Many delegates, advocacy groups, and UN officials are hopeful that the 10-day session, which runs through August 14, will result in a final agreement that delivers on the UN’s objective to “end plastic pollution.” But progress has been slow at each of the five preceding sessions, in large part because of a consensus-based decision-making structure that has allowed oil-producing countries to obstruct progress.

While the UN Environment Programme is eager to conclude the negotiations, some delegates and environmental groups are worried that the pressure to agree to something will yield an unambitious treaty. They’re gearing up for a contentious week and a half and preparing for the possibility of more deadlock – in which case negotiations could continue at yet another plastics treaty session, or at a separate, higher-level UN meeting that’s happening this December.

For Chris Dixon, who has attended each of the plastics treaty negotiating sessions and is the oceans campaign leader for the non-profit Environmental Investigation Agency, the discussions in Geneva will be a “real test” at a time of flagging confidence in multilateralism. “There’s currently a lot of investment in delivering this [treaty] within the UN,” she told Grist. “Can we still get countries around the world to commit to something really meaningful?”

Here’s how we got to where we are now, and what to watch for over the next 10 days.

Why the UN is negotiating a plastics treaty

The world is drowning in more plastic than it can manage. Since the material began to be mass produced in the 1950s, annual production has soared to some 460 million metric tons – roughly the weight of 1,400 Empire State Buildings – and is projected to triple by 2060 under business as usual.

Today, only 9% of plastic is recycled because of technical and economic limitations; the rest is sent to landfills and incinerators, or becomes litter in the environment. Plastic now permeates virtually all of the Earth’s landscapes, as well as human organs such as the brain, lungs, testicles and ovaries. It’s associated with myriad health concerns, and – because it’s made from fossil fuels – it’s a major contributor to climate change.

“Plastics have so many egregious issues,” says Holly Kaufman, a senior fellow at the non-profit World Resources Institute and co-founder of a research project on plastic’s contribution to climate change. She also notes the disproportionate pollution burden borne by people living near plastic manufacturing facilities, as well as plastic’s impacts on ecosystems and wildlife.

UN member states agreed in March 2022 to tackle the problem by negotiating an international, legally binding treaty to “end plastic pollution” and set a goal of finishing it by the end of 2024. Few foresaw how contentious the process would be. Over five rounds of scheduled talks, countries have repeatedly sparred over the scope of the treaty, including whether its mandate to address the “full life cycle” of plastics implies some sort of limit on how much plastic the world can create.

A handful of fossil-fuel-producing countries including Iran, Russia and Saudi Arabia used the consensus-based decision-making process to their advantage, stalling the negotiations over their opposition to plastic production limits, while a much larger bloc of other nations expressed a desire for more “ambitious” provisions. By the fifth round of talks in Busan, South Korea, last December, negotiators were so far behind that there was little hope they would be able to finish the agreement on schedule. The UN agreed to schedule one more meeting in 2025, calling it “part two” of the fifth negotiating session. That’s what’s kicking off this week.

What’s being negotiated

At the end of the last round of talks, the chair of the treaty negotiating committee published a “chair’s text” meant to encapsulate the full range of proposals under discussion and serve as a starting point for further negotiations. On production limits – the issue that has divided treaty negotiations from the outset – the text offers two options. One, depending on how it’s worded, could set a “global target” to “reduce,” “maintain” or “manage” the production of plastic, with the potential goal of reaching “sustainable levels” of “production and consumption.” The other option is no text at all, eliminating the article on plastic production altogether.

For green groups, a best-case scenario would be for the treaty to enshrine a global target directly – by requiring production to drop, say, 40% by 2040. Some countries might have to make deeper cuts, depending on their share of global plastic production and historical responsibility for plastic pollution, and each country would have to implement this goal through national legislation. Dixon said the window may have closed for such an agreement; it could be more realistic to push for the treaty to kick off a “target-setting process” that would unfold at annual meetings after the treaty is finalized.

Bjorn Beeler, executive director of the non-profit International Pollutants Elimination Network, has attended each treaty negotiating session, as well as previous UN meetings on plastic pollution starting in 2018. He isn’t expecting much progress on production limits either, saying the conversation on the topic hasn’t “matured” in the same way it has for other priority areas, particularly chemicals and their impacts on human health. Since treaty negotiations began, researchers have identified more than 16,000 chemicals used in plastic products, 4,200 of which are known to have hazardous properties. Most of the other chemicals have never been assessed for toxicity.

