Have you heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? I hadn’t until recently, and it’s awful -- a huge, spinning tangle of plastic trash in the Pacific Ocean, covering what some experts say is an area up to two times the size of the continental U.S. Where did this plastic come from? You guessed it -- from us.

I never thought I’d get so worked up learning about trash, but when My Lego Robotics team researched our waste habits and their effects on people and the planet for Lego’s 2015 Trash Trek Challenge, I was hugely affected by how important the trash we make, and what we choose to do with it, is.  

One of my discoveries has me particularly troubled, because I, my family, and almost everyone I know is making one consumer choice that is environmentally disastrous – those innocent-looking juice and baby food pouches that so many of us use these days, are horrible for the earth. They are metal and plastic mixed together, so they are not biodegradable and not truly recyclable.  And billions are sold per year in the U.S. alone.

I’ll bet that most people using these products are unaware of the terrible environmental impact they have. But the companies that choose to produce them are well aware of it, and have chosen to ignore the environmental damage they’re causing.

Honest Kids, one of the best-selling juice companies, has finally woken up and is switching from pouches to paper cartons because of concerns about environmental impact. I am now calling on Kraft Foods, maker of Capri-Sun, to follow suit.

Capri-Sun has been produced for 30 years, and an estimated 1.6 billion pouches are consumed in the U.S. each year. This means that if all Capri-Sun pouches discarded annually in the U.S. were laid end to end, they would circle the earth nearly five times. We didn’t know about the Pacific Garbage Patch when they first came on the market. Now that we do, we cannot allow these pouches to continue polluting our earth.

Americans throw away more trash than any other country – 4 pounds per person, per day. Recycling is one solution, though we still only recycle about 13% of plastics. We need to increase this number by a lot, as soon as possible. And companies like Kraft Foods need to stop compounding the problem by unnecessarily placing non-recyclable packaging onto the market, when readily available recyclable alternatives exist.

Please sign my petition calling on Kraft Foods CEO John T. Cahill to stop using these pouches for Capri-Sun. Kraft is a major leader in food production, and if it chooses to take responsibility this way, many other companies will follow suit.

#KnockOutThePouch