Meet Anna. A job in water drew her from Madison to Milwaukee. Anna is an Americorps member serving as the nonprofit Milwaukee Riverkeeper’s sustainability coordinator. In that role she organizes the Plastic Free MKE coalition, where she coordinates volunteers and conducts public education in order to reduce single-use plastic consumption in the Milwaukee area. Single-use plastic includes things like packaging, water bottles, take-out containers—anything designed for us to discard after just one use.

Single-use plastic is wasteful from a resource perspective because we use these products only once yet they may last for a thousand years. The petrochemical industry saturates our society with plastics, converting fossil fuels extracted from the planet’s crust into a sheen of synthetic materials resistant to degradation and reintegration by biochemical processes. That leaves plastic wastes building up everywhere, and our lakes and rivers are reservoirs that collect the pollution with harmful consequences for life and health.

The Plastic Free MKE coalition brings together nonprofits, public entities, and motivated community members to change the norms around single-use plastic.

Anna helps promote community activities like this “Play with Plarn” session, which was organized by another Plastic Free MKE volunteer. Plarn is yarn made from plastic. Crafters create bags, jewelry, and other items from the repurposed material.

“I really enjoy working collaboratively with people, doing a lot of public education, community organizing. In the future I’m actually really interested in working in sustainability in higher education. I see that as an exciting entry point for getting young people inspired about this stuff. I think there are so many young people who are really passionate about it because it’s their future. They see how maybe our government now is failing us, right? And they really want to step up but they don’t have the tools or don’t necessarily feel empowered to do that. So I think it’s a really cool entry point. I think over the next year Plastic Free MKE will try to reach more college students. We have some stuff in the works.”

To learn more about what you can do to make a difference, check out the Plastic Free MKE website and consider patronizing “Lake Friendly” certified businesses that are taking steps to reduce or remove plastic. The State of Wisconsin, Anna notes, actually has “a ban on bans” of plastic bags and other single-use “auxiliary containers.” That petrochemical-industry-friendly policy enacted by Republicans at the state level in 2016 actually made it illegal for local jurisdictions like Milwaukee to just say “no” to plastic. That makes it harder to reduce plastic pollution in our cities and waterways, leaving the choice literally in our hands.