109: Climate change in solid form

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Plastic waste is inescapable, driven by industry, and inseparable from the climate crisis

The Trapper (1921), Rockwell Kent

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Today we are going to talk about something that is very close to my heart, which is plastic, and by that I mean it is literally close to my heart because the sweatshirt I am wearing is almost certainly loaded with synthetic polymer fibers.

The amount of plastic we use for just about everything is absurd and gross and in a vast number of cases, entirely unnecessary. A growing number of people are aware of this problem and no longer want this to be the case, and yet, plastic remains everywhere.

Our clothes are made out of it. My computer I’m working on is full of it. I have two pieces of plastic jammed into my ears most of my waking hours. The pillow I sleep on is made out of “hyperelastic polymer.” I have three or four little plastic toys on my desk that I turn to throughout the day to ease my anxiety, my little plastic therapists. And though I am deeply embarrassed to admit it, as I type I am drinking an iced coffee out of a single use plastic cup—a practice I had reduced to almost zero pre-pandemic, but one that I occasionally cave in to these days, its normalcy resurgent in the COVID era as we threw ourselves into the sterile, protective arms of disposable synthetic materials.

Which is to say, even for someone like myself who fucking hates plastic products with a burning passion, especially single-use consumer products, they are realistically inescapable. The sheer volume of plastic waste we’ve produced is an irreversible part of our reality at this point, and the path to at least curbing the problem is often misunderstood, suppressed or ignored, in large part because of the way that we have come to think of the plastic problem.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the narratives used over the years by both industry and environmental advocates, and how they’ve never successfully defined the environmental problem of plastic, at least in a way that would lead to a commensurate solution. Sometimes driven by sinister forces, but often not, the way that we often view plastic pollution is as a problem of consumer waste vs. convenience, and more recently, as a technical cleanup problem. It is, however, primarily an extraction and production problem, driven by industry, at the expense of communities at both the front end and the back end of its product’s lifecycle.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because another way we ought to think about plastic use is as another facet of climate change. The two feed into each other, the industrial systems that drive their production are entangled, and the root cause is the same—an untenable fossil-fuel based economy in which prosperity is reliant on ever-growing extraction and then emission of waste. This is a framing of the plastic problem that I don’t think is widespread exactly, but one that I have been hearing a lot more often lately, and that’s a step toward solutions that meet the scale and nature of the problem.

The stories of plastic waste

There are a bunch of ways we can think about plastic, philosophically, scientifically, culturally, it’s an entire field of scholarship. Like oil and gas, plastic tells the story of modernity. But today I’m mostly talking about how we describe it as an environmental problem, including through nonprofit and industry communications over the years.

One of the most notorious examples is the “crying Indian” ad. It was a 1971 PSA-style TV commercial that featured a Native American in stereotypical garb, canoeing down a river full of trash. “Some people have a deep, abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country. And some people don’t,” a narrator says. At the end, a family throws a bag of garbage out a car window and the voiceover says “People start pollution. People can stop it.”

The commercial is offensive in like 1,000 different ways, but it has since been well-documented as total horseshit. For starters, we all know now that the actor playing the crying Indian was actually an Italian-American wearing makeup and a wig. But it was also produced by Keep America Beautiful, a front group for leading beverage and packaging corporations that actually opposed many environmental initiatives. It was a shrewd PR move that used the language of environmentalism to deflect blame from industry and place it on the shoulders of individuals. It also notably framed pollution as a problem of where we put stuff. It presents a pristine natural world and, separate from that, the world of humanity. The solution is for individuals to keep their garbage out of the pristine world, suggesting a boundary that rising sea levels and viruses remind us is imaginary.

Another step in the evolution of this messaging that was less nefarious, but carried similar implications, was the 1990s-era focus on lifestyle and consumption choices as the solution to environmental problems. On its face, it’s not a terrible impulse. Neither is not littering, for that matter, but both are incomplete. In this version, the framing shifts from where we put stuff, to how wasteful we are—the solution is a reduction of excessive consumption and buying of wasteful products.

This responsible consumption framing would ultimately be swallowed up by corporate greenwashing, and it fell out of fashion for a long time among environmentalists. When I was working in nonprofits, things like recycling, reusable containers, etc., were sort of dismissed as amateur hour, like it’s a cute thing to do, but we all know it doesn’t accomplish anything and policy and legal action is the only true environmentalism. Unfortunately, I think this resulted in a lot of environmentalists inadvertently turning their backs on the problem of waste. It’s still de rigueur in some circles to mock efforts to ban single-use plastic products, and the reusable tote itself has become a symbol of naïveté.

The latest incarnation of this story, and I think the one that we’re still mostly in right now, is that of plastic as an acute and isolated crisis. This is characterized by the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which environmental groups latched onto in the 2000s (it was huge when I was a fundraiser) as a new physical embodiment of environmental degradation—the new Cuyahoga River, but at a scale we never imagined. “There is an island made of trash that is the size of Texas” is a staggering, depressing statement that came to exemplify just how out of control pollution has become.

