Editor, The Beacon:

“Hey, children! It’s time to clean your room! Put your stuff away!” Remember this admonition from good ol’ Mom ’n’ Dad? Well, let’s expand this situation to pretend the house is our Earth, and our room, Florida.

It’s a mess with plastic! Are we like the folks in the reality TV show Hoarders?

Look at your room! Plastic is piling up, plastic bags, plastic straws, plastic-foam cups, big plastic hunks, minuscule plastic hunks! We are stepping over it and breathing it and eating it, but still our government has not passed legislation to help with a ban of any kind!

There was an amendment to ban plastic straws, but that was dissed-off.

Meanwhile, wildlife die and our bodies swallow or breathe more micro-plastic by the day. Look at a drop of water from the Indian River Lagoon under a microscope and you will see the kind of micro-plastics I refer to. It’s an ecological crisis.

This summer, I was in Maine, Massachusetts and Connecticut, and they have banned plastic bags. They use paper bags in the grocery store or bring their own bags. It works. A few complainers (always are), but now you don’t have to step on bags or watch as they clog drains or blow up and hang on treetops.

I love my state, and I know you do. I use reusable bags in the grocery and have one in my purse for stores. Please do your part and email legislators and tell them to “get real and demand we clean our room!”

Suze Peace

DeLand