A group of 24 U.S. senators and representatives are calling on the Biden administration to set legal standards to reduce plastic pollution at home and abroad.

---

The letter, sent on December 20, points to the recently introduced “Protecting Communities from Plastics Act” bill, which would require a mandatory reduction in single-use plastics, address pollution in environmental justice communities by pausing plastic facilities’ permitting and implementing stricter rules for current petrochemical plants, and would invest in research to better understand the human health impacts of plastic production and waste.

The bill, sponsored by Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA) and Rep. Alan Lowenthal (D-CA), builds upon the Break Free from Plastic Pollution Act, which was introduced in 2020. The four lawmakers also spearheaded the letter to President Biden, which was co-signed by 20 others, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).

“These types of actions show leadership and demonstrate that the U.S. is eager and supportive of policies that will meaningfully reduce plastic pollution,” the lawmakers wrote in the letter to President Biden.

The U.S. is the top consuming country of plastic and is one of the “leading drivers of this crisis,” they write.

The building blocks of almost all plastic items on the planet are little lentil-sized petrochemical-derived pellets, called nurdles, that are melted together and shaped to create larger plastic products. These nurdles are the raw material for making water bottles, automobile parts, food containers and countless other products we use in daily life.

These pellets pose a huge pollution problem long before they are turned into the products we know and use — littering beaches, absorbing and accumulating bacteria from seawater, smothering seagrass meadows and being mistaken as food by marine animals. Yet this pollution is entirely preventable, according to a recent report by the international conservation organization Fauna & Flora International (FFI).

According to Tanya Cox, FFI marine plastics senior technical specialist, the group worked collaboratively with a broad range of academics, trade associations, corporations, NGOs and policymakers to identify different sources of microplastic pollution. They aimed to identify potential improvements in policies and practices through mandatory measures that can help eliminate the pollution sources by preventing pellet loss at all stages of the supply chain.

Plastic pellets are a significant source of microplastic pollution around the globe, accumulating on beaches and coastlines, breaking down into tiny bits from weathering and destabilizing ecosystems. Yet nurdles are not paid enough attention in discussions of plastic pollution, the report stated.

Coastal countries are particularly vulnerable to cargo vessel nurdle spills, Cox said, because global shipping routes pass close to coastlines. In 2021, the cargo ship MV X-Press Pearl caught fire off the coast of Sri Lanka carrying more than 1,600 metric tons of plastic pellets. The pellets that were spilled, in what is now considered s the largest spill on record, contaminated not only the waters around Sri Lanka, but also far-away shores where ocean currents carried these billions of pellets.

“If there’s another incident like the X-Press Pearl, any neighboring state is vulnerable to the impact that pellet pollution has once it is in the environment,” Cox said.

According to the report, plastic pellets contain toxic additives; they absorb and accumulate bacteria and environmental pollutants from the water in which they float. These contaminants impact biodiversity, marine life and human health.

Frequently, the small pellets are mistaken for food by marine animals. Once ingested, the contaminants act as a “poison pill” for sea life. It is suspected that pellets are harming species across the taxonomic spectrum, the report stated. They are eaten by a wide variety of marine life, from zooplanktons — which are at the base of the marine food web — to migratory birds, sea turtles and mammals such as seals. Microplastics are now ubiquitous: They’re in the food we eat, the water we drink and even the air we breathe. The full potential impact of plastic pollutants on human bodies, however, is still currently being studied.

“This is a preventable source of pollution that is beyond the immediate control of the consumers,” Cox said. “It’s not something that the public can necessarily eliminate by changing their behavior in the same way that plastic bag pollution can be tackled.”

In general, individuals can address the overall plastic pollution problem by reducing plastic bag use or  shifting to more environmentally friendly alternatives. But individuals can do little to reduce plastic pellet pollution since nurdles are leaked into the environment at various stages along the industrial supply chain — before plastic products are made and before consumers buy them.

To end plastic pellet pollution, the FFI report called for a “robust, coordinated regulatory approach from industry, governments, and the International Maritime Organization (IMO).” Pellet pollution is a global challenge and all countries must commit to mandatory measures that prevent pellet loss and spills on land and at sea, Cox said.

“In order to fully tackle this problem, there has to be complementary, coordinated legal measures that require companies to do everything they can to prevent plastic pellet loss,” she said.

Plastic in the Philippines

The Philippines is one of the largest contributors of plastic pollution to Earth’s oceans. It is an archipelagic country, composed of more than 7,000 islands and many densely populated coastal urban areas, where huge amounts of mismanaged plastic waste enter into waterways, estuaries, ports — winding up on beaches and in the sea.

According to a 2020 research paper, marine biodiversity across the entire archipelago is under threat due to microplastics ingested by aquatic organisms. The study found that sardines in the Philippines’ major fisheries are very vulnerable to microplastic pollution; approximately 85% of the sardines examined at various catch landing sites contained microplastics in their stomachs.

Still, studies and baseline data on microplastics in the Philippines are scant. A 2020 research paper by two of the country’s leading microplastics researchers noted that small amounts of plastic pellets were found in surface water at five river mouths in Manila Bay, possibly due to nurdles and microbeads used as cleansing agents leaking from manufacturing facilities.

According to environmental engineer Ezra Osorio, one of the study authors, these pellets — even though detected in low quantities — can still impact marine biota through ingestion and contribute to global plastic pollution.

Although plastic pellets in those river mouths were not as abundant as secondary microplastics — tiny particles derived from fragmented larger plastics — Osorio said the finding is still significant because the pellets are not leaked from households, but rather coming from industries making or using the pellets.

“The detection of the plastic pellets in the major rivers draining to Manila Bay shows the occurrence of microplastics in waterbodies in the Philippines and the potential contribution of the industry to the microplastic leakage to the environment,” said Osorio.

Osorio’s suggestion was similar to those found in the FFI report. He said a legal framework was needed to regulate and prevent plastic pellet spills into the environment — requiring proper management in the collection, transportation, manufacturing and disposal of pellets.

He recalled, during one of his visits to a recycling plant, seeing pellet residue washed away in a cleaning process that would no doubt end up in sewers. Since there is no sewage treatment to filter that water, those pellets ultimately end up in rivers, estuaries and the ocean.

It is important for people to be aware and care about the plastic pollution issue, Osorio said, because these are now known contaminants. While the effects on people are still being studied, plastics pose a potential threat to human health via the foods we eat, including fish.

How do plastic pellets leak into the environment?

Plastic pellet pollution results from both chronic and acute loss, according to the FFI report. Chronic losses are small in scale — such as pellets leaking from poorly sealed sacks that are easily ripped or punctured during manual and mechanical handling — while acute losses involve a larger number of pellets entering the environment in one go.

“They were being spilled in large quantities at different points in the supply chain. Because of general lack of awareness and understanding of the risk of impact, there’s not enough attention on proper handling,” Cox said.

Whether small-scale or large-scale, these leaks and spills all contribute to pellet pollution occurring on both land and at sea.

According to the report, land-based plastic pellet pollution generally occurs during the production, transport and conversion supply chain stages, wherever and whenever there is careless handling, poor training and limited awareness of impact.

Sea-based plastic pellet pollution can happen during maritime transport, when damaged or improperly sealed containers and unsecured containers fall overboard, the report stated. It can also happen during maritime disasters as with the MV X-Press Pearl.

Once in the environment, plastic pellets are costly, time-consuming and difficult to retrieve and clean up. Thus, they’ll likely remain in the environment doing harm for at least hundreds of years.

