Author Archives: David Evans

Lisbon sits at the mouth of the Tagus River where it flows into the Atlantic. This confluence of waters welcomed thousands of people in June, who gathered in the Portuguese capital’s Altice Arena for the second United Nations Ocean Conference.
“Sadly, we have taken the ocean for granted, and today we face what I would call an Ocean Emergency,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said at the opening of the conference, which aimed to mobilize science-based solutions to the crisis. “We must turn the tide. A healthy and productive ocean is vital to our shared future.”
Altice Arena. Photo: James Fahn, Earth Journalism Network
Human actions have burdened the ocean and its inhabitants with serious problems, including more acidic and hotter waters from emissions and global warming, which represent existential changes for many ocean-dwelling organisms. Meanwhile overfishing, pollution and industrial activities have depleted and damaged ocean ecosystems. Through these combined threats, we’ve robbed marine communities of their resilience at the very moment they need it most.
Could granting the ocean inalienable rights help turn all of that around — and protect people who depend on the ocean in the process?

Experts at the conference argued that a declaration of oceanic rights from the United Nations could recognize the ocean as a living entity that has its own inherent entitlements, such as those to life and health, along with the right to continue its vital natural cycles.
Ocean Biology Processing Group at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, public domain
Participants included representatives of the Earth Law Center, a Colorado-based nonprofit dedicated to the growing Rights of Nature movement. The organization has spent the past five years spearheading the concept of ocean rights.
In 2017 the center secured support from more than 70 nonprofit organizations in 32 countries for its Ocean Rights Initiative. That year, at the UN’s first ocean conference, then-executive director Darlene Lee explained that the initiative recommended “the United Nations governments, organizations and stakeholders, promote and adopt holistic and rights-based governance of the ocean, including incorporating the inherent rights of the ocean into law and policy.”
There’s historic precedent for establishing far-reaching rights principles through the United Nations. In 1948 the UN passed the groundbreaking Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which enshrined certain rights and freedoms — such as liberty and equality — as basic entitlements of all people across the globe.
Although that declaration of human rights is not legally binding, Earth Law Center oceans campaign director Michelle Bender says it has served as a powerful tool for embedding human-rights principles in laws and policies, including international treaties, national constitutions, and legal codes around the world.
Similarly, this summer the General Assembly adopted a groundbreaking resolution declaring access to a clean and healthy environment as a universal human right. And in 2010 a resolution was passed on the human right to water and sanitation.
Activists hope to extend the notion to the ocean we all share.

The effort took a step forward at the UN Ocean Conference, where The Ocean Race — a round-the-world sailing contest that also advocates for a healthy ocean — organized a panel discussion where advocates could discuss ways to advance the declaration and raise awareness of its importance.
Speakers included Prime Minister Ulisses Correia de Silva of the Republic of Cabo Verde, Earth Law Center representative Callie Veelenturf, and Ocean Race chairman Richard Brisius.
Addressing a packed audience, speakers argued that establishing legal rights for the ocean could start a cascade of societal shifts in peoples’ attitudes toward, and understanding of, the ocean. They called on the public to urge their UN ambassadors to support ocean rights and get a declaration on the UN’s agenda.
Although these speeches were given in a dimly lit, hushed venue — one of two adjacent rooms where everyone had to listen through headphones so as not to disturb proceedings next door — the audience was enthusiastic. Many attendees clustered around the speakers as the event came to close, eager to hear more.

Experts and national leaders speaking at the panel, and those I talked to after the event, said the declaration would prioritize the ocean’s interests alongside those of people.
This is a fundamentally different approach from most of today’s ocean-related decision-making, which is typically “anthropocentric in nature,” says marine biologist Guillermo Ortuño Crespo, who attended the event. He’s not involved in the ocean rights initiative, but his research has involved scrutiny of management of the ocean. He says the current approach puts humanity at the center, valuing and protecting the marine environment based on the services it provides to people.
A wrecked fishing trawler believed to have been illegally fishing along the Skeleton coast of Namibia. (Photo by Pim GMX, CC BY-NC 2.0)
Crespo describes this anthropocentric paradigm as “a limited value system that psychologically removes us from nature.”
Other experts said a declaration of ocean rights could upend that value system by giving the ocean a voice. It would represent, in Bender’s words, “a fundamental shift in our relationship with the ocean.”
Granting the ocean legal rights would be a step toward “a more ecocentric value system,” Crespo says, “which is still upheld by innumerous coastal and Indigenous peoples across the ocean. These communities recognize the intrinsic right that the ocean and its many species and features have to exist and be protected.”

The UN panel didn’t occur in a vacuum — the Ocean Race is also in the middle of a series of summits, running through 2023, examining ocean rights as a solution to restoring ocean health. The organization has held summits since 2015 to bring together country leaders, industry figures, ocean experts and others to discuss critical marine issues.
Johan Strid, director of Ocean Race Summits, says the race has a “unique and neutral platform to host a dialogue and drive this discussion in a constructive way.”
The summits  and associated workshops, events and “action labs” are components of a strategic program that the Ocean Race, the Earth Law Center, the nonprofit organization Nature’s Rights and other partners ramped up earlier this year.
One major event took place in March in the Italian coastal city of Genova. There the partners started a consultation process to create a draft resolution. The consultation will “gather stakeholders from all backgrounds, regions and expertise to gain feedback on the process, partnership in outreach and raising awareness, as well as drafting of the principles themselves,” says Bender.
Moving forward, a series of workshops will allow consultation participants to analyze the  ideas discussed in the ocean rights summits. The workshops will then feed into a working group that will finalize the resolution.

The push for ocean rights resonates with other Rights of Nature efforts, but its scale is particularly ambitious.
“It would apply to the ocean as a whole, including in areas beyond national jurisdiction,” says Bender.
That’s an important distinction, as international waters — those beyond individual countries’ control — are currently “almost completely ungoverned and unprotected,” as the International Institute for Environment and Development highlighted in March. The United Nations is working to address this, with member countries negotiating a legally binding treaty on the conservation and use of the high seas under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.
Photo: Susanna Pershern/Submerged Resources Center (via National Park Service, public domain)
But conventional safeguards for the ocean often exist in silos, piecemeal and poorly enforced. Provisions such as Marine Protected Areas only shield selected parts of the ocean, while frameworks currently under discussion like the UN’s proposed plastic treaty tackle individual issues affecting the marine environment.
Bender commends all these efforts as “great steps forward,” but contends that we also need a whole-ocean approach.
This is essential, she argues, because every impact in the ocean is interconnected: Pollution that originates on land enters the ocean and affects the entire planet. A declaration of ocean rights would provide an opportunity to encompass all ocean governance issues and align related frameworks under one overarching umbrella.
Ocean rights would be based on principles that reconnect humans “to the systems that sustain us,” she says. The application of these principles could help to put the brakes on activities like deep-sea mining, and potentially have ramifications for related issues like CO2 emissions. Meanwhile, the standards it upholds could be systems-based. For example, recognizing humans as predators could result in efforts to guide fisheries management.

