U.S. has its first national strategy to reduce plastic pollution--three strong points and a key issue to watch
From phys.org
Plastic waste is piling up at a daunting pace around the world. The World Bank estimates that every person on the planet generates an average of 1.6 pounds (0.74 kilograms) of plastic waste daily.
To curb this flow, 175 nations are negotiating a binding international treaty on plastic pollution, with a completion target of late 2024. In July 2024, the Biden administration released the first U.S. plan for addressing this problem.
The new U.S. strategy covers five areas: plastic production, product design, waste generation, waste management and plastic capture and removal. It also lists actions that federal agencies and departments are currently pursuing.
I study environmental law, including efforts to reduce plastic pollution. As the world's largest economy, the U.S. is a critical player in this effort. Based on my research, here are three proposals in the U.S. plan that I believe are important and one omission that I view as a major gap.
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Switching to throwaway, one-time-use plastic bottles is what got us here. It started the flood of plastic packaging very early -
I'm thinking it must have happened in the mid-70's.
It's been 50 years of plastic bottles, and very few ever get "recycled." There never really was a plan to recycle plastic packaging, we started shipping it all to China until they refused to take it any more. Our landfills are overflowing with plastic packaging that was used once and thrown away. Enough already!
we did quite well before plastics, surely we can do even better now.
consumers must demand change. start leaving the plastics behind
at the grocery store is at least a start. producers can change a lot
of packing. the fossil fuel industry promotes waste, they get more money.