Mucha foam, poco chocolate: Reflexiones sobre el riesgo de greenwashing en la nueva Ley de Residuos

Mucha foam, poco chocolate: Reflexiones sobre el riesgo de greenwashing en la nueva Ley de Residuos

The recent emergency amendments to the Dominican Republic’s Solid Waste Law represent a significant setback in environmental governance, prioritizing rapid political maneuvers over technical expertise and stakeholder consensus. By bypassing the participatory process that originally established the law as a regional benchmark, these revisions have introduced vague, scientifically unsupported mandates that undermine the country’s efforts to manage waste effectively. This exclusionary approach highlights a critical governance failure where urgent legislative changes are made without the rigorous dialogue necessary to address complex ecological challenges. Central to this failure is the legalization of misleading "biodegradable" foam through inadequate testing standards, a practice that constitutes legalized greenwashing. The new regulation accepts preliminary laboratory tests that do not reflect real-world decomposition conditions, allowing manufacturers to market persistent plastics as eco-friendly solutions. This semantic manipulation enables the continued circulation of harmful materials while giving consumers and regulators a false sense of environmental responsibility, effectively entrenching the very waste problem the law intends to solve. The implications extend beyond environmental deception to severe economic consequences for ordinary citizens. The law imposes sudden, substantial increases in corporate contributions without technical justification, driving up production costs and triggering inflation on basic goods. Ultimately, the article argues that the true solution lies in enforcing the existing law’s mechanisms, such as Extended Producer Responsibility, rather than implementing disjointed, expensive, and scientifically flawed amendments that burden households and fail to address the root causes of pollution.