As discussions continue, organizers aim to have a draft resolution ready to present to the United Nations in September 2023.
Bender says deliberations so far have addressed principles such as intergenerational equity, connectivity and reciprocal responsibility.
Another principle in discussion boils down to “when in doubt, favor the ocean.”
This is similar to the in dubio pro natura standard adopted in Panama and elsewhere, which translates to “when in doubt, err on the side of nature.”
Strid says the resolution would be the starting point for a process within the United Nations itself, assuming the international body agrees on the concept in the first place. Even if that happens, he says, getting “all states in the world to agree on a matter takes time.” They hope that can be accomplished by 2030.
Strid accepts that the timeline is “highly ambitious,” but history shows it’s not impossible. The Universal Declaration on Human Rights took around two years from initial introduction to adoption.
The endeavor has some wind in its sails already, with committed support from the nations of Cabo Verde, the Seychelles and Panama, along with the city of Genova.
In the panel discussion, former Seychelles’ president Danny Faure argued that the support of nations like theirs — known as Big Ocean or Small Island Developing States — is important if ocean rights are to be achieved.
Strid agrees. “Small island states are significantly impacted by the issues concerning the ocean,” he says. Their participation, he adds, can raise awareness of these devastating effects.
Public support will also prove essential. The Ocean Race has launched a campaign called One Blue Voice through which people around the world can sign on to a petition that organizers will present to the United Nations.

Strid stresses that “we are in the early stages of the work.” As the process of shaping the resolution develops, they will focus efforts on gathering formal support from relevant organizations and policymakers.
Despite the immensity of the challenge ahead, both Bender and Strid say they remain hopeful.
“The nature of our sport is to overcome the impossible,” Strid says.
Bender, meanwhile, finds optimism in the successes of the rights of nature movement and the fact that ocean rights have been featured for the first time this year at the Blue Climate Summit and other events. She sees all this as essential momentum that will eventually achieve planetary support for nature and the people who rely on it.
“Humankind is a part of nature, and we cannot realize human rights without a healthy environment to support them,” she says.
This story was produced as part of the 2022 UN Ocean Conference Fellowship organized by Internews’ Earth Journalism Network with support from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (UK Branch).

Could Property Law Help Achieve ‘Rights of Nature’ for Wild Animals?

CHICAGO—Plastics executives embraced climate solutions at a major industry conference here last week and said they were betting on “advanced recycling” as a green response to the plastic waste problem, despite market headwinds and growing opposition from environmentalists.

But their version of climate solutions involves making and using more plastic products, and their push for advanced recycling—also known as chemical recycling—will require industry-friendly legislation and subsidies, company officials said at GPS + PEPP, the industry gathering put on by a Dow Jones Company, Chemical Market Analytics by OPIS. 

For too long, the plastics executives acknowledged, their industry has been a “linear” economy, in which plastic products are made from fossil fuels and then end up as litter or waste in landfills, waterways and incinerators. In the United States, less than 6 percent of plastic waste is recycled.

The alternative, they said, is a “circular” plastics economy that produces little or no waste once various plastic waste products are heated and treated with chemicals that turn them into fuels or new plastic feedstocks, although the processes for doing this are new and, so far, largely unproven.

“We are transforming from a linear to a circular economy,” said Nestor de Mattos, a vice president at Dow, the global chemical giant. “A smooth transition will be key to our success.” 

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Episode 37September 21, 2022(Conversation Recorded on August 19, 2022.)On this episode, Professor of environmental chemistry Martin Scheringer joins Nate. Together, they discuss Scheringer’s most recent paper on PFAS – the ‘forever chemicals, their ubiquity in waterways all over the globe, and their numerous critical health effects.More broadly, they outline the risks and scenarios of plastic pollution to planetary futures – and what we might do about it. Is it possible to live in a (mostly) plastic free world, and do we really have any other option?About Martin ScheringerMartin Scheringer is a professor of environmental chemistry at Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, and works in the research program on Environmental Chemistry and Modeling at RECETOX. He holds a diploma in chemistry from the Johannes-Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany, and a doctoral degree and a habilitation from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich, Switzerland.Show Notes & Links to Learn MorePDF Transcript00:37 – Martin’s works + info01:03 – PFAS02:14 – Outside the Safe Operating Space of a New Planetary Boundary for Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) – Martin’s newest paper03:07 – Plastic outweighs all animals on earth03:19 – Micro plastics04:13 – Health advisory levels for PFAS04:52 – PFAS Chemicals move with the water and outgas05:16 – All the products PFAS are used for + more 06:16 – Plastic containers last 700-800 years, and then once degraded last longer06:34 – PFAS never degrade into anything and will never go away08:30 – There are 5,000 chemicals of that type, and up to 300,000 chemicals on the market globally all with different properties and unknown health effects11:01 – ‘The solution to pollution is dilution’11:08 – The Graduate12:45 – Chemical Health Advisories by the EPA12:58 – These chemicals can lower immune response in babies 13:17 – Chemicals can lower sperm counts in men13:49 – Health effects of PFAS14:29 – Dupont teflon production facility releasing PFAS waste water into open waters15:42 – Dark Waters16:09 – Endocrine disrupting chemicals17:45 – Increase in non-communicable diseases over the last 15-20 years18:03 – Increasing climate effects shown19:22 – Endocrine disruptors on non-humans19:59 – The challenge of communicating science20:45 – Metabolic diseases potentially having origins from chemicals23:00 – Steep discount rates24:06 – Packaged food contains lots of these chemicals24:10 – Food Packaging Forum24:54 – We create 300 million tons of plastic each year, and half of that is single use plastic25:35 – The chemicals added into plastics25:53 – PVC, phthalates27:22 – All the products that come from a barrel of oil28:37 – Art Berman + TGS Episode29:09 – Plastic takes ~12% of oil production30:32 – Negatives of plastic alternatives33:11 – 500 billion fossil workers added per year33:35 – How did people used to live without plastic products?34:29 – Making glass thinner and lighter34:55 – Our supply chains are going to have to localize and regionalize35:45 – Nate’s story on The Great Simplification36:29 – Potential of small scale farms feeding everyone in the world36:40 – The centrality of fertilizers and pesticides37:50 – Petrochemicals in pharmaceuticals39:54 – RoundUp controversy – Patrick Moore willing to drink it and then refusing to41:05 – PCBs41:18 – PCB damage to whales, Orca found dead on beach with high level of PCBs42:08 – Mercury Biomagnification in fish43:06 – Average golden retriever in 1950s lived to 15 years old43:35 – Prevalence of cancer currently44:50 – List of diseases connected to PFOA   46:30 – Persistent chemicals47:37 – Environmental Justice and chemical pollutants48:46 – Persistence and Spatial range49:25 – Ocean acidification49:45 – Chemical stressor effects on animal populations and recent study: Impacts of endocrine disrupting chemicals on reproduction in wildlife and humans50:18 – Insect down by 50-70% in mass51:28 – Higher temperatures cause chemicals to outgas more easily51:51 – There is very minimal testing of chemicals before they are released as products56:45 – The New Car smell is phthalate, flame retardants, EDCs… 58:20 – Standing stock in the US grows at 2.5-2.8%/year1:01:27 – IPCC, IPCC biodiversity, IPCC for chemicals1:09:06 – Fridays for Future1:11:55 – Destruction of the Amazon

