The Report, “Economic Implications of a Permit ‘Pause’,” measured the anticipated impacts of the BFFPP Act’s provision requiring the Environmental Protection Agency to “pause” production permitting at numerous plastic manufacturing facilities for three to five years, which would result in factory shutdowns. (Similar language is included in Title IX of the proposed CLEAN Future Act). The “pause” also would halt the production of essential chemical building blocks – ethylene and propylene – that support nearly every sector of the U.S. economy.
The economic impacts would be enormous and devastating. The report found that the “pause” would put as many as 910,000 jobs at risk by 2026 and curtail as much as $413 billion in economic output.