Climate Change in Solid Form

Hello everyone, like Huey Lewis I have been working for a living, living and a working lately, but that doesn't mean we're taking what they're giving so today we have another cranky ass chapter from the Crisis Palace book. This one picks up where the last chapter left off, applying our analysis of individual responsibility to one of the most disturbing corporate abuses in our daily lives, plastic pollution. If you hate plastic products and also hate the fact that you are made to feel guilty for using them when there is really no other option, this one is for you.

People who get dunked on in this essay include Teddy Roosevelt, an Italian guy pretending to be Native American, the petrochemical industry, and myself. Of all the forthcoming chapters, this one includes the word testicle the most, by far.

Climate Change in Solid Form

How to think about plastic pollution.

By Tate Williams

Next I’d like 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 as I write this is absolutely loaded with synthetic polymer fibers. 

I hate it. You hate it. And yet, plastic remains everywhere. Our clothes are made out of it. I’m clackity clacking away on little squares of petroleum. 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, but one that I sometimes cave in to these days, its normalcy resurgent post-COVID after we threw ourselves into the sterile, protective arms of disposable synthetic materials.

The amount of plastic we use for just about everything is absurd and gross and in a vast number of cases, entirely unnecessary. As a result, perhaps even more so than other forms of petroleum use, a growing number of people are aware of this problem and no longer want this to be the case. As someone who has written about environmental issues for years, plastic pollution is the one topic, even more than climate change, that I hear about from friends who are looking for ways to help. They read about microplastics in the water, the air, inside their testicles and brains and, understandably, freak the fuck out about their families’ health. And sadly, most of the time I don’t have much consolation to offer because even for someone like myself who hates plastic products with a burning passion, they remain inescapable. 

The sheer volume of plastic waste we’ve produced is an irreversible part of our reality at this point. But the path to curbing the problem is also often misunderstood and suppressed because of the ways that we have been told to think of the plastic problem. It is maybe the most potent example of the fixation on our human identity as consumers, first and foremost, and how it forces us into the realm of useless tactics and agonizing guilt.

A big part of this frustration stems from narratives that have been used over the years by both industry and environmental advocates, and the fact that we’ve struggled to successfully define the environmental problem of plastic in a way that would lead to a commensurate solution. Sometimes driven by sinister forces, but often not, the way that we usually 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 a plastic product’s lifecycle. The individual’s role isn’t irrelevant to such a problem, but it must be viewed as a component of collective efforts to shut production off at the source. 

If that sounds familiar, it’s because another way we ought to think about plastic use is as one incarnation of climate change. Plastic and fossil fuels feed into each other, the industrial systems that drive their production are entangled, and the root cause is the same—a petroleum-based economy in which prosperity is reliant on ever-growing extraction of resources and emission of waste. And while it is strictly speaking a distinct problem from climate change, it reveals the way that what we call environmental issues are all enabled by a disconnect from the true nature of the problem, all part of a tangled mess that runs much deeper than we are often led to believe.

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 I’m mostly going to talk about how we’ve described it as an environmental problem through nonprofit and industry communications over the years, and where these descriptions have gone wrong. 

And really, we have to start with the “crying Indian” ad. An infamous 1971 PSA-style TV commercial, it 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 also been well-documented as total horseshit. For starters, many of us now know that the actor playing the crying Indian was actually an Italian-American named Iron Eyes Cody, born Espera Oscar de Corti, wearing makeup and a wig. But it was also produced by Keep America Beautiful, a front group for leading beverage and packaging corporations that 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. If this sounds familiar, the campaign more or less wrote the playbook for an even more successful industry PR push, the popularization of the carbon footprint as a way to divert public demand for climate action back onto the shoulders of the public by emphasizing what each individual should be doing.

The crying Indian ad 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 then is for individuals to keep their human trash out of the pristine world so that it can remain pure and free to explore on the weekends. This will again sound familiar, as it conjures the work of early white environmentalists like Teddy Roosevelt, who made it their mission to wall off as much nature as possible for European colonists’ appreciation, while seeking to erase Indigenous populations who stood in the way of an artificial indigenous bond with what settlers could pretend was untouched land. Today, of course, pandemics, heat waves, and rising seas remind us that the walls we build around the natural world are as imaginary as the separation between humanity and nature itself. As imaginary as a nation's claim to lands it has never owned. Philosopher Timothy Morton describes the concept of nature as a myth created by capitalism, "the featureless remainder at either end of the process of production," and the "lump that exists prior to the capitalist labor process." It's the lie that we are all over here generating value, and what we decide not to use or have not yet used is kept over there, and it's quite beautiful if you get the chance to visit so let's keep it that way.

