Play ball! Milwaukee Brewers and SC Johnson team up to fight plastic waste

GREENFIELD, Wis. (CBS 58) -- A partnership between the Milwaukee Brewers and SC Johnson was unveiled Thursday, Aug. 31.

The partnership was showcased at the Meijer grocery store in Greenfield.

The team and cleaning company partnered up, hoping to strike out plastic waste one cup at a time.

The Brewers are stepping up to the plate to be a part of a "closed loop" recycling plan, a plan looking to reduce our carbon footprint.

"Think about the 700,000 plastic cups that are used annually at American Family Field, and those get new life in our scrubbing bubble bottles," said Adrienne Pedersen, a spokesperson with SC Johnson.

The initiative started in 2021, with used cups from the games being sent to SC Johnson to make the special edition spray bottles.

"Twenty-five percent of the bottle is made from plastic cups that are used at Milwaukee Brewers and Milwaukee Bucks games," said Pedersen.

While the partnership is the first of its kind for any Major League Baseball team, area environmentalists said it’s a collaboration our climate needs.

"We need those types of partnerships out there in the field to make those connections to find a solution and to find somewhere to recycle those materials," said Laura Stevens, Recovery Resource Manager with the Department of Public Works.

Stevens went on to say, with the brewers helping turn cups into cleaning bottles, it’s the first step in hitting a home run for our quickly changing environment.

"So right now, we kind of have those fractured liner systems and we are working towards a more close-loop system where the items get created, and they can somehow be recycled back into something new," said Stevens.

For more information on the initiative, click the link here.