The Toxic Legacy of the Plastics Industries Must Finally Be Addressed.

By Geneva Omann and Margaret Shepard

   In June Governor Newsom signed into law SB 54, legislation designed to reduce harmful plastic pollution and make the plastics industry responsible for its waste. The bill is touted as the “nation’s most sweeping law to phase out single-use plastics and packaging waste.”¹ This legislation appears to be a major step forward in holding the plastics industries accountable for the harmful waste they produce. Industry representatives are not fond of the new law. Some environmentalists are satisfied, some think it does not go far enough. The state legislators themselves are very pleased: SB 54 passed in the Senate with 29 yes votes and no opposing votes, and in the Assembly it passed 67 to 2.

Why is plastic pollution such a big problem, and how did it become so? That history begins a mere 75 years ago, and already the magnitude of plastic pollution has far outstripped the planet’s capacity to manage it. The following article summarizes the vast extent of the problem, the history of how we got to this point, and what needs to be done to begin to tackle the problem (spoiler alert: plastic pollution is ubiquitous across the globe; capitalism’s mandate to prioritize profits over people and the planet has brought us to this point; and action at the personal, regional, state, national and international levels are required to reduce plastic production and clean up the mess).

Part 1.
Is Plastic Pollution Humanity’s Lasting Legacy for Planet Earth?

Plastic pollution has become a signature feature of humanities impact on this planet. Plastic products, produced mostly from fossil fuels beginning in the mid-20^th Century, can be found distributed throughout the world’s aquatic, atmospheric, and terrestrial ecosystems. Most plastics are not biodegradable and are not readily degraded by physical forces. Thus, they accumulate in landfills and the natural environment. It is estimated (as of 2017) that 8,300 million metric tons² of plastic had been produced and, of that, 6,300 million metric tons of plastic had become waste, with an estimated one third of that waste entering the natural environment (i.e. becoming pollution)³. The total mass of plastics on the planet is now over twice the mass of all living animals, and roughly 80% of all plastics ever produced remains in the environment⁴. The essentially permanent contamination of the environment with plastic poses considerable threats to the planet’s ecosystems, including humans.

Why is plastic so bad?

Plastic has been found throughout the depths of the oceans, on high mountain peaks, in Arctic ice, covering coastal ecosystems, in the soil where our food is grown, in the air, rain and snow and accumulating in ocean gyres --virtually everywhere researchers have looked on this planet.

Much of the plastic and other garbage in the oceans has accumulated in gyres, which are systems of circulating ocean currents caused by the earth’s rotation. There are actually five such gyres on the planet, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP), found in the North Pacific, being the largest. The GPGP covers an area three times the size of France, extends to the bottom of the ocean, and contains between 1.1 and 3.6 trillion pieces of plastic. ⁵ More than a million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals die each year from plastic debris in the oceans and on its shores.⁶

But marine animals are not the only life affected by plastic pollution. Plastic debris breaks down into small pieces, called microplastic, which is defined as any piece of plastic smaller than 5 mm in size. In addition, microplastics are also deliberately produced and added to many products such as personal care products, cleaning products, paints, and fertilizers. Microplastics are in the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink, and thus they readily enter the food chain. It is estimated that an average person could ingests as much as 5 grams of plastic every week. That is equivalent to the amount of plastic in a credit card⁷. This exposure is so pervasive, plastic particle pollution has been identified and quantified in the blood of 80% of humans sampled⁸.

Microplastics have been shown to enter cells and tissues where it can do harm. The long-chain structures that make up most plastics are generally thought to be inert. However, unreacted precursors and other harmful ingredients, added to confer specific structural and aesthetic properties, can be found in plastic. In addition, some types of plastic are able to absorb and concentrate toxic chemicals from the environment that then can be released after the microplastic is taken up into organisms. Many of these toxic chemicals have been identified as “priority pollutants” that are regulated by the USA Environmental Protection Agency because of toxicity and/or persistence in the environment. These chemicals have been shown to negatively impact cell division, reproduction, immune systems, and neural networks.⁹

Plastic production disproportionately affects low-income and indigenous communities and communities of color because production and waste management facilities are often located near these populations. These facilities generate toxic air, water, and land pollution. Occupational exposures negatively impact employees as well. Additionally, greenhouse gases are emitted at every stage of the plastic life cycle resulting in disproportionate impacts of global warming on these communities¹⁰.

How serious has the plastic pollution problem become?

