WEBVTT
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The results were shocking.
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From 2021 to 2022, surgeons from Beijing's Anjin hospital collected blood and tissue samples from 15 patients undergoing heart surgery, and every single patient had at least some microplastics in those samples.
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It's hard to escape.
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The air we breathe, the water we drink, the very food we eat.
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Microplastics are everywhere.
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But just how bad is this epidemic of plastic?
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Is there increased exposure to plastic destroying our health, like we're hearing about in the headlines?
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Microplastics in two areas of the human body where they have never been seen before.
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And what ties do microplastics have to climate change and the power of the fossil fuel industry?
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Today we tackle the specter of microplastics.
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We'll dig through minuscule grains of soil and explore the far reaches of the atmosphere.
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From the plastic running through our veins all the way to the damning documents that reveal the complicity of fossil capital in the plastic crisis, today we'll uncover just how dangerous microplastics really are.
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8 billion tons.
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A number so massive that it's hard to fathom.
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That is the amount of plastic estimated to exist on the Earth.
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That's double the mass of all the animals currently in existence.
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So it's no exaggeration to say that we live in a world of plastic.
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These days, pretty much anything you touch contains some form of plastic.
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Your phone, food container, clothes, and that shampoo bottle in your shower all contain some form of plastic.
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And now, almost 75 years after plastic exploded into mainstream use, we must face the consequences of such gluttonous production.
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While images like this or like this come to mind when we think of plastic pollution, we need to zoom in on a threat that has only recently garnered attention: microplastics.
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Unlike organic material, plastics are rarely chewed up, decomposed, and mineralized by bacteria and other microorganisms.
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They don't break down organically.
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Instead, they just split apart and degrade into smaller and smaller pieces.
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These little bits then accumulate everywhere.
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They come from plastic containers breaking down in the sun, from the polyester plastic fibers that fray off of your pants in the wash, and even from microscopic tears and car tires when they come into contact with the rope.
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And by everywhere, I do mean everywhere.
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Researchers have found microplastics in the air we breathe, cosmetics, our water, our soil, our immune cells, our livers, our hearts, our testicles, our breast milk, our placentas, and even our fruits and vegetables.
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But just how bad is it if plastic is everywhere?
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Is it really a plastic crisis, or is it just overblown?
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Climate change and plastic pollution appear to be parallel problems.
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Two crises that have co-evolved from the insatiable overproduction and over-accumulation of capitalism.
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Two separate catastrophes that rarely interact.
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But as we'll soon see, that is far from the case.
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Climate change exacerbates plastic pollution, and vice versa.
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The two are intimately intertwined.
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Indeed, microplastics and plastics in general are fueling the fire of climate chaos, because plastics are just fossil fuels made solid.
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Over 99% of plastics are made from chemicals derived from fossil fuels.
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Indeed, as this research paper reveals, plastic production accounts for 4% of global fossil fuel use for materials and 3-4% for energy during production.
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All this means enormous emissions from the creation of plastics.
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In 2019, the plastic industry, which is just a subsidiary of the fossil fuel industry, emitted the equivalent of 850 million metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
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Which means that if plastics was a country, it would be the sixth highest emitter.
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But it's not just the plastic production process that is damaging the atmosphere.
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The degradation of plastics into microplastic has also been shown to release copious emissions and toxic chemicals into the air and water.
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To make matters worse, recent research seems to suggest that as microplastics break down into smaller and smaller pieces, their emissions become larger.
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As a result of both this off-gassing and fuel needed for its production, the global life cycle of greenhouse gas emissions from traditional plastic materials were 1.7 gigatons of carbon dioxide in 2015, and if current trends continue, they will rise to 6.5 gigatons of carbon dioxide by 2050.
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As of right now, plastics are responsible for 4.5% of total global greenhouse gas emissions.
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But that percentage is only predicted to grow as the plastics industry becomes a safe haven for fossil capitalists to sell their glut of oil and gas reserves.
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Right now, plastics is one of the fastest-growing industries, and if left unchecked, plastic emissions could claim a 15% share of the world's emissions.
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Unfortunately, direct emissions are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to plastic pollution.
