Author Archives: David Evans

Reprinted from GreenBuzz, a free weekly newsletter. Subscribe here.Remember plastic pollution?
It wasn’t long ago that the world seemed wrapped up in plastic: outrage over plastic drinking straws and bags, mostly, but also the entire plastics and packaging industries. We fretted over the fate of various critters, notably a hapless sea turtle whose viral video led many to treat plastic straws with roughly the same disdain as nuclear waste. Consumer brands scrambled to commit to ending plastic waste sometime in the future, in many cases by making their packaging recyclable or compostable, never mind the wholly inadequate global infrastructure available to actually recycle or compost the stuff. The whole thing inevitably spawned a culture war that led some American politicians to ban plastic straw bans as an expression of “freedom.”
It was a war on plastic that, it seemed at the time, might actually curb plastic’s environmental excesses.
That was so 2018.
Today, the skirmishes have largely faded from public attention. The plastics problem hasn’t gone away, of course — quite the opposite. Sanitation and public health concerns have given single-use plastics new life and put the wraps on some jurisdictional bans on disposable plastic packaging. Global sales of plastics continue to climb, a growing profit center for beleaguered oil and gas companies, which are seeing demand for their principal fuels plateau in an era of a fossil-fuel phaseout.
But that reprieve of public attention may be short-lived: The climate crisis represents a new front on the war on plastics. It may lack the viral video and social media cachet of straw bans and nasal-impacted reptiles (and let’s briefly be thankful for that) but it is arguably a more powerful leverage point among advocates and activists.
And most companies — from polymer producers to consumer brands to retailers — are ill-prepared for what’s likely to come.

The climate crisis represents a new front on the war on plastics.

Consider a report issued last fall by a group called Beyond Plastics, warning that “The U.S. plastics industry’s contribution to climate change is on track to exceed that of coal-fired power in this country by 2030.” It cites the dozens of plants that have recently opened, are under construction or are in the permitting process. “If they become fully operational, these new plastics plants could release an additional 55 million tons of greenhouse gases — the equivalent of another 27 average-sized coal plants.”
And then it landed this zinger: “Plastics are the new coal.”
Other groups have been ramping up their efforts to link plastics and climate. Back in 2019, for example, the Center for International Environmental Law, the Environmental Integrity Project, the FracTracker Alliance and others pointed out that “The plastic and petrochemical industries’ plans to expand plastic production threaten to exacerbate plastic’s climate impacts and could make limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius impossible.”
Up in smoke
Carbon emissions can be found throughout the plastics lifecycle, starting with fracking, which yields the natural gas that is the basis for most plastics, and from “cracking,” which turns that gas into ethylene, a key precursor to many plastics. There are emissions from transporting and converting plastics into countless goods and materials. There are yet more emissions at the back end, too, including a range of carbon-intensive waste-management processes such as incineration and so-called chemical or “advanced” recycling, which can turn waste plastics into feedstocks to make more plastics.
It doesn’t stop there. Plastic marine waste emits methane when it is exposed to sunlight. Microplastics can undermine oceans’ resilience to climate change, including by disturbing the carbon stored in marine and coastal ecosystems.
And let’s not even get started on emissions from open burning, a common method of plastics disposal in the developing world, which sends all of those embedded petrochemicals up in smoke.
True, plastic has climate advantages, from lightweighting goods, which reduces their transportation emissions, to protecting foods from spoilage. And those may counterbalance some of the above problems.
Still, environmental advocacy groups are likely to stoke the plastics-climate linkage, two issues that to date have largely been seen as separate. And as the linkages are more widely understood, pressure could be directed toward the same brands that, less than three years ago, committed to ending plastic waste but not the use of plastic itself.
What’s not clear is whether plastics and climate activists will find common cause. It’s hardly a slam-dunk. Activist groups are notoriously myopic, steering clear of adjacent issues as if they were fully disconnected. To take a system’s view of plastics and climate would mean flexing some muscles that long ago atrophied within that community.
Even academics are culpable: “Now is not the time to be distracted by the convenient truth of plastic pollution, as the relatively minor threats this poses are eclipsed by the global systemic threats of climate change,” wrote two British professors in the journal Marine Policy back in 2019. They worry that corporations and governments may use the plastics issue to distract from the climate one. Perhaps, but there’s a vast anti-plastics ecosystem to watchdog that.

Activist groups are notoriously myopic, steering clear of adjacent issues as if they were fully disconnected.

Policymakers also seem to be missing the big picture. The world “plastic” doesn’t appear in the text of either the 2015 Paris Agreement or the more recent Glasgow Climate Pact. United Nations-sponsored talks next month in Nairobi to draft a global plastics treaty appear to avoid bringing climate change into the picture.
Can the myriad of groups focused on plastic waste, toxicity, marine pollution, climate change, public health, water pollution, environmental justice, beach cleanups and other issues come together? It won’t be easy.
It also may not be necessary. Given the growing focus on net-zero commitments and Scope 3 supply-chain accountability, and the rising concern by investors over risks associated with climate change, waste disposal, toxicity and other ESG issues, all of this could turn in a heartbeat. Companies may find themselves taking stock of — and being held responsible for — the upstream and downstream climate impacts of the materials they source. That, in turn, could engender legislation, litigation, consumer boycotts and more.
And brands, once again, will be taking the heat.
I invite you to follow me on Twitter, subscribe to my Monday morning newsletter, GreenBuzz, from which this was reprinted, and listen to GreenBiz 350, my weekly podcast, co-hosted with Heather Clancy.

Canada’s new environment and climate change minister has some first-hand experience when it comes to living in a resource town that goes through boom and bust cycles.

Steven Guilbeault, 51, hails from La Tuque, a small town of 11,000 people in north-central Quebec, about 290 kilometres northeast of Montreal.

As a young boy, he climbed a tree to stop loggers from cutting it down — perhaps foreshadowing a 2001 stunt, scaling the CN Tower to draw attention to the pressing issue of climate change.

In his new role, Guilbeault will have his work cut out for him. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has assigned the minister 40 distinct tasks in a mandate letter that is perhaps the longest one sent to any minister in the federal cabinet. It all means that Guilbeault will need to work with other federal cabinet ministers and stakeholders to assist energy workers in transitioning away from fossil fuel jobs.

He tells The Narwhal that it’s a mission that hits home.

“I come from a small pulp and paper town, mono-industrial town near Lac Saint-Jean which has gone through a series of shock waves because of what has happened in the forestry industry,” says Guilbeault, who took over the federal portfolio in October. 

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Guilbeault studied industrial relations, computer sciences and then political science at the Université de Montréal in the early ‘90s. While there, climate activism started to shape Guilbeault’s career and, in 1993, he and several colleagues established Action for Solidarity, Equity, Environment and Development — the forebearer to Équiterre, Quebec’s leading environmental organization. He later acted as Greenpeace Canada’s director and campaign manager for 10 years, which spurred him to the highest point of the Toronto skyline. 

Though we both now live in Guilbeault’s Montreal riding of Laurier-Sainte-Marie, I speak to the minister over Zoom as the latest wave of COVID-19 is sweeping across Quebec. Guilbeault’s embattled bicycle hangs on the wall behind him. 

Last November, when the minister appeared on a hybrid session of parliament with this same background, Conservative MP Ed Fast accused him of making a political statement. After I comment on the fact that he hasn’t changed his decor, Guilbeault quickly points out that his — year-round — chosen mode of transportation never made waves during his two years as heritage minister. 