The International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), consisting of geologists who determine the boundaries between geological units of time, have been debating a delineation of a new epoch tentatively named the Anthropocene (“anthropo” meaning human, “-cene” meaning new), emphasizing that the human-earth relationship has been so dramatically transformed that human impacts on the earth are now permanently encoded in geological strata. The designation exemplifies how human activity has begun affecting earth systems in entirely new ways as human economic systems, whose sole priority is economic gain, have begun to overwhelm the earth’s natural ecological and geological processes.

What does the Anthropocene have to do with plastic? Defining a new Epoch requires a distinctive, permanent, physical/chemical indicator in the geological stratigraphic record (i.e., a layer of dirt) that delineates the new epoch from the old, a so-called “golden spike.” Plastics are found both on land and in marine sediments; macroscopic fragments are widespread, and microscopic particles (microplastics) are essentially ubiquitous. Thus, because of its worldwide distribution in the geological record and its environmental persistence, plastic pollution is a top candidate for the golden spike. Is this the long-term legacy humans will leave on this planet?¹¹

A second example of the magnitude of the plastic pollution problem comes from research being conducted at the Stockholm Resilience Centre¹². An international group of scientists have identifying nine planetary processes that regulate the stability and resilience of the Earth system. For each planetary process, the research is quantifying “planetary boundaries” within which humanity can continue to develop and thrive. Exceeding these boundaries greatly increases the risk of large-scale irreversible environmental damage.

One of the nine processes, labeled “novel entities”, includes plastics, chemical pollutants, pesticides, and heavy metals mobilized by human activities. A report from January 2022 concluded that humanity has exceeded the planetary boundary related to environmental pollutants and other novel entities, noting that plastic pollution is a particular aspect of high concern. The study notes that even if production of novel entities, including plastics, ceased right now, the risk of large-scale environmental damage will continue because many of the novel entities, including plastic, persist in the environment.¹³

Finally, as a third example, just look around you. Plastic litter is everywhere. Few of us can walk a city street, visit a local park, swim a nearby beach, hike a local trail, or explore in our state and national parks and forests without finding plastic waste of some kind, candy wrappers, water and beverage bottles, shotgun shells, you name it.

Part 2:
How Did This Come to Be?

Although primitive plastics were developed in the mid-1800s, significant production and commercialization of petroleum-based plastics did not begin until around 1950, with single use plastics becoming the focus. At a 1956 conference of the Society of the Plastics Industry, Lloyd Stouffer, then editor of Modern Packaging Magazine and a director of the Packaging Institute, said, “…it was time for the plastics industry to stop thinking about “reuse” packages and concentrate on single use. For the package that is used once and thrown away…represents not a one-shot market for a few thousand units, but an everyday recurring market measure by the billions of units. Your future in packaging…does indeed lie in the trash can.” Seven years later at the 1963 SPI convention Stouffer praised the plastics industries for their success: “You are filling trash cans, the rubbish dumps and incinerators with literally billions of plastics bottles, plastics jugs, plastics tubes, blisters and skin packs, plastics bags and films and sheet packages—and now even plastics cans. The happy day has arrived when nobody any longer considers the plastics package too good to throw away.”¹⁴ The “single use” strategy has remained to this day the dominant strategy driving profits for the plastics industries.

Problems of plastic pollution were already evident in the 1950s and recognized as a mounting pollution hazard during the 1970’s environmental movement. Big Oil, plastic producers, and beverage manufacturers spent millions of dollars opposing regulatory efforts to control the problem. In spite of being well aware that plastic waste would become an expensive problem for society, the industry focused on single-use plastics as the strategy for increasing corporate profits. The industry continued to expand the single-use plastic market while shifting the blame for pollution onto consumers¹⁵. The industries funded groups, such as “Keep America Beautiful”, that launched campaigns to avoid corporate accountability by shifting the blame to “litterbugs” with the tagline, “People start pollution. People can stop it.”¹⁶ Although they knew recycling programs would not be effective, industry front groups promoted recycling campaigns fueling the illusion that plastic was an environment-friendly product. At the same time, they spent millions to oppose legislation that would effectively reduce plastic production and regulate plastic waste.¹⁷

Recently several water and beverage bottlers have launched marketing schemes claiming they will utilize 100% recyclable plastic in their beverage bottles, as exemplified by the American Beverage Association’s Every Bottle Back campaign. Several major beverage bottling companies claim they will invest in recycling infrastructure and commit to utilizing 100% recyclable plastic in their beverage bottles¹⁸. Critics of the Every Bottle Back program point out that beverage companies have made recycling promises in the past and have not followed through. Moreover, the promise of the Every Bottle Back campaign seems dishonest given that the beverage bottling industries, plastic production industries, and Big Oil have repeatedly, and continue to, lobby to block legislation that would build an effective recycling system and provide incentives to consumers to participate (e.g., bottle deposit programs).¹⁹

Why is recycling not THE solution?

