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Bold but Implausible Plan Pinpoints U.S. Role in Global Ocean Plastic Waste

Americans, we are told, generate more plastic waste both by weight and per person than any other country—42 million metric tons (MMT) yearly—or 287 pounds per man, woman, and child, at least as of 2016.

Ben Miyares

That is more than the 30 MMT/120 pounds per person of plastic waste spewed out by the 27 European Union countries and way more than India (26 MMT/43 pounds per person) or China (22 MMT/35 pounds per person), the next two highest national plastic waste generators, according to a pre-publication report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NAS).

If current practices continue, the weight of plastics discharged globally into the ocean could reach up to 53 MMT per year by 2030, “roughly half of the total weight of fish caught from the ocean annually,” says the NAS’s Committee on the United States Contributions to Global Ocean Plastic Waste, which wrote the bold but implausible report, due out this Spring.

Key elements of the NAS Committee plan call for the U.S. to:
• Substantially cut solid waste generation to reduce plastic waste in the environment and lower the environmental, economic, aesthetic, and health costs of managing waste and litter.

• Conduct a scientifically designed national marine debris shoreline survey every five years.

• Establish new or enhance existing National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) plastic pollution monitoring programs.

• Create a federal research and policy strategy that focuses on identifying, implementing, and assessing equitable and effective interventions across the entire plastic life cycle to reduce U.S. contribution of plastic waste to the environment, including the ocean.

The NAS calls for the strategy to be developed by December 31, 2022. But, in view of the number of ocean plastic waste “knowledge gaps” the report writers identify, that deadline comes too soon. Those knowledge gaps include:

• Limited access to transparent data on plastic production, which the report considers “a significant barrier to understanding the amounts and trends in quantities and types of plastic resins.” The committee admits it doesn’t know “just how much plastic is produced in the U.S. and how much is used for packaging. Still, it reports, “compared to other packaging materials, such as glass, plastic packaging uses less material, due to its strength, and less energy during transport, due to its lightweight nature.”

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