 are very excited to spotlight an exciting new report on this topic and we have two co-authors with us tonight. It is a fantastic report. We shared the link with many of you. I have had the privilege of teaching a class on plastic pollution at Bennington College in Vermont, which is now available online. And I have to say, if I just had this report a couple of years ago, my life would have been so much easier. And if you are like me and you are a public policy nerd, I have to tell you pages of amazing references starting on page 126 of the report, useful definitions on page 164 and a really interesting legal framework on page 167. This is the crowd that gets excited about those kind of citations and references. There is a lot going on in this field. Just last week alone, our friends at Oceana released a poll that they commissioned by the polling firm called Ipsos. And that poll found eight in 10 American voters supported taking local, state and national action to reduce single use plastics. And what I'd love about that poll is the eight in 10 support was bipartisan. It was Republicans, Democrats, independents. Also, just last week, the little company called Coca-Cola announced that they are committed to shifting to 25% reusable, returnable beverage containers by 2030. Couple details still need to be worked out but that is an indication that we're moving beyond recycling and finally getting to reduction, refill reuse. And this year, state legislatures across the country are looking at extended producer responsibility policies. The important thing is to get the details right. So my colleague, Jennifer Condon with Beyond Plastics, myself and a team of other policy experts spent part of last summer drafting a model extended producer responsibility law bill that we hope becomes a law. And that is available on our website which is beyondplastics.org. So in thinking about our webinar tonight, I kept also thinking about that recent Netflix movie called Don't Look Up. I assume many of you have seen it. I personally prefer romantic comedies but I watched this because it was about climate change. And since seeing that movie, I've been haunted by the final words by the actor Leonardo DiCaprio. His character said, right at the end of the movie, the thing of it is we really did have everything. The thing of it is we really did have everything. And that also applies to our ocean. Generations of people have enjoyed clean water. We have strong fisheries that feed millions of people a good protein source. We used to have very healthy coral reefs which serve as nurseries for fish. And the ocean really does have everything but it's now facing the double threat of climate change and plastic pollution. I honestly believe that the report that you will hear about tonight is a game changer. Information is power. This information will allow all of us as individuals, as academics, as organizations to work for change. So we have two of the co-authors of the report with us. They're very modest and they're going to say it was a team of co-authors which is true that these are two technical co-authors. I'll introduce them at both at the same time. They will speak to all of us this evening. And then if you have questions, type them in the Q&A section at the bottom of the toolbar. Chat mercifully has been disabled but we welcome your questions and we'll get to as many as we can. So let me tell you just a little bit about our speakers. Margaret Spring is the Chief Conservation and Science Officer at my favorite place in the world, the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Well, perhaps it can be competes with the Catskills and the Adirondacks for me. She has decades of experience in environmental law and policy. Margaret served as Chief of Staff and later Principal Deputy Undersecretary at NOAA. Prior to her tenure at NOAA, Margaret served for eight years as Senior and General Counsel to the US Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation where she advised members of Congress and developed key ocean and climate legislation. She's also been an attorney in private practice and she's an expert on the Federal Superfund Program which has some interesting lessons for cleaning up our ocean. We're also joined this evening by Dr. Rashid Sumala. Rashid is a professor and Canada Research Chair in Interdisciplinary Ocean and Fisheries Economics. Rashid is the Director of both the Fisheries Economics Research Unit and the Ocean Canada Partnership at the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries at the University of British Columbia. He was also appointed to the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs. His research focuses on bioeconomics, marine ecosystem valuation and the analysis of global issues such as fisheries, subsidies, illegal fishing, climate change, plastic pollution in oil spills. What a fascinating series of fields I could talk to you for hours. So let me turn the floor over to Margaret Spring. Listen to every word, then we'll hear from Rashid and then open the floor to questions. Thank you, Margaret. Great, well, thank you, Judith. And thank you, Jennifer. I'm going to share my screen and hopefully that will work because not always does it work. There we go. Can everyone see that? I hope you can. So as Judith said, I'm Margaret Spring. I'm now at the Monterey Bay Aquarium but I was played a role in bringing this report reckoning with the U.S. Roll and Oaks Global Ocean Plastic Waste to fruition. It was actually reported the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine and it was requested by a bipartisan group of Congress people through the Save Our Seas 2.0 Act and it was sponsored by NOAA's Marine Debris Program and I'm so glad to be joined here by one of our members of the committee that put this report together, Dr. Rashid Samila. And speaking of the committee, this is a list of the 10 experts who the National Academies pulled together from a range of disciplines and expertise to write this report. We had an amazing and wonderful committee. We met almost entirely, we've never met in person. We met entirely over Zoom and so somehow we still are friends and definitely are excited about this report. So thank you, Judith, for those great and supportive words. I'd also like to recognize not only their work but that NOAA's