The Rising Tide Against Plastic Waste: Unpacking Industry Attempts to Influence the Debate

Histories of the Dustheap Foote, Stephanie, Mazzolini, Elizabeth Published by The MIT Press Foote, S. & Mazzolini, E.. Histories of the Dustheap: Waste, Material Cultures, Social Justice. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2012. Project MUSE., https://muse.jhu.edu/. For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/19765 Access provided by University of Michigan @ Ann Arbor (2 Jan 2017 19:19 GMT) 8 The Rising Tide against Plastic Waste: Unpacking Industry Attempts to Influence the Debate Jennifer Clapp The recently discovered plastic “blob,” a continent-size patch of garbage composed mainly of plastic waste floating in the Pacific Ocean, is a wake- up call for our modern consumptive society. It highlights the fact that much of the world’s discarded plastic is not actually reused or recycled. Rather, it ends up as waste: disposed of in landfills, swirling in the ocean and other waterways, caught in trees, and littering roadsides. Plastics do not break down readily in the environment. The persistent presence of plastic waste in our surroundings, from local communities to the global commons, is a stark reminder of the growing ecological impact of our consumption and waste. As environmental awareness has grown, people around the world have increasingly questioned the ubiquitous use of plastic, particularly as a packaging material to be readily discarded without much thought as to its final resting place. Initiatives have emerged in multiple locations to tax, ban, or otherwise regulate the use of certain types of plastic packaging, most prominently plastic bags and bottles. These regulatory changes regarding plastic in different communities, ranging from municipal- to state- to national-level measures, signal that small steps can add up to a larger shift in attitudes and practices concerning a specific type of waste. The change in norms has been both rapid and globally significant. But as regulatory initiatives spring up worldwide in response to the shifting public sentiment, representatives of the plastics industry have resisted these measures. In this chapter, I examine the shift in norms and attitudes toward plastics along with the role of the plastics industry in resisting regulation that has emerged in response to new norms. I argue that as an antiplastic norm and associated regulatory measures have arisen, industry actors have actively resisted them, using several strategies. First, they have taken up a discursive campaign in the public domain in an attempt to assert that plastics are the most environmentally sound packaging choice. Second, 200 Jennifer Clapp they have acted to both lobby and litigate within communities seeking plastics regulation in an effort to impose a form of “regulatory chill.” The idea of a regulatory chill was originally identified in reference to countries failing to raise environmental standards for fear that investors would leave for other jurisdictions (see Neumayer 2001). The failure of communities to enact legislation on local environmental problems for fear of litigation represents a similar dynamic of industry influence on public environmental policy. Undergirding the plastics industry’s specific strategies on plastic bags and bottles has been its firm belief in the rights and responsibilities of individual consumers. The right to choose a product and responsibility to properly dispose of its packaging, in industry’s view, belongs with the individual consumer. Adherence to this principle is in line with the “indi- vidualization of responsibility”—a particular strand of environmentalism predominant in mainstream North America that sees both the problem and solution to environmental issues as being in the hands of individual consumers, rather than the producer or society as a whole (Maniates 2001, 33). This approach leaves little room for collective attempts to ad- dress environmental problems through, for example, regulation on the sale and distribution of plastics. Although industry has actively pursued its strategies to resist the regulation of plastic packaging over the past decade, the outcomes have thus far been highly uneven. Communities Take Action on Plastic Waste Within a short period of time, it has become increasingly socially unac- ceptable to use disposable plastic shopping bags, and in a growing number of places around the world it is now illegal to distribute them for free. Legislation is also restricting the purchase of plastic water bottles in many communities. A number of problems have been associated with plastic packaging waste, ranging from environmental degradation to concerns related to the potential health impacts of exposure to plastics. These issues have contributed to an emergent shift in people’s views regarding the usefulness of plastic packaging. An interesting element of this shift in norms is that it emerged first in the Global South, challenging the widely held perception that developed nations are generally environmental lead- ers. As early as 