Voters Head to the Polls in a World Full of Plastic Pollution. What’s at Stake This Year?

Polling shows environmental issues are far from the top of voters’ minds this year, and the global plastics crisis rarely gets a mention—unless it’s to defend plastic straws.

Nevertheless, the presidential election on Nov. 5 will likely affect U.S. policy on plastic production and waste management. And though political observers expect continued congressional gridlock after the election, control of the House and Senate is up for grabs, which could have consequences for plastics politics if not policy.

With voters already casting early ballots, here’s the backdrop: Research from across the globe tells us that plastic, despite its widespread use in the global economy, causes illness and death all along its lifecycle, from production to use and disposal. 

Made from fossil fuels, plastic causes toxic and climate-harming pollution when oil and gas is produced, transported and made into products at petrochemical plants. Toxic chemicals leak from plastic film and containers into food. Massive amounts of plastic waste get dumped into the environment, where it ends up in waterways and oceans and threatens marine life; the rest is piling up at landfills or incinerated, resulting in more toxic air pollutants. 

Plastic in the environment also breaks down into micro- and nano-plastics. Those find their way into the human body, likely carrying toxic chemicals that dangerously mimic hormones.

As plastic production globally soars, the threat has reached ubiquitous proportions, prompting the United Nations Environment Programme two years ago to start negotiations on a global plastics treaty. Whether the more than 170 nations working to reach an agreement by their goal of December will do so remains uncertain. A final negotiating session is set for Nov. 25 to Dec. 1 in Busan, Korea.

But regardless of where treaty talks stand when a new president takes office in January, the next administration will have a say in whatever follows —either continued negotiations or implementing an agreement at home in the United States. 

There are also two major competing bills in Congress. One is backed by the chemical industry, the other by environmental advocates, and either could dramatically reshape U.S. plastic policy. That’s if a new Congress could somehow shake its dysfunction and Republicans and Democrats hammer out a deal.

“This is a growing problem, and we need our elected leaders on the national level, the president and Congress, to take action to reduce the production of unnecessary single-use plastics,” said Christy Leavitt, plastics campaign director for the environmental group Oceana, a nonprofit that doesn’t make political endorsements. “And we shouldn’t miss the opportunity to act quickly.”

The chemical industry is fighting against limits on plastic production while advocating for laws to better manage plastic waste and encourage chemical processes it calls “advanced recycling.”

“No matter which party controls the House, Senate, or White House, we are committed to providing constructive solutions that enable plastics circularity, beginning at the design of plastic products through to recycling,” Ross Eisenberg, president of America’s Plastic Makers, said in a written statement. The plastics industry lobby group is part of the American Chemistry Council. 

Eisenberg defines a circular economy as one where “plastics are reused and remade instead of being discarded.”

Harris, Trump Have Different World Views

Neither former President Donald Trump, the Republican Party nominee, nor Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party nominee, have talked much in their campaigns about the plastics crisis, if at all. Neither returned requests for comment for this story. But there are strong indicators of how each might respond to concerns about plastic.

Trump, for example, has been known to complain about how Democrats want to “ban plastic straws,” a position Harris once thought might be a good idea but has since rejected.

Still, Trump’s supporters at Fox News have tried to turn Harris’ previous concern about plastic straws into a liability, and the official Trump 2024 campaign store sells red plastic straws adorned with his name on them.

Plastic straws became a global symbol of single-use plastics’ damage to ocean life after a 2015 video, now with 110 million views on YouTube, of a bloodied sea turtle with a plastic straw through its nostril went viral. That sparked some cities, the state of California and some companies to ban or restrict the use of plastic straws.

Harris, while representing California in the Senate, was a co-sponsor of the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act, which amounts to a catch-all of measures supported by Democrats and some environmental advocates to fight plastic pollution. The legislation has failed to gain traction in a sharply and narrowly divided Senate.

The two candidates also hold strikingly different views of foreign policy and global treaties, which could dramatically affect U.S. participation in any plastics agreement, said Brett Hartl, chief political strategist for the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund. 