support in funding this report and of course the staff of the National Academies, terrific. Susan Roberts may be on the phone. She's our Ocean Studies Board Director, brought this to fruition with her team, Megan May, Bridget McGovern and Kansas CDL Sherry, fantastic team. We couldn't have done it without them. So just to give you a sense of how big a report this is, we spent over a year working on it. We reviewed hundreds of studies and held public meetings where we heard from lots of experts from the sponsors of the legislation represented by the offices of Senators White House and Sullivan, again, a bipartisan team, federal and state agencies, including from NOAA and EPA, legal experts, industry and waste management organizations and scientists and conservation groups. And together, I just wanna assure you that we came to consensus on everything in this report. It is a consensus study. So as many of you know, plastics are widely utilized throughout society because of their useful properties from durability and flexibility to lightness and strength. And of course, inexpensive, they're inexpensive too, in many cases. They're found in a wide range of consumer and industrial applications and in medical settings, the use of plastics has improved patient and worker safety and have also been used to advance healthcare treatment. But plastic waste is present in essentially every marine and freshwater habitat from streams and lakes to beaches and deep sea sediments. The global production of plastics worldwide is increasing and the amount of plastic waste generated at entering our environment, including our ocean is also projected to increase. To date, voluntary actions while important have not been sufficient to reduce the blow of plastic waste and the economic costs of addressing the problem are substantial. For example, in terms of direct costs, the US spends roughly $11.5 billion on cleanup from trash leakage into our environment and state cities and counties together spend at least $1.3 billion. This doesn't even include the value of lost revenues or services, which we do discuss in the report. And those are data from trash, not just plastic, but that is a huge percentage of trash is plastic. The report is the first synthesis of scientific knowledge about the United States role in ocean plastic as defined by a very specific six part statement of task. And I agreed with Judd Judith that this was a big job because it hadn't been done before and it was sorely needed, I think. We hope it'll also serve, I'm glad you hear it already. She's brought this up that it's a source document, 30 pages of references, tables and appendices, your heart's delight, lots of texts to move through. And the other, the good news here is also that because NOAA commissioned this report prior to the enactment of the bill, this was only the first of many reports coming out of that. So we couldn't cover everything in this report, it felt like it. There are a number of other reports coming out from the Save Our Seas Act. And so we look forward to seeing those specific studies come out. You'll see from this that the committee approached the task in a very systematic way, starting with the production of plastic to its transformation to plastic waste, this is plastic and then there's plastic waste, and then to the ultimate fate in the environment and the ocean. Our top recommendation, what was it? Well, the report's overarching recommendation responds to the sponsor's request, specifically that we recommend, quote, potential means to reduce the United States contributions to global ocean plastic waste. And this recommendation is that the United States create a coherent, comprehensive, and cross-cutting federal research and policy strategy to identify, implement, and assess intervention spanning plastic production, use, disposal, and input to the environment. And we set a date for doing this, and getting this strategy out there at the end of this year and then look back at it in 2025. And this is a very active year already with the State Department already announcing support for a global treaty, so things are moving. No single solution can greatly reduce the flow of plastic waste to the ocean, but a suite of actions or interventions, as we call them, because we're nerdy, from source to sea can reduce ocean plastic waste and achieve environmental and social benefit. And the committee recommended that the US take action in every single one of these six stages of the plastic life cycle. The committee's three other recommendations relating to solid waste production and tracking and monitoring would be part of this larger strategy. But first, let's review what the committee learned about the US contribution to global ocean plastic waste that led to these recommendations. And for that, I'm gonna be turned this over to Rashid, who will explain the report's findings on plastic production waste generation and waste leakage, which all underpin the call for this national strategy. Rashid. Thank you very much, Margaret, and also Judy for the amazing introduction and all the work that went into this. For me, I see this as a big privilege to get the chance to share the results of one year of work with 10 very interesting, intelligent colleagues, whom we haven't met in person, but met online and managed to produce this. And so thank you all for making time to come, about 420 of you, roughly, online, which is amazing. So the first point I'm going to make is about the growth of plastic production. Now, global plastic production has increased nearly 20 times from 1966 to 2015. 