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.