the end of refillable beer and soda bottles as a
“growth frontier” because every reusable bot-
tle taken out of circulation “means the sale of
20 one-way containers.” By 1978, Coca-Cola ad-
opted its first plastic soda bottle — sparking a
shift that has conquered the planet. Four de-
cades later, the world is using half a trillion plas-
tic bottles a year.
To help keep pollution out of sight, the top
companies of Big Plastic have continued to fund
KAB, which organizes volunteer labor to pick
up trash on land, as well as the Ocean Conser-
vancy, which sponsors volunteer international
coastal cleanups. Since 2017, the top 10 catego-
ries of trash collected in the beach cleanups has
been made of one material: plastic.
Ocean Conservancy says it is dedicated to
“ending the flow of trash at the source,” but
critics accuse the group of a sin of omission.
The cleanups tally waste down to the last plas-
tic bottle (1,754,908 in the most recent effort),
but don’t link the waste to the corporations that
produced it. Only in recent years has Break Free
From Plastics launched a competing network
of cleanups, recording the branding they dis-
cover. In 2019, its audit called out a trio of the
world’s richest consumer brands as the top plas-
tic polluters: Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Nestlé. “I
was personally saddened by it,” says Bea Perez,
Coca- Cola’s chief sustainability officer, of the
company’s number-one ranking. “We don’t
want to be that number.”
Both KAB and Ocean Conservancy insist their
work is not compromised by corporate funding.
A representative for KAB — whose directors in-
clude executives from Keurig, Dr. Pepper, Mars
Wrigley, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé Waters,
Dow, Philip Morris, and the American Chemis-
try Council — rejects the “narrative” that KAB is
a corporate front group: “We’re not. We’re an
independent organization.” A vice president at
Ocean Conservancy — which placed executives
from Coca-Cola, Dow, and the American Chem-
istry Council on the steering committee of a re-
cent report on ocean plastics — tells ROLLING
STONE that the problems of plastic waste are so
systemic and complex that “we need everyone
— including corporations — at the table.”I
’M PEERING DOWN from a crane opera-
tor’s chair on the third floor of a
waste-to-energy facility — into what looks
like a real-life version of the trash com-
pactor in the Death Star.
Far below lies a rectangular pit, 35 feet deep,
where municipal garbage trucks dump their
loads. The trash there awaits “the claw” — a
7,500-pound grapple with six retractable steel
talons that scoops up to two-and-a-half tons of
garbage on every lift. The operator next to me
hoists trash out of the pit, releasing it onto a
mountainous mixing pile, “fluffing” the waste
to create a blend that will burn evenly. With
each pass, the grapple pops Glad bags like pus-
tules of trash, leaving behind ragged stream-
ers of plastic.
The top alternative to burying plastic in a
landfill is not recycling. It’s fire. Over the past
six decades, far more plastic has been inciner-ated than collected for reuse. This incinerator,
outside of Oregon’s capital, Salem, is operated
by Covanta, which runs similar waste-to-ener-
gy plants on the East Coast that burn trash for
New York and Philadelphia. For months after
China roiled recycling markets in 2018, Philadel-
phia tasked Covanta with burning half the city’s
“recycling” that had nowhere else to go.
Roughly a third of the trash is plastic. House-
holds served by this plant have recently beenes most toxic compounds in plastic. But inciner-
ation returns plastic to its origins as a fossil fuel,
creating carbon pollution that escapes through a
candy-striped smokestack, in a white wisp that’s
visible for miles.
The greenhouse-gas profile of plastics is sim-
ply unsustainable. As the world begins to wean
itself off of fossil fuel for transportation, Big Oil
giants from Texas to Saudi Arabia are turning to
plastic to support future growth. The Interna-
tional Energy Agency predicts that “oil demand
related to plastic consumption overtakes that
for road-passenger transport by 2050,” and its
top executive warns plastics are “one of the key
blind spots in the global energy debate.”
The industry is counting on a tidal wave of
new demand from emerging economies. A 2018
IEA report underscores that advanced econo-
mies use up to 20 times more plastic per capi-
ta than consumers do in India or Indonesia. And
it warns that increased recycling and single-use
bans in places like Europe and Japan “will be far
outweighed by developing economies sharply in-
creasing their shares of plastic consumption (as
well as its disposal).”
Global plastics production and incineration
currently creates the CO2 pollution of 189 coal
plants. By 2050, that’s expected to more than tri-
ple, to the equivalent of 615 coal plants. At that
rate, plastics would hog about 15 percent of the
world’s remaining “carbon budget,” or what can
be emitted without crossing the 2-degrees Cel-
sius threshold in global temperature rise that sci-
entists warn can trigger calamity.T
HE PLASTIC INDUSTRY’S damage to
the planet is vast, but not immeasur-
able. In fact, the industry has pub-
lished a detailed accounting that re-
veals its pollution is on pace to cause
trillions in environmental harm by midcentury.
The American Chemistry Council is a trade
group that represents the large oil and petro-
chemical companies that produce plastic resins
— the back end of Big Plastic. In 2016, the ACC
commissioned a study by the consultancy Tru-
cost — “the world’s leading experts in quantifying
and valuing the environmental impacts” from in-
dustry. The ACC paid for the study to demon-
strate that plastics are not easily replaceable,
and that many common substitutes — particular-
ly glass — carry higher environmental costs when
factoring in weight for transportation.
The Trucost finding that the ACC does not
trumpet? “The environmental cost to society of
consumer plastic products and packaging was
over $139 billion in 2015,” the report reveals.
Without a dramatic change in course, Trucost
predicts, that annual figure will soar to “$209
billion by 2025.”
In an interview with ROLLING STONE, Steve
Russell, the ACC’s vice president for plastics, ac-
knowledged that $139 billion “is a big number.”
An attorney, Russell has an affect more folksy
than slick. But that’s far from straightforward.
The giant sum, he says, is “not a literal debt
on the balance sheet.” But that is precisely the
point. Trucost measured externalities — or the
costs that companies don’t have to [Cont. on 96]instructed to toss out hard-to-recycle plastics
(yogurt containers, beer cups — anything with
a recycling number higher than 2), and those
items now come here to burn. When the oper-
ator is satisfied with the mix, he hoists a grap-
ple load to a height of 90 feet and dumps it into
the hopper — fueling the incinerator that gener-
ates electricity for the local grid. The extreme
temperature of the burner, 2,000 degrees, cre-
ates a near-complete combustion that neutraliz-8
3The Secret
Fossil-Fuel Crisis
Plastics produced in 1950
2 billion kilograms
Plastics produced in 2015
380 billion kilogramsPeak plastic waste exported by
the United States in 2015
2 billion kilogramsPercentage of plastics now used
in packaging
40
Annual value of plastic packaging
lost to waste after one use
$120 billionPercent of U.S. tap-water samples
contaminated with plastic pollution
94.4Plastic bags used globally every year
500 billion
Years a plastic bag will persist in nature
Up to 1,000Percentage of seabirds with plastic
in their stomachs
90MARCH 2020Year by which the plastic in the ocean
could outweigh all the fish
2050Single-use plastic bottles used
every year
Half a trillion