Plastics, Carbon, Politics, and Experimentation in Environmental Governance

In this Article, I discuss new developments on waste reduction involving plastics and continued social experimentation in greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction, especially as framed in two just-concluded, major international negotiations. In doing so, I describe the search for next-generation policies on waste reduction, including, but not limited to, extended producer responsibility (EPR) programs, along with newly announced policies on carbon offset markets as they relate to GHG reduction. In each case, society is on the verge of what movie producers might call “remakes” with EPR and other waste-reducing programs replacing first-generation recycling efforts and newly designed carbon offset markets replacing, well, older versions of such markets. And, although the two sets of international negotiations took place across the globe from each other, a person wonders especially whether progress made in one area might offer policy options useful for the other.

This abstract has been taken from the author's introduction.