Less than 6% of plastics are recycled. What happens to the rest? It piles up in landfills, it litters the roadsides, it gets washed out to sea—by the millions of metric tons.
Plastic waste comprises thousands of toxic chemicals, including endocrine disrupting substances, which interfere with healthy bodily processes. Microplastics are turning up in mothers’ breast milk, even in the snows of Antarctica. They are in our drinking water and the food we consume.
“What we are finding is this is much worse than we thought,” said John Myers, founder of Environmental Health Sciences, In testimony at the first congressional hearing on plastic waste, held in December 2022.
Over the last five decades, there has been a 50% decline in adult male sperm count, for which endocrine disruptors are believed responsible. The rate of decline is speeding up, and by the 2040s sperm counts could approach zero, he said. “Reproducing the old-fashioned way will become much less common.”
Also testifying at that hearing was Judith Enck, founder of Beyond Plastics and a former Environmental Protection Agency regional administrator. She spoke also in a February 2023 webinar with Sierra Club NJ Chapter Director Anjuli Ramos-Busot about the need for plastics reduction and the fallacies of plastics recycling, which releases harmful substances into the environment.
Plastics are so diverse they cannot be efficiently recycled and are increasingly converted back into fossil fuel, and in 10 years plastics are expected to result in more greenhouse gas emissions than original fossil fuels.
“We cannot leave our children and grandchildren with this enormous problem of plastics pollution,” Enck said. “There are solutions.”
She cited an Oceana poll finding that 82% of American voters want legislators to adopt laws that reduce plastics. She noted these results were bipartisan. “I’ve met many people who were climate change deniers. I have never met a plastic pollution denier,” she said. The point was our legislators have a clear mandate to address plastic pollution with tough laws.
In New Jersey, Beyond Plastics is working with Sierra Club and many other groups to develop a broad-based “extended producer responsibility” law (S426, Smith) that would shift the cost of managing plastic waste back onto the producers and incentivize more conservative use of these harmful compounds. Dubbed the “Packaging Product Stewardship Act,” S426 as currently drafted would do the following:
- Require producers to develop environmentally sound plans for recovering all discarded packaging products,
- Increase reuse of packaging materials,
- Include regular analyses of the success of these stewardship plans, and
- Develop producer financing to provide for collection and recycling by municipalities.
The law would apply to bottles, food packaging, home delivery packaging, and bulk product shipping packaging, whether these are made of paper, plastic, glass, or metal.
The Sierra Club and other advocates ask NJ residents to contact their elected representatives and urge passage of this legislation.
Resources
Hearing: bit.ly/3Kxchd5
EPR Bill: bit.ly/3KA6i7i
Oceana Poll: bit.ly/3ZgOOBd