November 11, 2020
New Bill Could End Rise of
Plastic Pollution in U.S.
By Lucy Hurlbut
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the plastic pollution crisis continues to threaten wildlife, marine life, and human health. Globally, humans currently produce plastic waste that amounts to about 300 million tons each year. While plastic is cheap to produce, it has found its way into just about everything from cookware to drinkware, food, electronics, clothes, water, and even one's own body. In fact, 91 percent of all plastic is not recycled and ends up in landfills. Because they do not biodegrade, plastics can remain for hundreds of years, polluting our air, land, waterways, and oceans. One bill could help significantly reduce the damage caused by all of this plastic. The Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act of 2020 (BFFPPA) was introduced in the U.S. Congress in February 2019, by Democratic Senator of New Mexico Tom Udall and Democratic Representative of California Alan S. Lowenthal.
The key effect of this bill would be to shift the responsibility of waste management from taxpayers and local and state governments to the manufacturers of plastic products. In the language of the bill, the manufacturers are “fiscally responsible for collecting, managing, recycling, or composting the products after consumer use.” In addition, the bill creates a national 10-cent refund on returned beverage containers to encourage consumers to recycle. Unfortunately, consumers tend to throw away products without paying attention to whether they should be recycled, composted, or sent to the landfill. To address this, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would be tasked with creating standardized labels for packaging and recycling bins.
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About 91% of all plastic, up to 300 million tons a year, ends up in landfills instead of being recycled, remaining there for hundreds of years.
The BFFPPA would phase out the production of many single-use products made from plastic, paper, glass, and metal beginning on January 1, 2022. These single-use products include to-go containers made of polystyrene and plastic carryout bags, utensils, stirrers, and cups. Plastic straws would continue to be available, but only if requested. A plastic bag fee would also be implemented nationwide to encourage consumers to use reusable bags.
The bill would set minimum percentages of recyclable content in plastic beverage containers and would gradually increase those percentages over time. For example, by 2025, plastic bottles would need to contain at least 25 percent material that can be recycled; by 2040, this percentage would rise to 80 percent.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the United States began exporting large quantities of its plastics to China, because it was cheaper than managing the waste at home. While this was initially profitable for China, as technology became a more lucrative business, the waste-recycling industry became a “low-profit and low-value enterprise.” In 2017, China stopped accepting this waste, and it is now being shipped to other countries that lack the resources to recycle properly. As a result, most of the waste goes into landfills. Therefore, the BFFPPA would ensure that plastic waste could not be exported to these countries.
Moreover, the bill would put a temporary freeze of up to three years on any permits for new or expanded production. This would allow the EPA to assess how the agency is addressing its plastic pollution management and update its standards on emissions and discharges for the Clean Air Act (CAA) and the Clean Water Act (CWA).
“This bill calls on all of us, from companies to communities, to address this crisis head-on,” says Lowenthal, “so that we can create a plastic pollution-free world.”