CLF and Boston Harbor Now hosted a forum with diverse stakeholders – city and state leaders, advocacy organizations, the development community, and others – to discuss regulatory updates and other proactive measures that will not only allow for, but encourage, climate resiliency measures on Boston’s waterfront that benefit the public.
“The best way to handle this is not to build landfill gas-to-energy systems or to capture the methane, because you’re never going to capture all of it,” Pecci said. “The best way to handle this is to keep our food scraps, our yard waste, our textiles, our paper and cardboard out of the landfill entirely.”
Jen Duggan, director of the Vermont Conservation Law Foundation, says cities and counties that have passed bag bans often defined prohibited bags by their thickness or applied measurements requiring that it carry a certain weight a certain distance. “What happened was the bag makers flooded the markets with thicker bags,” she says.
“Plastic bags are used for mere minutes before they poison our communities and our bodies for years,” said Kirstie Pecci, Director of the Zero Waste Project at CLF. “We cannot recycle our way out of this. Banning single-use plastics is the only way to protect our health and environment from this dangerous blight on our communities.”
By allowing “containers of single-use plastic straws to be out in full view, on bars, counters, at drive-thru windows, and on tables,” the new version of the bill won’t achieve the type of change in consumer behavior that was originally intended, argued Amy Moses, director of the Conservation Law Foundation in Rhode Island.
Wheelabrator cannot be allowed to ignore those whose lives are most directly affected by its proposal to expand its massive ash landfill in Saugus, Massachusetts.
Meanwhile, a federal judge in Boston in March allowed a suit filed by the Conservation Law Foundation against Exxon to go forward. The suit alleges the company failed to protect an oil storage facility against the impacts of climate change.
“Simply put, Vermont is leading the nation in dealing with the toxic blight of single-use plastics,” Jen Duggan, vice president and director of Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) Vermont, told Waste Dive
Stop plastic from harming our air, water, and health.
Tailpipe pollution from idling vehicles wreaks havoc on our environment and our health. Laws to prevent excessive idling are rarely enforced, so CLF is stepping in to hold New England’s biggest tailpipe polluters accountable.
