The US falls behind most of the world in plastic pollution legislation

What plastic pollution regulation exists in the U.S.?

In the absence of national legislation in the U.S., local governments at the city, county, and state levels have regulated plastics. As a result, there is a diverse set of mandates and ordinances scattered across the country.

One paper in the Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning says that "as of August 2019, eight

U.S. states, 40 counties, and nearly 300 cities had adopted policies that, either through a ban, fee, or combination thereof, aim to reduce the consumption of single-use plastic bags."

To Rachel Krause, a public administration researcher at the University of Kansas and author of the paper, it's curious to see such a large issue relegated to local governments. "We tend to say that policy responses should be at scale or in proportion to policy problems," she told EHN, "but local governments aren't at scale with climate change, local governments aren't at scale with global plastics. And yet, in a lot of places in the United States, that's where we're seeing the action happen."

Local action against single-use plastic, by definition, has limited reach and is less efficient than sweeping national policy would be. Ordinances at a city or county level are also prone to being struck down by statewide preemption laws, when states ban local governments from taking action.

Eighteen states have some sort of preemption law in place. In Texas, for example, individual cities like Laredo tried to implement plastic bag bans, but the Texas Supreme Court knocked them down in 2018, saying they conflicted with state solid waste management laws.

That said, "the amount of just individual pieces of legislation that have been introduced at the state and local level, in the last five years has, increased by an order of magnitude, maybe more," Alex Truelove, the Zero Waste Campaign Director with U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), told EHN. The legislative landscape felt so much more sparse just a few years ago, Truelove added — a great sign, since the more states engaging in anti-plastics discourse, the harder the issue is to ignore on a national level. Plus, "every time something passes, we learn something" about what does and does not work.

The problem is "it's much easier to block something than to get something passed," University of Southern Maine environmental policy researcher Travis Wagner told EHN. This is especially true at the federal level. He added that the federal government explored possible legislation against plastics as far back as the 1970s, as bottle bills were adopted around the country.

"Bottle bills," also known as "container deposit laws," typically work by mandating small deposits on drink containers like plastic bottles and metal cans that customers can get back if they recycle those bottles. Oregon passed the first bottle bill in the U.S. in 1971, and by 1986, 10 states had enacted some kind of bottle bill into law (there are still only 10 states doing this to date). In the 1970s, Wagner said, it seemed like there was enough momentum to pass a national bottle bill, "but politically, it was just really, extremely difficult."

In the half century since the federal government first considered taking a national stance on plastics, the issue has only gotten worse.

Who is to blame for plastic pollution?

Historically, the conversation around plastic pollution in the U.S. has centered on individuals' and communities' abilities to recycle. But Leavitt said that recycling was an ideal pushed on the public by the plastics industry as "a way for [them] to put the blame of plastic pollution and the responsibility to fix it on consumers. And it worked. While we focused on recycling, industry exponentially increased the amount of plastic it produced."

The idea that it is the individual's responsibility to recycle, to not litter, and to buy less was so pervasive "that it's become embedded in our psyche," added Wagner. "That's the industry saying 'It's not us, it's you.'"

Meanwhile, records and reports from as early as 1973 suggest top industry executives knew that plastic recycling could never be successful on a large scale.

"It's all coming down to dollars and cents for the industry," Shannon Smith, Manager of Communications and Development for the nonprofit FracTracker Alliance, told EHN. "The misperception is that there's a demand for all of this plastic, and so the industry is just responding to the demand of consumers, where it's really the opposite." In reality, she added, there's an oversupply of fracked gas in the U.S., and one of the best ways to profit from all that supply is to generate more demand for plastic. "So it's totally industry driven."

Plastics are primarily made from the natural gas byproducts ethane and propane, which are turned into plastic polymers in high-heat facilities in a process known as "cracking." The U.S. is the world's leading producer of natural gas, with 30 cracker plants currently in operation and at least three more expected by mid-2022. To add insult to injury, Smith said, "the fracking industry has never been profitable," and petrochemical companies and facilities are actually the frequent recipients of government subsidies. "We're subsidizing them, we're paying for their ability to make a profit while they're sacrificing our health."

It's time to put the responsibility of managing plastic waste back on the companies producing it, Truelove said. "If f your bathtub is overflowing, the first thing you do is turn off the tap," he added.

What is the future of plastics regulation?

The Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act has not been put into law yet. It is currently co-sponsored by 12 other senators, but the timeline for when it might be passed is still very unclear.

Truelove is hesitant to make predictions, but he's optimistic that, in the long run, some form of federal legislation will pass. Wagner is more skeptical: "I am optimistic, but not at the national level." In his mind, individual states will continue to lead.

Though the full Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act has no clear path forward at the moment, pieces of the bill are already breaking off and being discussed more seriously. Lowenthal wrote that breaking off elements of the bill and integrating them with more narrowly focused legislation with bipartisan support, or attaching them to bills at the verge of being passed, is a practical move to get parts of the bill through Congress bit by bit.

"A lot of this work tends to be incremental. It almost has to be, by nature, just the way our institutions are built," said Truelove.

But even if the bill is passed, it's still no panacea. The plastics and petrochemical industries will likely continue pushing for what Truelove calls "false solutions," like chemical recycling innovations (where plastics are broken down again into polymers, effectively turning them into diesel fuel — a different environmental nightmare) or flashier anti-littering campaigns.

"What we're doing is an affront to [industry's] business model," he added. "You've got Dow, DuPont, Chevron, Exxon, and so on...and they're incredibly powerful organizations with a lot of political influence." To substantially move towards less plastic production and more reusable products, the government will need to push past those distracting pseudo-solutions, even when they seem like they could be profitable.

"It's totally doable," said Truelove. "I mean, I think if we can get to the moon, we can figure out how to make it easy for people that have reusable foodware or reusable packaging for shipping."

Banner photo credit: Naja Bertolt Jensen/Unsplash