Environmental experts say there’s a strong possibility that a federal bill will be introduced in the U.S. that seeks to strengthen an industry known as “advanced recycling,” or “chemical recycling.”While proponents of advanced recycling tout it as a solution to the ever-growing plastic pollution issue, critics say that it’s not recycling at all, but a highly polluting incineration process that converts plastic into fuel.Experts say that current advanced recycling plants are able to operate with ease due to state laws that subject them to fewer regulations.Critics say the passing of a federal bill into law would substantially increase the number of advanced recycling plants across the U.S., allowing them to evade many environmental regulations while disproportionately polluting the air in low-income communities and communities of color. In April 2022, a Texas company unveiled a plan to transform a tiny Pennsylvania town into an industrial hub: it would invest $1.1 billion into building a manufacturing plant that will annually convert around 450,000 tons of plastic waste — an amount 40 times as heavy as the Eiffel Tower — into feedstock for new products, a process dubbed by the plastics industry as “advanced recycling,” though also known as “chemical recycling.”
In a press release, the company, Encina, says the facility will help the world transition toward a circular economy and achieve carbon neutrality. But critics say the company is simply burning plastic to make fuel and that these actions will endanger the environment and human health.
Encina has yet to open its new plant in Point Township, Pennsylvania, but there could be about eight other facilities currently operating across the U.S. that use so-called advanced recycling processes, according to a brief by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Environmental experts say the facilities operate under the guise of being recycling plants, when they’re really producing hazardous toxic waste, some of which is converted into fuel. Moreover, they say these facilities are able to evade a number of environmental regulations due to 20 state laws that define advanced recycling as a manufacturing process, rather than as a more strictly regulated waste disposal process.
Now, environmental experts say they anticipate an even greater problem: the possibility of a federal bill being introduced that, if passed into law, would strengthen the chemical recycling industry across the U.S.
Daniel Rosenberg, director of federal toxics policy at the NRDC, said the plastics and chemical industries would see the approval of a federal bill as the “holy grail.”
“Essentially, federal legislation similar to what has been passed in many of the states would apply nationwide, and would remove federal health protections,” Rosenberg told Mongabay in an email.
While no bill has yet been introduced at a federal level, Rosenberg said that the American Chemistry Council (ACC), an industry association based in Washington, D.C., that represents plastic manufacturers, has been saying “that they are going to introduce a bill,” and representatives from ACC have been “talking to Congressional offices about it.”
In response to these reports, a coalition of more than 200 organizations, including the NRDC, recently submitted a letter to the U.S. Congress, urging officials to reject any bill that would enable the plastics and chemical industries to forge ahead with advanced recycling.
“The last thing Congress should be doing is weakening regulations for toxic technologies,” Sarah Doll, national director of Safer States, an NGO that’s part of the coalition, said in a statement. “As a nation, we should be focusing on real solutions to the plastic crisis, like bending the curve down on the use of plastic and solutions like nontoxic reuse and refill systems.”
Activists say the very best way to curb the massive plastics pollution now escalating around the globe is to reduce plastics production, not to incinerate the waste, which can potentially cause air, ground and water pollution.
Environmental experts say there’s a strong possibility that a federal bill will be introduced in the U.S. that seeks to strengthen a petrochemical industry process known as “advanced recycling,” or “chemical recycling.” Image by Vivan Sachs/IBM via Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0).
What exactly is ‘advanced recycling’?
The world has a plastic problem. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) estimates that global society produces about 400 million metric tons of single-use plastic products and other plastic waste each year, and that less than 10% is recycled. In the U.S., the recycling rate is even worse — one study suggests that only 5% is truly recycled.
Plastic pollution has gotten so bad that scientists have suggested that we have crossed a planetary boundary for plastics and other chemicals entering the environment — meaning that we have transgressed a limit beyond which our Earth may not be able to cope with the environmental stress that humans inflict. This boundary crossing could destabilize Earth’s natural operating systems, especially when the unrestrained release of chemicals interacts with other Earth systems and processes. Ultimately, human survival could be at risk.
So what do we do with all of this plastic waste, much of which is polluting our oceans, waterways, land, and even the atmosphere? The chemical and plastics industry says a solution lies in “advanced recycling.”
America’s Plastic Makers, an association of plastic producers and fossil fuel companies that claims to seek the end of plastic pollution, says that “advanced recycling” is a sustainable process that “creates new top-quality plastics out of used plastics,” including 90% of “hard-to-recycle plastics.” Chemical recyling is described as a process of breaking down solid plastic into liquid or gas form through gasification (the heating of waste in a low-oxygen environment) or pyrolysis (the heating of waste without oxygen) to “remake plastics or products for other industries.”
America’s Plastic Makers argues that advanced recycling facilities do not emit more air pollution than facilities that produce cars or food, and that the process is “key to meeting circularity goals while keeping plastics out of landfills and our environment.”
Environmental experts view things very differently. First of all, they dispute the idea that advanced recycling is recycling at all, at least not in the traditional sense of turning an old plastic product into a new one. Instead, they say it’s a highly polluting, energy-intensive process that incinerates plastic waste, and in most cases, turns it into fuel, such as diesel and aviation fuel.
According to a Greenpeace report published in 2020, less than half of 50 surveyed recycling projects that were approved by the ACC — some of which are currently operational and some of which are yet to open — would be considered “credible plastic recycling projects,” while most of the rest turned plastic waste into fuel.
“Very little, if any, plastic is being recycled at the ‘chemical recycling’ facilities in the U.S.,” Rosenberg said. “These are plastic-to-fuel operations, which is not recycling. The industry is selling a fantasy of recycling plastic, but they are primarily making dirty aviation fuel.”
America’s Plastic Makers says that “advanced recycling” is a sustainable process that “creates new top-quality plastics out of used plastics,” but environmental experts say very little actual plastics recycling is taking place, with the polluting, energy-intensive, process used to skirt tougher waste disposal regulations, and so that the industry can receive subsidies. Image by Vivan Sachs/IBM via Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0).
‘Advanced recycling’ – Neither ‘advanced,’ nor ‘recycling’
Critics say that advanced recycling processes can produce toxic air pollutants that pose considerable health and safety risks for workers and local communities located near these facilities, many of which are low-income communities and communities of color.
Data collected by the Environmental Protection Agency indicated that a pyrolysis plant in Tigard, Oregon, produced nearly 500,000 pounds (227 metric tons) of hazardous waste in 2019, which was then burned to produce energy at plants located in six different U.S. communities. The main component of the waste was said to be benzene – a liquid hydrocarbon that has been identified as a carcinogen – as well as other dangerous elements like lead, cadmium and chromium.
The plastic-to-fuel process also has a “Goliath-sized carbon footprint,” according to a report published by the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) in 2020. This is because it requires fossil fuel energy to burn solid plastic to create fuel; the burning process itself also releases greenhouse gases and other chemicals, the report says.
New research published by Zero Waste Europe (ZWE), a group of experts and organizations working to eliminate waste, found that greenhouse gas emissions from facilities that use pyrolysis were nine times higher than plants that conducted traditional, or mechanical, recycling.