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The prevalence of microplastics throughout the natural world is disrupting crucial cooling and carbon sequestration systems.
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Systems that are holding back even worse global warming.
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Chief among these is the ocean's ability to pump carbon down into its depths and store it for millions of years.
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In very simplified terms, the ocean carbon pump works through phytoplankton near the surface, pulling carbon dioxide out of the air for energy.
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These then get eaten by larger organisms and turned into fecal matter, which slowly sink to the ocean floor, where those dead organisms and carboniferous fecal matter can be sequestered in the sediment for potentially millions of years.
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The problem comes, however, when that carbon's ability to sink downwards is disrupted by microplastics.
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The prevalence of microplastics in the upper reaches of the ocean means that as fish, copepods, and other organisms feast on phytoplankton, they also feast on plastic.
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Plastic that alters the sinking rate of fecal matter and ultimately the amount of carbon that reaches the ocean floor.
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Put another way by a meta-analysis on the role of microplastics in global warming, these positively buoyant plastic particles make fecal pellets lighter, reducing their sinking rate and as a result their carbon storage potential.
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This reduction in sinking rate varies from species to species, but across the board it's bad.
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Researchers found a 2.25-fold decrease in sinking rates for the Copapodicalinus helgolonditis, while another paper demonstrated a 1.35 to 1.47-fold decrease in sinking rates for another ocean-dwelling organism.
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In short, as microplastics accumulate in our oceans, they disrupt a crucial carbon sink.
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Indeed, the world's oceans absorb roughly 31% of all global carbon emissions.
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Microplastics are already starting to disrupt that great blue carbon sink.
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Alarm bells should be ringing everywhere.
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To add insult to injury, microplastics are potentially disrupting the cooling capacities of atmospheric cloud formation as well as disrupting the carbon sequestration capabilities of the very soil underneath our feet.
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Unfortunately, research in both fields is sparse and emerging.
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In terms of the sky, it's unclear whether microplastics will provide a net cooling or warming effect.
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When interviewed by Yale's Environmental Publication, a researcher in the field noted that skies heavily polluted with plastic will probably make both more high-altitude ice clouds, which tend to warm the Earth's surface, and more low altitude water clouds, which tend to cool the Earth.
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Which effect will dominate is unknown.
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Similarly, in the same meta-analysis of the effects of microplastics on global warming mentioned earlier, we see that, according to recent studies, soil microplastics may impact carbon cycling in soil and the ability of soils to store carbon, thus affecting how much nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere as greenhouse gases.
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But again, these studies are still not certain about just how destructive the relationship is between microplastics and soil carbon sinks.
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The unfortunate reality is that microplastic pollution is only projected to get worse.
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The 8 billion tons of plastic we've already made will continue to break down into smaller and smaller pieces.
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Meanwhile, we are projected to almost triple that amount of plastic on the planet by 2060.
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And all of this plastic isn't just disastrous for the planet, it's affecting human well-being right now.
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If you take a sample of the average person's kidney, blood, or even heart, you're likely to find some microplastic.
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That's right, plastic runs through our veins.
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And the growing body of science reveals that this is disrupting our health.
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To be clear, we are not consuming a credit card's worth of plastic every week, like headlines and even I had previously claimed.
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That was based on a flawed and discredited study.
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This much more rigorous study found instead that adults on average ingest roughly 0.000000583 grams of plastic per day.
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That's six zeros, which is far less than a 5 gram credit card.
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But the problem is that this plastic accumulates over the course of our lifetime.
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And even if the total amount of plastic is small, the toxicity of those foreign plastics in our body wreaks havoc across organs and cells.
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To start, microplastics increase inflammation.
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When you consider that the job of immune cells is to seek out and destroy foreign contaminants in the body, this makes sense.
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Studies like this one have found microplastics within immune cells.
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Or as Wendy Zuckerman and Rose Rimmler from the Science Versus podcast put it, the whole function of subimune cells is to take foreign objects inside your body, bacteria, viruses, right?
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And to get rid of them.
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And so they're seeing microplastics as a foreign object.
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Right, so what might be happening is that the microplastics were triggering people's immune cells to come out.
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That like that's inflammation, essentially.