At the end of the Busan talks, 94 countries signed a declaration calling for the treaty to include legally binding phaseouts of “the most harmful plastic products and chemicals of concern in plastics.” A coalition of scientists advocating for an “effective” plastics treaty favour treaty regulations based on broad chemical classes, with a streamlined process to regulate more chemicals over time. The chair’s text, however, currently lists just seven chemicals for phase-out, and only in specific products. It also lists seven types of single-use plastic products like straws and cutlery, and does not mention particular polymers – polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, for instance – that are more likely to leach hazardous chemicals. Enforcing a phaseout of selected chemicals would likely be up to individual countries.

Other, less controversial parts of the chair’s text aim to create better waste-management systems; improve the “durability, reusability, refillability, refurbishability, repairability, and recyclability of plastic products”; clean up existing plastic pollution; and foster a “just transition” for waste pickers and other workers who may be affected by the implementation of the plastics treaty. Several of its objectives, like preventing the release of microplastics into the environment, could also protect human health, since exposure to these tiny plastic fragments is linked to heart attacks, strokes and chronic degenerative diseases, among other conditions.

The UN resolution for the plastics treaty acknowledges that it may create expensive legal obligations, especially for poorer developing countries – these countries may not have enough money to create more robust waste-management systems and replace the plastic they buy with costlier alternatives. Negotiators have been considering how to create a mechanism that would ease this burden, either by standing up a new multilateral fund, drawing from an existing one or designing some combination of the two. They’re also deliberating on whether and how to differentiate countries’ financial responsibilities based on their wealth and historic contribution to the plastic pollution crisis. The chair’s text on this topic is heavily bracketed, meaning little of it is set in stone, although a widely supported proposal that African, Latin American and small island countries released last year suggests that most delegates favour a new fund with mandatory contributions from the most developed countries.

Other financial proposals include a tax on plastic manufacturing and the elimination of plastic production subsidies, although these measures face long odds in Geneva because of opposition from industry groups and oil-producing states.

Rules of procedure and the specter of no agreement

More mundane, although perhaps more important, than any of the substantive issues up for discussion in Geneva is the way negotiators make decisions. So far, procedural rules that encourage consensus-based decision-making have made it possible for oil-producing countries to stand in the way of progress when confronted with proposals they dislike. This dynamic will likely continue unless negotiators adopt “rules of procedure” that allow for voting.

“It doesn’t matter if we’ve got 11 days or 11,000 days,” Beeler says. Without the possibility of a vote hanging over delegates, “it’s just going to be a perpetual discussion.” He says that Geneva would be a victory even if new rules of procedure were its only outcome, because “then you’ve cleared up the mechanism to actually negotiate” at a future date. Beeler and other observers would rather end the Geneva talks with no treaty rather than one that’s been watered down just to accommodate an August 14 deadline.

If negotiators leave Geneva without an agreement, the next official opportunity for them to engage in plastics treaty diplomacy will likely be at the UN Environment Assembly’s next convening, in Nairobi, Kenya, in December. That forum allows voting – a double-edged sword. Countries that want an ambitious treaty could use the meeting to break the logjam around issues like production limits and chemicals of concern – but oil-producing states could also introduce a proposal to rewrite the treaty mandate originally agreed on in 2022, striking language around the “full life cycle” of plastics and perhaps reorienting it around waste management.

Some environmental groups have suggested that, if the talks in Geneva go poorly, high-ambition countries could drop out of the treaty altogether and negotiate their own agreement outside the UN’s purview. There is precedent for this, notably in a 1997 multilateral agreement to ban landmines that Canada spearheaded after countries couldn’t agree to do so within the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. But others say this is unrealistic, given countries’ commitment to the plastics treaty process and the logistical difficulties of trying to start anew.

Whether or not negotiators finalize the treaty this month, Beeler emphasizes that the hard work of enacting and enforcing its provisions will take many years. These negotiating sessions are “a warm-up for a marathon,” he says. “The global fossil fuel-plastic-chemical economy is massive, and to address it and make any changes does not happen overnight.”

This article originally appeared in Grist. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Grist is a non-profit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at grist.org.