Other parts of the plastic life cycle emit greenhouse gases — from the fracking of gases to plastic production and disposal. A report published last year by the NGO Beyond Plastic found that the plastics industry in the U.S. currently emits 232 million metric tons of greenhouse gases every year, the equivalent of 116.5 gigawatts of coal plants — and that plastics will release more greenhouse gas emissions than coal plants in the U.S. by 2030.
Joshua Baca, vice president of plastics at the ACC, said he believes the many criticisms of advanced recycling “represent a total lack of understanding [and a] purposeful misrepresentation of both advanced recycling processes and basic economics.”
“Advanced recycling converts used plastics into saleable feedstocks to remake into new plastics,” Baca told Mongabay in an emailed statement. “If all the plastics were incinerated as falsely alleged, there would be no products to sell or viable business models for the multiple advanced recycling companies across the globe.”
Baca also disputed the characterization of advanced recycling as incineration, arguing that pyrolysis and gasification units operate without combustion either in low oxygen or without oxygen.
“ACC will continue to engage lawmakers on the basic facts about advanced recycling, and we encourage public officials and journalists to critically review the false claims and self-cited publications perpetuating old myths,” he said.
A waste processing management facility and research center in Canada. Image by David Dodge/Green Energy Futures via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).
Fewer regulations, easier operations
Rosenberg said most state laws encourage chemical recycling in three main ways: by reclassifying plastic waste as “feedstock” to avoid environmental laws targeting waste disposal processes; changing the definition of “recycling” to include chemical recycling and its products; and making chemical recycling facilities eligible for state subsidies and other financial incentives.
“Generally speaking, having fewer regulatory requirements and receiving tax-payer subsidies is likely to make operations easier, which is why the chemical industry is pursuing them aggressively,” he said in his email. “It is also a way of laying the groundwork for eliminating protections at the federal level.”
Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics and former EPA regional administrator, told Mongabay that federal legislation would result in “more chemical recycling facilities created around the country,” and that many would likely end up in low-income communities and communities of color, which is where many current petrochemical facilities are located.
While it’s unclear how many new advanced recycling plants are planned for the U.S., Rosenberg said there are “new announcements almost weekly of plants that companies say they intend to build.”
Jessica Roff, a campaigner and policy advocate for GAIA, said a federal bill could also help advanced recycling facilities evade rules around incineration processes, which the EPA has been regulating for 30 years.
“If these plastic incinerators by another name can avoid being regulated as incinerators, they can escape Clean Air Act requirements altogether and their toxic pollution would be unfettered,” Roff told Mongabay in an email. “A federal law would also limit … community member rights, making it impossible for them to find out what toxic pollutants they’re being exposed to, let alone to stop them.”
In the letter sent to Congress by the coalition of groups, the authors say the concept of advanced recycling is a “dream come true” for chemical industry lobbyists.
“Having an eco-sounding way to make plastic waste vanish from sight helps the industry justify exponential growth in plastics production,” the authors write.
According to the OECD, plastic production could triple in the next 40 years — from about 460 million metric tons in 2019 to 1.23 billion metric tons in 2060 — in the absence of policies and action.
Environmental experts say the key to solving the plastic pollution issue is stopping plastic being produced in the first place. Earlier this year, 175 countries agreed to adopt a U.N. framework to fight plastic pollution by addressing the entire life cycle of plastic, including its production. But nations have yet to agree upon the details of the treaty, which may not be finalized until the end of next year.
“The answer to the plastic waste crisis is not to make more plastic, and then burn it, but to make less plastic,” Rosenberg said. “It is a very simple equation that does not yield a result pleasing to, or profitable for, the chemical industry. They are proposing an alternative ‘solution’ using funny math that will make things worse and benefit nobody but the industry itself.”
Banner image: Sorting through plastic in a plastic recycling plant. Image by ILO/M. Fossat via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).
Citations:
Milbrandt, A., Coney, K., Badgett, A., & Beckham, G. T. (2022). Quantification and evaluation of plastic waste in the United States. Resources, Conservation and Recycling, 183, 106363. doi:10.1016/j.resconrec.2022.106363
Möck, A., Bulach, W., & Betz, J. (2022). Climate impact of pyrolysis of waste plastic packaging in comparison with reuse and mechanical recycling. Retrieved from Zero Waste Europe and the Rethink Plastic alliance website: https://zerowasteeurope.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/zwe_2022_report_climat_impact__pyrolysis_plastic_packaging.pdf
Persson, L., Carney Almroth, B. M., Collins, C. D., Cornell, S., De Wit, C. A., Diamond, M. L., … Hauschild, M. Z. (2022). Outside the safe operating space of the planetary boundary for novel entities. Environmental Science & Technology. doi:10.1021/acs.est.1c04158
Schlegel, I. (2020). Deception by the numbers. Retrieved from Greenpeace website: https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/GP_Deception-by-the-Numbers-3.pdf
Vallette, J. (2021). The new coal: Plastics and climate change. Retrieved from Beyond Plastic website: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5eda91260bbb7e7a4bf528d8/t/616ef29221985319611a64e0/1634661022294/REPORT_The_New-Coal_Plastics_and_Climate-Change_10-21-2021.pdf
Elizabeth Claire Alberts is a staff writer for Mongabay. Follow her on Twitter @ECAlberts.
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Air Pollution, Chemicals, Environment, environmental justice, Environmental Law, Environmental Policy, Environmental Politics, Industry, Law, Plastic, Pollution, Recycling, Waste
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St. James Parish, located on a stretch of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans dubbed “Cancer Alley” due to the high concentration of petrochemical plants, is home to the country’s largest producer of polystyrene — the foam commonly found in soft drink and takeout containers. Now, the owner of that plant wants to build a new facility in the same area that would break down used foam cups and containers into raw materials that can be turned into other kinds of plastic. While there’s limited data on what kinds of emissions this type of facility creates, environmental advocates are concerned that the new plant could represent a new source of carcinogens like dioxin and benzene in the already polluted area.The proposed plant comes as the U.S. federal and state governments and private companies pour billions into “chemical recycling” research, which is touted as a potential solution to anemic plastics recycling rates. Proponents say that, despite mounting restrictions on single-use packaging, plastics aren’t going away anytime soon, and that chemical recycling is needed to keep growing amounts of plastic waste out of landfills and oceans. But questions abound about whether the plants are economically viable — and how chemical recycling contributes to local air pollution, perpetuating a history of environmental injustices and climate change. Skeptics argue that chemical recycling is an unproven technology that amounts to little more than the latest PR effort from the plastics industry. The Environmental Protection Agency is deciding whether or not to continue regulating the plants as incinerators, with some lawmakers expressing concerns last month about toxic emissions from these facilities. “They’re going to be managing toxic chemicals…and they’re going to be putting our communities at risk for either air pollution or something worse,” Jane Patton, a Baton Rouge native and manager of the Center for International Environmental Law’s plastics and petrochemicals campaign, told EHN of the proposed new plant in Louisiana.The air of St. James Parish, where the new plant will be located, has among the highest pollution levels along the Mississippi River corridor dubbed “Cancer Alley.” A joint investigation in 2019 by ProPublica, The Times-Picayune and The Advocate found that most of the new petrochemical facilities in the parish –including the recycling plant– will be located near the mostly Black 5th District.

