Every year, about 4.5 trillion cigarette butts are discarded globally, making them the most littered item on Earth. Around 90 percent of cigarettes have filters made of a biobased plastic called cellulose acetate, which can take up to 14 years to decompose. Nevertheless, cigarette butts are still considered hazardous solid waste, even if they are thrown away properly.

In recent years, non-menthol cigarettes have become less prevalent, but menthol cigarette use did not decrease nor change significantly. As a result, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently proposed a ban on menthol in cigarettes and other characterizing flavors other than tobacco in cigars to reduce cigarette use, pushing menthol cigarette users to stop smoking.

A menthol ban such as this may minimize health disparities since vulnerable populations have a higher tendency to use menthol cigarettes. Almost 40 percent of smokers across the country prefer menthol over non-menthol cigarettes. Still, this preference is disproportionately high among Black people, socioeconomically disadvantaged populations, lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals, and those with mental health problems. Menthol cigarette use also persists among racial/ethnic minority youth.

Although the FDA intended to reduce disease and death from cigarette use, research shows that a menthol ban can also benefit the environment.

Fewer smokers mean less cigarette litter

According to a Tobacco Control letter, adopting the FDA’s menthol ban would offer substantial environmental benefits because it would reduce 3.8 billion cigarette litter annually.

This has already worked in Canada. The country started banning menthol cigarettes from 2015 to 2018, leading many smokers to quit. The authors used the quit rate from Canada’s menthol cigarette ban to estimate that a similar ban in the US can cause 1.3 million smokers to quit. They then multiplied it by 11.9, the average daily number of cigarettes smoked among US adult menthol smokers, and by 365 to get the yearly reduction of cigarettes smoked—5.8 billion.

[Related: Ocean plastic ‘vacuums’ are sucking up marine life along with trash.]

“We multiplied 5.8 billion total fewer cigarettes smoked per year after the ban by the published estimate that 65 percent of cigarettes are littered in the US,” says Lorraine V. Craig, dissemination manager of the International Tobacco Control (ITC) Policy Evaluation Project at the University of Waterloo in Canada who was involved in the study. “This resulted in our estimate that the proposed US menthol cigarette ban would lead to 3.8 billion fewer cigarettes being littered per year.”

If each cigarette butt weighs about 0.2 grams, 3.8 billion fewer cigarette butts off the streets and beaches will reduce 755,502 kilograms of waste every year. That is equivalent to the amount of plastic waste produced by about 7114 Americans yearly, given that the average American generates about 106.2 kilograms of plastic waste annually.

Tobacco harms the environment throughout its life cycle

Smoking cessation is known to lower the risk of premature death and cardiovascular diseases. Still, policies that reduce tobacco consumption won’t just bring down the public health and economic costs related to smoking. According to the authors, they may also reduce the environmental harm of tobacco across its entire life cycle.

Cigarettes pollute the land, water, and air during the growing and cultivation of tobacco, the production and use of cigarettes, and the discarding of packaging and cigarette butts, says Craig. About 600 million trees are chopped down to clear land for tobacco crops, and 24 billion tons of water are required to make cigarettes. Meanwhile, the production and consumption of tobacco contribute 84 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year.

“Carcinogenic chemicals and toxic heavy metals such as lead and arsenic are commonly found in cigarettes and can leach into waterways and the soil,” says John Hocevar, director of the oceans campaign for Greenpeace USA, who was not involved in the study. “Once plastic microfibers [from filters] enter waterways, they act as magnets for polychlorinated biphenyls and other toxic chemicals, which bind to the fibers and make them even more dangerous.”

[Related: The FDA is prepping its biggest cigarette crackdown since the ’60s.]

Animals like whales, oysters, and corals may also ingest vast quantities of microplastics in the water. Not only will they suffer from the toxic chemicals, but they will also have a more challenging time meeting their nutritional needs, he adds.

“If cigarettes cause such widespread and multifaceted devastation to the environment, then tobacco control policies that reduce smoking would have a corresponding benefit to the environment by reducing that devastation,” says Craig.

Controlling cigarette use ultimately benefits the environment

Eliminating toxic chemicals in tobacco production would potentially make cigarette waste less harmful, but it would not keep plastic microfibers out of the environment, says Hocevar. Therefore, it’s best for the environment if governments can control cigarette use.

“The study calls attention to the problem of cigarette butts as a leading source of plastic pollution and the potential for menthol bans to reduce single-use plastics,” says Geoffrey T. Fong, principal investigator of the International Tobacco Control (ITC) Policy Evaluation Project at the University of Waterloo in Canada who was involved in the Tobacco Control study. 

Policymakers can reduce cigarette litter further by vigorously implementing tobacco control policies of the World Health Organization (WHO) Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, the global tobacco control treaty, says Fong. Countries bound by the treaty are obligated to implement measures to reduce tobacco use, like regulating the content of tobacco products, requiring the disclosure of ingredients, and placing prominent graphic health warnings on tobacco products.

