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8 The Rising Tide against Plastic Waste: Unpacking Industry Attempts to Influence the Debate Jennifer Clapp The recently discovered plastic “blob,” a continent-size patch of garbage composed mainly of plastic waste floating in the Pacific Ocean, is a wakeup call for our modern consumptive society. It highlights the fact that much of the world’s discarded plastic is not actually reused or recycled. Rather, it ends up as waste: disposed of in landfills, swirling in the ocean and other waterways, caught in trees, and littering roadsides. Plastics do not break down readily in the environment. The persistent presence of plastic waste in our surroundings, from local communities to the global commons, is a stark reminder of the growing ecological impact of our consumption and waste. As environmental awareness has grown, people around the world have increasingly questioned the ubiquitous use of plastic, particularly as a packaging material to be readily discarded without much thought as to its final resting place. Initiatives have emerged in multiple locations to tax, ban, or otherwise regulate the use of certain types of plastic packaging, most prominently plastic bags and bottles. These regulatory changes regarding plastic in different communities, ranging from municipal- to state- to national-level measures, signal that small steps can add up to a larger shift in attitudes and practices concerning a specific type of waste. The change in norms has been both rapid and globally significant. But as regulatory initiatives spring up worldwide in response to the shifting public sentiment, representatives of the plastics industry have resisted these measures. In this chapter, I examine the shift in norms and attitudes toward plastics along with the role of the plastics industry in resisting regulation that has emerged in response to new norms. I argue that as an antiplastic norm and associated regulatory measures have arisen, industry actors have actively resisted them, using several strategies. First, they have taken up a discursive campaign in the public domain in an attempt to assert that plastics are the most environmentally sound packaging choice. Second, 200 Jennifer Clapp they have acted to both lobby and litigate within communities seeking plastics regulation in an effort to impose a form of “regulatory chill.”The idea of a regulatory chill was originally identified in reference to countries failing to raise environmental standards for fear that investors would leave for other jurisdictions (see Neumayer 2001). The failure of communities to enact legislation on local environmental problems for fear of litigation represents a similar dynamic of industry influence on public environmental policy. Undergirding the plastics industry’s specific strategies on plastic bags and bottles has been its firm belief in the rights and responsibilities of individual consumers. The right to choose a product and responsibility to properly dispose of its packaging, in industry’s view, belongs with the individual consumer. Adherence to this principle is in line with the “individualization of responsibility”—a particular strand of environmentalism predominant in mainstream North America that sees both the problem and solution to environmental issues as being in the hands of individual consumers, rather than the producer or society as a whole (Maniates 2001, 33). This approach leaves little room for collective attempts to address environmental problems through, for example, regulation on the sale and distribution of plastics. Although industry has actively pursued its strategies to resist the regulation of plastic packaging over the past decade, the outcomes have thus far been highly uneven. Communities Take Action on Plastic Waste Within a short period of time, it has become increasingly socially unacceptable to use disposable plastic shopping bags, and in a growing number of places around the world it is now illegal to distribute them for free. Legislation is also restricting the purchase of plastic water bottles in many communities. A number of problems have been associated with plastic packaging waste, ranging from environmental degradation to concerns related to the potential health impacts of exposure to plastics. These issues have contributed to an emergent shift in people’s views regarding the usefulness of plastic packaging. An interesting element of this shift in norms is that it emerged first in the Global South, challenging the widely held perception that developed nations are generally environmental leaders . As early as 1992, for example, citizens protested for tighter regulation of plastic bags in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Today, a growing number of communities in the Global North are seeing similar kinds of citizen engagement on this issue. This change in attitudes has emerged not as [18.117.182.179...

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