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But inflammation is just the start.
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Plastics are host to copious amounts of chemicals like BPA that release as they break down and subsequently disrupt the functioning of hormones in our bodies.
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Hormones are essentially our personal messaging system.
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So when they're disrupted, our body starts going a bit haywa.
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Those toxic chemicals that mess with our hormones are known as endocrine disruptors.
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Endocrine disruptors have been linked to gaining weight in both animals and in humans because these chemicals tend to turn virgin stem cells into fat rather than bone or muscles.
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But also these harmful plastic chemicals disrupt crucial growth periods in young people.
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Indeed, some have pointed to endocrine disruptors as a leaning influence of girls starting puberty earlier to the tune of almost three months per decade from 1977 to 2013.
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Meanwhile, declining sperm rates as well as fertility rates among women have been linked to endocrine disrupting chemicals from plastics.
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The bottom line here is that plastics are all around us and in us, and they are already disrupting our hormonal functioning.
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But luckily we've gotten rid of BPA in our water bottles, right?
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So we're fine?
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Well, no.
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A lot of the BPA replacements are just as bad as BPA and have been linked to similar health outcomes we've seen from BPA.
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Because in order for plastic to be plastic, they need BPA or some sort of BPA substitute, which does basically the same thing.
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So given all of this, given the scope of both the environmental and human toll of plastics, why is the mountain of plastic and the prevalence of microplastics rising?
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To understand that and to understand how we've so monumentally failed to curb plastic pollution, we need to turn towards the fossil fuel industry itself.
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In February of 2024, the Center for Climate Integrity released a bombshell report, one that revealed five decades of deception from the oil and gas industry.
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But this wasn't about their decades of misinformation and obfuscation of the connections between fossil fuels and climate change.
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Instead, it detailed the insidious maneuvering of fossil capital to ensure plastics continue to be an essential part of the global economy.
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As I've already mentioned earlier, plastic companies are just another wing of the fossil fuel empire.
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It's just oil and gas packaged in another way.
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And as backlash against fossil fuels mounts, oil giants like Shell and Chevron are increasing their plastic output.
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But the plastics industry is vulnerable to public backlash.
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Indeed, the history of plastics is marked by deceptive marketing and tactics to quell public dissent about the toll of plastic pollution.
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At the core of this strategy, as the Center for Climate Integrity reveals, is selling consumers on recycling.
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To be clear, recycling is not a solution to the glut of plastic production.
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For one, the vast majority of plastics that consumers throw into the recycling bin aren't recycled into new products because there is no market for the specific type of plastic under capitalism.
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As the Center for Climate Integrity explains, certain types of plastics have no end markets and therefore are impossible to recycle.
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To date, viable markets only exist for PET and high-density polyethylene plastic bottles and jugs.
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These are known as plastics number one and two.
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In addition, there are so many different types of plastics, and recycling needs highly pure plastics.
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So a plastic bag or bottle that is made from several different types of plastics can often be unusable or too energy intensive to transform into usable plastic again.
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And finally, even if something is recycled, you can only get one to two cycles out of the process before the plastic degrades into unusability.
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And because of all these hurdles, plastic that ends up in recycling usually isn't turned into something new.
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It ends up in the landfill or in our oceans and rivers.
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Indeed, the US recycles just 5-6% of its plastics.
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And yet to keep their production line churning, fossil fuels flowing, and profits growing, the petrochemical industry championed recycling as the solution to plastic waste throughout the mid-1980s to the late 1990s.
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During that period, as one petrochemical representative testified in Congress in 1992, there was a rush to demonstrate environmental purity.
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The call was to recycle or be banned.
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As a result, fossil fuel companies like Exxon Chemical, alongside bottling companies, created the Plastic Recycling Foundation, which was used to assuage lawmakers' fears about plastics by claiming that the industry was researching plastic recycling and would tackle the problem.
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They did this, as one internal industry letter explains, to deflect some harsh, restrictive language, singling out plastic as a difficult material to collect and recycle.
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Recycling, then, was a shiny object the industry could hold up to distract from their destructive overproduction.
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And the petrochemical companies did this even though they knew recycling wasn't a real solution.
