The Plastic Problem

One day, during the second week of July of 2023, I woke up to the news that Lake Tahoe was full of plastic. Fibers, fragments and film; polyester, polypropylene and polyethylene. Tiny flecks of petroleum-based polymers, infiltrating every bay and beach, off-gassing climate-altering methane and ethylene in its millenniums-long process of degradation. 

And, it is not just Lake Tahoe. The global team of researchers that set out to analyze microplastics in lakes and reservoirs found them in 38 bodies of freshwater in 23 countries in the Northern Hemisphere. From urban, to remote, to see-to-the-bottom clear, every lake tested turned up tainted to varying degrees, proving once again that no place on earth is safe from humanity’s toxic legacy. It is the kind of finding that, were I a scientist, would make me hang up my lab coat in despair. Indeed, every line of the research paper, published in the journal Nature on July 13, reads as fraught with grief.

The market for single-use plastic bottled water grew by 73 percent from 2010 to 2020.

By now, almost everyone knows about plastic’s toxic legacy. We have seen the sea turtles strangled with six-pack rings; piles of disposal polymers — polyethylene water bottles, styrene take-out boxes, composite-film juice boxes — piled up on tropical beaches or swirling in the currents of the North Pacific Gyre. In the developed countries of the Northern Hemisphere to the emerging economies of the global south, people are widely aware that their plastic consumption poisons their bodies and imperils marine life. In the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, keyword searches about the toxic effects of plastic doubled and tripled over the last few years. In the United States, which deposits more plastic garbage into the coastal ecosystems than any other country and generates more plastic waste per capita, 86 percent of respondents to a World Wildlife Fund survey agreed with the statement: “We need to change our economy from one that throws things away to one that emphasizes reuse and recycling.”

Another poll, by the nonprofit Oceana, found that more than 90 percent of California voters are vexed about plastic pollution. Nationwide, three-quarters of voters surveyed supported an end to the construction of new plastic manufacturing facilities. “The concern is there,” says Christy Leavitt, Ocean’s plastics campaign director. “People are worried about plastic’s impact on the ocean. They want action on it.”

But few of us take that action ourselves. We wrap our sandwiches in clingy film; we buy disposable coolers made of polystyrene. We do not refuse plastic bags at the grocery store; we are told they are reusable, but we rarely reuse them. Most conspicuously, we buy water in plastic bottles, believing it to be safer, tastier and more convenient than what flows from the tap. The single-use water bottle turns up on the tables of witnesses at congressional hearings, in the ice coolers at high-school soccer games and on tennis-court benches. Every hotel room from budget to luxury features them.

This trend does not show any signs of slowing. The market for single-use plastic bottled water grew by 73 percent from 2010 to 2020, according to a United Nations’ report on the bottled water industry. By 2021, the industry produced 600 billion plastic bottles, “amounting to approximately 25 million [metric tons] of plastic waste.” The plastic bag and pouch market hit $16 billion in 2012; a decade later, it had topped $22 billion. Virtually all of it ends up as waste, with twenty percent of landfill space filled by discarded plastic. By some estimates, residents of the U.S. generate nearly a pound of plastic waste per person per day. A small household can be responsible for a ton over the course of a year. Plastic consumption has not slowed as our awareness of its dangers has risen. Instead, the opposite has happened.

“Being able to avoid plastic is a question of privilege.”

There is an easy explanation for why we hate plastic and still cannot quit it, says Alexis Goldsmith, national organizing director with the nonprofit advocacy group Beyond Plastic. The reason we keep using plastic is because manufacturers keep making it. “Being able to avoid plastic is a question of privilege,” Goldsmith says. “Can you afford plastic-free options? Do you have access to them?” Even if you do, “if you’ve ever tried to go plastic free, it’s actually pretty impossible, just because of how flooded the market is from plastic production.”

It is not that individual behavior is not important, she says; it is. It is just not enough, and it will never be enough. For every high-minded individual who fills her canteen from the tap before she leaves for the day, there will be 100 more whose drinking water tests positive for lead and therefore fill their grocery carts with supersized bags of individual juice pouches for the kids’ lunchboxes. When you are trying to make a living and feed your kids, you do not have time to seek out eco-choices that are not available at your local Costco. You may not even have those choices, no matter where you look.

