Plastic free Asheville!

 So there are now three pushes to ban single-use plastic - Town of Black Mountain (which is on hold at this time), Buncombe County, and Asheville, NC.

Asheville considers ban on single-use plastic bags

It’s in the creek, on the street, beneath your river tube and even in your secret swimming hole. Plastic litter, from bottles to bags, is everywhere.

Local environmental nonprofit MountainTrue has been documenting that fact for years, and is renewing its push to get single-use plastic bags banned from Asheville.

“A third of microplastics we’re seeing in the French Broad watershed is coming from these plastics that we might use for 12 minutes and end up throwing away. So anything we can do to curb the input of that into our daily lives the better,” says Anna Alsobrook, watershed science and policy manager for MountainTrue.

The nonprofit is advocating for a full ban on single-use plastic bags given at point-of-sale and polystyrene foam to-go boxes, with an additional 10-cent fee on the use of replacement paper bags. They argue this would have the largest environmental benefit while only costing consumers a bit more than $3 annually on average in paper bag fees.

Customers using EBT, SNAP and WIC would be exempt from any fees under the proposal. Read more here.

SOURCE: Mountain Xpress  April 29, 2023

RIVER DUMP: Anna Alsobrook, watershed science and policy manager for MountainTrue, signals her displeasure with what she found in the Swannanoa River near Biltmore Village during an April 18 cleanup. Photo courtesy of MountainTrue

And right off the computer, FaceBook this morning posts this photo of a local grocery, with stores in Asheville and Black Mountain I frequently shop there for discounted items.  Good news!