Reducing the tide of single-use plastic pollution: how the EU’s Single-Use Plastic Directive drives (and fails to drive) private company reflexivity

Single-use plastics (SUPs) are having catastrophic effects on marine environments. Establishing effective reduction and circularity strategies is complex and necessitates a legal approach that fosters reflexivity and learning by regulated companies, especially those that produce and sell SUPs. Reflexive environmental law (REL) offers a promising starting point to identify drivers and techniques in law that foster reflexivity, yet fails to consider how to define and identify reflexive responses by regulatees. Using reflexive governance and social learning literature, this article identifies four responses: negative, single-loop adaptive, double-loop reflexive and triple-loop reflexive. The article uses an explorative case study of the EU’s Single-Use Plastics Directive (SUPD), and its transposition by France and Germany, to analyse how the SUPD fosters company reflexivity through techniques building autonomy, accountability and responsiveness and adjustability. Through, among others, interviews with companies that must comply with the SUPD, this article reveals that single-loop and double-loop responses are the most prominent. However, reflexivity is shown to be inhibited by institutional, organisational and market factors. Better understanding of the dynamics between reflexive drivers within law(s) and the institutional, organisational and market characteristics of regulated actors is needed to design more effective regulations to transform to a sustainable circular plastics economy.