Rep. Lowenthal's Break Free from Plastic Pollution Act seeks to reform our broken waste management system and shift the financial burden of waste management off of our municipalities and taxpayers to where it belongs: the producers of this waste. It would require producers of packaging, containers, and food-service products to design, manage, and finance waste and recycling programs, launch a nationwide beverage container refund program to bolster recycling rates, ban certain single-use plastic products that are not recyclable, ban single-use plastic carryout bags and place a fee on the distribution of the remaining carryout bags, which has proven successful at the state level, and establish minimum recycled content requirements for beverage containers, packaging, and food-service products, among other policies.