Policy action to ban the sale of filtered cigarettes may also be an effective measure to reduce single-use plastic pollution, says Fong. 

“Any policy that reduces the number of smokers will lead to reductions in cigarette litter,” he adds. “It’s killing two birds with one stone. Or said in a different way, it is a win-win situation: strong tobacco control policies reduce smoking and reduce environmental damage.”

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas—Five years ago, when ExxonMobil came calling, city officials eagerly signed over a large portion of their water supply so the oil giant could build a $10 billion plant to make plastics out of methane gas. 

A year later, they did the same for Steel Dynamics to build a rolled-steel factory. 

Never mind that Corpus Christi, a mid-sized city on the semi-arid South Texas coast, had just raced through its 50-year water plan 13 years ahead of schedule. Planners believed they had a solution: large-scale seawater desalination.

According to the plan in 2019, the state’s first plant needed to be running by early 2023 to safely meet industrial water demands that were scheduled to come online. But Corpus Christi never got it done.

That hasn’t stopped the city and its port authority from pursuing broader plans to build out a next-generation industrial sector around Corpus Christi Bay and make this region a rival to Houston, home to the nation’s largest petrochemical complex, 200 miles up the Gulf Coast.  

As efforts to cut carbon emissions fall desperately behind the timetables established in decades’ of global climate accords, Corpus Christi is planning a massive expansion of its hydrocarbon sector, aimed at delivering oil and gas from Texas’ shale fields to global markets for decades to come. 

All that’s missing is the freshwater. Now the commitments city officials made over the past five years are coming due. Exxon’s plastic plant started operations this year and will eventually consume 25 million gallons of water per day, even as the region’s water plan foresees demand exceeding supplies in this decade. 

This summer, severe drought and heat pushed Corpus Christi into water use restrictions. Yet the desalination plans remained years away from completion, hung up on questions from state and federal environmental regulators—the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency—over the ecological consequences of dumping hundreds of millions of gallons of salty brine per day into Corpus Christi Bay. 

“I would love nothing more than to get right in front of their faces—the state, TCEQ, EPA, all of those agencies—and say, ‘Hey people! Do you realize that we need this permit now? We provide water for 500,000 people,” Corpus Christi mayor Paulette Guajardo told the city council in July, answering complaints over years of delays. “This is of urgency. We have to have this permit.”

Today the pursuit of desalination has become an increasingly desperate race to meet incoming demands. The number of plants proposed for Corpus Christi Bay has grown to five—two for the City of Corpus Christi, two for the Port of Corpus Christi and one for a private polymer manufacturer. 

Last month, the TCEQ issued its first wastewater discharge permit to a plant proposed by the port, despite a challenge from the EPA signaling what could be a long legal fight ahead.

Regulators and scientists worry that each plant’s discharge of tens of millions of gallons of hyper-salty wastewater per day could disrupt major reproductive cycles for a host of aquatic species, which rely on the half-salty waters of the coastal bays for larvae to mature. 

All together, environmentalists say, the five plants’ discharge, coupled with the water pollution and ocean freighter traffic from the industrial boom they would unleash, may constitute a near-fatal blow for life in the bay, whose once-teeming ecosystems have nursed communities on its banks since long before Corpus Christi.

While plant developers have put forth analyses showing their discharge won’t affect ambient salinity or wildlife, Paul Montagna, a department chair at the Harte Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi, doesn’t buy it.

“I don’t see how you can add brine to a salty system and not increase the salinity, I just don’t understand how that could happen,” he said from his corner office at the university, with two-story windows looking out to the bay. “I’ve read the engineering studies and I just don’t get it.”

Montagna agrees that Corpus Christi needs desalination, he just wants the brine piped a dozen miles offshore and released into the open Gulf instead of the shallow, almost stagnant bay. The idea is supported by scientists but dismissed by developers as too expensive. 

Other activists hope to block desalination altogether with an aim to hold up the buildout that has unfolded here in recent years, fueled by a spate of new pipelines carrying oil and gas from the Permian Basin and the Eagleford Shale since 2010, and by Congress’ lifting of the oil export ban in 2015, which have made Corpus Christi the nation’s top port for crude exports. One piece remains for the growth to continue. 

“That’s the chokehold,” said Isabel Araiza, a professor of social work at Del Mar College and founder of a group called For the Greater Good. “In order to bring heavy industry in they’re going to need water.”

Speaking Out Against Desalination 

Six days after Exxon accepted Corpus Christi’s offer of water in 2017, the city authorized an application for state funding to develop preliminary plans for a seawater desalination plant. 

When Steel Dynamics came seeking water in 2018, Corpus Christi offered another 6 million gallons a day, citing “plans for additional water sources in the planning and implementation phase.”

