How Cities are Leading in the Fight Against Plastic Pollution

“Plastic kills, and the damages of plastic pollution have no borders. We cannot beat plastic pollution if we don’t tackle climate change, environmental loss and food crises at the same time.” 

That was the powerful message Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo delivered during the Paris International Forum to End Plastic Pollution in Cities. The event was held before the second session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) on Plastic Pollution, which aims to develop a legally binding international instrument on plastic pollution, including in the marine environment. Over the course of a morning filled with presentations, roundtables and calls to action, global mayors, scientists and representatives from NGOs and philanthropies united to discuss the crisis of plastic pollution, and how cities can lead the way on solutions. 

Plastic waste is currently choking our environment and our oceans.  As the world has rapidly urbanized, consumption has increased and cities are left to cope with huge quantities of waste produced every day.  About 400 million tons of plastic waste is generated every year, of which 288 million tons comes from municipal solid waste streams, comprising up to 75% of the total plastic waste generation. The amount of this plastic waste that makes it into waterways and oceans reflects the overwhelming task of managing pollution. UN Habitat estimates that around 60.1 million tons of plastic from municipal solid waste streams pollute the environment each year and around 11 million tons flow into the ocean.  

Our current status quo around pollution reflects a dual crisis of overproduction of plastic and waste management failure. The flow of waste into natural habitats is harmful to ecosystems and people: chemicals can leak from discarded materials into the ocean and marine life, and microplastics (tiny fragments derived from plastic waste and industrial processes) can also contaminate water and seafood supplies. And current waste management practices, like landfills and waste incineration sites, expose nearby communities to toxic chemicals released by plastic burning. Currently, 2 billion people worldwide lack access to solid waste collection, and 3 billion people lack access to controlled solid waste disposal facilities. The need to reduce our reliance on plastic production and improve plastic waste management is a global issue, and one that connects to the efforts to mitigate climate change, stop biodiversity loss and curb pollution. Moreover, the urgent need for action is evident at the city level, particularly in impoverished areas, where basic waste collection services are most lacking. If no action is taken, the crisis of plastic waste in cities will continue to intensify and exacerbate inequities in health and quality of life.

While curbing plastic waste in cities will take a monumental effort, cities are rising to the challenge. 

Throughout the Forum, city leaders shared innovative local solutions for curbing the upstream and downstream plastic waste impacts, many of which are catching on across the globe. Single-use plastic bag bans have proved extremely effective. Inger Andersen, Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations and Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme, cited Rwanda’s successful effort, in 2008, to ban plastic bags and instead promote alternative materials like bamboo and paper for packaging, as an example that many other cities have followed. Following her speech, Bima Arya Sugiarto, Mayor of Bogor, Indonesia, shared his city’s groundbreaking initiative to ban single-use plastic bags in markets. Faced with initial pushback, Bogor conducted a massive campaign throughout the city, engaging women and young people, and sharing messages and facts through social media. Eventually, the city succeeded in implementing the policy. “The key is communication and socialization,” Sugiarto said. To date, the policy has reduced plastic bag usage by 34% and increased eco-friendly shopping bag usage by 70%.  

As we try to move away from unnecessary plastics, creating schemes to incentivize recycling is also critical in Global South cities, according to Mayor Joy Belmonte of Quezon City, Philippines. Under her leadership, Quezon City created a “cash for trash” program that enables residents to exchange recyclable plastics for environmental credits, which they can use to purchase essentials like rice and eggs and pay for utility bills. As Quezon City, with the support of C40 Cities, aims to transition to a circular economy and substantially reduce waste, creating more robust recycling and waste-reduction programs is essential. 

While every city faces unique challenges in reducing plastic waste, the mayors and city leaders were energized by the potential of engaging youth and women in the effort to beat plastic pollution. Bogor, Sugiarto said, has a partnership in place with a Millennial-led startup that’s transforming plastic into eco-planks and eco-pavement for construction projects, and recycling five tons of plastic each day in the process. 

Across the world, in the United States, young people are supporting cities along the Mississippi river to conduct data collection to determine what are the sources of plastic pollution in that critical waterway, Greenville, Mississippi Mayor and Chair of the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative, Errick D. Simmons told the audience. Supported by UNEP, the Mississippi River Plastic Pollution Initiative is leaning on a citizen-science approach and community engagement and buy-in to tracking and managing plastic waste entering the river.  