What is chemical recycling?

In the U.S., less than 10% of plastics are actually recycled. Credit: Hans from PixabayWhen most of us picture recycling, we picture what industry insiders call “mechanical recycling:” plastics are sorted, cleaned, crushed or shredded and then melted to be made into new goods.In the U.S., though, less than 10% of plastics are actually recycled due to challenges ranging from contamination to variability in plastic types and coloring. “No flexible plastic packaging can be recycled with mechanical recycling — the only real plastic that can be recycled are number one and number two water bottles and milk jugs,” George Huber, an engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin and head of the multi-university research center for Chemical Upcycling of Waste Plastics, told EHN.Enter chemical recycling –– processes that use high heat, chemicals, or both to break used plastic goods down into their chemical building blocks to, in theory, make more plastics. Proponents say that chemical recycling can complement more traditional recycling by handling mixed and harder-to-recycle plastics. “An advantage of advanced recycling is that it can take more of the 90% of plastics that aren’t recycled today, including the hard-to-recycle films, pouches and other mixed plastics, and remake them into virgin-quality new plastics approved for medical and food contact applications,” Joshua Baca, vice president of the plastics division at the American Chemistry Council, told EHN.

A long and winding history

The technology has actually been around for decades, with an initial wave of plants built in the 1990s, but it didn’t take off then because of operational and economic challenges. Huber said some factors have changed, like a significant increase in plastic use and China’s refusal to accept other countries’ waste, that make chemical recycling more viable this time around.Yet a 2021 Reuters investigation found that commercial viability remains a major challenge for chemical recyclers due to difficulties like contamination of the incoming plastic, high energy costs, and the need to further clean the outputs before they can become plastic. “It’s one thing in theory to design something on paper — it’s a whole huge challenge to build a plant, get it operational, get the permits and for it to perform like you think it would,” Huber said.Tracking down just how many chemical recycling plants operate today in the U.S. is tricky — and depends in part on what one counts as “recycling.”

Potential climate impacts

Most of the plants in the U.S. are pyrolysis facilities, which use huge amounts of energy to heat plastics up enough to break their chemical bonds, raising concerns about their climate impacts if that energy comes from burning fossil fuels. An analysis from Closed Loop Partners found that, depending on the technology, carbon emissions from chemical recycling ranged from 22% higher to 45% lower than virgin plastics production. “It’s a very promising technology to tackle the problem of (plastic) waste, but if you don’t concurrently tackle the challenge of where the energy is coming from, there’s a problem,” Rebecca Furlong, a chemistry PhD candidate at the University of Bath who has conducted life cycle assessments of plastics recycling technologies, told EHN. A life cycle assessment study prepared for a British chemical recycling company found that chemical recycling has a significantly lower climate impact than waste-to-energy incineration — but produced almost four times as many greenhouse gas emissions as landfilling the plastic. The American Chemistry Council, or ACC, says that there are at least seven plants in the U.S. doing plastics-to-plastics recycling, although many of those facilities also turn plastics into industrial fuel. For example, according to records reviewed by the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, or GAIA, in 2018 a facility located in Oregon and owned by one of the companies planning to build the Louisiana plant, converted 216.82 pounds of polystyrene into the plastics building block styrene, sending roughly the same amount to be burned at a cement kiln.The ACC, European Union regulators and Furlong and her advisor, Matthew Davidson, say plastics to fuel shouldn’t count as recycling. “Clearly digging oil out of the ground, using it as a plastic, and then burning it is not hugely different from digging it out of the ground and burning it,” Davidson, director of the Centre for Sustainable and Circular Technologies at the University of Bath, told EHN.

