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Philadelphia

Fines for Flouting Plastic Bag Ban Coming Soon, Philly Warns

The ban, which was passed in 2019 but delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, prevents stores from giving customers single-use plastic bags or non-recyclable paper bags

By Rudy Chinchilla •

Published March 17, 2022 •
Updated on April 1, 2022 at 7:55 am

> > IF YOU PLAN TO SHOP THIS > > > IF YOU PLAN TO SHOP THIS WEEKEND, DONu2019T FORGET TO BYOB. WE MEAN BRING YOUR OWN BAG. IF LAW HAS BEEN ON THE BOOK SINCE JULY BUT ENFORCEMENT BEGINS TODAY. BEGINS TODAY. BUSINESSES THAT DONu2019T COMPLY WILL GET WARNINGS TILL APRIL 1stth. AFTER THAT, THEYu2019LL GET A TICKET. > > Reporter: THIS WAS LONG > > Reporter: THIS WAS LONG DELAYED DUE TO THE PANDEMIC. AS OF TODAY, ITu2019S OFFICIAL. THE SINGLE USE CINKLY PLASTIC BAGS NOW BANNED IN THE CITY OF PHILADELPHIA. INSTEAD YOU HAVE TO USE THIS OR A PAPER ONE. WAWAu2019S HANDING OUT FREE ONES TO WAWAu2019S HANDING OUT FREE ONES TO THEIR FIRST 100 CUSTOMERS. THE BAN WAS RESULTING FROM THE BAN WAS RESULTING FROM PLASTIC POLLUTION. THEY GET CLOGGED IN STORM DRAMS, BLOWING IN THE WIND. A BILLION OF THESE BAGS ARE USED EVERY YEAR IN THE CITY. THEYu2019VE BEEN A STAPLE. ITu2019S GOING TO US FROM STRAIGHT FOLKS. WHILE OTHERS THINK IT IS LONG WHILE OTHERS THINK IT IS LONG OVERDUE. > > Iu2019VE BEEN BRINGING BAGS TODAY AND I WAS ABLE TO PURCHASE THEM FOR UNDER A DOLLAR. > > I DONu2019T LIKE IT BECAUSE PLASTIC BAGS ARE SOMETIMES BETTER. > > Reporter: THE CITYu2019S NOT GOING TO ENFORCE WITH FINES UNTIL APRIL OF NEXT YEAR. HOWEVER, ITu2019S LIKELY YOU WONu2019T HOWEVER, ITu2019S LIKELY YOU WONu2019T FIND ANY PLASTIC BAGS ANYWAYS, SO YOU WANT TO PACK ONE WITH YOU THE NEXT TIME YOU GO SHOPPING.”,”video_id”:”1957431363659_218″,”video_length”:”94195″,”video_provider”:”mpx”,”short_video_excerpt”:””,”mpx_download_pid_mobile_low”:”xxvtTi0iC5b7″,”pid_streaming_web_mobile_low”:””,”mpx_download_pid_mobile_standard”:”qKroLwK3wHDn”,”pid_streaming_mobile_standard”:”TUc2md6WrVM9″,”alleypack_schedule_unpublish”:””,”feed_remote_id”:”mpx_1957431363659″,”feed_thumbnail_url”:””}” data-livestream=”false” data-title=”Philadelphia Plastic Bag Ban Officially in Effect” data-vidcid=”1:12:2978338″ data-vidurl=”https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/philadelphia-plastic-bag-ban-officially-in-effect/2978338/” data-islead=”true” data-catnames=”{“440″:”U.S. & World”,”282048″:”News”,”285018″:”Changing Climate”,”441″:”Local”}” data-tagnames=”{“304729″:”changing climate”,”6″:”Philadelphia”,”327284″:”plastic bag ban”,”126″:”Randy Gyllenhaal”}” data-customdata=”{“ContentPartner”:”None”,”Source”:”WEBFM”,”SyndicationAllowed”:”true”,”mSNVideoCategories”:”MSN Video v4 Connector-most watched news”,”mSNVideoContentSupplierID”:”NBC_Local”,”mSNVideoCountry”:”us”,”subtitle”:”nosubtitle”,”uploadedByTeam”:”1″,”youtubeChannel”:”None”}” data-autoplay=”true” data-cplay=”true” >

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Warnings no more: in two weeks, businesses that don’t comply with Philadelphia’s plastic bag ban can expect a fine.

