Companies have spent decades obstructing efforts to take on the plastics crisis, potentially breaching a host of US laws, a new report argues.
The ban was set to appear on the 1990 ballot, but the industry devised a “highly coordinated and sophisticated campaign” to kill it, the authors write based on The Council for Solid Waste Solutions , an industry group funded by major petrochemical producers such as Exxon, Dow, DuPont andCSWS also facilitated the creation of a “front group”, which purported to represent local business interests. And it lobbied state lawmakers to water down the measure, promoting recycling instead of packaging bans.Another strategy: pitting environmentalists and organized labor against one another.