The War on Plastic Is Being Fought Mostly Against Surfers’ Boards, Not the Industry That Produces the Plastic

California’s regulatory focus on consumer plastic — wax, single-use packaging, board materials — imposes costs on surf culture while leaving the industrial plastic that constitutes 90 percent of ocean pollution essentially unregulated at the state level

Surfers care about the ocean. This is not a political position. It is a direct consequence of spending significant portions of one’s life in saltwater: you notice when the water quality changes, when the plastic concentrations increase, when runoff from rain events makes the surf dangerous, when the reef you grew up surfing looks different than it did ten years ago. The surf community’s environmental awareness predates the political mainstreaming of environmentalism by decades. Surfers were testing water quality and demanding discharge regulations before most environmental organisations existed. The Surfrider Foundation, founded by surfers in 1984, has been among the most effective coastal environmental advocacy organisations in the United States for forty years.

None of this changes the observation that California’s plastic regulation, as it has evolved, has disproportionately targeted the consumer-facing end of the plastic supply chain — the straws, the single-use bags, the packaging — while leaving industrial plastic production, the source of the majority of ocean plastic contamination, largely untouched at the state level. The regulatory burden falls on the individual and the small business. The industrial producer, whose lobbying capacity far exceeds that of the surf wax manufacturer or the small board shaper, faces a lighter regulatory touch.

The Industrial Source Ignored

Studies of ocean plastic contamination consistently find that the majority of plastic in the ocean originates from industrial sources and river transport in countries outside the United States and Western Europe — with Southeast Asia, South Asia, and China contributing the largest shares. This is not an argument against US and California plastic regulation; it is context for evaluating what form that regulation takes and what it actually accomplishes. Banning plastic straws in California eliminates a consumer product that constitutes a small fraction of the global ocean plastic load. It does not meaningfully reduce plastic contamination in the Pacific that affects the California coast.

The consumer-facing regulation preference reflects not only lobbying dynamics but a political economy of visible action: banning straws produces visible compliance — reusable alternatives that consumers carry — that signals regulatory commitment without confronting the industrial producers whose political and economic power makes meaningful regulation costly. The Mises Institute and other free-market analysts have critiqued this dynamic as “regulatory theatre,” but the critique is convergent with that of environmental effectiveness researchers who find that consumer plastic bans have limited impact on ocean contamination relative to industrial discharge controls and international cooperation on waste management.

What Surfers Actually Need

The environmental regulation that would most directly benefit California’s surf community is not consumer plastic restriction. It is: rigorous enforcement of stormwater discharge standards that prevent runoff from entering coastal waters after rain events; investment in beach water quality monitoring and rapid public notification systems; enforcement of existing regulations against industrial discharge into coastal waterways; and California’s engagement with federal and international processes on ocean plastic that address the primary sources of contamination. These are less visible than plastic straw bans. They are more directly connected to the water quality that surfers and beachgoers actually experience.

The regulatory apparatus that imposes compliance costs on surfboard manufacturers for foam formulations, on surf wax producers for ingredient disclosure, and on surf shops for packaging standards, while doing relatively little about the runoff event that makes the water at Malibu unsafe to surf for three days after a rain, has its priorities misaligned with the interests of the coastal community in whose name it often acts. Effective environmental regulation focuses on the largest sources of the problem. California’s coastal environmental regulation, as it has developed, has focused on the most politically tractable targets, which are not the same thing.

The political economy of California’s consumer-facing plastic regulation deserves examination as a case study in how regulatory focus is determined. The plastic straw ban passed the California legislature in 2018 with minimal opposition, significant public enthusiasm, and clear industry acceptance from restaurant associations who had already been managing away from straws in response to consumer pressure. The contrast with attempts to regulate industrial plastic use — including a 2022 bill that would have required plastic producers to fund cleanup programmes and meet reduction targets — illustrates the political asymmetry. The consumer product regulation generates visible compliance and public goodwill at low political cost. The industrial producer regulation generates significant lobbying opposition and requires confronting industries with the resources to sustain political campaigns against it. The regulatory outcomes reflect the political costs, not the environmental priorities. For the surfer who cares about ocean quality, the honest assessment is that the regulations that are easiest to pass are not the ones that most directly address the water quality they experience. The hard work is advocating for the harder regulations. The Surfrider Foundation does this work, persistently and against substantial opposition. The results are slower than the urgency requires and faster than they would be without the advocacy. This is how environmental regulation actually functions, as distinct from how it is marketed.

A final note on the industrial source question: the international dimension of ocean plastic contamination does not absolve California of responsibility for its domestic discharge sources, which include agricultural runoff from Central Valley operations that reaches the Pacific through the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta, stormwater from urban areas throughout the state, and industrial discharge from coastal manufacturing and port operations. These sources are within California’s regulatory authority and are inadequately controlled relative to their contribution to coastal water quality. The consumer-facing plastic bans that have dominated California’s regulatory energy on ocean plastic are not a substitute for controlling these domestic industrial sources. They are a complement to that work that is being pursued instead of it, because the political dynamics of regulating agricultural and industrial sources are significantly more difficult than banning plastic straws from restaurants. The Surfrider Foundation’s water quality programme focuses on precisely these domestic sources, with documentation of specific discharge events and advocacy for enforcement actions that the regulatory agencies have been slow to pursue. Supporting that work is what effective coastal environmentalism looks like in California. Buying a reusable straw is what it looks like when the political system has optimised for visibility over impact.

From The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine.

At The Onion | The Shovel | NewsThump

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/war-on-plastic-fought-against-surfers-boards-not-industrial-plastic/