By Will Atwater
- The science is catching up to the concern.
The EPA has designated microplastics as a priority contaminant group for the first time. - In North Carolina, policy progress has been slow.
A statewide plastic bag fee was killed by the General Assembly. Political has yet to match the urgency, advocates say. - Change may start closer to home than you think.
Experts say meaningful progress on plastic waste typically begins at the local and state level first.
In recent years, North Carolina environmentalists and researchers have raised more red flags about how much plastic debris is accumulating in the environment — in creeks and parks and on roadsides. This comes alongside awareness of how those plastics are increasingly showing up inside the human body.
Research reveals possible links between microplastics and hormone disruption, cancer and heart disease, and researchers studying plastic particle debris — some so tiny it can be inhaled and is invisible to the naked eye — are sounding a warning to single-use plastic producers and industry lobbyists who point to the absence of a definitive link between plastics and human health harms. The evidence, said Trisha Vaidyanathan, science director at Beyond Plastics, and other scientists at the forefront of plastic health research, is building.
“It’s important to remember that the absence of definitive proof or harm is not the same thing as proof of safety.”
Advocates have lobbied for legislation, published reports on the quantity, types and financial costs of plastic debris and its cleanup, and tracked growing federal awareness of the problem.
Federal officials took a concrete step forward in April, when the EPA released a draft contaminants list that designated microplastics as a priority contaminant group for the first time. This recognition could move plastic debris from scientific watchlist to active regulatory scrutiny, which could put drinking water standards on the horizon.
Researchers have identified 16,000 chemicals used in plastic production, at least 4,200 of which are considered highly hazardous to human health or the environment, according to the PlastChem Report, a peer-reviewed database published in 2024. Of those hazardous chemicals, only 980 have been regulated globally — leaving more than 3,600 unregulated.
In North Carolina, local efforts to ban plastic bags or impose fees on them were dealt a decisive blow when a provision buried in the 2023-24 state budget — backed by the North Carolina Retail Merchants Association and passed by the General Assembly — stripped municipalities of the authority to regulate single-use plastic bags, cups and other packaging.
The moment reflects a broader reckoning over plastic waste: The science is hardening, federal regulators are paying closer attention and advocates are pressing for systemic change, even as legislation to hold producers accountable has repeatedly stalled at the General Assembly.
That’s, in part, what animated a summit on June 12 in Durham all about “circularity.” One goal: to explore the potential health harms posed by plastic waste, possible policy remedies and what a circular economy might look like in practice.
Closing the loop?
Advocates of a circular economy seek to disrupt the “take, make, dispose” mindset, instead opting for an approach that designs products and packaging to be reused, repaired or recycled.
The framework extends beyond plastics to electronics, textiles and appliances, and it increasingly overlaps with the right to repair movement — a connection explored in an earlier session at the summit that examined consumers’ growing push to fix broken devices, mend older garments or transform them into something new rather than discard them.
For advocates thinking about plastic waste, circularity offers a framework for rethinking not just how plastics are managed at the end of their life, but how they are made in the first place.
Credit: Will Atwater/NC Health News
One policy tool gaining traction in that effort is extended producer responsibility. The idea is to shift the financial burden of waste management from municipalities and taxpayers onto the companies that created the packaging in the first place.
Durham City Councilman Matt Kopac, who advises companies and nonprofits on sustainability issues professionally, offered a plain-language explanation at the June 12 summit.
“It’s kind of making this invisible visible [by] assessing fees for materials and making producers pay by weight and by component,” Kopac said during his opening remarks at the third annual Circularity Summit, sponsored by Circular Triangle, a local nonprofit. “That money paid by producers is then collected and used to reinvest into recycling systems to make it easier to collect and have those materials available for a next life.”
It’s not that far-fetched an idea. Many states now have some form of extended producer responsibility legislation on the books, including laws around plastic packaging.