In Ambikapur, India, Commissioner Pratistha Mamgain shared with the audience the city’s local, sustainable, women-led waste management model—for which it was named India’s cleanest small city in 2017. Through Ambikapur’s program, 470 women waste pickers, who operate as independent entrepreneurs, conduct door-to-door waste collection and oversee transportation and sorting. The women entrepreneurs, called Swachhta didis, sort the waste into 156 different categories, ensuring organic materials are composted and inorganic materials are either sold off to recyclers or repurposed into materials like plastic pellets or cement. This model, Mamgain said, has improved accountability in the waste management sector and, by formalizing waste picking work, has created economic stability for the women who lead the network. “We needed to look inwards and adopt a local, sustainable approach that would make use of resources available,” she said.  

Leaders at the Forum envisioned a clear path forward. Cities should be able and have the responsibility to lead on the issue of plastic pollution. Cities must be ambitious in their endeavors. Indeed, Mayor Hidalgo shared Paris’ ambitious plan to ban single-use plastics from the 2024 Olympics, demonstrating the strength of more sustainable alternatives at the local level.  

While individual cities have made enormous strides on managing and reducing plastic waste, all stakeholders present agreed that they can’t, and should not have to, face this challenge alone. As the second session of the INC on Plastic Pollution gets underway in Paris, the Forum sent a clear message that a global framework and treaty for curbing plastic waste is essential. As cities continue to innovate, they should have the support of a global framework and legal structure to advance their actions. “The plastic treaty provides hope,” Greenville Mayor Errick Simmons said. “Cities cannot do it alone, governments cannot do it alone, individuals cannot do it alone.” 

“Cities need the whole system behind them,” UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen said. “We need to involve actors in the value chain from the beginning to the end, and the global agreement that we hope to land on has to be one that empowers and enables, so that we can close the waste management gap. We want ambition, we want legally binding, and we want control measures in this agreement.” 

On June 5, 2023, for World Environment Day, join millions around the world to #BeatPlasticPollution and share your work! 

UNDP and UrbanShift, together with the UN SDG Action Campaign and UNEP, have developed a series of media assets available for cities and local governments to share their local action to beat plastic pollution. 

The editable media cards are available for editing and downloading in Canva, feel free to adapt, and use freely. You can add your own messages, include your own logos and share the word! Some examples can be found here. 

This article originally appeared on shiftcities.org

Eillie Anzilotti is Communications Lead for UrbanShift.

A Massachusetts Town Is Suing Monsanto for Its Cancer-Causing PCBs

Clare Lahey has lived with her husband in the home he grew up in, just up the street from the Housatonic River in the town of Lee, Massachusetts, for nearly five decades. Now, in the twilight of their lives, they’re watching as the same chemicals that have ravaged the health of people living along the river for years are now being dredged and dumped near their home. 

Lahey has had bladder cancer twice, 15 years apart; her husband is wracked with illnesses including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease even though he never smoked. She believes that proximity to the river is to blame for their health problems, and she’s not alone: The Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, warns that the river’s polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, are likely to cause cancer in humans, and a Massachusetts Department of Public Health study on the cancer link is scheduled to be released this year.

“Why don’t we just move away?” Lahey asked. “Well, because he’s 85 and I’m 82, and we want to finish out our lives here.”

Lee is a working-class town in the heart of the Berkshires, a rural region near the New York border known for its scenic beauty. It’s also known, among locals, as a place polluted by PCBs, dangerous industrial chemicals manufactured by Monsanto and used by General Electric in the electric transformers the company manufactured and serviced. GE ran a plant in the county’s largest city, Pittsfield, and dumped PCBs into the local Housatonic River from 1932 to 1977, when Monsanto ceased production. In 1979, the EPA made PCBs illegal.

Trails lead through Woods Pond park near the site of the proposed dump site in Lee, Mass. The town has filed a lawsuit against Monsanto as part of an attempt to find an alternative site outside of the region.

Photo: Lori Grinker/Contact Press Images for The Intercept

After decades of efforts by local and state leaders and federal agencies like the EPA, GE in 2000 began cleaning the river and nearby areas. But the latest round of dredging, expected to begin in the next few years, would put a dump site in Lee. Residents of the town as well as local leaders — including the Housatonic Environmental Action League and the Housatonic River Initiative, who are challenging the plan in the First Circuit Court of Appeals — are resisting the decision. 

