(605c) Legal Drivers for Waste Plastic Law and Regulation

Environmental law and policy are designed to mitigate the harmful effects of pollution. Yet, plastic generally tends to fall outside the scope of stringent environmental regulation, depriving entities producing or distributing plastic from specific critical incentives that could best support their development of meaningful sustainable approaches. Familiar approaches to designing environmental law and policy is not specifically designed to address persistent synthetic materials such as the current suite of synthetic commercial plastics distributed in the market today. Environmental programs generally focus on addressing pollution by mitigating exposure to chemicals that pose a threat of acute and chronic toxicity including carcinogenicity. The synthetic macro and microplastics in our environment, while likely leaching some chemical pollutants, have observably caused harm through their persistence in the environment resulting from their inert nature. Through their characteristics of fracturing into smaller and smaller particles while not dissolving, reacting or degrading, synthetic plastics may result in significant acute and chronic harm from physical obstruction of biological processes, whether as macro, micro or nanoparticles. This harm is generally not mitigated through conventional environmental regulation focusing on mitigating chemical toxicity. Ongoing research that better defines this harm, and provides reproducible parameters, metrics and nomenclature for such harm, will support the development of new approaches to mitigating such harm. These new approaches can support better application of existing law and policy, while also informing development of more tailored authority to address this type of environmental pollutant. These new approaches also support litigation and other methods of distributing the burden of risk and harm better defined from this research once the harm can be quantified. This presentation will summarize the current status of global policy approaches, including the United States, and how both ongoing efforts to qualify and quantify harm, and these new legal and policy measures, serve to provide significant incentive for all plastic dependent industry sectors to seek more aggressive approaches to keeping plastic out of the environment.