Ocean Policy · Plastic Pollution

Bill to Phase Out Single-Use Plastics in US National Parks Stalls in Congress

The Interior Department dropped its own plastics phase-out in May 2025. The bill written to replace it has had one Senate hearing, while a deadly flood at Grand Canyon shows how much plastic-free parks depend on reliable water.

By SEVENSEAS Media | Ocean Policy

Staff and volunteers at Biscayne National Park, south of Miami, have been removing about 70,000 pounds of marine debris a year in recent years, roughly 32 tonnes, according to the National Park Service. The park spends more than $230,000 a year on the work, clearing coral reefs and the beaches where threatened loggerhead turtles nest. Park surveys count plastic as 52% of the debris items found on its reefs, 65% in its mangroves and 81% on its beaches.

The problem is easiest to see in a marine park, but it is not confined to the coast. The 5 Gyres Institute, which runs volunteer litter audits under its Plastic-Free Parks project, attributes nearly 80% of the pollution it records in parks to plastic, Packaging Dive reported. A 2020 study in Science found microplastics in 98% of rain and dust samples collected in national parks and wilderness areas of the western United States. Across the whole system, the Park Service’s Green Parks Plan estimates that its sites generate about 80 million pounds of municipal solid waste a year, from a system that recorded more than 300 million visits in 2025.

An order signed in 2022 and reversed in 2025

On World Ocean Day in June 2022, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland signed Secretarial Order 3407, which set a goal of phasing out single-use plastic products on lands the department manages, national parks included, by 2032. The order also asked the department to identify substitutes, and its suggestions ran from reusable glass, aluminium and steel to compostable and bio-based disposables. For a park clean-up crew, a compostable fork on a beach is still litter, so the choice between substitution and reuse was always going to matter more than the deadline.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum reversed the order on 20 May 2025, saying the phase-out had created “logistical and operational challenges” on public lands, E&E News reported. It was the second federal plastics policy for parks to be withdrawn in eight years. In 2011 the Park Service had allowed individual parks to end sales of bottled water, and 23 of its 417 sites did so, Grand Canyon and Zion among them. That policy was rescinded in August 2017, when the agency argued that the bans removed the healthiest drink on sale while sweetened drinks in plastic stayed on the shelves, NPR reported at the time. The bottled water industry welcomed the decision.

What the Reducing Waste in National Parks Act would require

Within two weeks of Burgum’s order, Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Representative Mike Quigley of Illinois, both Democrats, reintroduced the Reducing Waste in National Parks Act, numbered S.1926 in the Senate and H.R. 3604 in the House. All nine original Senate cosponsors are Democrats, apart from Bernie Sanders, an independent who caucuses with them. The Senate bill received a hearing before the Energy and Natural Resources subcommittee on national parks on 9 December 2025, according to the Congress.gov record, and has not advanced since. The House version has the broader coalition. As of mid-October it had 50 cosponsors, 49 Democrats and one Republican, Representative Nick LaLota of New York, according to the Congress.gov cosponsor list. It has not moved beyond its referral to the Natural Resources Committee in May 2025. Bills that have not passed when the 119th Congress ends in January 2027 lapse and have to be introduced again.

The bill text is more cautious than the campaign language around it. It gives the Park Service 180 days to set up a system-wide programme, then directs regional directors to end sales of water in disposable plastic bottles, and the sale and distribution of other disposable plastics, “to the greatest extent feasible”. Before acting, each director has to weigh thirteen factors, among them the cost of installing and testing refill stations, the effect on concessioner revenue and contracts, and the risk that visitors will carry too little water or drink from streams. On one point the bill goes further than the 2022 order did: its definition of disposable food ware includes products marketed as compostable or biodegradable. Parks that already sell no bottled water could keep it that way.

Oceana, which is campaigning for the bill, cites a 2021 Ipsos poll it commissioned, in which 82% of American voters said they would support the Park Service ending the sale and distribution of single-use plastic in parks.

People visit national parks to see whales breach and bison roam, not hiking trails littered with plastic bottles and coastal waters clogged by foam coffee cups. Our national parks should be free of plastic. Congress must pass the Reducing Waste in National Parks Act to phase out single-use plastics in our parks and safeguard these special places for generations to come.

Christy Leavitt, Senior Campaign Director, Oceana

What parks are doing without a mandate

Some parks have carried on regardless. Saguaro and Glacier both point visitors to bottle-filling stations. The most ambitious effort is on Grand Canyon’s South Rim, where the nonprofit Upstream is working with the park’s concessioners, Xanterra and Delaware North, and the Park Service on what it calls the largest reuse system for dine-in and takeaway food in the country. It began with a $400,000 grant from the National Park Foundation.

The design calls for durable containers, tracked by RFID from the till through washing and back, circulating among 16 dining sites in Grand Canyon Village, with a central wash facility designed by the reuse operator Vytal. Upstream estimates the system will keep 50 million single-use items and 190 tons of waste out of landfill over ten years, figures that are projections rather than results. Upstream was targeting a June 2026 launch, Waste360 reported, and its spring 2026 update described the team as still building toward it. SEVENSEAS could not confirm from Upstream’s public updates whether the system went live before the end of August.

Refill and reuse run on water

On 29 August a deadly flash flood tore through Bright Angel Canyon and the Phantom Ranch area. It destroyed the new water intake at Bright Angel Creek and damaged about 40% of the old Transcanyon Waterline, the only pipeline supplying the South Rim, a line that had already broken more than 85 times since 2010, the Associated Press reported. Concessioners stopped offering overnight stays inside the park from 31 August. Among the emergency measures, the park deployed potable water tanks and bottled drinking water, and it has asked visitors to arrive with their own.

The Park Service now projects that pumping from a repaired intake will begin by 16 November, with water reaching residents by Thanksgiving and about 45 days needed to refill the storage tanks. Until then the South Rim runs under Stage 4 restrictions, and the park is working on an agreement to truck in around 200,000 gallons a day.

Grand Canyon was among the 23 parks that stopped selling bottled water under the 2011 policy, and it is now host to the country’s largest reuse project. Since late August it has also been a park where bottled water is part of the emergency response. Two of the bill’s factors, the operating cost of refill stations and the risk of visitors drinking from streams, anticipate this kind of situation. Refill stations and dishwashing lines draw on the same pipes, pumps and treatment plants that make up much of the Park Service’s estimated $24 billion maintenance backlog, and a plastics law can require parks to use them but cannot repair them.

The full text of S.1926 is available from Congress.gov. Oceana is collecting signatures for a petition urging members of Congress to pass the bill.

SEVENSEAS Media · Conservation Journalism for the Ocean