In a press release, the city made clear to businesses that its monthslong warning period will come to an end starting April 1. 

“As we approach the April 1 enforcement deadline, we urge businesses to make the necessary arrangements to avoid any financial penalties. And we urge shoppers to bring reusable bags to do your shopping,” Mayor Jim Kenney said in a written statement in which he also underscored the importance of reducing single-use plastic waste to curb the effects of climate change.

The ban, which was passed in 2019 but delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, prevents stores from giving customers single-use plastic bags or non-recyclable paper bags. Businesses that are not complying will only be given a warning through April 1, at which point full enforcement – meaning fines starting at $150 per violation and possible further action in court – will begin.

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The ban includes certain exemptions, including bags used inside stores to package unwrapped food items, flowers, potted plants and dry-cleaned clothing. Bags intended for use as garbage bags or to contain pet waste and yard waste will also be exempt.

Philadelphia uses an estimated one billion plastic bags per year, which litter the streets, waterways and commercial corridors of the city. 

The city maintains other goals of the ban include reducing litter, saving money and keeping staff safe during the recycling process. People often try to recycle plastic bags curbside – which is prohibited – causing the bags to get stuck in the recycling equipment and leading to dangerous conditions for recycling center staff, as well as high costs, according to the city.

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Plastic bags account for more than 150 hours of lost time at the recycling facility, costing $300,000 each year, the city says.

GovLabPHL, an initiative led by the Mayor’s Policy Office, will work with City departments and other research partners to determine the success of the ban. The evaluation will examine what type of bags people use, as well as plastic bag litter and waste across the city.

Correction (April 1, 2022): This article has been updated with the corrected fine for plastic bag violations.

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In the fall of 2017, a resident of western Albemarle County was surprised to see a caravan of dump trucks making their way up a rural road – into the woods.That’s where contractors for the University of Virginia dumped a mysterious green cargo – 199 tons of synthetic turf. The news alarmed a local parent, Kate Mallek. She knew that turf fields were filled with shredded tires that provide cushioning but contain potentially toxic chemicals.“We don’t allow burning of tires,” she says. “We don’t allow people to simply throw tires into our environment. They have some lead. There are also some carcinogenic substances in them. It’s not something we want in our water.”So-called crumb rubber also contains Per- and Poly-fluoroalkyl Substances or PFAS, also known as forever chemicals because they break down slowly over time. Pete Myers, founder and chief scientist at Environmental Health Sciences – based in Charlottesville – says PFAS in turf could be dangerous.“Not only are the kids getting stuff on their skin – the tire crumb is all over the, but they’re probably breathing PFAS, which is a real problem,” he concludes.The Consumer Product Safety Commission says studies show no elevated health risk from playing on recycled rubber tires – a claim echoed by the industry.“The materials used in synthetic turf products have been thoroughly reviewed by both federal and state government agencies and are considered to be non-hazardous,” says Melanie Taylor, President and CEO of the Synthetic Turf Council, a group that represents manufacturers of artificial fields. She points to the first part of an EPA report as proof of safety, but the EPA – which reviewed scientific studies – said they were limited, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission said kids who play on surfaces made with recycled rubber should not eat or drink near the stuff and should wash hands and other exposed skin afterward.The EPA is now at work on a second study that will assess risk, and scientists in Europe have just published their analysis of 91 samples from synthetic turf fields around the world.“We are very worried about it,” says Jacob de Boer, a Professor of Environmental Chemistry and Toxicology at the Free University of Amsterdam. His team found all of the crumb rubber samples contained hazardous compounds – some exceeding safety standards set by the European Union for cancer-causing chemicals.“In this crumb rubber there are also these P-FAS compounds which have an effect on your immune system, and that effect is much more sensitive than for cancer,” de Boer says.He’s quick to add that risk is likely related to how long and how closely players are in contact with crumb rubber.“It’s not a matter of one game or one day or a week on this crumb rubber, but if you do it regularly, training for years, and you play all your matches there, then it is a problem, so the dose is important.”That said, Holland has now agreed to phase out crumb rubber fields by 2030. Here in the U.S., Melanie Taylor says manufacturers are looking at suitable substitutes for crumb rubber — Infills made of walnut shells or a mixture of coconut husks and cork, known as corkonut.And she predicts continued growth of her industry with as many as 16,000 synthetic fields already installed and up to 1,500 new ones going in every year. In our next report, we’ll talk about what happens when those fields wear out, and why environmentalists want Virginia to put new regulations in place.For more information:https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969721076208?via%3Dihubhttps://www.epa.gov/chemical-research/federal-research-recycled-tire-crumb-used-playing-fieldshttps://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-and-recycling/rubber-and-leather-material-specific-dataPART TWOWith the return of warm weather, more student athletes will be playing outside, many of them competing on artificial turf. Manufacturers say their product – made with recycled rubber tires – is an environmentally friendly alternative to grass, but with 16-thousand synthetic turf fields already in place nationwide and as many as 15-hundred more going in each year, disposal of worn-out fields poses a problem.

