MIAMI — Miami-Dade Commissioners are set to vote on a resolution to eliminate single-use plastics and styrofoam at county-owned venues like Miami International Airport, PortMiami, parks and office buildings — and instead sell aluminum bottles or cans or serve food on washable ceramic or compostable plates.

The resolution marks the latest chapter in a longstanding battle between the state and local governments over attempts to ban single-use plastics, with some hoping that successful implementation would inspire private businesses to voluntarily follow the county’s lead in reducing plastics proven harmful to the health of humans and the environment.

“I don’t want to go into any county-owned facility and see single-use plastics when there is a viable, cost-effective alternative,“ said Miami-Dade County Commissioner Eileen Higgins, who championed the proposal. The resolution, which could face a vote as early as Wednesday, would make exceptions for grab-and-go snacks or candy bars.

Despite their light weight, the plastic products that industries produce in the U.S. each year weigh 35.7 million tons. In the U.S., only 5% of all plastics are recycled, according to the Department of Energy, and recycling rates have dropped over the years.

The rest ends up in incinerators or landfills, pollutes storm drains, rivers and oceans, and breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces that have been found in breast milk, human brains, lungs and testicles.

Better options

While the county’s waste management master plan considers a new and controversial incinerator necessary – the amount of waste produced is expected to grow from roughly 2.5 million tons this year to 2.9 million tons by 2028 – experts and activists say that burning trash isn’t the only option.

“The trick is reducing and diverting waste,” said Dave Doebler, co-founder of VolunteerCleanup, which has helped remove 800,000 pounds of trash from beaches and parks in South Florida since 2013. Simply put, Doebler said, “the less volume we have to deal with, the less we need to incinerate or throw in a landfill.” And the less that can end up in Biscayne Bay or as toxins in our own bodies.

Microplastics have been linked to cancer and infertility and might even play a role in obesity, recent studies show, though their impact is most apparent on Florida’s coast, which not only draws millions of tourists, but sees plastics from across the world washed up. As petrochemicals derived from oil or gas, plastics account for 3.4% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Researchers project that plastic waste in the ocean could amount to about 600 million tons within the next six years – about 150 times the weight of the planet’s total blue whale population combined.

Dozens of volunteers gather regularly around Miami-Dade to try to make a difference by combing beaches and parks for plastic bottles and bags. Most of them are designed for just a few minutes of usage and can’t be recycled even if they were thrown in a recycling bin.

“People are not aware of how it could affect not just us individuals, but the animals that live here,” said Gabriella Wright, a 16-year-old who has passed up sleepovers and hangouts with friends since she was six to instead gather trash.

Though Wright has inspired her friends and family to be more mindful and reduce the amount of plastic they use — for example, by getting reusable water bottles — policies that support such waste-reduction efforts are urgently needed, activists say.

State pushback on bans

While 12 states, including Maine, Delaware and California, have already imposed some form of plastic bag ban, Florida’s state legislators took a different route in 2008 when they passed a preemption that restricts the right of local governments to regulate plastics, including “containers, wrappings, or disposable bags.”

Several local governments, from Surfside to Palm Beach, nevertheless passed plastic bans, citing the will of its residents, but quickly repealed or rescinded these regulations after the Florida Retail Federation (FRF), a lobbying group representing influential retail giants like Publix and Walmart, threatened them with lawsuits. Coral Gables lost a lengthy legal battle to FRF when the state’s Supreme Court declined to hear its appeal over a styrofoam food container ban in 2020.

Miami Beach and Broward County have passed similar resolutions as the one Miami-Dade will be voting on.

Earlier this year, the Florida Legislature considered further protecting plastics, which are derived from fossil fuels like oil and gas, with a bill that would have stopped local governments from passing measures restricting its use under public contracts. That bill, however, quickly died after environmental groups’ protests, paving the way for Miami-Dade’s measure.

More than 17,000 people have so far emailed the commission in support of the resolution. Florida-wide, 93% of people surveyed by the Department of Environmental protection in 2021 favored regulation of single-use plastics. A total of 82% said they’d support it even if it meant an additional fee.

Industry warns commission

Opposition is again coming from FRF, which sent a letter to the commission that warns of “a significant financial hit” and “unintended consequences that may arise, particularly in terms of negatively impacting small businesses that rely on sales of items packaged in, or utilize, plastic or polystyrene”. FRF did not respond to the Herald’s request to specify how their members would be hurt.

Efforts should be focused on improving recycling of plastics, the letter says. But the plastic industry itself has failed to create workable recycling for decades, and has internally expressed doubts that it would ever be possible to do so in an “economically viable” way since at least the mid-70s. In September, California’s state attorney filed a lawsuit accusing ExxonMobil of deceiving the public over the alleged recyclabilty of plastics for decades.

Publix, by far the single-biggest contributor to FRF’s political committee and a major powerhouse in Tallahassee, said it has reduced plastic bag usage by 9.7 billion since 2007 by coaching staff on “proper bagging techniques” and installing bins designated for recycling single-use plastics. Publix declined several requests for an interview and did not reply to a request to elaborate on the data.

The Miami-Dade resolution doesn’t limit product types, quantities or their prices, and is limited to future contracts only.

“We’re not trying to tell you how to run your household. But we are saying, ’This is how we want to run our household and our business’,” Higgins said. She believes that Miami Dade, the largest county in Florida, should lead by example. “We can, through our contracting, inspire companies to change the product portfolio, to make more in aluminum and less in plastic,” she said.

Who profits?

Businesses across the county, including Hard Rock Stadium, home to the Miami Dolphins, have already shown that reducing plastics can work. William Elgar, the director of Zoo Miami, said that his team also decided to tackle its own plastics issue during the pandemic, around the time the zoo opened its Sea Turtle Hospital that has so far removed plastics from some 30 sea turtles.

Across the premises, vending machines are now stacked with aluminum water bottles and cans with electrolyte drinks, which helped the zoo cut 340,000 bottles of plastic just last year.

“If you think about it, that’s 340,000 bottles and cups less that could get into our oceans, that could get into our water works, our streams, and cause microfilaments and plastic to get everywhere,” Elgar said.

The switch hasn’t hurt revenues, Elgar said, in part because the aluminum trash is bought by companies that can recycle it indefinitely.

Activists, however, say that recycling isn’t in the best interest of the companies producing plastics, nor in the oil companies’, which are banking on the increase of plastic production as the use of fossil fuels for transportation or heating decline.

“If we’re truly going to address or slow down climate change or avert the worst impacts of climate change, we also are going to have to address the emissions that are coming from plastics and petrochemicals, which are expected to rise,” said Renee Sharp, a policy expert at the National Resource Defense Council.

Along with other petrochemicals like fertilizer and synthetic fabrics, the International Energy Agency projects that plastics will account for roughly half of the growth in oil demand by 2050. Activists have called plastics the oil industry’s “Plan B.”

The only entity that would ultimately be hurt by a ban is the oil and plastics industries, says the Sierra Club’s Ken Russell, a former Miami city commissioner. “It does not hurt the end user, the retail tenant, or, of course, the customer,” Russell said, “and so the real pushback comes from the industry that creates, in this case, the plastics and the styrofoam.”

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