The Green Party of the United States said today that the Biden administration needed to support a global plastic treaty that calls for an end of single use plastics, a major contributor to climate change and global pollution.

“Plastics is the new coal in terms of its impact on climate change. It also has a very negative impact on human health, litter, and wildlife. World governments recently agreed to end plastic pollution but the Biden administration is pushing to protect the fossil fuel and chemical polluters. They need to reverse their position,” said Mark Dunlea, co-chair of the Green Party’s EcoAction Committee.

Green Party of the United States
gp.org

For Immediate Release:
March 3, 2023

Contact:
Diana Brown, Co-Chair, Media Committee, [email protected], 202-804-2758
Philena Farley, Co-Chair, Media Committee,  [email protected], 202-804-2758
Mark Dunlea, Co-Chair, Green Party EcoAction Committee, [email protected]

While the recently released proposal from the Biden administration does support the goal of ending plastic pollution by 2040, it largely mirrors the agenda of the chemical and plastic industry. The U.S. proposal does not seek enforceable cuts in plastics manufacturing, instead proclaiming the benefits of plastics and calls for management of plastic waste such as re-use, recycling and redesigning plastics.

Green Party leaders said that the treaty should end the production and use of toxic chemicals in plastics; remove toxic impacts at all stages of the lifecycle of plastics; and ban recycling of plastics containing hazardous chemicals. (For more info, see IPEN, the International Pollutants Elimination Network.)

Vinyl chloride, which is used to make plastic products, was the toxic chemical at the center of the public health crisis from the train derailment in East Palestine. Many are calling for it to be banned.

The fossil fuel industry is investing heavily in plastics as a way to continue their operations as the world moves to halt the burning of fossil fuels in response to global warming. More than 99 percent of plastics are made from fossil fuels, both natural gas and crude oil. In the United States, plastic is primarily made from ethane, which is a waste byproduct of the fracking of natural gas.

Only about 6% of the country’s plastic waste is recycled due to various limitations. The plastic industry is heavily promoting chemical recycling which environmentalists oppose as largely a dangerous form of incineration. The American Chemistry Council has gotten twenty states to reclassify chemical recycling as a manufacturingprocess, rather than waste disposal — a move that subject facilities to less stringent regulations concerning pollution and hazardous waste.

The March 2022 session of the United Nations Environment Assembly agreed to negotiate an agreement to curb plastic pollution, with specific legally-binding provisions to prevent and remediate plastic pollution and its toxic impacts. A December 2021 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine called for the federal government to adopt a national strategy by the end of 2022 to reduce its contribution to plastic waste in the ocean, including substantially reducing the amount of solid waste generated in the U.S. A major recommendation was to establish a national cap on virgin plastic production.

Extraction, fracking, production of plastics and chemical additives release substantial amounts of toxic substances into the air and contaminate the local environment, often in low-income and communities of color. Humans are exposed to a large variety of toxic chemicals and microplastics through inhalation, ingestion, and direct skin contact throughout the plastic lifecycle. The toxic chemical additives and pollutants in plastics threaten human health, including causing cancer or changing hormone activity (endocrine disruption), which can lead to reproductive, growth, and cognitive impairment.

The U.S. shipped 1.4 billion pounds of plastic trash overseas in 2020, with the majority ending up in developing countries without the infrastructure and markets to deal with it. Plastic trash exported from the U.S. is often burned in the open, damaging the health of local communities or discarded in waterways or in open pits in low-income communities far away.