Preventive measures, said Cox, are the same regardless of the volume of pellets being handled. The bottom line is to institute safety measures all along the supply chain to ensure fewer pellets reach the environment.

How can plastic pellet pollution be prevented?

Despite growing evidence documenting the sheer scale of global plastic pellet pollution, attempts to prevent losses and minimize impacts have been limited, as efforts are voluntary and mainly focus on land-based sources, Cox said.

The FFI report outlined pellet loss prevention recommendations that should be applied by industries, governments and the IMO to address the issue across land and sea and at every stage of the supply chain.

The first recommendation: Put regulations in place to tackle pellet pollution on land. FFI urged that all companies handling plastic pellets, regardless of company size or location, be legally required to provide independent, third-party verification that pellet loss prevention measures are implemented and maintained. Moreover, the prevention measures must be monitored for effectiveness at every stage of the supply chain. Standards and certification schemes should meet minimum requirements established in legislation.

The second recommendation addressed a need for improved packaging and labeling of pellets for transport. Legislation should stipulate the use of improved packaging that is resistant to impact, tear and degradation. Moreover, improved communication throughout the supply chain to reduce risk of chronic and acute pellet loss should be done by displaying clear warning labels indicating that the contents are dangerous goods and harmful to aquatic environments.

The third recommendation would put regulations in place to curb sea-based sources of pellet pollution. The report enumerated three key measures that the IMO should take to ensure pellet loss at sea is minimized: Legally classify pellets as marine pollutants, develop standardized disaster response protocols to aid containment and clean-up of future shipping disasters and establish clear protocols or guidance related to liability and compensation claims in the event of accidental loss.

Some additional measures that should be explored by the IMO, according to FFI, included introduction of minimum requirements for the maintenance of pellet containers and legal limits on the volume of loose pellets transported within containers.

According to the report, these recommendations would allow “the global community to vastly reduce the quantity of pellets” entering the world’s oceans, both through chronic spills and during maritime disasters. It would also ensure that maritime disasters involving plastic pellets were dealt with rapidly and effectively.

Cox said the IMO is exploring options for mandatory measures to eliminate pellet loss from ships. Meanwhile, the European Union is considering mandatory policy requirements for companies handling pellets to prevent loss to the environment.

Additionally, the U.N. Environment Assembly has adopted a landmark resolution to develop the world’s first Global Plastics Treaty that would aim to end plastic pollution through a legally binding international instrument that addresses the full life cycle of plastic, including its production, design and disposal.

“I think that the world is committed to start negotiating the Global Plastics Treaty — looking at tackling plastic pollution at all stages of its life cycle,” Cox said. “We all have a duty to do everything that can be done to prevent plastic pollution.”

According to Cox, dealing with pellet pollution is among the “low-hanging fruit” within a much bigger challenge of tackling global plastic pollution.

“This is an issue and a significant source of microplastic pollution, but it is a preventable one,” she said. “So let’s take steps today to prevent it while we deal with how to solve the other challenges.”

Banner image: An Atlantic grey seal (Halichoerus grypus) on a beach littered with plastic pellets in Norfolk, England, in January 2019. Image courtesy of Ed Marshall/Fauna & Flora International.

Related reading:

In ocean biodiversity hotspots, microplastics come with the currents

Citations:

Fauna & Flora International. (2022). Stemming the tide: putting an end to plastic pellet pollution. Retrieved from https://www.fauna-flora.org/app/uploads/2022/09/FF_Plastic_Pellets_Report-2.pdf

Tanchuling, M. A., & Osorio, E. D. (2020). The microplastics in Metro Manila rivers: Characteristics, sources, and abatement. The Handbook of Environmental Chemistry, 405-426. doi:10.1007/698_2020_659

Palermo, J.D.H., Labrador, K.L., Follante, J.D., Agmata, A.B., Pante, M.J.R., Rollon, R.N., & David, L.T. (2020). Susceptibility of Sardinella lemuru to emerging marine microplastic pollution. Global Journal of Environmental Science and Management, 6(3): 373-384. doi:10.22034/gjesm.2020.03.07

In 2015, an anonymous user posted a video on YouTube titled “Kill the K-cup.” In shaky footage, the video shows a city overrun by a monster composed of coffee capsules, interspersed with warnings that there are enough K-cups to circle the Earth more than 12 times. “Kill the K-Cup before it kills our planet,” the video warns. After the release of the video, the inventor of Keurig’s K-Cups admitted that he “feels bad sometimes” about creating coffee pods, given their environmental impact.

Coffee capsules are now ubiquitous. By 2025, the global market for the K-Cup and other kinds of coffee capsules is expected to be worth more than $29 billion. More than 40% of U.S. households owned a coffee pod machine in 2020, and in the U.K., the statistics are similar. Coffee capsules are popular in Europe and North America, but research predicts they are likely to spread to markets in Asia next, particularly China and South Korea.

The market for coffee capsules is growing, and waste grows with it. The global footprint of coffee capsule waste is about 576,000 metric tons — the combined weight of about 4,400 school buses. Responding to pressure from environmental campaigns like “Kill the K-Cup,” coffee companies have developed new capsules to move away from plastic, like Nespresso’s aluminum capsules and compostable fiber pods. But progress to ensure that coffee capsules don’t contribute to more pollution is still moving at a glacial pace.

‘A lie built upon a lie’

Keurig, the company responsible for producing K-cups, announced in 2021 that it had converted all its pods from a kind of plastic that’s nearly impossible to recycle to polypropylene, which is recyclable. Consumers are asked to peel the lid off a used capsule, empty the coffee grounds, and deposit the plastic capsules into their recycling bins, which, depending on where they live, are then sent to local recycling facilities. In small print, Keurig adds an important clarification: “check locally, not recycled in all communities.”

The problem is that while some people might put their coffee capsules in their recycling bins, most recycling facilities, called material recovery facilities, or MRFs, are not equipped to sort items smaller than 7.5 centimeters (3 inches). According to a new report by Greenpeace, only one MRF in the U.S. accepts coffee pods made out of polypropylene.

Halo, a competitor of Keurig that sells compostable coffee capsules, estimates that 39,000 capsules are produced every minute globally, and up to 29,000 of these end up in landfills — what it calls an “insane” state of affairs. Small plastics like coffee pods, according to some estimates, can take up to 500 years to decompose in landfills, where they leach chemicals into land and water. In Brazil, only 11% of used capsules were sent to recycling facilities in 2017; while in Hamburg, Germany, coffee pods were banned in 2016 to limit waste and pollution.

Keurig says on its website that through testing with MRFs, it found that small plastics can be recovered, and their tests demonstrate that pods are not too small to be sorted with other plastic containers. Howard Hirsch, a public interest lawyer in California, says that “Big Plastic” — the fossil fuel companies that produce plastic — have sold people on the lie that companies don’t need to keep burning fossil fuels to create new plastics, and that old plastics can be recycled to create new products. “The whole thing is just a lie built upon a lie,” Hirsch says.

In a recent settlement of a class-action lawsuit, Keurig Green Mountain has agreed to pay $10 million to settle the claim that Keurig misled consumers to believe its K-cup pods are recyclable. While Keurig did not admit to anything wrong, as part of the settlement it has agreed to revise its labeling for K-Cup pods, which will now say in larger font: “Check Locally — Not Recycled in Many Communities.”

“We can’t say we won on the merits of the case,” says Hirsch, the lawyer who brought the class-action lawsuit on behalf of consumers in the U.S. “But we can claim victory in so far as we got Keurig to improve the labeling of the products and put up $10 million. I think it sends a strong message to other companies that they should be truthful and accurate in the way they describe the recyclability of their products.”