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As one of the founding members of the plastics industry front group, the Vinyl Institute, explained at an industry conference in 1989, recycling cannot go on indefinitely and does not solve the solid waste problem.
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Indeed, the Vinyl Institute, a front group for the plastic industry, released a report in 1986 that explained, recycling cannot be considered a permanent solid waste solution, as it merely prolongs the time until an item is disposed of.
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And yet, instead of curtailing plastic production or finding a better waste management solution in light of the damning research on recycling, the petrochemical industry doubled down and championed its potential through marketing.
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The more you recycle, the more recycled plastic we can use in the future.
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Millions of them are being recycled every day, which we can use to make things.
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Like strong, lightweight garbage cans.
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According to the Center for Climate Integrity, the plastics industry pushed for things like resin identification codes on packaging that made it seem like their products were actually recyclable when they really weren't.
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The average person saw the symbol and said, Well, it's recyclable, right?
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Got three errors.
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I'm like, well, all of a sudden, our own customers, they would bring it in and not only say it has a triangle, but it would they would flat out say, it says it's recyclable right on it.
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And I'd be like, I can tell you I can't give this away.
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Meanwhile, plastics companies promoted commitments to recycle vast amounts of plastics even though they knew they were unattainable.
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One representative from DuPont admitted as much to a recycling conference in 1992, explaining that it is no secret that the quantitative goals industry originally set for itself for economically recycling plastic containers extracted from municipal waste streams were extremely ambitious.
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In short, the plastic industry wielded false commitments and false hope to deflect attention away from their industrial pollution throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
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And that campaign was successful.
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If the public thinks the recycling is working, then they're not going to be as concerned about the environment.
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Recycling exploded in popularity and backlash against plastic in the form of bands quieted down.
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Today, however, as plastic bans and ire over microplastics threaten business again, fossil chemical businesses are once again using similar tactics.
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This time they are claiming that advanced recycling will save us.
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And that's what's really exciting about advanced recycling, because this allows you to address the hard to recycle plastics that can't be recycled today.
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Because the knowledge that conventional recycling is not only ineffective, but also essentially a sham to individualize the problems of the plastic industry, petrochemical and packaging companies are embracing chemical recycling.
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An old technology with a new name, chemical or advanced recycling, has been proven again and again to be economically unviable, ineffective at recycling many plastics, and often just transforms plastics into toxic waste or fuel.
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And much like in the 1990s, petrochemical companies are championing ambitious recycling goals to distract us from their pollution.
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ExxonMobil, Dow, and Chevron Phillips Chemical have all announced pledges to increase their advanced recycling capabilities.
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As we have seen time and time again, capitalists are interested in the accumulation of profits.
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All else comes second.
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So paying lip service to cleaning up plastic pollution until anger wanes seems to be the continued strategy of fossil and petrochemical capital.
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This must end.
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It seems that true change and harm reduction in terms of plastic must be forced upon fossil capital.
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The unfortunate reality is that plastics have been crucial for certain aspects of life, from everything from healthcare to avoiding massive amounts of food waste.
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But those plastics represent a minuscule amount compared to the oceans factories churn out today.
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The reality is that plastic production is following the logic of capitalism.
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Its overproduction is pushing into every nook and cranny of our lives.
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A world without toxic packaging materials and physical plastic pollution seems far away, but we must start now if we are to make it there.
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This means employing stopgap solutions.
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Immediate harm reduction strategies could look like the banning of endocrine disrupting chemicals from plastic production while ramping up production of plastic alternatives, as well as pushing for the elimination of needless plastic.
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But ultimately, an end to plastic and microplastic pollution won't come from tinkering around the edges.
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Petrochemical companies must be held accountable, both for past harm and future production.
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The plastic industry must be held accountable for the end of life of their goods, much like glass bottle companies used to collect their own bottles for reuse.
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But to truly minimize the impact of plastics on our world and bodies, we must move away from a capitalist model that incentivizes the production of plastics and the dissemination of misinformation about the health of people and the planet.
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We must move from an economy based on exchange and profits to one based on use and needs.
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One where all non essential plastic production must end and be replaced with biodegradable non toxic alternatives that leave little impact on the planet and our bodies.
