U.S. plastic waste much more than thought
WASHINGTON — The United States is a much larger contributor to the plastic waste choking the world's oceans than previously understood, a new study tracking the flow of plastic through the nation's trash system shows.
Scientists from institutions including the University of Georgia and the Sea Education Association estimate up to 1.5 million metric tons of U.S. plastic waste is ending up in oceans each year due to mishandling and littering, a more than 13-fold increase from what was estimated in a seminal paper on the topic published in 2015.
The new study, published Friday in the journal Science Advances, puts the United States at the forefront of an international crisis that largely has been pinned on China and other nations in Southeast Asia, which lack the modern waste management systems in North America and Europe.
“It's a significant increase over what we've seen before,” said Jenna Jambeck, an engineering professor at the University of Georgia, who co-authored both the 2015 study and the one published Friday. “All countries have some mismanaged waste, and the U.S. says we have zero. So, for this study, we really wanted to try and dig deeper.”
For the study, scientists examined data on American municipal trash systems and landfills, finding the EPA data on which they previously had relied failed to adequately account for littering, illegal dumping and the exporting of trash to nations with poor waste management practices.
Once in the ocean, plastics break down into minus
cule particles that slowly poison fish and other marine life that ingest it. In response, the plastic industry, manufacturers and governments worldwide are moving to reduce the amount of plastic waste flowing into oceans.
Earlier this month, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler called plastic waste a “top priority,” and announced a series of moves domestically and abroad to increase recycling infrastructure and remove existing waste from the ocean.
“If we are going to solve this, we are going to have to address it in Asia,” he said.
In the 2015 study, China, Indonesia, the Philippines
and Vietnam were reported to be responsible for more than 50 percent of the plastic waste mismanaged each year, with the United States responsible for at most 1 percent, putting the nation 20th in the world.
Under the new estimate, the United States, which consumers more plastic than any nation in the world, would rank only behind China and Indonesia. However, the scientists did not employ the tougher analysis they used on the United States across other nation's waste data, negating such comparisons.
“There's no way we could possibly do that for the rest of the countries around the world,” said Ka
ra Lavender Law, a co-author and investigator with the Sea Education Association, an ocean research group in Massachusetts. “The data is just too sparse in other countries.”
Plastics companies and manufacturers including LyondellBasell, Exxon Mobil and Dow have committed to spending $1.5 billion to overhauling the world's plastic recycling system, which only processes a small fraction of the plastic waste produced each year.
In a report last month, the industry-funded Alliance to End Plastic Waste reported its members so far had spent $400 million on the effort, with a focus on projects in southeast Asia, Africa and India, which the
alliance called “the frontline of the plastic waste challenge.”
Joshua Baca, vice president for plastics at the trade group American Chemistry Council, cited the billions of dollars the industry is investing in new technologies and other measures to address the problem.
The industry also has urged policies to require new products and packaging to contain recycled materials, he told the Associated Press.
Environmentalists and some scientists are skeptical that recycling will solve the problem since new or virgin plastic is cheaper than recycled plastic. In Europe and some U.S. cities, governments are taking
more drastic measures, banning single-use plastics, such as bags, packaging and straws — measures the Trump administration has resisted.
“The science has made it abundantly clear that the sheer magnitude of plastic entering our ocean can't possibly be countered through recycling and cleanups alone,” said Nick Mallos, a co-author on the study and senior director at the Ocean Conservancy, an environmental group. “Reduction has to be part of the solution, and the administration's strategy is silent on this front.”