Ikea has opened its first Delaware County location, though it doesn’t look like its massive stores in Conshohocken and South Philly.
The home design company’s “plan and order point” in Media opened Wednesday. At less than 4,000 square feet, the outpost is a fraction of the size of its typical stores, with square footage in the hundreds of thousands.
Ikea, which has its U.S. headquarters in Conshohocken, said in a statement this fall that the location would provide design consultation services for more complex projects like kitchens, bedrooms, and bathrooms. But the space doesn’t contain inventory. Instead, customers can order items for delivery or on-site pickup.
For some Delaware County residents, the new location means “no more trekking through that notorious I-476 ‘Blue Route’ traffic” to get to the Conshohocken or South Philly stores, Ikea U.S. market manager George Holtkamp said in an October statement.
But if those customers get a craving for the popular Ikea meatballs, they’ll still have to make the longer trip, as the Media site does not have an in-store Swedish bistro.
People worked in the cafeteria of the 300,000-square-foot Ikea in South Philly in 2022.
Ikea has been adding more locations after its U.S. arm reported $5.3 billion in sales last year, the majority of which were made in-person. Over the same period, about 61 million people visited its physical stores, while more than 457 million people browsed the website.
In Media, Ikea joins Michaels, TJ Maxx, Kohl’s, Boscov’s, and a slate of other stores that occupy the 830,000-square-foot retail section of the Promenade at Granite Run. The complex exemplifies how struggling malls can be reborn.
After the Granite Run Mall closed in 2015, BET Investments spent more than $100 million to demolish the building and build the open-air town center in its place, according to president Michael Markman. Along with an array of retailers, the complex now contains 400 luxury apartments, as well as several restaurants and medical offices.
An aerial photo shows the Promenade at Granite Run in June 2022.
Markman said in April that the retail portion of the complex is almost fully leased.
“Its only gotten better since we originally tenanted it,” Markman said at the time. “We signed a Nordstrom Rack. We signed a small-scale Ikea.”
One person after another shuffled toward her from the funeral line snaking down the center aisle, through the vestibule of St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church, out to Forest Avenue in Ambler, and I wondered as I approached her how long Meg Kane could keep this up. The sad, grateful smile. The long, tight hugs. The posture she maintained, straight as a soldier, when the shock and grief simmering within her should have sent her to her knees.
It was Friday, April 12, 2024. Eight days had passed since the house fire that killed her parents — the kind of unbelievable tragedy that interrupts a local newscast, helicopters hovering over the smoldering ruins. Unbelievable, too, because it had happened to Meg. Over the quarter-century that we have been close, she has risen through the public relations industry to a place of power and influence within Philadelphia without compromising the qualities that made her, above all else, a decent human being. It always seemed that her intelligence and drive, her character and achievements, melded to form a shield that would protect her from catastrophe. Something like this doesn’t happen to someone like Meg, I thought that day, as if such a thought were anything other than a mind trick, a weak attempt to reconcile how and why my friend’s mother and father were dead.
The line stretched to more than 200 people, perhaps more than 300. No one standing in it should have been surprised at its length. Meg had relationships and connections throughout the Delaware Valley, of course, but more than that, she and her family had embodied the blending of some beautiful and long-conflicted aspects of Philadelphia’s history and culture. They had learned to live with and revel in the tensions inherent in certain traditions here. Their roots were that deep. Their hearts were that open. Hers most of all.
That background is one reason Meg has been the ideal face of the campaign to bring the World Cup to Philadelphia and promote it once it was here, to play up and celebrate the happy marriage of soccer and the city. It also is the reason that — through every match, every publicity event, every meeting, every long and restless night before and during this tournament, all while the eyes of the globe had been on Philadelphia — she has been holding all that pride in the same palm as so much pain.
Meg Kane looks at a photo of her mother among old family photos in her Philadelphia apartment in May. The photos were recovered from the scene of an April 2024 house fire in Ambler that killed both of her parents.
Everything essential in life
There she is again. Another quickie interview on Fox29. Another guest spot on a PHLY Sports panel. Another four paragraphs of insightful quotes to us at The Inquirer. Another Amtrak ride up to New York or 14-hour flight to Doha, Qatar, to see what she could learn, then another debrief with her colleagues at Philadelphia Soccer 2026. Here’s what they did. Here’s why it did or didn’t work. Here’s what we can and should do.
Nothing new for Meg Kane. Nothing out of the ordinary. Revitalizing Tastykake’s brand and business when its headquarters relocated from Hunting Park to the Navy Yard … making ready the way for Pope Francis’ visit to town in 2015 … counseling the Philadelphia Orchestra and the archdiocese … all this at the tenderest of ages, all this before she turned 45 in January.
“When the odds are against us,” said her friend Christopher Pinto, the development lead of the Philly Pops, “this city calls Meg Kane to make the impossible possible.”
Meg Kane (center) speaks at a press conference about preparations for the FIFA World Cup in May at Lincoln Financial Field.
Who was better to evangelize about Philadelphia, to make the case that it was an ideal location for the biggest event in the world’s most popular sport? Who else had the requisite combination of local expertise and enthusiasm to share the multitudes that the city contained? Meg’s mother, Debbie, and biological father, Richard, had divorced not long after Meg was born. Debbie then married Steve Wood in September 1983 — a Little Flower alumna and a North Catholic graduate reconnecting 15 years after they’d met as teenagers on the Wildwood boardwalk.
Meg wasn’t yet 3 when Steve became her stepfather, but the word was appropriate only in its most literal sense. He was Dad, too, and she was his daughter, full stop, and everything that was essential in his life became essential in hers …
… and everything included their early-afternoon car trips together starting when Meg was 7, when Steve would pick her up after another half-day at St. Martin of Tours School and drive down I-95 to 13th and Walnut, to the bar that Steve and his brother, Bill, had opened in 1980, to Woody’s — to the best-known gay social establishment that Philadelphia has ever known. While Steve balanced the books, Meg — still in her Catholic school uniform, her plaid skirt and saddle shoes — sat at the bar, the daytime bartenders fixing her fresh cherry Cokes, making them the right way, muddling the fruit and filling her glass with fountain soda, the little girl chatting up the customers and playing Ms. Pac-Man on the arcade machine upstairs and remaining mostly oblivious, never thinking anything there was strange or sinful, her parents never suggesting anything was.
As a child, Meg Kane’s afternoons sometimes included stops at her dad and uncle’s bar, Woody’s.
