Author Archives: David Evans

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.

Plastic production relies on oil and gas, yet reducing output has not been put forward as a response to the energy crisis. Until now. A new report says this is the moment for bold action.
That our collective relationship with plastic is unhealthy, has been well documented. It’s a relationship we have come to take for granted and from which we struggle to move on despite its often toxic nature.  But it’s also one that is little understood. Findings released Tuesday by the global Break Free From Plastic movement and the non-government Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) show the dynamics at play and how using less plastic would leave more energy to heat homes.  In their study ‘Winter is coming: plastic has to go’, CIEL and Break Free From Plastic, which counts more than 1,900 NGOs among its members, say scaling back on single-use plastics and packaging is a concrete step decision-makers could take to contribute to the overall effort to reduce fossil fuel consumption. It is, the authors write, time for the EU to “confront the petro-elephant in the room: plastics.” The link between gas, oil and plastic Derived from fossil fuels, produced in energy-intensive processes, and whether dumped, incinerated or recycled after use, plastics go hand-in-hand with emissions at every stage of their life.  Yet their production in Europe increased from 0.35 to 55 million tons between 1950 and 2020, and plastic is the EU petrochemical industry’s largest market. According to Tuesday’s report, in 2020 nearly 15% of overall EU gas and 14% of oil consumption was used to make petrochemicals. The majority of that went towards the manufacture of plastics. The findings note, for example, that as much gas was used to make plastics, as was consumed overall by the Netherlands.  Equally, the countries that consume the most oil and gas to produce plastics — Belgium, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Poland — are also responsible for 77% of all EU plastic packaging waste. Against that backdrop and in light of the scramble to source gas from outside Russia, Delphine Levi Alvares, European Coordinator of Break Free From Plastic, says it is a serious oversight not to include the sector in the EU’s Save Gas for a Safe Winter proposal aimed at securing heat and power across the bloc in the coming months.  “While families and small businesses are facing skyrocketing energy bills, the petrochemicals industry is wasting scarce resources to produce unnecessary single-use plastic, fueling the EU energy crisis,” she said on publication of the study.  Three birds, one stone Andy Gheorghiu, a climate campaigner who was involved in the report, says the fact that people are being told to shower cold and heat less while “we continue to feed this monster called the petrochemical and plastic industry with large amounts of oil and gas” reveals a serious disconnect between the expectations on individuals and industry.  But he also stresses how tackling single-use plastics at this juncture offers a genuine opportunity to “address three crises at once: the plastic crisis, the climate crisis and the energy crisis.” The authors are calling for a ban on unnecessary packaging The report lays out a raft of recommendations to that end. They include EU states putting a decreasing cap on overall packaging allowed to enter its markets, a limit to the volume of plastics produced globally and a halt to the construction of new fossil fuel infrastructure including petrochemical facilities. The authors also call for ambitious and binding prevention and reuse targets of 50% by 2030 and 80% by 2040 and bans on unnecessary packaging such as single-serving sachets and the wrapping of fruit and vegetables. Plastic lockdown in Europe? But Gheorghiu goes a step further.  “I personally would say now is the time for a lockdown of the plastic industry in Europe.”  In other words, he would like to see an immediate and complete stop of virgin plastic production. At least for the winter. He also advocates for a thorough European-level analysis based on the findings of the report.  “It should include expanding our research and going through the petrochemical industry and listing what kind of products they are producing to see if they are essential or not.” An estimated 855 billion plastic sachets were produced in 2018 — they can rarely be reycled As things stand any such lockdown doesn’t appear to be in the offing. In a statement to DW, press spokesman Adalbert Jahnz said the European Commission was, however, “implementing a comprehensive plan for a transition towards a regenerative economy,” which would address “the use of all resources, including fossil fuels for plastics through numerous actions such as legislating.” Though Europe has taken some steps on plastic, including its 2018 strategy, subsequent ban on certain single-use items, and current role in working towards an internationally binding agreement on ending plastic pollution, the report notes that the bloc has yet to take any steps to directly stop the production of new plastic. Reducing plastic production vs. high energy bills Gheorghiu hopes that besides highlighting the correlations between the plastic, climate and energy crises, the new research will “kick-start a debate around virgin plastic production and the need to further reduce single-use packaging in Europe.” He is optimistic that the prospect of the coming winter means the findings will resonate with both policy-makers and the general public.  “I think it is much easier for a politician to implement measures that tackle single-use plastics than it is to implement other measures that tackle things like heating systems in people’s homes or that increase energy bills.” Edited by: Sarah Steffen

