Brand owners, NGOs call for Washington to step up on recycling

Whatever happens around recycling and plastics policy in the United States, it's looking like Washington is going to play a much larger role in an area historically left to state and local governments.

A broad coalition of consumer products companies, the Recycling Leadership Council, unveiled a policy plan Feb. 4 that wants the federal government to be much more involved in regulating and financing recycling.

To buttress their point, the group's online unveiling included appearances by several U.S. senators and members of Congress.

The lawmakers said there's bipartisan interest in Washington in doing more, even if they did not identify specific legislation on the scale of what the RLC report is urging.

RLC, which is organized by the Consumer Brands Association, urged Washington help standardize U.S recycling, provide more funding for local systems and recyclers, and build better data collection.

One RLC recommendation that Washington could do soon: Any new infrastructure legislation in Congress should include money to help struggling recycling programs.

The report also made some plastics-specific points.

It argued that low virgin resin prices cause major problems for making plastics recycling economically viable, although it didn't detail what to do about that.

As well, it urged Washington to support development of advanced recycling technologies favored by the industry and study the "global impacts of U.S. plastic pollution," including whether U.S. plastic waste exports are actually properly recycled in other countries.

But mostly the RLC, which includes some of the world's biggest corporate buyers of plastic resin, intended its report as a statement from consumer product companies and allied groups that they want Washington to step up.

"Recycling in the United States is at a breaking point due to thousands of disparate systems, and the COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated the massive fractures in its foundation," said Geoff Freeman, CBA president and CEO. "The time is now to solve this crisis, and Americans overwhelmingly want federal leadership."

Other coalition members include the American Beverage Association, the Flexible Packaging Association and glass and metal packaging groups.

The report came on the same day that more than 250 environmental groups made their own pitch to President Joe Biden for $1.3 billion in new federal spending aimed at plastics pollution.

Like RLC, they also suggested funds come from new federal infrastructure spending, and they added climate or stimulus legislation.

The Break Free From Plastic coalition asked Biden for $75 million to better regulate and enforce environmental laws aimed at the plastics industry, as well as $150 million to investigate the health impacts of plastics and $500 million to support recycling of non-plastic materials.

The RLC report came in for criticism from Greenpeace, which said government should try to reduce the use of throwaway packaging and abandon the idea that recycling paid for with tax dollars can solve the problem.

"Real solutions start with an honest assessment of the problem, which goes well beyond waste and will require far more than recycling to solve," said John Hocevar, Greenpeace USA oceans campaign director. "It is time to abandon throwaway packaging, especially plastics, and incentivize systems of reuse. … Today's blueprint is just another 'call to action' from an industry front group that fails to acknowledge this fundamental reality."

RLC members, which includes the environmental group Ocean Conservancy as well as industry-funded organizations like The Recycling Partnership, see the report as an important step toward that goal.

RLC made several broad policy proposals, including calling for national definitions of recycling and recyclability, federal block grants for local programs and tax incentives for recycling companies similar to those given to the renewable power industry. They also called for stronger Federal Trade Commission enforcement of marketing claims for recyclability.

Meghan Stasz, vice president of packaging and sustainability at CBA, said RLC sees federal action as a "really critical piece."

"We don't see this blueprint as a singular solution," she said. "Rather, we think that strong federal action and leadership can really help accelerate the solutions that states and industries are already working toward."

Stasz and other RLC members said it will take a concerted effort in Washington.

"I think the next step of direct engagement up on Capitol Hill will be vitally important to make this real," said Kate Krebs, director of industry affairs at Closed Loop Partners.

RLC sees the report as building on a policy goal set by the Trump administration in its waning days, for a U.S. recycling rate of 50 percent by 2030.

The report did not get into details on how to pay for the upgrades to the thousands of local government recycling programs across the country, nor did it present a detailed picture of what that might cost.

But several of the coalition members noted at a news conference that their groups have gone further around funding and endorsed industry paying fees on packaging.

The Recycling Partnership released a report in September calling for packaging fees and "shared producer responsibility," said Dylan de Thomas, vice president of external affairs for the group.

"We are going to insist and assist that producers play that prominent role," he said. "Community recycling budgets have always been tight. But in this post-COVID and post China National Sword environment, we're going to see those governments squeezed even tighter to juggle to see how recycling fits into their offering of those critical public services."

As well, the CBA in an April policy agenda floated putting fees on virgin plastic resin to fund recycling, although that CBA idea was not part of the RLC report.

The RLC report noted research from Ocean Conservancy that said extended producer responsibility programs have "the most potential" to address the funding gap, followed by recycled content mandates. And it noted OC reports arguing that "bans on problematic plastic" can reduce contamination in curbside systems.

Legislation in Washington has not advanced to the stage of talking financial details beyond the Democratic-sponsored Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act, but members of Congress on the call said there's a lot of bipartisan interest in recycling.

Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, said both the Trump and Biden administrations have been interested, and he said he plans a third version of the Save Our Seas legislation, which passed with bipartisan support in its previous two versions.

"This is literally one of those issues where everybody for the most part is pulling on the same oar and that's how you get things done in this town," Sullivan said.

Some Democratic lawmakers singled out plastics in their comments.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., who is a co-author of the Save Our Seas laws with Sullivan, called for "particular attention to ocean plastics in this context. We have a real crisis emerging offshore."

Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., the new chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, also highlighted plastics in a statement distributed by the RLC.

"America's recycling system is not working, especially with respect to plastics," Carper said. "Recycling in our country is in dire need of new policies and solutions."

The RLC report said the low price of virgin resin is an obstacle to having strong end markets for recycled plastic.

"The primary obstacles to developing end markets are contamination of the recycling stream, low-value material, the low cost of virgin plastic and scalability," it said, noting it held several meetings with stakeholder groups.

"In the interconnected recycling system, economics matter," it said. "As the experts in several stakeholder panels identified, including the retail and plastics sessions, the cost of virgin material is often much lower than recycled content."

The report said that the rapid growth of plastic production, with an estimated 8.3 billion metric tons manufactured by 2017, is "outgrowing all other man-made materials other than steel and cement."

It said that's projected to grow to 34 billion tonnes by 2050.

As well, the report noted problems getting enough reclaimed plastics to meet market demands for recycled content.

One plastics industry trade group welcomed the RLC report.

Joshua Baca, head of the plastics division at the American Chemistry Council, pointed to ACC's plastics road map it released in October that called for industry financing like packaging fees as well as legislative support for recycled content.

"We're dealing with an issue that requires a lot of stakeholders to be involved and we welcome additional ideas and solutions," Baca said.

He said any effort should recognize the importance of technologies for chemical recycling, or advanced recycling as the industry calls them, to meet market demand for recycled content for plastics.

"You can't solve the plastic waste problem without advanced recycling," Baca said. "Hard-to-recycle stuff cannot be done without advanced recycling and it's very complementary to mechanical recycling."