But today, Guilbeault is the driver of the Trudeau government’s climate plan, putting some leaders, oil and gas companies and their allies on edge. Meanwhile, some of his former allies say he betrayed the environmental movement by joining the governing Liberal party in 2019 after it orchestrated the takeover of the Trans Mountain oil pipeline and expansion project.

“Sometimes you decide to work with people with whom you don’t necessarily agree on everything, but if you find common ground, and if you think that by working together you can move the dial along, then you do it.”

I spoke with the minister about a looming ban on plastics, slashing pollution from industry, being labelled a climate alarmist for recognizing what’s now common sense, and how the word “compromise” became a go-to word in his vocabulary. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You once stood side-by-side with CEOs of oil companies on a stage as Rachel Notley unveiled her government’s climate change plan for Alberta. How has that experience prepared you for your current role as environment minister and what do you hope to accomplish with the oil and gas industry?

It wasn’t the first time I worked with industry, it wasn’t the first time I worked with oil companies, it certainly wasn’t the first time I worked with provincial or other levels of government. But I think it certainly shows that I can work with people who have views that are not my own. Certainly it shows that I’ve worked with the Alberta government before and that I’m perfectly happy and capable of doing it again. And in terms of how I intend to work with oil companies, I mean I intend to work with these companies or the sector as I will with any other sector. 

Steven Guibeault, MP for Montreal’s Laurier-Sainte-Marie riding, was named Canada’s environment minister in October, after two years as heritage minister. Photo: Selena Phillips-Boyle / The Narwhal

We have to decarbonize our society and that includes transportation, and we’ve made a number of commitments on that, some previous to the last election campaign but certainly since then as well. We want to decarbonize the steel sector, the cement sector, the auto sector, the aluminium sector and the oil and gas sector. So I will be working with them as I would be working with others. 

It is true that oil and gas and transportation are our two biggest challenges in Canada, which is why when you look at our approach, you’re seeing more measures towards these sectors than towards others. Not because others aren’t important, we’re doing stuff in the building sector, we’re doing stuff on landfill, but both these sectors are 50 per cent of our emissions so they should receive a large portion of our attention. And for those who said that the cap was unfairly targeting the oil and gas sector, I’d said look at transportation, we are putting a cap on the transportation sector as well because at least for light duty vehicles, new sales will have to be zero emissions, 100 per cent by 2035, so in essence we’re also putting a cap on that sector as well. 

In your recent ministerial mandate letters, there are several ministers who have been tasked with setting up a Just Transition Fund for workers in oil-producing provinces: Alberta, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland and Labrador. What is your message to workers whose jobs might not exist, two, five or 10 years from now and do you think your government is working fast enough to help them? 

Our society has gone through a number of technological transformations since the industrial revolution. It’s not the first, unlikely to be the last one. And I mean ultimately just transition is about how do we adapt our workforce to changing technological conditions in the workplace. We could not be talking about climate change and still be having conversations about the need to make sure that people are properly trained, people are properly ready for the jobs that will be in vogue in five years, in 10 years, in 15 years. 

The difference this time is that I think in many cases before we didn’t really see [technological changes] coming or we didn’t want to see them coming, this time we do. We know it’s happening, it’s happening around the world, it’s certainly happening in Canada and, in answer to your question, are we doing enough? I’d say not yet. I’d say we need to do more and the fact that you’re seeing this in many ministers’ mandate letters is a clear sign that this is a priority for our government. 

Speaking of the mandate letters, you might have the longest of all the ministers in cabinet.

I’ve heard, I haven’t compared them, but yeah. 

Something like three dozen items. Have you given yourself any personal deadlines or goals of how to achieve everything on your list?

Well, I mean some deadlines are self-imposed. We have a commitment to phase out fossil fuel subsidies by 2023. So in some cases they’re very clear. In others they’re not necessarily as clear, but on a number of either legislative or regulatory measures we want to implement, we have said we want to do this in the very near future. As a minority government, it would be optimistic to think that we have more than two years. We might, but at this point I’m not assuming that this is the case, so I have to do everything that I can to ensure that we deploy as many of the measures that we’ve announced. Certainly on climate, but on plastics, we want to see movement very soon on that, the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, I have announced we’ll be tabling the bill, a similar version to the one that was tabled by minister Wilkinson, that will happen early in the New Year when the House resumes. 

A long-time environmental activist, Guibeault says the current concerns around climate change were labelled alarmist 30 years ago. Photo: Selena Phillips-Boyle / The Narwhal

Are you able to speak more about the movement on plastics that we’re going to be seeing more of soon?

Well, we had committed to present regulations by the end of 2021. [Editor’s note: the regulations were published on December 25, with public comment open until March 5.] The initial rounds of consultation we did while elaborating the regulations, we received something like 24,000 submissions, which is probably one of the highest number we’ve ever received on anything at Environment Canada. And the overwhelming majority of these comments were in favour of governments doing more to combat plastic pollution. So we will be moving ahead with banning a certain number of single-use plastic items. 

And, rightly so, people are focusing on that, but I think there is also a broader conversation that needs to happen in this country about how we recycle. We’re at roughly nine per cent of plastics being recycled, how do we get to 90 per cent by the end of the decade?

And that work has started, last week at the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment, plastic pollution was on the agenda; How do we better co-ordinate between the federal government, provinces and municipalities to ensure that we have higher levels of recycling to ensure that the plastics that we’re using in this country are not only recyclable but also recycled all across the country, which is not the case right now. So banning certain substances is super important, but we also need to do better on the recycling side. 

This past year, as we all know, B.C. has experienced some of its worst wildfires quickly followed by record disastrous torrential rain, landslides, flooding. Do you have climate adaptation plans for these kinds of issues and similar ones to come elsewhere?

Yes. Well, you know, there are those instances in life where you don’t want to be right and many of us 30 years ago were talking about climate change and talking about upcoming climate impacts and people were saying you’re out to lunch, you’re an alarmist creating problems that are not there. And 30 years ago, scientists with the information that was available, thought that the type of things we’re seeing today would happen in 2050 or something like that, but it’s happening now, unfortunately. 

Fortunately, our government has invested around $4 billion over the last few years in various climate adaptation and resilience programs. That money has started to be deployed. We’ve started investing in nature-based solutions to adapt to climate change. Just west of Montreal the big park we’re doing with the City of Montreal, this park was done interestingly enough using infrastructure dollars. Traditionally in Canada, infrastructure dollars were for concrete and pavement and now we’re using this to build parks that will help us alleviate spring floods. And we’ve done a series of these projects and we will be doing more and more of those. 

More broadly, at the beginning of [2021], we started consultations on a national adaptation strategy. There are five working tables that are composed mainly, at this point, of experts in the field. And the federal government is present at these tables, but we’re not chairing them, it is chaired by experts. We’re looking at different elements of the adaptation, of a national adaptation strategy, infrastructure, human health, resiliency. These consultations are coming to an end soon and then we will start working with provinces, territories and municipalities, Indigenous Peoples too. And it’s deliberately not called a federal adaptation strategy, it’s a national adaptation strategy and we want to have something agreed upon with provinces and other stakeholders, territories by the end of 2022 so that it can guide our work in the coming years. 

The prime minister gave you until March to come up with a plan to meet Canada’s 2030 climate change goals. By the time people read this article, that will be less than three months away. What do you think the hardest part of meeting this goal will be?