The cognitive dissonance might have caused constant friction in one family or torn another apart. It didn’t exist within Meg’s. Steve had one rule about the visits that Meg, her younger sister, Liz, and their younger brother, Stephen, made to Woody’s: If you see someone there you know, keep it to yourself. “It was important we never outed anybody,” Meg said. “At that time, there were people for whom Woody’s was an oasis, an escape, the one place they could be themselves.”
The bartenders there picked up extra work at Liz’s and Stephen’s christening parties. Bill’s partner, Lee Mallon, showed up to the family’s annual Christmas party dressed as Santa. Debbie, who became a principal at Norwood-Fontbonne Academy in Chestnut Hill after years of teaching in the archdiocese, loved to tell the story about the earnest couple who made an appointment to tell her something troubling … except the delicate topic had nothing to do with the couple’s children. The husband had been downtown, and he and his wife had been praying about whether to share what he saw with Debbie, and, well … Your husband walked into Woody’s. And Debbie let out a belly laugh. Oh, I know … By the way, have you forgotten what my last name is?
At the height of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and ’90s, Steve and Bill kept employees on the payroll even though they couldn’t work anymore, held celebration-of-life luncheons at the bar, and covered the cost of memorial services and burials when no one else would. Those trips to hospitals and funeral parlors were rarely, if ever, spoken of within the Wood family. Steve’s mother had died when he was 4 and his father when he was 13. His siblings had raised him, and he considered business associates to be friends and friends to be family, and maybe a young woman who later would be charged with uniting a diverse but territorial city behind a common mission had to grow up immersed in such acceptance, such label-free loyalty.
There was Meg, riding with Steve every morning during her high school years from their new home in the Montgomery County suburbs to Academy of Notre Dame in Villanova — a school with a great speech-debate program for a teenager who knew she’d end up talking for a living — the two of them listening to WIP throughout those 45-minute commutes. “It’s how I learned to be a sports fan,” she said. “My passion was cultivated because of our relationship.” There was Liz, going her own way at Mount St. Joseph Academy. There was Stephen, heading off to St. Joseph’s Prep. But it wasn’t until Meg’s freshman year at La Salle, when a male student she didn’t know knocked on the door of her dorm room to thank her — Your family owns Woody’s, right? I don’t know what I would have done without it — that she perceived her family as resting at the center of every Venn diagram of Philadelphia, sharing something in common with every group and subgroup.
I met her during the first semester of her junior year at La Salle, when she took a journalism class I was teaching in the fall of 2001. It is an intimidating thing to be a 26-year-old adjunct professor, to have taught for just two years, and to suspect immediately that one of your students is smarter and wiser and more sophisticated than you are. Ten days into the term, on Tuesday, Sept. 11, she proved she was.
Class began at 9 a.m. I tried to get 20 minutes worth of lecture time in as black smoke billowed from the World Trade Center towers and my students, a few of whom hailed from New York and North Jersey, chewed their fingernails and fidgeted in their chairs. Finally, Meg shot me a look that said, I know you mean well, but … please, we gotta get out of here. When the class reconvened later that week, I asked for the students’ forgiveness for my stupid officiousness, for my failure to read the classroom, and we spent the rest of the period discussing and venting about the terrorist attacks and their aftermath. In September 2011, Meg sent me a letter — not an email, not a direct message, a letter, on paper, more permanent — recalling that week. You did what a teacher is supposed to do, she wrote. You earned our trust, and you never lost it. It remains a treasured gift, that letter and its contents, that benefit of the doubt, that measure of grace that I hadn’t earned and didn’t deserve.
By then, Steve and Bill had sold Woody’s and opened another bar, Knock, and Meg had lifted off and would continue climbing in her career: from La Salle — she was her class’s commencement speaker — to graduate school at Maryland; from earning a master’s degree to planning and publicizing some of the city’s biggest events; from getting a text message in November 2019 from Angela Val, who was the CEO of the city’s convention and visitors bureau at the time, to meeting her that night at the Ritz Carlton. We need you, Val told her. We’re going to bid on the World Cup.
It was the project of a lifetime. It gave her the runway and credibility to open her own PR firm, Signature 57, in 2021. It put her front and center as the captain of the city’s World Cup cheerleading squad — “the Pied Piper of Philly soccer,” someone called her. And she still could be the daughter and sister and friend she’d always been, ready at a moment’s notice to give whatever had to be given. Drive five hours one way to attend the funeral of a colleague’s parent? It’s a day. What’s a day? Get off a plane after a week of work in Ireland and head straight to a chamber of commerce dinner that night? Work an 80-to-100-hour week? Of course. How else would she be there for her family if she didn’t excel in her professional life, if she didn’t squeeze her responsibilities and extra efforts into the smallest possible windows of time?
Yes, she thought it, too: Something like this doesn’t happen to someone like me. But things did happen. Debbie retired and, without her work in education, struggled in the void, losing weight, chain-smoking so much that her favorite blanket became pocked with holes where fallen ashes — and even the still-lit tip of one of her Merit Menthols, as she was dozing off — had burned through the wool. Stephen moved back in with his parents after finishing at Penn State and stayed with them for nine years, teaching English at Norwood, helping Steve care for Debbie. Liz and her husband, Michael McCabe, both faculty members at La Salle College High School, lost a baby daughter, Eleanor, and one night, Steve sat with Meg at his dining room table, a Phillies game on TV in the background. He had grown up without a mother and father. He had watched dear friends waste away to a deadly virus. Yes, these things and more did happen, but “my dad,” Meg said, “had an incredibly positive view of the world,” and at the table, he described to her how he had tried to comfort Liz.
Don’t despair, he said. Don’t despair. It’s the only way to keep going.
The horror of a ticking clock
On Thursday, April 4, 2024. Meg was in a room at the Fairmont in Washington, D.C., already awake for close to two hours, writing and rewriting speeches and teleprompter scripts for the Horatio Alger Association Awards, a three-day event for the philanthropic juggernaut that had become a signature project for Signature 57: a CEO’s retirement, the introduction of 12 new members, two major dinners, an undertaking so massive that Meg and four coworkers bunkered for a week in the hotel to complete it.
Still in her pajamas, she was trudging to the bathroom to wash her face when her phone buzzed and lit up pink, the color that meant Liz was calling. She assumed something was wrong with Francis, Liz and Mike’s 4-month-old son.
