PLANET PLASTIC

EVERY HUMAN ON EARTH is ingesting nearly

2,000 particles of plastic a week. These tiny

pieces enter our unwitting bodies from tap

water, food, and even the air, according to an

alarming academic study sponsored by the

World Wildlife Fund for Nature, dosing us with

five grams of plastics, many cut with chemicals

linked to cancers, hormone disruption, and de-

velopmental delays. Since the paper’s publica-

tion last year, Sen. Tom Udall, a plain-spoken

New Mexico Democrat with a fondness for white

cowboy hats and turquoise bolo ties, has been

trumpeting the risk: “We are consuming a cred-

it card’s worth of plastic each week,” Udall says.

At events with constituents, he will brandish a

Visa from his wallet and declare, “You’re eat-

ing this, folks!”

With new legislation, the Break Free From

Plastic Pollution Act of 2020, Udall is attempt-

ing to marshal Washington into a confrontation

with the plastics industry, and to force compa-

nies that profit from plastics to take accountabil-

ity for the waste they create. Unveiled in Febru-

ary, the bill would ban many single-use plastics

and force corporations to finance “end of life”

programs to keep plastic out of the environment.

“We’re going back to that principle,” the senator

tells ROLLING STONE. “The polluter pays.”

The battle pits Udall and his allies in Congress

against some of the most powerful corporate

interests on the planet, including the oil ma-

jors and chemical giants that produce the build-

ing blocks for our modern plastic world — think

Exxon, Dow, and Shell — and consumer giants

like Coca-Cola, Nestlé, and Unilever that pack-

age their products in the stuff. Big Plastic isn’t

a single entity. It’s more like a corporate super-

group: Big Oil meets Big Soda — with a puff of Big

Tobacco, responsible for trillions of plastic ciga-

rette butts in the environment every year. And

it combines the lobbying and public-relations

might of all three.

Americans have occasionally crusaded against

“problem plastics” — scapegoating packing pea-

nuts, grocery bags, or drinking straws for the

sins of our unsustainable consumer economy.

We’ve been slow to recognize that we’re actually

in the midst of a plastic pandemic. Over the past

70 years, we’ve gotten hooked on disposable

goods and packaging — as plastics became the

lifeblood of an American culture of speed, con-

venience, and disposability that’s conquered the

globe. Plastic contains our hot coffee and frozen

dinners. It is the material of childhood, from

Pampers to Playmobil to PlayStation 4. It cloaks

our e-commerce purchases and is woven into

our sneakers, fast fashion, and business fleece.

Humans are now using a million plastic bottles

a minute, and 500 billion plastic bags a year —

including those we use to bag up our plastic-

laden trash.

But the world’s plastic waste is not so easi-

ly contained. Massive quantities of this forever

material are spilling into the oceans — the equiv-

alent of a dump-truck load every minute. Plas-

tic is also fouling our mountains, our farmland,

and spiraling into an unmitigatable environmen-

tal disaster. John Hocevar is a marine biologist

who leads the Oceans Campaign for Greenpeace,

and spearheaded the group’s response to the BP

oil spill in the Gulf. Increasingly, his work has

centered on plastics. “This is

a much bigger problem than

‘just’ an ocean issue, or even

a pollution issue,” he says.

“We’ve found plastic every-

where we’ve ever looked. It’s

in the Arctic and the Antarctic

and in the middle of the Pacif-

ic. It’s in the Pyrenees and in

the Rockies. It’s settling out

of the air. It’s raining down

on us.”

More than half the plastic

now on Earth has been cre-

ated since 2002, and plastic

pollution is on pace to double

by 2030. At its root, the glob-

al plastics crisis is a product

of our addiction to fossil fuels.

The private profit and public

harm of the oil industry is well understood: Oil

is refined and distributed to consumers, who

benefit from gasoline’s short, useful lifespan in a

combustion engine, leaving behind atmospheric

pollution for generations. But this same pattern

— and this same tragedy of the commons — is

playing out with another gift of the oil-and-gas gi-

ants, whose drilling draws up the petroleum pre-

cursors for plastics. These are refined in indus-

trial complexes and manufactured into bottles,

bags, containers, textiles, and toys for consum-

ers who benefit from their transient use — before

throwing them away.

“Plastics are just a way of making things out of

fossil fuels,” says Jim Puckett, executive director

of the Basel Action Network. BAN is devoted to

enforcement of the Basel Convention, an inter-

national treaty that blocks the developed world

from dumping hazardous wastes on the devel-

oping world, and was recently expanded, effec-

tive next year, to include plastics. For Americans

who religiously sort their recycling, it’s upsetting

to hear about plastic being lumped in with toxic

waste. But the poisonous parallel is apt. When it

comes to plastic, recycling is a misnomer. “They

really sold people on the idea that plastics can

be recycled because there’s a fraction of them

that are,” says Puckett. “It’s fraudulent. When

you drill down into plastics recycling, you real-

ize it’s a myth.”

Since 1950, the world has created 6.3 trillion

kilograms of plastic waste — and 91 percent has

never been recycled even once, according to a

landmark 2017 study published in the journal

Science Advances. Unlike aluminum, which can

be recycled again and again, plastic degrades

in reprocessing, and is almost never recycled

more than once. A plastic soda bottle, for exam-

ple, might get downcycled into a carpet. Modern

technology has hardly improved things: Of the 78

E

“Plastics

are just

a way

of making

things out

of fossil

fuels. They

sold people

on recycling,

but it’s a

myth.“

8

ROLLING STONE 0

Senior writer TIM DICKINSON wrote about the

2020 battle for the Senate in December.