Plastic Proliferating on the Planet

By FRANK LINGO

My city, Lawrence, Kansas, recently banned single-use plastic bags. The Repugnican-led legislature is trying to pass a law to stop cities from making such ordinances. They want to ban the ban and let plastic bag usage continue. This is an example of what I call anti-environmentalism. It’s not enough for them to do nothing anymore, now they take active measures to stop sustainable treatment of our ecosystem.

As bad as Kansas is, Texas has perhaps the very worst environmental record. Inside Climate News just ran a new report from the non-profit Environmental Integrity Project (EIP). The March 14 article summarized the 50 plastic manufacturing complexes built, expanded or proposed since 2012, almost all along the Gulf Coast.

Texas, in its generous and understanding way with the oil industry, has provided $1.65 billion in tax breaks for the business in the past dozen years, so that those immensely profitable companies could get even richer while Texas schools struggle with shortfalls in teachers and funding.

Louisiana was even more extravagant in their tax giveaways, where $6.5 billion of discounts went to only three projects. Is it a coincidence that Texas and Louisiana schools spend several thousand dollars less per student than New York and New Jersey every year, according to U.S. News and World Report?

If you’re anything like me, you might be thinking the world doesn’t need more plastic. But the EIP report, entitled “Feeding the Plastics Industrial Complex,” says there are plans for 42 more new plastic plants, 24 of them in Texas. That is despite finding that most of the existing petrochemical plants that the report reviewed had committed repeated violations of their pollution permits, without any penalty on their public subsidies.

“I think if companies can’t obey the law, they shouldn’t be rewarded with taxpayer money,” said EIP research manager Alexandra Shaykevich.

Over 99% of plastic is made from fossil fuels, mainly oil. We know the extraction and burning of fossil fuels are a main cause of the climate crisis. Yet here go the petrochemical companies doubling down on plastic production, which will keep the demand for oil at record levels.

Unlike Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran, where you can stick a straw in the sand and draw oil, reserves in the U.S. are much deeper underground. This necessitates hydraulic fracturing, also called fracking, which as the name suggests, involves breaking the strata of the earth with explosives to get at the oil. Fracking has made the land unstable and is implicated in the rash of earthquakes that have become commonplace in states where it is widely practiced. It has also caused contamination with oil of some groundwater supplies that populated areas depend on for their water.

How bad is the plastic problem? A 2020 report by the Pew Charitable Trust and SystemIQ, LTD. estimated that the amount of plastic trash entering the oceans every year will triple by 2040. So that’s on top of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch which is twice the size of Texas, and there are other floating plastic aggregations as well. Besides clogging up the oceans and strangling sea creatures, the plastic works its way into our entire ecosystem in the form of microparticles. It is estimated that, on average, each human all over the world consumes about 5 grams of microplastic (the weight of a credit card) every week. I like fiber in my diet but this is ridiculous.

There are plastic substitutes available that are made from a variety of natural plant products that can be composted back into the soil. But we as a species are still stuck in a mindset of extraction and throwaway, rather than reuse and recycle.

Here’s a wild idea: How about requiring that every manufacturer of every product be responsible for recycling it when the consumer is done with it? Under 10% of plastic is currently recycled and it’s probably less if properly tracked. In an age when recycling is becoming the norm for many products, plastic disposal remains an abomination.

The only way that will change is when we consumers choose our products more ecologically, and also demand that our elected representatives hold the petrochemical companies accountable.

Frank Lingo, based in Lawrence, Kansas, is a former columnist for the Kansas City Star and author of the novel “Earth Vote.” Email: lingofrank@gmail.com. See his website: Greenbeat.world

From The Progressive Populist, April 15, 2024

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