In early 2022, Keurig Canada also agreed to pay a C$3 million ($2.2 million) penalty for “making false or misleading claims that its single-use K-Cup pods can be recycled.” Keurig did not respond to requests for an interview for this article.

The European Union proposed a new set of rules in November 2022 to drastically cut packaging waste, including coffee pods. The new rules, which still have to be approved by the EU member states and the European Parliament, will require that all packaging be designed in a recyclable way, and companies should ensure it is “recycled at scale“ in reality by 2035.

Are aluminum capsules the answer?

In a paid commercial for Nestlé’s Nespresso brand, George Clooney claims “the sustainability program with Nespresso is surpassed by no one … if you are responsible and want to participate in truly recycling, it’s very easy to do.”

To appeal to eco-friendly consumers, companies like Nespresso started selling aluminum coffee capsules. Nespresso offers recycling bags that coffee drinkers can mail back to Nespresso’s boutiques or their own recycling facility, where it ostensibly “goes back into the aluminum value chain.”

In the U.S., Nespresso teamed up with the New York City Department of Sanitation and Sims Municipal Recycling so New Yorkers can deposit their Nespresso capsules in their curbside recycling bins. It’s a selling point for Nespresso, but it’s difficult to verify the claims of sustainability.

City contractor Sims runs an MRF in Brooklyn that sorts residential recyclable waste, the stuff that New Yorkers put in blue recycling bins. The city sends all the recyclables from homes and public schools to the facility, which is situated rent-free in an old New York Police Department compound. The facility hums with the sound of breaking glass and a sea of moving metal, plastic and waste being shuffled and sorted together.

Kara Napolitano, the outreach and education coordinator at Sims Municipal Recycling, says the facility has used the $1.2 million from Nespresso to develop specialized equipment that can both sort the small aluminum capsules from other waste and remove coffee grounds in the capsules using a shredder. For smelters to buy used aluminum, coffee grounds need to be separated from the aluminum capsules.

Since coffee capsules are smaller than 5 cm (2 in), the company says, they get mixed with the glass recovery stream. This waste stream is sent to a glass-processing facility where glass is separated using optical sorters, and specialized equipment such as an eddy current separate non-ferromagnetic metals like aluminum.

Small plastic pods are not recycled. “No one will buy small plastics, so we can’t invest in a sore thumb,” Napolitano says. The company declined requests to visit the glass facility where it says the aluminum capsules are sorted, nor did it share data on how many aluminum capsules are being captured.

“We don’t have public information on that data … I wonder if Nespresso will share this data at some point,” Napolitano adds.

Nespresso says its global recycling rate for capsules at the end of 2020 was 32%. But these estimates are not independently verified.

Nespresso denied requests for interviews and visits to the facility that recycles capsules. Nespresso also did not provide statistics about its most recent recycling rate for aluminum coffee capsules. James Hoffman, author of “The World Atlas of Coffee,” has described Nespresso as “a black box of a company.”

“The back end of recycling systems is non-transparent,” says Jan Dell, independent chemical engineer and founder of The Last Beach Cleanup, a nonprofit that seeks to end plastic pollution. “Companies should be required to prove that products are actually being recycled before they claim recyclability.”

Which is better: coffee pods or drip coffee?

Coffee companies like Nespresso and Keurig often refer to assessments that suggest the environmental impact of capsules is lower than drip or filter coffee. Greenhouse gas emissions, water and fertilizer use occur primarily where coffee is grown. Brewing coffee can be energy-intensive, especially if people make more coffee than necessary or keep their pot warm for a long time. This is why, according to research commissioned by Nespresso and conducted by Quantis, an environmental consultancy, drip coffee fares worse.

“What the studies show is that the capsule or the packaging is only a small part of the impact,” says Sebastien Hubert, scientific director at Quantis. “The biggest source of impact is producing the coffee. The public perception is often focused on the packaging because that’s what people see in the garbage. There is a cognitive bias … people underestimate the impact of agriculture and overestimate the impact of packaging.”

Scientific literature is divided on the issue. Some peer-reviewed research argues that farming, brewing and packaging of coffee are the most energy intensive processes. But other research also suggests that production and packaging of aluminum or plastic capsules can have higher environmental impacts compared to French press or drip coffee. Another study looking at data from Campinas and São Paulo states in Brazil found that aluminum and plastic capsules use the most energy and water, and generate the most waste compared to other ways of brewing coffee.

Waste and disposal of coffee packaging have significant impacts on carbon footprint. Research looking at coffee consumption in Thailand found that disposal of coffee and its packaging also affects toxicity in freshwater and marine ecosystems. Scientists say there aren’t enough studies or solutions that look at what to do with used coffee capsules, at least in relation to recycling and environmental impact.

Alfred Hill, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Bath, U.K., says there is a lack of data on the merits of coffee capsules over other forms of brewed coffee, based on his research. “There were some preliminary results, but nothing has been peer reviewed or published,” Hill tells Mongabay in an email. “At present there is simply not enough data to assert any claims.”

According to Hubert, life cycle assessments are mostly focused on greenhouse gas emissions, but other impacts matter too. Coffee capsules are made from virgin aluminum. It can take twice as much energy to produce aluminum as opposed to plastic. Mining the bauxite ore to produce aluminum has significant negative impacts. Producing a ton of aluminum can generate 10 to 12 tons of waste, including 3 tons of toxic red mud. Aluminum mining is also associated with human rights violations, deforestation, pollution and poverty in the Brazilian Amazon, Papua New Guinea, India, and elsewhere.

Nespresso did not comment on how many of its capsules are currently produced using recycled aluminum.

The future of coffee pods

While aluminum and plastic capsules remain the most popular containers, compostable coffee pods have entered the market, which some scientists view as a positive step. Compostable coffee pods can be made from plant fibers (like sugarcane bagasse), bamboo or paper — all biodegradable material that people can send to a municipal composting facility or throw in a compost pile at home. Research finds that compostable coffee pods are the least harmful, compared to aluminum and plastic capsules.

But compostable coffee pods are not an easy panacea to the waste problem. Not every industrial composting facility is equipped to deal with biodegradable packaging. Reusable pods are another option, but people prefer the convenience of single-use pods.

Hubert suggests buying organic coffee, reducing energy use while making coffee, and pressuring companies to recycle are the best ways for consumers to influence the industry.

Piotr Barczak, a circular economy expert at the European Environmental Bureau, a network of 180 environmental citizens’ organizations, says focusing on consumer action is the wrong approach.

“It’s not correct to blame consumers for emissions or wastage,” Barczak says. Coffee companies could incentivize people who return capsules for recycling through a refundable deposit fee, he suggests. “These companies benefit from a lack of governance, [weak] environmental policies, a lack of enforcement, and they make huge profits — at the expense of both the environment and people.”

“Companies shouldn’t be making these things, period,” says Dell, the chemical engineer. “They need to innovate better solutions and better material … like fiber and paper.”