This was a more powerful and effective framing in a lot of ways, but it still understated the ubiquity of the plastic problem, and wasn’t linking it all that well with fossil fuels and climate change.

The Plastic Age

The defining characteristic of the plastic problem is its pervasiveness, and the narrative of the plastic gyres doesn’t quite get at it. Even the garbage patches themselves somehow undersell the problem they represent, as they aren’t really “islands of trash” but swirling, soupy nebula lacking well-defined borders, the tip of the plasticberg.

Like climate change, plastic is one of Timothy Morton’s “hyperobjects,” something that exists on a scale of time and space that humans can’t really get their heads around. One way to think about this is the suggestion from geologists that the “deep time record” is the most appropriate way to understand the scope of plastic pollution’s impact on the planet. Even if we never produced another piece of plastic ever again starting today, our plastic products are part of the fossil record, what you could call the Plastic Age. The ubiquity of plastic can be seen as a marker in the geological record as the beginning of the Anthropocene, the era of humanity’s dominance over Earth. The other likely indicator would be radioactive fallout from nuclear bombs. As one writer for Discover put it, “A million years from now, the 21st century will likely be remembered for plastic more than anything else.”

But we don’t need to look a million years into the future to see this legacy. Just open your mouth and inhale. Researchers tracing the way phosphorous nutrients travel around the globe discovered tiny plastic particles suspended in the air in every single sample taken from far-flung locations. Or look at baby poop. Another study found that based on body weight, levels of microplastics in baby poop were ten times higher than those found in adult poop. Disturbing, record levels of plastics have been found in fish taken from the Great Lakes. Plastic is in seawater and freshwater, so particles are making it into humans through our drinking water and up the food chain. We really don’t even know the extent of the potential health impacts, but it doesn’t seem great.

Its scope may be hard to grasp, but we’ve instinctively known for a very long time the world-altering impact of making everything we ever use out of a virtually indestructible material. The best depiction I’ve read of this ubiquity of harm is from way back in 1990, the novel Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, by Karen Tei Yamashita. It is an incredible book, considered to be in a genre defined by Jennifer Wenzel as “petro-magical-realism,” works of fiction that “imagine the transmutation of oil into spectacular life-changing wealth but also the ‘phantasmagoric ravagements’ of socio-ecological relations.”

In it, a mysterious, seemingly magical material emerges in a section of the Amazon rainforest, and it’s rapidly adopted as a miracle substance that impacts the full strata of society, ruining nearby Indigenous people’s lives, sparking a corporate boom town, even inspiring religious worship. The material is presented as offering utopian potential, with the ability to change everything, and for some it does indeed bring about great short-term luxury and prosperity.

As it turns out, it is actually just industrial waste, buried to such an extent that it has been pushed deep into the Earth, only to bubble up as a new substance in undeveloped parts of the globe. This ends predictably in disaster, but unfolds in bizarre, sad ways that all point to what one critic called at the time “metastasizing capitalism.” The material represents the kind of borderlessness and inescapability of extractive industry and its byproducts. Try to push it down and it emerges somewhere else, altering the lives of everyone it touches.

Turn off the tap

The other shortcoming of the acute and discrete crisis narrative is that its logical conclusion is a cleanup effort, a solution that is irresistible to those eager to believe that environmental degradation is a mere engineering problem to be fixed on the back end by human innovation. Not surprisingly, this approach has been championed by the tech industry, corporate philanthropy, and wealthy donors, who have sought out clever devices that can scoop up all that plastic and return the ocean to its pristine state.

The folly of this thinking is outlined in a depressing manner by Max Liboiron, an associate professor at Memorial University in Newfoundland and a leading scholar of plastic pollution, in an interview with Molly Taft at Gizmodo. You should definitely read that interview, but his overall point is that because of the sheer scale of the problem, “you cannot clean up the ocean in any way at a rate that is commensurate with the amount of plastic going into it.” He points out a big ocean cleanup effort underway that is seeking to remove 30 million pounds of trash, which it turns out, is a relatively minuscule amount.

“I can find you 30 million pounds, like, just outside of town with washed up fishing gear,” Liboiron says. “Yeah, I can get that in a hot minute. We’ve got some serious scale problems.”

He compares the problem to an overflowing bathtub, and instead of turning off the faucet, people keep trying to mop. “I’ve been saying turn off the tap the whole time. Turn off the tap, turn off the tap. That’s what we do. And we can name who is keeping the tap running. Coca-Cola. ExxonMobil. We have their phone numbers.”

You will not be surprised to know that those very corporations he mentions and more have not only resisted calls to turn off the tap, they’ve been, in large part manufacturing demand to open it up even more. Another must-read recent article on this topic ran in The Atlantic, by sociologist Rebecca Altman, whose father was a manufacturer of polystyrene in the 1960s. She chronicles how, since the invention of synthetic polymers, the industry has had to sell us on the necessity of the new material in its many forms.

