Kickstart: Plastics policy and beach vacations

As the news out of California has proved, legislative action dealing with plastics can have some big impacts on the industry. (Check out Steve Toloken's coverage of California's Senate Bill 54, which will bring extended producer responsibility to the state and likely have implications beyond its borders.)

The thing is, there are a lot of public policy actions involving plastics happening throughout the U.S. at any one time.

But now, finally, there's one place you can go to track what's happening.

The National Caucus of Environmental Legislators has a 2022 recap covering what's going on in terms of public policy, consolidated at one website. That includes actions involving plastics, with 270 bills being considered in 36 states. Forty bills passed and 27 were enacted, NCEL says.

"This year, states continued to push for zero-waste policies that eliminate single-use plastics, improve waste management and advance effective recycling strategies," the group says.

From there, you can click through to an interactive map with actions by individual states.

The NCEL website also allows you to sort bills dealing with PFAS (218 bills in 31 states), climate justice (118 bills from 24 states), emission reductions (21 bills from 15 states) and a range of other environmental issues.

If you're headed to the beach this year, please take care to handle your trash properly.

In its latest survey of items collected on more than 1,000 international beach cleanups in 2021, the Surfrider Foundation found that the biggest single type of item found on beaches was a perennial problem — cigarette butts — with 136,736 collected. But if all of the plastic items found were combined in one category, they would easily top that number.

Consider:

• 67,729 small plastic fragments.

• 38,145 large plastic fragments.

• 33,004 small foam fragments.

• 28,571 plastic food wrappers.

• 23,249 large foam fragments.

• 17,790 plastic caps or rings.

You get the idea. In total, 84 percent of all items collected were plastic. And those statistics bring us back to the list of legislation referenced above.

"As every single one of the top 10 items found were plastic, our beach cleanup data confirms that plastic is everywhere and it isn't going anywhere without large-scale legislative change," said Jennifer Savage, Surfrider's senior manager for the plastic pollution initiative.

Getting into the Plastics Hall of Fame isn't a trivial accomplishment. But knowing who is in the hall may help you win a trivia game.

A recent episode of the TV show Master Minds (it airs on the Game Show Network) asked its contestants to name a brand of fabric marketed for its ability to keep users dry "whose namesake is in the Plastics Hall of Fame."

The answer, of course, was Gore-Tex, named for Wilbert L. Gore, who was named to the hall in 1990, and his son, Robert Gore, who created the fabric.

A quick note here: Crain Communications, the parent company of Plastics News, has an extended holiday weekend, and who am I to argue? We'll monitor for breaking news, but otherwise will catch you all again on July 6.