Unknowns about environmental health impacts

Depending on the type of plastic waste the facilities are processing, the plants can generate hazardous compounds.Depending on the type of plastic waste the facilities are processing, the plants can generate hazardous compounds. Credit: Frauke Feind from Pixabay
Chemical recycling saw a boost under the Trump administration, including a formal partnership between the federal Department of Energy and the American Chemistry Council, which lobbies on behalf of the plastics industry, to scale up chemical recycling technologies.

There’s limited information, however, on the environmental health impacts of chemical recycling plants. Furlong said she had not included hazardous waste generation in her life cycle assessments because of a lack of data. Tangri said there have been few studies outside the lab, in part because there are relatively few chemical recycling plants out there. Additionally, the ones that do exist are either too small to meet the EPA’s pollution reporting threshold, or are housed within a larger petrochemical complex and so don’t separately report out their air pollution emissions.

Earlier this year, the Natural Resources Defense Council released a report looking at eight facilities in the U.S. The environmental group found that one facility in Oregon sent around half a million pounds of hazardous waste, including benzene and lead, to incinerators in Washington, Colorado, Missouri and three other states. Hazardous waste incinerators can release toxic air pollution to nearby communities. Additionally, some hazardous waste incinerators in the U.S. have repeatedly violated air pollution standards and the EPA has recently raised serious concerns about a backlog of hazardous waste piling up due to limited incineration capacity.

The Oregon facility, which is supposed to break down polystyrene into styrene, also sent more than 100,000 pounds of styrene in 2020 to be burned in waste to energy plants rather than recycled back into new plastics, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council’s report.

Plastics contain a range of additives, like phthalates and bisphenols, that have serious health concerns. The European Chemicals Agency expressed concerns in a 2021 report about the extent to which chemical recycling could eliminate these chemicals, especially “legacy” additives like lead-stabilized PVC that the EU no longer allows, and prevent them from showing up in new plastic products.

The agency also cautioned that, depending on the type of plastic waste the facilities are processing, pyrolysis and gasification plants can generate hazardous compounds such as dioxins, volatile organic compounds and PCBs. Dioxins are considered “highly toxic” by the EPA as they can cause cancer, reproductive issues, immune system damage and other health issues. Volatile organic compounds can cause breathing difficulties and harm the nervous system; and some, like benzene, are also carcinogens. The agency noted that companies are required to take measures, like installing flue gas cleaning systems and pre-treatment of wastewater, to limit emissions.

Additionally, experts interviewed by the EU highlighted an overall lack of transparency about the kinds of chemicals used in some of the chemical recycling processes.

The American Chemistry Council, or ACC, says that emissions from most chemical recycling plants are too low to trigger Clean Air Act permits, citing a recent report from consultant Good Company and sponsored by the ACC that found that emissions from four plants in the U.S. were on par with those from a hospital and food manufacturing plant.

The trade group claims the plants are “designed to avoid dioxin formation with many interventions, the primary one being that the plastic material is heated in a closed, oxygen-deprived environment that is not combustion,” and that the facilities would be subject to violations or operating restrictions if dioxins were formed.

Policy debate

As the EPA decides what to do about chemical recycling plants, 20 states — including Louisiana, where the new plant could be built — have already passed laws that would regulate the facilities as manufacturers rather than solid waste facilities, according to the American Chemistry Council — a move that environmental advocates say could lead to less oversight and more pollution. “Whenever I see a big push for exemptions from environmental statutes, I get a little concerned,” Judith Enck, director of the anti-plastics advocacy group Beyond Plastics, told EHN.Advocates in Louisiana fear the new law will exempt the new facility from being regulated by the state Department of Environmental Quality, something the ACC says won’t happen. However, it is unclear in the text of the law which state agency will oversee its environmental impacts (the state Department of Environmental Quality didn’t respond to our question). In a recent letter to the EPA, U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and more than 30 other lawmakers requested that the agency continue to regulate pyrolysis and gasification plants as incinerators. Additionally, they also urged the EPA to request more information from these facilities on their air pollution and climate impacts. “Communities located near these facilities need to know what chemicals they are being exposed to, and they need the full protection that Congress intended the Clean Air Act’s incinerator standards to provide,” wrote the lawmakers.The American Chemistry Council contends that chemical recycling plants take in plastics waste that is already sorted, and that regulating these facilities as solid waste facilities, with measures like odor and rodent controls, does not make sense. The ACC adds that, like other manufacturing facilities, chemical recycling plants would still be subject to air and water pollution and hazardous waste regulations.Tangri, from GAIA, said that the U.S. should also follow in the footsteps of the EU and not count plastics to fuel as chemical recycling. Overall, environmental advocates would prefer to see stronger measures taken to reduce plastic use and require that manufacturers take more responsibility for plastic packaging — a concept known as “extended producer responsibility.” Enck suggested that there be mandatory environmental standards for packaging similar to auto efficiency standards. “We really need to move to a refillable, reusable economy,” she said. “Do we need all these layers of packaging on a product? Do we need multi-material packaging?”From Your Site ArticlesRelated Articles Around the Web

St. James Parish, located on a stretch of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans dubbed “Cancer Alley” due to the high concentration of petrochemical plants, is home to the country’s largest producer of polystyrene — the foam commonly found in soft drink and takeout containers. Now, the owner of that plant wants to build a new facility in the same area that would break down used foam cups and containers into raw materials that can be turned into other kinds of plastic. While there’s limited data on what kinds of emissions this type of facility creates, environmental advocates are concerned that the new plant could represent a new source of carcinogens like dioxin and benzene in the already polluted area.The proposed plant comes as the U.S. federal and state governments and private companies pour billions into “chemical recycling” research, which is touted as a potential solution to anemic plastics recycling rates. Proponents say that, despite mounting restrictions on single-use packaging, plastics aren’t going away anytime soon, and that chemical recycling is needed to keep growing amounts of plastic waste out of landfills and oceans. But questions abound about whether the plants are economically viable — and how chemical recycling contributes to local air pollution, perpetuating a history of environmental injustices and climate change. Skeptics argue that chemical recycling is an unproven technology that amounts to little more than the latest PR effort from the plastics industry. The Environmental Protection Agency is deciding whether or not to continue regulating the plants as incinerators, with some lawmakers expressing concerns last month about toxic emissions from these facilities. “They’re going to be managing toxic chemicals…and they’re going to be putting our communities at risk for either air pollution or something worse,” Jane Patton, a Baton Rouge native and manager of the Center for International Environmental Law’s plastics and petrochemicals campaign, told EHN of the proposed new plant in Louisiana.The air of St. James Parish, where the new plant will be located, has among the highest pollution levels along the Mississippi River corridor dubbed “Cancer Alley.” A joint investigation in 2019 by ProPublica, The Times-Picayune and The Advocate found that most of the new petrochemical facilities in the parish –including the recycling plant– will be located near the mostly Black 5th District.