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A report released last week by the nonprofit Center for Climate Integrity, or CCI, chronicles a “decades-long campaign of fraud and deception” from Big Oil and the plastics industry to promote recycling as a solution to the plastic pollution crisis. New documents show that industry executives pushed plastics recycling despite knowing since the 1980s that it “cannot be considered a permanent solid waste solution,” and that recycled plastics would never be able to compete economically with virgin material.

Today, the U.S. recycling rate for plastics sits at about 5 or 6 percent. It has never risen above 10 percent.

The report’s authors liken the plastics industry’s recycling campaign to Big Oil’s tactics to convince the public that its products don’t cause climate change. Many companies have been involved in both efforts, since plastics are made from fossil fuels. “The oil industry’s lies are at the heart of the two most catastrophic pollution crises in human history,” Richard Wiles, CCI’s president, said in a statement.

CCI traces industry support for plastics recycling back to the 1980s, when it was proposed as a response to widespread public concern over the material’s proliferation — especially as litter. With the threat of regulation looming large, industry representatives felt they had little choice but “to recycle or be banned.”

Even then, the industry acknowledged major and potentially insurmountable hurdles to plastics recycling. Most significantly, there was no market for recycled plastic — it was too expensive and low-quality to compete with virgin material. One document uncovered by CCI — a 1986 report from the plastics industry trade group the Vinyl Institute — noted that “purity and quality demands set for many applications preclude the use of recycled material.” In the end, the report concluded that recycling “merely prolongs the time until an item is disposed of.”

Plastics and petrochemical company representatives repeatedly shared similar concerns at industry conferences, in meeting notes, and elsewhere: that plastics recycling consumed too much energy, that it would only work for a small fraction of plastic waste, and that a quickly growing supply of virgin materials would “kick the s–t out of” recycled plastic prices, as one official of the now-defunct American Plastics Council wrote in meeting notes obtained by CCI.

Davis Allen, an investigative researcher for CCI and the lead author of the report, said many of the new documents came from a former American Plastics Council staffer. Others came from industry document databases maintained by Columbia University, New York University, and the University of California, San Francisco.

The documents, Allen said, strongly suggest that the plastics and petrochemical industries saw recycling as little more than a way to tame public outrage and ward off anti-plastic legislation. One 1994 document quotes a representative of Eastman Chemical saying that, while plastics recycling might one day become a reality, “it is more likely that we will wake up and realize that we are not going to recycle our way out of the solid waste issue.” Another document — handwritten notes from a meeting between Exxon Chemical and the American Plastics Council — quotes Exxon Chemical’s then-vice president saying that, when it came to recycling plastics, “we are committed to the activities, but not committed to the results.”

Still, trade groups and large petrochemical companies invested heavily in public relations to improve plastics recycling’s image. They touted ambitious goals to increase the recycling rate, and then remained quiet when they failed to meet them, or changed the way they measured their progress. Advertisements “simply repeated the same lies about the viability of plastic recycling,” according to CCI. For example, one 1991 ad in Ladies’ Home Journal claimed that “a bottle can come back as a bottle, over and over again.” Meanwhile, educational materials created for use in schools implied that recycling could assuage students’ guilt over using disposable plastic foodware.

By the mid-1990s, the results seemed to have paid off. Industry polling showed that public opinion on plastics had greatly improved and state-level efforts to ban or restrict plastic production had waned considerably — even though the dismal state of plastics recycling had not significantly improved.

Today, the U.S. recycling rate for plastics sits at about 5 or 6 percent. It has never risen above 10 percent.

Today, most plastic waste gets incinerated or sent to landfills, where it creates hazardous air and water pollution that disproportionately affects low-income communities and communities of color. Meanwhile, environmental advocates say the “myth” of plastics recycling has facilitated the industry’s unmitigated expansion — plastic production has grown by nearly 230 times since 1950. Plastics are expected to drive nearly half of the growth in global oil demand between 2017 and 2050.

CCI isn’t the first group to document the plastics industry’s deceptive communication practices around recycling. A 2020 investigation from NPR and Frontline found ample evidence that the plastics industry and its trade groups promoted plastics recycling despite knowing it was “costly” and “infeasible.” Two former industry executives told the outlets that recycling was used to “advertise our way out of” negative PR.