But that wasn’t exactly true. The preliminary plans had yet to be shared with city council and implementation remained years away at best. 

When the plans were presented in 2019, they noted Exxon’s demand scheduled for 2022 and Steel Dynamics’ after that. 

“Large increases in water demand are projected to occur in 2022,” the city’s presentation said. “Based on supply and demand projections, the first desalination plant needs to be operational (supplying water) in early 2023.”

The council voted unanimously to adopt the plan. Activists quickly pushed back. Araiza, the leader of For the Greater Good, stood outside Fry’s Electronics on Black Friday speaking out against desalination. 

“It’s for industry, not for us. And we pay for it,” she remembers telling shoppers. 

Araiza, whose family has been in Corpus Christi for a century, hoped to engage the public in such big decisions about the city’s future, which she said were too often made by small cliques of business elites for their own benefit. Her family had been in the area for a century. On her dad’s side she was the first generation in memory not to pick crops.

Growing up in the 1970s she rode buses across Corpus Christi as part of belated integration of white and Hispanic schools. She earned a Ph.D. from Boston College, then returned home to organize and teach. 

“What’s happening with industry and water is symptomatic of a bigger problem,” she said. “Our way of life is problematic: consumerism, disposable products, single use plastics.”

Araiza joined a budding activist movement that was heaping challenges on the desalination plans, forcing a slate of environmental permit applications through tedious administrative reviews. 

Council member Mike Pusley, a retired petroleum geologist and former Exxon employee, was not impressed with the city’s progress. At a meeting in April 2021, he told the Corpus Christi water department its original plans, long delayed, were no longer sufficient.

“I can assure you that within the next five years, you’re going to have several Exxons here, and you’re not going to be ready with a plan. We’re not going to be ready. We’re not going to be ready at all with the water,” he said. 

‘How Did They Get Ahead of Us?‘

While desalination plans fell further behind, the water supply was shrinking. The city’s reservoirs dipped to 40 percent of capacity as drought and heatwave grew acute this summer, prompting new restrictions and $500 fines for anyone caught running a sprinkler more than once per week. 

Meanwhile, the Port of Corpus Christi Authority had jumped into the race and claimed a clear lead, threatening the city’s historic monopoly on the regional water supply. 

“It’s taking way too long for this to happen. The port has out-warriored us, they’ve out-lobbied us, they’ve out-engineered us,” Pusley said. “How did they get ahead of us? We’re the regional water supplier.”

“They spent more money on lawyers and lobbyists,” responded Mike Murphy, chief operating officer  for the Corpus Christi water department, who moved to the city in 2021.

(The port’s lobbyists and lawyers wouldn’t secure their first controversial permit, issued by the Industry-friendly TCEQ over the EPA’s objections, until September.)   

“This drought we’re in right now, there’s no solution for it but conservation,” said Corpus Christi manager Peter Zanoni, who moved to the city in 2019, to the council. 

Conservation, however, only applies to residents in Corpus Christi. According to a 2018 city ordinance, high-volume industrial users can pay $0.25 per thousand gallons consumed for exemption from restrictions during drought. Most pay it. While citizens face fines for sprinkler use, large facilities continue consuming millions of gallons per day.

A Proliferation of Energy and Industrial Projects

The fight for water comes at a time of rapid industrial growth around Corpus Christi. 

In the last five years, Valero and FlintHills expanded their refineries. Cheniere Energy built the region’s first export terminal for liquified natural gas and plans to double its output. Vostalpine built a plant that makes iron briquettes. Three huge, adjacent crude export terminals have cropped up on the bay, operated by Enbridge Inc., FlintHills and Buckeye Global Marine Terminals. Elon Musk wants to build a lithium refinery. 

“When we started being able to sell oil [abroad], the amount of new industry that moved to this area was phenomenal,” said Montagna. “I think there has been more change in this region in the last four years than there had been in the last 20.”

This year, Exxon opened its plastics plant, turning ethane, a form of natural gas, into ethylene and polyethylene, building blocks for plastics, on 1,300 acres across the bay from Corpus, in San Patricio County.

When the plant uses its ground flare—sportsfield sized units for burning off chemicals—Elida Castillo can see the sky glow orange from her house in the small town of Taft, about eight miles away, near a cemetery where her great, great grandparents are buried. Sometimes, she said, the sheriff posts on Facebook saying not to be alarmed. No one ever tells the community what chemicals are being burned. 

“Our aim is to block the infrastructure that industry needs to cut our roots and establish its own roots here,” said Castillo, who this year launched a Texas branch of Chispa, a national Latino organizing project. 

The port is pursuing its own $650 million expansion plan, including an 75-foot-deep channel running 11 miles into the Gulf to enable the world’s largest oil tankers to cross Corpus Christi Bay. A colossal, new billion-dollar bridge (by the same builders of a bridge that collapsed in Florida in 2018) will allow them into Corpus Christi Harbor and its port. 