I think the work we’re doing right now is some of the hardest work we’ll have to do. … We’ve been able to remove what would otherwise have been 30 million tonnes [of emissions projected for 2030], which is almost equivalent to half of what Quebec emits every year. So our plan is starting to work, but we need to do more and we need to do it faster, clearly. That’s certainly a message we heard during the last election campaign. 

I could talk to you about X measure or that sector, but ultimately, take Clean Fuel Standards for example. We’ve been having public consultations on this for five years. One of the things I told stakeholders when I was in Toronto recently and then in Calgary, one of the things I told the department as well is we don’t have that luxury anymore. We don’t have five years to consult every time we want to introduce a new measure. I told you earlier that my timeline is two years, so in the next two years, more stringent methane regulations, zero emission vehicle standards, net-zero grid by 2035, cap on oil and gas, and obviously phasing out fossil fuels, all of these things must be in place in the coming 18 months. I mean, maybe 2024, but that’s the type of timeframe we have to work with. And it’s going to be tough because, on the one hand, some people are going to criticize us for not giving them enough time to be consulted, but the state of climate change is such that we need to learn to do things faster and that’s certainly true of us as a government, but it’s going to be true of many stakeholders. 

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been criticized for not committing to ending fossil fuel use. His government did commit to ending fossil fuel subsidies by 2023. Photo: Adam Scotti / Prime Minister’s Office

I mean, who knows what’s going to happen by 2100. I think we’ve made a commitment to being carbon-neutral, like most of our trading partners and the vast majority of emitters, by 2050. Some like India have said 2070. Ultimately, what is important is what does the atmosphere see? And if the atmosphere sees less emissions, then we’re succeeding, which is why we’re putting a cap on pollution. 

So your tight timeframe ironically reflects…

Yes, time is not my friend. 

You’ve now been on the job as the environment minister for over a month now. In some of your recent comments to journalists you have stressed that you are still an activist, but that you’re taking on a role as a minister for all Canadians. What kind of compromises have you had to make so far, and how do you justify accepting a job that requires you to make compromises on the positions you took publicly in the past?

Even before coming into politics, I would often compromise. I mean, when you’re with a group of people at Équiterre or Greenpeace, did I get 100 per cent of what I wanted 100 per cent of the time? Of course not. People have different views in terms of how to do things, tactics, strategies, so you compromise. I think the key thing is never to compromise on your values and on what you believe in. As a father of four, I can tell you I never get 100 per cent of what I want and if that’s true in my family, I cannot understand how it could not be true in a country of 38 million people. 

Just a few months into his term, Guilbeault says he’s no stranger to compromising and hearing out opposing viewpoints to find a common ground. Photo: Selena Phillips-Boyle / The Narwhal

So I mean compromises are a part of what it means to live in a society, but you can’t compromise on your values. You can find accommodation on the implementation of things. 

Earlier when we started talking you referenced when I was on stage with premier Notley and the contentious issue for many of us environmentalists who decided to be on stage was the cap on oil and gas. If you recall, the cap was set at a higher level than the level of emissions in those days in Alberta. Some environmentalists really criticized me and others who were on stage saying that the cap was too high and of course I would have preferred a cap that was lower. On the other hand, industry would have preferred a cap that was higher than what they got, but overall I felt that everything that premier Notley was proposing at the time, a price on pollution, phasing out coal, more renewables, more efficiency, the cap, I thought that a higher cap than what I would have wanted was better than no cap at all and the sky being the limit. I’m willing to make those types of compromises. But never about what I believe in. 

Oil Change International released a report last October saying that Canadian fossil fuel producers receive more public funding and renewable energy funding than any other G20 country. And now you’re meant to phase out fossil fuel subsidies by 2023. The governments in Canada have been promising to phase out these types of subsidies ever since former prime minister Stephen Harper signed on to a G20 commitment in 2009. So what makes this time different? 

As you know, the timeline that G20 countries set for themselves to phase out these subsidies is 2025. So when people say you haven’t met that promise, it’s true, but we’re not in 2025 and we’ve decided to do it two years earlier. What’s different? Umm. Well it’s in my mandate letter and the mandate letter of the finance minister. It’s an instruction that the prime minister gave to us, it’s a campaign promise. So not delivering is simply not an option. 

And since we’re talking about Stephen Harper, in 2015 he made a commitment at the G7 to end the use of fossil fuels by 2100. How come Harper was able to make a promise to end fossil fuel use, and Justin Trudeau is avoiding doing that?

As you know, natural resource extraction or usage is largely a provincial jurisdiction. But the Supreme Court in the carbon pricing case clearly stated that when it comes to pollution, and climate change pollution, the federal government has a role to play. It’s not a magic wand that we can wave any way we want. We have to use this power with clairvoyance, but that’s why we’re going after pollution. And then, we’ll see what happens to production. 

Rightly so, when we talk about climate change in Canada, we do talk about oil and gas production, because we’re a large producer, but we also have to look at what we’re doing on the demand side for these products. We’re investing record levels in transit, never in the history of this country have more public transit projects been in the works. Three hundred projects under construction now, about 1,000 in preparation, what we’re doing on electrification, what we’re doing on emissions for light duty vehicles, these measures will have significant impacts on the demand, and the net zero grid by 2035, these will have significant impact on fossil fuel demand in Canada. 

And of course, some would say well, Canadian companies can just export their oil to other countries who aren’t doing those things. Theoretically they could, but the reality is that what we’re doing here in Canada, we’re seeing similar things happening in the U.S. and in Europe and clearly some countries are ahead of us [on electric vehicles], like Norway, but one out of two electric vehicles that are sold in the world is sold in China right now. So my question to these people is who, where will the demand be if all the major economies of the world are reducing their demand for fossil fuels? I think, we, companies and provinces that are highly dependent on these resources need to start thinking and looking at what the world will look like in 10, 15, 20 years from now. To think that the past will guarantee what will happen in the future is not necessarily the most responsible thing for these people to be doing. 

Over the past 20 years, you went to many UN climate summits and often criticized the Canadian government for not doing its fair share on the international stage. What do you think activist Steven Guilbeault in 1997 would have told Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault at the 2021 summit in Glasgow?  

I mean in those days we had no pricing, we had no investment in transit, very little investment to speak of in clean tech, no regulation, certainly no legislation to phase out coal use in Canada by 2030, no regulation on methane, we weren’t doing anything on EVs. If you look at my track record, I’ve never shied away from saying congratulations to a government or a company that I felt deserved it. But, I would also say you’ve got to do better and you’ve got to do it faster. 

Canadian Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault speaks at the Ocean Risk and Resilience Action Alliance roundtable at COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland. Photo: Karwai Tang / UK Government / Flickr

How will the Canada Water Agency and updated Canada Water Act address Indigenous Peoples’ access to clean water, which is something that came up a lot recently in elections?

Well, I mean, I can only answer this at 20,000 feet because we only started working on this, but clearly ensuring that everyone in Canada has access to safe, drinkable, fresh water is a priority. As you know, we’ve managed to lift a little over two thirds of the boil water advisories that were in place when we came into power in 2015, and we’re working to eliminate the others in the coming years. So how exactly will the water agency deal with that is a good question, one that I can’t really answer right now, but certainly Indigenous Peoples will be consulted on the elaboration and the mandate of this agency. 

[Editor’s note: Before his 2015 election, Trudeau promised to end all boil water advisories in Indigenous communities by March 2021.]

There are other former environmental activists that have taken on ministerial roles in government, if we think of Peter Garrett in Australia and Nicolas Hulot in France. When Hulot resigned, I’m sure you know, he said he could no longer keep lying and that he hoped the government would learn something from his resignation. Are there lessons that you take from these people who’ve followed similar paths?