In spite of the plastic industries’ campaigns to promote plastic as recyclable, only about 9% of plastic waste has actually been recycled.²⁰ This is due in part to the fact that most of the plastic containers with the three chasing arrow recycle symbol are not actually recyclable because of the many challenges to developing effective recycling programs.

Most current recycling systems rely on mechanical recycling, meaning it has to be sorted, cleaned and shredded, then melted and turned into pellets that become feedstock for further plastic manufacturing. Inherent problems with this approach include: 1) there are many different types of plastics that cannot be co-mingled, that is, they need to be sorted, a costly process; 2) the melting process can release harmful volatile organic compounds, and 3) of course melting requires energy that can create carbon emissions that contribute to global warming; 4) heating and melting of plastic can cause degradation of the plastic components resulting in a product that is of lesser quality than virgin plastic, thus most plastic is “downcycled” to products other than the original—in general, plastic can be recycled for one to two cycles after which it ends up as waste; 5) many types of plastics contain persistent organic pollutants that are highly toxic, requiring special, costly handling rendering them too toxic and too costly to be recycled²¹.

For years, recycling collection facilities in the western countries shipped their recycled waste to China, until 2018 when China banned the importation of mixed and contaminated plastic waste. As a result, much of the western world’s plastic waste was shipped to Southeast Asia where, lacking recycling infrastructure, it was simply dumped or burned. The resulting release of the persistent organic compound, dioxin, contaminated the food chain in Ghana and Indonesia at levels equaling that seen in Vietnam following the use of Agent Orange²². Consequently the Southeast Asian countries also began rejecting shipments, requiring western countries, including the USA, to deal with their waste.

Now plastic producers are promoting the concept of chemical recycling whereby chemical and thermal processes are used to break down the plastic polymeric chain into its original links which then can be used as feedstock for chemical manufacturing or burned as fuel. Far from being an environmentally friendly strategy, this process releases pollutants and requires a huge input of energy thus releasing large amounts of CO₂ further driving global warming and the climate crisis. An analysis by the International Pollutants Elimination Network (IPEN) states that “chemical recycling in the context of the current crisis is largely a public relations distraction that will have little impact on the problem”. The report goes on to state that plastic recycling has had minimal impact on reducing environmental plastic pollution. Indeed, 108 million tons of plastic waste are estimated to enter the environment or be openly burned in the year 2050 alone.²³
Most importantly for a capitalist economy, plastic recycling has never been cost-effective, since it has to compete with newly made plastic which is manufactured from fossil fuels. Not only is fossil fuel extraction heavily subsidized by the US government (i.e., by tax payers), the recent glut in fracking has made the petrochemical stocks used to make plastic even cheaper. As the growing global acceptance of the reality of the climate crisis has exerted pressure on petroleum extraction industries to reduce the production of petroleum products as fuels, the petroleum industries are promoting exponential growth in plastic production as the source of their continued profits. Bottom line--recycling does not lead to profits for the petroleum, plastics, and packaging industries.

Part 3:
What Is to Be Done?

Each of us, as individuals, can and should play a part in reducing plastic pollution by rejecting the modern global throw-away culture, to the extent that we can. There are many practical things we can all do to limit our consumption of single use plastics. W.A.T.E.R. has assembled a list of strategies we as individuals can use to reduce plastic waste²⁴.

However, there is a limit to what we each can do since most manufacturing industries control what kind of products are produced and how they are packaged, and marketing and advertising industries push products that are profitable, not necessarily ecologically sound²⁵. The plastic pollution problem must be tackled at every stage in the plastics cycle, from the extraction of its fossil fuel-based feedstocks to its production, transport, use, disposal and cleanup. This will require global collective action, i.e., legally binding instruments that regulate the relevant industries, holding them, not the consumer, accountable for the real cost of production and disposal of plastic products.

Current efforts essential to support:

State of California:

The new California law, SB54, entitled “Solid waste: reporting, packaging, and plastic food service ware,” is an amendment to the Public Resources Code relating to solid waste. It is a step in the right direction.
The law requires that, by 2032, all packaging in California will be compostable or recyclable; plastic packaging will be reduced by 25 percent with CalRecycles having the authority to increase that percentage if the amount of plastic in the economy and waste stream continues to increase; and 65% of all single use plastic packaging will be recycled²⁶. There will be penalties to the industries for not meeting these goals. In addition, the plastics industries will be required to raise $5 billion from industry members to fund effective recycling systems and support disadvantaged communities impacted most by the harmful effects of plastic production and waste. Fortunately, the law also bans “chemical recycling,” the process of converting plastics to fuel, energy, or other forms of plastic, because it is a highly polluting process, as noted above.

