Heather McTeer Toney is the executive director of Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Beyond Petrochemicals Campaign.
Living in a community on the edge of an acres-wide petrochemical plant in Texas or Louisiana means that you can see, smell, and taste plastic pollution every day. All too often leaders who are charged with making decisions about plastic pollution are too far removed from the impact and easily miss the risks to human health and the environment.
This past week, a thousand miles away, delegates from over 170 countries met in Ottawa, Ontario, to discuss just that: pollution from plastic. This meeting marks the fourth session of the UN Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC-4), where leaders are working to develop a legally binding, global plastics treaty ahead of final negotiations set for November.
As decisions move forward, Beyond Petrochemicals is supporting our community partners to help bring their lived experience to the negotiation process. These frontline leaders are working hard to push for a fair and effective treaty that puts public health, human rights, and the environment first.
But the petrochemical industry is at work too, placing pro-plastic ads near negotiating rooms and touting false solutions like “chemical recycling.” Industry executives continue to downplay the role of plastics in the issue of pollution, even as a new report from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that plastic production emits as much carbon pollution as 600 coal-fired power plants annually. By 2050, carbon pollution from plastics production could triple, taking up as much as 20 percent of our remaining carbon budget and undercutting global efforts on climate change.
Canadian minister vows to fight attempts to weaken plastic pollution treaty
It can be hard to relate to the fluctuations of international treaty negotiations or new scientific reports when you spend each day worried about breathing in the pollutants being negotiated. It’s easy to feel like just a number—some statistic about economic hardship or disease. That’s a problem.
Firsthand experience of pollution
Communities know firsthand the impact of plastic pollution at every step of the process. Plastic pollution begins when companies drill and extract oil and gas and use it to process and manufacture petrochemicals for plastics. More than a third of the carbon pollution generated by plastic production happens during the extraction and refining of fossil fuels. And it’s not just carbon pollution, this industry is suffocating communities in places like Texas, Louisiana, and the Ohio River Valley with millions of tons of toxic, cancer-causing pollution.
The global plastics treaty can be a landmark international agreement to address the escalating crisis of plastic pollution at every step – but the only way to get an effective treaty is with the perspectives and input of the communities on the frontlines of petrochemical pollution. Because when communities are trusted to lead, real change is possible.
I have seen the power of communities declaring they are more than a number. Two women separated by a thousand miles and seemingly just as many differences dared to fight the expansion of the petrochemical industry in their community – and they won.
Jill Hunkler, Ohio Valley resident and grassroots leader
Jill Hunkler, a seventh-generation Ohio Valley resident, is a fierce advocate for her community. Faced with plans to displace her friends and neighbors to build the largest ethylene plant of its kind in the United States, she became a leader of a grassroots movement. Phone calls, emails, and meetings helped put the pressure needed on state and federal leaders and stalled what was once seen as inevitable.
Together, they were more than a number and in fact helped avert 1.7 million tons of carbon emissions per year.
Sharon Lavigne of RISE St. James
Sharon Lavigne, a retired teacher from St. James Parish, Louisiana, is tired of the moniker given to her community, “Cancer Alley.” Decades of unabated industrial development have overwhelmed this primarily Black parish leaving a wake of disease and hardship. Sharon knows her parish is more than this, that it is more than a number.
Founding the group RISE St. James, Sharon is leading a multi-generational movement to block a petrochemical and plastics facility poised to produce as much pollution as three new coal plants. Their fight against the Formosa Sunshine plant has gained global attention thanks to her leadership, spurring legal actions and rallying work to ensure this plant is never built.
Sharon and Jill are not alone. Last year, a total of five newly planned petrochemical facilities were blocked by similar community efforts. And last week, after nearly two years of community-led organizing and opposition, Encina Development Group withdrew its plans to build a toxic chemical recycling facility along the Susquehanna River in Point Township, Pennsylvania.
People coming together makes a difference. As the plastics industry works to expand – to build more petrochemical plants and create more plastic than we could ever possibly need – the perspectives of frontline leaders are essential if we are going to arrive at a global plastics treaty that supports a stable climate, a livable planet, and a just future. Alongside powerful community organizers, my colleagues and I are proud to continue this effort to stop the expansion of the petrochemical industry.
Heather McTeer Toney is also the author of Before the Streetlights Come On: Black America’s Urgent Call for Climate Solutions. She was appointed by President Barack Obama to serve as a regional administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for the Southeast region. In 2004, she became the first woman and African American to be elected mayor of Greenville, Mississippi, a position she held until 2011.
The post ‘More than a number’: Global plastic talks need community experts appeared first on Climate Home News.
‘More than a number’: Global plastic talks need community experts
The country’s most valuable utility didn’t like offshore wind. But a proposed merger with Dominion would include a $11.4 billion project in Coastal Virginia.
A utility megamerger announced this week would mean that the largest offshore wind project in the United States would be owned by the same company that already is the nation’s leading developer of renewables and battery storage.
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Australia’s new environmental standards are supposed to protect wildlife. Right now, they don’t.