Citations:

Maciejewski, G., & Mokrysz, S. (2020). New trends in consumption on the coffee market. Scientific Journals of the Warsaw University of Life Sciences, European Policies, Finance and Marketing, 22(71), 132-143. doi:10.22630/PEFIM.2019.22.71.31

Marinello, S., Balugani, E., & Gamberini, R. (2021). Coffee capsule impacts and recovery techniques: A literature review. Packaging Technology and Science, 34(11-12), 665-682. doi:10.1002/pts.2606

Domingues, M. L. B., Bocca, J. R., Fávaro, S. L., & Radovanovic, E. (2020). Disposable coffee capsules as a source of recycled polypropylene. Polímeros, 30(1). doi:10.1590/0104-1428.05518

Hassard, H., Couch, M., Techa-erawan, T., & McLellan, B. (2014). Product carbon footprint and energy analysis of alternative coffee products in Japan. Journal of Cleaner Production, 73, 310-321. doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2014.02.006

Brommer, E., Stratmann, B., & Quack, D. (2011). Environmental impacts of different methods of coffee preparation. International Journal of Consumer Studies, 35(2), 212-220. doi:10.1111/j.1470-6431.2010.00971.x

de Figueiredo Tavares, M. P., & Mourad, A. L. (2020). Coffee beverage preparation by different methods from an environmental perspective. The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, 25(7), 1356-1367. doi:10.1007/s11367-019-01719-2

Phrommarat, B. (2019). Life cycle assessment of ground coffee and comparison of different brewing methods: A case study of organic arabica coffee in northern Thailand. The Environment and Natural Resources Journal, 17(2), 96-108. doi:10.32526/ennrj.17.2.2019.16

Kooduvalli, K., Vaidya, U. K., & Ozcan, S. (2020). Life cycle assessment of compostable coffee pods: A US university based case study. Scientific Reports, 10(1). doi:10.1038/s41598-020-65058-1

Soares, A. P. S., Mothé, C. G., & Mothé, M. G. (2021). Comparative life cycle assessment of coffee capsule recycling process and its composites reinforced with natural fibers. Journal of Polymers and the Environment, 30(4), 1380-1390. doi:10.1007/s10924-021-02282-4

Tonelli, A., Mosna, D., & Vignali, G. (2018). Comparative life cycle assessment of different packaging systems for coffee capsules. Proceedings of the 4th International Food Operations and Processing Simulation Workshop (FoodOPS 2018), 1-9. doi:10.46354/i3m.2018.foodops.001

Samoggia, A., & Riedel, B. (2018). Coffee consumption and purchasing behavior review: Insights for further research. Appetite, 129, 70-81. doi:10.1016/j.appet.2018.07.002

Feedback: Use this form to send a message to the editor of this post. If you want to post a public comment, you can do that at the bottom of the page.

Banner image: A selection of Nespresso coffee capsules. Image by Wany Bae via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).

Most of the “recyclable” plastic we all use ends up in the landfill. Its a logistics and economics problem. There needs to be a better way to handle this massive waste stream. A company called CRDC Global may have a viable solution.

Plastics play a wide range of crucial roles in modern society, but they also represent a major waste disposal challenge. Particularly when it comes to consumer packaged goods (CPG) the practical reality is that only a small fraction of the plastic is actually recycled, and a great deal ends up going to landfills or to even more undesirable “end of life” scenarios such as incineration or release into the environment. The problem was exacerbated in 2018 when China stopped accepting this waste for hand sorting. There are many positive strategies being implemented to deal with this waste crisis including better collection in the developing world, decomposable alternative materials, and fully sorted collection of plastics at the business-level. There is also a new technology based on hyperspectral imaging which can differentiate the various clear or plastics based on how they “look” at light wavelengths outside of the visible range.

There is another innovative alternative that is gaining momentum because it addresses the sorting challenge and also provides a positive value proposition. CRDC Global has developed a way to turn mixed plastic waste into a synthetic lightweight aggregate, a substitute for the sand used in making concrete and asphalt. This option benefits from a geographic alignment between where plastic waste is generated and where most construction is underway – major population centers. From a business perspective this is a push/pull scenario – the CPG industry needs a plastic waste solution, and the construction industry needs an alternative to sand.

If you look on the bottom or side of “recyclable” plastic containers there is a number between 1 and 7. In terms of recycling, only “1s” and “2s” (PET and HDPE) are practical candidates for recycling into new containers and there is an almost zero tolerance for any mixing of types or contamination with labels or organic matter. Plastics marked “3” to “6” are of minimal value for re-use and “7” stands for “other” and has essentially no value. CRDC has developed a process that can take a mixed load including all these plastic categories and turn it into a new plastic resin. The process is the “brainchild” of CEO Donald Thomson. Ross Gibby, COO, creatively named its output “RESIN8.”

The process is as follows: the mixed plastics are chopped, shredded and granulated into small flakes which can include a reasonable degree of organic contamination (e.g. the residue left in a bottle of ketchup or a peanut butter container). At that stage some naturally occurring minerals are added – similar to those that are used for “liming” of agricultural soils. That mixture is melted and extruded as a foam which hardens to something akin to a plastic lava rock. It is finally ground into granules the size and gradation of fine sand. That material can then be added to cement at a ration of 2% to 25% to make concrete for anything from pre-formed blocks to poured structures or surfaces. High quality sand is a scarce resource in many regions, and it is very expensive to transport. A local alternative is a very attractive concept for the construction industry as long as it is functionally and visually equivalent. The RESIN8 concrete checks all those boxes. Not only that, concrete made with RESIN8 has several advantages compared to conventional concrete. It is lighter weight; it provides higher thermal insulation, and it absorbs more noise. It is just as strong and long-lasting. At the end of its useful life, concrete made with RESIN8 can be recycled to be used as aggregate in new concrete.

CRDC Global started with seed capital and through loans from the Alliance To End Plastic Waste and its CEO Donald Thompson is motivated by his desire to leave a better world for his grandchildren. They have now shifted to a mix of family office and institutional investors. They have set up 6 small scale facilities during a proof of concept stage, and currently have three large scale facilities running in Pennsylvania, Costa Rica and South Africa. Their vision is to have 20 sites operating within 3 years each producing around 20 thousand tons of synthetic aggregate sand substitute every year.

The company has a global action plan and its board includes individuals from around the globe who meet via Zoom. 27 different countries have expressed interest in starting to use the technology. There is also on-going research about the process at universities in the United States, Costa Rica, South Africa, the UK and Australia.

CRDC Global is cooperating with a major cleanup project in Alaska which has a huge problem with plastic waste, mostly from Asia, crossing the ocean and ending up on that state’s 33 thousand miles of coastline. There is an excellent video presentation about this GoAK project.

There are several models for how this can work. Existing trash hauling players can divert either all their plastic or plastics 3-7 to a CRDC site. They have also worked with a direct consumer connection they called “The Bag That Builds”, often through presentations at schools through which they find motivated children and “soccer moms” and dads who like the idea of helping with the problem. The slogan they teach potential helpers is that most plastic will end up meeting one of three fates– “burnt, buried or built” with the later being a much better outcome.

These voluntary participants are supplied with a supply of labeled green bags which these consumers can bring it to collection points – either by bagging all plastics together or better yet separating out easily identifiable 1s and 2s for one bag and another with any other kind of plastic everything. In the later scenario CRDC is able to generate income through true recycling of the 1s and 2s to help pay for the overall collection system. Consumers are easily trained to accurately identify things that are made of plastic, and in the process, they get a feeling for just how much plastic they need/use. The CRDC process can use things other than CPG containers, in fact the entire post consumer thermoplastic waste stream. Even the foil/plastic used as a wrapper for something like a granola bar can be handled within this system. “Compostable” plastics or fully biodegradable ones will likely be eliminated during the high heat step but can also be part of RESIN8 if they persist.

If this approach is greatly expanded, it could provide a better end of life alternative for the majority of plastics because there is so much potential demand from the construction side.

GARY, Ind.—For Lori Latham and four other self-described “badass women,” the future of their hometown rests on a battle over 75 acres that lie between a giant steel mill and a failed casino once owned by Donald Trump.