Nationally:

There are several proposals before the US congress to deal with the national pollution crisis. Those backed by the plastic industries primarily rely on limited voluntary measures that most critics point out have failed in the past. The most comprehensive legislation, opposed by the plastic industries, is the “Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act” ²⁷, originally introduced into the US Congress in 2020. The Act proposes policies to reduce plastic production, protect front-line communities, and shift the cost of plastic waste management on to the industries that produce plastics.

Of critical importance to holding polluting industries accountable in the USA is House Joint Resolution 48²⁸ (also see Movetoamend.org²⁹), a resolution proposing a constitutional amendment that says 1) rights protected by the US constitution apply only to natural persons and not to artificial entities such that corporations are subject to regulation, and 2) money spent in campaign financing cannot be construed as speech under the First Amendment and thus can be regulated. How will this Amendment help? The large corporations involved in producing and distributing plastics (fossil fuel extractors, plastic production facilities, beverage bottling industries and their trade associations, etc.) fund political campaigns of legislators who then support their profitability (i.e., oppose regulatory legislation). In addition, the industries lobby against legislation that would reduce plastic production and pollution as it would inevitably also reduce their profits. Often if such regulatory legislation passes, the industries then take legal actions asserting that their constitutional rights have been violated. Historically, the courts have been heavily biased in favor of corporate rights that then overshadow citizens’ and human rights. Thus the amendment proposed by HJR48 will be essential to ensure legislation such as the Break Free From Pollution Act could be passed and fully implemented.

Internationally:

The United Nations recently announced a resolution³⁰, supported by 175 nations, to develop an international legally-binding agreement to end plastic pollution by addressing the full life cycle of plastics, including its production, design, and disposal. The resolution signals the international recognition of the magnitude of the plastic pollution crisis and establishes an Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee with a mandate to draft an agreement by the end of 2024. Public awareness and participation in this process will be essential to ensure the intent is not undermined by the plastic industry “stakeholders” who will undoubtedly work to protect their profits (as we have seen repeatedly with the UN Climate Change Conferences efforts to stop global warming).

An additional tactic for reducing plastic waste would be to impose an international designation of plastic waste as hazardous waste³¹ (unbelievably, given plastics pose many pollution hazards, this has not yet happened). As hazardous waste, the plastic waste would then be highly regulated and it’s handling even more costly, thus driving down the incentive for production. This approach has worked in the past for other environmental contaminants; for example, chlorofluorocarbons were classified as hazardous in 1989 under the Montreal Protocol and production stopped within seven years. Hopefully this tactic will be included in the proposed UN agreement.

Summary

In less than 75 years, the manufacture and use of plastic has permanently altered both our internal and external landscapes and contributed to the threat to life on the planet, which includes humanity.  The plastic industry, using some of the same pages out of Big Tobacco and Big Pharma's playbooks, spends billions of dollars annually to expand production and place profits over people, all the while shifting accountability from themselves to consumers. With the rise in alternative energy sources and demand for electric vehicles, fossil fuel producers are seeing the writing on the wall and need to exploit other uses for petroleum products, plastic production being at the top of the list. This makes it imperative that we take a global, multi-faceted approach that involves all of us in order to help eliminate the industry’s attempts to continue to promote production and avoid accountability and regulation. Besides educating ourselves and those around us and reducing our use of plastic, it is of utmost importance that we participate in collective action to force plastic manufacturers to curb production, participate in and be responsible for its disposal, as well as removing the dubious constitutional protections that allow corporations to undermine the public good.

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Footnotes
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1 Rust, S and Sosa, A. Newsom signs nation’s most sweeping law to phase out single-use plastics and packaging waste, Los Angeles Times, June 30, 2022. Accessed 08-15-2022 at https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2022-06-30/california-new-law-phase-out-single-use-plastics-containers

2 Plastic production is estimated to be double this value by 2030.

3 Geyer, R, Jambeck, JR, and Law, KL. Production, use, and fate of all plastics ever made. Science Advances 3, e1700782 (2017): Jambeck, JR et al, Plastic waste inputs from land into the ocean. Science 347, 768-771 (2015).

4 https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/research-news/2022-01-18-safe-planetary-boundary-for-pollutants-including-plastics-exceeded-say-researchers.html; Elhacham, E, et al. Global human-made mass exceeds all living biomass. Nature 588, 442–444 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-3010-5

5 https://marinedebris.noaa.gov/info/patch.html: Lebreton, L et al. Evidence that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is rapidly acccumulating plastic. Scientific Reports 8, 4666 (2018). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-22939-w.