Meg looked at her phone. It was 6:42 a.m.
Liz?
Meg, she shrieked, I’m watching the house burn down!
What?
I’m watching the news. I’m holding the baby, feeding the baby, and the house is on fire!
Meg told Liz to call the police. She put her phone down and walked to the bathroom, violently shaking, and did not wash her face. She called her boyfriend, Keith Audit, and told him, I need you to find out if my parents’ house in on fire, and Liz called back and said that the police had told her that someone would be in touch and she had tried calling Steve’s phone but it had gone right to voicemail and Liz kept saying, It’s definitely the house, and I don’t know what to do, and then Meg said out loud an irrational thing: We have to call Norwood. Stephen’s a teacher. Stephen’s not going to make it to school. Someone has to let Norwood know to get a sub. And Meg hung up with Liz and called Shannon Craige, Norwood’s curriculum director, who told her the students were on spring break and Norwood was closed.
Meg looked at her phone. It was 6:53 a.m.
She called Stephanie Bambach, the vice president of Signature 57, who was in a room above her. When she arrived at Meg’s room, Bambach was surprised that Meg’s demeanor was as measured as it was. She was not surprised that Meg’s voice was trembling.
I have to finish writing the remarks for Saturday night, Meg said. I’m only halfway done. I can’t leave.
It doesn’t matter, Meg.
Meg reopened her laptop and emailed every document and every draft of every unfinished document to Bambach. She grabbed a black striped sweater and a pair of black leggings, went into the bathroom, and got dressed.
“I remember looking at myself in the mirror,” she said later, “and saying, ‘You will never wear these clothes again.’”
Bambach arranged for a car service to pick up Meg at the hotel and drive her back to Philadelphia. The two of them rode an elevator down to the lobby. Meg held her room key. She tried to hand it to Bambach.
In case, Meg said, someone needs to use my room.
Bambach didn’t take the key. Keep it. Good thoughts. It’s going to be OK. You might come back.
I’m not coming back, Meg said. It’s not going to be OK.
In the back seat of a black sedan, Meg’s phone rang again.
I’m at the house, Liz said. I just spoke with a detective. Mommy and Daddy didn’t make it.
Meg took a deep breath. Where. Is. Stephen?
He’s OK, Liz said. He got out.
Meg looked at her phone. It was 7:43 a.m.
The black sedan pulled up to her apartment. Keith was waiting for her. She threw her bags in his car, and they drove to Temple University Hospital’s burn unit. Stephen was there, in a bed in a room in the back, his face and body covered in soot. That acrid, sickening odor. Physically, somehow, he was fine.
“We were the luckiest people on that floor,” Meg said later. “He was going to get out of that bed and go home. That day couldn’t have been worse, but my God, it could have been.”
She looked at her phone. It wasn’t yet 11 a.m.
Miles away
Two months. That’s how long she stepped away. From the World Cup campaign. From Signature 57. From everything except what was gone and what remained.
The fire’s official cause was undetermined. Its damage was incalculable. Steve and Debbie had no wills. Their birth certificates and Social Security cards were gone. Meg had to pick up the mail and pay the mortgage and pay other bills and access both their personal bank account and the finances for Knock and show up for every meeting with every lawyer and builder and contractor, everything moving incredibly fast and in slow motion at the same time, so many dear memories now coldly cataloged on an Excel spreadsheet.
She did not talk about the fire at all in public and only rarely in private. Her last name was not Wood; few strangers, if any, knew her connection to the tragedy. The relative anonymity was meager relief from the pressure she piled on herself. Who else could handle the fallout? Who else could inch everyone a little closer to normal again? It had to be her.
She didn’t have a newborn to raise, like Liz and Mike did. She hadn’t awakened in the dead of night to dodge flames and hold her breath to keep smoke from seeping into her lungs, like Stephen had. Hell, her poor brother couldn’t even cradle his baby nephew two months after their parents’ deaths: A potent combination — a crackle of July 4 fireworks and a quick post-traumatic contemplation of the fragility of human life — compelled him to hand Francis off to someone, anyone, before something terrible happened again. Nothing she was dealing with came close. Hell, she had been 150 miles away when the house went up. She hadn’t even been there.
Her friends worried that she was pushing herself to the brink of a breakdown and beyond. “She’s really not someone who leans on people,” Bambach said. “I wish she had leaned on us more in the aftermath. So much of her identity is who she is as a leader of Signature, of Philly Soccer, and accepting help from people was a position she was really uncomfortable with. As her friend, I had moments when I wished she would just ask for help.”
Two months. She couldn’t bring herself to take more time away from work. She ping-ponged between her guilt over what she had to do for her family and her guilt over her desire to return to her career. “I really struggled with that,” she said. “Everyone is replaceable at work. If I’m not there, does it run better without me? Are people doing better? Philadelphia World Cup 2026 — is it running better and smoother? Are they finding this to be easier without me? I thought about that even with Signature 57. I’m the founder and CEO, and I still grapple with that. You can go to dark places.”
Meg Kane was out of town the night a house fire killed her parents.
The things that remain
On the kitchen table of her Fairmount apartment, Meg Kane reached into a box to handle the delicate pieces of her parents’ past and her present. Three pages from a memoir by talk-show host Mika Brzezinski, their edges singed black, survived the fire; Meg found them when she first returned to the house’s site. A couple of old family photo albums, the pictures mounted under sticky plastic, the books stashed in a sealed Tupperware container, seem untouched, save for their smoky smell. “It’s really hard to …” she said. “It takes you back there.” So does a black magnetic card that she lifted out of the box. The key to her room at the Fairmont. She kept it.
There’s a vision she can’t shake: Steve waking Stephen up, making sure he got out of the house, then remaining at Debbie’s side, knowing he could not leave her, his children knowing he never would. He had to be so scared in those final moments. He had to be so brave.
“At the end, there’s just grief,” Meg said. “I’m not sure I’ve dealt with the grief. I don’t know I’ve felt it all the way. I don’t know that I’ve allowed it to be something I fully felt.”
So she stores it away, lets it out only during the brief and rare breaks in her schedule, when the events and interviews have paused and some stillness and quiet return to her life. In May, Stephen proposed to his girlfriend, and at the engagement party, Meg pulled him aside for a conversation. It lasted 15 minutes. “It was the talk that everybody was avoiding all night,” he said, a talk about how much he had grown over the last few years, “the kind of talk you would want from your mom or dad.”