Referring to Trump, Hartl said that “having one candidate that has gone out of his way to trash every single type of international agreement he can think of would not bode well for our participation in those negotiations.”

When he was president, Trump, who advocates for what he calls an “America first” agenda, pulled the United States out of the 2015 Paris climate agreement. That UN accord focused on reducing the greenhouse gas emissions causing global warming. It also aimed to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change. 

He also withdrew the U.S. from the UN’s cultural body UNESCO and has been sharply critical of NATO, the political and military alliance of countries from Europe and North America.

Harris supports U.S. leadership in global affairs. Environmental advocates, however, have wanted the administration of President Joe Biden, and Harris, to fight harder for a strong plastics treaty, including limits on plastic production.

A strong treaty would be legally binding on the countries that participate, Oceana’s Leavitt said. It would also reduce plastic production and prevent reliance on what she and many other advocates warn are “false solutions,” such as “advanced” or “chemical” recycling. 

And, she added, bans and reductions on single-use plastic products are needed. Those include products like bags, wrappers, cups, food and beverage containers, cutlery, plates and straws that get used once and are tossed. 

The U.S., which produces more oil than any country in history and is the leading natural gas exporter, until recently has sided with other leading oil and gas-producing countries that openly resisted caps on plastic production.

The U.S. Department of State has recently signaled that it will accept limits on plastic production, without offering public details.

U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon, described the choice between Harris and Trump as “stark” by recalling the time Trump called oil and gas executives to his Florida home in April and asked them for $1 billion.

“Trump took oil and gas executives to Mar-A-Largo and asked them to invest in his campaign and promised that in return he would reward them,” Merkley, a lead sponsor of the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act, said in a written statement. “A Harris Administration holds the potential to restore American leadership to lead by example and propel global action to solve this crisis.” 

Hartl said it’s worth pointing out that Harris was part of an administration that returned the United States to the Paris Agreement and has had a strong record on the environment as a senator and as California’s attorney general, taking on oil companies over pollution.

“What matters is the people who surround the president,” Hartl said. 

Trump put representatives of the fossil fuel industry in leadership roles during his administration.

“The staffing would look dramatically different” with Harris, he said. “I’d expect she would put in people who have an interest in holding polluters accountable, ensuring environmental justice and addressing climate and plastics, which are related.”

Whose View of “Advanced Recycling” Will Win Out?

One of the most contentious debates over plastics policy has to do with the role of what the industry calls “advanced recycling,” an umbrella term used to describe various “chemical recycling” processes that seek to turn waste plastic into feedstocks for new plastics. Depending on the method, it can produce hazardous waste, toxic air emissions and greenhouse gases, and very little waste plastic gets turned into new plastic.

Trump, during his administration, lent support to chemical recycling. The Biden-Harris administration has adopted policies that discourage it.

Last year, for example, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reversed a Trump EPA proposal to relax clean-air regulations for two chemical recycling technologies, pyrolysis and gasification, in a move welcomed by environmental advocates.

In September, California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, filed a lawsuit against ExxonMobil that cited internal company documents claiming no more than 8 percent of the plastic waste that the company accepts into its Texas pyrolysis-based chemical recycling facility becomes new plastic feedstocks. The rest largely gets burned as fuel, releasing more heat-trapping pollution, the lawsuit claims.

“I can say with confidence that none of us voted for more plastic, yet plastic production is estimated to triple from 2025 to 2050.”

— Judith Enck, Beyond Plastics founder and president

The EPA concluded last year in its draft national strategy to prevent plastic pollution that converting “solid waste to fuels, fuel ingredients, or energy” should not be considered a recycling practice.

“The stakes couldn’t be higher,” said Judith Enck, founder and president of the environmental nonprofit Beyond Plastics, and a former EPA regional administrator. Her group dubbed chemical recycling “a dangerous deception” in a 2023 report and has offered 27 ideas for the next president, including a national moratorium on the construction of new chemical recycling facilities. 