Since the mid-2010s, a second wave of anti-plastic outrage has spurred the plastics industry and its lobbying groups to again promote the promise of plastics recycling — only this time, they’re pushing so-called “chemical recycling,” which can supposedly melt plastic into its constituent polymers so it can be turned back into new products. Although chemical recycling technologies have existed for decades, most existing facilities — and there are only a few — are still unable to create new plastic products; they mostly turn plastic into chemicals or fossil fuels to be burned.

Lew Freeman, the Society of the Plastics Industry’s former vice president of government affairs, told Grist in an interview last year that there are “serious questions” about the degree to which chemical recycling can ever work. “The industry seems to be doing the same thing it did 30-some-odd years ago,” Freeman said.

Ross Eisenberg, president of America’s Plastic Makers — a subgroup of the petrochemical industry trade organization the American Chemistry Council, which absorbed the American Plastics Council in 2002 — criticized the CCI report as “flawed.” In a statement, he said it “works against our goals to be more sustainable by mischaracterizing the industry and the state of today’s recycling technologies.” Eisenberg did not specifically refute any of the claims made by CCI.

The oil industry’s lies are at the heart of the two most catastrophic pollution crises in human history.

 

– Richard Wiles, president of Center for Climate Integrity

In response to Grist’s request for comment, the Vinyl Institute did not address any of the report’s claims but said it was “committed to increasing” the amount of polyvinyl chloride — a kind of plastic — that gets recycled each year. Eastman Chemical and Exxon Mobil did not respond to Grist’s requests for comment in time for publication.

CCI hopes that its report “lays the foundation” for more ambitious legal challenges against the plastics and petrochemical industries. According to Alyssa Johl, CCI’s vice president of legal and general counsel, most lawsuits so far have targeted the makers of specific products — for instance, Keurig, which misleadingly placed the “chasing arrows” recycling symbol on coffee pods that couldn’t actually be recycled.

These lawsuits “don’t go far enough,” Johl said. In her view, future cases should target the whole industry — including the fossil fuel producers themselves and their trade organizations, highlighting the integral role they played in promoting recycling as a solution to the plastic pollution crisis. Such lawsuits are mostly likely to be brought by cities or state attorneys general, Johl said, and they may invoke public nuisance, consumer fraud, racketeering, or conspiracy laws — similar to successful legal challenges that have been brought against the tobacco and opioid industries.

The most promising push so far has come from California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who in 2022 began investigating fossil fuel and chemical companies for their role in what he called an “aggressive campaign to deceive the public” about the viability of plastics recycling. That investigation is ongoing.

This article originally appeared in Grist. 

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

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Several other companies around the world are also offering to arrange for collecting plastic from where it winds up and doesn’t belong (landfills, waterways, roadsides), and then verify credits, including Plastic Bank and Plastic Credit Exchange. “As the plastic credit market is still emerging, at this stage each issuing organization largely follows its own protocols that govern the process of creating credits,” says rePurpose Global, another crediting platform that “empowers business to act on plastic pollution.”

Who’s eligible to buy plastic credits? It currently depends on the verification organization. Verra, for example, allows anyone along the plastics pipeline to participate: plastic makers, companies that use plastic packaging, wholesalers, or even retailers. Peter Wang Hjemdahl, the co-founder of rePurpose, tells Mongabay that “Governments, philanthropies, individuals, and companies can all support verified plastic recovery because we need all hands on deck to tackle the plastic pollution crisis.”

Forbes reports that rePurpose already funds plastic recovery projects in six nations and is working with companies and organizations like Nestlé, WWF and the World Bank to create an international plastic offset standard.

A wary response

Critics say there’s good reason to be skeptical of organizations offering plastic credit verification. They point to Verra’s carbon credit program which came under scrutiny this year for lack of verifiability and for serving as an excuse for companies not to reduce their carbon footprint. A recent investigation found that 90% of Verra’s verified rainforest carbon offsets were worthless “phantom credits” that failed to represent genuine carbon reductions.

Verra counters that plastic credits will be easier to verify than atmospheric emissions because auditors can see the physical material flow, from collection to reuse, and don’t have to speculate or calculate as with invisible gases. Verra may also have learned from its carbon credits experience, and is on the spot to perform this time, suggests Bjørnufl Østvik, CEO of Ecogensus, a New York City-based company focused on global recycling and sustainable waste management. “I don’t think there’s going to be patience with another credit system” that goes wrong, he says.

