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.

Author: Chantal Lavigne

From time to time, Karel Ménard visits sorting centers in Quebec to document what is going on there. He leads the Quebec Common Front for Ecological Waste Management. Last January, we accompanied him to a sorting center in the Montreal region. What he sees that day does not please him. The bundles of paper and cardboard stacked outside contain far too many plastic bags and wrappers. The customer who is going to buy this, he is going to have to sort it all out again , he says.

Author: Greenpeace

Washington, DC (April 21, 2023)-In response to the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) release of the Draft National Strategy for Reducing Plastics and Other Waste in Waterways and Oceans, John Hocevar, Greenpeace USA’s Oceans Campaign Director, said: “It is encouraging to see the EPA’s proposal to reduce the production and consumption of single-use, unrecyclable plastic products. We also welcome the increased emphasis on environmental justice, as low-income communities – especially people of color – are the most harmed by plastic production, use, and disposal. We can’t protect our communities or the environment from plastic pollution unless we drastically reduce plastic production and use, and this draft is a step in the right direction.”

Authors: Dr. Anna Reade, Avinash Kar, Dr. Veena Singla

California’s SB 54 was a big step forward on plastics last year—it addressed our ever-growing piles of plastic waste and the fact that very, very little (less than 9% according to estimates) was getting recycled. Negotiated between industry, environmental advocates, and legislators, it represented significant progress on addressing waste and making the companies that generate waste responsible for dealing with it. BUT . . . it did not address another important dimension of the plastics crisis we face—toxic chemicals. That’s where Assemblymember Rivas’ AB 1290 comes in. It would phase out a number of unnecessary and problematic plastics in packaging, particularly those associated with health harms. 

Author: Oceana

Oceana is calling on Amazon shareholders to protect the oceans by supporting a resolution that asks the company to develop a plan for reducing its growing plastic packaging footprint. The resolution will be voted on for the third year in a row at Amazon’s annual meeting on May 24. In 2022, support for the proposal increased by over ten percentage points from the previous year – securing 48.9% of the vote. The measure would have passed if company insiders had supported the resolution. Amazon’s plastic packaging waste grew by 52.5% from 2019 to 2021, according to recent reports from Oceana. 

Author: Freddy Pawle

An aerial shot has revealed the scale of Australia's major supermarket chains' failure to recycle plastic waste. Taken above a warehouse in Marsden Park, in Sydney's north-west, the shot reveals hundreds of bales of soft plastics that were left unrecycled by the now-defunct REDCycle. REDCycle was tasked with collecting and recycling plastics that were placed in branded bins outside of major supermarket chains Woolworth's, Coles and Aldi. 

Author: Becky Ferreira

Marine species that are normally found close to shore have been surviving for years in the open ocean on rafts made of plastic waste, reports a new study. The discovery exposes novel ecosystems that are now emerging due to widespread human pollution. A surprising variety of coastal animals—including mollusks, anemones, and crustaceans—were found living, and even reproducing, on floating plastic debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an ocean gyre between Hawaii and California that contains an estimated 80,000 tons of accumulated trash, according to the new research. 

Author: Mark Smulian

Farmers are burning agricultural plastics illegally because of regulatory loopholes and lack of monitoring, the Environmental Investigations Agency (EIA) has said. It said mismanagement of agriplastic waste occurred across the UK food supply chain, with farms producing 135,500 tonnes a year of contaminated agricultural plastic waste. The EIA – an international body that monitors waste crime mainly in relation to wildlife – cited data from the Chartered Institution of Wastes Management that only 20-30% of farm plastic is reprocessed while the rest is disposed of, including by illegal burning, burying, dumping or export.

Author: Ciara Nugent

A huge plume of smoke, visible from miles around, continues to billow over a plastics recycling plant in the city of Richmond, Indiana, where a fire broke out Tuesday afternoon. Some 2,000 people living within half a mile of the facility were forced to evacuate to escape harmful fine particulate matter and potentially toxic chemicals in the air, and building debris falling on their lawns. Once lit, plastic fires are incredibly tough to put out, and officials say the plant will burn for several more days.