The two desalination plants proposed by the port would produce up to 80 million gallons a day.   

The port declined to answer questions about projects in the pipeline, industrial water demand projections or plans for desalination. 

Port CEO Sean Strawbridge, who came to Corpus Christi seven years ago and made $650,000 in 2021, told a meeting of the Ingleside City Council in August last year that the port began pursuing desalination plans after he “got a call” from someone who “decided to invest here and they’ve got a large project going on. Basically said, ‘What the heck is going on with your water situation down there?’ And the port commission decided to take a leadership role.”

A Century of Rising Salinity 

Whether the port and the city ultimately get the permits they need for their desalination plants will depend upon forthcoming environmental assessments of Corpus Christi Bay, where the deadly effects of rising salinity are not theoretical—they are the lived experience.

These placid, shallow waters, sheltered from the Gulf by more than 200 miles of barrier island, once teemed with shrimp and oysters that had nourished bayside communities for thousands of years. Today dolphins still splash and great herons still stalk the wetlands, but the bounty of shellfish is gone.

In Nueces Bay, an inland appendage of Corpus Christi Bay, oysters died off in the late 1930s. Two dams on the Nueces River, and two railroads across its delta, were reducing freshwater flows. 

“Oysters did not come back,” said a 2011 report from the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M. “Because the salinities were too high.” 

Fifty years later, the shrimp were vanishing too. Two much larger dams stopped any freshwater at all from reaching the bays, turning Nueces from vibrant river delta to a shallow, stagnant mudflat where evaporation leaves extra-salty water and few living things.

“It was saltier than seawater,” said Montagna. “It became evident that the bay wasn’t producing shrimp or oysters anymore.”

The bays, formed by rivers that flowed to the ocean until the 21st Century, distinguish Texas’ coast from the successful examples of seawater desalination in California, where plants release brine into the deep, open Pacific. In Corpus Christi, developers want to discharge into a shallow, almost stagnant body. It takes one year for the contents of Corpus Christi Bay to be replaced by new water, Montagna said. The brine is going to accumulate, he said.

All manner of ocean fish and crustaceans rely on the shelter and moderate salinity of the bays to mature. Less salt in the water means more oxygen, which larvae need to survive. Without the bays, species can’t reproduce. 

“They literally grow there,” Montagna said. “The life cycle requires these low salinity nursery habitats.

And it’s not only about the salty waste. Some of the freshwater will pass though plants and refineries then re-enter the bay as permitted industrial discharge laced with toxins like chromium, zink, plastics, “coil coating process wastewater” and generic “contaminated water.” 

“This is going to be bad for the world,” said Patrick Nye, a former petroleum geologist, looking over the bay from the spacious balcony of the waterfront beach house his parents built near Ingleside in the 1960s. 

A few hundred yards away across a green vibrant marshland, a hulking tanker docked at the continent’s largest crude export terminal, which Nye had watched take shape in recent years. 

He pointed down to the shallow water where, he said, he built sandcastles as a kid on a wide, dry beach before the rising sea consumed it, forcing his parents to build a concrete seawall in its place.

Born in 1954, the son of a local chief justice, Nye played on the Texas Tech University tennis team then went into oil exploration. 

“A lot of my peers would disagree,” he said. “But I believe climate change is here.” 

He left oil and gas more than 20 years ago to start his own wind power venture, which has continued to expand. Thousands of white wind turbines spin today in the sprawling fields outside Corpus Christi. 

He thinks the global market for fossil fuels is preparing to peak, and he’s not alone. Although decades of international protocols, climate accords and ambitious emissions reductions goals have not succeeded in reversing the growth in oil demand, even oil producers now acknowledge the crest is coming. 

Exxon is ramping up plastic production near Corpus Christi while the world’s two largest markets, China and India, implement bans on single-use plastics. 

For now, Russia’s war in Ukraine is supporting oil prices high and energizing the coastal buildout in Texas. 

“It’s a goldrush to get as much in place before the whole thing craters,” Nye said.

While he hopes for a future with less fossil fuel, less plastic and less air pollution, those changes in global markets raise grim prospects for Corpus Christi, conjuring visions of other places where industrial booms have come and gone, like the sprawling collection of discarded refineries in Oklahoma.   

Or like the abandoned coal mines of West Virginia. Or parts of Ohio, one the first great oil states, where the good times left a legacy of “stranded assets” and “brownfields.” 

“That’s their business model,” said Jim Klein, who teaches history at Del Mar College. “My worry is: that’s what will happen to Corpus Christi.

