Jeff Merkley

I just want to encourage you to expand your horizon to understanding those pieces because it is such an important part of the conversation.

I do a town hall in every--this issue comes up everywhere. There are parents in every county who have lost their brothers or sisters or spouses or children to the contamination from fentanyl and that is just a horrific impact on America.

Secure Rural Schools is not an entitlement program. It's a commitment our Federal Government made to rural forest communities and counties out of fairness and common sense.

We are not really seeing them as robustly supportive of defending a republic against a dictatorial aggression.

It is important for us to really work diligently to support Zelensky's government in taking on corruption because it will be a kind of a cancer eating away at that support that they need from everyone in the world.

I think it particularly bothers me with democracy in South Africa as democracies.

Are you going on to say Oregon is one of the highest recyclers of bottles?

A year in which we will all dedicate ourselves to make our communities, our States, our country and the world a better place.

But when you hear about plastics appearing in human breast milk, and when you are aware of the impacts of endocrine disruptors as chemicals, do you have any concerns at all about the impact of plastics on human health?

Wouldn't it make more sense for us to support the producers by not having a 50 State pattern and actually having packing rules that support replacing plastics with corrugated cardboard or so forth, rather than doing it State by State?

I think we may have heard breaking news from Mr. Seaholm on a national bottle bill. We need a national bottle bill.

And you mentioned recycling. Is your industry supportive of nationwide strategy such as a bottle recycling bill to try to greatly reduce the amounts of bottles?

There is no way to get those microplastics out of the ocean, those that Senator Sullivan was concerned about and many of us are concerned about.

If you go down to the cafeteria down below here, you will find that every piece of plastic that touches food is directed to be put into the waste stream, not into the recycling stream.

Certainly my door is open. I would like to work with you all.

I think it also becomes clear from the testimony that there is a whole lot of plastic that is absolutely unnecessary to have in our economy.

We need strong, some call it extended producer responsibility, I call it packaging reduction and re-use requirements.

Isn't the answer none?

I think the point you are making is that the landfills that you are shipping to are because you can't open similar landfills in Alaska.

Because I am probably the only person up here who has actually visited a chemical recycling site.

I will tell you, in Oregon it is much harder to return to stores now.

But I can't pick up a piece of package recycling that is going to exist in the universe for thousands of years to come and find out how much PFAS is in it, or phthalates are in it, because that disclosure is not required, isn't that right?

Thank you very much for your testimony.

If we can keep the PFAS out of products, that would be helpful as well.

We need to make sure that it is very lucrative for a fisherman, when they get near ghost gear, to haul it out of the water.