As plastic pollution continues to be a global problem affecting both human and environmental health, scientists have developed new biodegradable materials which could help to rectify this.
Plastic is now so widespread it has been found at the bottom of the deepest oceans and near Everest’s peak, while microplastics have even been found in our blood.
Hoping to solve this issue, scientists at the University of California San Diego have developed materials which have been proven to biodegrade in compost and seawater by a study published in Science of the Total Environment. 
Working alongside the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the team found their polyurethane foam, developed over the last eight years, was colonised by marine microorganisms and biodegraded back to the starting chemicals.
These microorganisms, which were mainly bacteria and fungi found in natural marine environments, then consumed these chemicals as nutrients.

‘Improper disposal of plastic in the ocean breaks down into microplastics and has become an enormous environmental problem,’ said Stephen Mayfield, professor in UC’s School of Biological Sciences and director of the California Center for Algae Biotechnology. ‘We’ve shown that it’s absolutely possible to make high performance plastic products that also can degrade in the ocean. Plastics should not be going into the ocean in the first place, but if they do, this material becomes food for microorganisms and not plastic trash and microplastics that harm aquatic life.’
The researchers used the Ellen Browning Scripps Memorial Pier and Experimental Aquarium which allowed them to test the materials in a natural near ecosystem, exactly like the environments plastics tend to end up in.
They also exposed foam samples of the material to tidal and wave dynamics, tracking molecular and physical changes, and found that it started degrade in as little as four weeks.
Microorganisms found in six marine sites around San Diego were also discovered to be capable of breaking down and consuming the polyurethane material.
‘No single discipline can address these universal environmental problems but we’ve developed an integrated solution that works on land—and now we know also biodegrades in the ocean,’ said Mayfield. ‘I was surprised to see just how many organisms colonize on these foams in the ocean. It becomes something like a microbial reef.’
It’s hoped this could go some way to helping to tackle the global plastic crisis, as researchers estimate that eight billion kilograms of plastic enter the ocean each year, collecting in locations such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
In the UK, the Big Plastic Count found Brits collected 1.8 billion pieces of plastic within a week, leading organisers to call for an end to single-use plastics.
Photo by Daniel Zhen, Algenesis Inc.

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As of today, Montreal businesses are no longer allowed to distribute disposable plastic bags. That includes everything from retail stores and supermarkets to takeout and delivery.And that’s just fine for Janou McDermott who has been collecting different types of reusable grocery bags for years.”The more people you see with reusable bags, the more it’ll lead by example,” she said. “I think that more people will follow suit and I think once there are no more alternatives, you’ll have to get onboard.”In a news release, the city says only 16 per cent of bags are recycled while the rest often end up in the environment, taking up to 1,000 years to break down. The plastic impacts ecosystems and the film contaminates the paper bales in sorting centres, the release says. The ban will significantly impact the quality of sorted paper at recycling centres, it says.”The fight against climate change is everyone’s business and we hope that this strong gesture can equip other municipalities to follow suit,” Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante is quoted as saying in the release. Some stores offer alternatives you can buy, such as brown paper bags or reusable bags. Stores that continue to offer plastic bags can be fined as much as $1,000 for a first offence and up to $2,000 for repeat offences. Janou McDermott checks a label while carrying her reusable shopping bags in a grocery store in Montreal’s west end.