They say everything is bigger in Texas — and that includes the scale and brazenness of voter suppression efforts. The 2020 election saw record turnout in the Lone Star State, an 8% increase from 2016 overall and a 9% increase among nonwhite Texans. In a healthy democracy, such a substantial jump in voter participation — especially in a state plagued by notoriously low turnout — would have been cause for celebration.

But Texas Republicans only saw peril. Echoing former President Donald Trump and the national hysteria over election fraud — the same Big Lie that led to the failed Jan. 6 coup attempt — Gov. Greg Abbott called a special session of the state Legislature in the summer of 2021 to rush a slate of new voting restrictions into law. The fact that a multimillion dollar audit of the 2020 election by the Texas secretary of state found no evidence of widespread voter fraud did not deter the passage of SB1, with the Orwellian title of the Election Integrity Protection Act. “Senate Bill 1 ensures trust and confidence in our elections system,” Abbott said at the signing ceremony on Sept. 7, 2021, “and most importantly, it makes it easier to vote and harder to cheat.”

For Black and Latino Texans, who have fought against disenfranchisement for generations — and who have paid an especially high price for the environmental and public health damage wrought by the unregulated oil, gas and chemical industries that are among the perennial top donors to Republican campaign coffers — the timing and intention of SB1 could not have been more clear: It had nothing to do with “election integrity” and everything to do with limiting the influence of likely Democrat voters, especially Texans of color.

“It didn’t make any sense,” said Bridgette Murray, a registered nurse, environmental activist and community organizer from Pleasantville, on Houston’s east side. “We were in the middle of a pandemic, and you’re saying people can’t use a drop box?”
 

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“They make people believe their vote doesn’t mean anything. Nothing ever changes, so why bother?”

~ Elida Castillo, CHISPA Texas

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Houston is in Harris County, where election officials expanded access to the polls in 2020 with measures like extended early voting, curbside and drive-through voting, 24-hour voting and broader availability of mail-in ballots, all of which made voting easier for working-class people and people who were concerned about exposure to COVID-19. Harris County’s voting access efforts were successful: Turnout jumped about 25% from 2016, equivalent to more than 300,000 additional voters casting ballots. But activists like Murray have good reason to worry that turnout won’t be so high in 2022: SB1 restricts or bans most of the measures used in Harris County to expand access to the polls. In Murray’s opinion, SB1 is just “another tool in their toolbox” to keep Texans of color from the polls — and she has witnessed the effects firsthand.

Now 69 years old, Murray, who is Black, has watched for decades as her neighborhood, Pleasantville — once a bustling community of Black laborers, professionals and small business owners — has been walled in by highways, railyards, truckyards, chemical storage facilities and other industrial businesses. In 2012, Murray founded a nonprofit called Achieving Community Tasks Successfully (ACTS) to organize Pleasantville residents to work for better air quality, reduced exposure to toxins from industrial facilities and improvements to flood mitigation, but she says she remembers a time when her neighbors could work with their elected officials to get results.

“It wasn’t unusual for there to be over 90% voter turnout back in the day, and it was basically the power of the vote that helped get a lot of the infrastructure improvements that we needed in our community,” said Murray, who cast her first vote in 1971 at age 18. “Our community leaders were able to get the funding to close open ditches, to make use of green spaces. There were a lot of infrastructure improvements at that time.”

But over the course of her life, Murray has witnessed her community’s voice in regional and state politics diminished to a whisper due to voter suppression and gerrymandering. “Voter suppression means that communities that need those dollars for infrastructure improvements can’t get them,” she said.

*   *   *

The history of voter suppression in Texas is as old as the state, and for more than a century, it was Democrats — anti-Reconstructionists and Jim Crow segregationists among them — who used tactics such as poll taxes, white primaries and terrorism to keep Black and Latino Texans from exercising the most fundamental right of citizens in a democracy. But the tables have turned. Now, it’s Republicans who are driving voter suppression, and the momentum of their anti-democratic efforts is accelerating.

“The Republican Party doesn’t want Black people to vote if they are going to vote 9-to-1 for Democrats,” Texas Tea Party activist Ken Emanuelson told the crowd at a Dallas County GOP event in early June 2013. Later that same month, with its 5-4 Shelby v. Holder decision, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act meant to protect racial minorities from discriminatory voting laws. Locked and loaded in anticipation of the ruling, Texas enacted the nation’s harshest voter identification law the very next day.

Shelby v. Holder also emboldened proponents of aggressive partisan gerrymandering after the 2020 census, who used a tactic known as “cracking and packing,” which splits up voting blocs and then crowds them into a few districts. In Texas, this process was seen as a way to undercut the growing voting power of nonwhite Texans. “They make people believe their vote doesn’t mean anything,” said Elida Castillo, who was born and raised in Taft, Texas, across the bay from Corpus Christi on the Gulf Coast. “Nothing ever changes, so why bother?”