Østvik estimates it could take at least a decade under the best possible scenario just to clean up existing plastic pollution, with verification programs being potentially helpful in that cleanup. “When you look beyond the 10-20-year time frame, or 10-30-year time frame … science will get to a point where waste [management] and recycling can evolve to where these types of programs [will then] start to become not needed.”

However, scientists emphasize that plastic cleanups and recycling can only deal with larger plastic waste. There is currently no technologically effective means for removing the microplastics that now pollute the environment — where these invisible particles pose risks to wildlife and even the climate.

A work in progress

Verra currently accredits four plastic credit projects, most recently opening one in Senegal, its first in Africa. There, it works with a local sustainability outfit called Africa Carbon & Commodities (ACC). It took a year and a half of setup and audit before Verra approved the Senegal program. It says 30 other accreditation projects are in the pipeline, while ACC plans to expand its operations into Burkina Faso, Guinea-Bissau, and the Gambia.

ACC’s Deekali Plastic Project in Senegal provides paying jobs for landfill waste pickers, says managing director Nicole Dewing. They are trained as to what types of plastic can earn credits, since many types are not reusable. “They are not going to get paid if they bring the wrong kind of plastic,” she says.

Because of the lack of government-sponsored waste management programs in Senegal (population 17.9 million), analysts predict the small country will be deluged with more “unmanaged” plastic waste than the U.S. by 2025, Dewing says, especially along its Atlantic coast. ACC’s project turns some collected waste into plastic lumber, which is then crafted into tables, desks and chairs for schools. But ACC says it currently lacks the machinery to recycle and reuse plastic bottles.

Verra’s certification process allows plastic to be incinerated or turned into energy to replace fossil fuel, but rePurpose doesn’t credit incinerated plastic. Incineration, also called pyrolysis, and dubbed “chemical recycling” or “advanced recycling” by the plastics industry, is controversial for the pollution it causes.

Accuracy assurances

Plastic credit providers say they use all sorts of methods to confirm accuracy. rePurpose says it “collects chain-of-custody documentation from all stakeholders involved in the supply chain. The protocol ensures timely audits, spot checks, unannounced site visits, and impact verification from third-party auditors on an ongoing basis.”

rePurpose also says that “certifications are not a license to continue using plastic and keep contributing to the plastic waste problem.” Company co-founder Hjemdahl says that “we have long-term engagements with over 300 brands and organizations globally to help them pursue a comprehensive plastic action strategy,” of which credits are only a part.

In the meantime, he says, “we’ve [validated collection of] 38 million pounds [17,200 metric tons] of plastic [and more that hasn’t been validated] that would be in the environment today if we hadn’t existed.” The Southern Hemisphere countries rePurpose works in lack strategies to clean up plastic waste, so presumably anything collected is a plus, he adds.

As with other certifying organizations, rePurpose stresses its focus on accuracy, employing everything from visual inspections to outside auditors, Hjemdahl notes. “If there’s a discrepancy, we fix it,” using the most conservative figures.

He acknowledges that his company must take into consideration that those at various points along the recovery supply chain have incentives for providing different counts: Those selling the plastic want a higher count, whereas those buying (the plastic, not the credit) prefer to give a lower number. So certification inspectors need to check carefully at every step of the process.

Chris DeArmitt runs Phantom Plastics from Cincinnati, Ohio, which consults with business on plastics problems. He says credits can work because people won’t discard something if they find value in it. While people may throw away single-use bottles, he notes, “people don’t drop their credit cards.” He adds that “the credits thing is just a lot of people trying to enrich themselves,” but the system works because of financial incentives.

Greenwashing risk

Critics see plastic credit systems as little more than window dressing, giving firms an excuse to continue making and using plastic rather than finding alternatives. The NGO #BreakFreeFromPlastic, which calls itself “the global movement envisioning a future free from plastic pollution,” documented that a Verra-certified incinerator in Bali, Indonesia, was fouling the air. And in Brazil, where Nestlé was earning credits, the “certificates do not guarantee that the companies’ products are effectively recycled,” says the NGO, adding that Nestlé hasn’t proved its activity is helping, rather than harming, the environment.

