Hutzell: Plastic pollution is choking the Chesapeake Bay. Now there’s hope.

Tuesday’s storm washed billions of gallons of water from Baltimore and Annapolis into the Chesapeake Bay.

And with it came the tide of plastic bottles.

By the millions, they bobbed and rolled down rivulet and river. Wind and current will flush some out to the Atlantic, but most will end up along the shore, deposited with the sea grasses, driftwood and other flotsam.

It’s called the wrack.

Plastics break down in the thousands of miles of wrack along the bay, beaten by waves and sun into nodules and filaments. It finds its way into everything.

“As soon as the plastic is in the environment, it mingles with the ecology, and to get it out of there is almost impossible,” said Martin Thiel, leader of the Marine Global Earth Observatory at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center.

Thiel and researcher Ostin Garcés Ordóñez spent the summer of 2025 mapping plastic across the bay. Their findings, published recently in the Marine Pollution Bulletin, say pretty much what you’d expect.

Where there are people, there is plastic. People are crap. You can hold cleanup days from now till forever, and it won’t stop plastic from flowing into the Chesapeake Bay.

To do that, you’ve got to think big.

“If we want to solve this problem,” Thiel said, “we need to go to the source.”

Maryland is ready to try.

Around the time Thiel and Garcés Ordóñez set out on their voyage of plastic discovery, Gov. Wes Moore signed the Extended Producer Responsibility program into law. The idea is to get plastic and packaging producers to clean up their own mess.

“Taxpayers shouldn’t have to foot the bill,” said Rick Kessler, director of landfill and waste programs at the Maryland Department of the Environment.

Over the next three years, the department and some of the world’s worst polluters will develop a plan to cut plastic and increase recycling.

State Sen. Malcolm Augustine and Del. Sara Love wrote the law to, in theory, make disposable plastic and other packaging too expensive to be good for business.

The state picked the Circular Action Alliance to represent producers. It’s a nonprofit compliance organization created by giants in the food, beverage, consumer goods and retail industries.

So far, the alliance has identified more than 2,500 companies doing business in Maryland that produce or import plastic and other packaging. By 2028, it has to submit a plan to MDE that meets state goals to cut waste and lays out how producers will pay to meet them.

The alliance has done this in California, Colorado and Oregon. It’s working in Minnesota and Washington.

“It is valuable to look at successes and best practices from other jurisdictions as potential inputs for future work,” said Andrea Crooms, the alliance’s manager for Maryland.

The goals are similar. California producers would pay up to $17 billion over five years to cut single-use plastic by 25% and recycle or compost 65% of plastic by 2032.

Maryland’s plan will be unique. The state listed 80 types of trash it wants to reduce and set a goal of 50%. The plan should fund better local programs.

If the goals are ambitious, the omissions are significant.

The state is relying on producers for the solution. Big companies are crap. With an army of lawyers and incentives to cut costs, Big Plastic will want the best deal for themselves — and pass the bill to consumers.

As Maryland’s environmental cop, the state’s environmental department has a mixed record. It’s let the alliance skip this year’s report on what its members produce because the agency is still adjusting the regulations based on industry feedback.

The law doesn’t cover commercial packaging, like the plastic film wrapped around a pallet of plastic bottles.

And it doesn’t call for arguably the most effective way to cut plastic waste — a deposit. Legislators rejected a bottle deposit even as they approved enhanced recycling.

Bottles make up 50% to 80% of plastic pollution. The 10 states with deposits report container return rates of 70% to 90%. Maryland’s average is around 25%.

Producers hate deposit laws. It’s been 25 years since Hawaii adopted the last one, and producers oppose even raising existing deposits.

It’s been 12 years since Julie Lawson, a founder of Trash Free Maryland, took future U.S. Rep. Sarah Elfreth and a senior Environmental Protection Agency adviser on the first “Trash Trawl” to show them what people were seeing on the bay.

Plastic. Everywhere.

A year later, that trip resulted in funding for an early attempt to quantify the pollution. The effort involved collecting 60 water samples from the Back River to the mouth of the Potomac.

“There was plastic in all of those,” said Lawson, now a city environmental program coordinator in Washington, D.C.

It seems unlikely that the EPA, which has a Chesapeake plastic-pollution task force, will do much to help curb the source of that plastic under this presidential administration.

So researchers have continued studying how plastic finds its way into the Chesapeake and what it does to soil, water, oysters, rockfish and even seagrass blades. They’re trying to map how it flows across land into the water.

Because this isn’t just a bay problem. It’s global.

Thiel invited Garcés Ordóñez from Colombia for a two-year fellowship. An expert in studying plastic in mangroves, Garcés Ordóñez is translating that experience to salt marshes and wrack zones.

“The next step of our research is to determine how this accumulation of plastic carbon [and] natural carbon ... is affecting the ecosystem service of marshes and mangroves as a carbon storage,” Garcés Ordóñez said.

On their 2025 trip across 27 bay sites, the researchers detailed patterns.

Close to Baltimore and Annapolis, bottles and bags were common. There was commercial plastic, too.

The closer they got to the ocean, the more buoys, nets and ropes from fisheries and shipping replaced bottles and bags.

None of that was surprising. Everyone who walks along the shore sees what’s out there. Now there’s proof and, at least, a plan for a plan.

Maybe even hope.

“We knew that things are coming from the population centers, and this is where we need to be active,” Thiel said. “This is where we need to take action if we want to solve this problem.”