It was the happiest moment in a spring and summer that have had many happy ones. She partied on Lemon Hill in Fairmount Park and marched with several hundred Croatian soccer fans from Center City to Old City and rode a subway train quaking from the chants and songs of Brazil’s futbol fanatics, and she saw Philadelphia reveal itself as a world-class sports showcase. They are just Band-Aids, to be sure, covering the paper cuts of knowing that her parents never got to meet their son’s fiancée or hear their grandson speak his first word. But for those of us fortunate enough to call her a friend, they are the answer to the question we were asking as we stood in that church two years ago. How would she get through each day? How would she keep this up?
She did it by holding on to something a father told his daughters. She did it in the only way any of us can. She remembered that she has loved and is loved, and she did not despair.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — The United States launched new airstrikes against Iran early Thursday, and Tehran responded by targeting U.S.-allied Mideast countries in an exchange of fire that threatened an interim deal intended to help end the war in the Middle East.
Back-and-forth attacks, including a day earlier, have repeatedly threatened the ceasefire. But Thursday’s appeared bigger all around, with sirens sounding at least three times in Bahrain, home to the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet headquarters, and missiles targeting Kuwait and Qatar.
Sirens sounded Thursday afternoon in Jordan as well, where the U.S. has stationed troops and aircraft.
An Iranian official accused the U.S. of launching an airstrike later Thursday targeting the area around Iran’s sole nuclear power plant, and other explosions were reported elsewhere in the country during the afternoon.
The strikes came hours after President Donald Trump said recent Iranian attacks on ships in the Strait of Hormuz signaled the end of a fragile ceasefire and threatened to escalate the conflict if they didn’t stop. That raised concerns that the region could tip back into a war that would engulf several countries and could halt energy shipments through the strait that are crucial for the global economy.
In Iran, the two days of American airstrikes have killed at least 14 people and wounded another 78, Iran’s Health Ministry said Thursday. Most were reportedly members of the armed forces.
In Kuwait, the military said falling debris wounded one person as the nation shot down three ballistic missiles, a cruise missile and 10 drones. Bahrain said it shot down incoming fire, without elaborating, and Jordanian government spokesman Mohammad al-Momani said all incoming fire from Iran had been intercepted. Iranian state TV said the country’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard fired missiles at a U.S. base in Jordan.
There was no immediate word of damage in Qatar.
U.S. strikes hit more targets
The U.S. military’s Central Command said it hit 90 targets across Iran, releasing black-and-white footage of what appeared to be strikes on an airport runway and missile launchers.
The U.S. said the strikes were intended to “further degrade” Iran’s ability “to threaten freedom of navigation” in the strait, through which a fifth of the world’s traded oil and natural gas passed before the war began with U.S. and Israeli attacks on Feb. 28.
Traffic has picked up somewhat since a tentative deal last month included opening the waterway. Maritime data company Lloyd’s List Intelligence said Thursday that preliminary data showed at least 576 ships passed through the strait in June, compared to 233 in May. More than 3,100 transited the strait in June 2025.
Attacks on ships — and the threat of such strikes — virtually halted traffic in the waterway during the conflict, making oil prices skyrocket and raising the cost of food and other basic goods far beyond the region.
Iranian state media reported explosions in several locations, including Bushehr, home to Iran’s nuclear power plant complex, and southern port cities. The state-run IRNA news agency quoted Ehsan Jahanian, a local official in Bushehr, as accusing the U.S. of striking near the plant around noon, hours after the U.S. military’s Central Command said it had ended its latest round of strikes on Iran. Asked for comment on Bushehr, Central Command referred to a press release that detailed targets but made no mention of the nuclear power plant.
During the war, several strikes hit the area around the plant but didn’t damage it.
For the first time since April, U.S. strikes also appeared to target Iranian bridges. State media reported a strike on a railway bridge in Iran’s northeastern Golestan province, and the Revolutionary Guard said two bridges were attacked on the route to Mashhad, where officials plan to bury the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Thursday.
Trump warns of attacks on shipping
After leaving a NATO summit in Turkey, Trump posted several videos on his social media site of what he said were explosions in Iran and issued another warning to the Islamic Republic.
“This is in retribution for yesterday’s bombing of ships by Iran. If it happens again, it will get much worse!” Trump wrote Wednesday, a day after three tankers were attacked in the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump said the latest back-and-forth fighting would not result in lengthy military action.
Trump also renewed his past threats to hit Iran’s civilian infrastructure, including electric and desalination plants, and to seize Kharg Island, through which some 90% of Iranian oil exports pass.
Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, a key negotiator in talks seeking a permanent end to the war, was defiant in a post on X on Thursday morning: “America still hasn’t learned that bullying and breaking promises are no longer cost-free. Let me put it plainly: If you strike, you’ll get hit.”
Meanwhle, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said he spoke by phone with his Saudi, Turkish and Omani counterparts and with Pakistan’s army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, who has been one of the main mediators in the war. The diplomatic outreach suggested efforts may be underway to reduce tensions.
In a post on Telegram, Araghchi repeated Iran’s assertion that the U.S. has violated the interim peace deal reached last month. The U.S. says Iran breached the agreement by firing on commercial ships in the strait.
Strikes raise fear that war could resume
Trump fueled concerns that the war could restart by saying Wednesday that the interim agreement to pause the fighting was “over.” He added that he would allow negotiations to continue but thought negotiators were “wasting their time.”
Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi, also a top negotiator, retorted on X that Trump’s remarks “are not a sign of power but an admission of the failure” of U.S. policy toward Iran.
Negotiations to reach a final deal were due to start after the dayslong funeral for Khamenei, who was killed in the war’s first moments. He was to be laid to rest Thursday.
The talks are meant to focus on the toughest matters, including fully reopening the strait and rolling back Tehran’s disputed nuclear program.
More than seven years after MLB announced the All-Star Game would come to Philadelphia for the nation’s 250th birthday, baseball’s midsummer classic is nearly here.
All-Star Week kicks off Friday at Citizens Bank Park and continues through Tuesday, with the HBCU Swingman Classic, MLB draft, All-Star Village, Futures Game, Home Run Derby, red carpet, and the All-Star Game itself.
I’m Sam Ruland, filling in or Earl this week. Let’s dive in.
The Schmitter sandwich displayed at the All Star Games Media Preview to showcase All-Star Week Events, New Food, and Commemorative Bell at the Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia, Pa., on Wednesday, July 8, 2026.