The country was largely not buying it until World War II, during which military contracts drove mass production and later consumer products. In another parallel to fossil fuels, the cheapness of plastic products was created by government subsidies and economies of scale—which required more products to be made, a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy that allowed plastic to eventually dominate the marketplace. Now, as Altman points out, even the most responsible consumer cannot escape it. “Society is awash in throwaway plastics not because of the logic of desire but because of the logic of history and of integrated industrial systems.”

And just as the crying Indian told us that pollution was our fault, industry has continued to push the narrative of consumers’ ability to recycle our way out of the problem, a practical impossibility. Some 40% of plastic goes toward short-term use products and 79% of all plastic that’s been generated to date has accumulated in landfills. Altman writes:

For decades, the industry has created the illusion that its problems are well under control, all while intensifying production and promotion. More plastics have been made over the past two decades than during the second half of the 20th century. Today, recycling is a flailing, failing system—and yet it is still touted as plastics’ panacea. No end-of-the-pipe fix can manage mass plastics’ volume, complex toxicity, or legacy of pollution, and the industry’s long-standing infractions against human health and rights.

Plastic is climate change

In plastics, we have a powerful product that in many ways ushered in modernity, but also supercharged colonialism and exploitation, and grew a powerful industry that would do anything to ensure its ever-expanding production and use. That probably sounds familiar because at the end of the day, the plastic problem is inseparable from climate change.

As Altman points out, these days the source material is pretty much the same—petroleum, or to be specific, natural gas liquids—of which the fracking boom has created a glut in the market that demands the creation of more petrochemical plants and plastic manufacturing (although the gas industry does everything it can to extend gas-powered electricity as long as possible). Needing new markets for plastic products, the oil and gas industry is lobbying to reverse Kenya’s limits on plastic use, and pushing the country to import more plastic garbage.

Meanwhile, plastic production itself is an emissions-intensive process, eating up an increasing share of the world’s carbon budget. And in both plastics and fossil fuels, the prerequisite step toward a solution is the same—turn off the tap. Geographer Dierdre McKay sums it up:

In a climate crisis, plastic waste doesn’t look like the world’s most pressing environmental problem. But considering plastic and climate as two separate issues is a mistake. Concern about plastic pollution isn’t distracting people from a more serious problem – plastic is the problem. If we see plastics as “solid climate change”, they become central to the climate crisis.

Real solutions

None of this sounds like very hopeful messaging, but as with climate change, until we recognize the nature of the problem, we’ll only keep seeking out the wrong solutions. It’s telling that just as industry leaders cling to the idea of ocean cleanup as a solution to plastic waste, so do they put all their chips on carbon dioxide removal as a climate solution. Mop, mop, mop, all day long.

I do think the narrative of the plastic problem is changing, as these articles and more point out. But it’s telling that when a friend recently asked me who he might donate to because he’s worried about plastic pollution, I had a hard time recommending a group that wasn’t focused mainly on cleanup, recycling, or industry innovation (plant-based plastic is a whole other mess).

One of the most prominent organizations working on waste reduction is the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which promotes something called the Circular Economy, the idea that we can make superior disposable products that can be reabsorbed into the ecosystem or turned into other products. Sounds good, but it also sounds an awful lot like, um, recycling, a strategy hasn’t really worked so far. A look at the organization’s enormous list of donors and partners inspires further pessimism:

Amazon, BASF, BIC, Bridgestone, Cargill, Coca Cola, Cisco, DuPont, Heineken, HP, Ikea, InBev, Keurig, LaCoste, Mars Inc., Microsoft, Pepsico, Philips, Primark, Ralph Lauren, Starbucks, Unilever, Veolia, Walmart, 3M, and the hits keep coming, basically every producer and distributor of single-use goods, plastic-lined clothing, and well, junk, that you could imagine is backing this work.

You might look at that and think, well that’s good news that they are open to solving this problem. But this is a bunch of people who are going to do everything in their power to continue mass producing and selling plastic products as long as they possibly can, because that’s what they exist to do. I’m not saying that everything this organization does is bad, or that reusing and recycling is bad, or even that making lifestyle changes is bad. These are all part of the solution. But none of it works unless we stop it at the source.

There must be more out there that I don’t know about, but Greenpeace is one group that has a waste reduction program focused on holding industry accountable. Other leaders are the organizers in environmental justice communities—like Sharon Lavigne and Rise St. James in Louisiana—who are working to block the construction of plastics and petrochemical plants.

It comes as no surprise that the people putting their bodies on the line are the people closest to the problem, as in the case with water protectors fighting oil pipelines, demanding that we keep it in the ground. The tap has been running in their neighborhoods for a long time now. They see who’s got their hand on it, and they’re done mopping up.

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Links

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Listening

Arooj Aftab, Lullaby

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Well another Saturday email because yesterday I had to go get a bunch of stuff in advance of this big snowstorm. Late last night it was looking kind of weak sauce and I was talking some shit about it, but it has turned out to be the real deal. But we have pancakes and plenty of coffee that I can make and drink out of a glass don’t worry. And today I have a wool sweater on. I don’t know about these sweatpants though, sigh.

Stay cozy fam

Tate

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