Plastic Product Stewardship: Who is Responsible for Ocean Plastics and Plastic Recycling Failures?

February 15, 2021

Walking along Aliso Creek Beach in Laguna Beach for sunset on Valentine’s Day, I was saddened by the volume of single-use plastic trash left scattered on the beach post holiday picnics. It was slightly worse than MLK Day. The morning previous I pulled out heaps of plastic bags from Naples in Long Beach while paddling its canals.  As a systems-thinking beach cleanup host, I spend a lot of time pondering how to prevent ocean plastics, mostly via incentivizing blue innovation and behavior change. Trashing beaches on the day of love is a clear indicator that many Southern Californian plastic consumers aren’t plastic product stewards. Technically, plastic manufacturers should be responsible for product stewardship. But is anyone holding them accountable for where their waste ends up? The answer is no.

Of the 300 million tons of nearly indestructible plastic produced each year on the planet, 9 million tons end up as waste in the oceans and beaches—and the number continues to grow. By 2050 projections show there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish. This imposes a large cost to economies and degradation of marine ecosystems. The brands responsible are tallied by the labels found floating in gyres or scattered on beaches, Coca Cola being the primary plastic polluter.

The United Nations considers single use plastics a planetary crisis. Like cigarettes, there should be warning signs on the label of plastic containers that indicate its mortality and toxicity to marine life if the product is not disposed of properly. Unfortunately, there is no such warning for consumers. To the defense of Coca Cola, they insist their products are designed to be fully recycled, and they plan to use 50% recycled plastic material by 2030. But are plastic manufacturers monitoring or studying the recycling behavior of their product consumers? They are not. The far majority to do not recycle. According to NPR, since the 1970s the plastics industry has backed recycling programs to buttress its public image.

Coca Cola and other plastic beverage companies have gotten away with shifting the recycling responsibility to the consumer—even if the region lacks recycling infrastructure to handle recyclables. Lower-income countries, primarily in Southeast Asia, are now overwhelmed by the volume of plastic waste from imports. Sailing through Vanuatu and Solomon Islands, I could find Coca Cola plastic bottles in shop shelves of the most primitive communities and littered on their beaches. There was definitely no recycling options there. Coca Cola is presently running a pilot project in Atlanta to deepen recycling infrastructure. I appreciate the effort, but who is going to engage the rest of the planet in a paradigm shift to view plastic bottles as a resource instead of waste? Who is responsible for getting the plastics industry more involved in the end-of-life disposition of their products? No one.

Plastic recycling is *broken* and a failure across America and the entire planet. In developed countries that offer recycling collection, few consumers realize that China no longer accepts and recycles the world’s plastic. Even if you put your plastics in the recycling bin, that doesn’t mean it will get recycled. Less than 9% of plastics gets recycled—mostly downcycled into lower grade plastic products. China’s National Sword policy, enacted in January 2018, banned the import of most plastics and other materials headed for that nation’s recycling processors, which had handled nearly half of the world’s recyclable waste for the past quarter century. The move was an effort to halt a deluge of soiled and contaminated materials that was overwhelming Chinese processing facilities and leaving the country with yet another environmental problem—and this one not of its own making.

Now that the collect-sort-export model no longer works, what are the primary plastic polluters (Coca Cola, Nestle, Pepsi) doing about it? A group of plastic industry and trade groups sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on April 16, 2020 asking Congress to allocate $1 billion to municipal and state recycling infrastructure in the next pandemic stimulus bill. Of all the businesses that don’t need stimulus assistance and should be paying for the recycling infrastructure on the planet—its the plastic industry. Shifting responsibility to governments, taxpayers, and consumers isn’t effective, nor is it helping the ocean.

Despite the broken-ness of plastic disposal, there are positive solutions beginning to tackle the sea of plastic waste. I appreciate the wildlife-friendly ocean cleanup devices being used to absorb waste in harbors and at river mouths to prevent ocean plastic. Britain is planning to tax manufacturers of plastic packaging with less than 30 percent recycled materials. And Norway recently adopted a system in which makers of single-use plastic bottles pay an “environmental levy” that declines as the return rate for their products rises. The bottles must be designed for easy recycling, with no toxic additives, only clear or blue color, and water-soluble labels.

Ultimately the true solution to ocean plastic isn’t relying on cleanup or taxing. The prevention of ocean plastic requires an entire planetary paradigm shift from a make-use-disposal culture to a make-reuse-repurpose-recycle culture. Plastics should be labeled as detrimental to the ocean health. Manufacturers should be held accountable for product stewardship, social-environmental governance of their products life cycle, educating their consumers, and not selling recyclable products in places with no recycling infrastructure.  We certainly have a long way to go, but for the sake of ocean health, I hope we can get there sooner than later.