What this is
Plastic Free Rochester is a volunteer public-service campaign helping people in Rochester, NY and Monroe County use less single-use plastic. Each post gives one practical action: a swap, a local refill or repair spot, a cleanup on the Genesee River or Lake Ontario shore, or a policy update worth knowing.
We share what works here, credit local groups doing the work, and keep it simple. Not affiliated with any business.
Three things you can do this week
Keep plastic bags out of the blue bin.
In Monroe County, bags and wrap jam the sorting machines. Start a bag of bags by the door and drop it at a grocery store film bin or the county ecopark.
Source: Monroe County DES, Residential Curbside Recycling
Put recyclables in loose, never bagged.
For safety reasons, bagged material that reaches the county recycling center is treated as trash.
Source: Monroe County plastic film brochure
Fill a reusable bottle at the tap.
A 2024 Columbia University study in PNAS measured about 240,000 tiny plastic particles per liter of bottled water, most of them nanoplastics.
Source: Qian et al., PNAS, 2024
Follow along
Look for @plasticfreeroc on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and Bluesky. Three posts a week, one of them a short video.
Questions, a local spot we should know about, or a group doing the work: hello@plasticfreerochester.org