Industry backs plastic recycling fee (and dividend) ? CCL backing?

Some of the
world’s largest product
manufacturers and
petrochemical companies,
including the likes of Exxon
Mobil and LyondellBasell, are
in discussions with Democrats
and Republicans in Congress
about the creation of a federal
fee on packaging materials to
fund the expansion of recycling
infrastructure.
With plastic waste building up
on land and at sea, threatening
wildlife and human health, such
a policy has the potential to
improve the United States’ low
recycling rate and bring the
nation in line with policies in
place in Europe and being
developed in states including
California and Maine.
Negotiations are in the early phases, but large lobbying groups including the American Chemistry Council,
which represents petrochemical interests along the Gulf Coast, say they are generally supportive of what is
known as an extended producer responsibility policy at the national level.
“The recycling system must be improved and modernized,” said Ross Eisenberg, president of America’s
Plastic Makers, a division of the chemistry council whose membership includes BASF, Chevron Phillips
Chemical and Dow. “America’s Plastic Makers are ready and willing to engage in a needed conversation
around extended producer responsibility.”
Under such a system, product manufacturers such as Coca-Cola or Procter & Gamble would theoretically
pay a fee based on how much packaging they sell and the toll that packaging takes on the environment.
Those fees then would be collected by an independent nonprofit charged with meeting specific recycling
Staff file photo
Plastic and other waste is visible along Buffalo Bayou in downtown Houston. The petrochemical industry is lining up
behind a bipartisan effort to establish a federal fee on packaging materials.
goals and distributed to municipal waste systems around the country to expand recycling infrastructure.
The idea comes after years of failed efforts to improve the nation’s recycling system, which according to
EPA only recycles 9% of the plastic waste generated each year — compared to almost 40% in the European
Union.
At a hearing in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee last week, H. Fisk Johnson, CEO of
S.C. Johnson, which manufactures products including Windex and Mrs. Meyer’s soap, said federal
recycling regulation was necessary to achieve the scale necessary to meaningfully improve recycling rates.
“For all our company’s work and ambition I can’t say I feel good about the progress we’ve made,” he said.
“Voluntary actions only go so far.It takes everyone in the plastic ecosystem working collectively together.”
Whether other brand-name manufacturers such as Coca-Cola, Pepsico and Procter & Gamble would go
along with a federal recycling fee remains to be seen. The companies did not respond to request for
comment. But Coca-Cola, along with Unilever, Nestle and Walmart, supported the mandated recycling
system created in Colorado.
And with six more states in discussions around creating their own packaging recycling mandates, each with
their own rules and complexities, companies are likely to unify around the value of a federal system, said
Dylan de Thomas, vice president of public policy at the Recycling Partnership, a nonprofit that partners
with companies and retailers to improve U.S. recycling.
“Ten years ago you would have been hard pressed to find any company being OK with this, and now it’s a
regular talking point with plastic companies and brands,” he said. “Some brands that know that (mandated
recycling systems) are a way to meet their sustainability goals, while there are others that just see it as a
cost. It’s evolving.”
For petrochemical companies, a federally mandated recycling system is a means to make sustainable a
plastics sector that has come under increasing fire from activists over the past decade.
If plastic was more readily recycled, it might offset calls for a curb on plastic production, now under
discussion at the United Nations. Plenty of details remain to be figured out, and doing so in a way that
satisfies plastics producers, manufacturers and environmentalists is likely to be a long negotiation.
LyondellBasell, for instance, said in a statement it supported a federal recycling system under conditions
including that the fees collected should be invested in recycling as opposed to “unrelated government
programs” and the system should “be funded and directed by the private sector.”
At the senate hearing last week, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.V. ranking member of the environment
committee, cautioned that any recycling system should not only improve recycling rates but “provide new
opportunities economically.”
“I have yet to see a proposal that addresses all these concerns,” she said. “Like any complex issue its easy
to sit here and list out all the problems but its very very difficult to start finding realistic solutions.”
Still, momentum around a federal recycling system continues to grow in Congress, with members on both
sides of the aisle agreeing to sit down and discuss the possibility, said Erin Simon, a vice president at the
World Wildlife Fund.
“It looks like it could be more possible than it ever has before,” she said. “Companies are starting to realize
no amount of investment that is going to solve this and they needed to start working closer with
government. That’s a huge shift for American companies. They historically have not been supportive.”