Artificial Turf Part Two

With 16,000 synthetic turf fields already installed, some experts wonder where they’ll go when they’re worn out.

Listen • 3:17

A typical turf field comes with a warranty of 8-12 years. When that time is up, the field, which is made from layers of plastic and shredded tires or crumb rubber, is hauled away. Mary Lehman, a delegate from Maryland, heard from a constituent who saw rolls of used turf sitting in a vacant lot.“The concern was that the crumb rubber infill was washing down the hill into a storm drain,” she recalls. “I think everyone can agree we don’t want that happening. We don’t want shredded tires to end up in our waterways, and in Maryland pretty much everything ends up in the Chesapeake Bay.”Because the stuff is bulky, Lehman says landfills in her state don’t accept artificial turf.“We really don’t know where it’s gong. It probably is mostly going out of state to Virginia where they either are land-filling or possibly incinerating the fields or the crumb rubber infill, and there are places in Virginia where they are allowed to burn rubber,” she says.Unscrupulous contractors may even dump turf in rural areas or find property owners willing to store the stuff for less than a landfill might charge.

Artificial turf fields last about ten years. Where they go next is a mystery.

At Prince William County’s Solid Waste Authority, Director Scott MacDonald thinks it’s unfair that cities or counties have to deal with artificial turf and other materials that can’t be recycled.“We didn’t buy the products. We didn’t sell the products, and we didn’t make the profits, but at the end of their life the public looks to us for a solution,” he explains.MacDonald would like to see Virginia join 47 other states that are members of the Product Stewardship Institute, headed by Scott Cassell. He helps write laws making producers of products responsible for their disposal.“There are 124 of these laws on the books for 15 product categories in 33 states – products like pharmaceuticals, medical sharps, mercury-containing products and Maine and Oregon just passed the first two state laws on packaging,” he says.And Cassell claims this approach works in other countries.“These type of systems have been in place in Europe for over 35 years on packaging, over 15 years in Canada and in other places all around the world. Companies will make changes to lower their costs, and these laws give them incentive. It’s really about making products with less material and more reusable and recyclable material.”During the last legislative session, Virginia Delegate Betsy Carr introduced a bill to require that manufacturers accept and properly dispose of or recycle their products. It died in committee.“Sometimes you bring up something new, it’s dismissed summarily the first time,” she observes, “but you know people begin to think about it and talk about it and maybe it takes a couple more years.”Lawmakers did agree to form a task force that would study it.In the meantime, Melanie Taylor with the Synthetic Turf Council notes worn-out fields can be re-used at local driving ranges, band practice fields, pet parks, bullpens and batting cages and equestrian stables.A Danish company says it will soon open a plant in Pennsylvania to recycle synthetic turf, and for now the industry argues it is conserving billions of gallons of water each year and eliminating the need for pesticides, fertilizers and mowing to maintain grass fields.