The notoriously conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals tends to intervene to keep restrictive voting laws on the books and has only become more aggressive with the addition of six Trump appointees. (Only four of the 5th Circuit’s 16 judges were appointed by Democrats; a Joe Biden nominee is awaiting confirmation for the vacant 17th seat.) Numerous lawsuits challenging Texas voter suppression laws on the grounds that they violate nonwhite citizens’ constitutional rights under the 13th Amendment and the Voting Rights Act have been successful in the Western District of Texas, but time and again, the 5th Circuit has stepped in to block the lower court’s decisions.
 

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Texas has added about 4 million new residents since 2010, and 95% of the newcomers are nonwhite.

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As a result, prospects have dimmed for the kinds of substantial gains in the Texas Legislature that could move the needle on environmental policy — from climate change mitigation and resilience to green energy transition to environmental justice. “Gerrymandering has impacted us greatly,” said Castillo, who lives in San Patricio County, which used to be part of Senate District 21 — stretching north from the Rio Grande Valley with zig-zag boundaries clear up to far South Austin — but which is now in Senate District 20 as a result of 2021 redistricting. “You don’t always have an open polling location in your community, especially in more rural areas,” Castillo said. “They have varied hours and they’re usually not convenient for the greater population who actually work, so they’re totally inaccessible and inconvenient.”

Because of the 2013 Shelby v. Holder decision, it was the first time since 1965 that new district maps were drawn and implemented in Texas without preclearance from the federal government. An analysis by the Texas Tribune found that the new maps protect Republican incumbents, dilute the power of nonwhite voters and increase the number of districts where Trump would have won in 2020.

Castillo works as a pro-democracy and environmental activist for CHISPA Texas, a project of the League of Conservation Voters. Like Bridgette Murray in Houston, she has seen her hometown and its surrounding areas overrun by industrial facilities — in her case, a massive plastics plant owned jointly by ExxonMobil and a Saudi partner, and a Chiniere Energy gas liquefaction plant, to name just two.

Castillo said industrial growth in San Patricio County, where she lives, has exploded as a result of the lifting of the oil export ban in 2015; four years of regulatory free-for-all under the Trump administration; and, most recently, with the surge in global demand for liquid natural gas caused by the war in Ukraine. In her work with CHISPA, Castillo helps Corpus Christi-area residents understand the environmental and public health issues that affect them as a consequence of industrial activity, and she helps them make their voices heard in public comment sessions about matters like air quality and water usage permitting.

“I want politicians who aren’t going to constantly sweeten the pot by giving these industries so much money and pushing back when they come with greenwashing pipe dreams,” Castillo said, referring to proposals from major energy companies for carbon capture and sequestration facilities in San Patricio County. “They’re being proposed by the same industries that are causing these problems. It’s like a robber saying, ‘I know I broke into your house, but hire me to fix it.’”

*   *   *

As Texas becomes younger, less white and less rural, Republicans have reason to worry that organizing efforts by Castillo, Murray and others like them will weaken their stranglehold on state politics. The state has added about 4 million new residents since 2010, and 95% of the newcomers are nonwhite. About 85% of the growth has occurred in the cities and suburbs of just four metropolitan areas — Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, San Antonio and Austin — all of which chose Joe Biden over Donald Trump in 2020.

Harris County, where Murray lives, is the third-most diverse county in Texas and one of the fastest growing. In 2018, Harris County voters elected Colombia-born Democrat Lina Hidalgo to the position of Harris County judge. She has used her power of the purse to increase funding for the county’s Fire Marshal’s Office (to bolster its hazmat team) and its Pollution Control agency. Under Hidalgo, both agencies have stepped up enforcement against industrial polluters. Hidalgo has also teamed up with Houston-born County Attorney Christian Menefee, who was elected in 2020, to seek damages from major polluters in court.

It’s not hard to understand why the powerful Texas Republican politicians — who take in millions in campaign donations from the oil and gas industry — would view outspoken reformers like Hidalgo and Menefee with alarm. Abbott alone took in more than $12 million from the industry in the lead-up to the 2022 Republican primaries. In the same period, industry donors gave more than $800,000 to Railroad Commissioner Wayne Christian, the senior member of the agency responsible for regulating oil and gas companies.

The more voters in places like Harris County get to the polls, the more likely it is that Democrats who share Hidalgo and Menefee’s commitment to holding the oil and gas industry accountable and taking strong action to mitigate the risks associated with climate change will win a statewide election. That day seems to be getting closer with every election cycle. In 2018, Harris County voters helped make Beto O’Rourke’s bid for Ted Cruz’s U.S. Senate seat the most competitive performance by a Democrat in a statewide race since 1994.

O’Rourke, who is currently running an underdog campaign against Greg Abbott in the 2022 gubernatorial race, has pledged to fasttrack the state’s transition to green energy and prioritize climate change resilience. He’s trailing by a wide margin, but a Democrat running in one of the less publicized statewide races — the race for land commissioner — may have a shot at victory.
 

