07/19/2026
It’s 🎉 Instead of putting together a list of things you just *need* to buy, we wanted to talk today about a serious and overlooked issue: tiny, or easily airborne, plastic packaging.
Think: plastic bags, candy and bar wrappers, bread bags, bread tags, and even things like the N95 mask you might be wearing again because of the smoke.
Plastic doesn’t just disappear once it’s in the trash, and it gets released into the environment more often than people realize. Ripped trash bags, overflowing bins, wind-blown litter on collection day, and landfill piles that never quite stay put all give lightweight plastic an easy escape route. From there, it’s a short trip into storm drains, streams, rivers, and eventually the ocean.
Our next-door neighbor at our Rising Sun facility is TTF Watershed Partnership, the Tookany / Tacony-Frankford Watershed Partnership, a 30-square-mile watershed spanning parts of Philadelphia and the surrounding suburbs. We do regular team cleanups of the watershed, and we see this plastic pollution first hand. It’s a real problem, and the flow of trash never stops.
The good news: you can help cut down on runaway plastic without spending a dime. It’s not just about the plastic you don’t buy; it’s just as important to make sure the plastic you do use ends up disposed of properly, not loose in the environment. Scroll to see how!
Eco-brick it. Pack small plastic waste (bags, wrappers, bread tags, mask bodies) tightly into a clean, dry plastic bottle. Once it won’t hold any more, toss the sealed bottle in the trash (not recycling, since packed mixed plastic jams can recycling equipment if the bottle breaks open). Note: pull out the thin metal nose wire from masks before adding them to your brick. It’s not strictly required if the brick’s headed for the trash anyway, but it keeps the bottle from getting punctured and is safer to handle.
😷 Cut the ear loops before tossing any mask, brick-bound or not. It takes two seconds and removes the biggest entanglement risk for birds and other wildlife if it ever ends up as litter.
🫙 Leave caps on bottles when recycling. Detached caps are too small for sorting machines to catch and usually end up lo