What is chemical recycling?

In the U.S., less than 10% of plastics are actually recycled. Credit: Hans from PixabayWhen most of us picture recycling, we picture what industry insiders call “mechanical recycling:” plastics are sorted, cleaned, crushed or shredded and then melted to be made into new goods.In the U.S., though, less than 10% of plastics are actually recycled due to challenges ranging from contamination to variability in plastic types and coloring. “No flexible plastic packaging can be recycled with mechanical recycling — the only real plastic that can be recycled are number one and number two water bottles and milk jugs,” George Huber, an engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin and head of the multi-university research center for Chemical Upcycling of Waste Plastics, told EHN.Enter chemical recycling –– processes that use high heat, chemicals, or both to break used plastic goods down into their chemical building blocks to, in theory, make more plastics. Proponents say that chemical recycling can complement more traditional recycling by handling mixed and harder-to-recycle plastics. “An advantage of advanced recycling is that it can take more of the 90% of plastics that aren’t recycled today, including the hard-to-recycle films, pouches and other mixed plastics, and remake them into virgin-quality new plastics approved for medical and food contact applications,” Joshua Baca, vice president of the plastics division at the American Chemistry Council, told EHN.

A long and winding history

The technology has actually been around for decades, with an initial wave of plants built in the 1990s, but it didn’t take off then because of operational and economic challenges. Huber said some factors have changed, like a significant increase in plastic use and China’s refusal to accept other countries’ waste, that make chemical recycling more viable this time around.Yet a 2021 Reuters investigation found that commercial viability remains a major challenge for chemical recyclers due to difficulties like contamination of the incoming plastic, high energy costs, and the need to further clean the outputs before they can become plastic. “It’s one thing in theory to design something on paper — it’s a whole huge challenge to build a plant, get it operational, get the permits and for it to perform like you think it would,” Huber said.Tracking down just how many chemical recycling plants operate today in the U.S. is tricky — and depends in part on what one counts as “recycling.”

Potential climate impacts

Most of the plants in the U.S. are pyrolysis facilities, which use huge amounts of energy to heat plastics up enough to break their chemical bonds, raising concerns about their climate impacts if that energy comes from burning fossil fuels. An analysis from Closed Loop Partners found that, depending on the technology, carbon emissions from chemical recycling ranged from 22% higher to 45% lower than virgin plastics production. “It’s a very promising technology to tackle the problem of (plastic) waste, but if you don’t concurrently tackle the challenge of where the energy is coming from, there’s a problem,” Rebecca Furlong, a chemistry PhD candidate at the University of Bath who has conducted life cycle assessments of plastics recycling technologies, told EHN. A life cycle assessment study prepared for a British chemical recycling company found that chemical recycling has a significantly lower climate impact than waste-to-energy incineration — but produced almost four times as many greenhouse gas emissions as landfilling the plastic. The American Chemistry Council, or ACC, says that there are at least seven plants in the U.S. doing plastics-to-plastics recycling, although many of those facilities also turn plastics into industrial fuel. For example, according to records reviewed by the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, or GAIA, in 2018 a facility located in Oregon and owned by one of the companies planning to build the Louisiana plant, converted 216.82 pounds of polystyrene into the plastics building block styrene, sending roughly the same amount to be burned at a cement kiln.The ACC, European Union regulators and Furlong and her advisor, Matthew Davidson, say plastics to fuel shouldn’t count as recycling. “Clearly digging oil out of the ground, using it as a plastic, and then burning it is not hugely different from digging it out of the ground and burning it,” Davidson, director of the Centre for Sustainable and Circular Technologies at the University of Bath, told EHN.

Unknowns about environmental health impacts

Depending on the type of plastic waste the facilities are processing, the plants can generate hazardous compounds.Depending on the type of plastic waste the facilities are processing, the plants can generate hazardous compounds. Credit: Frauke Feind from Pixabay
Chemical recycling saw a boost under the Trump administration, including a formal partnership between the federal Department of Energy and the American Chemistry Council, which lobbies on behalf of the plastics industry, to scale up chemical recycling technologies.

There’s limited information, however, on the environmental health impacts of chemical recycling plants. Furlong said she had not included hazardous waste generation in her life cycle assessments because of a lack of data. Tangri said there have been few studies outside the lab, in part because there are relatively few chemical recycling plants out there. Additionally, the ones that do exist are either too small to meet the EPA’s pollution reporting threshold, or are housed within a larger petrochemical complex and so don’t separately report out their air pollution emissions.

Earlier this year, the Natural Resources Defense Council released a report looking at eight facilities in the U.S. The environmental group found that one facility in Oregon sent around half a million pounds of hazardous waste, including benzene and lead, to incinerators in Washington, Colorado, Missouri and three other states. Hazardous waste incinerators can release toxic air pollution to nearby communities. Additionally, some hazardous waste incinerators in the U.S. have repeatedly violated air pollution standards and the EPA has recently raised serious concerns about a backlog of hazardous waste piling up due to limited incineration capacity.

The Oregon facility, which is supposed to break down polystyrene into styrene, also sent more than 100,000 pounds of styrene in 2020 to be burned in waste to energy plants rather than recycled back into new plastics, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council’s report.

Plastics contain a range of additives, like phthalates and bisphenols, that have serious health concerns. The European Chemicals Agency expressed concerns in a 2021 report about the extent to which chemical recycling could eliminate these chemicals, especially “legacy” additives like lead-stabilized PVC that the EU no longer allows, and prevent them from showing up in new plastic products.

The agency also cautioned that, depending on the type of plastic waste the facilities are processing, pyrolysis and gasification plants can generate hazardous compounds such as dioxins, volatile organic compounds and PCBs. Dioxins are considered “highly toxic” by the EPA as they can cause cancer, reproductive issues, immune system damage and other health issues. Volatile organic compounds can cause breathing difficulties and harm the nervous system; and some, like benzene, are also carcinogens. The agency noted that companies are required to take measures, like installing flue gas cleaning systems and pre-treatment of wastewater, to limit emissions.

