— By Plasteurope.com correspondent — 

US president Donald Trump has lost no time in rolling back one of his predecessor’s key environmental policy moves by announcing he intends to scrap Joe Biden’s removal of single-use plastic products across US governmental departments.

Writing on his Truth Social account recently, Trump said: “I will be signing an Executive Order next week ending the ridiculous Biden push for Paper Straws, which don’t work. BACK TO PLASTIC!”.

Since his election in November, Trump – perhaps the world’s most prominent climate change sceptic – has signalled his intention to put into reverse much of the environmental legislation put in place by President Biden and voiced a commitment to expand oil and gas exploration under his tagline of “Drill, baby, drill.”

The about-turn on single-use plastics is likely to be just one of a number of edicts that will put the US out of step with countries around the world. But it wasn’t always this way.

Last summer, the then-incumbent administration of Biden and Kamala Harris announced commitments to phase out single-use plastics (SUP) across the federal government. As part of an existing executive order, the commitments called for the phase-out of SUP products across US federal government agencies by 2035, and a phase-out of all SUP products in food service, packaging, and events by 2027.

Related: ‘Trump 2.0’ will see major changes in climate legislation

At the time, the World Wildlife Fund said the administration’s commitment to removing SUPs throughout government departments went “beyond the positive environmental effects, sending a message to the public and private sector across the world: if we can make change happen at scale, so can you.”

Trump’s move has changed all that. His plan was inevitably met with despair in environmental campaigning circles. Christy Leavitt, plastics campaign director at Oceana, told The Guardian newspaper: “President Trump should be making the US a global leader in addressing the plastics crisis at the source by reducing the production and use of single-use plastics, and moving to reuse and refill systems.”

It remains to be seen how the new US president plans to tackle plastics pollution, but a month into his new term it would appear his first policy moves are pointing in another direction.