News from a Changing Planet -- #44-- How to End Plastic Pollution for Good

New data shows it's possible, but the international community has work to do.

If we do nothing about plastic waste soon, by 2050, we will produce enough to cover Manhattan in a pile more than 2 miles high. Credit UC Santa Barbara, UC Berkeley, Washington Post

Plastic waste, as we all know from lived experience, is everywhere. But what if we could stop it? I wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post about how we might be able to do just that, based on new research from University of California Santa Barbara and Berkeley.

Plastic is everywhere for lots of reasons: it’s really useful. It can be light weight, flexible, rigid. It can be used to make clothing, or to extend the shelf-life of food or medicine. PVC blood bags can last for 40 days compared to 28 days for a non-PVC alternative, which can make a big difference in many parts of the world.

Plastic’s usefulness, though, should excuse neither the plastic industry’s blockade of efforts to prevent plastic waste from polluting our planet, and nor the false promise of truly recycling their products to get us all to use more plastic.

Plastic trash headed to a landfill in Oregon, since most of it (like all plastic) can’t or won’t be recycled. Credit Laura Sullivan for NPR.

Plastic is also everywhere because it’s incredibly cheap to produce, but that’s because no one really pays for the actual costs. Greenhouse gases and ensuing climate change. Healthcare costs or premature deaths for people breathing in the toxic chemicals from making or burning plastic. The long-term effects for all of us (and most animals) of having microplastics in our bodies (which we probably all do). (Those PVC blood bags? They contain phthalates, which are endocrine disruptors.)

Plastic is woven into every aspect of our economy and our daily lives, not to mention the air we breathe, the water we drink, our food supply, the farthest reaches of our environment.

Over the last decade, the US has become one of the world’s largest producers of fossil fuels, particularly natural gas, a result of the fracking boom. That has driven down prices, and the big oil and gas companies, also expecting a decline in the use of fossil fuels over time, are making up for those low prices by heavily investing in plastic production (which is made from fossil fuels).

Natural gas contains ethane, which is one of the key components in plastic production. Because the US has so much natural gas, we also now have a lot of ethane. By the end of 2019, $200 billion was invested into 333 new chemical and plastics projects. In 2023, US ethane production reached a new high: 2.7 million barrels per day in April.

Here’s a small part of an aircraft carrier with people for scale…Credit me ;)

Between 1950 and 2021, humanity produced about 11 billion metric tons of virgin plastic – that’s the weight of 110,000 U.S. aircraft carriers (Have you ever seen an aircraft carrier…?!). Only about 2 billion tons is still in use. The rest – some 8.7 billion metric tons (87,000 aircraft carriers) — is waste: 71 percent has ended up in landfills or somewhere else in the environment, including the ocean; 12 percent has been recycled; 17 percent has been incinerated.

At the rate we’re going, global plastic waste will rise 60 percent by 2050, producing enough to cover Manhattan with a pile of plastic waste more than 2 miles tall. Much of that increase will take place in emerging economies without robust waste management infrastructure where pollution will be even more harmful. As is so often the case, this is an environmental justice issue.

Just to reiterate…

Which is why it’s good news that some people/governments/scientists are trying to slow down the rate at which we’re going, though the fossil fuel industry is not making it easy for them.