New Ballot Measure Threatens California’s Coast and Ocean.

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Environment California

Sacramento, CA- The California Secretary of State has just certified a ballot measure to repeal the California ban on single use plastic bags (SB 270). Out-of-state single use plastic bag companies paid over $3 million dollars 98% from out of state to repeal the popular law.

Below is a statement from Dan Jacobson- State Director for Environment Califonria:

Out-of-state polluters are going to keep on dumping millions of pounds of plastic into our ocean.Nothing we use for five minutes should pollute our environment for hundreds of years.

In just a few years, our movement to stop plastic pollution has grown by leaps and bounds, from Los Angeles to San Francisco, with single-use plastic bags now banned in more than 120 communities (and more on the way!). Together, we can fight the out of state plastic bag industry and protect our ocean for future generations.

Californians throw away 123,000 tons of plastic bags each year, and too many of them end up as litter in our ocean. Today, there are 100 million tons of trash in the North Pacific Gyre; in some parts of the Pacific, plastic outweighs plankton 6 to 1.

All of this trash in the Pacific is creating an ecological disaster:

• Turtles and seabirds frequently ingest floating plastic, mistaking it for food. They also get entangled in bags and often drown or die of suffocation.

• Adult seabirds inadvertently feed small bits of plastic to their chicks — often causing them to starve to death after their stomachs become filled with plastic.

• Toxic pollutants leach from the plastic into the water. Scientists are now studying whether fish and other marine animals absorb these toxic pollutants. If so, there is a good chance that we also absorb them when we eat fish.

What’s really scary is that scientists tell us this plastic may never biodegrade. And every day we go without tackling this problem, it becomes a little bit worse.

 A link to the contributions by plastic companies to the campaign can be found here.  For more information, visit www.CAvsBigPlastic.com and follow us on Twitter @CAvsBigPlastic.

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