Citizens Bank Park is about to become the center of the baseball world.
Matt Breen has everything you need to know about All-Star Week, from Friday’s HBCU Swingman Classic to Tuesday’s All-Star Game. There’s also All-Star Village at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, the Futures Game, MLBx All-Star 3-on-3, and Monday’s Home Run Derby.
🍿 Get weird in Phoenixville:Blobfest returns this weekend with movie scene recreations, stage shows, competitions, costumes, and plenty of love for the 1958 cult classic The Blob. Tickets are required, so plan ahead.
🫐 Berry good summer fun: Blueberry season is in full swing at Linvilla Orchards, where Saturday’s festival includes berry picking, magic shows, a pie-eating contest, treats, and more.
As seen from Camden’s Pyne Poynt Park, fireworks light up the skies, behind the Ben Franklin Bridge, on Saturday, June 27, 2026.
Fourth of July may be over, but there’s still one big celebration left. The Benjamin Franklin Bridge turns 100 this month, and Saturday’s free celebration will close the span to vehicle traffic while opening the roadway to pedestrians.
Expect food trucks, live entertainment, family activities, historical displays, and a rare chance to walk across one of the region’s most iconic landmarks.
🏮 Lanterns light up Franklin Square: The Philadelphia Chinese Lantern Festival is back with dozens of handcrafted displays, including soccer-themed lanterns honoring the World Cup.
🍹 Sip the summeriest Philly cocktail: The water ice martini has gone from South Philly secret to full-blown summer drink trend. Here’s where to find boozy water ice around town.
🪩 Hit the waterfront:Spruce Street Harbor Park and Summerfest are both open for the season with hammocks, games, roller skating, mini golf, carnival rides, and plenty of ways to cool off by the river.
🎤 Thursday: Patti LaBelle brings the America 250 celebration to the Dell Music Center with Avery Sunshine, Jeff Bradshaw, and Pieces of a Dream.
🎸 Friday: Dave Matthews Band returns to Camden for its annual two-night summer stand. Reminder: The Ben Franklin Bridge closure is Saturday, so check your route if you’re heading to night two.
🎶 Friday: Philly bands Hurry and Sad13 celebrate new releases at Johnny Brenda’s.
🤠 Saturday: Megan Moroney brings her country-pop hits to Xfinity Mobile Arena.
🎻 Saturday: Rick Ross marks the 20th anniversary of Port of Miami with the Renaissance Orchestra at the Met Philly.
🎸 Tuesday: Bob Dylan comes to TD Pavilion at the Mann with Jimmie Vaughan & the Tilt-a-Whirl Band and Brittney Spencer.
❓Pop quiz
The Schmitter is returning to Citizens Bank Park for MLB All-Star Week. What Chestnut Hill tavern created the signature Philly sandwich?
a) McNally’s Tavern
b) McGillin’s Olde Ale House
c) Triangle Tavern
d) Dirty Frank’s
Here’s the answer to last week’s question: What year did the first Independence Day celebration take place in Philadelphia? Answer: 1777
Ask Earl anything (when he returns)
Earl’s starting something new for the newsletter, and he wants your participation.
Many of you have questions about each week’s listings, and others about Philly’s arts, culture, and entertainment scene.
He has you covered. Have a question? Email him for a chance to have it answered in an upcoming newsletter.
All right, folks! That’s all for this week’s edition of Things to Do. Whether you’re headed to the ballpark, the bridge, the Shore, or just somewhere with cold water ice, enjoy the weekend.
— Sam Ruland
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Federal prosecutors on Thursday formally indicted Eugene Albert Horsch, the Olney man at the center of a widening investigation into the disappearance of at least two women, on charges that he illegally possessed firearms and fake federal law enforcement credentials.
The two-count indictment accuses Horsch, 44, of possessing two loaded firearms despite having been convicted of a prior felony, which bars him from having guns. It also alleges that he had “fraudulent identification documents” that appeared to have been issued by the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but that neither agency had produced.
The indictment stems from Horsch’s arrest on June 19. On that day, U.S. Park Police officers recovered two loaded firearms — a .38 Special revolver with an obliterated serial number and a Taurus .40-caliber semiautomatic pistol — from beneath a front seat of his black BMW, which was parked in a restricted area near Independence Hall in Center City, according to court records.
Officers said they also recovered counterfeit DEA credentials from the vehicle. And later, during a search of Horsch’s home in the 400 block of West Chew Avenue, federal and local authorities uncovered fraudulent FBI credentials and a desktop computer that may have been “used to facilitate” the fake documents, according to the indictment.
Horsch has remained in federal custody since his initial appearance in U.S. District Court last month, after a magistrate judge ordered him detained pending a trial.
Horsch’s attorney, Jerome Brown, said this week: “We believe Mr Horsch is innocent.”
The federal case has unfolded alongside a broader investigation that began after Horsch’s arrest. Authorities searching his deteriorating twin home found another firearm, equipment used to grow marijuana, barrels of chemicals, ashes of least one relative, documents connected to two women who have been missing for years, and an unsigned, handwritten letter describing violence and referencing serial killer Ted Bundy, officials have said.
Investigators have said they have not found human remains at the property, but found a “significant” amount of blood. They have continued examining evidence recovered from the home as they search for any possible links between Horsch and the disappearances of Blair Tonzelli, who was reported missing in 2023, and Amy McHale, his father’s former wife, who was last heard from at the Olney property in 2016.
Brown previously said he did not believe his client had harmed either woman.
“I’d be shocked if [police] found any harm related to those missing persons at that location,” Brown said after Horsch’s detention hearing.
Staff writer Ryan W. Briggs contributed to this article.
In a rare move, Pennsylvania’s two senators have created a joint fundraising committeethat would allow them to split money from donors who want to give to both of their campaigns, despite being members of different parities.
As polls have shown him losing support among Democratic voters, he has also reported raising significantly fewer campaign funds on his own and has not said if he will run for a second term in 2028.
Common Ground PA, which filedpaperwork with the Federal Election CommissionMonday, lists four beneficiaries for the joint fund: Fetterman for PA; Friends of Dave McCormick; Every Vote PAC, which lists Fetterman as the PAC sponsor; and Pennsylvania Honor, which lists McCormick as the leadership PAC sponsor.
A joint fundraising committee, first enabled by the FEC in 1977, allows two or more candidates, PACs, or party committees to coordinate fundraising efforts to share donations and expenses.
