Championing Ecological Health and Environmental Justice in Plastic Action: Q&A with Judith Enck, Founder of Beyond Plastics
By Clare Auld-Brokish & Tongxin Zhu | 3/25/21 | NewSecurityBeat
“There is one thing I think about a lot: how do you get people active on plastic waste? How do you structure having impact?”
Judith Enck discovered her interest in environmental activism when she interned in college for the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG) and was asked to lobby for the Returnable Container Act (commonly referred to as the Bottle Bill), which had stalled for 10 years. The difficulty she faced in lobbying for this relatively simple bill motivated her to return for a second internship. After graduation, she abandoned plans for social work or law school to return to environmental advocacy and quickly became the executive director of Environmental Advocates NY. The bill eventually became a New York State law in 1982 and has since prevented the unnecessary export or landfilling of billions of plastic bottles. Judith learned important lessons from that victory and has been making her mark on America’s waste policy ever since.
With whirlwind developments in packaging technology over the last few decades, the world has come to expect the convenience and versatility that plastic brings. Yet, the production of plastic and its disposal are both contributing to health and environmental effects that disproportionately effect those least equipped to handle them. Judith was galvanized to work on these issues because she saw how the global community had turned a blind eye to the consequences of our reliance on plastic. How factories spew pollutants into backyard streams and fields, dining establishments package their food with the cheapest toxin-laden resins, and how “polluted landfills and incinerators are almost always sited in low-income communities and communities of color.”
A self-described “solid waste gal,” Judith views waste issues from an equity perspective. From her first bottle bill and her campaign to ban medical waste incinerators, to her appointment as U.S. EPA Regional Administrator in the Obama Administration and Congressional testimony in support of the Break Free From Plastic Act of 2020 (BFPPA), waste activism is the thread that runs through her career. Plastics represent a systems-scale crisis to Judith, because addressing it demands a holistic view of the production pipeline and connects the fields of climate change, public health, and environmental justice.