Winter Report | 2019

Effort to tackle plastic foam gains traction

It’s clear we have a plastic problem. Over the past six decades, we’ve pro-duced more than 9 billion tons of the stuff. This plastic pollution puts our health, environment and wildlife at risk, as it’s incinerated and released into our air, dumped into our landfills, littered across our communities, and washed into our rivers, streams and wetlands. Every day Americans use and throw away more than 70 million foam cups. This comes to 8 billion plastic foam cups annual-ly—excluding take-out containers and silverware—that end up polluting American waterways and coastlines each year.

Wildlife Over WasteTo help tackle the growing threat of single-use plastics, PennEnvironment launched a campaign calling for a statewide ban on one of the worst forms of plastic: polystyrene foam cups and containers—what many of us call Styrofoam.

We kicked off our campaign by bringing this issue direct-ly to communities across the state through our door-to-door citizen outreach efforts. Over the summer months, PennEnvironment staff and volunteers talked with more than 45,000 Pennsylvanians about our effort and collected nearly 15,000 petition signatures calling on state officials to ban polystyrene food containers.

We also hosted a river cleanup at Philadelphia’s Heinz National Wildlife Refuge. Dozens of concerned citizens and local elected

officials joined together to help us clean up trash littering the Refuge. The successful event received television and radio news coverage across Philadelphia.

Statewide polystyrene banOur effort paid off: State Rep. Tim Briggs (Montgomery County) introduced legislation to ban single-use polystyrene products this summer. This proposal, House Bill 2560 quickly garnered support from legislators around Pennsylvania and across the aisle. By early fall, House Bill 2560 had nearly a group of nearly 35 bipartisan legislators who had signed onto it as cosponsors.

PennEnvironment’s Jess Bellwoar getting to work at the clean up we hosted at John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge.

Photo credits: Staff; Top photo: Matt Pierce

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PennEnvironment staff and volunteers prepare to testify at the Clean Cars standards hearing in Pittsburgh on Sept. 26.

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ongoing illegal pollution along the Susque-hanna River.

Toxic pollution is leaking from Brunner Island’s coal ash landfills near the river and flowing into the Susquehanna River. The Brunner Island plant generates 442,000 tons of ash and other coal waste each year, including dangerous pollutants such as arsenic, boron, lithium and sulfate. This pollution leaks from the coal ash landfills and into the groundwater, river and a nearby tributary stream.

“We simply cannot sit back and let the Brunner Island power plant run rough-shod over our environment and our cornerstone environmental laws,” said PennEnvironment Water and Conservation Advocate Stephanie Wein.

Protecting America’s cornerstone conservation programAfter more than 50 years of funding Amer-ica’s national park system — including Gettysburg, Valley Forge and the Delaware Water Gap — inaction by Congress allowed the nation’s preeminent conservation fund-ing program to expire on Sept. 30.

Known as the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), this program not only funds some of the nation’s most majestic and well-known public lands, it has also funded thousands of local and state park preserva-tion efforts across the country. The LWCF has funded priority conservation projects in every single county in Pennsylvania.

PennEnvironment has launched a rapid-re-sponse campaign to convince Pennsylva-nia’s congressional delegation to lead the campaign to convince Congress to renew this program as quickly as possible. This is critical to ensure future conservation projects and wild places in Pennsylvania and across the nation will have the funds necessary to succeed. PennEnvironment has gotten thousands of concerned citizens to contact members of Congress demanding action; garnered news coverage across the state and is meeting directly with the state’s congres-sional delegation to build their support.

Pennsylvanians stand up for clean carsWith the country’s clean cars standards at stake, Pennsylvania hosted one of only three Environmental Protection Agency public hearings in the nation to get the public’s input.

PennEnvironment Research & Policy Cen-ter turned out dozens of concerned citizens to voice their opinions on the Trump ad-ministration’s proposal to roll back clean car standards. The message from Pennsylvanians was clear: Don’t hit the brakes on clean cars. We also mobilized top city and state officials

to blast the rollback. Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney and U.S. Reps. Dwight Evans and Brendan Boyle joined PennEnviron-ment at a Philadelphia news conference to oppose the rollback.

