Plastics, environmental justice, economic gains debated at Senate

Washington — Democrats and Republicans on a Senate environment panel have some sharply different visions of what environmental justice means for plastics manufacturing, at least judging by a June 15 committee hearing.

Republicans at a Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing accused Democrats generally — and President Joe Biden's administration specifically — of distorting the meaning of environmental justice or applying it unfairly.

Democrats, for their part, said they were exploring how to address pollution and high cancer rates in communities along petrochemical zones, including the concentration of plastics resin plants in the Louisiana corridor known as Cancer Alley.

The ranking Republican on the waste management subcommittee, Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, used the hearing, titled "Impacts of Plastic Production and Disposal on Environmental Justice Communities," to accuse Democrats of moving the idea away from its original meaning.

"Today's hearing highlights an original novel idea called environmental justice that has been transformed away from its original intent of helping poor and marginalized communities with specific needs, into a social movement Democrats have taken over to push progressive policies forward under the disguise of social and racial equality," Mullin said.

And Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, said the Biden administration had a "double standard" around environmental justice in his state for declaring that fossil fuel production and pipeline development would not benefit communities.

"This is ridiculously naive, in my view," Sullivan told the hearing. "And what I worry about sometimes is when we talk about environmental justice, the native people, the indigenous people of my state, always get left out of the Biden administration's views."

Sullivan began his remarks by noting he had worked closely with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., on two pieces of bipartisan ocean pollution cleanup legislation, the Save Our Seas laws.

He ended his comments saying he was concerned about policies that could push plastics manufacturing overseas.

"One thing I do worry about is that if we crack down on plastics here, production of that, it's just going to drive it overseas to China, places that don't have strong environmental standards like we do," Sullivan said.

But the top Democrat on the subcommittee, Oregon Democrat Jeff Merkley, said he wanted to find ways to recognize the valuable uses of plastics in society while addressing challenges around health, recycling and microplastics.

"When you have harmful effects, it isn't the right answer to say, 'Well, there is nothing that can be done,'" he said. "One of the conversations is, how do we distinguish between necessary uses of plastic and those that are not necessary, because maybe we can reduce those harmful effects by reducing how much we produce.

"And when we produce it, how do we produce in a way that is less harmful to the communities in which it is located," Merkley said. "How do we reduce the emissions and reduce the cancer, the disease rates there."

The Biden administration has elevated the concerns, issuing executive orders, new emissions monitoring rules for large petrochemical plants and citing environmental justice concerns in putting a large Formosa Plastics complex in Louisiana through additional reviews.

Michael Regan, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, spent several days early in his tenure touring communities along chemical and plastics manufacturing corridors in Louisiana and Texas.

As well, EPA made protecting overburdened communities part of a draft national plastics strategy that it unveiled in April.

Sharon Lavigne, founder of the Louisiana group Rise St. James, said pollution from petrochemical plants is impacting health in her community. Her group has opposed the Formosa plastics plant expansion in the state.

"The health effects of making these plastics are killing the people or making us sick, giving us cancer," she said. "When I was diagnosed with autoimmune hepatitis, I didn't know where it was coming from until I did my research. They say it came from industrial pollutants. And I live in a cesspool of pollution. So I believe that that's where it came from."

But another witness, Donna Jackson, with National Center for Public Policy Research, said industrial development has helped to create economic opportunities and said the links between factory emissions and disease are unclear.

"American manufacturers are subject to the most rigorous environmental standards in the world, including plastic plants, and industrial emissions have declined substantially over the last several decades," said Jackson, who is director of membership development for the center's Project 21 program.

"For every study claiming a cancer cluster or statistical association with some other disease, there are others that find low-income people living near these facilities are no worse off than comparably poor people in general," she said. "I think it's worth noting that the environmental justice activists who focus on the correlation between industrial emissions and health care impacts tend to ignore the undeniable and well-documented improvements that come with the transition from poverty to well-paying employment."

Other panelists, however, said they did not see the economic benefits of those chemical and plastics plants spread widely in nearby communities and said the health risks are clear. Lavigne said the Formosa expansion would add more pollutants to her overburdened community.

At the hearing, Jackson described the center as "one of the oldest and largest Black conservative think tanks" in the United States.

The hearing room turned contentious at times, with comments from the audience interrupting opening remarks by Mullin, the ranking Republican on the panel, which prompted Mullin to respond.

"You guys are welcome to be here but whoever keeps interrupting us, they either need to behave or they need to be removed here," Mullin said.

That prompted Merkley to urge the crowd of 50 or 60 packed into a small Senate hearing room to "listen thoughtfully, and if you passionately disagree, still be very respectful of the person speaking."

The crowd stayed under control for the hearing, with people occasionally shouting out phrases like "break free from plastic."

Mullin — who at one point told a witness he disagreed with that "I don't mean to be condescending here" — told the hearing that plastics manufacturing is vital to U.S. society, and he asked what would replace it.

He said plastics are "already heavily regulated in the U.S."

"We don't have a plastic problem," he said. "We have a recycling handling problem. Instead of halting infrastructure projects or manufacturing development that results in U.S. job loss and more reliance on countries like China to produce critical material needed for modern life, why would we not refocus in improving recycling?"

A Democrat on the committee, Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, however, said he planned to reintroduce legislation putting a tax on virgin plastic and called on industry to commit to doing much more to deal with plastic pollution.

Whitehouse said the U.S. plastics recycling rate is less than 10 percent and noted that less than 2 percent of single-use plastics are made with recycled feedstocks.

"I'm getting ready to reintroduce my Reduce Act bill, as it's called, that puts a 20-cent-per-pound fee on the sale of new plastic that is destined for single-use products," Whitehouse said, to encourage more recycled plastic in single-use products.

He also called on plastics companies to echo a commitment from consumer products maker Unilever plc that it will remove a pound of plastic from the world for every pound of plastic packaging it puts into the world, calling it a "pretty reasonable minimum standard."