Both UC Berkeley and the city of Berkeley have announced initiatives to reduce and, to some extent, eliminate all single-use plastics by 2030. With the help of CalPIRG, the campus has committed to eliminating all single-use plastics by replacing them with viable alternatives by 2030. UC Berkeley’s goal marks a step toward sustainability by initiating the country’s strongest ban on single-use plastic, according to a CalPIRG press release.
“Plastics are a huge issue for our environment and for our health,” said campus CalPIRG chapter chair Nicole Haynes. “We are at a climate crisis and we can’t just keep making little steps, we have to be making big strides.” Haynes added that she first stressed the importance of UC Berkeley banning plastics to the CalPIRG team about a year ago, but that she did not expect to see the campus commit to this action “so soon.”
Haynes noted that campus will run into some difficulties during this process involving dining halls, cafés and labs that use many different kinds of single-use plastics. She added, however, that both dining halls and independent cafés around campus have signed on to support the resolution. “It is possible to phase out single-use non-essential plastic, if we pursue and create environmentally sound alternatives and reduce so much of the unnecessary packaging,” said UC Berkeley’s chief Sustainability and Carbon Solutions officer Kira Stoll in the press release.
The support of many, including Vice Chancellor for Research Randy Katz, was crucial to campus’s adoption of this target. According to the press release, he is committed to making campus research enterprise as safe and sustainable as possible.