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, this is not a terrible impulse. Neither is the desire to stop littering, for that matter, but both can be weaponized when isolated from the systemic culprits of environmental devastation. In this version, the framing shifts from where we put stuff, to how much stuff we use—the solution being a reduction of excessive consumption and buying of wasteful products. This is a prime example of Matthew Huber’s Marxist analysis of the working and professional classes being held at arm’s length from the solutions to climate change, most of which lie in the realm of production, as we are left to muddle about in our relatively weak realm as market actors. 

This responsible consumption framing would ultimately devolve entirely into corporate greenwashing and, as a result, the focus on consumer behavior 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. It’s still common in some circles to mock bans on single-use plastic products, and the reusable tote and the paper straw have become symbols of liberal naïveté. Unfortunately, I think this framing and eventual collapse resulted in a lot of environmentalists inadvertently turning their backs for a long time on the problem of waste.

A later incarnation of the environmentalist story of plastic, and one that we’re still somewhat engaged in right now, is that of plastic as an acute and isolated mess that must be cleaned up. This is characterized by the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which environmental groups latched onto in the 2000s 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 had become. This was a more powerful 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 the production of 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 in the oceans 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, more like swirling, soupy nebula lacking defined borders, the tip of the plasticberg. It wasn't until our shift in common understanding of microplastics when we would enter something far scarier, a world in which plastic is inescapable, where even the boundaries between humanity and petroleum feel impossible to define.

Like climate change, plastic is what Timothy Morton describes as a “hyperobject,” something that exists on a scale of time and space that humans can’t really get their heads around. It is so vast that geologists suggest the deep time record may be 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 would be 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 of humanity’s dominance on 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.”

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. A 2026 study found that the increased presence of microplastics swirling around in the atmosphere can act as a heating agent contributing to rising global temperatures. Research on the presence of microplastics and nanoplastics in the environment is still developing, and the rigor of the data regarding how much is out there is up for debate, but thousands of studies on the topic have found microplastics all over the place—in Antarctic sea ice, inside marine animals in the deepest ecosystems on earth, in 83% of tap water samples taken in a global study, throughout the Great Lakes, in a variety of food products, in bottled drinks, and on and on. Understanding their presence in the human body is also a work in progress, with some of the more alarming studies finding plastic in our brains and testicles coming under fire, but what is not up for debate is that tiny plastic particles are inside of our bodies. A meta-analysis of studies on the topic point to microplastics detected in eight out of 12 human organ systems, and in biological samples such as breastmilk, feces, urine, and loogies.

Its scope may be hard to grasp, but I think we’ve instinctively known for a very long time the world-altering impact of making everything we ever use out of indestructible material. My favorite depiction of this ubiquity of harm is in the 1990 novel Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, by Karen Tei Yamashita, part of a genre defined by scholar 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 the novel, 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 entire 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 luxury and prosperity.

As it turns out, the substance 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 material in undeveloped parts of the globe. This ends in disaster, but unfolds in bizarre, sad ways that all point to what one critic called at the time “metastasizing capitalism.” The material comes to represent the 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.

'No end-of-the-pipe fix'

A major shortcoming of our narratives about plastic is that their logical conclusion is a mere cleanup effort, a solution that is irresistible to those eager to believe that environmental degradation is an engineering problem to be fixed with human innovation on the back end. It’s a solution that has been championed by the tech industry, corporate philanthropy, and billionaire donors, who have sought out clever devices to scoop up all that gross plastic and return the ocean to its pristine state.