This is not an oversight, Goldsmith says, nor is it the marker of an industry that just has not swung with public opinion. Instead, she says, “it is all very calculated.” Plastics — polyethylene, polystyrene and polypropylene — are all petrochemicals, produced from fossil fuels, primarily fossil gas and naphtha, a distillation of petroleum. If they get into the waste stream, they do not degrade or dissolve, but rather break into smaller and smaller particles that spread everywhere, borne up by the wind or carried away in water. And the petrochemical industry wants you to believe this is your fault.

“The petrochemical industry has done a really good job of shifting blame to individuals and consumers, rather than going to the root of the problem,” Goldsmith says, which is simply that the market is flooded with more and more plastic every day. Indeed, industry analysts predict that the demand for petrochemicals — the feedstock for plastic — will be the main driver of rising oil consumption in the next seven years.

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Plastics have been with us since 1907, when a Belgian-born chemist, Leo Baekeland, combined the petrochemicals phenol and formaldehyde to produce the world’s first synthetic plastic, called Bakelite. Durable and light, made from raw materials discovered in abundance just over a half-century before, synthetic polymers could replace ivory, rubber, lac beetle excretions and silkworm threads — materials found in nature, which already faced a dwindling bounty. The demand for ivory billiard balls among fashionable Victorian gentlemen nearly drove the elephant herds of Africa and India to extinction. Plastic meant that humans would exploit fewer animals and rely less on the whims of nature for its products. It also meant that it would slowly begin the ruin of the natural world upon which we once depended for raw materials.

At least that early plastic was meant to stick around: I still have Bakelite bracelets from those early times. Only in the last few decades has plastic meant to be used just once and discarded become a ubiquitous part of everyday life. When it is not made to last, plastic is like nuclear power: Its toxic waste problem outweighs its benefits.

It was not until the early 1970s that the oil and chemical juggernauts recognized that selling the world on single-use plastic could pad their profits when other markets for their products slumped. Recycling was invented in the early 1970s to make us feel better about it all. The first plant, in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, went up just after the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill inspired the first Earth Day, right around the same time manufacturing industries teamed up to give us the famous crying Indian commercial, blaming us litterbugs for making Native people sad. But recycling was always a sham. By most estimates, only 10 percent of global consumer plastic gets a second life; virtually none of it gets a third. In the U.S., we recycle less than five percent of the plastic we use. The rest goes to the landfill, the street or the incinerator, where it emits toxic chemicals along with all the greenhouse gases associated with combustion.

“The petrochemical industry has done a really good job of shifting blame to individuals and consumers, rather than going to the root of the problem.”

Most plastic is not even recyclable. The #5s, #7s, #9s and some others, are too complex to melt and shred in conventional plants. For that, there exists so-called “advanced plastics recycling,” which involves changing the chemical structure of complex polymers with super-high heat or chemicals, or both, to return them to their original state, which is oil. That oil can then be used to make more plastic. For existing waste plastic, it sounds like a reasonable solution, and some companies have employed it usefully: LG Chem in Korea, for example, plans to use it to turn retired buoys into a nearly weightless insulation called “aerogel.” Mostly, though, the pyrolysis oil produced during the heating and cooling of plastic or rubber waste goes toward more fuel, powering jets and diesel engines without any real savings on emissions. Make of that what you will.

The more you know about it, the more our belief in recycling seems less of a science than a faith. We deposit our plastic in the bins marked with the familiar circle of arrows, assuming our plastic bottles at least go into new fleece jackets. We rarely bother to find out where those bottles go. Our municipal governments take care of the problem, we think; in fact, they tell us they are. We trust, but don’t verify. 

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The limits of individual responsibility notwithstanding, there are still actions we as individuals can take. The first is to pressure local, state and federal legislators to pass laws already on the docket and write new ones to reduce the sale of plastic. European countries are already far ahead of the U.S. on this. France, for example, has already instituted a ban on single-use tableware in restaurants, and in July 2021, the entire European Union banned single-use plastic plates, cutlery and straws, as well as polystyrene food and beverage containers. 

But there has been progress stateside, too: California legislators last year began requiring plastic manufacturers to reduce plastic in single-use items by 25 percent over the next decade, and by 2032 make all packaging in the state to be either recyclable or compostable. “It is to date the strongest plastic-reduction policy in the U.S.,” Oceana’s Christy Leavitt says. “It addresses plastics economy-wide as rather than [restricting] individual products.” It also moves toward reuse and refill, which Alexis Goldsmith calls the “gold standard” of waste-reduction policies.