Microplastics from European rivers spreading to Arctic seas, research showsBetter waste management needed to protect Arctic ecosystem, say scientists Microplastics from European rivers are finding their way to Arctic seas, research suggests.These tiny plastic particles, which come from clothing fibres, car tyres, cosmetics and many more sources, have been found across the entire planet, from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans.People are known to consume the tiny particles via food and water, as well as breathing them in. Microplastics have been shown to harm wildlife but the impact on people is not known, though microplastics do damage human cells in the laboratory.They have also been found in the Arctic, and until now the source of these tiny particles has not been known.A new study in Scientific Reports, led by Mats Huserbråten from the Institute of Marine Research, in Bergen, Norway, suggests particles in the Arctic Ocean, the Nordic Seas and Baffin Bay have spread from Europe.Companies race to stem flood of microplastic fibres into the oceansRead moreThe scientists used modelling to predict how many microplastic particles would be in certain parts of the ocean, and compared it with water samples from these places. Their analysis suggests microplastics have been circulating in the Arctic for at least a decade.To work it out, they combined models of ocean currents between 2007 and 2017 with simulations of floating microplastic movements. Then, they simulated the release of microplastics from 21 major rivers across northern Europe and the Arctic every day over a 10-year period and modelled their movements over decades. After this, they simulated the release of microplastics from 21 major rivers across northern Europe and the Arctic every day over a 10-year period and modelled their movements over decades, then compared the results of their model with the distribution of floating microplastics across 121 seawater samples that were collected from 17 sites off the west coast of Norway between May 2017 and August 2018.They found that most simulated particles drifted along two main pathways after being released from rivers, with 65% drifting along the Norwegian coast towards the Laptev Sea, north of Russia, before going to the Arctic Ocean, across the north pole, then exiting the Arctic Ocean via the Fram Strait east of Greenland. Thirty per cent went in another direction, travelling across Greenland then farther south along the north-east coast of Canada.Analysis of seawater found in each of these areas revealed the distribution of these floating microplastics was consistent with what was predicted by the models.The researchers warned that better waste management is required so the health of the Arctic ecosystem is not compromised.They said: “The equal distribution of sampled synthetic particles across water masses covering a wide time frame of anthropogenic influence suggests a system in full saturation rather than pronounced injection from European sources, through a complex circulation scheme connecting the entire Arctic Mediterranean. “This circulation of microplastic through Arctic ecosystems may have large consequences to natural ecosystem health, highlighting an ever-increasing need for better waste management.”Current methods to reduce microplastic release include adding filters to washing machines to catch particles. They can also be removed by some wastewater and drinking water treatments.TopicsPlasticsOceansArcticnewsReuse this content