The site sits behind parked railroad cars painted in graffiti, where abandoned concrete silos rise from the sandy southern shore of Lake Michigan, a remnant of a former cement plant that helped build the country’s interstate highway system. Here, a California company called Fulcrum BioEnergy wants to construct a gasification plant and refinery to turn the Chicago area’s trash—as much as 30 percent of it waste plastic—into jet fuel. 

It’s a bid, according to Fulcrum, to make a dent in the airline industry’s contribution to climate change while reducing waste at landfills. The city’s mayor, Jerome Prince, touts what he sees as a green energy future in this once-booming vestige of the Rust Belt.

But Latham and the group she co-founded, Gary Advocates for Responsible Development, along with some national environmental experts, smell a ruse. 

They question the company’s claims of sustainability in what amounts to a complicated, high-energy production process, and the company’s ability to deploy a new combination of technology intended to turn the trash and plastic waste into a gas used to make aircraft fuel. They also say it’s unfair to locate the plant in an environmental justice community already burdened disproportionately by a century of pollution from heavy industry.

“We use the term greenwashing, where they make things seem like they’re green technologies when they’re really not,” said Latham, a Gary native who works in business development for an engineering firm and also is chairwoman of the environmental justice and climate committee of Gary’s branch of the NAACP, the nation’s oldest civil rights organization. “I feel like Gary is being used based on its location, and also based on its demographics just to be a solution for where to put Chicago’s trash.”

The company’s plans, while embraced by the federal government and the airline industry, do not pass a common sense test, said Jane Williams, executive director of the environmental nonprofit California Communities Against Toxics, who has advised the Gary advocates.

“They are taking trash and applying massive amounts of heat to make a fuel, and then burning it,” Williams said. The proposed gasification process uses intense heat to turn the trash and plastic into a synthetic gas, before another process turns the gas into synthetic crude oil, which in turn is used to make jet fuel in an on-site refinery.

“This is one of the most energy-intensive processes I have reviewed in my career,” she said. “That’s a massive carbon footprint.”

In the Fulcrum proposal, Earthjustice attorney James Pew sees an illustration of a national trend in which facilities that burn waste, including plastic, through a process like gasification or a similar method called pyrolysis, are working to skirt health protections in the Clean Air Act.

“This whole fight at the local, state, and federal levels is about getting gasification and pyrolysis incinerators rebranded as non-incinerators so they can … avoid installing pollution controls and monitoring and reporting their emissions,” Pew said. “EPA’s regulations have defined facilities like Fulcrum as incinerators for almost 30 years.”

GARD is organizing opposition among area residents. It’s challenged the proposed plant’s air pollution permit from Indiana state regulators. And it has filed a Civil Rights Act complaint with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The complaint argues that the Indiana Department of Environmental Management’s decision to grant Fulcrum its air permit is part of a longstanding pattern and practice of local discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin.

Gary’s 68,000 residents, down from 175,000 in 1970, are 78 percent Black. One in three city residents lives in poverty.

For its part, Fulcrum, based in Pleasanton, California, is a sharp contrast with Gary. An affluent suburb of San Francisco with a poverty rate of 5 percent, it touts the economics of making what it describes as an $800 million investment in Gary, providing about 1,000 construction jobs and 130 to 200 permanent jobs.

“We just feel that we have created, designed and now are just a short time away from proving that garbage-to-fuel is possible,” said Fulcrum’s vice president of administration, Rick Barraza. “It’s doable, and it is a sustainable source of renewable fuel going forward.”

He also dismissed the Gary residents’ opposition and encouraged Inside Climate News to do the same. “I certainly hope that you don’t give too much time to the local citizens that just don’t want that facility in their backyard,” Barraza said. “There’s a local group out there that just doesn’t want the project. And so they’re starting to get vocal.”

$4 Billion in Federal Taxes to Develop Sustainable Aviation Fuel

Fulcrum has been working to turn trash into aviation fuel for more than a decade. The company broke ground on the second phase of its first plant near Reno, Nevada, in 2018, where it’s still seeking to begin full production.

Those efforts are part of a global push to develop what the airline industry and federal government call “sustainable aviation fuel,” or SAF.  In theory, SAF is made by recycling renewable plant- or animal-based materials as feedstock, offsetting the need to use new fossil fuels that would unleash carbon that scientists say needs to remain locked underground to prevent the worst impacts of climate change.

Industry and government scientists are experimenting with different feedstocks ranging from animal fats, plant oils and wood waste to trash and plastics. 

Nikita Pavlenko, a program leader with the International Council on Clean Transportation, a nonprofit environmental research group, says he  does not like the term “sustainable aviation fuel” because regardless of what is used to make these new fuels, “it implies it is actually sustainable,” or beneficial. “I always prefer the term ‘alternative aviation fuel,’ because there’s such a wide variation in the climate impacts of those alternatives.”  

In all, aviation contributes about 2 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. But when other impacts—including the heat-trapping effects of condensation trails planes paint across the sky—are factored in, aviation accounts for as much as 3.5 percent of warming caused by humans, according to research published last year in the journal Atmospheric Environment.

As aviation has soared, so has pressure to reduce its emissions. 

“It doesn’t make sense to give aviation a license to continue polluting if we’re imposing climate policy on (motor vehicle) drivers or people who purchase electricity because those are a much more representative sector of society,” Pavlenko said.

The 290 member airlines of the International Air Transport Association, a global trade association, have committed to achieving net-zero carbon emissions from their operations by 2050. In the United States, IATA members include American, Delta, United and cargo giants UPS and FedEx.

Right now, there’s only one kind of SAF used in the United States, in test flights, said McCormick. It’s made with fats and oils, such as waste cooking oil, beef tallow or soybean oil, he said. 

Widespread industry use could be a long time coming.

“As you might imagine, you have to meet some pretty stringent approvals to legally sell them as aviation fuel as compared to say, a diesel fuel, because trucks are not going to fall out of the sky,” he said.

Decarbonizing air travel will be difficult, acknowledged Sebastian Mikosz, a senior vice president of IATA. “Unlike others in the transportation industry, we have to fight with something that they don’t have to fight with, which is gravity,” Mikosz said. “And our biggest problem is that we have to take our source of propulsion, our energy source, with us in the air.”

The industry is getting help from the Biden administration, which has pledged more than $4 billion to support the research and development of low-carbon fuel. The Biden administration has set a goal for the U.S. to produce aviation fuels with half the carbon emissions of conventional fuel, and to make enough of it by 2050 to meet all domestic aviation fuel demand.

The Plastic Problem

Last year, Fulcrum secured $375 million in tax-exempt revenue bonds through the Indiana Finance Authority to support the Gary project. 

For Fulcrum’s production here, the company plans to collect and sort municipal waste that otherwise would head to a landfill, and shred it at up to two locations outside of Gary. In all, the company plans to divert 700,000 tons of municipal solid waste from the region each year; Chicago alone produced more than 4 million tons of solid waste in 2020, according to a 2021 University of Illinois at Chicago study.

The Gary plant’s feedstock—about half paper and 30 percent plastic, along with wood and other trash—will be hauled into the city in about 90 trucks a day, the company has said. 

The presence of plastic causes two main problems. Plastic is made from a myriad of chemical mixtures. Gasification systems function the best with a consistent feedstock, McCormick said, so plastic waste poses a technical challenge.

Plastic complicates the company’s sustainability claims, as well. 

With plastic waste as a feedstock, McCormick said, “you’re going to have to answer the question, ‘To what extent is it a sustainable aviation fuel compared to biomass?’ It’s not going to have as low of a carbon intensity … simply because the plastic is made out of petrochemicals, (or) fossil carbon.”

