Plastics Crisis – Events in April

There seems to be a lot of plastic related activities on my calendar for April.

Beyond Plastics Ozarks will have a table at the Earth Day Music Fest in Springfield later in the month…lots of prep and logistics to work through between now and the event. Info sheets are the easy items …we are developing things to draw people to the table (maybe a plastic trash monster…maybe a big BYOB (standing for “Bring Your Own Bag”!) and then handing out reusable bags collected from various places or maybe having a ‘craft’ making a reusable bag from an old t-shirt).

There will also be a day with Stream Teams United at the state capitol to learn more of the legislative process and perhaps meet our state Representatives/Senators. I’ve never done anything like this before so it will be a learning experience. There are several plastic related bills that have been proposed in this session.

In early May we have an after school program for K-5 students at a smaller town school district northeast of Springfield. The educator that works with the Show-me Less Plastic project is helping with it. It should be a fun day for us and the students.

There is still a big challenge of getting more people actively engaged. There seem to be many people interested but we are yet not connecting with people that want to go beyond individual action at this point.

Plastics Crisis – Action at the Community Level

Over the past month or so, I have begun working with a small group of people to create a Beyond Plastics local group. We chose to call ourselves Beyond Plastics Ozarks to reflect that we are going to be working across a larger area than Springfield MO. We are thrilled to see our pin on the Beyond Plastics map – filling in the southwest Missouri space.

We have met twice and are working on our website; the part of the website that might be worth looking at now is our collection of recent plastics related articles. We are fortunate that we can leverage the efforts of the Show we less plastics project at the state level since they are offering a Plastics learning series (webinars) in the first quarter next year….allowing us to get that message out while we focus on honing our action plans. We have also benefited from the Beyond Plastics guide for setting up a new local group and that they provide a Zoom account for us too. The logo below was created for us by Beyond Plastics. Both state (Show me less plastics) and national (Beyond Plastics) organizations have materials we can use as well. Now for the hard work of picking campaigns that will be effective for our area of Southwest Missouri.

Concurrently we have identified three campaigns and have started exploration/planning for two of them. 2026 is going to be a busy year and I am hopefully that we will find additional people to help…and lots of people that are interested in learning more about the plastics issue.