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The results were shocking.
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From 2021 to 2022, surgeons from Beijing's Anjin hospital collected blood and tissue samples from 15 patients undergoing heart surgery, and every single patient had at least some microplastics in those samples.
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It's hard to escape.
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The air we breathe, the water we drink, the very food we eat.
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Microplastics are everywhere.
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But just how bad is this epidemic of plastic?
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Is there increased exposure to plastic destroying our health, like we're hearing about in the headlines?
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Microplastics in two areas of the human body where they have never been seen before.
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And what ties do microplastics have to climate change and the power of the fossil fuel industry?
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Today we tackle the specter of microplastics.
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We'll dig through minuscule grains of soil and explore the far reaches of the atmosphere.
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From the plastic running through our veins all the way to the damning documents that reveal the complicity of fossil capital in the plastic crisis, today we'll uncover just how dangerous microplastics really are.
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8 billion tons.
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A number so massive that it's hard to fathom.
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That is the amount of plastic estimated to exist on the Earth.
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That's double the mass of all the animals currently in existence.
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So it's no exaggeration to say that we live in a world of plastic.
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These days, pretty much anything you touch contains some form of plastic.
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Your phone, food container, clothes, and that shampoo bottle in your shower all contain some form of plastic.
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And now, almost 75 years after plastic exploded into mainstream use, we must face the consequences of such gluttonous production.
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While images like this or like this come to mind when we think of plastic pollution, we need to zoom in on a threat that has only recently garnered attention: microplastics.
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Unlike organic material, plastics are rarely chewed up, decomposed, and mineralized by bacteria and other microorganisms.
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They don't break down organically.
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Instead, they just split apart and degrade into smaller and smaller pieces.
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These little bits then accumulate everywhere.
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They come from plastic containers breaking down in the sun, from the polyester plastic fibers that fray off of your pants in the wash, and even from microscopic tears and car tires when they come into contact with the rope.
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And by everywhere, I do mean everywhere.
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Researchers have found microplastics in the air we breathe, cosmetics, our water, our soil, our immune cells, our livers, our hearts, our testicles, our breast milk, our placentas, and even our fruits and vegetables.
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But just how bad is it if plastic is everywhere?
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Is it really a plastic crisis, or is it just overblown?
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Climate change and plastic pollution appear to be parallel problems.
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Two crises that have co-evolved from the insatiable overproduction and over-accumulation of capitalism.
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Two separate catastrophes that rarely interact.
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But as we'll soon see, that is far from the case.
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Climate change exacerbates plastic pollution, and vice versa.
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The two are intimately intertwined.
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Indeed, microplastics and plastics in general are fueling the fire of climate chaos, because plastics are just fossil fuels made solid.
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Over 99% of plastics are made from chemicals derived from fossil fuels.
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Indeed, as this research paper reveals, plastic production accounts for 4% of global fossil fuel use for materials and 3-4% for energy during production.
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All this means enormous emissions from the creation of plastics.
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In 2019, the plastic industry, which is just a subsidiary of the fossil fuel industry, emitted the equivalent of 850 million metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
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Which means that if plastics was a country, it would be the sixth highest emitter.
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But it's not just the plastic production process that is damaging the atmosphere.
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The degradation of plastics into microplastic has also been shown to release copious emissions and toxic chemicals into the air and water.
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To make matters worse, recent research seems to suggest that as microplastics break down into smaller and smaller pieces, their emissions become larger.
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As a result of both this off-gassing and fuel needed for its production, the global life cycle of greenhouse gas emissions from traditional plastic materials were 1.7 gigatons of carbon dioxide in 2015, and if current trends continue, they will rise to 6.5 gigatons of carbon dioxide by 2050.
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As of right now, plastics are responsible for 4.5% of total global greenhouse gas emissions.
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But that percentage is only predicted to grow as the plastics industry becomes a safe haven for fossil capitalists to sell their glut of oil and gas reserves.
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Right now, plastics is one of the fastest-growing industries, and if left unchecked, plastic emissions could claim a 15% share of the world's emissions.
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Unfortunately, direct emissions are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to plastic pollution.