At least one airline is specifically targeting plastic waste to make fuel.  United Kingdom-based Virgin Group, which includes the airline Virgin Atlantic, announced in February that it was partnering with U.S.-based Agilyx to produce synthetic crude oil from plastic waste that will then be refined into what it claims will be a lower-carbon fuel.

Fulcrum officials acknowledge plastic in its feedstock reduces its fuel’s climate benefits, even as it claims SAF from its Reno plant will represent  an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gases compared to traditional aviation fuel made from fossil fuels. And it expects that percentage to improve at its Gary plant.

But the company has been less than transparent about how it got to that 80 percent figure. It appears to rely on environmental lifecycle analyses, the kinds of studies that experts often describe as being fraught with assumptions that can skew the conclusions. 

And a 2015 lifecycle analysis for the company’s Reno plant estimated that fuel produced there would result in a product claiming a less-robust climate benefit of 60 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions compared with traditional fossil fuels.

Fulcrum officials said they updated the 2015 study for the California Air Resources Board, which lists the company’s claims as certified. But Fulcrum did not provide a copy of the updated analysis for Inside Climate News to review. Fulcrum also did not provide any analysis of carbon emissions for the proposed Gary plant.

The company claims benefits to the climate from keeping trash out of landfills, where it rots and releases methane, a potent greenhouse gas. But that’s an inexact science as well. Scientists and the EPA have been arguing over how to accurately calculate landfill gas emissions, Inside Climate News reported last year with NPR and Orlando public radio station WMFE.

Environmentalists are skeptical of the company’s claims, though Pavlenko said its fuel would represent “one of the better options” as long as the plastic content is “kept to a limited contribution.”

Municipal solid waste passed a Center for Biological Diversity assessment for potentially sustainable aviation fuels published in August, but the environmental group warned that the availability of those feedstocks will fall far short of meeting a Biden administration goal of 35 billion gallons of SAF for the U.S. aviation industry by 2050.

And, the group emphasized, plastic waste should never be part of any municipal solid waste feedstock for aviation fuel, since plastic left in a landfill doesn’t break down, so it stores its carbon there. Also, the report concluded, using plastic to make fuel releases toxic chemicals during manufacturing.

A 2021 report from Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) specifically calls out Fulcrum. 

“Such proposed solutions tend to facilitate a facade which outwardly supports corporate and governmental responsibility in the short term, but in the long term, provide a distracting diversion from the need to reduce waste production, ban single-use plastic, and leave fossil fuels in the ground,” GAIA concluded.

Julie Peller, a chemistry professor at nearby Valparaiso University, said the combination of technologies proposed for Gary appears to be unproven, leaving the city’s residents vulnerable.

“This is going to be a huge amount of waste that gets hauled into this city that is already an environmental justice community,” she said. “Unfortunately, the residents of Gary have to be the suckers to deal with everybody else’s garbage.”

Years of Work and Investments—but No SAF Yet

In Reno, the company has been working for more than a decade to develop its “Sierra” plant, which was backed by a $70 million Department of Defense grant in 2014. It also won a $104 million loan guarantee from the Department of Agriculture that same year for the plant. 

The Gary plant, called Centerpoint, will be three times the size of the one in Reno, producing about 31 million gallons of fuel a year, compared with 11 million gallons in Reno, according to the company. Company officials said they anticipate construction in Gary in 2024, and opening for business in 2025. Globally, the pre-pandemic demand for jet fuel was 106 billion gallons a year; that’s projected to grow to over 230 billion gallons a year by 2050, according to a 2020 Department of Energy study.

“We look to be producing fuel (at the Reno plant) in the very near future,”  Barraza said. “And then we’ll take whatever lessons learned we have from Sierra and then build that into our next plant, which will be the Centerpoint biofuels plant in Gary.”

Prince, through a spokesperson, declined requests for an interview. But the mayor celebrated the Fulcrum proposal in a September state of the city address.

Gary, he said, “is poised to be a clean industry hub,” and “Fulcrum Counterpoint has come along at the right time.”  

The Northwest Indiana Forum, a regional economic development organization, also supports the project, for similar reasons.

“Northwest Indiana is seeing multiple renewable energy projects developing in our counties,” said Kay Nelson, director of environmental affairs for the business group. “Having these growth opportunities with jobs related to a green economy is exciting.”

Humanity and Poetry Amid Industry Decline

The “badass women” moniker came from Carolyn McCrady, a retired English teacher and GARD co-founder who was drawn to Gary in the late 1960s to work for Richard Hatcher, one of the first Black mayors of a big U.S. city. She described her GARD colleagues from her ranch-style home in Miller Beach, a neighborhood adjacent to Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore and Marquette Park, with its oak woodlands, sandy shoreline and view of U.S. Steel’s Gary Works steel mill nearby and the Chicago skyline in the distance.

“We’ve got some smart people, and dedicated people,” she said of her GARD colleagues. “We’re not big, but we know a lot of people and we’re able to pull a lot. We have relationships with our legislative delegation.”

Other GARD leaders include Jennie Rudderham, a home-schooling mom, who is in this fight for her young son. “He needs a future,” Rudderham said. “He needs a planet. The city needs a future.”

Dorreen Carey, who moved to Gary in the mid-1970s to get involved with the steelworkers union, is retired from a career working on environmental issues for the city of Gary and the Indiana Department of Natural Resources. In addition to co-founding GARD, she has been active in efforts to protect the region’s rare “dune and swale” ecosystem and local waterways.

Kimmie Gordon, another GARD founder, also established and directs the Gary nonprofit Brown Faces Green Spaces, which promotes diversity in outdoor recreation.

“I love this city,” Gordon said. “I love the people who are still in my neighborhood that I went to grade school with.”

But, she added, “there’s sadness here.”

On a tour of the city and adjacent communities of East Chicago and Whiting led by Gordon and Carey, heavy industry and its remnants stand out along more than 10 miles of the Lake Michigan shoreline. 

The sights include some of Gary’s thousands of abandoned buildings, some with poetry written by teenagers stenciled on boards covering broken windows.

One poem reads: “I see kids playing in the grass, staining their knees. I see a big bright sun that’s yellow light cheese. Sometimes I think Gary isn’t as bad as it seems.”

A lot of the industrial property isn’t being used anymore, Carey said, navigating her Chevy Impala while pointing to smokestacks and Superfund toxic waste sites.

People have been thinking about developing trails along the lakefront through the mill or other former industrial properties, Carey said, “which is one of the things why Fulcrum is such a bad idea because it’s going in the opposite direction. It’s like re-industrializing.”

Gary ‘Turned Into Dumping Grounds‘

The GARD team has appealed permit decisions from the Indiana Department of Environmental Management, or IDEM, filed a civil rights complaint and persuaded the EPA’s regional office to visit Gary and hold a public meeting on how the Biden administration is stepping up its environmental justice program.

Gary and the surrounding area have “been turned into dumping grounds for polluting industries with predictable effects,” the civil rights complaint against IDEM alleges. It calls on EPA to force IDEM to pause issuing new permits, investigate allegations raised in the complaint and “incorporate environmental justice and racial considerations into all aspects of its work.”

The proposed Fulcrum plant’s air permit adds to the swirl of the uncertainty of its carbon footprint. Indiana does not regulate greenhouse gas emissions in industrial facilities they consider to be “minor sources” of air pollution, said Barry Sneed, a spokesman from IDEM, which is how the Fulcrum plant is classified.  