1966 to 2015, 20 times, 20 times, think about that. North America, we're roughly around the average, 19% the growth of the total plastic production in the world. So 20%, 19%, if you compare that to the population of North Americans compared to the rest of the world, that already tells you something. However, I want to note that we found that, the committee found that international system of plastic production trade and use complicates the effort to fully quantify. So I'm putting this as a caveat. This is the best science we could find. And as you know, the best science is always progressing. So this is our best knowledge now. And let's go to underline that, you know, in inaccessible or non-existent production data also makes it difficult to quantify exactly US contributions, right? We would like you to note that. Yeah, now we go to slide number 10, please, my boy. And the second point is that the US, US municipal solid waste generation is two to eight times per person greater than in many other countries around the world. So, and this shows in my last slide where I said the North America is 29% of the total, right? That shows up here. So we do produce a lot of this per capital. And I say we here, I'm based in Canada but when it comes to plastic, we are like one nation actually in terms of the consumption. So I could say that, right? And the US should therefore substantially reduce solid waste generation, you know, both in absolute quantity and also per person and the two are related of course, in order to reduce plastic waste in the environment and therefore the environmental, economic, aesthetic and health cost of managing waste and litter. You know, the reason why we care about plastic entering the environment and the ocean is that it's partly it affects life in the ocean but it ends up affecting we the people, right? So there is that connection. Next slide, please. Now, US has a very high plastic waste generation rate, right? And the majority of the plastic waste is landfill. So you see the growth there of different forms, the way we deal with this. And many citizens actually believe that recycling can solve the problem or even is probably already solving the problem but this is not what we see in the data. Recycling is only about 8%, around 8% of the total waste that goes in, right? So, in fact, from the first principles of thermodynamics recycling cannot do it, there's always leakages as we will show later. So we need to do more. And this goes to Margaret's point about all the six stages, the US and the world in fact, Canada should actually have strategies for each of the level from production all through to when it enters the ocean. Next slide, please. Now, plastic waste can leak at multiple stages from use through to final disposal. And at each of these stages, something leaks out. And when you think of this, since I'm an economist, when you think of the leakages on where they happen, the big problem we have is there's a mismatch and disconnect between those who either, most of the time, not deliberately, allow this leakage to happen. The cost to the environment and to other people, health and so on, is not only on them. So the mismatch between benefits and costs are actually part of the problem you see it all through. And we need to deal with this actually in terms of policy, right? In order to start solving the problem. Next one, please. Transport and distribution of plastic. We spent a lot of time on this. And we have, among the 10 of us, there are really deep aspects in this. And I'm going to talk about our general finding here. And what you find is that, yeah. So there are many pathways, as you would expect, where plastic actually gets into the ocean and other environment. Now that we know a bit more about the production, it's very important to really look at the transport and the many pathways. So one of the findings we actually came up to is that although the transport of plastic waste to the ocean in the US cannot be comprehensively estimated from available data. And this is important. You don't need to comprehensively estimate this before you can take action. We know enough, right? Individual studies show sizable transport of microplastics and microplastic waste along a variety of water borne and airborne paths, as well as direct inputs from shorelines and marine activities. So again, if you want to deal with this, you have to understand the transport, how it goes, and then we can put interventions to try to find out. Another finding in our report is that plastic waste discharged to the ocean varies greatly with location and time. Reflecting variability in plastic waste generation by different sources. The effectiveness of the waste collection and variability in the transport processes such as river, stream flows, ocean waves, currents and ties and waves. The picture I'm painting is that this is not an easy straight forward thing to understand and study this. We are making progress. Scientists are looking at this. We need more efforts. At the same time, we do know enough to be able to take action. Next slide, please. Now, the distribution of plastic waste in the marine environment is complex and dynamic. That is what I've been trying to explain all along. Still, the report is full of good stuff, like Judith said, and you will find references. And actually, the rate of production of papers is unbelievable on this area at the moment. So studies are going very fast. Here is another finding for you. Plastic have found us contaminants throughout the marine environment, including in marine life in the animals. But plastic amounts of volume in specific reservoirs or in the ocean as a whole cannot currently be accurately quantified from existing environmental data. We emphasize this a lot because we need to understand more. We need to learn more. And therefore, we need to know where the knowledge is. Take stock. That's what we've done and show the way into the future. Next slide, please. Now, plastic waste is having devastating impacts and life in the ocean. Lake plastic waste is having devastating impacts on our ocean, on the wildlife in the ocean, and actually this translates to people. You can see this picture here. My God. Can you imagine if you see your dog in this condition, how hard-broken you will be? And this is an image from Hawaii, actually, a monk cell, which if you look at it, you see this. Think of your dog because they're quite similar. You see how much you feel about the impacts of this. So it has real life consequences, not only for wildlife, but for people also. Because why? As I will say later, the animals see plastic, microplastic. They think it's food. They eat it. They think it's algae. Then we eat the fish. And what happens? We get impacts. Again, studies are beginning to show more and more the effects of plastic on the health of people. All right. Next slide. Marine life, they ingest this thing, the plastic. They get entangled by the plastic, and all this leaves to hurt and harm and pain, and actually economic losses and social losses, cultural losses that come