to reduce plastic pollution and litter,” said Olivia Reda, Alliance for the Great Lakes Volunteer Engagement Manager.
In April, the Alliance released for the first time 20 years of data collected by Adopt-a-Beach volunteers that show 86% of the trash was either fully or partially made from plastic. Single-use plastic 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 and use large amounts of fossil fuels in their production.
“I am consistently humbled and inspired by the hard work Alliance Adopt-a-Beach volunteers do, using their precious free time to clean up the region’s beaches. Plastic producers should give our volunteers a break by taking responsibility for the pollution they produce,” said Joel Brammeier, Alliance for the Great Lakes President and CEO.
There is serious momentum across the country to steer the burden of plastic pollution away from consumers by holding producers accountable for the plastics that choke beaches and lakes, The Alliance for the Great Lakes has called 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.
In August, Illinois Governor Pritzker signed a bill into law to eliminate the use of small, single-use plastic bottles containing personal care products in hotels. Minnesota became the fifth state in the U.S. to establish extended producer responsibility legislation for packaging, joining the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec, which have been implementing policies holding producers accountable for years. In the United States, extended producer responsibility laws have passed in Maine, California, Oregon and Colorado.
The Biden Administration announced in July that the federal government would phase out its purchases of single-use plastics since it is the biggest buyer of consumer goods in the world. At the Federal level, the Alliance is supporting the Plastic Pellet Free Waters Act, the Farewell to Foam Act, and the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act.
If you would like to volunteer to join an Alliance for the Great Lakes Adopt-a-Beach cleanup event, please follow this link: https://adopt.greatlakes.org/s/
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If you are a member of the media and would like more information about covering an Adopt-a-Beach cleanup event, please contact Don Carr at dcarr@greatlakes.org.