A donor can abide by federal contribution limits while still giving one check that can be allocated to multiple campaigns. But since these groups typically involve party committees, it’s rare for these joint ventures to be bipartisan.
Mike DeVanney, a spokesperson for McCormick’s campaign, called the PAC a donor-driven effort.
“This group of donors value the collaboration exhibited by Senators McCormick and Fetterman for Pennsylvania and want to support both of them,” he said in a statement.
The joint fundraising committee was first reported by Politico.
The two senators have spoken often about their cross-aisle friendship since McCormick took office in 2025, and they have repeatedly teamed up in recent months.
They appeared alongside each other last week in Philadelphia to promote Trump Accounts, the new federally backed savings accounts for kids that became law with President Donald Trump’s signature One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Fetterman has routinely criticized his own party, feuding with progressives on a range of issues, including Israel and immigration enforcement.
In a fundraising email sent in May, McCormick referred to Fetterman as one of his “closest working partners,” a realization that he said surprised even him.
In that drive, which asked donors to support his efforts to “work across the aisle to get results for the people of Pennsylvania,” McCormick praised his Democratic colleague.
“Senator John Fetterman and I couldn’t look more different. We don’t agree on everything. But we both grew up in Pennsylvania. We both know what it means to fight for working families who feel like Washington forgot them. And we both refuse to let politics get in the way of getting things done,” he wrote.
McCormick told reporters in May his friendship with Fetterman is the most frequent topic of conversation he hears, and he gets positive feedback from it.
“We look for ways to work together. I think people want that,” he said.
Individuals could donate to Fetterman or McCormick separately. But joint fundraising committees, which are used widely by both parties, pull in large checks from donors and split the money across multiple committees using a formula that adheres to federal contribution limits, according to an analysis from the watchdog group OpenSecrets.
Typically, though, campaigns joint fundraise with their party.
Common Ground PA is among the few coordinated efforts across the aisle. A former PAC, the Problem Solvers Patriots, fundraised for members of both parties in previous election cycles.
Former U.S. Rep. Conor Lamb, who lost the Senate primary to Fetterman in 2022 and has not ruled out a run in 2028, blasted the move online as “Another betrayal from Fetterman.”
U.S. Rep. Chris Deluzio, a Western Pennsylvania who has received “a lot of encouragement” to run for Fetterman’s seat, also questioned the creation of the PAC.
“Helping the Republicans raise money to spend against Democrats is bad, right?” Deluzio said on X.
However, Fetterman has been notching strong approval from Republicans, and Pennsylvania Republicans along with Trump himself said he could receive GOP support if he switched parties.
Fetterman’s Republican support has also been growing at the bank with contributions from prominent GOP donors, particularly through his other joint fundraising committee and leadership PAC. At the same time, his fundraising has plummeted overall, raising less than half his previous annual totals in 2025.
Staff writers Gillian McGoldrick and Sam Janesch contributed to this story.
A Colwyn woman and her boyfriend took on the responsibility of caring for the woman’s 20-year-old cousin after her previous caregiver died, Delaware County prosecutors said Thursday.
But instead of providing the woman, who has Down syndrome, with a safe environment, they fed her table scraps, beat her whenever she attempted to sate her hunger, and ultimately kicked her out of their home, into freezing April rain, for eating their Goldfish crackers.
Yahnae Clegg-Brown taunted the woman, whom police did not name in court filings, as she stood, rain-soaked, begging to be let back inside, according to the affidavit of probable cause for her arrest. Naiyr Sanders, Clegg-Brown’s boyfriend, demanded that she leave the property, according to the affidavit, then punched her in the head and pushed her down the house’s front steps.
A concerned neighbor called 911 after seeing the woman shivering and calling for help after a night spent outside, the affidavit said. When officers took the woman to Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital for treatment, she weighed just 80 pounds.
Clegg-Brown, 35, and Sanders, 31, have been charged with neglect of a care-dependent person, abuse of a care-dependent person, and related crimes. They remained in custody with bail set at 10% of $250,000. There was no indication they had hired attorneys.
District Attorney Tanner Rouse, in announcing the charges, said the case was heartbreaking and beyond comprehension.
“Those entrusted with another person’s care have a responsibility to protect them,” he said. “My office will continue to stand up for victims who cannot always stand up for themselves and will work tirelessly to hold those responsible accountable.”
Investigators said the woman began living with Clegg-Brown in November 2023 after the death of Clegg-Brown’s father, who had been caring for her.
The woman’s living conditions at Clegg-Brown’s home on Ellis Avenue were spartan, according to police: She was sleeping in an upstairs bedroom on a “deteriorating mattress” with no bed linens, the affidavit said.
Clegg-Brown had placed a surveillance camera on top of the refrigerator in the home’s kitchen, which she later told police was used to make sure her cousin was not “stealing” her food. Investigators noted in the affidavit that the woman was receiving regular government-assistance benefits, and that the money was supposed to be spent on her living expenses.
Clegg-Brown never took her cousin to her scheduled doctor’s appointments, and did not enroll her in school, the affidavit said. During meal time, she forced her cousin to sit on the floor and fed her leftovers or ramen noodles and oatmeal. As a result, the woman developed type 2 diabetes from malnutrition, according to the affidavit.
Clegg-Brown told investigators the “final straw” came on April 25, when she found her cousin hiding in her bedroom, eating a package of Goldfish crackers.
She and Sanders forced the woman outside, placed her clothes and bedding in trash bags that were too heavy for the woman to carry, and locked the door behind her, the affidavit said.
Clegg-Brown told the woman she was tired of dealing with her, and told her to find somewhere else to live, according to the affidavit.
Since her hospitalization, the woman has been placed in a new home with a different caregiver, police said, recovered to a healthy weight, and is now attending school.
A New York-based developer that outbid real estate investor Dean Adler and Philadelphia’s PMC Property Group for control of the huge office complex at Centre Square has decided to walk away from the property.
Centre Square, one of Philadelphia’s largest office buildings, saw soaring vacancy after the COVID-19 pandemic and went into foreclosure in 2023.
In February, Adler announced that in partnership with PMC, he would buy the 1.76 million-square-foot office complex at 1500 Market St. for $70 million and transform it into a mixed-use mecca with hundreds of apartments and hotel space. The previous sale price in 2017 had been $328 million.