with all of this. So studies today shows that 900 marine species are known to suffer from plastic ingestion or entanglement, so loss of animals. And so another good reason for us to really deal with this. These two graphics you see here, the pig species known to take in, that is the yellow, they ingest the plastic, or become entangled, as shown in the red picture there. Marine debris and are based on review of studies through 2014 by Suzanne Kohn and her colleagues. This was published in 2015, so you can find it in our reference list. The sizes of the boxes you see there represent how many species of each group that are known to ingest or become entangled in marine debris. The larger the box, the greater the number of species in that group that has been affected. And you can see there are really large boxes there, so the effects on animals is serious. Yeah, let's go. Please, next one. Now, there are impacts, and I've alluded to this before. It's not only the impact on marine life, but an evaluation of specific impacts of plastic was beyond our study scope. However, for some context, some discussion of the diversity of impacts of plastic waste is provided in the current report in our chapter one, the introduction in chapter three. You will find material in chapter five on distribution and the fate of the plastic, all connected to this window. That's not a big ask for us as a committee. We still couldn't get away from putting this material in there because it's important. Next slide, please. Now, regular standardized and systematic data collection is needed. And all through my talk, you have seen me emphasize how complex, how there are things we don't know. So this is one of the big recommendations we have that we need regular standardized, systematic data collection to help us understand the extent of plastic waste in the environment, and therefore, help us develop effective interventions and evaluate progress in reducing US plastic waste. The beauty about this report emphasizing the US is that US is a big producer of plastic products. It produces a lot of waste, but US is a leader. There's a lot of talk about China and Russia, but if you come to the base of it, for the rest of the world, US is a leader and continues to be the leader. If the US tackles this well, I can assure you many countries around the world are going to follow suit, right? So it's a leadership thing we're talking about here. Next slide, please. Tracking and monitoring, to be able to measure, you have to track and you have to monitor and you have to then do the measuring. And that measuring then provides us the kind of information we need to be more precise, more effective in our policy designs. Next one, please. National Marine Debris Tracking and Monitoring Framework. Yeah, the nice thing is actually the US has a number of efforts already going on. The committee recognizes the Marine Debris Tracking and Monitoring conducted today by NOAA via the Marine Debris Program, the Marine Debris Monitoring and Assessment Project, and beyond, right? We also recognize that NOAA efforts addressing Marine Debris and environmental plastic include and represent multiple NOAA line offices scattered all over the country. So, and this is quite good, right? Because then the coverage can, we can push up the coverage to make sure this is truly national. This figure depicts the recommended components of a national Marine Debris Tracking and Monitoring network consisting of research and community-based initiatives. And the communities are important here because they are the first to see this. They are the first to sound and allow and the researchers pick on this. And so if our policymakers who listen to communities and the scientists and the researchers, then we'll make progress on this. Today, the absence of a cohesive system system has prevented integration of desperate and sometimes granular data sets into a meaningful hole. Now, I think the US has a lot of elements here that can be put together to give us a more cohesive and coherent and consistent, more comprehensive picture of things. And that will then help us to move forward as my grade is coming on now to tell us more about what to do with all this information. Thank you very much. Thank you, Rishi. Yes, this is, I know this is a complex slide. There's a lot of information in the report about this because it was a specific request from the sponsors. And so, but just know that if you're involved in a community-based effort, it could be linked up and we hope it will be to the national system. So, in the report, our conclusion was that without modification of current class practices in the United States and of course, worldwide, plastics will continue to accumulate in the environment, particularly ocean with adverse consequences for ecosystems and society. Yes, there are opportunities for action to address plastic waste. And I know most of this audience is interested in that. The story of plastics is not a foregone conclusion. And there are many ways to address this prevalent and pressing problem. The committee observed many important themes in its review, which Rashid has already previewed. First, there's a need and ability to act without perfect knowledge. There's a need for a systemic approach involving actions across multiple institutions. There's also a need for government as well as industry standards, goals, criteria and rule to guide this work. And there's a need and opportunity to deploy economic instruments to incentivize change. And the co-benefits actually are important and they've been previewed also. Social and environmental equity is an important opportunity here. There's a number of sections in the report talking about that. And also recognizing EPA's focus on that at this time. Also that recognizing that greenhouse gas emissions are associated with the production used and disposal of plastic is something to keep in mind. And those are goals that we have as a nation. Technological innovation is absolutely an opportunity here and you're seeing a lot of that come to the fore. And also there are economic opportunities to sort of level the playing field, make sure that people are not burdened by cost but also there's opportunity associated with creating new product. So the US can and should take systematic action interventions in each of these