Top US diplomat for plastics treaty calls Ohio derailment a 'wake-up call'

National Harbor, Md. — The top U.S. negotiator on the global plastics treaty told an industry audience March 8 that last month's spill and burning of vinyl chloride monomer in an Ohio train wreck should be a "wake-up call" for a broad rethinking of plastics policy.

Monica Medina, the assistant secretary of state for oceans and international environmental affairs, told the Plastics Recycling Conference in a speech that the derailment in East Palestine in early February supports a "holistic" approach to plastics pollution that goes beyond recycling.

"If anything has brought this closer to home it's that train wreck in Ohio a couple of weeks ago that was carrying chemicals — toxic chemicals — to make plastics," Medina said. "I think that was another wake-up call to the U.S. that we need a more holistic approach that includes all of the above: reduce, reuse and recycling.

"We're thinking about sort of a multifaceted approach," she told the conference, held at the National Harbor convention center just outside Washington. "Recycling is a huge part of that, but we also need reuse and reduction."

Medina, who leads the U.S. delegation to the treaty talks, told the conference of 2,700 people that she wasn't there to "demonize" plastics and said it has "many vital applications," including in medical devices and making cars more energy-efficient.

But Medina outlined changes that, over time, she saw coming from the treaty that would help companies that recycle plastics, improve the U.S.'s "abysmal" plastics recycling rate and address concerns around toxic chemicals in plastics.

"We want to focus on plastic pollution," she said. "We need to take a comprehensive approach to combating it through the life cycle of plastics."

For the U.S., that means a heavy reliance in the treaty on national action plans countries to develop and publicly review at future global conferences, in a similar process to the Paris Climate Agreement.

Medina said national plans could include harmonized standards to make recycling collection rules more consistent across thousands of U.S. cities and towns, as well as standards to reduce problematic plastics and potentially toxic chemicals used within plastics that could be a barrier to using more recycled material.

She also noted steps like standardizing colors on bottles to produce simpler recycling streams.

"I could imagine an agreement and a national action plan that has some element of reducing or eliminating, phasing out some of the most toxic chemicals that are in plastics," she said. "We need to simplify, get down to fewer and fewer polymers and colors and all of that to make recycling simpler [and] probably have some reuse standards."

As well, she appeared to echo language used by the U.S. Plastics Pact that call for companies to not use plastics that the pact says are difficult for the recycling stream to handle. The pact puts 11 materials and products on that list, including vinyl and polystyrene in packaging.

"We know that stakeholders need to come to grips with certain problematic plastics as well as additives and plastics that harm human health and make your jobs so much more difficult," Medina said.

She told attendees in the plastics supply chain that the changes should lead to a better business environment.

"For you all, I hope, it's a kind of comprehensive and consistent recycling system that allows your businesses to grow," she said.

Medina said the U.S.'s national action plan will also depend heavily on state and local government action, as waste management has largely been a local responsibility.

"Really, it's going to come down to state and local government and our ability to leverage changes in state and local government law that will help us to flip the paradigm here in the U.S., where big states like California have already made a huge step forward," she said. "We need more states — more of the big ones — to come along."

Medina said the treaty's goal should be to eliminate leakage of plastics into the environment by 2040, with that serving as the agreement's "North Star" in the way that limiting global warming to 1.5° C is the goal for the Paris Agreement.

Countries held the first of five plastics treaty negotiating sessions in Uruguay in late November and plan the second for late May in Paris, with the goal of completing the talks by the end of 2024, a fast time frame for international talks.

President Joe Biden's administration is committed to an ambitious agreement and sees national action plans as vital, she said.

"From the U.S. perspective, we need an ambitious, innovative and country-driven agreement, kind of like the Paris Agreement but for plastics, where countries come up with their own action plans," she said. "We don't have a one-size-fits-all solution that we negotiate that's supposed to fit every country in the world."

Some environmental groups have criticized the U.S. position, saying it's not aggressive enough and have expressed concerns that the Paris Agreement's reliance on national action plans has meant that not enough progress has been made on climate change.

As well, a group of about 50 countries and the European Union — calling themselves the High Ambition Coalition to End Plastic Pollution — have publicly called for the treaty to go further and reduce the production of virgin plastic, as well as to reduce and eliminate specific plastics and chemicals of concern.

At another presentation at the conference, a diplomat from the European Union's delegation in Washington referred to a "slight divergence" between the U.S. and European Union positions.

But in a brief interview after her presentation, Medina said the U.S. sees flexibility as leading to innovation.

"I think we are just as ambitious as anybody out there," she said. "We want to see the most innovation possible. We think being overly prescriptive in the agreement will only lead us to a far lower standard because you'll meet the least common denominator."

The U.S. government's official submission to the treaty says the agreement could reduce demand for plastics.

"We recognize that many of these actions, when taken together, could also drive down the demand for plastic," the U.S. submission said.

The document said national plans could include provisions around product design, eco-labeling, recycled content in plastics, government procurement and programs to incentivize recycling and reuse like extended producer responsibility regulations.

Medina said it's too early in the negotiations to define in more detail what parts of the treaty could look like.

"We are not at a place where we could define exactly what we see each element of the treaty would look like," she said. "We have to do all of the above: reduce, reuse and recycle. We need to do it in a way that provides glide paths that makes it easy for everyone in these industries because they are pervasive."

She told the audience that the treaty would not need approval by the U.S. Senate if it's done as an "executive agreement," like the Paris climate pact, because it would not require changes in U.S. laws.

Medina said other government agencies are contributing to the U.S. negotiating position, including the Environmental Protection Agency, and she noted that the White House Council on Environmental Quality recently appointed a senior director to work on chemical safety and plastic pollution issues.

"The Biden-Harris administration takes this issue very seriously and is putting it on the front burner domestically as well," Medina said.

She said the U.S. government wants input from all stakeholders.

"We are talking about this enormous change; everyone is so used to the convenience of single-use plastics in particular," Medina told the crowd. "I don't know that we can bring the public along overnight, so I think what we need from you is a sense of how to actually flip that paradigm."

Steve Alexander, CEO of the Association of Plastic Recyclers, told the audience that the U.S. Department of State helped APR get official status to attend and participate in the next treaty negotiating session, in late May, joining other plastics groups that attended the first.

Alexander, who moderated the session and whose organization is a sponsor of the conference, said priorities for recyclers include increasing the supply of materials and standardizing recycling collection systems across the 9,000 programs in the U.S. that largely set their own rules.