Photo Credit: Sloane Irie Amelia
Trash Free Maryland joined Waterfront Partnership, Maryland PIRG, National Aquarium, and Blue Water Baltimore, to share policy recommendations in the wake of the November 10th release of a new study that reported finding microplastics throughout the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. PennEnvironment Research & Policy Center and the Environment America Research & Policy Center sampled the Bay itself as well as rivers and streams throughout the multi-state basin. Microplastics were found in 100% of the locations sampled.
Investigators looked for four types of microplastic pollution:
Fibers: primarily from clothing and textiles;
Fragments: primarily from harder plastics or plastic feedstock;
Film: primarily from bags and flexible plastic packaging;
Beads: primarily from facial scrubs and other cosmetic products.
The findings are concerning:
100% of waterways sampled had microfibers;
93% of sites sampled had microfragments;
47% of sites sampled had microfilm;
27% of sites had microbeads.
While there has been some positive news regarding reductions in some plastics in local cleanups following product bans — like bans on plastic checkout bags or foam food packaging, the ubiquity of plastics found in the environment through this study is a call to urgent action. Maryland has taken steps to ban problematic and unnecessary plastic items and to implement the first steps of producer responsibility for packaging, but we need to act quickly and assertively to catch up with the scale and variety of single-use plastic products sold and trashed every day in the state. Each plastic bottle littered today is a source of future microplastic pollution.
Cleanups and recycling won’t be enough without also prioritizing single-use plastic source reduction policies, including reducing the amount of plastic packaging sold in the state, shifting from single-use to reuse systems, and improving recycling quality and materials markets. We are calling for our producer responsibility program for packaging to include meaningful targets and timelines for reducing plastic packaging and its impact on the environment and human health from production to final disposal.
The possible presence of plastics from materials that have been banned for years is also a reminder that our policies are only effective when fully implemented and enforced. We need to include measures to periodically assess how well policies are performing as well as whether they are in need of adjustments to make compliance and enforcement clear.
