Who We Are
In the mid-1990s a room of recycling organizers watched a film about the albatrosses of Midway Atoll, birds that fill their chicks with bottle caps mistaken for food. One of them turned to Rick Anthony and asked what he was going to do about it. That question started the Save The Albatross Coalition. It grew out of the Grass Roots Recycling Network (now Zero Waste USA), founded in 1995, and it is now co-chaired by Neil Seldman and Captain Charles Moore. What held then still holds: we are activists who think the plastic problem gets solved by stopping plastic at the source, making the companies that produce it responsible for it, and treating Zero Waste as the honest alternative to the idea that there is anywhere to throw things “away.”
STAC is a program of Zero Waste USA. Our members include:
- Algalita Marine Research and Education
- Moore Institute for Plastic Pollution Research
- Long Beach Organic
- Plastic Intelligence
- California Resource Recovery Association
- Zero Waste San Diego
- National Recycling Coalition
- Zero Waste International Alliance
- Sierra Club (on the Connect the Cap campaign)
The people behind these groups have spent decades on this work, from a Sunday sidewalk market in Long Beach to the deck of a research vessel a thousand miles from shore, and they share one read on the subject: the cleanup fantasy fails, so the work is upstream.