“It’s a downstream approach dealing only with plastic waste, and while that may address legacy plastics, it completely disregards the impacts of plastic in the earlier stages of [the] life cycle (extraction, production, consumer use). Also, cleanups are not necessarily in areas where the pollution of production or transportation occurs,” says Marian Ledesma, zero waste campaigner for Greenpeace Southeast Asia.

Credits give companies a pretext to keep making disposable plastics products, she adds. “Unfortunately, there has not been as much effort to look at plastic reduction,” or at using “different types of plastic” or substitute materials. Nothing in the certification system calls on manufacturers to make or use recyclable or biodegradable plastics or improve production, Ledesma says. Credits “give all the plastic makers an excuse to continue their plastic production.”

ACC’s Dewing counters that “people say this is greenwashing. [But] this is not greenwashing at all. It is getting the plastic out of the environment and getting it to have value.” Plastic was littered all over the road before the ACC initiative became active, Dewing said. Now she sees less of it.

A working paper issued last year by the International Solid Waste Association for the U.N. Environment Programme summed up the debate. It concluded that “plastic credit mechanisms can play a significant role within sustainable waste management systems, along with local and national policies such as producer responsibility schemes and waste prevention and reduction laws, but can also be a potential tool for greenwashing if not implemented properly. Plastic credits are not a long-term solution but rather a short-term remedy while we move to better waste and resource management systems.”

How representatives from the world’s nations will deal with plastic credits in the evolving U.N. plastics treaty negotiations is anyone’s guess.

Corrections: This article was updated on 10/23/23 to include minor corrections and clarifications made by Verra, rePurpose and ACC.

This article was first published by Mongabay.

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One disturbing consequence of the pandemic has been the mountains of single-use plastic it has generated.

In January, Tennessee-based Eastman Chemical unveiled a bold initiative to tackle this problem with plans for a US$1-billion plant in France that each year will turn up to 160,000 tonnes of plastic waste currently sent to landfills or incinerators into brand-new packaging and textile materials. Some of the world’s largest users of plastic containers, such as Procter & Gamble, Estée Lauder and Danone, have signed up as suppliers.

The French plant – like a smaller one under construction in Tennessee – will use Eastman’s polyester renewal technology, which breaks down hard-to-recycle carpets, textiles and containers into their molecular building blocks, then reassembles the material into new plastics. The company claims that the process can be used repeatedly on the same materials with no loss of quality. It estimates that the combination of its technology and France’s renewable energy resources will cut greenhouse gas emissions by 80% compared with other recycling methods.

The company’s head of plastics, Scott Ballard, told a Tennessee TV station: “What we’re trying to do is make it easier … for governments to create infrastructure to recycle.

Because with this technology, that waste becomes valuable, [so] we can pay money for it as a feedstock, as opposed to them having to pay to dispose of it.”

Eastman’s project, which will benefit from French government incentives, is an encouraging sign that the fight against plastic pollution is gathering steam. Last November, a study for the U.S. National Academy of Sciences estimated that the pandemic has generated more than eight million tons of plastic waste, mostly from hospitals.

More than 70 prominent consumer-goods companies came together in January to call for a global treaty to fight plastic pollution. The signatories, including Unilever, Walmart, Ikea and Coca-Cola, urged governments to adopt a wide range of policies to “keep plastics in the economy and out of the environment, reduce virgin plastic production,” and decouple plastic-production fossil fuels.

Such initiatives are sure to face pushback from powerful fossil-fuel and chemical industries that supply the raw materials for plastics. They would be wise to recognize, however, that the tide is not moving their way. Projects like Eastman’s will hopefully persuade businesses in many other sectors that the future lies in ever more efficient recycling.

Zero: Keurig

Speaking of recycling… Coffee-machine maker Keurig boasts on its website that by using its K-Cycle program, corporate customers can fully recycle every one of its single-use coffee pods. By 2020, the Massachusetts-based pioneer of single-serve coffee makers had diverted 136 million pods, weighing more than 2.7 million kilograms, from landfills by composting the grounds and filters and recycling the plastic and aluminum packaging.