Plans to build what’s been called the nation’s largest plastics recycling plant in Erie took a step forward Monday as International Recycling Group completed the purchase of 25 acres of the former Hammermill Paper site.The property was purchased for $1.23 million from SB3 LLC, owned by Erie businessman Samuel P. “Pat” Black, III, and his daughter Sumi James-Black.The sale closed Monday afternoon.More:Breaking the mold: In-depth look at how Erie-based IRG wants to change plastic recycling’s futureThe purchase price represents a tiny fraction of the expected cost of building a plastics recycling facility.But it’s an important step, said Mitch Hecht, a former steel company executive who is chairman and founder of IRG.”Actually owning the site is a really important, concrete step,” Hecht said. “Now we can move forward on negotiations for putting our financing package together. Everything, including permitting and going out for debt and equity financing, is dependent on owning the property”Related coverage:$100 million recycling plant planned for ErieThe recycling plant, which is being built on a federal Opportunity Zone — which provides special tax incentives for those investing capital gains — moved out of the starting gate in 2020 with a combined $9 million investment from Erie Insurance and the Erie-based Plastek Group.At the time of that investment, Hecht was describing the project as a $100 million investment that would create at least 50 jobs.More:History of International Recycling Group included challenges, setbacks en route to ErieThat’s changed.Hecht now pegs the overall investment at $185 million with the expected creation of about 300 jobs.”We have decided to put more investment in value-added downstream manufacturing capacity for value-added materials, Hecht said.”We are not getting into finished product,” he said. “We are not doing anything that is involving chemicals or heat. It’s still basic.”But instead of producing what he described as reground plastic flake, the plant will produce washed ready-to-use resin pellets.The demand for those recycled pellets is rising, Hecht said.”We have seen the market really moving in our favor,” he said. “There is dramatically increased demand for post-consumer resin (plastic) under demand from consumer product companies to increase the recycled content.”More:Rules of recycling in the city of Erie for plastics, papers, metals and other itemsIn an interview in April 2021, Dennis Prischak, CEO of Plastek Group, said his company’s partnership with IRG, “will allow us to dramatically increase the percentage of our products that contain recycled materials.”While plastics recycling efforts have struggled financially in the past, Hecht had said previously that IRG had a market to sell the lowest-grade plastics — which are typically sent to a landfill — to steel mills that can use the blended plastics to take the place of coke in the production of iron oxide.Hecht said he expects that only about 10% of the plastics IRG processes would be used for that purpose.Help from Penn State BehrendMeanwhile, researchers at Penn State Behrend’s School of Engineering recently completed an analysis, looking at the company’s supply chain and how different polymers might be reused or recycled. The second round of research is about to begin.Behrend Chancellor Ralph Ford serves on the board of directors for IRG.Hecht expressed confidence Monday that his plans for the massive recycling facility, previously described as up to 300,000 square feet, will move ahead quickly.He said he hopes to have both debt and equity financing in place by late this year and to break ground by next spring.The goal, he said, is for the plant to be operating by the middle of 2024.If the IRG plant is built as planned it would join a number of other environmentally focused endeavors operating on the former Hammermill site, including Prism Glass Recycling and Hero BX, a biofuels company. Both Hero and Prism are owned by Erie Management Group.Sumi James-Black, interim CEO of Erie Management Group, which owns SB3 Industrial Park said, “The best way for us to support this project and its impact on the community was to offer the property. We look forward to seeing it come to life.”Contact Jim Martin at 814-870-1668 or jmartin@timesnews.com. Follow him on Twitter @ETNMartin.

