Plastic Unlimited

How Corporations Are Fuelling the Ecological Crisis and What We Can Do About It

Alice Mah

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781509549474
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Despite the global movement to tackle plastic pollution, demand for plastics continues to rise. As the world transitions away from fossil fuels, plastics are set to be the biggest driver of oil demand. Single-use plastics – deemed essential in the fight against COVID-19 – have been given a new lease of life. In a world beset with crisis fatigue, what can we do to curb the escalating plastics crisis?

In this book, Alice Mah reveals how petrochemical and plastics corporations have fought relentlessly to protect and expand plastics markets in the face of existential threats to business. From denying the toxic health effects of plastics to co-opting circular economy solutions to plastic waste and exploiting the opportunities offered up by the global pandemic, industry has deflected attention from the key problem: plastics production.

The consequences of unfettered plastics growth are pernicious and highly unequal. We all have a part to play in reducing plastics consumption but we must tackle the problem at its root: the capitalist imperative for limitless growth.

1
Plastic Unlimited

The world woke up to the global plastics crisis in 2017 and to the climate emergency in 2018. On the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic, sustainability issues were dominating plastics industry discussions due to the groundswell of public backlash. However, by spring 2020 single-use plastics were back in favour, seen as necessary to fight the virus. Plastic recycling programmes ground to a halt, their viability thrown into question as the price of crude oil plummeted. People despaired over the piles of takeaway containers and facemasks strewn over public spaces, but global attention to the wider issue had shifted. After all, plastic pollution paled in comparison with the more immediate global health crisis. The climate emergency, by contrast, gained considerable political momentum during the pandemic, as governments around the world resolved to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels through green recoveries.

The plastics crisis is inextricably linked to crises of global heating, toxic pollution, biodiversity loss, and global inequality. It exemplifies an existential planetary threat of overconsumption beyond the sustainable limits of the earth. There are serious social and ecological consequences of sidelining plastic pollution as a lesser kind of crisis competing for bandwidth in a crisis-saturated world. The toxic impacts of plastic pollution compound existing social inequalities concentrated in climate-vulnerable coastal communities and in disadvantaged fenceline communities (i.e. communities immediately adjacent to polluting companies) around the planet. If current policies continue, plastic waste is projected to rise from 11 million tons of plastic entering the ocean per year in 2020 to 29 million tons per year by 2040. In the same period, global plastics production is forecast to use 19% of the world’s total remaining carbon budget to keep global heating within the limit of 1.5 degrees.¹ Combined with the deadly heat waves, floods, mass extinctions, and pandemics that come with climate catastrophe, the world will be smothered in toxic plastic waste within the span of one generation.

This book argues that corporations across the plastics value chain are fuelling the ecological crisis through the pursuit of unlimited plastics growth, and what is more, they are getting away with it. Since the dramatic rise of plastics production after the Second World War, petrochemical and plastics corporations have fought to expand and protect plastics markets through manufacturing demand, denying risk, and co-opting solutions. Over the years, they have faced existential threats to business, first in a number of toxic scandals linking plastics to cancer and other illnesses, and later in relation to marine plastic waste and the climate crisis. Often, industry leaders have resorted to blatant deception to deny toxic risks in their quest to retain market control. Another industry tactic has been to shift blame to individual consumers and to poor infrastructure in Southeast Asia and Africa. Recently, corporations have become more sophisticated in their sustainability strategies, for example through adopting the circular economy agenda, appearing to embrace green initiatives while pursuing unsustainable growth. They have also played one crisis off against the other, proclaiming plastics in wind turbine blades and electric vehicles as the solution to climate change. Their aim has been to deflect public attention from the key problem: plastics production.

While waste is the most obvious manifestation of plastic pollution, the root of the plastics problem is not waste but production. Even at the height of the storm of public outrage over marine plastic litter, amid all the single-use plastics bans and corporate-sponsored beach clean-ups, global demand for plastics was on the rise. The largest market for plastics is for packaging, accounting for approximately 40% of global end markets. The second largest market is for building and construction at 20%.² New plastics markets are also rapidly proliferating in green technologies. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), plastics will be the biggest driver of oil demand in the energy transition, reaching close to half of global oil demand by 2050.³ Yet the increasing demand for plastics cannot keep up with the insatiable corporate drive for petrochemical expansion.

The petrochemical industry makes plastics from raw material ‘feedstocks’, which are derived from fossil fuels and other hydrocarbons through a process known as ‘cracking’, applying heat and pressure to break down heavy hydrocarbons into lighter molecules. Petrochemical expansion relies on (1) access to cheap and abundant ‘virgin’ (fossil fuel-based) feedstocks; and (2) continual growth in new plastics markets to absorb expanding production. The petrochemical industry is a cyclical industry, with boom-and-bust cycles of expansion and overcapacity.⁴ In the decade leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a surge of petrochemical project investments around the world, linked to a range of factors including the availability of cheap liquefied natural gas (LNG) from fracking in the United States, the drop in oil prices in 2014, diversification into plastics from oil-producing countries (anticipating the energy transition), and strong GDP growth in China.⁵ By the end of 2019, the petrochemical industry was heading into a downcycle. However, the COVID-19 pandemic delayed the predicted crisis of overcapacity.⁶ The price of crude oil hit historic lows, new petrochemical projects stalled, and recycled plastic feedstocks became more expensive. Meanwhile, corporations used the health crisis to reverse single-use plastic bans and to roll back sustainability commitments. Demand for single-use plastics in packaging and personal protective equipment rocketed, offsetting short-term losses in other plastics markets, such as automotive products and appliances.⁷ ‘Looking forward, we’re looking at fat margins,’ a US industry executive commented in 2021. ‘Not just in North America but around the world.’⁸

What can we do to stop the escalating plastics crisis? Despite the global momentum to address plastic pollution, policymakers have failed to challenge the capitalist imperative for unlimited plastics growth. We need to tackle this challenge head on. As a first step, let’s take a closer look at the plastic facts.

The Plastic Facts

Within just a few years, the media landscape has become filled with facts about plastic. In December 2018, the fact that ‘9% of all plastic ever made has been recycled’ was named the ‘statistic of the year’ by the British Royal Statistical Society.⁹ Between 1950 and 2015, 8.3 billion metric tonnes of plastic were produced globally, 6.5 billion metric tonnes of which became plastic waste. Of that waste, 79% went to landfill or was leaked into the environment, 12% was incinerated, and 9% was recycled. Half of all plastic ever manufactured has been made since 2000.¹⁰ The cumulative total of plastics production is expected to increase to the staggering amount of 34 billion metric tonnes by 2050, by which point plastic is predicted to outweigh fish in the oceans.¹¹ It is almost impossible to grasp these numbers, even with handy infographics about how many times around the earth we could line up all the plastic bags and bottles.

All plastics are polymers, meaning ‘many parts’ in Greek, made up of long chains of molecules with repeated units. Plastic polymer chains are composed of strong carbon bonds that can be combined with chemical additives to make just about anything. Petrochemicals derived from fossil fuels are used to make 99% of plas...