'People want to make an impact': Organization wins municipal bottle bans in every Cape Cod town

Doug Frazier Cape Cod Times

Published Jul 1, 2021 

TRURO — The town meeting article passed on a voice vote with no debate. Not unusual. Town budgets in the tens of millions of dollars typically go that route.

Except this was a petitioned article, and those can ruffle the feathers of town officials or boards who bridle at outsiders, particularly those who don’t live in town, trying to tell them how to conduct business.

But — like in 14 other Cape towns — Truro voters Saturday supported the article that prohibited town departments from buying single-use plastic bottled beverages. The article also prohibited the sale of non-flavored, non-carbonated drinking water in single-use plastic containers on town property.

The vote wrapped up a campaign by the group Sustainable Practices that began in earnest two years ago. It marked the 15th and final Cape town to pass a similar petitioned article that, either as policy or as bylaw, banned municipal purchase and distribution of the ubiquitous bottle of water.

(Truro and other Cape municipal bottle bans do allow for their use in declared emergencies and during public safety and health operations.)

In addition, 10 Cape towns have passed a companion article mandating a retail ban on single-use plastic water bottles. Yarmouth town meeting voters in May did not pass the retail bottle ban. The issue has not yet come before Barnstable Town Council for a vote, and it has not yet come before town meeting in Bourne, Mashpee and Truro.

“This is not a littering issue, this is a human health and environmental issue,” said Madhavi Venkatesan, executive director of Sustainable Practices, which spearheaded the campaign, and an assistant teaching professor of economics at Northeastern University in Boston.

Venkatesan, who lives in Brewster, started her anti-plastics campaign in 2016 showing the documentary “A Plastic Ocean” at the Chatham Orpheum Theater. She knew she had tapped a nerve when 75 people showed up for the first viewing on a Saturday morning in July.

Suzanna Nickerson, who since has become a member of Sustainable Practices, showed up for the movie towing a skiff filled with plastics collected off a Chatham beach.

“This whole movement has been full of moments like that,” Venkatesan said.

She is hoping to get positive votes affirming the retail ban in the remaining five Cape towns over the next year.

Cape leads the state

Although the first retail ban in Massachusetts happened in Concord in 2012, the Cape and Islands towns represent nearly all of the bans, both municipal and retail, that have occurred since then. As of May, there were only six towns in the state not on the Cape and Islands that had bans, according to information from the Sierra Club of Massachusetts.

For materials that didn’t come into widespread use until the 1950s, plastics have made significant inroads into the environment and the global food chain. They've been found in everything from single-celled organisms to human organs and in the remotest parts of the world.

More: Scientists find microplastics embedded in New Bedford and Cape Cod salt marshes

Plastics have been killing sea animals like birds, turtles, even whales, and their impact on humans spans from the emissions that take place during extraction and manufacturing to possible cancers and organ damage caused by ingestion of microplastics in the food chain, according to scientists and environmental groups.

It’s not easy to get anything to pass in all 15 Cape towns, even articles that have no impact on town operations or our lifestyle. But the support that the plastic bottle bans experienced may just be the result of what those who live here see every day.

“I would say most people want to make an impact. They know there are changes that need to be made,” Venkatesan said. “When they see an organization that is trying to make inroads on making those changes, they say, ‘OK, now I can contribute.’”

Is recycling an answer?

A 2019 report by Australian scientists estimated that 15 million tons of plastic enter the ocean each year. The Cape is virtually surrounded by ocean, and plastic bottles and caps ranked third in terms of the number of items collected during a September 2020 clean-up of a 1.5-mile stretch of beach between Truro and Provincetown.

Plastic bottles are second on the list of the 10 most widespread ocean waste items, just behind plastic bags, according to the online statistics portal Statista, which used data from a 2021 study of ocean litter published in the online journal Nature Sustainability.

Beverage companies push recycling as the solution.

Speaking at a recent online forum on the Cape’s municipal bottle bans, Steve Boksanski, executive director of the Massachusetts Beverage Association, said the industry response to the plastics problem was on recycling. He cited an industry campaign “Every Bottle Back.”

“The goal of Every Bottle Back is so that companies can meet their future goals of using recycled plastic in their new packaging,” Boksanski said.

But the consensus of many experts is that it will be difficult, if not impossible, to recycle our way out of this problem.

According to the EPA, nearly 36 million tons of plastic was manufactured in the U.S. in 2018, with only 3 million tons recycled. Nearly twice that amount was burned to produce electricity, but nearly 27 million tons went into landfills, EPA numbers show.

The recycling rate for bottles and jars is higher than other plastics, but is still below 30%, according to the EPA.

Norway leads the world in recycling bottles, with a 97% recycling rate. That's thanks to a program that resembles our bottle bills, with a charge tacked on at purchase for all bottles that can be redeemed at a reverse vending machine, according to a November 2020 Statista article.

But in the U.S., progress on bottle bills has languished, with only 10 states participating, according to a June 23 article in the online newsletter Waste Dive. It’s been 16 years since any state was added to that list. The Massachusetts bottle bill only covers carbonated beverages. 

Coca-Cola was sued this month by Earth Institute in federal court, alleging that it was engaged in false advertising for its “World Without Waste” campaign that claimed it would collect and recycle a bottle or can for each one they sell by 2030.

In 2019, the Conservation Law Foundation advocated for bans on plastic bottles, cups, straws and bags. The organization cited environmental and human health concerns in production and recycling, and low recycling rates that the EPA estimated at 8.7% in 2018 for all plastics produced in the U.S.

Growth in plastics

Plus, the fossil fuel industry, beset by shrinking demand, has targeted plastics as a growth sector. A recent story in the online journal Vox showed British Petroleum forecasting that the company expects that plastics will represent 95% of net growth in demand over the next 20 years.

In 2017, bottled-water sales surpassed carbonated beverages in sales and those numbers grew every year — with the exception of 2008 and 2009 — from 1977 to 2017, according to the Beverage Marketing Corporation. Single-serve bottles comprised 67% of the market, it said.

Plastics production increased from 16.5 million tons in 1964 to 343 million tons by 2014, and was expected to double by 2034, according to a 2014 World Economic Forum and Ellen MacArthur Foundation report.

A 2015 study by University of Georgia researcher Jenna Jambeck estimated that only 9% of all plastics worldwide are recycled and 12% are incinerated. About 79% was either in landfills or in the natural environment, including oceans, she concluded.

“We’re dealing with a tremendous misinformation campaign by the (beverage) industry,” Venkatesan said. 

Even countries where plastics recycling is an industry can’t keep up with worldwide production. Until they ended the practice of accepting plastic waste from other countries in 2017, China and Hong Kong handled 70% of the U.S.'s discarded plastic materials, according to a 2018 Greenpeace report. Much of that may have gone into the environment: China was home to six of the 10 rivers that contribute 93% of the plastics that enter the oceans each year, according to a 2017 study in Environmental Science & Technology. 

“There’s a reason why so much of our clothing has plastic in it; there’s a reason why so many things around us are made of recycled plastics, because where else are you going to put this product?” Venkatesan said.

She said that bans were necessary because the U.S. economy is based on production, not what is good for the environment, or for our health.

“The reality is we live in a society where people have become so individually focused and self-gratified … that they do not like to consider that just because something is available to them, that they don’t have a responsibility in the future use of that product,” Venkatesan said. “The damage we have done is one thing, but do we not have a responsibility for the future?”