As a Francophone, you can bet that I’ve been asked about Nicolas Hulot about 100 times and I know him. When I was at Équiterre, Équiterre worked with Fondation Nicolas Hulot pour la Nature, certainly at the time I think he was nominated ambassador for the French government in the lead up to Paris in 2015. 

I can’t speak on behalf of Nicolas and I don’t know what were the dynamics within the French government when he was there. He said he felt alone, I certainly don’t feel alone. I mean you now have the natural resource minister, who was environment minister, who was before that minister for fisheries and oceans. You have the minister for fisheries and oceans who used to be the B.C. environment minister and someone who did tree-planting as a living, like as a business, before coming into politics. You look at the mandate letter of pretty much all of my colleagues at the cabinet table and everyone has the responsibility to work on climate change and that was the case in 2019 as well. 

When you look at the 2020 Climate Change plan, the enhanced climate change plan, when you look at the number of ministries and ministers that were involved in this plan, they obviously had environment, natural resources, transportation, finance, economic development, I’m forgetting some I’m sure, international trade, it has become a whole of government approach. Again, I don’t know how things were for Nicolas with the Macron government, but what I can tell you is that I have a lot of allies and I have a lot of support around the cabinet table when I’m trying to move forward legislation or regulation, and that makes a whole difference.

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Environment Minister Steven Guibeault views the next two years as his window to reshape Canada’s climate change policy.
Photo: Selena Phillips-Boyle / The Narwhal

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Milind Tambe and Shriram Kondhawekar are cycling along the Indian coastline covering a distance of about 6,179 kilometres to highlight the ill-effects of single-use plastic

At a time when Indian coasts are battling a tidal wave of plastic pollution, two cyclists from Maharashtra are on a mission to highlight the ill-effects of single-use plastic and its impact on marine life. Naval veteran Milind Tambe, 56, and 49-year old Shriram Kondhawekar are cycling along the Indian coastline covering a distance of about 6,179 kilometres as part of their Indian Coastal Cycling Expedition. The Pedalbums, as they call themselves, started the first leg of their journey from Mumbai last February. The journey had to be halted in Goa due to the second wave of the pandemic. Milind and Shriram resumed their expedition from Goa on November 14 with an aim to complete the remaining three legs of the journey cycling through Kanyakumari, Visakhapatnam, Kolkata and Gujarat before culminating their expedition in Mumbai.“While travelling through the beaches, we came face-to-face with the extent of plastic pollution plaguing our coastline. The beaches are mostly polluted with single-use plastic. Pollution was worse on beaches around urban and semi urban areas, while rural coasts had negligible amounts of single-use plastic,” says Milind during an interaction in Visakhapatnam earlier this week. “We are carrying the little plastic generated along our tour till we find a designated recycling facility. Even today my bag contains used biscuit wrappers and the like, which I will carry with me till I can dispose it off responsibly,” says Milind. “We are against irresponsible disposal of single-use plastic. There are ways to upcycle and that is what we tell whomever we interact with,” adds Shriram.The cyclists’ expedition has been formally recognised by the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports under the Fit India Movement.The duo is cycling with Fuji Touring and Marin Four Corners bikes. “These cycles are made for cycle touring and are capable of carrying heavy loads of the touring setup. Also the frame geometry makes it easy to attach panniers and frame bags on the cycle,” explains Milind.Fitness routine Milind says they are following a high protein and carbohydrate diet during the expedition. The duo’s fitness preparation was taken care of by Fittr, their fitness sponsor. “They analysed our body structure and dietary habits and gave us six months of strength training and endurance building exercises. They also made customized diet plans. This has helped us a lot in this expedition,” says Milind.The cyclists were on the road for 50 days before coming to Visakhapatnam. “We found many good souls along the way. People were very generous and more than willing to help us, be it with finding accommodation, or directions or just general advice,” says Shriram. There were instances where the cyclists had food at small wayside hotels. “The owners, after chatting with us and knowing the objective of our tour, refused to accept money,” recalls Milind.The cyclists have been meeting several cycling groups, who hosted them for dinners and showed them around.Talking about the toughest parts of the expedition, Milind says: “The southern coast from Kanyakumari was one of the most challenging. It is not because of the terrain, but the humid climate that was extremely energy sapping. Being physically fit and mentally strong are of equal importance during long-distance cycling. Determination is all that matters,” he says. As far as the gear is concerned, Milind says having a cycle which you can take apart and reassemble is a vital skill. “Cycles need to be suited for the terrain that you would intend to traverse. We have adopted a minimalist approach in our luggage and carry very little in terms of clothes and other accessories,” he adds.What has been the biggest takeaway from the expedition? “That we have to be adaptive to change, and that we can live with very little. One doesn’t need much to live,” says Milind.

Ocean plastic pollution in North Jakarta, Indonesia. Credit: Yunaidi Joepoet / Getty.

A new, filter-free method of separating microplastics from seawater has been developed in Indonesia.

Researchers in Indonesia have developed an innovative way to remove microplastics from water without the need for expensive filters.

It works, says Dhany Arifianto, an engineer at the Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember in Surabaya, Indonesia, by passing contaminated water through a pipe, while underwater speakers make the pipe vibrate like the sound board of a guitar.

We think of sound in terms of what we can hear. But to an engineer, it’s merely a series of pressure waves.

Normally, we think of sound in terms of what we hear. But to an engineer, it’s merely a series of pressure waves. When contaminated water passes through the pipe, the water, being liquid, simply transmits the tone. But microplastic particles, being solid, feel the pressure differently, and are driven away from it, Arifianto says.

Surround them by the same tone coming from all sides, and the only place for them to go is the centre of the pipe. When the water emerges from the pipe, this concentrated stream of plastic can then be diverted, while the rest of the water, now cleansed, flows on. “That’s basically the principle of our research,” Arifianto says, “the force created by sound.”

It’s an important development, because microplastics are a growing threat, both to humans and the environment.

Microplastics are tiny fragments of plastic, produced as larger pieces degrade. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration classifies them as anything smaller than five millimetres in length. “That’s about half the size of a fingernail clipping,” says Charles Moore, founder of Algalita Marine Research and Education, a nonprofit group in Long Beach, California, that is deeply concerned about ocean plastics.

Microplastics are a growing threat, both to humans and the environment.

Moore is a racing-boat captain who first discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a massive concentration of plastic detritus trapped by currents, when he was sailing from Hawaii to California after a race and found himself surrounded by a sea of plastic trash.

But the big chunks of plastic Moore stumbled across aren’t the only ones polluting the seas. In the ocean, big pieces of plastic break down into smaller ones, which then break down into microplastics, and from there into even smaller bits. “Microplastics don’t stay micro,” Moore says. “They get nano.”

This map shows the location of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Credit: NOAA.

When that happens, he says, they can lodge in tissues of animals that ingest them (including people). “They don’t just pass through, they get absorbed,” he says. “They pass the blood-brain barrier; they lodge in the placenta. They get into brains and change behavior, because the brain is an electrical organ, and plastics are insulators.”

For example, he says, fish exposed to microplastics don’t go as far or spend as much time looking for food as they normally would.

They also contain xenoestrogens: chemicals that behave like artificial oestrogens. One of these is bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical that is on the State of California’s official list of developmental and reproductive toxicants, based on a review of more than 300 scientific studies of its effect on the female reproductive system.

