Sec. 2. Findings; purpose
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Congress finds the following: The Environmental Protection Agency has recognized that reusing and recycling materials conserves natural resources, reduces waste sent to landfills and incinerators, prevents pollution, conserves natural resources, reduces greenhouse gases contributing to climate change, and helps create jobs and tax revenue. Given these benefits, the Environmental Protection Agency set a National Recycling Goal in 2020 to increase the national recycling rate for all materials to 50 percent by 2030.
As a parallel effort, the Environmental Protection Agency developed a National Recycling Strategy that identifies objectives and actions to create a stronger, more resilient recycling system. Collectively, these efforts intend to increase the amount of materials that can be recycled, make the processing system more efficient, ensure the industry can keep pace with today’s diverse and changing waste system, and strengthen the economic markets for recycling materials. These measures are also intended to help manufacturers make more products using recycled materials, increase competition, and encourage demand for more products made using recycled materials.
There is an unprecedented public and private momentum and investment to innovate, improve, and expand the existing recycling system to develop a circular economy for plastics. A circular economy for plastic products and materials, whether derived from oil, gas, or organics, benefits businesses, society, and the environment. To meet the National Recycling Goal and support domestic interests and competitiveness within international markets, it will be necessary for the recycling market in the United States to expand its deployment of advanced recycling technologies.
These innovative manufacturing processes fundamentally transform the chemical structure of post-use polymer products, many of which are traditionally hard to recycle by mechanical recycling techniques, back to their basic chemical or molecular components. The purposes of this Act are to— grow the circular economy for plastics products and materials to— meet the National Recycling Goal; protect the global environment; reduce plastic waste; support the standardization of the recycling infrastructure capacity in the United States; and bolster competition, technological innovation, and robust global and national markets around circular products; create national plastics recycling standards to encourage the modernization of the recycling infrastructure of the United States; foster competition and consistency in marketing recycled plastics in plastics packaging; recognize advanced recycling technologies as a critical component of the international market for recycled products and the National Recycling Strategy; recognize advanced recycling as a manufacturing process to be regulated under applicable Federal, State, and local environmental statutes, rules, and regulations, including the Clean Air Act ( 42 U.S.C. 7401 et seq. ); and promote international movement towards the use of advanced recycling technologies and the utilization of recycled plastics in the manufacturing of plastics packaging to support the global economy.
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