Larry Glass, NEC Board President
Caroline Griffith, NEC Executive Director
As many astute readers know, our recycling system has long been broken, corrupted by a plastics industry desperate to keep producing its product. The latest “solution” for plastic waste that the industry spin doctors are pushing is so-called advanced recycling. While this might sound like something good, the fact that ExxonMobil and their ilk in the petrochemical industry are heavily promoting the process as the solution to runaway plastic waste means we need to maintain a healthy skepticism. Most environmental advocates warn that these processes pump out highly toxic air pollution, contribute to global warming and don’t solve the plastic problem at all.
Many of us alive on the planet today have grown up in a world filled with plastic products. Just like the oil and gas that’s used to make it, plastic has become an almost unavoidable part of our lives; most of us understand that it is damaging our air, water and bodies but feel powerless to do anything about it. Roughly 1/3 of the 430 million metric tons of plastic produced each year are tossed out after a single use, despite claims about recyclability; worldwide less than 10 percent of plastic is recycled, in the United States it is less than 6 percent.
United Nations officials have declared plastic a big part of what they call the “triple planetary crisis” of climate change, nature loss, and pollution. This has led to a global effort to draft a treaty to cap plastic production and end plastic waste. There is a push to sign a treaty by the end of 2024, but advocates warn that the industry has already watered down the agreement. In the United States, lawsuits over plastic pollution are multiplying, as are calls to reduce production and hold producers accountable. All of this is putting pressure on the petrochemical companies like ExxonMobile to try and come up with some kind of public relations solution.
And let’s be clear: although recycling can be revolutionary and is an important piece of our waste management system – particularly when it comes to highly recyclable materials like paper, aluminum and glass – the plastics industry has long pushed it as the solution, framing problems of waste more as disposal issues rather than production issues. The mirage of recyclability has allowed the industry to green its image while continuing to produce a product that is killing the planet.
The current industry scheme is chemical recycling. The industry lobby group the American Chemistry Council says this allows for more kinds of plastic to be “recaptured” and “remanufactured” into so-called “new plastics” and products, but the evidence is that chemical recycling is an unproven market ploy that allows the industry to clean up its image while plastic production keeps growing. It’s an end of the pipe solution that doesn’t require industry to cut down on production or profits and its plans for a large expansion. All of this means more pollution as the entire plastics life cycle – from oil and gas drilling to plastic production to plastic waste contamination of rivers and oceans to physical harm to our bodies from micro and nano plastics – leaves a trail of destruction.
Modern plastics are made up of some 16,000 chemicals, almost all of them toxic. Exxon describes its chemical recycling as a type of pyrolysis where waste plastic is super-heated to 600° in a reactor and converted to oil and gas form, then sent to other Exxon units for further refining into plastic to be used in new products. Plastic producers claim that processes like pyrolysis allow them to unlock the inherent value of used plastics that might otherwise wind up in a landfill, but the alarming fact is that when plastic is heated up or burned it releases dioxins, furans, mercury, Polychlorinated biphenyls (BCPs), acrolein, acetone, butadiene, butane, formaldehyde, aldehydes, hydrogen chloride and hydrogen cyanide, polyethylene, methane, ethane and propylene. Add to this the fact that very few pyrolysis facilities are up in running, and this looks like typical petrochemical industry deception.
It’s gotten so bad that California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who is already investigating Exxon Mobile and other oil companies for their deception regarding climate change, is now investigating the oil and gas industry’s role in deceptive public messaging about plastic pollution and recycling. His office issued subpoenas to Exxon and industry lobbying groups, the American Chemistry Council and the Plastics Industry Association. The root of the investigation is the fossil fuel industry’s decade-long campaign of deception, perpetuating the myth that recycling can solve the plastic crisis.
Although the data from Coastal Cleanup Month is still being analyzed, if past trends hold true, the majority of waste that volunteers picked up during the month of September was plastic. While it’s great that community members were able to get that trash before it was washed out to sea with the rains, what would be even better is if it didn’t exist in the first place. For that to happen, we need to hold the plastics industry, i.e. the fossil fuel industry, accountable.