The United States welcomes the historic opportunity at the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA 5.2), February-March 2022, to start a process with other nations and stakeholders to fight plastic pollution. The United States is already acting both domestically and internationally to address this global challenge.
Key U.S. programs are highlighted below.
National
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
- National Recycling Strategy: EPA published the National Recycling Strategy November 2021 and reaffirmed the goal to increase the U.S. recycling rate to 50 percent by 2030. The Strategy identifies strategic objectives and actions needed to create a stronger, more resilient, and cost-effective U.S. municipal solid waste recycling system. Recycling has been an important component of the EPA’s decades-long efforts to implement the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) and more recent efforts to pursue a Sustainable Materials Management (SMM) approach, which aims to reduce the environmental impacts of materials across their lifecycle.
- Sustainable Materials Management (SMM) program: EPA releases an annual report, Advancing Sustainable Materials Management: Facts and Figures, to provide information on Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) generation, recycling, composting, combustion with energy recovery and landfilling. The report analyzes MSW trends in generation and management, materials and products, and economic indicators affecting MSW.
- WasteWise Program: EPA works with businesses, governments, and nonprofit organizations to promote the use and reuse of materials more productively over their entire life cycles. Partners demonstrate how they reduce waste, practice environmental stewardship and incorporate sustainable materials management into their business model, including their waste-handling processes.
- Trash Free Waters is a voluntary program that emphasizes stakeholder engagement to assist U.S. and international communities with addressing primarily land-based sources of marine litter. Within the United States, there have been more than 200 place-based projects that have been or are being implemented.
- The Trash Free Waters International Implementation Guide – a tool that provides step-by-step guidance for including all stakeholders, either at the national, state, or community level in decision-making to address land-based sources of marine litter.
- Best Practices for Solid Waste Management: A Guide for Decision-Makers in Developing Countries – The Guide covers a diverse set of important topics for city-level decision-makers around the world, including stakeholder engagement, waste management planning and economics, waste collection and transportation, prevention, minimization, and recycling, landfill design and operation, and energy recovery.
U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)
- DOE launched the Plastics Innovation Challenge in 2018 to coordinate the many initiatives across the department on plastic recycling, degradation, upcycling, and design for circularity. The goals of this program are to develop solutions that deliver greater than 50 percent energy savings, address greater than 90 percent of plastics, reduce greenhouse gas emissions by more than50 percent, and achieve at least 75 percent carbon utilization. The work includes solving fundamental science challenges through research projects and Energy Frontier Research Centers, forging public-private partnerships such as the BOTTLE Consortia (bottle.org) and the REMADE Institute, and working with industry partners to reduce plastic waste through the Better Plants Program.
U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)
- USDA offers support and programs to increase the research, development and buyer/consumer awareness of bioplastics. Agricultural Research Service scientists developed a way for crop residues from cornstalks, straw, and sugarcane bagasse, combined with sustainable enzymes, to convert crop-derived sugars into…
Read More: U.S. Actions to Address Plastic Pollution