But in a corner of the state that fails to meet federal ozone regulations, the permit shows IDEM allowing emissions from Fulcrum of new ozone-forming pollutants, dangerous tiny particles and an array of hazardous air pollutants, some with links to cancer.

IDEM also exempted the company from a solid waste permit under provisions of a July 1 change in state law that altered the definition of solid waste in an industry-friendly way.

In GARD’s challenge to Fulcrum’s air permit, it argues the plant should be regulated more strictly as a major pollution source. The group claims IDEM should have assessed how the Fulcrum emissions would add to the total burden of environmental impacts on Gary residents and evaluated the area’s environmental justice concerns.

Regional EPA “representatives indicated that they were satisfied with our responses to their comments and our regulatory determination regarding solid waste and incineration,” Sneed countered. 

A regional EPA spokeswoman said the agency had recommended IDEM take further environmental justice steps but declined to comment on the Civil Rights complaint while it is under review.

Against the backdrop of the Fulcrum proposal, frustrations bubbled up at a recent EPA workshop in Gary, where an EPA official used an online tool, “EJ Screen,” to provide a snapshot of where the community falls on the spectrum of race, poverty and the environment: 

Gary ranks in the highest percentiles of the country for a variety of environmental justice measures, including cancer risk from toxic air emissions, exposure to soot, proximity to Superfund sites (there are five nearby), level of wastewater discharges, level of education and the number of people of color and residents who are low income or unemployed.

“We can jointly plan for change together consistent with the priorities of this administration,” Alan Walts, who oversees environmental justice and other programs for EPA’s Chicago-based office, assured the gathering. “There’s a lot of resources coming.”

“Grants are great,” said Robert Buggs, a vice president of the NAACP’s Gary branch. But he wanted to know why EPA gives companies “a license to move forward” on projects like Fulcrum despite documented environmental justice concerns.

Stephen Mays, president of the NAACP’s Gary branch, said: “We know where we stand. We’ve been hearing this for the last 30 years. What’s the remedy?”

It’s the year 2050, and humanity has made huge progress in decarbonizing. That’s thanks in large part to the negligible price of solar and wind power, which was cratering even back in 2022. Yet the fossil fuel industry hasn’t just doubled down on making plastics from oil and gas—instead, as the World Economic Forum warned would happen, it has tripled production from 2016 levels. In 2050, humans are churning out trillions of pounds of plastic a year, and in the process emitting the greenhouse gas equivalent of over 600 coal-fired power plants. Three decades from now, we’ve stopped using so much oil and gas as fuel, yet way more of them as plastic.

Back here in 2022, people are trying to head off that nightmare scenario with a much-hyped concept called “bio-based plastics.” The backbones of traditional plastics are chains of carbon derived from fossil fuels. Bioplastics instead use carbon extracted from crops like corn or sugarcane, which is then mixed with other chemicals, like plasticizers, found in traditional plastics. Growing those plants pulls carbon out of the atmosphere, and locks it inside the bioplastic—if it is used for a permanent purpose, like building materials, rather than single-use cups and bags.

At least, that’s the theory. In reality, bio-based plastics are problematic for a variety of reasons. It would take an astounding amount of land and water to grow enough plants to replace traditional plastics—plus energy is needed to produce and ship it all. Bioplastics can be loaded with the same toxic additives that make a plastic plastic, and still splinter into micro-sized bits that corrupt the land, sea, and air. And switching to bioplastics could give the industry an excuse to keep producing exponentially more polymers under the guise of “eco-friendliness,” when scientists and environmentalists agree that the only way to stop the crisis is to just stop producing so much damn plastic, whatever its source of carbon.

But let’s say there was a large-scale shift to bioplastics—what would that mean for future emissions? That’s what a new paper in the journal Nature set out to estimate, finding that if a slew of variables were to align—and that’s a very theoretical if—bioplastics could go carbon-negative.

The modeling considered four scenarios for how plastics production—and the life cycle of those products—might unfold through the year 2100, modeling even further out than those earlier predictions about production through 2050. The first scenario is a baseline, in which business continues as usual. The second adds a tax on CO₂ emissions, which would make it more expensive to produce fossil-fuel plastics, encouraging a shift toward bio-based plastics and reducing emissions through the end of the century. (It would also incentivize using more renewable energy to produce plastic.) The third assumes the development of a more circular economy for plastics, making them more easily reused or recycled, reducing both emissions and demand. And the last scenario imagines a circular bio-economy, in which much more plastic has its roots in plants, and is used over and over.

“Here, we combine all of these: We have the CO₂ price in place, we have circular economy strategies, but additionally we kind of push more biomass into the sector by giving it a certain subsidy,” says the study’s lead author, Paul Stegmann, who’s now at the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research but did the work while at Utrecht University, in cooperation with PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency. If all three conditions are met, he says, it is enough to push emissions into the negative.

Amazon founder, space traveller and the world’s first “centibillionaire” Jeff Bezos recently disclosed that he would give away most of his unimaginable wealth in his lifetime.

While there were precious few details on how much of the $116bn fortune he planned to donate to charity during the CNN interview with his girlfriend Lauren Sanchez, it was confirmed that a chunk will go to fighting the climate crisis.

A good place to start that planet-sized battle might be at Amazon.

The company is far and away the world’s largest retailer, outstripping its nearest competitors, Walmart and Alibaba, in earnings and global reach. The Covid-19 pandemic was boom times for Amazon with consumers locked down at home and brick-and-mortar stores shuttered. Profits soared, taking the online retailer’s valuation to $943bn.

But shipping billions of packages in over 100 countries for the past 30 years has left its mark.

Oceana, the environmental advocacy group, estimated Amazon’s plastic packaging waste at 709 million pounds (or 321,596 metric tonnes) last year – up 18 per cent from 2020. That’s a plastic footprint weighing about the same as 80,000 adult killer whales. It’s also enough plastic to circle the world at least 800 times in air packaging pillows, reports Oceana, based on market data and insights from e-commerce packaging experts.

Amazon has refuted the figure, and said that Oceana’s past reports overestimated the company’s plastic footprint by as much as 300 per cent.

“While we share Oceana’s commitment to protect the world’s oceans and respect their work, they continue to release flawed data and overinflated information about our business,” an Amazon spokesperson told The Independent.

“We’re not sure how Oceana gathers their data or why it’s so far off each year, but since we have the actual data and numbers to do the calculations, we know that our figures are accurate.

“In 2021, we reduced plastic packaging weight per shipment by over 7 per cent, resulting in 97,222 metric tonnes of single-use plastic being used across our global operations network to ship orders to customers.”

Amazon said the figure reflects the significant majority of plastic used to ship orders to customers – including independent third-party sellers whose orders are fulfilled by Amazon. The company also says it offers “incentives” to these independent third party sellers to create original packaging that will withstand shipping without the need for additional Amazon packaging.

Oceana acknowledged the “step towards increased transparency” but said Amazon’s plastic packaging figure was not directly comparable to the non-profit’s estimate which includes all sales through Amazon’s e-commerce platforms globally.

“There’s different ways of slicing the pie,” Dana Miller, Oceana’s director of strategic initiatives, told The Independent.

“Oceana has estimated [plastic packaging waste] from everything sold through Amazon’s site. We feel that those purchases would not have happened had Amazon not been facilitating them, so Amazon is therefore responsible for the plastic packaging used for all those orders.”

While Amazon may be the largest online retailer, the tsunami of plastic pollution today goes far beyond its impact alone. The e-commerce industry used more than 1.3 million tonnes of plastic packaging in 2021 – a figure that’s projected to more than double this decade. Roughly a third of all plastic is used for packaging – and 85 per cent ends up in landfills.

