Conduct a plastic audit in your home or at your workplace. Audits are a good way to see all at once, just how much plastic packaging is in your garbage. Around 40% of plastic produced is used to make packaging.

Be sure to include your recycling bin in the audit as well. The Last Beach Clean Up and Beyond Plastics’ report “The Real Truth About the U.S. Plastics Recycling Rate” documents a recycling rate of just 5-6% for post-consumer plastic waste in the U.S. for 2021. Post-consumer paper, cardboard, and metals all maintain high rates of recycling, but plastic recycling has always failed as it has never reached 10% even when millions of tons of plastic waste per year were counted as recycled when exported to China.