REDUCE Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I want to talk a moment about my REDUCE Act, which is the act to reduce plastic pollution, of which we have a lot.

Humans have created 8 billion tons of plastic, and it is all over the place. It is in our water. It is in our rivers. It is in our food. The Presiding Officer is from Colorado. As he knows, there was a study done that tested the rain falling in Colorado that showed that there were microplastics in the raindrops in Colorado.

So we have a plastics problem, and this is a bill whose intention is to solve that plastics problem.

I want to have you think about three numbers while I am making this speech: 2 percent, 10 percent, and 2050; 2 percent, 10 percent, and 2050.

What is 2 percent? Two percent is how much recycled plastic the plastics industry uses in single-use, disposable, throwaway plastic.

We had a hearing in the Environment and Public Works Committee, led by Chairman Carper. We had witnesses in who were experts. They said it is actually less than 2 percent. So the plastics industry is comfortable with a business model in which they are only using recycled plastic for less than 2 percent of their production of single-use, disposable stuff.

They will then say: Well, yeah, but we don't need to worry about that because then it goes into the recycling bin.

Well, first of all, that is not much help if you are only going to use 2 percent recycled plastic in your plastic manufacturing and then 98 percent is all new fossil fuel-based plastic.

But here we get to the second number, 10 percent. When you put plastic in that blue bin and send it out to be recycled, less than 10 percent of that plastic actually gets recycled. Some people have said 6 percent. Some people have said 8 percent. Some people have said 9 percent. But pretty much everybody agrees that less than 10 percent of what you put in the recycling bin to recycle ever gets recycled. And the plastics industry is cool with that too.

The plastics industry is cool with 2 percent recycling content in their throughput, in their supply, and they are comfortable with 90 percent or more of your recycled plastics sent out in the blue bins never being recycled.

This brings me to the third number, 2050. Twenty-fifty is the year which, on present trends, will produce the following state of affairs: There will be more waste plastic floating in the Earth's oceans by mass than there will be living fish. That is the trajectory we are on with an industry that is totally content to use only 2 percent recycled plastic in its production and to have the recycling system recycle less than 10 percent of the plastic that goes in. That is where we end up by 2050. And if we are content in this room to confer on our children and grandchildren a world in which there is more waste plastic floating around than there is living fish, then shame on us.

This is a trajectory we have to change, and my bill will change it. But, of course, the plastic industry doesn't love this. They are happy with using only 2 percent recycled plastic in their production. They are happy with less than 10 percent of recycled plastic in the blue bin ever getting recycled. They don't seem to give a red hot damn about the trajectory we are on with where we are going to be with waste plastic in the oceans. But they obviously care a lot about the bill because if you lived in Washington, DC, and you got the Washington Post on Wednesday, September 22, you got this little gem tucked in your newspaper on the front. It is a very glossy, multicolored handout, and it says:

Stop the plastic tax. Keep everyday goods affordable.

And then it shows a whole bunch of everyday goods: a bicycle helmet, reusable plastic containers that you use in your refrigerator to put stuff away when you are putting it back in the fridge, sneakers, a plastic child's toy, and a baby diaper.

Not one of those things is covered by our plastics tax--not one of them--not personal hygiene products like a diaper and not multiuse products like a child's toy or a sneaker or a bicycle helmet or the plastic containers that you store stuff in in your refrigerator.

If you flip it over, they go at it even further. There is a child's baby seat. There is solar paneling. There is a toothbrush. There is a cellphone. And there is a little package of tomatoes in Saran wrap in one of those foam Styrofoam containers.

The one thing on this whole page that this plastics pollution fee would touch is that disposable bit of foam. And if you would rather have that in the ocean instead of being recycled, fine; vote against this bill. But if you would like to see that kind of junk get properly disposed of, you need to support the act.

So why do you think the industry got this so wrong? Bicycle helmets, children's toys, car seats, toothbrushes? Do you think they actually didn't know what was in the bill or is it possible that they are just lying about the bill? And what conclusion do you draw when an industry is lying about a piece of legislation? The conclusion that I draw is that they know they would lose if they argued on the truth, and so they lie.

And they spent a lot of money on this. This is, you know, glossy. This is multicolor. We in politics, we send out mailers. This is not inexpensive. You put this onto every Washington Post--that is a big deal. They flooded the DC metropolitan area with this glossy pack of lies.

So let's just take a quick look at some of the stuff that they have been saying. Their myth is that the REDUCE Act affects all plastic products. No. Read the bill. It is a fee on single-use plastics that targets the fossil fuel companies that make the fossil fuel feedstock for those single-use disposable plastic products.

All you have to do is read the bill to see that. I don't know how we could make that any clearer. We specifically exempt anything other than single-use disposable plastics.

Further, if it is a single-use disposable plastic that is used in healthcare, that is used in hospitals, in patient treatments, we understand that; we exempt that too. It is the plastic spoons and the straws and the wrapping and the foam containers and all the rest of that junk that you can walk down any beach in America and see; that is the junk we are trying to see gets properly recycled by charging a fee on the people who are throwing this stuff out into the environment and not recycling it--or at least 98 percent not recycling it.

Here is the other myth: The REDUCE Act disadvantages U.S. businesses; we will fail in international competition if we do this.

Not true. If you are importing plastic, you have to pay just the same way as if you used U.S.-made plastic. This is a fee on plastic that touches the U.S. economy if it is going to be single-use disposable, and we are going to need to think about recycling it. It applies to any company doing business in the United States and imports from foreign companies. So that is another made-up myth.

And the last one, which is really--maybe it is designed to annoy me, but it is that the fee on plastics to encourage recycling would actually harm our climate; that this is an anti-climate piece of legislation.

The fact of the matter is that by the middle of the century, plastics will account for about a quarter of global oil consumption. This is what the fossil fuel industry is banking on for its future as we start driving electric cars that are nicer than internal combustion cars and cheaper and easier to maintain.

By 2030, greenhouse gas emissions from new plastics production will reach 1.3 billion tons--1.3 billion tons--which is equivalent to running 300 coal-fired powerplants. That doesn't sound to me much like sustainability.

This REDUCE Act is a fair and sensible and effective response to plastic pollution that is filling up our oceans, our rivers, and even our raindrops. The costs will be paid by the fossil fuel industry where the profit is made.

And by the way, when they try to push that cost down to consumers, good luck, ExxonMobil, telling Coca-Cola: We are raising our prices to you. Coca-Cola and all of its beverage companies have got pretty significant market clout, and they might just say: Not so fast, pal; you eat that cost. This is your mess; you clean it up.

Anyway, it is a good discussion to have because 2 percent of the plastics stream being recycled, 10 percent or less of plastic in the blue bins ever actually being recycled, and an ocean that has equal parts waste plastic and fish in it by 2050 is not acceptable.

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