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NJPIRG students organized a Day of Action to highlight the need to ban plastic bags on campus.  Plastic bags are a nuisance - they litter our streets, they get caught in the bushes and the trees, and end up our streams, rivers, and eventually end up in the ocean.  There is even a trash island twice the size of texas floating out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Here at Rutgers, we use 19.5 million plastic bags per year - that's 500 plastic bags per person!         

On our Day of Action, we collected hundreds of pledges from Rutgers students who committed to stop using plastic bags to show support for a campus ban.  This brought our total number of pledges for the fall semester to over 2,000.  We collected pledges from students outside the dining halls and student centers on the College Ave., Cook-Douglass, Livingston, and Busch campuses.  We even had our very own plastic bag monster on campus to bring attention to this issue!

We concluded the day with a screening of the new documentary, Bag It! At the end of the movie we got to skype with a student from CALPIRG who talked about their own efforts to ban plastic bags on campus and in the local community.  They are working towards a statewide ban.

Currently plastic bag bans have been passed in 17 cities in California.  We have a lot of catching up to do here in NJ!