But there’s a snag for those of us who use Keurig pods at home. The company reached a settlement with Canada’s Competition Bureau in January over what the bureau described as “false or misleading” claims about the recyclability of K-Cup pods. Under the deal, Keurig agreed to pay a $3-million penalty, donate $800,000 to a charity focused on environmental causes, and cover the costs of the bureau’s investigation. It must also reword its claims about the pods’ recyclability, and change their packaging accordingly.

Within a few weeks of the settlement, Keurig Canada had put up a banner on its website, noting that “Keurig K-Cup pods may not be recyclable in your area; check with your local municipality for more information.” A link gave more details of the settlement.

Alerted by researchers at the University of Victoria’s Environmental Law Centre, the bureau found that Keurig pods are not widely accepted by municipal recycling programs outside British Columbia and Quebec. It also concluded that Keurig’s claims give the impression that coffee drinkers can prepare the pods for recycling simply by peeling off the lid and emptying out the grounds, when, in fact, some recycling programs require more steps.

“False or misleading claims by businesses to promote ‘greener’ products harm consumers who are unable to make informed purchasing decisions,” noted Commissioner of Competition Matthew Boswell. Such claims, he added, also hurt suppliers of rival products that are less environmentally damaging.

Of course, Keurig is not alone in promising more than it delivers. The University of Victoria group found that Toronto’s solid-waste department recovers about 90 tonnes of coffee pods annually from a variety of brands that clog its recycling system.

The Competition Bureau’s statement announcing the settlement ended on a note of appreciation for the company’s “voluntary cooperation in resolving this matter.” Even better, Keurig and other pod makers could avoid the problem by making only refillable pods.

The post Heroes and Zeros: Eastman Chemical vs. Keurig appeared first on Corporate Knights.

A shift is happening, on a large scale, as a growing number of lawmakers voice support for circular policies. The European Commission’s directive on single-use plastic is considered one of the biggest steps taken to treat plastic and other materials people use in a less-wasteful way. Its nuanced policy for curbing plastic pollution is based around a simple premise: Making better use of the plastic we already have reduces the need to produce more plastic. Among the strategies outlined in this and other circular plans are obligations for corporations to assume extended producer responsibility, or EPR for short, assuming economic and ecological accountability for their products throughout the products’ entire life cycles. EPR schemes may involve continued research, deposit-return systems, vastly improved recycling systems, redesign and replacement, use restrictions, and better collection systems for many popular single-use plastic products, among other initiatives.

Unlike most plastic legislation passed to date, which has done little to shift throwaway culture, the EU’s directive seeks to rethink plastic as a resource, instead of waste, and close the present gap that exists between a plastic item’s final use and its potential next life—which is rarely ever realized.

For all the people on board with circularity, there are many others who are not—unsurprisingly, most people leading industries dealing in petrochemicals and plastic. While some companies, including Coca-Cola, have publicly committed to some voluntary measures to cut plastic use, behind closed doors it and other companies have opposed important policies that address plastic, including the EU directive. Further adding to the illusion of corporate concern is the common practice of allowing industry trade associations to do their dirty work. 

“While companies may tell the public they’re good guys, many belong to trade groups—including the Plastics Industry Association— which are strongly opposing the legislation we need right now,” said John Hocevar, of Greenpeace, who is now working to hold some of the world’s biggest companies accountable for their secretive trade association alliances. “We call up these companies and remind them that they are deceiving people by saying publicly that they care, but in reality belong to groups opposing meaningful action.” 

As a result of such efforts, big brands like Coca-Cola, General Motors, PepsiCo, and SC Johnson severed ties with the Plastics Industry Association in 2019. Still, when plans for the EU directive were first unveiled, Coca-Cola (then still a member of the trade group), was the biggest corporation to sign off on a letter to the European Commission opposing the new plans, which would require that manufacturers redesign their plastic bottles so that the caps were less likely to twist off and become unrecoverable in nature, among other measures meant to minimize plastic products’ harm on the natural environment and improve plastic recovery and recycling rates. 

In their letter, the beverage corporation leaders cite the efficacy of deposit return schemes and recycling in reducing plastic litter in their arguments against the EU directive, which would require serious commitment and investment by corporations. This, though Europe’s average plastic recycling rate, while higher than in many parts of the world, is nowhere near circular at just 42 percent, with much of it exported elsewhere, to be burned or piled up in landfills and the natural environment instead of actually being recycled. The corporations proposed increased efforts to “reinforce and incentivize [the] right consumer behaviors” in lieu of taking responsibility for their products. It’s the same old story. 