California’s new law is an example of “extended producer responsibility” legislation, which shifts the burden of reducing waste from consumers and their municipalities to the manufacturer. EPR laws typically require that manufacturers of disposable products not only manage the end-of-life issues of their products, but design them in a way that makes disposal benign, or, better yet, unnecessary. 

As of 2023, six states (including California) had passed EPR laws, according to Source Intelligence, a firm that helps companies reduce the environmental risk of their operations. The regulations vary by state: Maine only asks that producers take responsibility for waste generated by their packaging materials, while Oregon requires producers to foot the bill for improvements in the state’s recycling infrastructure. Colorado, Washington state and New Jersey also put the onus on manufacturers to pay the costs of reducing waste.

In addition to Oregon’s EPR law, the state also passed a ban on plastic-foam foodware. (Polystyrene, also known as Styrofoam, is not easily recyclable, no matter what you’ve heard.) Delaware passed a similar law last year, as have the cities of Los Angeles and San Diego. In Washington State, lawmakers have banned single-use hotel toiletry bottles, a major scourge in the municipal waste system.

EPR laws have also been introduced at the federal level. The most powerful of them, called the Break Free from Plastic Pollution Act, is “comprehensive legislation that deals with production, the use and the disposal of plastics,” Leavitt says. But in a regulation-averse Congress, that bill has a long way — and at least one election cycle — to go before it has any chance of passing. In terms of what is happening now and of what is possible to achieve in the near term, Leavit says, “states and cities are really leading the way.” 

Several entrepreneurial ventures have popped up around the country to make such bans more workable, especially when it comes to food. In New York City, Deliver Zero works with more than 75 participating restaurants to provide reusable containers. Customers who get takeout in the containers can return them by scheduling a pickup or dropping them off at any restaurant on the platform. In San Francisco, Dispatch Goods does the same, with the added convenience of return bins stationed around the city. Portland, Oregon has Bold Reuse, which provides reusable takeout food containers and food delivery kits to local businesses, and Vessel, in Berkeley, California and Boulder, Colorado, runs a stainless-steel to-go cup-sharing program: You can buy your coffee at one place and return it somewhere else or at a drop-off bin.

Beyond that, on an individual level, it is still possible to look for and encourage alternatives. The most obvious of them is simply to carry your own refillable water bottle, preferably made of stainless steel or silicone-wrapped glass so the container does not leach chemicals into your water. You can buy shampoo and dish detergent that comes wrapped in fine compostable paper; you can choose clothes made of hemp and linen and organic cotton, natural fibers that biodegrade. Some companies make raingear made of rubber-bonded cotton instead of forever-chemical-coatings, while others use rubber for yoga mats and dog toys. Buying rubber rewards the people who grow trees in tropical climates. In fact, as plastic reduced the demand for rubber, more Amazonian landowners have cleared their forests to plant grass and graze cattle, thus destroying one of the world’s most powerful carbon sinks. Resuscitate the rubber market and you bring back the trees. 

Cork, too, requires trees, and can substitute for the plastic-based materials that go into vegan footwear. I have some boots made from Portuguese cork, which comes from a grove of old-growth cork oaks that can only shed their bark safely after they reach the age of 30. The boots have held up in both rain and heat, and molded to my feet over the years. 

On an individual level, it is still possible to look for and encourage alternatives.

And should you absolutely need disposable plates and cutlery, there are replacements for plastic, too. We have known how to make plastic-like products from plants since the mid-19th century. Some companies make cutlery and bowls made of sugar or corn syrup of wheat fiber. You can put them the compost bin or you can reuse them until they fall apart.

Do all of this as ostentatiously as possible, and you might influence a few people, even as you annoy them. Better yet, you can join forces with Beyond Plastic through their network of local affiliates, to both educate the public and ride herd on lawmakers as a united anti-plastic front. You can even start your own group with the nonprofit’s support. 

No one can guarantee that any of these actions will effect sweeping global change; in fact, individual behavior modifications on their own rarely do. But at least you can say you are participating as little as you can in the toxic plastic economy, and alleviating what tiny bit of burden on the planet you can manage. You may still drink from a plastic water bottle when your thirst is urgent and the local water undrinkable; you might still settle for takeout in a plastic box. Or you might bring your own reusable container, order in person and ask the restaurant to fill it with food. You may not change the world alone, but you will at least reduce your own harm to the planet. And that might just give you the will – and the confidence — to do more.