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Harris County voters helped make Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 U.S. Senate bid the most competitive performance by a Democrat in a statewide race since 1994.

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Democrat Jay Kleberg is running against Republican Dawn Buckingham to head the General Land Office, which oversees state public lands, the Alamo and veterans’ homes. In recent years, the agency has also overseen allocation of federal recovery funds in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, which brought devastation to huge swaths of the Gulf Coast. Houston and its surrounding areas bore the brunt of damage totaling an estimated $125 billion. But in 2021, when outgoing Land Commissioner George P. Bush announced the recipients of the first round of $1 billion in federal relief funding, the city of Houston got nothing.

Houston’s inexplicable exclusion from relief allocations prompted lawsuits and, eventually, in March 2022, a letter from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development threatening an investigation and a potential referral to the Justice Department. HUD’s letter claimed the GLO’s process for awarding funds “discriminated on the basis of race and national origin” and “disadvantaged minority residents with particularly disparate outcomes for Black residents.” As of October 2022, the matter is still tied up in litigation and bureaucratic disputes.

Kleberg has said that he would have directed at least 50% of the first round of relief funds and mitigation funds to Houston and that he would use the GLO’s resources to make the Gulf Coast more resilient to climate change. A second round of $1.2 billion in relief funds is still pending, and if Kleberg wins the race for land commissioner this month, he will have an opportunity to make future disbursements more equitable.

Like many of her fellow Houstonians, Bridgette Murray is frustrated by the delays, and she does not have much hope that help will come any time soon. She watched as Interstate 610 drained flood water into Pleasantville like a funnel during Hurricane Harvey. The water was trapped for days due to the storm surge in the Houston Shipping Channel, causing severe damage in residents’ homes and contaminating groundwater.

“The city did submit a proposal to the General Land Office to address upgrading the storm water system in our community and creating detention,” Murray said, “but none of the projects submitted by the city of Houston were approved. So like so many communities, we’re still waiting for relief.”

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Copyright 2022 Capital & Main

Laura McAndrews has seen and heard some things that the fashion industry wouldn’t want the public to know.

For many years, it was her job to find factories to produce millions of items of clothing for big American brands like The Gap and Anthropologie.

She started to worry about the environmental impact of clothing just as these multinational companies began accelerating into fast fashion.

When she was asked about organic cotton in 2005, she found out just how easily sustainability could be dropped as a priority.

“They were like, ‘Laura, look into how we get organic,'” she told ABC podcast, Threads.

“I give them my little presentation … and they were like, ‘You know what? We just did some market research. No-one’s asking for it. No-one cares about it unless you can get us organic for the same price as everything else. Let’s just not do it.'”

This period of her career changed her perspective on the industry.

Dr McAndrews, now an assistant professor at the University of Georgia, sees a lot of the sustainability and environmental claims about clothing as little more than public relations spin to improve the image of brands.

It’s a practice known as “greenwashing”, where companies misrepresent the extent to which a product is environmentally friendly, sustainable or ethical.

“Like putting a green tag on it, giving you a pretty little story – and now you feel good about your overconsumption. There’s nothing good about it.”

Is greenwashing really that bad?

As consumers become aware of the environmental cost of fast fashion, brands are finding new ways to market their clothing as sustainable.

They might spruik the fast-growing nature of bamboo or lower carbon footprint of organic cotton, or tout the benefits of recycled polyester (more on that later).

But the end results aren’t always what they’re made out to be.

Earlier this year, high street retailer H&M was scrutinised for its use of bogus environmental scorecards for its clothing.

An investigation by Quartz found half of the company’s claims were misleading and, in some cases, outright deceptive. In response, H&M temporarily removed the claims from its website.

Greenwashing is rampant across the industry, at least according to analysis by the Dutch sustainability non-profit, Changing Markets.

They recently analysed thousands of clothing items and found that nearly two-thirds of sustainability labels were unsubstantiated and misleading to consumers.

This was much higher for the worst brands; 96 per cent of claims made by H&M were found to be false.

Dr McAndrews said the claims were often little more than a marketing ploy or a response to bad publicity about a brand’s environmental record.

“Greenwashing in general is completely reactionary,” she said. “We need to see things how they really are.”

It’s an issue that is increasingly on the radar of watchdogs in Australia.

In October, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission launched a crackdown on companies’ false environmental and sustainability claims.

The internet sweep targets greenwashing in over 200 company websites, including some selling clothing and footwear.

So what’s wrong with turning plastic bottles into T-shirts?

Like Laura McAndrews, Adrian Jones spent years in the fashion industry.

He started his career as a merchandiser for big British chains like Marks and Spencer and NEXT. By 2014, he was chief executive at APG & Co, the Australian company that owns Sportscraft, SABA and JAG.

