Author: Matt Liu, University of Wyoming Director of Debate I’ve had the opportunity to do a little research on the new PF topic. What follows is a quick primer about possible pro and con arguments for the February 2024 PF resolution: Resolved: The United States federal government should ban single-use plastics. Aff Ground The two most obvious aff advantage areas are the environment and public health. Of those two, I prefer focusing on the environmental harms of single-use plastics. Plastic pollution is notoriously bad for the environment, especially for marine environments like oceans and rivers. The epitome of this is the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” (aka ‘Trash Island’), a 1.6 million square mile collecting of plastic and floating trash. Some of the plastic in the patch is over 50 years old because plastic is non-biodegradable, and the patch is rapidly growing (increasing 10-fold every decade). Read the complete article below the fold. However, the resolution is just about the United States. Plastic pollution in many countries, not just the US, contributes to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Negative arguments that unilateral bans cannot overcome the global collective action problem of plastics pollution are very strong. China and India definitely produce more plastic pollution than the United States, not to mention the increasing per capita use of plastics in emerging economies. Arguments that other countries will model US action in this area are very weak and unlikely to be true. Therefore, the strongest affirmative cases will be specific to US ecosystems endangered by plastics pollution. I wouldn’t be surprised to see affs with contentions specific even to individual species, like the loggerhead turtle. Specificity makes the aff very hard to refute, and specificity to US ecosystems makes global alt causes irrelevant. If I were writing a case, I would explore the link between plastics pollution and ecosystem degradation in places like: the Great Lakes, the Gulf of Mexico, Chesapeake Bay, the Mississippi River Delta, Hawaii’s coastal waters, the Puget Sound, US wetlands (like the Everglades), or US coral reefs.
My ideal environment contention would probably look something like this:
This is a fairly techy approach, but, it has its benefits. A contention like that gets you three distinct impacts (US freshwater biodiversity generally, the Great Lakes specifically, and the Chesapeake Bay) and it gets you impact diversity, as I chose to impact the Chesapeake Bay with a fishing economy / food insecurity argument instead of a redundant environment impact. Most important, the specificity of the aff environment contention to the United States will nullify negative arguments about plastic pollution being inevitable in other places. This is of course just an example, there are other great ways to structure an environment contention. Another common aff contention will be public health. Pro teams will argue that microplastics are responsible for health harms to humans as they accumulate in the environment and we consume them as they move up the food chain. I think that the best versions of these arguments will be based in environmental justice literature, and argue that these harms disproportionately affect those who live in marginalized communities. The literature for this contention is strong, but, I’m not sure it’s my favorite argument. I’m skeptical plastics, let alone single-use plastics, are uniquely responsible for these kinds of health hazards. If someone did write this contention I think focusing on the impact framing of "slow violence" and environmental justice would be critical to winning this case. The second contention I would choose to write would be on about innovation. A ban on single-use plastics will force us to step up the search for sustainable and economic alternatives. The aff can make arguments that the ban stimulates innovation in the material sciences. The aff can also argue that adjusting to a plastics ban would necessitate the development of a circular economy. I like this contention because I think there can be cool impact arguments to materials science innovation and the circular economy, but I also think this contention creates important aff solvency arguments. “The alternatives are worse” is a powerful negative argument against plastics bans, but a material sciences innovation advantage allows the aff to say “we incentivize the development of new, better alternatives.” That said, I think it’s important to recognize that the neg is sitting pretty on this topic. Single-use plastics have a bad rap, but a national ban is a rigid and harsh solution. Strategically, the negative also has a cornucopia of arguments at their disposal. Nearly every industry relies on single-use plastics in the status quo: from healthcare to the exploration of outer space, to natural disaster response, single-use plastics are ubiquitous and relied on. This means that any one of those areas or virtually any US industry could be disrupted, at least in the short-term, by a ban on single-use plastics. That is a lot of negative ground; a lot of different contentions the neg could read. I think the affirmative can counter-balance against diverse negative ground by having a universal argument that alternatives solve. The neg might have arguments that single-use plastics are good for healthcare, but do they have any reason that cloth PPE wouldn’t work? This is also where a material science innovation contention shows its strength: even if the con does have good evidence that single-use plastics are key and alternatives fail for a specific industry or area, that doesn’t assume the ban economically incentivizes the development of new and better materials. New alternatives solve is an even stronger version of alternatives solve. The second way the pro can push back against unpredictable negative arguments is by advancing an argument about bias in the literature. Some of the best negative articles come from the plastics industry itself, or think tanks with innocent-sounding names funded by the plastics industry. Outside of that, many articles from seemingly independent sources rely on citing the plastics industry and their think tanks. Of course, it’s not enough to point out that bias exists. Good affirmative teams need to show and prove that negative