BPA can also have effects on males – enough that a recent review article in Reproductive Biology and Endocrinology provocatively labeled it an “emerging threat to male fertility.”

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Moore adds that it also has behavioral effects, causing male rats to hang out closer to the nest than normal, though it’s not clear if that’s because it is feminising them or simply making them anxious – a factor revealed in other studies.

“They get into brains and change behaviour, because the brain is an electrical organ, and plastics are insulators.”Charles Moore

Arifianto’s sound-based cleanup system is still in its infancy, but in lab tests that were scheduled to be presented at the December 2021 meeting of the American Acoustical Society, in Seattle, Washington, his team was able to filter out nylon fragments to an efficiency of up to 99%, and other microplastics to an efficiency of up to 95%. Although, he told Cosmos after he was stranded in Indonesia by US COVID protocols, those results are for fresh water, which is easier to work with than seawater. For seawater, he says, his team has to date only achieved 58% efficiency.

Fifty-eight percent may not sound like a lot – and it wouldn’t be if the goal was to purify drinking water. But Arifianto’s target is more ambitious. He wants to help clean up the ocean, starting in the waters offshore from Indonesia. For that, even 50% efficiency would be an enormous benefit.

To do this, he envisions an array of sonic scrubbers deployed across the narrow straits between his country’s main islands, through which currents circulating between the Pacific and Indian oceans offer perfect locations in which to intercept a lot of microplastics, especially those originating from Indonesia.

It sounds crazy, but the straits aren’t all that wide (the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra, for example, is only 24 kilometres across at its narrowest point). And plastics float, meaning that the vast majority of them will be in the top five metres of the water column. To collect them, Arifianto envisions an array of sonic pipes stretching across the straits (except for the shipping channels), moored to the bottom so they stay in place and powered by solar cells, wave energy, or perhaps even the temperature gradient from the top to the bottom of their cables. “There is research [on that] in Japan,” he says of the third option.

Arifianto’s target is more ambitious. He wants to help clean up the ocean.

The big problem (other than cost), is likely to be noise pollution. “We are generating audible sound,” he says, “so marine life is going to be affected.”

How badly, he doesn’t know, but the sonic level used in his lab experiments is around 50–60 decibels, which is somewhere between the level of a quiet conversation at home and the buzz of conversation in a busy office. Either way, he says, it’s enough to be “quite audible” and “noticeable at quite a distance”. Figuring out how to deal with that will be a priority in future research.

Moore is skeptical of the idea of trying to clean up the ocean. “It’s just not possible,” he says.

What’s ultimately needed, he believes, is to rethink our use of plastics and become “plastic smart”. Or, as his organisation’s website puts it in a banner headline: “First, we change our relationship with plastic. Then, we change the world.”

Algalita members protesting against ocean plastic pollution. Credit: Algalita.

Arifianto wouldn’t disagree. “I hope I can spread the message that first, we have to stop dumping plastic on the water, whether it’s fresh water or seawater,” he says. “Because it’s going to come back to us in a very harmful way.”

But that doesn’t mean cleanup is useless. “Our work is inspired by the Clean Ocean Project, which put a net in the Pacific to catch ocean garbage.” That was a great idea, he says, but nets can only catch big chunks of plastic. “[So, we thought] how about microplastics?”

Ultimately, Arifianto says, microplastic pollution is a global problem, requiring international efforts. “I hope [our work] is going to reach more people to be aware of the problem and hopefully participate in this global action to clean up.”

Each week, Ghana receives 15 million items of used clothing sent from the West. But 40% of the products get discarded due to poor quality. They end up at landfills and in bodies of water, polluting entire ecosystems.
The Kantamanto market in Ghana’s capital Accra is West Africa’s hub for used clothing from the West. Here, traders hastily sort through piles of clothes daily in order to grab the best bargain. But often, there are more rags than riches. “We didn’t get any good clothing at all,” a trader told DW after one of these hasty routines. Recently, the deliveriesfrom the West have increasingly been focused on so-called fast fashion items. These clothes usually wear out after only a few weeks. To some traders, it is actually an imposition to sift through the,. “The goods that are coming now are really affecting our business,” another trader said, stressing that such cheap items cannot be resold in the local market. Scavenging for quality clothes donated from the West is part of the local economy in Accra Environmental catastrophe in the making While most of these secondhand clothes are typically donated with good intentions from industrialized countries, many have now become an environmental hazard in Ghana and beyond. The OR Foundation, and NGO from the United States, has estimated that about 15 million individual items of used clothing now arrive in Ghana weekly, while 40% end up discarded due to poor quality. With no use for them, the discarded clothing items first end up at landfills and then travel further into the ocean.  Environmental activists say this is a major catastrophe in the making; groups like the Ghana Water and Sanitation Journalists Network (GWJN), are trying to raise awareness about this underreported issue. “Because it is secondhand clothing, some of them wear out very quickly, and then they get thrown all over the place. You get to (the) refuse dump, and you find a lot of them dumped over there,” Justice Adoboe, the national coordinator of the organization, told DW. “You go even near water bodies, you realize that as rainfalls and erosion happen, (they carry) a lot of these second hand clothing wastes towards our water bodies,” Adoboe added, highlighting that because some of the items include toxic dyes, “those who drink from these bodies (of water) downstream might not be drinking just water but chemicals.” Furthermore, the discarded clothing items that are flushed into the sea later get washed back up on the country’s beaches. For UN Goodwill Ambassador Roberta Annan, this is a disaster in the making for marine life: “You can’t take it out. You have to dig. It’s buried. It’s stuck. Some of these clothes are polyester and, I would say, synthetic fabrics that also go into the waterway and choke the fish and marine life in there,” Annan told DW, as she tried to pull some of the clothing out at beach in Accra. Nearly half of all used clothes are thrown away – but the other half provide a lifeline to many Ghanians Finding alterative uses for waste clothing Meanwhile. some fashion designers are looking into finding alternative solutions to this growing problem. Elisha Ofori Bamfo focuses on upcycling discarded secondhand clothes. But even he is not happy with the quality of some of the clothes he found in recent times. Bamfo told DW that it is even difficult to upcycle and recycle some of the second hand clothes that are imported into the country these days: “Sometimes when you go to the market, there are some clothes that can’t be upcycled or can’t be sold,” Bamfo said, adding that local authorities have to take the lead and ensure that only quality secondhand clothing items are imported. Other African nations have indeed taken a more proactive and bold approach – especially on part of authorities and regulations – when it comes to the waste created by secondhand clothing, issuing bans.Rwanda, for example, has banned secondhand clothes imports in 2018 in order to boost its own textile industry. And other nations have followed suit. To ban or not to ban When the coronavirus pandemic emerged in 2020, Kenya also banned the importation of secondhand clothing to prevent the potential spread of the virus. That ban has, however, since been lifted because of its economic impact on people’s livelihoods. Bamfo agrees that in Ghana, an absolute ban on these products would likely also impose extra economic hardship on many people dependant on them: “Thousands of people depend on second hand clothing to survive to feed their families,” he said. Adoboe meanwhile believes that Ghana might indeed benefit from a total ban, but says that there is no political will to see such an initiative through. He believe that until political leaders start to take the impact of these used clothing on the environment seriously, Ghana will continue to remain helpless in this battle against pollution. Roberta Annan, however, is resolute in wanting a quick solution to protect not just the environment but the local fashion industry as well: “The fashion industry actually loses $500 billion a year due to fashion waste.” Annan said. Ghana’s government has remained silent so far on the issue, and there is no sign that it might take any action to deal with the endemic of secondhand clothes and the impact they have on the local textile industry as well as environment. Whenever authorities might want to decide to join the fight against this growing issue, it might perhaps be to late.