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The prevalence of microplastics throughout the natural world is disrupting crucial cooling and carbon sequestration systems.
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Systems that are holding back even worse global warming.
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Chief among these is the ocean's ability to pump carbon down into its depths and store it for millions of years.
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In very simplified terms, the ocean carbon pump works through phytoplankton near the surface, pulling carbon dioxide out of the air for energy.
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These then get eaten by larger organisms and turned into fecal matter, which slowly sink to the ocean floor, where those dead organisms and carboniferous fecal matter can be sequestered in the sediment for potentially millions of years.
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The problem comes, however, when that carbon's ability to sink downwards is disrupted by microplastics.
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The prevalence of microplastics in the upper reaches of the ocean means that as fish, copepods, and other organisms feast on phytoplankton, they also feast on plastic.
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Plastic that alters the sinking rate of fecal matter and ultimately the amount of carbon that reaches the ocean floor.
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Put another way by a meta-analysis on the role of microplastics in global warming, these positively buoyant plastic particles make fecal pellets lighter, reducing their sinking rate and as a result their carbon storage potential.
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This reduction in sinking rate varies from species to species, but across the board it's bad.
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Researchers found a 2.25-fold decrease in sinking rates for the Copapodicalinus helgolonditis, while another paper demonstrated a 1.35 to 1.47-fold decrease in sinking rates for another ocean-dwelling organism.
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In short, as microplastics accumulate in our oceans, they disrupt a crucial carbon sink.
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Indeed, the world's oceans absorb roughly 31% of all global carbon emissions.
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Microplastics are already starting to disrupt that great blue carbon sink.
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Alarm bells should be ringing everywhere.
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To add insult to injury, microplastics are potentially disrupting the cooling capacities of atmospheric cloud formation as well as disrupting the carbon sequestration capabilities of the very soil underneath our feet.
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Unfortunately, research in both fields is sparse and emerging.
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In terms of the sky, it's unclear whether microplastics will provide a net cooling or warming effect.
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When interviewed by Yale's Environmental Publication, a researcher in the field noted that skies heavily polluted with plastic will probably make both more high-altitude ice clouds, which tend to warm the Earth's surface, and more low altitude water clouds, which tend to cool the Earth.
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Which effect will dominate is unknown.
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Similarly, in the same meta-analysis of the effects of microplastics on global warming mentioned earlier, we see that, according to recent studies, soil microplastics may impact carbon cycling in soil and the ability of soils to store carbon, thus affecting how much nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere as greenhouse gases.
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But again, these studies are still not certain about just how destructive the relationship is between microplastics and soil carbon sinks.
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The unfortunate reality is that microplastic pollution is only projected to get worse.
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The 8 billion tons of plastic we've already made will continue to break down into smaller and smaller pieces.
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Meanwhile, we are projected to almost triple that amount of plastic on the planet by 2060.
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And all of this plastic isn't just disastrous for the planet, it's affecting human well-being right now.
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If you take a sample of the average person's kidney, blood, or even heart, you're likely to find some microplastic.
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That's right, plastic runs through our veins.
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And the growing body of science reveals that this is disrupting our health.
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To be clear, we are not consuming a credit card's worth of plastic every week, like headlines and even I had previously claimed.
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That was based on a flawed and discredited study.
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This much more rigorous study found instead that adults on average ingest roughly 0.000000583 grams of plastic per day.
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That's six zeros, which is far less than a 5 gram credit card.
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But the problem is that this plastic accumulates over the course of our lifetime.
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And even if the total amount of plastic is small, the toxicity of those foreign plastics in our body wreaks havoc across organs and cells.
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To start, microplastics increase inflammation.
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When you consider that the job of immune cells is to seek out and destroy foreign contaminants in the body, this makes sense.
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Studies like this one have found microplastics within immune cells.
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Or as Wendy Zuckerman and Rose Rimmler from the Science Versus podcast put it, the whole function of subimune cells is to take foreign objects inside your body, bacteria, viruses, right?
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And to get rid of them.
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And so they're seeing microplastics as a foreign object.
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Right, so what might be happening is that the microplastics were triggering people's immune cells to come out.
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That like that's inflammation, essentially.
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But inflammation is just the start.