six stages as we discussed and such an approach would help avoid there's a current mismatch which we note in the report between the sources and production of plastic products and the waste and management systems charged with the waste. They're not sized to deal with each other and there's no system to make sure that it's all gonna work and they're nowhere near a circular economy in other words. So just to go through this because it is complex, we're just gonna go through each stage quickly. At the production stage, reducing the amount of plastic produced can help decrease waste stream management needs. As I said, for example, that could be reducing the production of plastics that are not reusable or practically recyclable. And we have a lot of information to report about the challenges with recycling and I don't have time to go through it here but I'm sure you know it well. At the materials and product design stage, innovation can develop substitutes that are reusable more easily recycled or that biodegrade using principles like green chemistry. A focus here could be those items most likely to become waste and leak into the environment and you have those data of course, at least from the beach cleanup. At the waste generation stage, the intervention would focus on reducing how much waste we generate by reducing the use of plastic products with short disposable use periods as in many single use products. These can include product limits, which you're seeing a lot in the states and local governments, as well as targets for recycling and reuse such products or materials, or of course incentives to procure only those certain reusable products. This can include efforts to increase collection of plastic waste, excuse me, this can include product limits like plastic bag vans you've seen and targets for recycling and reuse. At the next stage, improving waste management and we're getting into EPA territory definitely here, interventions would focus on improving solid and other waste infrastructure including leakage control and accounting. This can include efforts to increase the collection of plastic waste, improve recycling, waste isolation, capture or treatment to avoid leakage. And at the stage where plastic is in the environment already, well actions can include recapturing the waste from brown litter, stormwater, or directly from waters where it accumulates such as beach cleanups and we've seen a lot of that activity and it's so welcome. But even after plastic waste enters the open ocean, however, these tend to be expensive, particularly at sea recovery, which can also be inefficient and impractical given the large scales involved and fragmentation of plastics into microplastics. Finally, there's plastic waste disposal in the ocean, unfortunately. And so this stage would focus on reducing these directed intentional and unintentional discharges from vessel point sources or platforms. And it includes a lot of actions governed under many specific ocean vessel solution laws and treaties like the Marple Treaty. But also it includes things like releases from abandoned or lost fishing and aquaculture gear. And a lot of those efforts have been focused on US attention as well as global attention because of endangered species entanglement. So there are opportunities for many stakeholders across at least this intervention framework. So this is not just government, but I think government has a role to play in organizing this. The National and State governments have critical roles there, not only organizing but motivating people to help towards a larger goal. And the committee recognized that the US has taken action in many of these stages. We're not saying there's been no action in each of these stages, but that a coordinated systemic approach would be more effective. In fact, what we observed was that the US federal interventions we've documented in the report really focus on stages three through six, maybe largely four through six, cleanup and local waste management, which still can't stem the leakage because of the large volume of flow relative to the available resources that we have. And interventions will also be required in production material and product design stages one and two. And then of course, increase emphasis on decreasing the waste generation in three. We need to do that to equitably distribute costs and enable more effective and cost efficient intervention. There are also lots of opportunities to learn from others. States and local jurisdictions have been operating as US policy laboratories for a lot of these early stage interventions, whether that be something like bands or extended producer responsibility procurement guidelines, things like that have been tested in a number of states. And other nations have been piloting approaches to an entirely systemic approach as far as their circular economy plans. And you see that in the EU as well as in Canada to be getting in that. So there's a lot to learn from the what's been tested and not only here at home, but in other countries. So we ultimately felt that the federal leadership is going to be needed. United States needs to pull together and think, look at what it's doing already but also make it a lot more comprehensive and cohesive. There has to be research to support this too but in tandem with that. We think this comprehensive approach would better organize actions across the range of federal agencies and programs as well as non-federal actors. It can build, as I said, on the existing legal authorities and record agency efforts. We could adopt new models that are being tested and fill important gaps that we identified in the report such as the need for goals for reducing waste, plastic waste in the ocean. Economic incentives for improved manufacturing and reductions for use and recycling. Reducing plastic leaks in the US waste and solution system and addressing the funding gap and reversing inequitable cost benefits, as I suggested. One of the things that we, I wanna note is that in this report the data available were really about solid plastic waste. We don't have a lot of information on sources and input. And so we don't really know most of our estimates that we used in the report where I would say conservative estimates of how much is being contributed to the environment. But we don't need to know, have