The folly of this thinking is outlined in depressing manner by Max Liboiron, an associate professor at Memorial University in Newfoundland and a leading scholar of plastic pollution. Because of the sheer scale of the problem, he says, “you cannot clean up the ocean in any way at a rate that is commensurate with the amount of plastic going into it,” noting a big ocean cleanup effort underway 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 said in an interview. “Yeah, I can get that in a hot minute. We’ve got some serious scale problems.” He compares the problem to an overflowing bathtub, but 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 manufacturing demand to open it up even more. In an article in The Atlantic, sociologist Rebecca Altman, whose father was a manufacturer of polystyrene in the 1960s, 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 (a predecessor to crypto and AI as the next big thing you need). The country was largely not buying plastic 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 in a 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. Global plastic production doubled from 2000 to 2019, and some 40% of plastic goes toward packaging. One study found that 79% of all plastic waste that’s been generated to date has accumulated in landfills; others estimates put the amount of plastic waste actually recycled at somewhere between 5% and 9%. 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 plastic, we have a revolutionary substance that in many ways ushered in modernity, but also supercharged exploitation and grew an all-powerful industry that would do anything to ensure its ever-expanding production and use. That sounds familiar because at the end of the day, the plastic problem is the climate change problem.

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. For example, seeking new markets for plastic products as concern over climate threatens the eternal dominance of petroleum, the oil and gas industry is lobbying to reverse Kenya’s limits on plastic use, and pushing the country to import more plastic garbage. Both climate change and plastics are consequences of the same industrial systems of production that are controlled by the same small number of corporations, making intentional decisions to ensure their pervasiveness for as long as possible. 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.

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 the more we learn about it. Not that long ago, they were very hard to find, but there are now several organizations out there that are pushing back against false solutions and unhelpful narratives. For example, Surfrider Foundation, an ocean protection nonprofit, calls out false solutions like recycling and bioplastics, and explicitly states: “If your bathtub is overflowing, what’s the first thing you do? You do not grab a towel or a mop—you turn off the tap! We cannot clean up our way out of this crisis until we stop the deluge of plastic pollution into our ocean.” The Amsterdam-based Plastic Soup Foundation similarly names recycling, consumer behavior, lightweight packaging, compostable plastic, and industry self-regulation as “bogus solutions.” 

But it is still an extremely fraught space littered, if you will, with corporate horseshit. Take, for example, the Alliance to End Plastic Waste, which focuses on “enhancing waste management capacity and capability by improving collection, sorting, processing, and recycling systems, especially in underserved regions.” With priorities that include “cleanup” and “innovation” the group’s leadership boasts besuited corporate lawyers and PR specialists, and its network is a murderer’s row of polluters, including several chemical and packaging companies, Dow, ExxonMobil, Formosa Plastics, Shell, and Procter & Gamble. Another prominent organization 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, which has not made a dent in the problem. A look at the organization’s enormous list of partners inspires further pessimism: Amazon, BASF, Bridgestone, Cargill, Coca Cola, Cisco, Danone DuPont, Heineken, H&M, Ikea, LaCoste, Mars Inc., Microsoft, Pepsico, Philips, Primark, Ralph Lauren, Starbucks, Unilever, and the hits keep coming. Almost every producer and distributor you can imagine trafficking in single-use goods, plastic-lined clothing, and well, junk, is backing circular economy work. 

You might look at those company names 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 extract petroleum from the ground and sell it in the form of whatever they can, as long as they possibly can, because that’s what they exist to do. These corporate-backed entities will latch onto anything they can pass off as a solution, other than the one solution we know will work—ending the constant flood of petroleum-based products. It’s the same way that the oil and gas industry is going to perpetuate record levels of digging up and burning of petroleum for fuel, parallel to development of renewables and carbon capture. Whether energy or plastic goods, it is the industries profiting from these products that perpetuate their production. 

Turn off the tap

We have this fact of life to deal with, plastic, that is being bent and twisted in every which way to benefit those producing it, and make those of us who are left depending on it feel either good or bad about it. We’re made to feel as though it’s a benevolent substance that’s only bad when we set it down in the wrong place; that it’s a frivolous distraction from serious environmental problems; that it’s one big whoopsie we need to scoop up and throw in the trash; that it’s a misdirected flow of consumer goods that can be corrected with the proper technology; and finally, that it’s everywhere and it’s just the cost of modernity.

This leaves a lot of us feeling confused and sad because, just as in carbon guilt among the professional class, the only way most of us are left to rid ourselves of this toxic soup is by not purchasing it as a consumer good. This is problematic because, for one, maybe even more than fossil fuel use, it has become practically impossible to live a life free from plastic. I just don’t know if you could even do it. 

