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Tucked into a green-sounding federal recycling bill filed last month is a wish list, not of tough new mandates to get a handle on the world’s plastic’s crisis, but of regulatory rollbacks and government assistance that would boost the plastics industry.
Endorsed by petrochemical lobbyists, the legislation is being criticized by environmentalists who are calling it the industry’s own Project 2025 — a playbook for a potential Trump administration to support an oil and gas industry that’s increasingly dependent on manufacturing plastic.
Among the bill’s supporters’ litany of wishes: They want taxpayers to help prop up “advanced” chemical recycling methods that companies have oversold as a solution for plastic-choked oceans and communities.
They want one of the plastic industry’s dirtiest and most inefficient technologies — one akin to incineration — to be redefined as manufacturing, which would make it exempt from air pollution laws.
They want to legitimize an accounting method that allows companies to exaggerate how much recycled plastic is in their products.
And they want to ensure secrecy around how companies process old plastic and prevent states from setting more stringent regulations for the industry.
Even though the bill itself is a legislative long shot, federal agencies under Donald Trump could adopt some of its most extreme provisions without congressional approval, said Daniel Rosenberg, director of federal toxics policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The previous Trump administration had already started the most consequential rollback — the exemption from air pollution regulations — before the Biden administration reversed it.
“The likelihood of really bad stuff happening is exponentially greater under a second Trump administration,” Rosenberg said. The Trump campaign didn’t return a request for comment.
Lobbyists could also break up the bill and try to push it through one piece at a time regardless of who wins the election, he added.
The American Chemistry Council, a prominent plastics lobby, praised the bill as “ground-breaking, solutions-oriented legislation aimed at increasing plastics recycling and preventing plastic from ending up in the environment.” The bill echoes key provisions from a 2022 ACC policy plan. Council spokesperson Andrea Albersheim pushed back on the “inflammatory” characterization that the bill is akin to Project 2025 and noted that it has bipartisan sponsorship.
Rep. Don Davis, a Democrat from North Carolina, and Dr. Larry Bucshon, a Republican congressman from Indiana, co-sponsored the bill, titled Accelerating a Circular Economy for Plastics and Recycling Innovation Act of 2024.
Bucshon is retiring at the end of the legislative session. Davis is in his first term in Congress and faces a competitive reelection race in November; he serves on congressional committees involving agriculture and the military, not science or........