Stand up for the public interest with PIRG this Giving Tuesday

These days, it can be a challenge to keep your wits about you while the world around you makes less and less sense.

You might be asking yourself: How do I curb plastic waste when Americans are still throwing away enough plastic every day to fill the Dallas Cowboys stadium and then some?

How can I stop companies from treating human beings as guinea pigs for their chemicals, despite mounting evidence that PFAS, glyphosate and other toxic substances endanger our health?

What can I do about the companies that think it’s “OK” to put up roadblocks to repairing our electronic devices to keep them running longer?

Some people might shake their heads, shrug their shoulders, and ignore it all. But you can meet these challenges head-on, together with like-minded, civic-spirited people across America and a staff of consumer advocates who stand up for the public good. 

This Giving Tuesday, you can help make a difference on a range of issues — from curbing plastic waste, to stopping the use of toxic pesticides, to winning progress toward ensuring we all have the right to repair the things we own — by making a gift to PIRG today.

Your Giving Tuesday gift powers the work we do for the public interest

You can back advocates who do the homework, find the solutions, build the bridges, and never stop doing the work necessary to win results that make a difference in all of our lives.  

That’s what supporting PIRG is all about. We fight for you. You make the difference. 

Here are just a few of the campaigns your Giving Tuesday gift will help power in the months ahead:

• Moving our country beyond plastic. Our country’s plastic waste problem has gotten way out of hand. Americans generate 35 million tons of plastic waste each year, and less than 10% of it gets successfully recycled. PIRG’s commonsense approach follows the three Rs: Reduce, reuse, recycle. We’re working to reduce the amount of plastic we consume first, by winning bans state by state on some of the worst types of single-use plastic, building support for federal legislation to make plastic producers responsible for the waste their products are designed to become, and urging companies to take unnecessary and wasteful plastics off their shelves. And we’re advocating for better ways to reuse and recycle the rest.
• Banning toxic pesticides. Too many of the chemicals used on farms and in public spaces to kill insects and weeds also endanger human health time — and it’s time to rethink how we use them. To protect public health, we’re calling on Bayer (the maker of the toxic pesticide Roundup) to follow through on its commitment to reformulate it without glyphosate, which has been linked to cancer. And we’re advocating for bans on dangerous, drifting dicamba, toxic PFAS “forever chemicals,” and the toxic neonicotinoid pesticides that have been linked to bee die-offs.
• Standing up for our Right to Repair. It should be commonsense: We should be able to fix our electronic devices when they break or have them fixed by the repair shop of our choice. Doing so could save consumers money and save millions of fixable devices from being thrown out. Our national network just won a major new law in California, home of Silicon Valley, to ensure that consumers have access to the parts, tools and service information they need to repair their phones, printers and other devices — and Apple has already announced it will comply with the new law. Now, we’re continuing our work to win similar laws state by state and at the federal level to enshrine our Right to Repair.

There’s a real shortage of common sense in today’s world of waste, narrow self-interest and shortsighted thinking. We’re thankful for people like you who are determined to make this world a better, safer, healthier place for all.

This Giving Tuesday, your gift will help us tackle problems that we should no longer tolerate and win solutions that improve the quality of our lives.