Written by Jacqui Palumbo, CNNAfter you finish your fries, eat the ketchup packet. When you add your pasta to boiling water, toss the bag into the pot, too.If these instructions sound confusing to you, it’s only because you haven’t yet heard of Notpla, a London-based startup company that is designing a seaweed-based replacement for single-use plastic packaging. Founded in 2014, the company closed a £10 million ($13.5 million) Series A financing round last month, led by the VC firm Horizons Ventures, to scale and further develop its product line.Notpla’s products are meant to be composted or dissolved after use — though some are edible, too. Current offerings include sachets for condiments, water and even alcohol; a film wrap for products in your pantry or bathroom, like coffee or toilet paper; and takeaway boxes that replace plastic-based coating with seaweed lining to make them fully biodegradable.The Ooho can replace condiment packets and other single-serve liquids, while the seaweed-lined takeaway boxes are fully biodegradable.

Can new year’s resolutions to go vegan and fly less help stop climate change — or are individual lifestyle changes a distraction from real solutions?
Turn off lights. Eat less meat. Walk to work. Fly less. Buy less. Recycle. These are some of the solutions popularized over the last decade in an effort to cut people’s carbon footprints. If those in rich countries were to change their lifestyles, the thinking goes, they would emit fewer gases that act like a greenhouse around Earth, thereby preventing it from heating to ever more deadly levels. That might not sound controversial, but climate activists are increasingly dismissing the focus on personal carbon footprints as a distraction. Many scientists, meanwhile, see tweaking individual lifestyles as a vital step to changing systems. At the heart of the debate is a simple question: how much does anything we do for the climate actually matter? What is a carbon footprint? A carbon footprint is the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere through the actions of an individual, organization or country. The idea of a footprint came from two Canadian researchers in the 1990s as a metaphor for humanity’s impact on the planet. A decade later, oil and gas giant BP took what was still an obscure term to the public. They popularized carbon footprints as part of an estimated $100 million annual marketing campaign. They took out whole-page adverts in newspapers like The New York Times, stuck posters on billboards in airports around the world and ran commercials on TV asking viewers “What size is your carbon footprint?” They created a calculator to let people work it out themselves. In doing so, they shifted responsibility for the damage caused by their products onto the public. At the same time, they and other fossil fuel companies were extracting millions of barrels of oil a day. Talking about a company’s footprint in the same way you talk about a person’s “levels the playing field in a way that’s misrepresentative of the true nature of the climate challenge,” said Geoffrey Supran, a researcher at Harvard University who studies how fossil fuel companies have misled the public on climate change. “The footprint literally personifies greenhouse gas emissions. It brings it down to the scale of a human footprint.” Oil and gas companies have emphasized society’s role in cutting emissions What do cigarettes and plastic have to do with it? Fossil fuel companies promoted the idea of personal carbon footprints and individual action even while lobbying to weaken regulations to limit their pollution. But they weren’t the first industry to do so. As early as the 1970s, the environmental group Keep America Beautiful made adverts that criticized people for littering and encouraged them to recycle. But the organization was funded by corporations churning out plastic bottles who were fighting regulation to address the root of the problem. The tobacco industry then took these tactics further. It distanced itself from the damage that cigarettes cause by downplaying the science and running adverts centered around the idea of an individual’s “freedom to choose.” When companies got taken to court by doctors, they argued that deaths from heart and lung disease were the smokers’ fault for buying their products. A study Supran co-authored in the journal,One Earth found that oil giant ExxonMobil targets individuals while downplaying the reality of climate change.  “These patterns mimic the tobacco industry’s documented strategy of shifting responsibility away from corporations — which knowingly sold a deadly product while denying its harms — and onto consumers,” the authors wrote. Fossil fuel companies have used similar tactics to the tobacco industry Is it the fault of big business? When asked whether the industry is passing blame onto consumers, ExxonMobil told DW it is committed to working to decarbonize high-emitting sectors by investing in technologies that help society achieve a net-zero emissions future. “Ultimately, changes in society’s energy use, coupled with the development and deployment of affordable lower-emission technologies, will be required,” the company wrote in a statement.   Two other fossil fuel companies, BP and Shell, did not respond to a request to comment. But along with French oil giant Total, these four privately-owned companies are indirectly responsible for 11% of the CO2 and methane emissions from burning fossil fuels between 1965 and 2018, according to a September study published in the journal Energy Research & Social Science. Together with state-owned companies in Saudi Arabia, Russia and Iran, just seven companies are behind 20% of emissions. “You and I contribute relatively little to the climate crisis,” said Emily Atkin, a climate journalist who runs a newsletter highlighting hypocrisy in the fossil fuel industry. “Our personal carbon footprints don’t actually matter that much in the grand scheme of climate change.” That feeling is echoed widely. A statistic that holds 100 companies responsible for 71% of CO2 emissions has become a viral rallying cry for people arguing that personal action is useless. But while these companies extract the oil, gas and coal that is used to generate those emissions, the responsibility for burning it is still shared with people who buy their products.  Structural changes make it easier for people to cut their emissions What can individual action achieve? The International Energy Agency projects that 40% of emissions cuts needed to decarbonize the global economy by 2050 will come from policies over which the public has little control — like making more electricity from renewable energy or using cleaner technologies in industry — while just 4% are expected to come from purely personal actions like flying less or walking to work. The remaining 55% comes from changes that need a mix of government action and active consumer choices. That means — with the help of subsidies and advances in technology — buying electric cars, installing a heat pump or better insulating homes.  In rich countries, that would still require enormous changes to lifestyles. A study published in the journal Nature in November found such solutions can cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2050 and improve quality of life at the same time. Plant-based alternatives to meat have become more popular as people try to cut their carbon footprint What’s more, experts say, every action taken to cut emissions has a bigger impact on society than simply shrinking one person’s carbon footprint. The rise of veganism, for instance, has encouraged companies to invest in tastier meat alternatives that make it easier for meat-eaters to choose a plant burger over a steak. Individual action is also not limited to consumer choices: voting and putting pressure on politicians can also trigger policy changes that shift society. People say their actions are a “drop in the ocean” and the system needs to change, said Stuart Capstick, deputy director of the Center for Climate Change and Social Transformation at the University of Cardiff in the UK. “Well, my response to that is how is that system going to change? Systems don’t change unless people push for them to change.” Edited by: Tamsin Walker

