Duke Experts Inform New White House Strategy on Plastic Pollution

A new White House strategy targeting plastic pollution cites Duke University research on the environmental justice implications of plastics' impacts.

The White House released "the first comprehensive, government-wide strategy to target plastic pollution at production, processing, use, and disposal" on July 19. It includes a new goal to phase out procurement of single-use plastics from all federal operations by 2035. 

The strategy cites Duke research published in Frontiers in Marine Science in January 2023. The study examines the inequitable distributions of plastics' benefits and burdens on economies and public health. The authors also identify solutions that can mitigate some of the societal burdens of plastic. 

The paper was authored by Rachel Karasik (Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability), Nancy Lauer (Duke University School of Law), Anne-Elisabeth Baker (Nicholas School of the Environment), Niki Lisi (Nicholas School), Jason Somarelli (Duke Cancer Institute), Will Eward (Duke Orthopaedic Surgery), and Meagan Dunphy-Daly (Nicholas School) with Kathinka Fürst at Norsk institutt for vannforskning (NIVA).

The Duke authors are members of the university's Plastic Pollution Working Group, which includes 40 faculty, staff, students, and alumni who collaborate on interdisciplinary approaches to better understand plastics policy issues and inform equitable, effective solutions.

Members of the Plastic Pollution Working Group also provided background on other plastics topics to the White House's Council on Environmental Quality during development of the strategy.

The Nicholas Institute offers a suite of resources to support local, national, and international efforts to address the plastics challenge: 

• The Plastics Policy Inventory is a searchable database of nearly 900 public policies introduced around the world since 2000 that aim to reduce plastic use and waste. 
   
• The companion Plastics Policy Effectiveness Study Library links studies of policy effectiveness to specific documents in the inventory to highlight measured outcomes of implemented policies and, in some cases, how they are leading to unintended consequences.
   
• The Plastic Pollution Prevention and Collection Technology Inventory was created to aid local governments, nongovernmental organizations, and other stakeholders in identifying technologies that may help to remediate hotspots of marine plastic pollution. The inventory contains 108 technologies that were identified through a literature review completed in May 2022.
   
• Nicholas Institute experts have teamed up with collaborators in the Plastic Pollution Working Group and at other institutions on research examining knowledge gaps in the effectiveness of national plastics policies, assessing how plastics policy addresses gender-differentiated impacts, analyzing voluntary corporate commitments to address global plastic pollution, and identifying novel transdisciplinary interventions for curbing plastic pollution.