Author: Matt Simon

THE PLASTICS INDUSTRY has long hyped recycling, even though it is well aware that it’s been a failure. Worldwide, only 9 percent of plastic waste actually gets recycled. In the United States, the rate is now 5 percent. Most used plastic is landfilled, incinerated, or winds up drifting around the environment.  Now, an alarming new study has found that even when plastic makes it to a recycling center, it can still end up splintering into smaller bits that contaminate the air and water. This pilot study focused on a single new facility where plastics are sorted, shredded, and melted down into pellets. Along the way, the plastic is washed several times, sloughing off microplastic particles—fragments smaller than 5 millimeters—into the plant’s wastewater. 

Authors: Wojciech Cieśla and Paulo Pena

In the town of Wschowa, not far from the German border, an entrepreneur’s sand mining business caught the attention of authorities after locals complained of rancid smells coming from the fields. Court documents show that Zbigniew T. made his fortune not from selling sand but by burying thousands of tonnes of illegal waste from Germany and western Poland. His profits ran into millions of (untaxed) zlotys. The sand and gravel holes operated by his firm were several hundred metres deep, and prosecutors allege they were filled with almost half a million cubic metres of waste – enough to fill around 5000 large trucks.

Author: Elizabeth Claire Alberts

New research suggests that plastic recycling facilities could be releasing wastewater packed with billions of tiny plastic particles, contributing to the pollution of waterways and endangering human health. A team of international scientists sampled water inside a new recycling facility at an undisclosed location in the U.K. They suggest that the facility could be releasing up to 75 billion microplastics — tiny plastic pieces less than 5 millimeters, or 3/16 of an inch, in length — per cubic meter of wastewater per year. That’s about 6% of the plastic that entered the facility to be recycled. However, the researchers only considered microplastics as small as 1.6 microns (μm), which means these numbers are likely to be an underestimate, they say.

Authors: Simon Jessop and Helen Reid

LONDON, May 4 (Reuters) - Investors including Pictet and Amundi managing $10 trillion in assets, signed a statement urging consumer goods and grocery companies to do more to cut their use of plastic packaging amid rising costs and risks. The group of 185 investors, coordinated by the Dutch Association of Investors for Sustainable Development (VBDO), said plastics imposed an estimated $350 billion a year in costs on society from emissions, pollution and collection costs.

Authors: Attracta Mooney and Chris Flood

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A coalition of investors that oversee $10tn in assets has called on companies including Amazon, PepsiCo and McDonald’s to drastically reduce their reliance on plastics, saying a failure to do so exposes them to financial risks. The 183-strong group has written to 30 of the world’s biggest grocery, retail and consumer goods companies to warn that continued production of plastics poses risks to public health, biodiversity, climate change and human rights.

Author: Marissa Heffernan

The Federal Trade Commission requested comments on its revisions to the Green Guides and got 850 responses, with many calling for a crackdown on deceptive claims and better definitions of key terms.  The decade-old Guides for the Use of Environmental Marketing Claims, otherwise known as the Green Guides, cover recycling, compostability, ozone impacts, carbon offsets, the use of healthy ingredients, claims about general environmental benefits, manufacturing with renewable energy, and more. When it comes to recycling, they discuss when and how marketers should make claims about recyclability and recycled content. 

Author: Greenpeace

Today, six national environmental and health groups submitted 54 pages of detailed recommendations and extensive evidence in response to the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) solicitation of public comment on the Guides for the Use of Environmental Marketing Claims (known as the “Green Guides”). The comprehensive comments, submitted by The Last Beach Cleanup, Just Zero, Plastic Pollution Coalition, Beyond Plastics, Center for Biological Diversity, and Greenpeace USA, focus on recyclability and recycled content labels and claims on plastic products and packaging. The commenting organizations are extremely concerned about the growing environmental and human health impacts associated with plastic production, waste, and pollution. Despite a dismal 5%-6% U.S. plastic recycling rate and rising public backlash about the prevalence of unrecyclable and single-use plastic products, companies continue to use plastic when designing and packaging their products.

Author: Sarah Liversidge

Woolworths has begun to phase out its 15c shopping bags from stores across three states in a bid to reduce plastic waste. Reusable plastic bag stock in stores in New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania will start being run down from Monday. The supermarket giant has already scrapped the bags in ACT, NT, SA, WA and Queensland, but by June no stores will be selling them in Australia.

Author: Greenpeace

WASHINGTON, DC (April 27, 2023)–In response to Coca-Cola’s 2022 Business and Sustainability Report, Lisa Ramsden, Senior Oceans Campaigner, said: “Coca-Cola says they want to help tackle the plastic waste crisis, but then they continue to increase the amount of plastic they use, year after year. As they continue to use more single-use plastic, the numbers of refillable bottles they have in circulation stay the same. This is exactly why we need a strong Global Plastics Treaty – corporations will never change their harmful, polluting ways unless they are forced to.” 

Author: Attila Kálmán

With so much data circulating on plastic waste, it is difficult to unpack it all. Investigate Europe calculated some striking statistics from this sea of data to give an idea of what our plastic problem is all about. “Plastic is not necessarily a monster,” says Helmut Maurer, a former official in the EU Commission’s circular economy directorate. Cheap, versatile and practical, it’s hard to imagine life without it. “But what is a monster,” he says, “is the way we make use of short-lived plastic. And this is what causes also the bad image and what causes the pollution.”

Author: Deanne Toto

During Earth Week, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released the draft “National Strategy to Prevent Plastic Pollution” for public comment. The draft strategy was released alongside a new White House Interagency Policy Committee (IPC) on Plastic Pollution and a Circular Economy. The IPC will coordinate federal efforts on plastic pollution, prioritizing public health, economic development, environmental justice and equity to ensure the benefits of acting on plastic pollution—including jobs, minimized exposure to harmful chemicals and clean communities—are available to all, the EPA says.

Author: Jared Paben

Although it doesn’t use the word “ban,” the U.S. EPA released a plastics pollution strategy that supports steps to reduce production of single-use and difficult-to-recycle plastics.  EPA on April 21 published a draft of its “National Strategy to Prevent Plastic Pollution,” and the agency is seeking comments on it. The 48-page document lays out a number of steps to reduce plastic pollution, including addressing impacts during plastic production and post-use material management, including preventing plastic from entering waterways and cleaning up the material that’s already in the environment. 

Author: Megan Quinn

A new draft strategy from the U.S. EPA calls for numerous plastic pollution reduction measures, including ones meant to align collection, recycling and composting with environmental justice efforts. The draft National Strategy to Prevent Plastic Pollution, an extension of the EPA’s National Recycling Strategy released in 2021, calls for reducing pollution during plastic production, improving end-of-life plastic management and preventing plastic trash and microplastics from entering the environment.

Author: VERÓNICA GARCÍA DE LEÓN ROBLES

Mexico is Latin America’s largest importer of plastic waste and the main destination for the plastic waste generated and exported by the United States. Sending plastic waste - which can take hundreds of years to degrade – to Mexico is not new, according to available official statistics. However, shipments doubled between 2019 and 2021 to 167,548 tons, even after an international agreement to regulate cross-border trade of this material was implemented.