Lawsuits Targeting Plastic Pollution Pile Up as Frustrated Citizens and States Seek Accountability
James Bruggers | Inside Climate News | June 5, 2024
The plastic pellets washing up on beaches and in marshes around Charleston, South Carolina, became very obvious about five years ago.
Called nurdles, these pebble-sized particles that are the raw material for many plastic products floated, too, in the aquamarine waters of the harbor, many carried at high tide to Sullivan’s Island, known for its white sand and million-dollar homes, where they caused alarm.
“We had been working to enact single-use plastic bans and then we started to see this nurdle problem,” recalled Andrew Wunderley, the executive director of Charleston Waterkeeper, part of the national Waterkeeper Alliance, an environmental organization. “Now we had industrial-like plastic pollution.”
So Charleston Waterkeeper joined with the Southern Environmental Law Center, a nonprofit law firm, and the Charleston-based Coastal Conservation League, to identify what they believed to be the source of the nurdles and then to take that company, Frontier Logistics, L.P., to federal court, in March 2020. A year later, the environmental advocates and Frontier reached a settlement that included $1 million to improve water quality in the Charleston Harbor watershed.
From South Carolina to California, nearly 60 lawsuits have been filed since 2015, mostly by citizens or environmental groups, targeting the plastics industry. The litigation comes amid a rapidly expanding body of scientific knowledge detailing how burgeoning plastics production damages the planet and threatens public health.
Most recently, attorneys general in Connecticut, Minnesota and New York have raised the stakes with their own plastics lawsuits, bringing with them considerable legal firepower.
And, in California, a two-year-old investigation by Attorney General Rob Bonta into the plastics industry and its claims about recycling shows signs of concluding, potentially resulting in a case pitting the largest state in the nation against one of the largest plastic makers in the world, ExxonMobil, and powerful industry trade associations such as the American Chemistry Council (ACC) and the Plastics Industry Association (PIA).
In late May, the ACC and the PIA filed their own lawsuits in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., objecting to Bonta’s effort to obtain through subpoenas certain internal documents from the associations, including some involving the controversial practice of “advanced” or “chemical” recycling, while claiming California was infringing on their first amendment rights to advocate for their preferred public policy.
Bonta’s media office declined to comment on the status of the California investigation. Still, in April, the attorney general told a Reuters reporter that a decision on whether to proceed with the plastics litigation could be made “within weeks.”
Typically, these plastics lawsuits attempt to hold the companies that use plastic packaging or stores that use plastic bags accountable for alleged deceptive marketing claims about the environment or recycling.
Most are still working their way through the courts, though some have been dismissed, and environmental advocates count a few victories, such as the nurdle case in South Carolina.
“There has been zero action at the state or federal level to stop pollution from the plastics industry,” Wunderley said, four years after the South Carolina settlement. “It’s left to the citizens to pick up the slack. When the state and federal government won’t act or haven’t acted, we can step in and hold these polluters accountable.”