Then in May, the Philadelphia Business Journal reported that Manhattan-based CSC Coliving had bid $80 million for the project. CSC, too, planned a mix of residential, hotel, and office space.
“We were kicked out, and we didn’t fight it. We played by the rules,” Adler said. “We accepted when they were going to overbid us.”
On Thursday, the managing partner of CSC said his company had decided against the project.
“We backed out from 1500 Market,” said Salomon Smeke, managing partner and cofounder of CSC. “The tax abatement incentives in Philly were not enough to justify the conversion.”
Smeke said that “it would help” if a 20-year property tax abatement, like the one Mayor Cherelle L. Parker has been considering, were in place.
Asked for his reaction to CSC’s decision, Adler says that while he is still theoretically interested in the property, he will need to take another look to get a sense of why his competition backed out.
“Are we still interested? We are always interested,” Adler said. But he also said he would need to do more research.
“We are going to take our time,” Adler said. “I got to find out if there’s something we missed. Maybe they found something that we didn’t know, so we have to go back to do more homework.”
Philadelphia developer Dean Adler at the Center City District’s State of Center City event in April.
Adler has been on a roll of dramatic and ambitious adaptive reuse projects with his former company Lubert-Adler Real Estate Partners, transforming Philadelphia landmarks into mixed-use campuses, notably at the Bellevue Hotel on South Broad Street and the Battery on the Delaware River.
In these projects, Adler has championed a mix of residential, hotel, office, restaurant, and wellness.
Adler is also locked in a dispute with his former partner Keystone Property Group over the Bourse on Independence Mall, which he hoped to turn into another mixed-use hub.
The Centre Square project would have been CSC’s largest project in Philadelphia. The developer is known in Philadelphia for its purchase of the former International House in University City, rebranded as the Mason. CSC then toyed with the idea of turning the 3701 Chestnut St. tower into a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center.
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo woke up at 5 a.m. Tuesday and started his day like almost every other one for the last 35 years since he came to Houston from Mexico and built his own American dream brick by brick — sending his three sons to top universities on the foundation he’d constructed through years of backbreaking labor.
His wife also got up to make him a hearty meal before he put on his work boots, fired up his van, and picked up three coworkers in Houston’s heavily Latino East End to build new homes on the city’s outskirts. But it proved to be Salgado’s last drive.
Just a short time later, the 52-year-old Salgado was lying face down outside of his van on a city sidewalk, surrounded by agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as blood poured from a bullet wound on the right side of his stomach. He was recorded screaming in pain: “Help me! They shot me! … ¡Me están matando!”
Translation: “They are killing me!”
He died a short time later in a nearby hospital. ICE said the fatal shooting occurred after officers tried to arrest Salgado in what it called “a targeted enforcement operation” — even though Salgado apparently had no criminal record and for more than a year had been steadily making progress toward securinga work permit that would resolve his immigration status.
“We dotted every ‘i,’ crossed every ‘t,’ filled every document, attended every appointment,” his tearful son, 29-year-old teacher Ronaldo Salgado, said in a news conference on Wednesday. Afterward, the younger Salgado told the Bulwark: “I love our dad; he worked hard. He always told us that we needed to do well in school so we don’t end up like him in the sun.”
Ronaldo Salgado, son of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, wipes away tears while speaking during a news conference Wednesday in Houston.
The killing of Salgado — family man, essential worker, and American dreamer who was doing everything the right way after joining the 1990s mass migration of undocumented Mexicans — is a crime against humanity that makes anyone who still has a functioning moral compass want to scream in outrage.
Still, what happened after Salgado was gunned down is deeply troubling in a different way. America seemed to mostly shrug at a killing no less senseless than this winter’s Minneapolis ICE fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, let alone other law enforcement murders like George Floyd in 2020, which sparked days of nationwide protest.
The implosion of now ex-Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner or Donald Trump’s inane prattle at a NATO summit took up most of the hour on cable-TV news, with reporting on yet another ICE killing squeezed in at the end. A fascist regime cutting down our law-abiding neighbors in the streets is becoming background noise.
Just how they want it.
To be sure, there are differences between what happened Tuesday in Texas and the Minneapolis killings that grabbed so much attention six months ago. A large activist community in the Twin Cities was out in the streets at the time of the Good and Pretti shootings, with whistles and cell phones, producing a flood of video evidence that exposed ICE’s lies and inspired massive demonstrations.
In contrast, Salgado was killed in a low-income neighborhood, and while there is video of the wounded laborer on the ground, there’s not yet been definitive footage revealing how or why he was shot. That doesn’t alleviate the nagging concern that the media and some corners of the public and the body politic care more when the victims are white U.S. citizens — which, if true, is morally unconscionable.
A makeshift memorial for Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who was shot and killed by an ICE officer Tuesday, is shown Wednesday in Houston.
Americans should be alarmed at the bigger picture that’s slowly unfolding before us. After briefly pressing the pause button in the furor over the Good and Pretti killings — pulling back from its federal assault on Minnesota, firing the flamboyant and infuriating Greg Bovino and Kristi Noem, and drastically scaling back its plan for warehouse concentration camps — ICE is back, and more dangerous than ever.
After an era of waving a red flag before an activated, engaged, and angry citizenry it didn’t see coming, by naming operations like the “Catahoula Crunch” or “Charlotte’s Web,” and with Bovino mugging for the TV cameras, ICE has resumed working toward its inhumane target of one million deportations per year, but with a much lower profile.
There are thousands of new immigration agents on the streets, fueled by Congress giving two massive funding infusions totaling about $240 billion, and with Homeland Security and ICE under new management, they are hoping to terrorize immigrant communities without generating headlines or protests. “ICE is making record arrests right now,” Trump’s immigration czar, Tom Homan, told Fox News. “We turned the heat up …”
The New York Times reported last week that with no press releases or hoopla, daily immigration arrests had doubled over a five-day period to a total of roughly 10,000, or 2,000 per day, with immigrants arrested during required government check-ins, but also during traffic stops like the one in which Salgado was killed.
This is a human rights nightmare in the making. The stepped-up arrests are all but certain to lead to more dangerous and potentially fatal encounters like the one that occurred on Houston’s Canal Street, but the other impacts are equally pernicious.
Fear levels in big-city neighborhoods with large immigrant communities are spiking yet again — keeping countless kids home from school and essential workers off the job, crimping an already strained economy. The Trump regime’s squalid gulag archipelago of immigration detention centers — whose crisis of overcrowding had eased slightly with the spring enforcement slowdown — is seeing a surge again, and that will also lead to catastrophe.