1992, for example, citizens protested for tighter regulation of plastic bags in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Today, a growing number of communities in the Global North are seeing similar kinds of citizen engagement on this issue. This change in attitudes has emerged not as The Rising Tide 201 the product of a globally networked campaign against plastics but rather, interestingly, as a series of localized movements in different communities worldwide responding to specific local concerns (Clapp and Swanston 2009). Though local, these shifts have global significance. A key problem with plastic packaging, which has contributed to many of the locally specific concerns about the waste it generates, is its perma- nence. Plastics can take hundreds, if not thousands, of years to degrade. Moreover, items such as plastic bags do not actually biodegrade. Instead, they “photodegrade”—meaning that they break down into smaller and smaller pieces, but do not disappear entirely. In the words of Charles Moore (2006), an oceanographer who studies plastic waste in the seas, “Plastic, like diamonds, are forever!” The plastic that went into produc- ing every plastic bag ever handed out and every water bottle made is still out there, somewhere. It could be in the ocean, a tree, or a stream, along a roadside, at the bottom of a landfill, or in a bird’s stomach, or it may have been recycled into something else, like a plastic lumber deck, or even more plastic bags and bottles. Although many types of plastics can be recycled, the problem is that for the most part, they are not. Total recycling rates reflect both a “capture” of the material to be recycled and the demand for that material to be remade into other products. A mere 5 percent of plastic bags in North America, for example, are collected for recycling, and less than 25 percent of plastic water bottles are recycled.1 The market for postconsumer plastic bags is weak. Even in nations with a developed recycling infrastruc- ture, plastic bags are rarely included in major recycling programs, and if recycling of this kind of plastic is attempted at all, it is usually in the form of drop-off centers at retail locations. The main issue is contamination, which makes plastic bags much less attractive to recyclers than other types of plastic. The market for plastic water bottles is much stronger because of the type of plastic and lower contamination levels. But even in the case of water bottles, the vast majority of them are not collected for recycling—signaling that there are still major issues with the capture of this kind of plastic waste. The growing presence of discarded plastic in the environment, particularly after the rapid growth in plastics use in packaging over the past thirty years, indicates that recycling alone has not solved this problem. This reality has prompted communities around the world to consider management strategies other than recycling, such as action to restrict the use of plastic packaging in the first place. One of the earliest manifestations of shifting public norms around plastic packaging was a growing distaste with plastic shopping bags 202 Jennifer Clapp (Clapp and Swanston 2009). Single-use plastic shopping bags only re- ally started to be handed out to shoppers in industrialized countries in the 1980s, and the developing world followed suit in the 1990s. These bags were seen to be convenient and inexpensive, and it quickly became standard for retailers and vendors to offer up a plastic bag to carry one’s purchases home.2 The lower cost combined with the ease of transporta- tion and storage meant that plastic displaced the paper bags that retailers used to offer their customers. Yet the ease of offering plastic bags that followed meant that they quickly became ubiquitous. Shoppers who took them soon became inundated with plastic bags. Because manufacturers began to make them thinner and thinner in order to save costs, plastic bags soon were viewed as entirely “disposable,” and made their way into the waste stream. In other words, convenience had become compatible with disposability, and the use of plastic bags became widespread with little consideration of the environmental and social consequences. Nu- merous reports note that the average amount of time a plastic bag is in a person’s possession after receiving it from a retailer is approximately twelve to fifteen minutes—meaning that bags go from being a carrier of goods to useless waste with remarkable speed.3 Although presented as a convenience, plastic bags are a nuisance when they are carelessly discarded into the environment. A major concern is that they pose a hazard to wildlife. Marine animals such as sea turtles and fish as well as seabirds often mistake pieces of plastic bags for food, which can block their digestive systems and cause death. These animals can also get tangled up in them. Additionally, plastic bags have been im- plicated in clogging sewer drains in a number of countries around the world, contributing to flood risk.

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