“I can say with confidence that none of us voted for more plastic, yet plastic production is estimated to triple from 2025 to 2050,” Enck said. “There are things the federal government can do to address this surge of plastic production. But there has been a profound absence of effective action at the federal level to deal with the growing problem of plastics.”

In Congress, a Battle of the Plastics Bills

Most action on plastics policy has been at the state level. Several, including California, Minnesota and Colorado, passed what has been called “extended producer responsibility laws.” 

While critics like Enck have warned that the California law has loopholes that could render it ineffective, it is so far the most ambitious. Among its provisions, the law requires certain types of packaging in the state to be recyclable or compostable by 2032. It cuts plastic packaging by 25 percent in 10 years and requires 65 percent of all single-use plastic packaging to be recycled in the same timeframe.

Congress, however, has so far been slow to meaningfully act.

Congress passed “Save Our Seas 2.0” and Trump signed it into law in 2020 but with no budget. It sought to boost research, international cooperation and ocean cleanup capacity and offer new grants for waste management and recycling equipment.

The plastics and petrochemical industries in 2021 welcomed $350 million for recycling and plastic waste management that was included in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, a substantial portion of it belatedly funding Save Our Seas 2.0. However, there was broad agreement from industry representatives and environmental advocates alike that the spending would not do nearly enough to solve the United States’ contribution to a global crisis of plastics waste.

The most comprehensive current bill is the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act, sponsored by Merkley and U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman, a California Democrat.

It would require companies that make plastic and use plastic packaging to be responsible for managing plastic waste. The bill would also mandate fewer single-use plastics and ban those that are not recyclable; place a moratorium on new plastic production facilities; restrict chemical recycling; and block certain toxic chemicals from beverage containers and plastic that has been used by consumers and recycled into new products, among other provisions.

“Plastic pollution is a global crisis that requires global action,” Merkley said. “The United States can and must lead the world in addressing the many threats posed by plastics—from harmful greenhouse gases emitted during its production that damage our environment to plastic trash choking our wildlife and waterways to microplastics leaching toxins into our food, water, and blood.”

Enck considers the Break Free From Plastics Act “too skimpy.” It lacks specific requirements for less plastic production, she said, adding that it needs to be more explicit about reducing toxic chemicals and banning chemical recycling.

For its part, the American Chemistry Council (ACC) considers the bill to be far too broad and onerous. The lobbying group said the legislation would raise costs on consumers, risk jobs and affect numerous sectors of the economy, including health care and transportation. 

The bill “is wholly partisan” and an “impractical anti-plastic wish list,” said the ACC’s Andrea Albersheim in a written statement.

The ACC is backing a bill that was introduced in September by Reps. Larry Bucshon, a Republican from Indiana, and Don Davis, a North Carolina Democrat, called the Accelerating a Circular Economy for Plastics and Recycling Innovation Act. It would set a 30 percent recycled content standard for plastic packaging by 2030, give a boost to chemical recycling by defining it as manufacturing, set up a third-party “mass balance” auditing system for tracking the effectiveness of chemical recycling and require a national study on the relative greenhouse gas contributions from plastic and other materials.

The Bonta lawsuit describes such third-party auditing methods as being in “the imaginary realm.” They divorce the need for end products to reflect the actual amount of physical waste plastic contained in them, the attorney general’s lawsuit claims.

Albersheim described the bill as “the first comprehensive bipartisan effort in years to tackle plastic pollution in the United States. In a divided Congress, it has the potential to pass and fundamentally transform how we make and remake plastics to better conserve and protect our natural resources and the environment,” she said.

But regardless of which party controls the House of Representatives or the Senate, neither Republicans nor Democrats are likely to control the 60 of 100 Senate seats generally needed to pass major legislation.

On a subject like plastic, that could well mean another two years of inaction.

“Each side has a very different view as to what the right solutions are in terms of how to deal with the crisis,” Hartl said.