6 http://www.unesco.org/new/en/natural-sciences/ioc-oceans/focus-areas/rio-20-ocean/blueprint-for-the-future-we-want/marine-pollution/facts-and-figures-on-marine-pollution/

7 No Plastic in Nature: Assessing Plastic Ingestion from Nature to People. June 2019, WWF – World Wide Fund for Nature, https://awsassets.panda.org/downloads/plastic_ingestion_press_singles.pdf: Senathirajah, K et al, Estimations of the mass of microplastics ingested—A pivotal first step towards human health risk assessment.” Journal of Hazardous Materials 404 (Part B) 15 February 2021, 124004. https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S0304389420319944?token=DD4E91487DB796A7354052218A9F0BB450CE8C3C7C9599335787B969E544CECE0BCA9ADB9A31E4F0EA75439D7DF77E0B&originRegion=us-east-1&originCreation=20220919010523

8 Leslie, HA et al. Discovery and quantification of plastic particle pollution in human blood, Environment International 163, 107199 (2022), https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412022001258

9 Rochman, CM et al. Classify plastic waste as hazardous. Nature 494, 169 (2013).

10 https://prismreports.org/2021/06/02/whos-paying-the-human-costs-of-plastic-pollution/

11 Zalasiewicz, J et al. The geological cycle of plastics and their use as a stratigraphic indicator of the Anthropocene. Anthropocene, 13:4-17 (2016).

12 https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html

13 Persson, L et al. Outside the safe operating space of the planetary boundary for novel entities. Environ. Sci. Technol. 56:1510-1521 (2022). https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acs.est.1c04158

14 Stouffer, L, 1963. Plastic Packaging: Today and Tomorrow. 1963 National Plastics Conference. Society of the Plastics Industry, Inc., Section 6A, page 1-3. Accessed at https://discardstudies.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/stoffer-plastics-packacing-today-and-tomorrow-1963.pdf

15 Center for International Environmental Law, Fueling Plastics: Plastic industry awareness of the ocean plastic problem (2017). https://www.ciel.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Fueling-Plastics-Plastic-Industry-Awareness-of-the-Ocean-Plastics-Problem.pdf

16 Jones, ST. Plastic Industry’s Fake Tears. ‘Every Bottle Back’ is Industries Latest Bid to Dodge Responsibility for Plastic Pollution. Center for Biological Diversity, February 23, 3021. https://medium.com/center-for-biological-diversity/plastic-industrys-fake-tears-2d45c2e0c4cb

17 Plastic Wars documentary; https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/plastic-wars/. Sullivan, L. How big oil misled the public into believing plastic would be recycled Sept 11 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled

18 https://www.innovationnaturally.org/plastic/

19 Jones, ST. Plastic Industry’s Fake Tears. ‘Every Bottle Back’ is Industries Latest Bid to Dodge Responsibility for Plastic Pollution. Center for Biological Diversity, February 23, 3021. https://medium.com/center-for-biological-diversity/plastic-industrys-fake-tears-2d45c2e0c4cb

20 Geyer, R, Jambeck, JR, and Law, KL. Production, use, and fate of all plastics ever made. Science Advances 3, e1700782 (2017)

21 Hartman, D. "The Disadvantages of Recycled Plastics", https://sciencing.com/disadvantages-recycled-plastics-7254476.html

22 Takada, H and Bell, L. Plastic Waste Management Hazards. International Pollutants Elimination Network (IPEN), June 2021.

23 Ibid.

24 https://www.cawater.net/Blog/Entries/2020/1/help-reduce-plastic-pollution.html Also see links therein

25 Triller, M. The Limits of Ethical Consumerism. Dollars & Sense, July/August 2021, pages 20-25. https://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2021/0721triller.html

26 Governor Newsom Signs Legislation Cutting Harmful Plastic Pollution to Protect Communities, Oceans and Animals https://www.gov.ca.gov/2022/06/30/governor-newsom-signs-legislation-cutting-harmful-plastic-pollution-to-protect-communities-oceans-and-animals/ Published: Jun 30, 2022

27 https://www.breakfreefromplastic.org/pollution-act/

28 https://legiscan.com/US/bill/HJR48/2021

29 https://movetoamend.org

30 https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/historic-day-campaign-beat-plastic-pollution-nations-commit-develop

31 Rochman, CM et a. Classify plastic waste as hazardous. Nature 494:169-171. (2013). https://www.nature.com/articles/494169a