Houston Chronicle by James Osborne July 31, 2019
Four years ago, store owners in the border city of Laredo faced a long and costly legal fight against a citywide ban on the sale of single-use plastic bags, one in a multitude of such ordinances sweeping Texas at the time.
With the case headed for the Texas Supreme Court, it was unlikely business owners could afford the legal bills ahead, said Les Norton, then president of the Laredo Merchants Association. But the problem was solved when a group of plastics and petrochemical companies, eager to erect a legal blockade against the local bans, offered to help fund their case — allowing the merchants to hire a prominent Dallas attorney who had argued cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.
“The underlying concern was if you give city government this much power, today its plastic bags, tomorrow they might say they don’t like Styrofoam cups and plastic water bottles,†said Norton, explaining the petrochemical companies interest in the suit. “They basically through the legal challenges did everything necessary to get it to the (Texas) Supreme Court.â€
As plastic waste in the world’s oceans has become a growing public concern, the petrochemical industry centered on the Gulf Coast has trumpeted efforts to invest in recycling and develop new, biodegradable plastics. But simultaneously, as the Laredo case shows, companies and their trade groups have engaged in heated legal and political battles to block government from enacting bans on single-use products designed to address the very waste problem they say they are committed to solving.
For more than a decade, plastics lobbyists have fanned out across U.S. courtrooms, city halls and state capitols, not only to argue against such bans but also to campaign for laws preventing the creation of plastic bans in the first place. And they have by and large succeeded.
At least 14 states have passed some form of preemption law blocking or limiting the ability of towns and cities to impose plastic bans, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. That includes Texas, where last summer the state Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Laredo Merchants Association, holding that an existing Texas waste law prohibited bans on plastic bags.
Earlier this summer, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, signed a budget bill that contained a provision blocking cities and towns from passing plastic bans for 12 months after Republicans forced the measure into the state’s budget negotiations.
“It was a response to Philadelphia City Council’s ban,†said Jennie Romer, an attorney with the Surfrider Foundation, a conservation group fighting plastic waste. “The following week the state Legislature went ahead and put language in the budget bill. It’s kind of impressive how quickly this happened.â€
At the center of the fight are a division of the Plastics Industry Association called the American Progressive Bag Alliance, which serves as the industry’s front-line defense against plastic bans, and the American Chemistry Council, a Washington trade group representing chemical and plastic manufacturers including Exxon Mobil, the Houston petrochemical company Lyondell Basell and the world’s biggest chemical maker BASF.
Sitting in a conference room in his Washington offices, American Progressive Bag Alliance Executive Director Matt Seaholm, a former Republican political operative, argued plastics have been unfairly maligned in the debate over the trash crisis and their environmental benefits ignored. For instance, he cited a study sponsored by the Canadian province of Quebec that found cheap plastic grocery bags require much less energy to make compared to heavier-duty reusable bags or paper bags, thus producing less greenhouse gas emissions.
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https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/As-plastic-bans-spread-industry-went-on-attack-14273378.php