perfect knowledge to know that this is a problem and it needs to be addressed at a national level as other countries are doing. We think that the strategy would enhance US leadership in creating solutions to the global plastic pollution and also shaping modern industrial plastic policies. And also, of course, with the United States entering global discussions, it's a really good time to start thinking about it. So this is the report. We've got a nice QR code for you for those of you who like that. We also have some information, some links that you can share. And we'll also make sure that Judith has this fantastic interactive website that the National Academy has put together. You can tell your friends and family about it in a more easy to digest way because a 200 plus pages is probably too much for your family or maybe some of your friends. So thank you so much for your attention and thanks Rashid for joining me on this. This has been great. And I guess I'll turn it back to Judith. Thank you, Margaret. Thank you, Rashid. I feel like we're in the Olympics of plastic pollution tonight. This was a lot of good information. I think it will inspire action. While I have the floor, I also want to recommend a really good book that recently came out, Thicker Than Water, The Quest for Solutions to the Plastic Crisis by Erika Serino. So be sure to check this book out. It's a nice pairing with the National Academy's report. And Erika is a really impressive young scientist journalist who did a good job with that and she did not ask me to hold it up. I don't even know if she's listening. I get the opportunity to ask the first question and then we'll turn it to Jennifer. Margaret, I really appreciated you mentioning that this big issue is really about production, use and disposal. This report obviously dealing with the third thing there. At Beyond Plastics, we are extremely concerned about the large number of new petrochemical facilities proposed to make single use plastics and other plastics, mostly in Louisiana, Texas and Appalachia, causing immense public health harm for people who are breathing in the air toxins, the water pollution. And we just published a report in October called Plastics is the New Coal because of the greenhouse gas emissions from plastic production. So one of the things I love the most about your report is the explicit recommendation to make less plastic. It's obvious, but we don't see that a lot in government sponsored reports. And your report also suggests that we consider the possibility of a cap on virgin plastic production. I think this is significant because plastic recycling has been a failure at only 8.5%. And now we see the very risky false solution of chemical recycling being promoted, which is mostly gasification and pyrolysis producing more fossil fuel, the last thing the planet needs. And I think this focus on reduction is quite significant. So what other recommendations in this report do you see as potential game changers that'll move things along quicker? One of our advisory board members at Beyond Plastic is Bill McKibbin. And he has said, winning slowly is losing. And I worry about the pace. I think this report is going to click in the pace at every level of government, but what else in the recommendations do you think is potential game changers? Well, that's an interesting question. So let me just say that we didn't prescribe specific interventions. We gave examples of what could happen. And we did recommend that an outside group work with the government to come up with very specific proposals. Having said that, we looked around at what was being done. And so I would say that in most cases, a full-on production cap is, I haven't seen very examples of it. However, what you do see is a lot of proposals to put limits on certain products that are not needed and unnecessary and harmful. And so, that may seem like a step-wise approach, but it also is what's being tested right now, as you know well, in states and localities. What I do see is the incentive opportunities here. Now, to me, the signal game changer about this report is that everything has to happen at the same time. The connection of the production end and through design to the end of life thinking, the circular economy approach is absolutely critical. People really, really want that one thing and you cannot get there with the one thing. And so, I'm gonna turn it over a little to Shabashid because he is a champion for economic tools and he knows a bit about it, but the extensive producer responsibility, replacing reorganizing so the burdens are on a different, are on the producer as it is. And we've refined it in a number of other roles. It makes some sense and it's a hopeful thing too, I think it's much, much changing. So, Shabashid. Yeah, thank you very much, Margaret. You've really treated it well. What stands out for me also in addition to this reduction of production, because really, if you look at the whole thing, that is the beginning of things. And you see this in economic models, environmental economic models where you lay out, what you take out, the Beijing and the initial thing. That's what fits up and costing. So, truly, truly, if you want to reduce this, that is where to start. And that is what we managed to get through that. But the second other thing I thought was very interesting is the idea of social justice and the idea of mismatch between those who get the benefit and those who suffer the pain, right? And the idea that the cost and benefits are not, they're just a disconnect. And if you're an economist, this is really where you emphasize and focus on, how do you bring this incentive such that the cost and the benefits match? Because then those doing the action will internalize, as we like to say in the common, is their actions because they feel the pain. So, the social justice angle is really cool. And also, we had a list of gaps. And so, we have gaps in funding. All of these things, I like to say that all your good intentions die at the altar of no finance, right? So, funding is important. And I'm talking about private and public funding. And the public funding is seed money. It's very important. You set up the enabling environment so that private actors can also go in there, reduce their risk and let them invest and make returns whilst helping us fix