The town has filed a lawsuit against Monsanto as part of an attempt to find an alternative site outside of the region. 

The lawsuit is asking for compensatory and natural resource damages and for a court order “that will require Monsanto to deposit funds awarded by a jury into an escrow account so that Lee has the funds to move the 2,000,000 tons of PCB soil and mud projected to be dumped in Lee to an out of state location.” Lee Select Board chair Bob Jones told The Intercept that the town doesn’t have a specific site in mind, “although there are certainly licensed sites in existence.”

“We’re hoping if we can show that Monsanto produced these toxic items, cancer-causing PCBs, that if we can come up with enough money to have that, we can then leverage GE taking the stuff out of the area and not having a waste dump in the town of Lee,” Jones said. “That’s really what we’re looking for.”

Bayer, the pharmaceutical giant that bought Monsanto in 2018, rejects the lawsuit completely. The company’s director of U.S. external communications, Nicole Hayes, told The Intercept in an emailed comment that Bayer believes the lawsuit “is meritless.” 

“There is no legal basis for imposing liability on Monsanto for the lawful sale of PCBs into the stream of commerce more than four decades ago, over which Monsanto had no control,” Hayes said. “Furthermore, Monsanto ceased its lawful production of PCBs more than 45 years ago and never disposed of PCBs in or near the Town.” The lawsuit does not accuse Monsanto of dumping PCBs, only of manufacturing them, and makes clear that GE was the offending party for the chemical disposal.

Despite Monsanto’s claims, a memo published by the Poison Papers project in 2017 shows that the company was aware of the problems posed by PCBs at least as early as 1969, eight years before it stopped producing the chemicals. The memo shows that Monsanto knew that PCBs could have detrimental effects on people’s health and that the evidence for its persistence in the environment was “beyond questioning.” A series of potential solutions was offered, including immediate cessation of PCB production; the company, apparently, chose the “do nothing” option.

Lee isn’t the first municipality to take Monsanto to court over its production of PCBs that other companies later dumped. Similar efforts in Washington state, California, Missouri, and elsewhere have had varied levels of success: Some cases have been settled, some have resulted in the company being ordered to pay restitution, and others have been found in Monsanto’s favor. 

“I feel like we have a good chance of winning because this is so clearly unjust,” Lahey said.

Signs in town advocate against the future PCB dump site in Lee, Mass., on May 21, 2023.

Photo: Lori Grinker/Contact Press Images for The Intercept

In 2016, the EPA made an agreement with GE and other nearby towns that GE would dredge the river and remove the contaminated soil out of the county. No sooner was the agreement made, Jones said, than GE went to court to change the parameters. That led to a mediated agreement, done in private with representatives from the affected towns — Lee, Pittsfield, Lenox, Great Barrington, and Sheffield — the EPA, GE, and environmental groups including the Berkshire Environmental Action Team, or BEAT, that resulted in the dump site being placed in Lee. 

Jones and Lahey are among the Berkshire residents in and outside of Lee who feel that what they see as the secrecy of the process — former Select Board member Patricia Carlino was the town’s representative — did a disservice to the people of the town. 

“To mediate, negotiate, and seal a deal without any knowledge or input from the general public is a failure of representative government,” Jones told The Intercept. 

The agreement was signed by the Select Board after 18 months of closed-door sessions and without consulting the rest of the town, something that still angers anti-dump residents. Under the agreement with GE and the EPA, Lee will get $25 million from GE in exchange for the dump site. If the town rejects the site, the funding is off the table. 

“A PCB dump was imposed on a town of only about 5,500 people, plus or minus, without their knowledge,” Jones said.

Clare Lahey stands near the future PCB dump site, an area with porous sand that is close to the Housatonic River, in Lee, Mass., on May 21, 2023.

Photo: Lori Grinker/Contact Press Images for The Intercept

Jane Winn, BEAT executive director, agrees that Monsanto should be held responsible for its role in producing PCBs. She remembers a time when the river and surrounding wetlands were in far worse shape than they are today, due to the chemical’s corrosive damage. The river used to change color and catch fire, she said.

Despite Winn’s support for the lawsuit, she doesn’t think it’s likely to succeed. Winn, as BEAT executive director, was a signatory to the consent decree putting the dump in Lee. She told The Intercept that while she’d like to see a more permanent remedial solution, “the site they’ve chosen, if it has to be in the Berkshires, is a reasonable site.” 

