Announcing the Plastics Litigation Tracker, a new resource from the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center and the Guarini Center on Environmental, Energy, & Land Use Law. The project tracks cases addressing plastics across federal and state courts, tagging each case by categories such as false advertising, environmental protection, and securities. The tracker includes resolved and pending cases, and will be kept up to date to reflect new developments.
What: The Plastics Litigation Tracker, a new resource for attorneys and other advocates fighting plastics pollution that tracks cases addressing plastics across federal and state courts. It includes resolved cases and cases that are still pending, and provides a summary and status update for each case. The cases can be filtered by category, plaintiff, defendant, and jurisdiction, or searched for by keyword.
Where: plasticslitigationtracker.org
Why: Over the last ten years, as production of plastic products has grown, so has litigation around plastics and plastic pollution. This tracker allows users to stay up to date on these cases and follow trends in plastics litigation. The tracker currently has 49 cases, revealing four major trends, as explained in this blog post.
“Plastic pollution has become one of the defining environmental challenges of our time. With the stark and growing impact of plastic on oceans, the air, and human health, advocates have been working to hold accountable the corporations that are responsible. Industry has also filed cases against plastics regulation. Our new tracker is intended to document these trends and provide a source of analysis for government, business, law, and the NGO community.”
Danielle Spiegel-Feld, Executive Director of the Guarini Center for Environmental, Energy, & Land Use Law and NYU School of Law
“As the plastics and petrochemical industry continues to grow, litigation surrounding it will too. Advocates can use this tracker to understand the fate of different litigation strategies and approaches in the courts. Scholars can use it to analyze litigation trends on this issue at both the federal and state level going back for decades. The plastics litigation tracker will be an essential tool for anyone interested in the role litigation has played in the plastics and petrochemical landscape.”
Bethany Davis Noll, Executive Director of the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center at NYU School of Law.