This is hardly the time to talk about plastics is what I think when Dad, hovering over the waste bin at a post-funeral potluck, waves me over, his gesture discrete but emphatic. He has retrieved from the trash a crystalline plastic cup, with fluted, rigid sides. “Polystyrene,” he grins, inverting the cup to reveal its resin code (a 6 stamped inside the recycling symbol). “But not my kind.”Dad, back in the 1960s, had manufactured a more resilient variety of polystyrene for Union Carbide, one of the 20th century’s major plastics manufacturers, since acquired by Dow Chemical Company. Now, in the parish hall, I recognize he is seconds from crushing the cup. As if on cue, he closes his grip. Being a certain type of polystyrene—and this is his point—the cup splinters into a strange bloom of shards arrayed about the cup’s circular bottom.No butadiene, I think. “No butadiene,” he says, which, on the production lines he ran, had been added to rubberize the resin, one among 10,000 helpmates that make plastics as we know them possible. Dad shuffles off to find the recycling bin, though he knows the cup has little chance for recovery and likely a long afterlife ahead. This is especially true for polystyrenes, of which there are multiple varieties; plastics, as the anthropologist Tridibesh Dey notes, are a chemically complex lot, designed for performance rather than reclamation.Dad once believed that plastics could be reused indefinitely. I imagine that, maybe, he thought plastics, like their makers, deserved the chance to begin again. When Union Carbide downsized in the 1970s, Dad took severance and stayed home with my siblings until he could figure out what a life beyond plastics might look like. The answer, it turned out, was public administration: For a time, he ran my hometown’s recycling program. Recycling, though, never lived up to Dad’s ideal. Of all the plastics made over his lifetime, less than 10 percent has been effectively repurposed.This failure, like so many other aspects of our relationship with plastics, is often framed in terms of individual shortcomings; plastics’ producers, or the geopolitics that have made plastics so widespread, are rarely called out. But to read plastics’ history is to discover another story: Demand for plastic has been as manufactured as plastics themselves. 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.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.All of this has been true for years, but if there is a time to talk about plastics, now might be it. Plastics are poised to dominate the 21st century as one of the yet-unchecked drivers of climate change.When Dad’s former employer started making plastics in the late 1920s, no market was itching to buy them. But the company, in a sense, had to make plastics.Its new commercial antifreeze, Prestone, was synthesized from natural gas and created a by-product, ethylene dichloride, a chemical that had no practical purpose and so was stockpiled on-site. Quickly, it amassed in unmanageable, “embarrassing” quantities, as one Carbide newsletter later put it. Its best use, the company decided, was in making vinyl chloride monomer, recognized as a carcinogen since the ’70s, but back then a building block for a rascally class of plastics no one had commercialized yet—vinyls.This isn’t an isolated example, but rather an illustration of how product development often unfolds for chemicals and plastics. For Carbide and other 20th-century petrochemical firms, each product required a series of multistep reactions, and each step yielded offshoots. Develop these, and the product lines further branch, eventually creating a practically fractal cascade of interrelated products. Everything that enters the system, explains Ken Geiser, an industrial-chemicals-policy scholar, in his book Materials Matter, must eventually go somewhere; matter being matter, it is neither created nor destroyed. And so it must be converted: made into fuel, discarded as pollution, or monetized. After many iterations, Carbide arrived at Vinylite, finally made workable by blending two types of vinyls: polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and polyvinyl acetate.According to an internal marketing report, Carbide spent years trying to “synthesize” new customers and invent new uses for Vinylite, while a credit department eased the financial burden of adopting it. The company even sent technical teams around the country to teach manufacturers how to use the resin, all with limited success. Celluloid, before Bakelite, and polystyrene afterward, had similar troubles gaining purchase.Then World War II erupted. War contracts expedited the development of emerging resins. For example, the U.S. Navy helped DuPont and Union Carbide secure a license from Britain’s Imperial Chemical Industries to begin manufacturing polyethylene for insulating wire and cable (enabling radar). The Manhattan Project spurred DuPont to industrialize its new fluorinated plastic, what would become Teflon, previously produced in batches measured by the gram rather than the ton. The war also matured existing resins: 32 times more polystyrene was being produced at the war’s end than at its outset.But polystyrene also shared base ingredients with another material crucial to modern, mechanized warfare—styrene-butadiene rubber, or SBR. Rubber made up tank treads. Bomber tires. The soles of the boots that soldiers wore.Left: A sound radar used to detect approaching aircraft, 1949. (Hulton-Deutsch Collection / Corbis / Getty) Right: A worker in the Chrysler Dodge truck plant during World War II, near Detroit, August 1942. (Corbis / Getty)Germany’s colossal IG Farben had already been synthesizing Buna S rubber, its coal-derived version of SBR, when disruption of the natural-rubber trade forced the U.S. to catch up. One American alternative, GR-S, or Government Rubber-Styrene, was developed in a crash course of research and development, wrote the historian Peter J. T. Morris, that rivaled the race for the atom bomb. To keep pace with wartime rubber demand, styrene was produced at levels that seemed “almost unbelievable,” reads a Dow advertisement from the 1940s, especially considering how hard it had been to make previously.Styrene, too, came with risks. Like vinyl chloride monomer, it has the potential to cause cancer. The same was true with synthetic rubber’s other main ingredient: butadiene, yet another monomer later found to be carcinogenic, and a chemical emblematic of how once-discrete industries—petroleum and chemicals—fused into the petrochemical sector.The U.S. found itself caught between two ways of making butadiene. One involved making the chemical from grain alcohol, the other from petroleum. Oil interests vied with the farm bloc over government contracts to feed the new rubber machine. Grain held its own during the war, but afterward, the federally backed petroleum boom routed any possibility of a carbohydrate-dominated chemical-and-plastics industry. Grain harvests were deemed too irregular, too beholden to the seasons, to floods and droughts, and thus to price fluctuations.By the 1950s, the government had sold its wartime rubber factories to private interests. Styrene, as Dow advertised, received its “honorable discharge” so it could “serve a world at peace.” Multiple firms, including Union Carbide, could now make styrene and butadiene in quantities that exceeded what a peacetime rubber industry could consume. The outlet for excess styrene: more polystyrene, some portion of which would later be modified into high-impact grades. Dad’s kind of polystyrene.Photograph by Matthew Porter for The AtlanticPlastics’ postwar “domestication occurred unevenly, by fits and starts,” the cultural historian Jeffrey Meikle writes in his book American Plastic. To whip up demand, the industry as a whole invested heavily in advertising, in fact becoming one of advertising’s biggest clients. At first, it set its sights on women, to teach them plastics’ advantages and how to pronounce what the Society of the Plastics Industry (SPI) admits were their “jaw-breaker” names. (“Polly and Vinny Who?” reads one 1953 pamphlet the SPI co-published with the women’s magazine McCall’s. Why it’s: “Vine-ills and Polly-sty-rene.”) When the industry couldn’t invent new markets with, for example, the Tupperware party, it pushed into established ones by underbidding leather, cotton, glass, and metals. Still, sales were such that, by the mid-1950s, as the plastics scholar Max Liboiron has explained, the industry looked for growth by moving plastics not into homes but through them. The rosy future of plastics was in disposables—or as Modern Packaging Magazine’s editor, Lloyd Stouffer, put it, “in the trash can”—and polystyrene was one of the go-to resins.Soon Scott placed a series of ads in Life magazine featuring what the company called the first throwaway “‘glass’ nice enough for entertaining.” The cup, made from “pure porcelain-smooth polystyrene” was, the copy promised, “absolutely, positively, guaranteed disposable.” By the 1960s, the era my dad made plastics, the military was buying polystyrene again, this time to manufacture the incendiary napalm-B, but packaging and single-use applications were becoming plastics’ largest markets. Production rates were headed “up and up with a vengeance,” wrote an analyst whose sentiments were entered into the 1971 congressional record. At the grocery store, plastics picked off paper item by item: the egg carton, the bread bag, the meat tray, and, eventually though not easily, the grocery sack, says the science writer Susan Freinkel in her book Plastic: A Toxic Love Story.