We have one of the worst mammal extinction rates in the world. We’ve already lost 39 species, including the Christmas Island Shrew and the desert rat-kangaroo, while iconic species like the Hairy-Nosed Wombat, Pygmy blue whale and Swift Parrot continue to slide towards extinction. Forests are still being bulldozed at an alarming rate. Rivers and reefs are under serious pressure.
Fixing this sorry state of affairs was why the Federal Government promised to fix Australia’s broken national nature laws—a promise that culminated in the nature law reforms passed late last year.
A big part of these reforms is the creation of new “National Environmental Standards” — rules intended to guide decisions on projects that could damage nature.
But the Government’s latest draft standards—open for consultation until May 29th—fall dangerously short.
Instead of setting clear environmental guardrails, the draft rules risk making it easier for damaging projects to get approved, while nature continues to decline. Legal experts are warning that unless the standards are changed, they could weaken protections rather than strengthen them.
So what are these standards, exactly?
The new standards are a centrepiece of major reforms to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC Act), which were passed late last year and are designed to fix a broken environmental regulatory system. They are meant to set clear rules for what environmental protection should actually look like.
In simple terms, they’re supposed to answer questions like:
- What measures should developers be made to put in place to protect threatened species?
- How do we ensure the most important habitats and natural places are not hacked away, “death-by-a-thousand-cuts”-style, from ongoing development proposals?
- When should a project simply not go ahead?
- What rules should states follow if they’re in charge of assessing development projects?
- How do we make sure nature is actually improving, not just declining more slowly?
If designed and implemented properly, these standards could become the backbone of strong, effective reformed nature laws.
But right now, they leave huge loopholes open.
The biggest problem: process over outcomes
The biggest problem with the draft standards is that they focus too heavily on whether companies follow a process—not whether nature is genuinely protected in the end. That might sound technical, but it has real-world consequences.
Imagine a company wants to clear critical habitat for a threatened species. Under a strong system, the key question should be: Will this project cause unacceptable or significant environmental harm?
But under the current draft standards, if the company follows the required steps and paperwork, the project could still be considered acceptable — even if the damage to nature is clear.
This is deeply ineffective. Destruction that checks bureaucratic check-boxes is still destruction. The standards should enforce the protection of nature—not just the ticking of procedural boxes.
A smaller definition of habitat could leave wildlife exposed
Another alarming change in the draft standards is the narrowing of how “habitat” is defined, which could have serious consequences for wildlife protection.
Habitat is more than just the exact spot where an animal is seen sleeping, nesting or feeding today; we need to think more holistically about habitat as a connected network of ecosystems that species may rely on to survive, including breeding grounds, migration corridors, areas used during drought or fire, and places they may need to move to as the climate changes.
But the draft standards effectively shrink the areas considered important enough to protect by defining habitat as only very small areas that if destroyed would certainly send the species extinct, rather than habitat which maintains and restores healthy populations able to thrive well into the future.
For animals already under pressure from habitat destruction and climate change, protecting only the bare minimum is a dangerous approach. In practice, that could mean that places which are essential for threatened species to recover and survive long term are destroyed just because they are not classified under the standards as ‘habitat’—a lose-lose outcome for biodiversity and the Australian government’s nature protection goals.
Offsets are still doing too much heavy lifting
Australians have heard the promise before: “Yes, this area will be damaged — but it’ll be offset somewhere else.” In practice, environmental offsets have severely failed to replace what was lost.
You can’t instantly recreate a centuries-old forest. You can’t quickly rebuild complex wildlife habitat. And some ecosystems simply cannot be replaced once destroyed. Yet the draft standards still rely heavily on offsets rather than prioritising avoiding harm in the first place.
The standards must reduce their reliance on offsets, and instead prioritise actual habitat protection. Because once extinction happens, there’s no offset for it.
Australia cannot afford another backwards step on nature
The Albanese Government came to office promising to end Australia’s extinction crisis and repair national nature laws. But this will be a broken promise if the huge loopholes in the National Environmental Standards aren’t addressed.
Right now, Australia is losing wildlife and ecosystems faster than they can recover. Scientists have warned for years that incremental change is no longer enough.
Strong standards could help turn things around by:
- stopping destruction in critical habitat,
- setting firm limits on environmental harm,
- requiring genuine recovery for nature,
- and making decision-makers accountable for real outcomes rather than process.
If the Government locks in rules that prioritise process over protection, Australia risks entrenching the very system that caused the crisis in the first place.
What needs to change?
The Government still has time to fix the draft standards before they are finalised over the next month.
Greenpeace Australia Pacific is calling on the government to:
- ensure decisions are based on outcomes, not just process
- ensure that all important habitat is protected, not just narrow areas
- ensuring that death-by-a-thousand-cuts is avoided by considering the “cumulative impacts” of multiple projects in a region
- ensuring offsets are only used as an absolute last resort
Australians were promised stronger nature laws—not more loopholes. Australia’s wildlife cannot afford another missed opportunity.You can help ensure the Federal Government’s final standards put to parliament are as strong as possible by putting in a quick submission here.
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