[title]
It's time to upgrade your Hydro Flask. The Department of the Interior recently announced a plan to reduce and ultimately phase out the use of single-use plastic in national parks, wildlife refuges and other public lands, as reported by The Guardian. That’s great news since plastics have a deep, troublesome impact on the natural environment.
A ban on single-use plastics in 23 of our national parks had already been in place for six years but was reversed by former president Donald Trump in 2017. According to the Guardian, plastic bottles at the Grand Canyon alone created 20 percent of the park’s waste stream and 30 percent of its recyclable waste. Designated water bottle filling stations at high-traffic areas on both rims of the canyon let visitors fill their own bottles for free, and reusable souvenir bottles are sold for as little as $2.50 for that purpose.
The White House announcement came in tandem with World Ocean Day (June 8) and Biden’s proclamation of June as National Ocean Month. It includes the goal to phase out the use of single-use plastic products on lands managed by the Department of the Interior by 2032. The Department is required to ‘identify nonhazardous, environmentally preferable alternatives to single-use plastic products, such as compostable or biodegradable materials, or 100 percent recycled materials, in an effort to reduce the more than 14 million tons of plastic ending up in the ocean every year,’ reads the report.
There were a host of other climate emergency plans announced at the same time, such as actions to conserve the nation’s deepest Atlantic canyon—Hudson Canyon, which lies about 100 miles off the coast of New York and New Jersey and is a stunning 2.5 miles deep in places (coincidentally, about the depth at which the Titanic was found)—and to create the country’s first-ever Ocean Climate Action Plan. There is also nation-to-nation coordination with the federal government and Indigenous communities in the Bering Seas area to steward the Northern Bering Sea Climate Resilience Area, in addition to other environmental justice initiatives.