Plastics have always been global—even before science began tracking the peregrinations of microplastics across meridians, into rain, through the human pla​​centa. At the industry’s outset, Civil War–era rubber goods were fashioned with latex extracted from the Amazon and later through Belgium’s brutal regime in the Democratic Republic of Congo. England imported gutta-percha from Southeast Asia for undersea telegraphy wires. Celluloid depended on Taiwanese camphor as a solvent and plasticizer. Today, tankers ferry hydrocarbons siphoned from beneath Appalachia’s shale basin to become plastics in Europe. And much of the plastic waste from Europe and the U.S. streams back toward Southeast Asia, Africa, or South America. Yet the dispersal of plastics and their pollutants, if regulated at all, has been addressed through a patchwork of municipal and national policies and a smattering of uncoordinated international instruments.Early this month, however, following 10 days of late-night negotiations in Nairobi, Kenya, the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) passed a resolution mandating the creation of a multilateral treaty to address plastic pollution. One hundred seventy-five nations backed its provisions, which are to be legally binding, rather than voluntary. Once in force, the treaty could be plastics’ symbolic equivalent of the Paris Agreement on climate change, and in its provisions, likely even more far-reaching. The meeting ended in an ebullient wave of joy and tired-teary relief.The resolution impanels an international negotiating committee and issues it a broad mandate: a treaty outlining global ground rules to eliminate plastic pollution. Most significant is the breadth of the resolution’s ambition—the committee must consider plastic as more than a matter of marine litter. Rather, the treaty will take on plastics’ entire life cycle—from production and design through use and reuse to disposal and environmental dispersion—and will address plastics’ myriad contributions to the “triple planetary crisis” of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution. This treaty could govern not just micro- and nanoplastic pollution, but also the air pollutants, greenhouse-gas emissions, and toxic chemicals associated with plastics. The scope of the work is breathtaking and the timeframe ambitious: just over two years.What transpires between the resolution and the treaty will determine whether the final provisions are likely to make meaningful change. In the coming months, the United Nations Environment Programme will convene a working-group meeting, to include member states and private-sector and civil-society stakeholders, which will set the formal agenda for the negotiations to come. The final treaty’s success will rest on how inclusive a process the working group and negotiating committee follow, and whose experiences are enfolded into its deliberations. The strongest possible treaty will recognize a range of relationships to plastics and its assorted pollutants—including those of constituents who, across time and geography, have borne the heaviest, life-altering burdens of plastics production, and of people who require plastics to live or to earn a living. Plastics have engendered violence, but also resilience and community mobilization to mitigate those harms.The treaty’s strength will come from how negotiators resolve a few key issues. One is whether the treaty will limit pollution by limiting production—to close the tap, as so evocatively signaled by the sculpture, by the artist Benjamin Von Wong, installed outside the UNEA meetings, a floating spigot with a 40-foot torrent of locally gleaned plastic waste. The rate of world plastics production exceeds 400 million metric tons per annum—more plastics have been produced in the past 20 years than in the five decades following World War II. Short-term plastics, which include packaging, now account for about 40 percent of plastics made each year. Absent global controls, plastic production continues to trend upward; by the end of the decade, it is projected to hit 600 million metric tons a year, and 800 million metric tons by 2040. Plastic makers as well as the oil and gas industries, which supply plastics’ feedstocks, will likely fight production limits—especially as oil and gas companies look to plastics as a key area of growth.A weak treaty would lack enforcement mechanisms and focus on technological solutions to plastic waste. Some of the technologies pushed by the industry, based on high-heat waste management, are yet unproven and emit air pollutants and greenhouse gases. Decades of experience and recent modeling, however, have demonstrated that dealing with plastic-related pollution downstream from its source, even with a massive waste-infrastructure build-out, will not keep pace in the long term without policy and other interventions that limit the influx of yet more virgin plastics and related pollutants into the system. And the world knows how to do better. Both the Montreal Protocol, which addresses ozone-depleting pollutants, and the Minamata Convention on Mercury provide models for setting progressive targets that help nations phase out harmful materials.A second key question: How should the treaty address the toxicity of the more than 10,000 additives and other chemicals used in plastic production? Plastics are complex compositions, more than mere polymers. Their base materials are hydrocarbons, some of which are known carcinogens; finished plastics contain a mixture of chemicals—some additives, some residuals, some unintended—which can over time leach into the environment.Going back to the industry’s beginnings, when plastics were products of farms and forests, a network of toxics that served as solvent systems, processing aids, plasticizers, and more made these materials possible while also imposing health costs on workers. Carbon disulfide, used in hard rubber, viscose rayon, and cellophane, harmed generations of workers yet remains in use, notes Paul Blanc, a professor of medicine at UC San Francisco who has written about this history.Chemical additives in plastics have never been labeled, and most lack adequate health and hazard data. But what scientists know is cause for worry. Common additives used in food containers have been shown to interfere with the endocrine system, which directs human growth, fertility, and metabolism. And some plastics-associated chemicals are so long-lived, mobile, and toxic that they have been regulated under the UN Stockholm Convention, which curbs worldwide production of