Can We Make Plastic Sustainable?

We're drowning in plastic. It's quite literally everywhere – from our parks to our oceans to our bodies – but when we search for a life raft, we find hundreds of articles telling us how we can individually "reduce, reuse, and recycle" our way out of the 10 million tons of plastic that currently sit in our oceans. Corporations and systemic inertia have placed the onus of plastic waste on the individual, when in reality little can be done by an individual without collective action.

The concept of plastic use reduction to curb plastic pollution seems simple: use fewer single-use plastics and fewer will need to be processed or end up in the environment. It urges consumers to carry reusable water bottles and straws made of bamboo inside of their canvas shopping bags rather than relying on plastic water bottles, straws, and bags. According to the Container Recycling Institute, each shopper who replaces their plastic water bottles with reusable ones saves anywhere between 300 to 1,460 containers from entering landfills or the ocean annually. As for plastic bags, 100 billion bags pass through the hands of U.S. consumers every year. Clearly, our individual actions matter, but can individual action ever be enough? There is a tremendous amount of single-use plastic waste, and so many plastics that never touch the end consumer, that it feels akin to deception to claim that these actions alone can make an appreciable difference.

So much of what is created today is not meant to last. From our clothes to our electronics, to the cars we drive, our economy thrives on an unending desire for more. With that trend comes planned obsolescence and the environmental consequences of it. We know that many plastics are harmful if used repeatedly and some simply can't be reused in the conventional sense. "Recycling" is a corporate innovation. The promise that plastic bottles would become shoes, fleeces, car parts, or anything else if only the consumer took the appropriate steps to get the bottles to the recycling facility was always spurious. As far back as 1974, people within the plastic industry wrote that there was very little evidence that recycling would be economically viable. But when the oil industry continued to make more than $400 billion per year on plastic production, they chose not to go public. Instead, they continued with the knowledge that every piece of plastic created would be more likely to end up in the ocean or a landfill than ever repurposed. For years, the products we rigorously cleaned and sorted for recycling were actually bought by China at the rate of 4-5 million tons per year. This continued until 2018 when China said they no longer wanted it. Since then, municipalities have been saddled with millions of tons of plastic waste they have no ability to process. And with no market for plastic refuse, more and more of it has ended up where it doesn't belong.

The problems of climate change and plastic pollution have a lot in common: our choices as consumers, voters, and neighbors impact demand and public policy, but collective action is necessary to effectively address the crisis. As an elected lawmaker in a representative democracy, my job is to instigate that collective action. It is with this in mind that Congress has begun to propose solutions to the mounting and urgent problem of plastic pollution.

There are targeted solutions and there are broad solutions – both are necessary to fight a problem that threatens to spiral further out of control. Legislation like my Reducing Waste in National Parks Act is a solution for a specific set of circumstances that can make a small difference in a certain context. It is a good bill that will ensure our national parks do not become landfills by banning the sale of all single-use plastics in national parks, where practical. But a great solution to the larger problem is the Break Free from Plastic Pollution Act, introduced by Senator Jeff Merkley and Representative Alan Lowenthal. Drafted over many months with the perspective of both scientists and policymakers like me, this bill would revolutionize how we approach plastic waste by holding producers fiscally responsible for the collection and management of products after consumer use. This way, corporations could no longer place the onus squarely on consumers but instead be required to find innovative ways to complete the life cycles of their products. Collective action could also mean engaging in tax incentives for alternatives to plastic, known as "Clean Tax Cuts," which can drive up investment and drive down the cost barrier to creative solutions.

If we are successful in cleaning up our oceans and passing to future generations a world that we can be proud of, it will not be because we correctly sorted our trash into the appropriately colored bins. Instead, it will mean that the collective force of our society succeeded in taking action through policy to protect our natural habitats and our environment. This is our responsibility and moral obligation.

Originally published in the March/April issue of The Environmental Law Institute's "The Debate" periodical.