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Plastics are host to copious amounts of chemicals like BPA that release as they break down and subsequently disrupt the functioning of hormones in our bodies.
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Hormones are essentially our personal messaging system.
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So when they're disrupted, our body starts going a bit haywa.
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Those toxic chemicals that mess with our hormones are known as endocrine disruptors.
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Endocrine disruptors have been linked to gaining weight in both animals and in humans because these chemicals tend to turn virgin stem cells into fat rather than bone or muscles.
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But also these harmful plastic chemicals disrupt crucial growth periods in young people.
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Indeed, some have pointed to endocrine disruptors as a leaning influence of girls starting puberty earlier to the tune of almost three months per decade from 1977 to 2013.
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Meanwhile, declining sperm rates as well as fertility rates among women have been linked to endocrine disrupting chemicals from plastics.
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The bottom line here is that plastics are all around us and in us, and they are already disrupting our hormonal functioning.
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But luckily we've gotten rid of BPA in our water bottles, right?
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So we're fine?
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Well, no.
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A lot of the BPA replacements are just as bad as BPA and have been linked to similar health outcomes we've seen from BPA.
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Because in order for plastic to be plastic, they need BPA or some sort of BPA substitute, which does basically the same thing.
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So given all of this, given the scope of both the environmental and human toll of plastics, why is the mountain of plastic and the prevalence of microplastics rising?
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To understand that and to understand how we've so monumentally failed to curb plastic pollution, we need to turn towards the fossil fuel industry itself.
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In February of 2024, the Center for Climate Integrity released a bombshell report, one that revealed five decades of deception from the oil and gas industry.
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But this wasn't about their decades of misinformation and obfuscation of the connections between fossil fuels and climate change.
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Instead, it detailed the insidious maneuvering of fossil capital to ensure plastics continue to be an essential part of the global economy.
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As I've already mentioned earlier, plastic companies are just another wing of the fossil fuel empire.
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It's just oil and gas packaged in another way.
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And as backlash against fossil fuels mounts, oil giants like Shell and Chevron are increasing their plastic output.
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But the plastics industry is vulnerable to public backlash.
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Indeed, the history of plastics is marked by deceptive marketing and tactics to quell public dissent about the toll of plastic pollution.
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At the core of this strategy, as the Center for Climate Integrity reveals, is selling consumers on recycling.
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To be clear, recycling is not a solution to the glut of plastic production.
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For one, the vast majority of plastics that consumers throw into the recycling bin aren't recycled into new products because there is no market for the specific type of plastic under capitalism.
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As the Center for Climate Integrity explains, certain types of plastics have no end markets and therefore are impossible to recycle.
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To date, viable markets only exist for PET and high-density polyethylene plastic bottles and jugs.
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These are known as plastics number one and two.
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In addition, there are so many different types of plastics, and recycling needs highly pure plastics.
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So a plastic bag or bottle that is made from several different types of plastics can often be unusable or too energy intensive to transform into usable plastic again.
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And finally, even if something is recycled, you can only get one to two cycles out of the process before the plastic degrades into unusability.
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And because of all these hurdles, plastic that ends up in recycling usually isn't turned into something new.
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It ends up in the landfill or in our oceans and rivers.
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Indeed, the US recycles just 5-6% of its plastics.
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And yet to keep their production line churning, fossil fuels flowing, and profits growing, the petrochemical industry championed recycling as the solution to plastic waste throughout the mid-1980s to the late 1990s.
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During that period, as one petrochemical representative testified in Congress in 1992, there was a rush to demonstrate environmental purity.
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The call was to recycle or be banned.
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As a result, fossil fuel companies like Exxon Chemical, alongside bottling companies, created the Plastic Recycling Foundation, which was used to assuage lawmakers' fears about plastics by claiming that the industry was researching plastic recycling and would tackle the problem.
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They did this, as one internal industry letter explains, to deflect some harsh, restrictive language, singling out plastic as a difficult material to collect and recycle.
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Recycling, then, was a shiny object the industry could hold up to distract from their destructive overproduction.
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And the petrochemical companies did this even though they knew recycling wasn't a real solution.