Afghan national Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal, who died in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on March 14, is pictured in this undated family photo.
Detention deaths are soaring to record levels — more than 50 since Trump returned to office in January 2025. We are learning troubling details, for example, about the March death of an Afghan national who came to the United States after working with U.S. Special Forces and who died after just one day in ICE custody. Relatives of Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal, 41, said he was not allowed to bring his asthma inhaler into detention; officials say he died of an “adverse drug reaction” that brought on an attack.
In Houston, there’s no evidence to support ICE’s initial claim that Salgado was resisting arrest, but — given what we are learning about the horrors of detention — it’s not surprising that immigrants facing an arrest are terrified at what might happen next. Meanwhile, ICE and other agencies are going to extreme lengths to avoid accountability.
In California, ICE — overflowing with our tax dollars — is spending an astronomical $1.5 billion to buy two large privately run immigration prisons from the corporation CoreCivic, for the purpose of preventing state and local inspectors from monitoring what happens there. WIRED recently reported that ICE’s internal watchdog agency is focusing its attention not on agent misconduct but on tracking down outside critics.
What are they trying to hide?
In the killing of Salgado, we don’t know the answer — yet. ICE claims Salgado, whom it dehumanized as an “illegal alien,” “weaponized his vehicle” and tried to run over the agent who was arresting him, and that the agent then fired the fatal bullet.
We don’t know if there’s any truth here. But what we do know is that in every similar situation during the Trump regime — including Good and Pretti and others like Chicago nonfatal shooting victim Marimar Martinez — the initial ICE version of what happened proved to be a lie, and often a brazen one. It takes a willing moral blindness to automatically accept ICE’s story about what happened to Salgado.
And yet, we are seeing that not only from the local FBI — which is not investigating the officer’s action, but the alleged crime of resisting arrest — but also from Houston Mayor John Whitmire, who said he trusts the federal government to do a thorough investigation, as if he’d been living in a cave these last 15 months.
In their anguished news conference on Wednesday, family members and local Democratic officials called for the release of any ICE body-cam footage and an independent investigation into what really went down in Houston’s Magnolia Park section.
They need our help, though. ICE’s new summer assault on immigrant communities, and its ability to get away with its many crimes, is counting on an exhausted or apathetic American public to not demand action as so many of us did with Pretti or Good or Floyd.
Please say his name — Lorenzo Salgado Araujo — and take to the streets and demand justice. His death is just as deserving of our time and our moral outrage, if not more so.
“This is the exact spot that Lorenzo took his final breath,” Cesar Espinosa, executive director of the immigrant rights group FIEL Houston, told the protest marchers. “And in the spirit of solidarity, I don’t know about you, but I say, if they come for one of us, they come for all of us.”
A sampling of retailers, takeout businesses, pharmacies, convenience stores, and food stores shows half are violating Philadelphia’s ordinance that bans plastic bags and requires a fee on paper bags.
That’s according to the PennEnvironment Research & Policy Center, which sent members to purchase items in 80 stores across the city and in neighborhoods with varying demographics.
The nonprofit advocacy group’s survey found:
55% of businesses violated at least one key provision of the law.
50% of businesses failed to charge a 10-cent fee on paper or reusable bags.
20% of businesses provided plastic bags that have been illegal for years.
Faran Savitz, a zero-waste advocate for PennEnvironment, said during a news conference Thursday outside City Hall that the group didn’t just scrutinize chain stores like Wawa, although those larger operations were generally compliant.
He said the 80 stores surveyed were chosen to represent multiple types in all neighborhoods, although they amount to only a fraction of businesses in the city,
“We wanted to look at as many different types of businesses and hit as many different neighborhoods in the city as possible, so we could get a sense of is this concentrated on one neighborhood or is it spread geographically everywhere,” Savitz said. “We found that this is a pretty widespread problem.”
Charts from a survey of stores conducted by the nonprofit advocacy group PennEnvironment show what the report calls widespread noncompliance of Philadelphia’s revised plastic bag law that went into effect in January 2026.
Savitz said that chain stores tend to know the law and its requirements. Many small businesses remain unaware.
However, the survey did highlight some positive momentum. Currently, three-quarters of surveyed businesses no longer distribute plastic bags. That’s a significant improvement from the group’s previous investigations that caught half of all stores providing them.
The city’s updated bag ordinance
Philadelphia’s original plastic bag law, introduced by Councilmember Mark Squilla, was passed in 2019 but was phased in slowly. It went into full effect in 2021.
After that, paper bag usage skyrocketed, said Squilla, who represents the 1st District, including parts of South Philadelphia, Center City, and the River Wards. Although paper bags are biodegradable, they require more energy to produce and the cutting down of trees.
Squilla introduced an updated bag ordinance last year, which was approved by City Council, and went into effect in January. It required a 10-cent fee on paper bags.
The goal of the fee, Squilla said, is to change shoppers’ behavior and get them to bring reusable bags to the store.
Squilla called the violations found by PennEnvironment “disappointing,” but said he knew compliance would be a challenge.
“Our goal is to end single-use plastic bags in our waste stream and in the city of Philadelphia,” Squilla said.
To close the compliance gap, PennEnvironment is urging Licenses and Inspections to improve education and enforcement, and asking residents to report noncompliant businesses to the city’s 311 system.
Faran Savitz (left) of PennEnvironment Research & Policy Center and Philadelphia Councilmember Mark Squilla, at lectern, discuss PennEnvironment’s findings outside City Hall on July 9.
Plastic bags
Ryan Rabenold, environmental program coordinator at the Pennsylvania Resources Council, said the city’s law is key to reducing waste, noting that most reusable plastic bags do not get recycled.
Plastic bags contribute to litter, require fossil fuels to produce, and become microplastics in the environment when they break down.
“They either get lost in the system, are contaminated with food or grease, which makes them unrecyclable, or they simply get blown away when we’re trying to collect them,” Rabenold said. “When they do end up in our recycling system … they contaminate materials that are recyclable and force them to be removed from the system.”
Rabenold noted that microplastics have been detected in human blood and tissue.
“We are feeling the impacts of something that we may not be able to see, Rabenold said.
“It’s better for our health and the environment to use one thing 1,000 times,” Rabenold said of reusable bags, “rather than use 1,000 things once.”
