CALPIRG volunteers hold beach clean up and call on Amazon to eliminate single-use plastic

On July 30th, CALPIRG volunteers headed to Santa Monica beach to clean up some of the plastic trash that ends up polluting our environment. 

In just an hour, 18 volunteers collected over 1000 pieces of plastic trash.  Most of the plastic was in the form of small pieces as plastic items break down easily into microplastics that can be ingested by marine life and even pollute our drinking water. 

So much of this plastic comes from things we don’t need, like plastic take out containers and all that plastic packaging companies like Amazon wrap around our online orders. 

Rather than spend our weekends cleaning up our beaches, we need to stop using so much single-use plastic in the first place. That’s why CALPIRG is calling on companies like Amazon to eliminate single-use plastic packaging.