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As one of the founding members of the plastics industry front group, the Vinyl Institute, explained at an industry conference in 1989, recycling cannot go on indefinitely and does not solve the solid waste problem.
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Indeed, the Vinyl Institute, a front group for the plastic industry, released a report in 1986 that explained, recycling cannot be considered a permanent solid waste solution, as it merely prolongs the time until an item is disposed of.
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And yet, instead of curtailing plastic production or finding a better waste management solution in light of the damning research on recycling, the petrochemical industry doubled down and championed its potential through marketing.
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The more you recycle, the more recycled plastic we can use in the future.
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Millions of them are being recycled every day, which we can use to make things.
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Like strong, lightweight garbage cans.
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According to the Center for Climate Integrity, the plastics industry pushed for things like resin identification codes on packaging that made it seem like their products were actually recyclable when they really weren't.
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The average person saw the symbol and said, Well, it's recyclable, right?
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Got three errors.
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I'm like, well, all of a sudden, our own customers, they would bring it in and not only say it has a triangle, but it would they would flat out say, it says it's recyclable right on it.
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And I'd be like, I can tell you I can't give this away.
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Meanwhile, plastics companies promoted commitments to recycle vast amounts of plastics even though they knew they were unattainable.
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One representative from DuPont admitted as much to a recycling conference in 1992, explaining that it is no secret that the quantitative goals industry originally set for itself for economically recycling plastic containers extracted from municipal waste streams were extremely ambitious.
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In short, the plastic industry wielded false commitments and false hope to deflect attention away from their industrial pollution throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
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And that campaign was successful.
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If the public thinks the recycling is working, then they're not going to be as concerned about the environment.
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Recycling exploded in popularity and backlash against plastic in the form of bands quieted down.
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Today, however, as plastic bans and ire over microplastics threaten business again, fossil chemical businesses are once again using similar tactics.
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This time they are claiming that advanced recycling will save us.
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And that's what's really exciting about advanced recycling, because this allows you to address the hard to recycle plastics that can't be recycled today.
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Because the knowledge that conventional recycling is not only ineffective, but also essentially a sham to individualize the problems of the plastic industry, petrochemical and packaging companies are embracing chemical recycling.
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An old technology with a new name, chemical or advanced recycling, has been proven again and again to be economically unviable, ineffective at recycling many plastics, and often just transforms plastics into toxic waste or fuel.
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And much like in the 1990s, petrochemical companies are championing ambitious recycling goals to distract us from their pollution.
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ExxonMobil, Dow, and Chevron Phillips Chemical have all announced pledges to increase their advanced recycling capabilities.
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As we have seen time and time again, capitalists are interested in the accumulation of profits.
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All else comes second.
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So paying lip service to cleaning up plastic pollution until anger wanes seems to be the continued strategy of fossil and petrochemical capital.
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This must end.
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It seems that true change and harm reduction in terms of plastic must be forced upon fossil capital.
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The unfortunate reality is that plastics have been crucial for certain aspects of life, from everything from healthcare to avoiding massive amounts of food waste.
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But those plastics represent a minuscule amount compared to the oceans factories churn out today.
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The reality is that plastic production is following the logic of capitalism.
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Its overproduction is pushing into every nook and cranny of our lives.
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A world without toxic packaging materials and physical plastic pollution seems far away, but we must start now if we are to make it there.
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This means employing stopgap solutions.
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Immediate harm reduction strategies could look like the banning of endocrine disrupting chemicals from plastic production while ramping up production of plastic alternatives, as well as pushing for the elimination of needless plastic.
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But ultimately, an end to plastic and microplastic pollution won't come from tinkering around the edges.
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Petrochemical companies must be held accountable, both for past harm and future production.
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The plastic industry must be held accountable for the end of life of their goods, much like glass bottle companies used to collect their own bottles for reuse.
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But to truly minimize the impact of plastics on our world and bodies, we must move away from a capitalist model that incentivizes the production of plastics and the dissemination of misinformation about the health of people and the planet.
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We must move from an economy based on exchange and profits to one based on use and needs.
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One where all non essential plastic production must end and be replaced with biodegradable non toxic alternatives that leave little impact on the planet and our bodies.
