What would a Harris presidency mean for the plastics crisis?

Among the reasons Republicans think Vice President Kamala Harris is unfit for the country’s highest office: She “wants to get rid of plastic straws.” 

That’s according to Jason Miller, a senior adviser to former president Donald Trump’s reelection campaign. On the day that President Joe Biden dropped his bid for reelection and endorsed Harris, Miller told NBC that Harris’ comments on plastic were part of the “radical record” she developed as a prosecutor and attorney general in California. The far-right Fox News commentator Sean Hannity weighed in on Harris’ record separately, telling viewers: “I love my plastic straw; I hate those paper straws.”

It’s unsurprising rhetoric, given the contemporary conservative movement’s tendency to conflate environmental pollution and personal freedom. But the plastic pollution crisis is no joke — every year, more than 460 million metric tons of plastic are produced globally, and just about 9 percent of it is recycled. The rest festers in landfills, emits toxic chemicals into the air when incinerated, and strangles aquatic life when it escapes into the world’s rivers, lakes, and coastal waters.

Meanwhile, recent polls show that Americans overwhelmingly want government action to address the problem. According to a recent survey from the nonprofit Oceana, three-fourths of registered voters support national policies that reduce single-use plastics; other surveys show even stronger support for reducing plastic production overall.

So what would a Harris presidency mean for plastics?

Harris’ track record on the subject is sparse, but experts say her background as California’s attorney general, combined with her record in the Senate and comments she made as a 2020 presidential candidate, augur well. If nothing else, Harris could build on progress achieved under the Biden administration, like a recently announced strategy to eliminate single-use plastics from federal operations. 

“There are not a lot of data points,” said Sam Pearse, plastics campaign manager for The Story of Stuff Project, a nonprofit that advocates against plastic pollution. “But she has both the know-how and credentials to challenge plastic pollution as president, and hold polluters to a higher standard.”

Here’s what we do know about Harris’ views on plastics. She did say, in a 2019 interview with CNN, that the U.S. should ban single-use plastic straws. (She joked about the need for “innovation” to make better alternatives than paper-based straws that tend to wilt when wet.) But that wasn’t exactly a groundbreaking policy position; in 2019, support for plastic straw bans functioned mainly as a culture wars flashpoint for presidential candidates. Plastic straws make up just 0.25 percent of the estimated 8 million metric tons of plastic that end up in the world’s oceans each year.

More significant was her co-sponsorship, along with four other Democratic senators, of the federal Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act of 2020. This far-reaching Democratic bill would have phased out a whole host of unnecessary single-use plastic products — yes, including straws — as well as created incentives for recycling beverage containers, held companies financially responsible for the plastic trash they generate, and placed a temporary pause on new or expanded plastic manufacturing facilities pending a comprehensive environmental review. That bill, as well as subsequent versions introduced in 2021 and 2023, never got a floor vote in the House or Senate, but environmental groups think it helped drum up awareness among the public and legislators about the kinds of systemic interventions needed to address the plastic pollution problem.

“To have her support as a sponsor is a huge signal that she believes in addressing this problem from a life cycle perspective,” said Julie Teel Simmonds, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund, a group that advocates for political candidates who will prioritize environmental issues. The term “life cycle” refers to all stages of plastic production, use, and disposal, in contrast to a perspective favored by industry groups that focuses mostly on reducing plastic litter.

Other environmental advocates said Harris’ track record as California’s attorney general could indicate a willingness to take on big plastic polluters. In 2011, Harris sued water bottle companies for claiming that their plastic bottles were “100 percent compostable and recyclable.” She also sued BP, ConocoPhillips, and Phillips 66 — companies whose fossil fuels are used to make plastic — for environmental violations, and oversaw an investigation into Exxon Mobil’s alleged efforts to lie to the public about the risks it faced from climate change. 

None of this means that plastics (and the petrochemicals used to make them) will be a top priority for a potential Harris administration. Historically, action on plastics has tended to fall low on Democrats’ political agenda, even compared to other environmental problems. But the plastic pollution crisis has become much more visible over the past few years, in part due to United Nations negotiations over a treaty to “end plastic pollution.” Those negotiations are set to conclude by the end of the year, though further discussions around implementation could continue long after then.

The Biden-Harris administration has also ramped up the U.S.’s efforts to address the plastic pollution crisis, including most recently by announcing a target to phase out government procurement of single-use plastics from all federal operations by 2035. An interagency plastics policy committee set up by the Biden-Harris administration has also begun to acknowledge and address environmental justice issues caused by plastic production facilities, which tend to be sited near poor communities of color. A former White House staffer told Grist that Harris’ office has expressed interest in continuing this work.

The same can’t be said for a second Trump administration, according to several experts Grist spoke with.

“The extent to which a Trump administration would be willing to acknowledge the scope and the breadth of plastics and the effect that the oil and gas industry has on plastic is like, zero to negative a million,” said Rachel Karasik, a plastics research scientist at the Norwegian Institute for Water Research, which focuses on a range of water-related issues, including plastic pollution. 

Back in 2019, in the aftermath of Harris’ 2019 straws comment, Trump’s then-campaign manager Brad Parscale swiftly launched a line of 9-inch, Trump-emblazoned plastic straws that raised nearly half a million dollars in just one week. They were apparently so popular that the first batch sold out within hours.

Although the last Trump administration didn’t totally ignore plastics — it released an interagency strategy to clean up “marine debris,” including plastics, in October 2020 — experts told Grist that a second time around would probably see the reversal of Biden-Harris plastics policies and the loosening of environmental restrictions on production facilities. They also said Trump would likely pull out of negotiations over the U.N. plastics treaty, much as he withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement in 2020. 

This is in contrast to hopes that the Harris administration will join a “high-ambition coalition” of countries supporting a strong agreement, and effectively implement the treaty’s provisions domestically. “Harris is at least competent and a true public servant, and she believes in international diplomacy and tackling global problems,” Teel Simmonds said. “I can’t say the same for Trump.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What would a Harris presidency mean for the plastics crisis? on Jul 31, 2024.