While companies may tell the public they’re good guys, many belong to trade groups—including the Plastics Industry Association— which are strongly opposing the legislation we need right now.

-John Hocevar, oceans campaign director at Greenpeace

When politicians in the world’s most wasteful country, the US, unveiled its first national circularity-based plan to tackle plastic pollution in 2020, the plastic industry, predictably, reacted in strong opposition. Called the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act, and recently reintroduced in March 2021 by Congressman Alan Lowenthal (D-CA), Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR), and more than ninety other members of the House and Senate, the act is designed to ultimately compel corporations and industries to cease production of certain non-recyclable single-use plastic products. To achieve this goal, the act would, among other strategies, require governments and industries to assume additional responsibility for plastic products, phase out some single-use plastic products entirely, restrict plastic waste exports, and place a temporary moratorium on permits for new and expanded plastic- and petrochemical-producing facilities.

Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics, an organization focused on eliminating plastic pollution, has proven to be a valuable ally of the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act, advising lawmakers and other supporters of the bill. As a former EPA administrator, she is well aware of both the government bureaucracy and industry influence that so commonly impede passage of meaningful legislation. “The biggest hurdle to getting the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act passed is to get past plastic lobbyists in every state legislature and Congress who are trying to tinker with the language of the law so that it’s less effective,” Enck said in early 2021, the bill still under consideration. 

When asked directly about the issue of plastic pollution and how to best address it, a representative from the Plastics Industry Association, the major plastic-industry trade group, told me in an email that it “believes uncollected plastics do not belong in the natural environment and that is why we partner with other associations, non-governmental organizations, and intergovernmental authorities to coordinate efforts to strengthen recovery systems around the globe to prevent loss of plastics into the environment. Our members understand that our industry needs to be a part of the solution. We encourage education and call for the enhancement of our recycling infrastructure in order to encourage new end markets for plastics.” 

Scientists continue to reiterate that industry’s inclination to put the onus for plastic pollution almost solely on consumers is unfair. 

“Ocean plastics are a symptom of poor upstream waste management, poor product design, as well as consumer littering behavior,” Marcus Eriksen of 5 Gyres once explained to me. What industry suggests as a solution is “a perpetuation of old narratives, where pollution is caused by consumers. Regulation of products and packaging must be fought for intensively.” 

Those laws now in place have already proven themselves on varying scales over the past few decades. Local rules on single-use plastic have been linked to reduced amounts of plastic waste ending up as litter in the environment. But strong national legislation—and hopefully, one day international legislation—is by far most capable of making the biggest reductions in plastic production, use, and disposal, due to the global nature of the plastic crisis. 

To get effective legislation passed even in the face of widespread industry opposition, Enck urges people to contact their elected officials and express why we need strict plastic legislation now. “Yes, it’s hard, and there’s a lot already on people’s plates,” she acknowledged. “But believe it or not, many lawmakers are still fixed on the idea that plastic pollution is ‘just’ a straw up a turtle’s nose.” She suggested the public remind their representatives that the plastic crisis is much larger and more urgent than that single perspective—causing not only ecological catastrophes but also harming human health, while upholding systemic racism and other forms of injustice. And then there is plastic’s inherent connection to fossil fuels, and the catastrophe that is climate change. Because fossil fuels are finite—their underground stores cannot be replenished when exhausted—there will inevitably come a day when petrochemical industries and manufacturers will have to rethink their reliance on plastic. Looking forward, it seems most players in industry and business will remain focused on perpetuating the plastic status quo, all while continuing to rake in billions of dollars a year—at great expense to all of us. That is, of course, unless we stop them. 

Is it brilliant, or brainless, that petrochemical and plastic corporations are choosing to go down with a sinking ship?

The answer to that question depends on what matters most to each of us.

From Thicker Than Water: The Quest for Solutions to the Plastic Crisis by Erica Cirino; Copyright © 2021 by the author. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C

Erica Cirino is a science writer and artist who explores the intersection of the human and nonhuman worlds. Her photographic and written works have appeared in Scientific American, The Guardian, VICE, Hakai Magazine, The Atlantic, and other esteemed publications. She is a recipient of fellowships from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, and Safina Center, as well as several awards for visual art.

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