The Plastic Pandemic

While working on this bill, Rausch and her colleagues collected the plastic trash that accumulated in their office, demonstrating the mountains of waste generated on a daily basis. There was so much plastic, when her children came into the State House during a day off from school, they “built a kindergarten-sized human completely out of plastic trash,” she recalls. “We called him Plastic Pete.” Rausch brought Plastic Pete out to the floor of the Senate and to a press conference in advance of a debate on the bill, as a “warning” to her fellow policymakers about its necessity. “I think people don’t want to become Plastic Pete,” Rausch says.