roughly two dozen persistent pollutants. Wind, weather, and ocean currents concentrate these pollutants in the globe’s upper latitudes, a burden borne by Arctic Indigenous Peoples, whose leadership was instrumental in framing the Stockholm Convention and in calling out how microplastics add to that problem. The interlocking crises of climate change, toxics, and plastic pollution compromise both the way of life and the existence of Sivuqaq’s Yupik people, wrote Delbert Pungowiyi, the president of the Native Village of Savoonga, in the Anchorage Daily News. Just last year, the Stockholm Convention recognized plastic debris as a unique mechanism for transporting pollutants northward.Chemical additives were not included in the final UNEA resolution, says David Azoulay, the director of the Environmental Health Program at the Center for International Environmental Law. But the terms that delegates negotiated ensured that chemicals’ toxic bearing on human health would remain within the treaty’s mandate. The negotiating committee will still, for example, take up supply-chain transparency, sustainable production, product design, circularity, and plastics’ impact on human well-being—all of which additives have a bearing on.A third criterion for the treaty’s success will be how responsive proposed plastics controls are to localized needs. In some communities, plastic has become so unavoidable that scaling back its presence would create new complications. In the Philippines, plastics have squeezed out traditional packaging, such as natural fibers, glass, and paper, and vital commodities are available or affordable only in small plastic packets. In some West African cities, sealed 500 ml plastic sachets are an important source of water. In subsistence economies—for example, in India—plastic carrier bags and other containers are used and reused to purchase essential goods, including rice and even liquids such as oil or kerosene, in low-cost portions.The disability community likewise has crucial insights into what’s possible for plastics, and “can be advocates for the success of solutions that bring everyone along,” as the Reverend Theresa Soto, a disability-community advocate, has noted. Disability can mean that those who most rely on certain plastic technologies are also among the most vulnerable to plastics’ toxic implications, observes the science and technology scholar Jody Roberts. He has written with eloquence about the toxics-plastics nexus that is the flexible plastic feeding tube.These three measures address, in different ways, basic questions of how, what, and who. But the treaty’s success can also be judged on whether it fully acknowledges the long arc of plastics’ exploitative history.Over the centuries, plastics’ burdens have fallen inequitably over the world, compounding preexisting inequities. Sourcing feedstocks for 19th-century plastics led to ecological ruin and deforestation, violent plantation economies, and colonial appropriation of indigenous lands. Across the 20th century, processing plants were overconcentrated in vulnerable communities. Fenceline communities and UN human-rights experts have flagged the environmental racism of siting yet another plastics factory in already overburdened petrochemical corridors, such as the Lower Mississippi Valley. Likewise, the Aamjiwnaang First Nation, who live surrounded by Canada’s plastics and petrochemical production, have resisted plastics’ unrelenting emissions and industrial expansion for decades.At the other end of plastics’ life cycle, discards have been dumped onto communities of color in the U.S. or the global South, often on the pretext that recycling it could generate income. But recyclability proved a pipe dream, absent adequate infrastructure and technical and financial support to process a crush of mostly single-use plastics not designed for recovery. Indeed, the very idea of disposability, even recycling, says the multidisciplinary plastics scholar Max Liboiron, is premised on unfettered access to land, often Indigenous land, such as for landfills.The resolution does recognize communities who have been integral to (and yet harmed by) this system—for example, by calling out the vital work performed by 20 million waste pickers, sorters, and recyclers, many of whom belong to marginalized groups, who reclaim much of the world’s plastic discards and have become experts as a result. In apprenticing with plastic-waste pickers and sorters in India, one of us, Dey, observed the highly specialized and efficient systems that waste handlers evolved to identify and classify plastics. Recyclers could bite and differentiate among various finer grades of low-density polyethylene. Sorters could crumple films and tell—by their sound—their polymer lattices. Their systems were far more specific than the resin-identification labels stamped onto plastics by manufacturers.Accordingly, the mandate directs negotiators to consider comprehensive knowledge systems, including best-available science, traditional knowledge, and the expertise of waste workers and indigenous peoples, which in turn presents opportunities for affording rights and developing best practices to deal with complex plastic waste. Even more, recognizing—at a global scale—the hands and bodies that recover plastics through the day and into the night presents an opportunity to advocate for better working conditions, job security, wages, and dignity.There are pitfalls to international negotiation—the need for consensus, compromises driven by member states and trade associations—and the response of producer nations, especially the U.S., the largest contributor to plastic waste, could ultimately shape the treaty’s success. The U.S. has signed other major agreements, including the Stockholm Convention, and then stopped short of ratifying them; this one, too, will require Congress to pass the necessary implementing legislation.Less than three years from now, we will find out whether the international community is up to the task the UNEA has set out. The influx of plastics and associated pollutants into the planetary system, say the scientists Linn Persson, Bethanie Almroth, and their colleagues, now diminishes the planet’s capacity to support life. And onward flow plastics through time, territories, and tissues. But if the treaty responds boldly to its mandate—if its negotiators heed history and hear the wisdom of those most intimately affected—it could offer a new vision for plastics’ place in society and the economy, and by extension, it could well alter the future of humanity and the planet.