We must find a better way to deal with this harmful stuff
By Mary Lhowe /
ecoRI News contributor
A medical doctor and epidemiologist with decades of experience in pollution’s impact on the health of people, animals, and nature reminded a national audience recently that “disease, disability, and death occur across the whole life cycle of plastic,” from production through use and disposal.
The increasingly destructive nature
of plastic has become a familiar story in recent years, but the speaker, Philip
J. Landrigan, director of Boston College’s Global Public Health Program, tried
to soften the dour information with reminders of public actions that have
reversed the harms of pollution in the past. Among them: the Clean Air Act of 1970,
the banning of DDT, and the removal of lead from gasoline and paint, all from
the ’70s.
Further, Landrigan said, some states
and communities are now taking up arms against the public health dangers and
environmental assaults of plastic with policies like bottle deposit-and-return
systems, bans on plastic shopping bags — which the Rhode Island General
Assembly passed last year and which takes effect in 2024 — and policies that
require manufacturers to help pay for disposal of plastic waste from their
products.
Landrigan’s online talk was hosted by Beyond
Plastics¸ a Vermont-based advocacy group that disseminates
information on harms of and alternatives to plastics.
Production, use, and disposal of plastics for broad consumer use got underway around 1950. At the time, single-use plastics such as tableware were promoted and praised for their throw-away convenience.
Plastic production has skyrocketed in recent years as
the oil and gas industry see their profits from fossil fuels endangered by more
renewable sun and wind energy and the increasing electrification of buildings
and transportation.
Landrigan showed a graph
illustrating the growth of global plastic production. In 1955, 1.7 million tons
of plastic was produced globally; that annual figure rose to more than 400
million tons in 2015.
Plastic is made primarily with fossil fuels, along with thousands of chemical additives, all produced by the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries. On the consumer level, the worst offender is single-use plastics such as soda bottles and shopping bags.
The
use-once-and-discard ethic of single-use plastics like food and consumer goods
packaging is “turning our oceans into a watery landfill,” said Judith Enck,
president of Beyond Plastics.
Experts have said that even with the
best intentions, plastic recycling — never higher than 8% in the United States
— cannot work because plastic products are so full of chemical additives that
can’t be removed from plastic material, making recycled plastic unsafe for
later uses. In fact, Landrigan said, most plastic that is collected for
recycling ultimately gets burned or buried.
Landrigan laid the groundwork for
his talk by explaining that plastic is wholly synthetic and made with a carbon-based,
polymer backbone to which “thousands” of other chemicals and additives are
attached.
Additives can be carcinogens,
neurotoxins, and endocrine disruptors. Since the 1950s, Landrigan said, 350,000
chemicals and chemical mixtures have been created and inserted into millions of
products and disseminated throughout the environment.
He said more than 8,300 million tons
of plastic have been manufactured since 1950, and production is expected to
double by 2040 and triple by 2060. Single-use plastics account for about 40% of
plastics being produced.
Alarmingly, there is almost no
oversight over the health effect of new petrochemicals created to go into
plastics.
“New chemicals are introduced with
enthusiasm and little due diligence,” he said. “Manufacturers have no
obligation to report new chemicals to the government. Then, belatedly, [some
chemicals] are found to cause harm to the environment and to children’s
health.”
Plastics, including microplastics,
the tiny bits that break down and scatter from the depths of the oceans to the
Arctic, are found everywhere on Earth.
A few groups can stand in as representatives for the worst harmed. At the production end, enormous petrochemical plants are located in this country near communities that tend to be poorer, non-white, and politically powerless.
Landrigan illustrated this glaring streak of environmental injustice with pictures of huge ethane cracker plants in modest communities near Pittsburgh, Pa., and Port Comfort, Texas. Ethane cracker plants perform the first step in transforming ethane — an element of natural gas — into plastic products.
These communities are
susceptible to fires, release of dangerous gases, leaks and spills during
production and transit of fuels and chemicals. Workers at the plants face these
types of risks daily.
A group heavily harmed by use of plastics are fetuses and newborns, who absorb microplastics through the mother’s body and breast milk, and young children, who are especially sensitive to plastic chemicals that leach into our food and beverages because their bodies and systems are developing so fast.
Landrigan, who is co-author of the
book “Children and Environmental Toxins. What Everyone Needs to Know,” said,
“Toxic chemicals can damage babies and children at the lowest detectable levels.”
“Brain damage caused by plastic
chemicals can contribute to autism, ADHD and IQ loss,” Landrigan said. “The
only treatment is prevention of exposure.”
And, disposal of waste plastic
hammers oceans and sea creatures in the form of large objects like plastic
fishing gear entangling whales and turtles to microplastics getting absorbed
into the bodies of fish, and from there sometimes into human consumers.
Landrigan said 8-12 million tons of plastic is estimated to go into the oceans
every year.
Production of plastics — led by
single-use plastics — is ramping up rapidly, Landrigan said, because the
“fossil fuel and carbon industry is pivoting away from producing fuel” as a
result of the global transition to green energy.
He said operation like ExxonMobil,
Gulf, and Chevron are vertically integrated and control their entire supply
chain, so they are well positioned to redirect their investments into plastics
and petrochemicals. Also, there has been “an enormous expansion of oil and gas
due to fracking,” making the United States now the “world’s largest gas and oil
producer.”
And all of that carbon-based fuel
needs to be used somewhere.
Landrigan said some scientists are
now “concerned that, like climate change and biodiversity loss, plastic and
chemical pollution may be nearing a tipping point, where it could cause
irreversible damage.”
Possibly to forestall a tsunami of
despair in his audience, Landrigan shifted to areas of hope. He said high- and
some moderate-income countries are now enacting law and policy to curb the
creation, use, and disposal of plastics.
In the United States, the Clean Air Act has led to a 75% reduction in air pollution. Boston Harbor and Chesapeake Bay, to cite two examples, have largely been cleaned of pollutants. Bans on lead in gasoline and paint from the late 1970s have led to a 95% percent reduction of brain-damaging lead in American children.
The ban of the pesticide
DDT has allowed endangered species like eagles and osprey to rebound. The Food Quality Protection Act of 1996 orders
the federal government to track data on pesticide residue commodities most
frequently consumed by infants and children.
In the arena of plastics,
communities have banned single-use plastics; one of the most effective methods
to control plastic and thus litter is bottle bills that require and refund a
deposit for drink bottles. A system called extended producer responsibility
(EPR), of which a bottle bill is a variation, requires manufacturers to pay for
disposal of their packaging. (An EPR bill was introduced into the General
Assembly last year, but failed to move out of committee.)
Landrigan said he recommends laws
and policies to: require that petrochemicals be proven safe before they enter
the market; eliminate unnecessary uses for single-use plastics; require plastic
manufacturers to contribute money to remediation of plastic waste; design safer
and more-sustainable materials; establish wide-scale human biomonitoring; and
strengthen international agencies working on this problem.