a big problem, which is plastic pollution. So, yeah, thank you. Thank you. I'll just note that in the report, we did identify the growth potential. And some of the things you're talking about it, the statistics are very shocking. Yeah, Rashid, I love the way you phrase that. Those who get the benefit and those who suffer the pain. And when you look at Cancer Alley in Louisiana and you look at the export of plastic waste to other countries, that is so true. Take a look at the movie, The Story of Plastic, which won an Emmy for Best Documentary. I show it to my students every semester. So I've seen it about nine times and I've learned something new every time. Let me turn the floor over to my colleague, Jennifer Congdon with Beyond Plastics. Questions? Hi, everyone. So, yes, we have a ton of questions in the Q&A. I wanted to just address one logistical thing. We will be sending a follow-up email with a link to the recording for this webinar and it will have the PowerPoint presentation, the slides that you saw. So if you have specific questions about slides, I'm not gonna answer those and I just wanna address that overall. So it's my job to pull out some questions that I think will be really helpful for everyone. And so the first one I would like to ask, and forgive me, I was supposed to find easy ones, but we have a very political crowd. And so I'm gonna ask one that I actually am really curious about, which is how was this report received by the bipartisan congressional body that originally requested it? Oh, I love this question. Okay, thank you for the question. I have to say, of course, you wanna please your sponsors in terms of making sure you did what you were supposed to do. And I have to say that we did what was possible. And we got an amazing positive response from the bipartisan sponsors of Save Our CZAC. They posted it almost the same day on their website together, a very supportive and appreciative of the report, which to me and to our team was very encouraging. We wouldn't have changed anything in the report, but it meant that they really wanted to know the, they asked the question and we answered to our best of our ability. And that was critical. And I was happy to share that. I'm sure Judith has that link, but I'm happy to share that letter because it was quite helpful to us to know that we hit the mark. Wonderful. Great, thank you so much. So another one that I wanted to ask is the fossil fuel industry is adding plastic production capacity, partly to counteract reduced use of fossil fuels for electricity production. They're basically quoting our report from October. How can we counteract that? Regulation, taxes, that's the question. Well, I'll say it was a month of the scope of our report really, what we weren't asked to it. That's one of the challenges and the benefits of the national candidates report is very specific. However, I'll let Rashid weigh in with an opinion he has, and I'll say what I know. Yeah, so economics has kind of helped, right? I mean, the idea of designing incentives such that to deal with the consequences of private action on third parties, right? Essentially, so if this is happening and we see it coming, the thing is to put in the incentive structures and there are two ways, two quick ways you can deal with this. One is through taxes, if it's a negative externality that is going to affect the environment and people in our health, those who don't actually get the benefit, you do the taxes. And I know it's difficult to talk about taxes. Actually, I made a joke years ago, I was talking closer to the White House, I think, and I said, oh, you know, I mean, I'm in the U.S. So I wouldn't use the word tax. I know it's not popular. I'll say we'll give those people negative subsidies, you know, negative subsidies which are essentially taxes, but that is just a joke. And then if you have actions like anyone who is helping us whether through technology, through science, through knowledge to help us deal with this move, right? To reduce it. They are contributing positively. So we have a positive externality and actually we should actually give them positive subsidies, not the negative ones, right? So yeah, economic theory and ideas could help here to stem the tide. Right, and I'll just add that, of course, awareness and publicity about the situation is always important because there's nothing more complex than permitting decisions in terms of when you can comment and when you can provide data and when you can influence. I will say that there seems to be a lot more attention to this issue in the current EPA context, especially with environmental justice concerns and EPA administrator Regan appears to be really paying attention to these issues. So in that climate, it's even better to raise your voices, to share concerns. And it is a challenge because a lot of these, you know, projects are halfway underway, but the same tools that conservation groups use and the other discussion around a decision are are utilizable, but I do think that the information about potential impact and also the information about whether the communities were included effectively in outreach would probably be appropriate. Great, thank you. So maybe one or two more questions, Judith. So what percent, I don't know if this was exactly in the report, did you guys figure out what percent of global plastic pollution is generated by the United States? Oh, you had to get to the complex stuff, yeah. So no, we had, there are many, there's a table in fact that will show you the many estimates that exist about this. But what I'll say is there is an estimate that was created in 2020 by law at all in a paper in Science Advances that we do cite. And in their report, they estimated that based on their, you know, what you know about solid waste and how much we were, they tried to actually include the amount we were exporting to other countries and get a percentage of the estimate of what might be released in the environment in those other countries based on the waste we were releasing. And of course, those are based on 2016 data that we were between the third and 12th largest contributor to plastic waste in the not to say the coastal environment. It is quite a, and you have to, what we would say is there's no specific estimate that's perfect, but the estimates that are out there, which