On November 21, 2024, the EPA issued its final National Strategy to Prevent Plastic Pollution, as required by the Save Our Seas 2.0 Act. This comes after the Agency received almost 92,000 comments on its draft strategy. The final strategy includes six objectives that aim to prevent plastic pollution throughout the plastics lifecycle, from plastic production to material and product design to waste generation and management to the capture and removal of plastic pollution to minimizing loadings and impacts to waterways and the ocean. Each objective is followed by opportunities for action.
Several action items focus on upstream sources of pollution and include (1) conducting evaluations to ensure that fossil fuel extraction as well as petrochemical and production facilities comply with regulatory requirements and (2) continuing to review and, where appropriate, update regulations for petrochemical and plastic production facilities and transporters of plastic pellets and plastic additives. The final strategy also states that the EPA should build on existing efforts under the Clean Water Act and, further, Clean Water Act programs could potentially be utilized to capture and remove plastics and other materials that may enter, or are already in, waterways and the ocean such as through material capture mandates in NPDES permits.
Several other action items include:
- exploring the creation of a voluntary certification to recognize products that are manufactured under rigorous environmental standards;
- reviewing, developing, updating, and using sustainability standards, ecolabels, certifications, and design guidelines (consider, for example, the Federal Trade Commission’s Green Guidelines, last updated in 2012);
- reducing the production and consumption of single use plastic products; and
- developing a national extender producer responsibility (EPR) framework.
The final strategy states that its implementation is expected to be an iterative process as resources, entities leading efforts, and needs change over time.
Federal regulatory efforts will likely continue to be limited to upstream sources of pollution and may be thwarted by the Trump Administration’s deregulatory agenda. In the interim, states have been addressing plastic pollution through bans on microbeads in personal care products, single-use plastic bans or restrictions, post-consumer content laws, EPR laws, and in California, testing drinking water for microplastics.
Two recent developments include Illinois’ Small Single-Use Plastic Bottle Act, which bans hotels from providing small, single-use plastic bottles containing personal care products (California and New York have similar bans) and the California Responsible Textile Recovery Act of 2024, which is the first EPR law in the textile space. Other EPR laws in California, Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, and Oregon apply to packaging.
This is all while citizen suits, public nuisance claims, and consumer protection/greenwashing claims continue to make their way through the courts.
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