Use Federal Purchasing Power to Reduce Single-Use Plastics

The federal government is the single largest purchaser of goods and services in the United States, spending more than $450 billion per year.  In July 2022, the General Services Administration (GSA) put out an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to seek public feedback on their Acquisition Regulations for Single-Use Plastics and Packaging, to which they received over 65,000 comments. This is a huge opportunity to not only reduce demand for single-use plastics but to also drive the markets toward reusable and other sustainable materials, instead of the polluting plastic products and packaging that Surfrider Foundation volunteers find all too often on our beaches.

Surfrider Foundation signed on with other NGOs to encourage a broad scope of the reusable procurement policy by GSA, including elimination of single-use plastics in all government buildings and events. But there is no hard and fast deadline for when the single-use plastic reductions will be made by GSA or what changes may happen first. 

Surfrider Foundation has encouraged GSA to prepare a strong rulemaking with metrics to assess the effectiveness of their single-use plastic reductions. Check out GSA federal acquisition policies directly here.