“Consumers,” Meikle explains, “could choose only from among goods presented in the marketplace.” And by the closing decades of the 20th century, what was on offer was plastic.In my office, polystyrene cups of many shapes, sizes, grades, and hues line my bookshelf. All were gifts from Dad, who has the admittedly obscure habit of bringing them over. To toss them feels unbearable, and recycling, uncertain.It can be hard to visualize the web that connects commonplace cups to the interlocking global crises of toxics, environmental injustice, and climate change, and even harder to locate where to intervene. True, some plastics make goods and vehicles more lightweight and thereby efficient. And plastic components help make up technologies that capture and distribute renewable energy. But by comparison, more than 40 percent of plastics now goes into containers, cups, packaging, and other short-term-use products. Despite encouragements to refuse disposables when possible and to #bringyourown, most people in most cases have little say over the volume of plastic packaging in their lives. In some places, a sizable proportion of discardable plastics (for example, sachets) has become largely unavoidable, especially in rural and remote regions where alternatives can be either inaccessible or unaffordable.From Life magazine, 1955. A family tossing paper cups, plates, aluminum-foil pans, lunch trays, straws, and napkins through the air, illustrating how society has turned into a disposable society with throwaway products. (Peter Stackpole / The Life Picture Collection / Shutterstock)Moreover, plastics’ ubiquity isn’t always that visible. Google can lining and drain cleaner and watch for yourself how, once a soda or beer can is submerged in drain cleaner, the cleaner digests the metal layer, leaving a clear, plastic sleeve behind. Or better yet: Soak your next takeout paper coffee cup in a bowl of water. The paper will slough off, revealing the thin layer of polyethylene within.By the early 1970s, 15 states were already considering how to limit the rapid proliferation of plastic containers. The industry shifted from promotion to self-defense. Industry groups stymied New York City’s attempt at a two-cent bottle tax, and in the following decade beat back restrictions in nearby Suffolk County on polystyrene cups and other tossable plastics. Industry trade groups have even lobbied for states to preempt bans on plastic bags. And whenever public-opinion polls suggested slippage, or if the threat of public regulations loomed, industry and its trade associations upped their ad buys.At no other juncture in its history, though, has plastics faced the scrutiny it does now. This past March, two Democratic members of Congress introduced legislation to address plastic pollution. At least two-thirds of United Nations member states (including, recently, the United States) support negotiations toward a binding treaty to address plastics’ global implications. And this month, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine called on U.S. producers to reduce the volume of plastics entering commerce and, by extension, the environment. Even my dad has been involved in a push to introduce a municipal ban on disposable polystyrene.All of these efforts call into question plastics’ unfettered production, but there’s another reason, too, to address plastics now—the industry’s carbon-intensive production is driving climate change.Plastics has been an adaptable industry, at first forming products from raw materials such as gutta-percha and wood pulp, and then from other industries’ discards, including cotton linters, agricultural waste, and the remnant gases emitted from city gas plants or steel’s coal-to-coke ovens. Plastics are now made in a highly integrated network of refineries, crackers, and petrochemical plants—complexes that have been retrofitted or relocated to better tap new or different oil and gas deposits. Today, 98 to 99 percent—that is to say, most plastics—are manufactured from fossil fuels.Historically, fossil-carbon feedstocks have been something of a distorted market, given the number and variety of government subsidies: assistance with technology transfer, tax breaks, grants, soft loans, price controls, and, as described here, wartime contracts—which has shaped plastics’ pricing and production in turn. The plastics industry hasn’t had to account for the true costs of its operations, either, including the price of what it has burned, drummed, dumped, lagooned, landfilled, injected, spilled, incinerated, sent up the stack, or drained out the outfall pipe.But the nature of petrochemicals issued its own economic imperative. Plastics had to be a high-volume product to recoup the substantial capital investments necessary to build and then operate such complex facilities, among the largest, most expensive, and most energy-intensive in the process and manufacturing sectors. Yet again, the same problem: more plastics that need more uses and more markets.The U.S. “fracking boom,” or what’s been called the “shale revolution,” has fueled plastics’ most recent expansion. Fracking has made the U.S. the world’s largest producer of oil and gas, resulting in “a glut,” Kathy Hipple, a senior research fellow at the Ohio River Valley Institute, told me. This oversupply of feedstock drove another round of investments in plastics plants, which in turn, Hipple explained, has forced an excess of plastic packaging onto the market—more than demand can absorb. These plastics, now primarily polyethylenes and polypropylenes made from natural-gas liquids, have reduced polystyrene to a minor player in the packaging and disposables market—about 2 percent. Tongue in cheek, I’ve taken to calling plastics’ latest output “frackaging.”But the economics of plastics is once again changing. As energy and transportation shift away from fossil fuels, plastics seem to many oil and gas producers like one of the few opportunities to keep growing, to keep going. Some new “mega-plants,” such as China’s Zhoushan Green Petrochemical Base, convert crude oil, rather than refinery by-products, directly into chemicals and plastics.And this is (partly) how plastics would come to produce a greater share of the world’s carbon emissions. Should U.S. plastics production continue to grow as the industry projects, by 2030, it will eclipse the climate contributions of coal-fired power plants, concludes Jim Vallette, the lead author of a new Beyond Plastics report. Or, by another measure, the current growth trajectory means that by 2050, the industry’s emissions could eat up 15 percent, and potentially more, of the global carbon budget. How much varies by feedstock and type of plastic, but on average, 1.89 metric tons of carbon-dioxide equivalents (a composite measure of greenhouse gases) is produced for every metric ton of plastic made.Emissions stem from upstream fossil-fuel production and processing. But there are concerns, too, about the potential for even more emissions at the other end of the life cycle, should states green-light industry proposals to expand such carbon-intensive waste-management technologies as incineration, refuse-derived fuels, and molecular, chemical, and so-called advanced recycling. These unproven technologies use high heat and other methods to convert waste into feedstocks for making more plastics. As of now, such technologies shift “the landfill from the ground to the sky,” says Yobel Novian Putra, who works on Asia Pacific climate and energy policy for the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, which in turn has implications for both air quality and climate.But petrochemical production itself is also energy-intensive—among the top-two energy users in the manufacturing sector. Even if the industry were to convert to low-carbon energy sources (or to adopt problematic carbon-capture-and-storage, or CCS, technologies), plastics would remain a significant emitter of climate-relevant gases, according to analysts from the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL).Yet to date, climate policy has not focused on manufacturing or plastics. And too often plastics’ proliferation can seem of secondary importance as climate disasters accelerate. But plastics and climate aren’t separate issues. They are structurally linked problems, and also mutually compounding, with plastics’ facilities spewing climate-relevant emissions and extreme weather further dispersing plastic into the environment. Research is under way to study their interaction—the way, say, thermal stress affects how species respond to toxic exposures. But they have the same root. “Plastic is carbon,” fossil fuels in another form, CIEL’s president, Carroll Muffett, told me. Or, as the geographer Deirdre McKay phrases it, plastic is climate change, just in its solid state.Scientists are still learning how deep the layers of damage may go—how climate-altering gases waft from sun-drenched plastics, how plankton take up microplastics, which may well be altering their capacity to supply oxygen and sequester industrial carbon, pulling it down and away and into the sea. “Research into these [climate] impacts is still in its infancy,” according to a report published by CIEL and several other groups, “but early indications that plastic pollution may interfere with the largest natural carbon sink on the planet should be cause for immediate attention and serious concern.”And so I think back to that funeral, recall the cup in hand, the waves of grief. As wildfires spark, as their smoke wafts across continents, as waters rise and shorelines recede, amid droughts and deluge, cancers and extinctions, deadly heat and deadly pandemics, it might not seem like the right time to talk about plastics—about the excess of war-matured, throwaway plastics foisted onto society that can now be found everywhere, anywhere. But it is. And the world doesn’t have a moment to waste.