NB. This blog was published on JULY 20 2019, 12:30 P.M

WASTE ONLY

HOW THE PLASTICS INDUSTRY IS FIGHTING TO KEEP POLLUTING THE WORLD

THE STUDENTS AT Westmeade Elementary School worked hard on their dragon. And it paid off. The plastic bag receptacle that the kids painted green and outfitted with triangular white teeth and a “feed me” sign won the students from the Nashville suburb first place in a recycling box decorating contest. The idea, as Westmeade’s proud principal told a local TV news show, was to help the environment. But the real story behind the dragon — as with much of the escalating war over plastic waste — is more complicated.

China’s National Sword

China’s decision in 2017 to stop receiving the vast majority of plastic waste from other countries blew the flimsy lid off our dysfunctional recycling system. That year, when the Chinese government announced the National Sword policy, as it’s called, the U.S. sent 931 million kilograms of plastic waste to China and Hong Kong. The U.S. has been offloading vast bundles of scrap this way since at least 1994, when the Environmental Protection Agency began tracking plastics exports. The practice has served to both mask the mounting crisis and absolve U.S. consumers of guilt. But in fact, much of the “recycled” plastic scrap that the U.S. sent to China appears to have been burned or buried instead of being refashioned into new products.

All the Plastics in the Seas

The terrifying news about plastic seems to be as inescapable as the plastic itself, tiny bits of which are now almost everywhere. One study found these “microplastics” in the Pyrenees mountain air 100 miles from the nearest city. Another found that microplastics are being turned into sewage sludge and spread on fields that grow food. And, as we know from the plastic-filled whales that regularly wash up dead, the oceans are awash in plastic waste and now contain some 150 million tons of the stuff — a mass expected soon to surpass the weight of all the fish in the seas.

Big Plastic Fights Back

Even the executives at a recent plastics industry conference admit how bad the crisis is — at least to one another. All we hear is “you’ve got to get rid of plastics,” Garry Kohl, of PepsiCo, said to his fellow members of the Plastics Industry Association at a conference in April. Gathered in the gilded ballroom of a Dallas hotel, the representatives of big plastics manufacturers, recyclers, raw materials providers, extruders, brand owners, and others in the plastics business grappled aloud about their role in the crisis. Especially difficult, said Kohl, who directs packaging innovation of PepsiCo’s snacks and foods, was the widely circulated picture of a dead plastic-filled albatross. “This is very emotional for our senior leaders,” Kohl said, as the now iconic picture of the albatross — really just a few feathers and a decaying beak arranged around an assortment of bottle caps, lighter parts, and plastic bits — flashed above him. “They’re all talking about the albatross.”

Banning Plastic Bans

Matt Seaholm, the executive director of the American Progressive Bag Alliance, seemed to relish his part in the fight. While others at the plastics industry conference tended toward hand-wringing and at least some acknowledgment of the problem of plastic waste, Seaholm was unapologetic in his antagonism of environmental groups that have been calling attention to it. In Texas, Seaholm, the former national director of the Koch brothers-led Americans for Prosperity, positioned himself as the enemy of environmentalists.

The Plastics Industry Vs. Two Little Girls

In Isle of Palms, South Carolina, the people who spearheaded the state’s first plastic bag ban in 2015 wouldn’t disagree that their effort was driven by emotion. Suzette Head and Mila Kosmos, who live in the small coastal town near Charleston, screeched with joy when their local ordinance passed. “I felt happy that the bags would be gone,” Mila, now 9, remembered recently.

The Crying Indian

If the image of giant multinational corporations destroying little girls’ efforts to protect sea creatures is less than flattering, the plastics industry can take comfort in the fact that it has successfully defeated environmentalists’ attempts to hold it responsible for plastic with similar tactics before. The trick has been to publicly embrace its opponents’ concern for the environment while privately fighting attempts at regulation.

The “Recyclable” Scam

Much of the plastic waste that is amassing in the oceans, buried in landfills, and scattered throughout nature is “recyclable,” which is to say that it could, in theory, be refashioned into new products. Companies have latched on to the hopeful term to make their latest plastic products more palatable. Starbucks, for instance, has lavished praise on itself for its “recyclable lid” rolling out in six cities this summer, which the company predicted will eliminate a billion straws. But because the lids are made from polypropylene (also known as No. 5 plastic), and there is very little market for recycled polypropylene, that number has no basis in reality. Only 5 percent of polypropylene was recycled in 2015 — and that was before China decided to stop taking our waste. Since then, the percentage recycled is likely much lower still, meaning that the vast majority of the 1 billion new “recyclable” Starbucks lids will end up where the old ones did — in landfills, trash heaps, incinerators, and the oceans.

Recycling or Burning?

One of the latest solutions industry is offering to the plastics crisis isn’t recycling exactly. While many questions remain about what exactly the Hefty EnergyBag program is, it is making it clear how expensive and difficult it is to find a use for plastic waste.

In April, 49 years after protesters kicked off the first Earth Day by dumping single-use waste at Coca-Cola’s doorstep, Dow Chemical was a “forest green sponsor” of Omaha’s Earth Day event, despite the fact that it is the largest plastics manufacturer in the world. With a $5,000 gift, Dow’s Hefty EnergyBag program, a joint effort of Dow and Reynolds Consumer Products, was one of the two biggest donors for the event. Held in Omaha’s lush Elmwood Park, the day’s festivities were as green and wholesome as any corporate sponsor could want. Native American folk music played as locals strolled the grass from table to table learning about urban beekeeping, rain barrels, microchickens, and tree planting. Children stroked a soft gray rabbit. And dozens of environmentally concerned Nebraskans participated in an outdoor yoga class, bending and stretching in the sun along with their neighbors.

The Myth of “Chemical Recycling”

Renewlogy and New Hope are two firms offering what the plastics industry is putting forward as the newest solution to plastic waste: so-called chemical recycling. According to the American Chemistry Council, expanding plastics recovery into this realm could “result in billions of dollars of economic output.” Yet even the technology’s biggest proponents acknowledge that no one yet knows how to efficiently and economically convert plastic into its component parts and then back into fuel. If all the non-recycled plastics in the U.S. were converted to oil, “we could create enough fuel to power 9 million cars each year,” the Chevron Phillips sustainability director, Rick Wagner, argued in a recent article in Plastics Recycling Update magazine. That transformation would also allow Chevron, the second-largest plastic manufacturer in the world, to shrug off its responsibility for the massive quantities of pollution now choking the globe. But even Wagner admits that we’re still far from knowing how to chemically recycle. It’s sort of like going to Mars, Wagner wrote. “We’re not quite there yet. Not tomorrow, but someday. Hopefully soon.” Mendoza described pyrolysis, the method used by the Renewlogy plant to which Hefty EnergyBag waste has already been sent, as “a potential next step toward advanced recycling.”