“What’s in the Air” is a column by Dominique Browning, Moms Clean Air Force Co-Founder and Director, in which she explores life today through the lens of air quality and public health.
The plastics industry has done a brilliant job—evilly brilliant—of making us think that any and all plastic—and as much of it as possible—is just great, and people are the problem. People just need to … recycle.
Plastics are not great—they are made of toxic chemicals, carcinogens, endocrine disrupters. Nearly half of the plastic produced is meant to be used once and then thrown away. And people aren’t the problem—not when we literally cannot leave the supermarket without something wrapped in plastics. Not when there is no way to safely recycle plastics—in spite of a “new” technique the plastics industry, represented by the American Chemistry Council, is pushing these days: “advanced recycling.” A process that is not advanced. And certainly not recycling. It’s just hiding a waste problem by turning it into a potential air pollution disaster. (More on this in a moment, but let’s get up to speed.)
Remember that exchange from that classic 1967 movie The Graduate, when a boyish Dustin Hoffman gets what you might call career advice from an older man: “I want to say one word to you. Just one word—plastics… There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?”
We’ve been creating (and consuming) that future ever since. The plastics industry has been selling so much plastic, dreaming up new and profligate uses for plastics, marketing ways to convince us we need ever more plastics. We creatures here on land, and creatures living in the soil, and creatures in the oceans, and creatures flying through our skies, are drowning in plastic, breathing plastic, eating plastic, choking on plastic, disrupting our hormones with plastics, and even being born pre-polluted with plastics. Our foods are contaminated. Our lands and waters are contaminated. Our bodies are contaminated.
Fifty years later: Plastics has turned out not to be such a great future.
We are in a plastics crisis. It is getting worse each year. A headline in The Guardian caught my eye recently: “They Lied: Plastics Producers Deceived Public About Recycling, Report Reveals.”
The piece describes a report produced by the Center for Climate Integrity, which uncovered a 30-year effort to market plastic as recyclable, even knowing it was not. Since the 1950s, the plastics industry has pushed the idea of single-use plastics—use once and toss—because that meant an infinite opportunity to sell more plastic. Then plastic trash began to pile up, so in the 1980s, the industry started promoting the idea that plastics could be recycled.
We began to sort the trash, teach our children to be vigilant. We trusted that our plastics were being safely recycled and reused, instead of what was actually happening. The plastic trash was mainly ending up in landfills or being burned; some of it mechanically recycled, but that creates problems too. Metal is a huge recycling success story. Ditto paper. Ditto glass. But not plastics. For lots of complex reasons, it doesn’t recycle well because there are too many different kinds and colors and qualities of plastics, and too many toxic chemicals. Plastics recycling contaminates waterways with massive amounts of microplastics. In 2018, when China refused to accept the United States’ plastic trash, the problem began to pile up all around us, and in our oceans too.
Now the industry is pushing a new scheme on states around the country: Let us burn your plastic trash and call it recycling. I won’t get into the mechanics of pyrolysis here; we have details on our site. But the bottom line is that so-called chemical recycling of plastics, or “advanced recycling,” is a terrible idea no matter what it is called. It involves burning plastic trash in incinerators that emit some of the most dangerous air pollutants known to humankind, along with chemical wastes and heavily contaminated industrial fuels.
This is not the same thing as the mechanical process of recycling, which involves sorting, grinding, and melting plastic waste, and then combining it with virgin plastic. However, this process also creates plastics with toxic chemicals—and it releases toxics into the water and soil. As a result, researchers are finding excess amounts of toxic chemicals in recycled plastic children’s toys, water bottles, and food-contact materials. The concentrations can be far higher than the amounts found in virgin plastic.
With “advanced recycling,” the plastics industry wants to evade Clean Air Act protections by going through Congress to pass a law that gets plastics reclassified so it isn’t regulated by EPA incineration rules. Our Moms Clean Air Force plastics expert, Cynthia Palmer, herself a highly concerned mom, notes that the pollutants from these “advanced recycling” facilities include dioxins, benzene, formaldehyde, particulate matter, and heavy metals, such as mercury and arsenic. Exposure to this pollution increases the risk of cancer, birth defects, reproductive system damage, developmental issues, cardiovascular problems, respiratory impairment, hormonal irregularities, and neurological problems.
On top of everything: Our incineration rules are antiquated. EPA has finally proposed to upgrade incineration protections, which are 20 years old, and cover only nine chemicals. Plastics are made from more than 13,000 chemicals!
Moms Clean Air Force got wind of this effort to circumvent EPA and burn plastic without Clean Air Act protections a couple of years ago. We began meeting with lawmakers in Washington, DC, to explain why “advanced recycling” bills—also called chemical recycling bills—were a terrible idea and should not be supported. This is an ongoing campaign that is far from over.
There are billions of dollars at stake for the plastics industry, which is on track to triple production by 2050. It needs to make its biggest problem—trash, waste, litter filled with toxic chemicals (which the industry sure doesn’t want us to focus on)—disappear (into our lungs) so that it can keep cranking out more plastic without paying to control pollution. All, of course, subsidized by the big government that they profess to hate.
This situation reminds me of the way the tobacco industry worked so hard to keep people from understanding the link between lung cancer and smoking. The way the oil and gas industry denies the links between climate disruption and oil and gas emissions so that we don’t regulate climate emissions and switch to renewables. The petrochemical industry stands in the way of protecting our health—to sell more cling film.
Don’t get me wrong. Plastics in some instances have been a miraculous product—just think of the lifesaving threads of plastic tubing flexible enough to get into the tiny veins of premature babies. I remember, decades ago, visiting a friend at her mother’s house. Three or four plastic baggies were drying on the dish rack. She had washed them to reuse them. I was surprised. My friend was mortified and rolled her eyes at the frugal ways of that generation, born when the effects of the Great Depression of the 1920s was still being felt. Now I think back on my friend’s mom and see her as a role model. She saw a different future.
We should think of plastic more as a precious material, to be used as sparingly as possible. But this isn’t a problem that is going to be solved by each of us individually being careful. We need an ambitious systemic overhaul of our plastics production—including ways along the production process that stop dangerous air pollution and chemical disasters.
It’s time for all of us to think about the future of plastics. That line from The Graduate takes on new resonance.
“Think about it. Will you think about it?”
Learn more about the link between plastics and our changing climate with our PLASTICS AND CLIMATE CHANGE fact sheet.
For a deeper dive on the plastics industry and its impact on our health, check out WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT THE PETROCHEMICAL INDUSTRY: Q&A.
Learn more about Moms’ work on “advanced recycling” and waste incineration.
TELL CONGRESS: PROTECT OUR FAMILIES FROM PLASTIC INCINERATION POLLUTION