Winn said that the dump in Lee is a “downside” to the cleanup but that the trade-off of having low-level contaminant soil put in the town site is the compromise in order to get to that point. She understands that Lee feels it’s been treated unfairly but urged perspective: “They’re getting more sediment out of the river in Lee because of it.”

There’s some outright local opposition to Lee’s lawsuit. The Berkshire Eagle, in an opinion piece taking issue with Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s written support for the Lee effort, questioned what the next move would be if the dump were stopped and endorsed the site as an imperfect but ultimately necessary solution to the river’s pollution. 

“While the dump disproportionately affects Lee (and Lenox Dale), the fate of a comprehensive Housatonic cleanup plan matters to a much broader part of the Berkshire community,” the paper’s editorial board wrote in the unsigned opinion piece. “Whatever the intensity of the understandable hard feelings in Lee, it’s reasonable to ask what the procedural limits of reflexive opposition are here.”

It’s not lost on Jones that the site is in the poorest town of the towns involved in the discussions. “It’s a working-class town,” Jones said. “It was a mill town, but the mills are gone.”

“We’re the ones who have to bear the burden of it,” he added.

Budget focused on education, health, security, local bodies

Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah on Sunday said that it was for the first time that he did not have to shout himself hoarse for the budget speech.

With the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf lawmakers either in jail or on the run after the May 9 riots, Murad said it was the first budget speech he delivered comfortably and his throat was also fine. There was no commotion in the house, he quipped.

Regarding the budget proposals, Murad said that budget consisting of record Rs2.25 trillion outlay has record allocation of Rs800 billion for four major goals ¬ education, health, law and order and local bodies.

Speaking at a post-budget press conference at Sindh Assembly Auditorium, the CM said that they received $2 billion from external sources for flood relief and managing such a huge amount in four months was a great achievement. Similarly, Rs25 billion were obtained from external sources for the reconstruction and rehabilitation of flood affected houses.

He reminded that although the irrigation system of the province was destroyed, there was a record production of wheat this season.

Sindh Local Government Minister Nasir Hussain Shah, Sindh Information Minister Sharjeel Inam Memon, Labor and Manpower Minister Syed Ghani, Sindh Government Spokesperson Murtaza Wahab were also present on this occasion.

Shah said that current capital expenditure has increased this year because the loans obtained by the provincial government ballooned due to rising cost of dollar.

CM said that the provincial government is not happy with the schemes offered in the federal budget.

The provincial government believes that Sindh deserves a lot and "we have discussed this with the federal government as well."

Schemes of Karachi

The chief executive of the province said there are Rs701 billion worth of foreign-funded schemes for Karachi. Of this amount, at least Rs127 billion has been allocated for World Bank-funded Competitive and Livable City of Karachi (Click) Project which will be executed by the local government.

He pointed out that Rs27 billion has been allocated for the ambitious WB-funded Yellow Line project, Rs27.2 billion have been allocated for the Karachi Water and Sewerage Improvement Project.

Apart from this, an amount of Rs27.5 billion has been reserved for local councils, while 14.5 billion are for solid waste management schemes. The work of BRT red line is also going on, for which an amount of Rs26 billion has been allocated, besides an amount of Rs23 billion has been allocated for the yellow line.

Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre Hospital has been given a new cyber knife worth Rs1 billion, which will benefit the entire country. He said that Rs1.2 billion for Karachi Thatta Dual Carriage Way, Rs389 billion scheme of NICH.

He said that M9 M5 Link is a project of Rs2 billion , Malir Expressway is a project of Rs27.5, Maripur Expressway is a project of 11.2 billion dollars, Dhabiji Industrial Estate is a project of Rs16 billion and these are the projects that have been completed

He said that M9 M5 Link is a project of Rs2 billion, Malir Expressway is a project of Rs27.5 billion, Maripur Expressway is a project of 11.2 billion dollars, Dhabiji Industrial Estate is a project of Rs16 billion and these are the projects that have been completed

Karachi- Hub water canal project is in the bidding stage, which is a project worth Rs24 billion, while the waste water treatment project is worth Rs125 billion. Apart from this, Waste Water Treatment Plant One is a Rs60 billion project, Jinnah Hospital Safety and Security Project is Rs2 billion, Marble City Project is Rs5 billion, NED Technology Pak Project is a Rs24 billion project.