evidence comes from or relies on citing these biased sources. If I was debating on this topic, I would put one card about extensive bias and “bought and paid for” research in my affirmative constructive, and then I would utilize it as relevant (and only as relevant) against applicable negative evidence. That said, specificity wins debate, and these universal (aka generic) tools will only get you so far. In a debate among equals, when the neg has evidence that single-use plastics are key to a specific industry and the aff doesn’t have evidence in the context of that industry, that debate should favor the neg (for example, the neg should beat ‘new alternatives solve’ on ‘short-term disruptions trigger the link- hospitals can't wait for new materials to be developed, they rely on single-use plastics now’). So the best way for the aff to be prepared to answer diverse negative contentions is to be prepared: do the work to predict and produce evidenced responses to likely negative contentions. Neg Ground As the above indicates, I think neg ground on this topic is very diverse. A con team willing to do the research could have a lot of fun breaking new contentions throughout March. If I were debating, I would have a well-developed economy contention and a rotating industry/area contention that I would change frequently to stay one jump ahead of my opponents. There's just a wreck of evidence that a ban on single use plastics would undermine our economy. I think the strongest part of this is that in additional to general evidence that a ban on single-use plastics would be bad for economic growth and US competitiveness, the neg can develop very specific modules or internal links that bring depth to this contention. The con can argue that the single-use plastics ban would be bad for jobs, manufacturing, consumer spending, small businesses, and supply chains. I’ve even seen articles that plastics bans would lead to inflation. I think the small business internal link is the best of these, both because they would struggle the most with the aff’s draconian regulations (because they’re smol!) and because of how good the evidence is that small businesses are the lifeblood of the economy. This piece of evidence is amazing that small businesses are key to the economy, and there’s even a wealth of evidence that says small businesses are vital to American national security. Economy contentions are also very strategic against environment advantages. A WDR article published last month gave an example of how to win that economic growth is better for the environment than pro-environmental regulation (control f “Econ Turns the Environment”). You can find an example of evidence to support these claims here. I think my favorite part of this topic though is the sheer number of industries that utilize and rely on single-use plastics now. Disruptions to any of these industries can be a negative contention. I’ve seen arguments that single-use plastics are key to fields as diverse as natural disaster response, space colonization, and agriculture. There’s articles that plastics are key to clean energy and emissions-reducing technologies. But by far, my favorite negative contention is healthcare. There are amazing articles that single-use plastics are key to pandemic response, and many of these go so far to explain, with detailed warrants, why substitutes specifically for things like PPE and medical devices wouldn’t work. There are plenty of other negative arguments. I’ve seen literature that a unilateral ban on plastics by a North American country would run afoul of NAFTA and undermine trade agreements. A federal ban on plastics would of course not be in line with the principles of federalism, although that DA always suffers from uniqueness issues. However, one of the best arguments is that plastics ban aren’t thought through in the context of disability. Single-use plastics are important in many ways for disabled people, and bans on single-use plastics rarely think through the ways they impact the disabled. The case debate is also fantastic for the negative. There’s very good offense for the negative in the environment debate, that a ban on single-use plastics would make things worse, not better. For example, there are arguments like alternatives are worse: production of paper substitutes requires more water, produces more carbon emissions, and contributes to deforestation. There’s good nuance to support these arguments: even if alternatives could be better, lack of education often contributes to more pollution. For example, certain substitutes are biodegradable but only under specific conditions- but because they are touted as green replacements, people assume they can be junked like normal trash. There’s also arguments that rapid introduction of alternatives would be worse than the status quo, even if a gentle transition is good. As mentioned above, there’s also great arguments that a unilateral ban fails. In economics, this is called a collective action problem. The US banning single-use plastics doesn’t change anything in China, India, or emerging economies. There’s even a chance it makes things worse, as plastics producers might shift to countries with weaker environmental regulations. Even organizations as left as Greenpeace have advanced this argument. Related to this is a prices turn: banning single-use plastics in the US could decrease their prices globally, making them more economically attractive in other countries and leading to a surge in global demand. Finally, there’s a recycling tech turn. Plastic bans in the US would undermine the incentive to seek alternative solutions, like developing next-generation plastic recycling. If the product is banned, there’s no need to focus on innovative reforms. But better recycling tech wouldn’t just address plastics pollution in the US, it would offer a global solution. In other words, unilateral bans fail, but reform-based solutions like technology development offer improvements for the entire world. I think it's clear that you can have a lot of fun on the negative with diverse arguments, keeping your opponents off guard by rotating through various contentions (if you're willing to do the work!). It's equally clear to me that teams will need to put in the work to be prepared for that when they're aff.
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