EnviroPolitics Blog

Only 5% of plastic waste generated by US last year was recycled, says Greenpeace

Americans discarded 51m tons of plastic in 2021 – of which almost 95% ended up in landfills, oceans, or scattered in the atmosphere

By Nina Lakhani The Guardian in New York

Only 5% of the mountains of plastic waste generated by US households last year was recycled, according to new research by Greenpeace.

Americans discarded 51m tons of wrappers, bottles, and bags in 2021 – about 309lb of plastic per person – of which almost 95% ended up in landfills, oceans, or scattered in the atmosphere in tiny toxic particles.

Plastic can take hundreds of years to break down – and we keep making more

The plastics problem is not just down to wanton consumerism or laziness – in fact, the situation would still be bad even if every household separated every piece of plastic and disposed of it in a dedicated recycling plant, according to Greenpeace.

Not a single type of plastic packaging in the US meets the definition of recyclable used by either the Federal Trade Commission or the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s new plastic economy initiative, the report found.

Even plastics long considered recyclable – bottles and jugs (PET #1 and HDPE #2) –fall far short of the 30% recycling rate needed to meet the definition of recyclable by the foundation. The reprocessing rate for the rest of the plastics used by millions of people every day to wrap leftovers, eat takeout or return unwanted online purchases is less than 5%.

The recycling sham will anger those who have spent time diligently washing out plastic containers and bottles, in the belief that they’d end up reprocessed and repurposed into another plastic package the world probably didn’t need.

“Corporations like Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé, and Unilever have worked with industry front groups to promote plastic recycling as the solution to plastic waste for decades. But the data is clear: practically speaking, most plastic is just not recyclable. The real solution is to switch to systems of reuse and refill,” said Lisa Ramsden, Greenpeace USA senior plastics campaigner.

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The report, Circular Claims Fall Flat Again, updates the 2020 survey of 370 recycling plants which found most plastics were not widely accepted, and even the bottles and jugs were not completely recycled or recyclable. Not much has changed, in fact, the official recycling rate in the US has fallen from a high of 9.5% in 2014 and 8.7% in 2018. At that time, the US, like many countries, exported millions of tons of plastic waste to China and counted it as recycled even though much of it was burned or dumped.

After China stopped accepting plastic waste in 2018 because it was basically garbage, too dirty to recycle, the shortfall in capacity was never recouped while plastic use kept rising.

Read the full story here

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Has Pa. turned a blind eye to the pollution potential of Shell’s giant ethane cracker?

The Shell facility opening soon has been granted a permit to emit more volatile organic compounds than the Clairton Coke Works, a notorious

*A view of Shell Chemical’s ethane cracker plant processing plant across the Allegheny River can be seen under construction on* Oct. 27, 2017, *in Monaca, Pennsylvania. Credit: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images*

By Jon Hurdle, Inside Climate News

Fifteen years after Pennsylvania’s natural gas industry began to raise worries about air and water pollution, the industry’s critics now fear a new source of harmful emissions from the fledgling petrochemical industry, which is poised to become a major customer for the state’s abundant gas reserves.

In a state that has long nurtured the extraction of oil, coal, and now gas, environmentalists warn that a vast new Shell plant on the banks of the Ohio River 30 miles north of Pittsburgh will add to air and water problems in a region that has endured decades of pollution from the steel and coal industries.

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The plant, which is expected to open before the end of 2022, will convert ethane, a form of natural gas, into ethylene, a building block for plastics. The operation will produce millions of tons of tiny plastic pellets called “nurdles” which opponents predict will leak into the Ohio River and beyond during shipment, and will contribute to a flood of plastics that are polluting the world’s oceans and clogging landfills.

After being lured to Pennsylvania with the promise of $1.6 billion in state tax credits, and being awarded a state air permit to issue more volatile organic compounds than that emitted by the Clairton Coke Works, a notorious local polluter, the “cracker” plant appears to be getting the same easy ride from state officials as the fracking industry did starting in the mid-2000s, critics say.

The Shell plant, in Monaca, will take ethane, a liquid hydrocarbon separated from fracked natural gas, and “crack” its molecules to make ethylene and polyethylene resin pellets called nurdles, which are melted down and turned into all things plastic, from bottles to car parts.

“We are seeing a lot of these things repeat themselves with the cracker, and with the specter of petrochemical development in the region,” said Alison Steele, executive director of the Environmental Health Project, a nonprofit that has been monitoring the health impacts of the region’s natural gas industry, and representing affected residents, since 2012.

Read the full story here

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EPA’s Environmental Justice Efforts Moving Beyond Regulatory Structures and Into Programming

From The National Law Review

As we move toward two full years of the Biden Administration, we can see the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) environmental justice (EJ) efforts move from the creation of new offices and guidance materials toward seeing EJ-focused changes occurring in EPA’s efforts to regulate the physical environment. Below, we highlight three recent EJ-focused changes.

EPA’s Creation of its Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights

On September 24, EPA announced the creation of a new office merging functions previously managed by three existing programs at the agency: the Office of Environmental Justice, External Civil Rights Compliance Office, and Conflict Prevention and Resolution Center. The office will eventually be headed by a Senate-confirmed assistant administrator and be staffed by approximately 200 full-time employees. At the time the office was announced, EPA Administrator Michael Regan noted the move will embed “environmental justice and civil rights into the DNA of EPA and ensuring that people who’ve struggled to have their concerns addressed see action to solve the problems they’ve been facing for generations.”

