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Last
month, we surveyed the Story of Stuff Community
about the ways you see consumerism showing up in
your lives and communities …
and the ways you want to address
them.
Thousands of
you, from nearly 70 countries and territories
answered the call, giving us detailed feedback
and some incredible suggestions for ways our
team can help you flex your advocacy
muscles.
The gist: you’re not big fans of
waste (no surprise there!), from
plastic bottles to electronic gizmos to fast
fashion, and you want to hold the companies that
make all this trash to account.
You’re also remarkably solutions-focused,
creative and ready to roll up your sleeves and
get to work.
That’s why I’m so excited to fill you
in on our plans for the coming
months:
First, in
mid-September we expect to bring your voice
inside the California Water Board hearing over
BlueTriton’s illegal removal of public
water from the San Bernardino National
Forest for bottling as Arrowhead
Mountain Spring Water. We’ve already delivered
more than 10,000
petition signatures from you and our
partners at Eko demanding the Board approve a
Cease & Desist Order to shut down
BlueTriton’s theft of our water once and for
all.
We’ve been at
this campaign for more than six years now
(wow!), through many ups and downs, and we’re
excited that a big win appears to be
imminent.
But we’re not
resting on our laurels; far from
it.
In early October, we’ll be launching
Bring Back Refill, a campaign
demanding that Coca-Cola, the world’s largest
bottler, match its global commitment of 25%
refillables by 2030 worldwide here in the United
States, its largest
market.
To date, Coke
has been sketchy about its plans for refill in
the United States, where more than 200 PET
beverage bottles are wasted per capita each
year, the highest rate in the world. So we’ll be
holding their feet to the fire, ensuring that
the company that created the refillable bottle
brings it back to the country where it all
started.
And yes,
because we share your skepticism that a company
like Coke will ever do the right thing, we’ll
also be introducing legislation in several
states that mandates across the board refill
quotas for the whole beverage industry! Does
your state need such a law?
Speaking of
systemic change, we’ll also continue to
push world leaders to address the plastics
crisis with a binding global
treaty during the next
negotiating session in Nairobi in
November.
In fact, just
this week the United Nations released its “zero
draft” of the treaty language, which proposes a
progressive reduction of plastic production, the
elimination of polymers and chemicals that harm
human health, the elimination of particularly
problematic and avoidable plastic packaging, a
just transition for impacted communities and
systems and targets for reduction and
reuse.
Is it perfect?
No. Will getting a binding and meaningful treaty
across the line be hard? For sure. But don’t
underestimate the power of people united to win
big change.
Finally, as
always, we’ll be asking you to support
partners around the world at key moments in
their own campaigns – to pass Right to Repair
legislation, for instance, or shut down a waste
incinerator – and we’ll continue to
fund frontline leaders with our Grassroots
Grants fund.
Thanks for
sharing your ideas and insights with us. Now
let’s get to work!
Sincerely,
Michael
O’Heaney
Executive
Director 
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