As Matthew Huber points out about climate change, these goods are intentionally commodified and cheapened such that for the working class, there is no other option but to use them. Even if all of the financially secure people who don’t control the means of production were to stop using plastic products, you’d still run into the hard limit of a much larger working class that cannot do the same. There is no environmentally friendly version of being poor under capitalism, and that’s especially the case with the use of plastics, doubly so as life gets harder and less stable during times of crisis.

As we learned during the pandemic, when society goes into emergency mode, the promise of convenience, sterility, and disposability takes precedence over any concerns about microplastics in the ocean or even our poor testicles. In the early 2020s, every major city street was overflowing with used masks and rubber gloves. Many cafes refused to even fill reusable cups, and bag and straw bans were ridiculed as naive and unsanitary. When I first started working in mutual aid in Arizona, I couldn’t help but cringe at the distribution of single-use plastic water bottles or food packaging, but before long you realize that reducing personal plastic usage is a preposterous idea to someone who is trying to not die in 115-degree heat. You can give out reusable bottles and containers, but where are unsheltered people supposed to keep them? In a temporary camp, until a housed neighbor calls the cops and they come and “clean” the camp, throwing everything in the trash, disposable or not. There is no environmentally friendly version of being poor under capitalism. 

But as with all lifestyle environmentalism, individual action is less important when it exists as one person’s contribution, but potentially powerful as a link to what the collective decides it will not tolerate, and as a way to build up the potential for joint action in opposition to it. Especially if we can solidify the connection to climate change in the way that we communicate about plastic waste, and if we can move away from narratives of litter, recycling, or cleanup, a societal-if-symbolic shunning of petroleum in its solid form could be an agent of cultural change. It also presents an opening to model a better way of life, to practice it before it becomes systemically possible. If you can, it’s a good thing to use cloth bags at the grocery store, not because it’s within your capacity or responsibility as a consumer to stop the use of plastic, but because it just feels like shit to use a plastic bag one time and throw it away. You’d like to live in a world where it doesn’t have to happen, so if you don’t have to, don’t do it. 

So in that sense, just as I don’t think we should shame people for using plastic products, we shouldn’t ridicule people for trying to cut plastic use out of their lives, so long as they do so with the right understanding. I realize this places a lot of emphasis on internal lives and motivations of individuals taking action, but that feels important to me, just as the way we talk about and understand the nature of these global problems feels important. Because, for one, it helps us live in the day-to-day with a better understanding of why we are taking the actions that we are, and less likely to feel like we are going insane when we observe the differences between our own actions and the systems around us. Action with the right understanding and motivations can more likely translate into the right kind of structural change, instead of the individual checking off of a box. 

Even though it may feel as though there are no avenues to make that change happen, or that the buying of the right products is all we can do, that’s not actually the case. For examples, we can look to the same kinds of fights that are resisting the expansion of oil and gas on the supply side. One of the most influential cases of such a campaign is RISE St. James in Louisiana, led by special education teacher Sharon Lavigne, who has been working for years to block the construction of plastics and petrochemicals plants in the South, a region known as “Cancer Alley.” Hundreds of plants pollute the surrounding predominantly Black communities with cancer-causing chemicals, and RISE has been fighting new proposed plants for years. The group defeated a proposed $1.25 billion plastics manufacturing plant in 2018 through grassroots organizing and coalition building, and as of this writing is still fighting a $9.4 billion project by Formosa Plastics (one of the noble partners of the Alliance to End Plastic Waste), which would have been the largest complex of plastics manufacturing plants in the nation. The Taiwanese company is trying to build 16 facilities over land the size of 80 football fields, which would use fossil fuel byproducts and chemicals to create polymers for use in products like plastic bags and artificial turf. RISE scored a huge victory in 2022 when a judge struck down the permits for the complex. In 2024, an appeals court reversed that decision, but organizers continue to grind down the struggling company and prevent the construction. 

These are the fights that we can hope to spark and fuel with our opposition to plastic products. And it comes as no surprise that the people putting their bodies on the line and leading the way are community members, as in the case of water protectors fighting oil pipelines, demanding that we keep that shit 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.