Kopac added that extended producer responsibility also creates a financial incentive for companies to move away from using packaging materials that have poor health profiles or no viable end-of-life pathway. The approach, he noted, is already being applied to textiles and electronics.
In North Carolina, though, legislative solutions have not yet had success.
House Bill 882, titled “Break Free From Plastic and Forever Chemicals,” would establish an extended producer responsibility program for packaging materials, ban toxic substances including PFAS and phthalates from packaging, and prohibit intentionally added PFAS in food containers. Introduced in April 2025 by Rep. Pricey Harrison (D-Guilford), the bill was referred to the House Rules Committee, where it has stalled. An earlier version of the bill died in the same committee in 2023.
The last time North Carolina passed any legislation making producers liable for waste was with passage in 2007 of a bill regulating discarded computer equipment.
Where circularity gets complicated
Taylor Price, global sustainability senior manager at AptarGroup and a member of Durham’s Environmental Affairs Board, offered a manufacturer’s perspective on what circularity looks like from inside a plastics company.
Aptar makes the kinds of plastic components that rarely get named in debates about plastic waste but are everywhere: lotion pumps, sports caps, lipstick packaging, asthma inhalers and more. With plastic making up roughly 95 percent of its raw materials, the company has a direct stake in how those plastics are designed, used and recovered, she said.
“We are really thinking about plastic as our biggest raw material,” Price said, “and so we’re really thinking about designing our products to be just better — manufacturing them better.”
Price said Aptar began focusing on the circular economy around 2018, and that circularity is now one of the company’s three main sustainability pillars, which shapes everything from zero-waste manufacturing programs to partnerships aimed at designing products for recyclability and incorporating recycled content.
But she was candid about the complexity of the challenge. Price used the closure and valve on the Heinz ketchup bottle that sits upside down in your refrigerator as an example of the complexity of the problem. She noted that Aptar only makes the closure and valve. The bottle comes from another supplier. The label from another. The tomatoes, sugar and salt from still others.
“I think a lot of people don’t realize how many partners go into making one package,” she said. Moving an entire supply chain toward circularity, she noted, requires manufacturers to collaborate sometimes with direct competitors.
“We really have to partner together, almost work with our peers and work with our competitors, so to speak, to really make that system more useful, to build a better system.”
Step by step
For Madison Haley, a Ph.D. candidate at NC State University and member of the NC Plastic Waste Reduction Coalition, the path forward runs through policies that make plastic waste literally worth something.
Haley pointed to bottle deposit bills as one of the most proven tools available. In the 10 states where such laws exist — first enacted in 1971 — consumers pay a small deposit when purchasing a bottled beverage and recover it when they return the container.
“It’s not a fee, it’s not a tax — you get it back,” Haley said. “Litter is worth money, so you’re going to want to pick it up.”
The results, she said, speak for themselves. Beverage container litter drops by roughly 80 percent in bottle bill states, and the quality of recycled materials improves dramatically — recycled plastic bales from bottle bill states fetch nearly three times the market value of those from states like North Carolina.
In North Carolina, a bottle bill has been introduced in each of the past three legislative sessions without becoming law. But Haley sees the repeated introductions as a sign of building momentum rather than failure.
“It’s not necessarily going to become law next year,” she said, “but we are seeing momentum, and there is kind of an educational campaign around that.”
She cited extended producer responsibility legislation as another front where pressure is building, even if progress in North Carolina has been slow.
“It’s got to start somewhere,” she said. “It starts locally, it starts at the state level — and those are the big ones.”
Underlying both the policy push and the industry effort is advocates’ shared belief that reducing plastic waste means addressing it at the source, not just managing it after the fact.
That local-to-state-to-federal pipeline is precisely what gives Price reason for optimism. Drawing on her experience navigating corporate sustainability across global markets, she noted that — and that history suggests — a tipping point may be closer than it appears.
Once somewhere between seven and 25 states adopt similar measures, federal action typically follows, she observed.
“Local policies eventually turn into state policies, which can eventually turn into national policies,” Price said.
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