Additionally, experts interviewed by the EU highlighted an overall lack of transparency about the kinds of chemicals used in some of the chemical recycling processes.

The American Chemistry Council, or ACC, says that emissions from most chemical recycling plants are too low to trigger Clean Air Act permits, citing a recent report from consultant Good Company and sponsored by the ACC that found that emissions from four plants in the U.S. were on par with those from a hospital and food manufacturing plant.

The trade group claims the plants are “designed to avoid dioxin formation with many interventions, the primary one being that the plastic material is heated in a closed, oxygen-deprived environment that is not combustion,” and that the facilities would be subject to violations or operating restrictions if dioxins were formed.

Policy debate

As the EPA decides what to do about chemical recycling plants, 20 states — including Louisiana, where the new plant could be built — have already passed laws that would regulate the facilities as manufacturers rather than solid waste facilities, according to the American Chemistry Council — a move that environmental advocates say could lead to less oversight and more pollution. “Whenever I see a big push for exemptions from environmental statutes, I get a little concerned,” Judith Enck, director of the anti-plastics advocacy group Beyond Plastics, told EHN.Advocates in Louisiana fear the new law will exempt the new facility from being regulated by the state Department of Environmental Quality, something the ACC says won’t happen. However, it is unclear in the text of the law which state agency will oversee its environmental impacts (the state Department of Environmental Quality didn’t respond to our question). In a recent letter to the EPA, U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and more than 30 other lawmakers requested that the agency continue to regulate pyrolysis and gasification plants as incinerators. Additionally, they also urged the EPA to request more information from these facilities on their air pollution and climate impacts. “Communities located near these facilities need to know what chemicals they are being exposed to, and they need the full protection that Congress intended the Clean Air Act’s incinerator standards to provide,” wrote the lawmakers.The American Chemistry Council contends that chemical recycling plants take in plastics waste that is already sorted, and that regulating these facilities as solid waste facilities, with measures like odor and rodent controls, does not make sense. The ACC adds that, like other manufacturing facilities, chemical recycling plants would still be subject to air and water pollution and hazardous waste regulations.Tangri, from GAIA, said that the U.S. should also follow in the footsteps of the EU and not count plastics to fuel as chemical recycling. Overall, environmental advocates would prefer to see stronger measures taken to reduce plastic use and require that manufacturers take more responsibility for plastic packaging — a concept known as “extended producer responsibility.” Enck suggested that there be mandatory environmental standards for packaging similar to auto efficiency standards. “We really need to move to a refillable, reusable economy,” she said. “Do we need all these layers of packaging on a product? Do we need multi-material packaging?”From Your Site ArticlesRelated Articles Around the Web

WASHINGTON D.C., Sept 27 (Reuters) – The United States is seeking to form a coalition of countries to drive negotiations on a global plastic pollution treaty, weeks after a similar group involving several other G7 nations was launched, according to a document seen by Reuters.The move underlines its desire to keep the treaty’s focus on the efforts of individual countries in a model similar to the 2015 Paris climate accord, rather than provide new universal rules favoured by other major nations, according to six government and civil society sources involved in the talks.United Nations members agreed in February to create the world’s first treaty to tackle the scourge of plastic waste which extends from ocean trenches to mountain tops, with the aim of finalising it by the end of 2024.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comRegisterIn August, 20 countries, including Britain, Canada, France, Germany and several developing nations at the sharp end of the environmental crisis, formed a “High Ambition Coalition To End Plastic Pollution” advocating for the treaty to include global standards, bans and restrictions on plastic.Now, the United States is seeking to form its own group with a different approach, and has invited several countries to join including Australia and Japan, the sources said.A concept note for its coalition seen by Reuters says “the development of national action plans” should be “the primary mechanism” for countries to contribute to the treaty, an approach environmentalists say will not be robust enough to curb the runaway problem.The U.S.-led coalition aims to launch at or before the first round of treaty negotiations scheduled to take place in Uruguay from Nov. 28 to Dec. 2, the draft document says.The State Department did not directly answer questions about the proposed coalition.In an emailed statement, Monica Medina, the U.S. official leading its treaty negotiations, said the country was committed to ending plastic pollution by 2040.”The best way is through a Paris-like agreement that helps countries take ambitious action and holds them accountable, let’s them be innovative on finding solutions, and leads to action now and not later,” she said.The United States was a key architect of the country-driven approach of the Paris agreement, a landmark international deal to limit global warming to at least 2 degrees Celsius. But that deal has faced criticism for having no enforcement mechanism as countries have missed deadlines to ratchet up their climate actions.Japan’s vice minister for global environmental affairs, Hiroshi Ono, said he knew of a proposed coalition on plastic involving the United States but declined further comment. Australia’s environment department said in a statement it was aware of different coalitions forming, without elaborating.’LIGHT TOUCH’Environmentalists say measures taken by individual countries must be complemented by more top-down measures like coordinated curbs on virgin plastic production and universal design standards to increase the recyclability of plastics.Plastic production is forecast to double over the next 20 years while the amount of plastic flowing into the ocean will triple. That will cause widespread environmental damage, destroying sensitive ecosystems and putting some species at risk of extinction, according to a World Wildlife Fund study.”We don’t need a treaty for countries to decide themselves what their national actions should be. We need a treaty that can actually add on top of that,” said Eirik Lindebjerg, global plastics policy manager at WWF, calling such an approach a “light touch.”However, Ono, the Japanese environment official, said that the treaty cannot take a “one-size-fits-all approach” as countries have different “national circumstances” and “priorities” towards upstream measures, like plastic production, or downstream measures, like waste collection.Calls for tougher global measures such as those focused on plastic production have also met resistance from the powerful oil and petrochemical firms that make plastic. Industry groups have been lobbying governments, including the U.S., to reject any deal that would limit plastic manufacturing, Reuters reported in February.John Hocevar, a campaign manager for Greenpeace, and two other sources who requested anonymity told Reuters that U.S. officials had privately said they are wary of agreeing to any global rules that would likely be rejected by its divided Congress.That is why the United States is keen to pursue a Paris-like deal, the sources said, which did not have to be ratified by Congress because it largely relies on voluntary commitments based on national laws.”If we are working from the position of we are only going to negotiate what we can get done at home, we’ve lost before we’ve even started,” said Jane Patton, a U.S.-based campaign manager for plastics and petrochemicals at the Centre for International Environmental Law.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comRegisterReporting by John Geddie and Valerie Volcovici; Editing by Marguerita ChoyOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.