The EJ office will supervise various activities we have previously covered, including weighing in on EJ issues in the compliance and permitting space; working to develop the capacity of environmentally overburdened communities to meaningfully participate in environmental decision making; and supervising EJ-focused spending included in the Inflation Reduction Act.

EPA’s Office of Land and Emergency Management Finalizes its EJ Action Plan

On September 30, EPA’s Office of Land and Emergency Management (OLEM) finalized its EJ Action Plan. OLEM’s Action Plan builds out EPA’s EJ efforts related to land resources governed by statutes, including the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) and the Comprehensive Environmental Recovery and Cleanup Act (CERCLA). OLEM’s EJ Action Plan builds out principles in EPA’s overall Equity Action Plan, which we discussed here.

Key efforts outlined in the OLEM EJ Action Plan include focusing OLEM’s efforts on environmentally overburdened communities, building out EPA’s RCRA site data resources to allow comprehensive mapping of RCRA sites with the potential for EJ impacts, working to prioritize EJ concerns as part of site assessment, and targeting funding in this space to EJ-impacted communities.

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NJDEP schedules two new public sessions on inland flood rule, emergency or not.

By JON HURDLE, CONTRIBUTING WRITER, NJ Spotlight

Little more than a year after Tropical Storm Ida dumped record rains on much of New Jersey, the public is getting an opportunity to weigh in on a proposed new rule designed to protect inland areas from even bigger storms in the future.

The state Department of Environmental Protection scheduled two “engagement sessions” this week to hear comments on the proposed Inland Flood Protection Rule, released last week. The measure would raise building elevations in riverine areas — the height above the highest anticipated flood that a new building should be constructed — by two feet from current DEP flood maps, and by three feet from levels on maps by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The measure, which does not apply to existing structures, was first floated to business and environmental groups in May but prompted strong protests from the business community that said that making it more difficult to build in these areas would hurt builders and real estate agents.

‘I am assuming that they have abandoned the emergency rulemaking and are now proceeding with the normal rulemaking process. If so, we are thankful for this change of direction, and it removes many of our immediate concerns.’ — Ray Cantor, New Jersey Business and Industry Association

Critics also rejected DEP’s argument that the public faces “imminent peril” from flooding in inland areas, and it would be justified in implementing the rule on an emergency basis, without the public hearings and revisions that come with a regular rulemaking process.

The opposition led the state to drop its plans for emergency implementation in June, prompting protests from environmental groups who said the climate crisis demands an immediate response. They also noted that DEP was way behind schedule for publishing a rules overhaul called Protecting Against Climate Threats (NJPACT), which was launched by Gov. Phil Murphy in January 2020 and includes the measure on inland flooding.

No longer an emergency rule?

Now, the DEP appears to have dropped its plans for an emergency rule, and it said nothing about “imminent peril” in a press release announcing the virtual public hearings, suggesting that the measure will be conducted as a regular rulemaking. DEP spokesman Larry Hajna declined to say whether the rule is now subject to the longer rulemaking process.

Next week, the DEP will hold separate, invitation-only sessions on the new plan for developers and labor organizations; environmental groups; legislators and staff; and municipal and county officials, engineers and planners. The first three meetings, all online, are scheduled for Oct. 24; the fourth will be on Oct. 25.

Read the full story here

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Newspapers with a partisan aim filling the void of traditional media

As independent local papers collapse, a new industry is being fueled by ideological donors seeking to further political agendas

By Michael Scherer, The Washington Post

Pennsylvania’s most widely circulated newspaper showed up, without fanfare or explanation, in the mailboxes of about 1 in every 5 households in the state this April.

A 12-page tabloid with a circulation of 953,000, it has arrived every month since, with articles from the Associated Press, crosswords, recipes, and useful updates on which nearby towns had the lowest gas prices. But nowhere in its pages does it disclose its true mission.

The Pennsylvania Independent is, in fact, a new sort of political-journalism hybrid becoming more popular on the left — just one part of a quiet four-state, $28 million election-year effort by the liberal-leaning American Independent Foundation and partner groups aimed at swaying voters in the midterm elections.

Only the articles offer a clue of the underlying intent: A piece in the October issue described the opposition to “any gun safety measures” by “New Jersey resident” Mehmet Oz, the Republican candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania. Other stories detailed President Biden’s domestic manufacturing initiative, Republican denials of the 2020 election results and a proposal for a national abortion ban by Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.).

Read the full story here

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Warming waters force Alaska to cancel snow crab season for first time

By Andrew Jeong, The Washington Post

Alaska will cancel the upcoming winter snow crab season in the Bering Sea for the first time, and bar fishers from catching king crabs in the Bristol Bay for a second consecutive year, because of a sharp decline in their estimated population.

This week’s announcements by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game deal a severe blow to fishers who make a living off the crabs. They also bring back to the forefront questions about the role of climate change in the rapid decline of the snow crab population: The number of juvenile snow crabs was at record highs just a few years ago, before some 90 percent of snow crabs mysteriously disappeared ahead of last season.

Alaskan officials said they had consulted carefully with stakeholders before canceling the season. They said they were aware of the impact of the closures on “harvesters, industry and communities” but that they had to balance economic needs with conservation.

“These are truly unprecedented and troubling times for Alaska’s iconic crab fisheries,” Jamie Goen, executive director of the Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers, a trade association that says it represents some 70 percent of local crab harvesters, said in a statement. “Second and third generation crab-fishing families will go out of business due to the lack of meaningful protections by decision-makers to help crab stocks recover.”

Read the full story

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