is why we laid them out in this table show the scale of understanding of what could be. And so I guess we would have to say there's no perfect estimate, but it's important. And it's even harder because the United States and Europe export so much plastic waste to countries that don't have the infrastructure to deal with it. And then we turn around sometimes, not we, but some parties turn around and blame those countries for all the plastic loading into local rivers when so much is exported. Yeah, it was helpful to show that we produce at least in terms of urgent resin with Canada and Mexico because that's North America up to 19% of global plastic production. We don't know how much America specifically. And of course, things are changing as new plants come online, et cetera. So, but what we could find, we put in the report. And it is from that, it is from those estimates that we came up with the two to eight times, right? Per capita. From those solid waste. Exactly, solid waste in particular, right? So that gives an indication. I think what we can say almost for sure, you never know for sure is that on average, North Americans produce more waste on average than most places, I mean, not more. Yeah, that's an important point. We produce a lot of waste. That is a top finding of our report that's based on science that I cited before. How much is actually released to the environment in the ocean is what I was trying to get at, which is very, that's how much, and what other sources there are, we're not counting those. That's how we need a monitoring system. So, but we gave the best we could, is my point. It was great. So, I will say maybe before we close down, there's a lot of discussion in the Q&A. We get this a lot about individual action and people feeling frustrated about trying to avoid plastics in their own lives and how hard that is. And we always tell people that while it's great to do all of that and to try to reduce your own waste, it's really important to work towards more systemic changes. And I think that's what Judith was getting at with your report. It really was about needing a more systemic approach to plastic waste reduction. So, do you wanna say any final word about that before we close down? Yeah, maybe I go before my question. So, you say the final, final. As a chair of the committee, right? So, yeah, I get this question a lot. I mean, about fish, right? People tell me what can I do individually, right? And I'm always empathetic to people when they find it difficult, right? You go to the supermarket, you're trying to do the right and it's so difficult and there's mislabeling and all that, right? So, individuals can try, but I really think like you have said, we need the more systemic action. This is why we have government. This is why we have all sorts of structures and institutions because in the VDWA, there are things you just cannot do, you know, even though you try. So, yes, we need that comprehensive systematic setup that will then enable us as private agents to really operate in a way that helps the whole country in this case. Right. I mean, it all does, I would agree with Rashid and it all ladders up, right? And grassroots awareness. Look, we run the Seafood Watch program. Seafood Watch started with people knowing there was a problem, what should I do? Giving them some simple choices. Now, you know what we ask them to do is just ask the question, send the signal into the marketplace. Then you also send the signal into we can use policy levers to send that same signal, but businesses are responding too and you're seeing that. That's what I just wanna say is the fact that, you know, that brands have now made this announcement just a week or so ago is in response to not only the public pressure, but the signals from the economics of this. So it's all coming together. So I would use every avenue you have, one of the things aquariums or groups like Beyond Classic can do is give you, make you aware of the opportunities to raise your voice and organize and I think the other thing is just don't worry about the one thing. I mean, just do as much as you can. And the more you learn, I've found that the more I tell people about it in my own family or my friends, they are making changes and this is very easy to understand. It's so concerning and which is why Congress is interested. So what you're seeing be hopeful. Congress is interested. The administration is reading our report. They're going to this big treaty discussion. Wow, in a year, what has happened? So just keep the voices going. But yes, you educate yourself in your own life. You will be clearer about what you need to do. Great. So I'll just say that anyone who's looking to get more involved, please write to us at beyondplasticsatbennington.edu and we can help you link into local advocacy efforts. We're happy to get you linked into some of the things happening around the country. Judith, do you wanna say anything else? Yeah, can you put that slide up? So I really wanna thank Margaret and Rashid for a really compelling presentation. And thank you for your service. I mean, you got a lot of other things going on in your life and the fact that you spent a year on endless Zoom meetings cranking out this report with your colleagues is greatly, greatly appreciated. Let me just do the pitch for Beyond Plastics. We're a small nonprofit education and advocacy group. We're not a webinar shop. We don't do a lot. We do four a year. This is our first this year. We'll do another in June. Sign up on our website beyondplastics.org for free email updates. We do not flood your inbox. We just contact you with good resources and actions that really matter. And please consider a tax deductible donation. You can donate online or an old fashioned check. We accept both. So there are those details. We can keep that up. But I think if we were allowed to go off mute and applaud you would hear really, really loud applause for Rashid and Margaret. Thank you so very much. And thanks to all of you for joining us this evening. We love interacting with all of you and have a pleasant evening. Good night. Thank you so much. Thank you so much Judith for hosting. Yeah, well done. It's great. Reason report. It is really cool. I hope some have before they joined us or they will now. I think the questions were kind of about.