The type of plastic used in a lot of packaging is nearly impossible to recycle. In fact, only a fraction of all plastic ever made has been recycled – about 9 per cent.

Amazon packaging is made of film which Oceana dubs the “plastic shopping bag category of plastic” – difficult to process and not accepted by most municipal recycling programmes.

Of the 18 pieces of packaging on the “Second Chance” US page for Amazon.com and Amazon grocery delivery, ten are recyclable, like paper-padded mailers, and three cannot be recycled such as paper mailers with air bubble padding. A further five items – including the blue-and-white, bubble-lined plastic bag – are accompanied by this message: “Some cities offer curbside recycling. Where not available, use designated store drop-off locations where plastic film is accepted.” It includes a link to “find your drop off location”.

According to Oceana, a 2021 mystery shopper experiment at 186 drop-off locations in 25 cities across the US and UK found that 41 per cent said they could not accept Amazon plastic packaging. Managers at more than 80 per cent of these stores were unaware they had been listed as a drop-off location.

“Local municipal recycling officials in both the United States and the United Kingdom confirmed that they are not able to recycle Amazon’s plastic packaging. They explained that this packaging continues to be put in recycling bins and contaminates other plastic,” Oceana wrote.

In a blog post published on Tuesday, Amazon wrote that “[a]lthough the plastic packaging Amazon uses today is recyclable, it generally requires our customers to take the materials from their homes to store drop-off locations”. The company added that it “recognize[d] it’s not the easiest customer experience”.

About 12 per cent of solid municipal waste is made up of plastic, according to the United Nations. Some 40 per cent of that global garbage is burned, releasing dangerous toxic gases into the atmosphere. The rest is rotting in landfills, where plastic will leak chemicals into the environment over the hundreds of years it takes to break down.

If it’s not polluting land or going up in smoke, vast amounts of plastic are finding their way to the ocean. Eight million tonnes of plastic enters the ocean every year at a rate where it will outweigh the number of fish by 2050.

Oceana’s new report estimates that 26 million pounds (11,793 mt) of Amazon plastic packaging enters the world’s waters. Plastic can be lethal for ocean animals. Hundreds of species have eaten or become tangled up in it which can cause the, to suffocate, starve or drown.

Recent research has also linked plastic with increasing ocean acidification which lowers the pH of seawater and turns it into a more hostile habitat for marine life.

But what happens in the ocean doesn’t stay there. Plastic first breaks down into tiny fragments called microplastics, and then again into microscopic pieces, nanoplastics.

These are swallowed by fish and hoovered up by little water-filtering creatures like mussels, clams, oysters. From there, it’s no mystery to how it ends up on our plates.

Studies have shown that humans drink microplastics from water and breathe them in. Scientists have also discovered microplastics in human blood, in feces and in the placentas of unborn babies.

Research into the effects of all this plastic is still in its infancy. However studies have shown that microplastics can cause damage to human cells and are potentially linked to conditions such as inflammatory bowel disease.

“We think we are at big risk and there are a lot of scientists who already say there is evidence that we get affected by the contaminations of plastics, especially microplastics,” said Harmen Spek, innnovation and solutions lead at the Plastic Soup Foundation which focuses on the link between plastics and human health.

The group launched the first-ever Plastic Health Summit in 2019 and has also funded research into how plastics impact food systems.

“[In] the blood, flesh and milk of cattle, there was plastic everywhere so that’s really concerning,” he told The Independent. “We know from our research that even very small particles, nanoplastics, are being taken up by [plant] roots and we eat those crops. Even tap water is infected with microplastic nowadays, and that’s a high concern.”

He said that there was always a risk level with plastic because it sheds tiny pieces during the mechanical processes required to produce it.

“With packaging material, it’s the same thing,” Mr Spek said. “There are a lot of processes before it can be used as a packaging material, and it’s handled by humans as well. They’re in a room with the material, constantly working with it. So the chances are quite high that there are a lot of microplastics coming from it.”

The proliferation of Amazon’s plastic waste appears fundamentally at odds with its ambitious climate pledge. The company has committed to reaching net-zero carbon by 2040 and 300 other businesses have signed up to its plan.

Oceana’s Dana Miller described the disparity as “frustrating”.

“Efforts to reduce plastic packaging could assist in [Amazon’s] efforts to reduce their carbon footprint,” she said.

The climate crisis and the growing plastic crisis are inseparable because it’s made from fossil fuels. And the majority of plastic that’s not recycled, generates even more greenhouse gas emissions as it breaks down.

Oil companies have identified plastics, or the petrochemical industry, as a growth area as more and more countries transition to clean energy. “Plastics is the Plan B for the fossil fuel industry,” Judith Enck, founder and president of the nonprofit advocacy group Beyond Plastics, told CNBCearlier this year.

Amazon has shown itself to be innovative when it comes to cutting emissions – rolling out electric delivery vehicles, and planning a switch to 100 per cent renewable energy by 2025.

However, there remains a big question mark over what emissions that Amazon is actually counting as it self-reports its journey to net-zero.

A February 2022 piece by The Center for Investigative Reporting found that the retailer only fully counts the carbon emissions of Amazon-branded products like Kindles and AmazonBasics items. “Those, the company has told Congress, total 1 per cent of its online sales,” the article notes.

It also puts Amazon at odds with the approach of smaller retailers and competitors like Target and Walmart – and risks leaving vast quantities of planet-heating emissions unaccounted for.

In response to the article’s findings, an Amazon spokesperson told The Independent that it was applying “best-known practices” for reducing carbon emissions.

“Amazon is also finding, investing in, and building new solutions to meet the urgency of the climate crisis,” the spokesperson said. “As a co-founder and the first signatory of The Climate Pledge, we set a goal to reach net-zero carbon by 2040 – 10 years ahead of the Paris Agreement because we knew we needed to go faster. We continue to rapidly scale investments in science-based carbon reduction solutions that will have large, long-term impacts to move us forward on our path to net-zero carbon by 2040.”

Nearly half of Amazon shareholders seem less than thrilled by the plastic packaging pollution including powerful investors like BlackRock.

“Amazon does not explicitly disclose the total amount of plastic used; therefore, it is difficult for stakeholders to determine how effectively the company is managing this material risk and their progress year over year,” the world’s largest asset manager wrote in a bulletin ahead of Amazon’s AGM this year. BlackRock dubbed plastic pollution a “long-term business risk”.

In May, 48.9 per cent of Amazon shareholders voted for a resolution to have the retailer do more to address its plastic pollution. While shy of a majority, the request received more support than any other resolution in company history, Oceana reported.

Amazon has already proven its capable of adapting to reusable packaging and more easily recyclable paper and cardboard in countries where local laws have been tough on plastic including in India, Germany and the UK.

Public tolerance for single-use plastic is also diminishing in the United States which contributes most of Amazon’s plastic packaging footprint, Oceana says.

California has introduced ambitious state legislation to reduce single-use plastic packaging and increase recycling this year. And where California, the world’s fifth-largest economy, leads on environmental issues other US states are proving they will follow as has happened with its bans on plastic bags and new gas-powered cars by 2035, for example.

But rather than a hotpotch approach, Oceana is leading calls for Amazon to commit to company-wide plastic packaging cuts at least third below current levels by 2030. They also want the company to publicly report on its plastic packaging footprint – taking into account all products sold through its website.

“It’s all about what [Amazon] is prioritizing, and unfortunately they aren’t prioritizing plastic to the extent that they should be,” Ms Miller said.

“There is a crisis facing our oceans right now and as the world’s largest retailer, Amazon really can make a significant difference.”