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- Make Polluters Pay — Tell Big Plastic to Drop Their Lawsuit
Make Polluters Pay — Tell Big Plastic to Drop Their Lawsuit
Big Plastic made the mess. Now its lobbyists are suing to escape accountability.
California passed a landmark plastic pollution accountability law to make companies reduce waste, improve packaging, and help pay for the pollution they create. It is a simple idea: if corporations profit from throwaway plastic, they should not be allowed to dump the cleanup costs on the rest of us.
Now the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors has joined 17 Republican-led states in a lawsuit to block that law before it can fully take effect. Its members should not get to hide behind lobbyists while communities drown in plastic waste.
Corporate lobbyists hate accountability. They want taxpayers, towns, sanitation workers, and polluted communities to keep cleaning up the plastic waste their industries profit from.
Plastic waste is choking waterways, filling landfills, harming wildlife, and breaking down into microplastics found in our air, water, food, and bodies. The companies flooding the market with throwaway packaging should not get a free pass while the rest of us pay the price.
California’s law is common sense: polluters should pay for pollution.
But if NAW’s lawsuit succeeds, it could gut one of the strongest plastic accountability laws in the country and scare other states away from taking action. That would be a huge win for corporate polluters — and a disaster for communities fighting plastic waste.
Big Plastic wants to keep the profits and dump the cleanup costs on us. We cannot let them.
Thanks for all that you do,
Matt from the Swarm