“The clean car standards are the single greatest action the U.S. has taken to date to address global warming,” said Kelly Flan-igan, Global Warming Solutions campaign associate for PennEnvironment Research & Policy Center. “Rolling them back would be a massive blow to the environment and public health.”

Protecting the Susquehanna River from illegal pollutionPennEnvironment joined our partner groups Waterkeeper Alliance, the Environmental Integrity Project and the Lower Susquehan-na Riverkeeper Association to announce our intent to sue the Brunner Island power plant under the federal Clean Water Act for

PennEnvironment

Winter Report | 2019

To k e e p t h e m o m e n t u m g o i n g , PennEnvironment staff and volunteers worked to increase support for this initia-tive. We distributed a letter of support for a polystyrene ban to which more than 70 local officials, nonprofit groups and sustainabili-ty-minded businesses all signed on.

Pennsylvanians signed for a changeThis fall, our staff worked with Rep. Briggs to hold a news conference to continue to gather media coverage on this important issue. On November 1, PennEnvironment’s Executive Director David Masur and Rep. Briggs were joined by the Executive Director for the Schuylkill River Greenways, members of the local fishing group Stony Creek Anglers Association and Darrah Moore from the local restaurant Founding Farmers along the banks of the Schuylkill River to hand-deliver all of our petition signatures to Rep. Briggs.

“PennEnvironment is excited to deliver these signatures to Rep. Briggs in support of his legislation to tackle the issue of single-use polystyrene takeout food containers in Penn-sylvania,” stated PennEnvironment’s Execu-tive Director David Masur. “Nothing we use once for a few minutes should be allowed to pollute our environment for centuries.”

“Plastic waste in our communities is quickly becoming an epidemic,” noted Represen-tative Briggs. “Eliminating polystyrene products that cannot decompose or be recycled is a step toward a more sustainable environment.”

Next stepsGoing forward, PennEnvironment’s priority is to continue to build support and increase co-sponsorship for House Bill 2560 in the 2019 legislative session. We also plan on building support for legislation in the state Senate. We’re working with a group of bipartisan legislators to introduce further proposals to tackle single-use plastics includ-ing single-use plastic bags, plastic straws and other plastic items that put our environment at risk.

You care about clean air and wa-ter, a healthy climate, and all the places that make Pennsylvaniabeautiful—and so do I. That’s why I’m proud to share with you some of the things we accom-plished together in the closing months of 2018.

Thank you for making all this work possible with your action and support.

Page 1 story continued: Effort to tackle plastic foam gains traction

Top: John Heinz Wildlife Refuge staff holding polystyrene retrieved from the clean up PennEnvironment hosted.

Below: PennEnvironment Executive Director David Masur (right) hand-delivers 15,000 petition signatures to ban polystyrene to State Representative Tim Briggs (left).

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Helping Pennsylvanians take charge of their energy use

Each year, Americans waste two-thirds of the energy produced across the country.

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businesses. The guide, titled “It’s Time to Take Charge: A Citizen’s Guide to Saving Energy” offers tips on whether, when, where and how to avoid activities that consume energy by using electronic devices smartly, modernizing and leak proofing our homes, and more.

“We still produce and consume energy the same ways we did almost a hundred years ago, putting our most basic needs at risk — our health, the environment and even the climate,” said PennEnvironment Research & Policy Center’s Flora Cardoni “We must start conserving energy, right now. Using this guide, Pennsylvanians can take concrete steps to adopt energy-saving measures.”

Incredibly, two thirds of the energy we produce in the United States ends up being wasted.

With shorter and colder winter days loom-ing, PennEnvironment Research & Policy Center released a new guide on Oct. 5 to help Pennsylvanians conserve energy and reduce wasted energy in their homes and

Our mission: We all want clean air, clean water and open spaces. But it takes independent research and tough-minded advocacy to win concrete results for our environment, especially when powerful interests stand in the way of environmental progress.

That’s the idea behind PennEnvironment. We focus exclusively on protecting air, water and open spaces. We speak out and take action at the local, state and national levels to improve the quality of our environment and our lives.

PennEnvironment1429 Walnut St., Ste. 1100Philadelphia, PA 19102(215) 732-5897