And like Dr McAndrews, he also became disenchanted with the excesses of fast fashion. He now works for a start-up that aims to divert fashion waste from landfill.

He said one of the worst new trends — one that deserved the tag of greenwashing — was recycled polyester, also known as rPET.

This fibre is made by melting down existing plastic and re-spinning it into new polyester fibre.

Nike and Zara’s parent group, Inditex, relies on down-cycling single-use plastic bottles to meet its demand for polyester.

Patagonia used recycled polyester for 88 per cent of its polyester clothing in the spring 2022 season, while H&M markets rPET as part of its “Conscious” collection.

It’s meant to lessen the reliance on virgin polyester, and the petroleum and energy that comes with making new fibres. One Swiss study found that emissions were reduced by nearly a third compared to virgin polyester.

But critics like Jones say recycled polyester may convince people that their purchases don’t have an impact on the environment — a claim that’s far from true.

He said turning old plastic bottles into T-shirts wasn’t just diverting a problem, but creating one.

Once turned into clothing, most plastic can’t be recycled further and will instead be thrown away.

Clothes are already hard to recycle. Globally, only 12 per cent of material used in clothing ends up being recycled, and this is especially true for polyester, which is often mixed with other materials like cotton, preventing the fibres from being separated and made into other garments.

Jones said making clothing from plastic bottles took them out of a system where they would otherwise have been recycled into new bottles over and over again, accelerating the path of plastic to landfill.

“All that recycled polyester has come from bottles. Not one scrap of it has come from polyester garments,” he said.

There’s also the problem of plastic microfibres, which continue to be shed from clothing, whether the polyester used is recycled or not.

When clothing is made of plastic, it lasts in the environment for a long time.

“If you put pure cotton in the soil, it’ll break down fairly quickly because it’s an organic product,” Jones said.

“Polyester will take 200 years, maybe 1,000 years [to break down], and during that stage it will release noxious chemicals.”

Can consumers buy their way out of the problem?

All fibres used to make clothing come with some impact. Some are better than others, and often one advantage comes with a new environmental cost.

Polyester, for example, uses far less water to produce than cotton, which is water-intensive at all stages of production, from growing to spinning and dyeing.

Dr McAndrews said the most sustainable approach was to wear clothing many times irrespective of the fibre, and to buy fewer garments.

The big question eating away at campaigners like Urška Trunk from Changing Markets is how companies can make very loose environmental claims and get away with it.

Trunk said in the EU, regulators were cracking down on some practices and holding fast fashion companies responsible.

In Norway, the consumer watchdog recently took a close look at the Higg Index, a self-assessment tool developed by the fast fashion industry to monitor the sustainability of their own supply chains.

Its judgement? “The Higg index is based on weak methodology, is misleading to consumers and should therefore be illegal,” Trunk said.

The tool has been suspended – a move that has big implications for brands around the world, she said, “because there will be scrutiny of their green claims and they will be penalised for misleading consumers”.

And in the Netherlands, regulators reprimanded H&M and sports chain Decathlon for using terms like “conscious” and “eco-design” without further explanation to back up their claims.

Although neither company was fined, both promised to do better and donated nearly a million euros combined to various sustainable causes.

Trunk said this was a problem that couldn’t simply be solved by ethical consumption, and that real solutions required regulation.

“We did not create the fast fashion model,” she said. “It was the [fashion] industry.

“We don’t have the capacity or time to look at every item and see whether it’s good or bad when we go to the store. Shopping sustainably should be the default.”

Most certified “home-compostable” plastics do not fully break down in home compost bins, a UK citizen science project has found.

The project also showed that while 85 per cent of people surveyed were “enthusiastic” about buying compostable packaging, many were confused by what “compostable” meant.

The study was published in Frontiers in Sustainability.

Danielle Purkiss from University College London, who ran the study, said even when people correctly identified certified home-compostable plastic and placed it in their home composter, most of those plastics remained in large fragments after a year, and many lingered as microplastics.

Some barely broke down at all.

“We have photos [of home compost-certified plastic] that people have submitted after 12 months where you can still read the home compost certification label on it, which is ironic,” Ms Purkiss said.

Plastic not so fantastic

The world’s appetite for plastic has increased dramatically in the past couple of decades. Since the turn of the millennium, global plastics production — and ensuing waste — doubled.

Around half of the 353 million tonnes of plastic waste generated in 2019 ended up in landfill, while just under a quarter was “mismanaged”, meaning it was burned in open pits or ended up in waterways, oceans or dumped on land.

And while plastics that make their way into the environment do eventually break down, the process can take hundreds of years, and involves them first eroding into microplastics that permeate every corner of the globe.

In an attempt to tackle plastic pollution, many countries, including Australia, are phasing out single-use plastics and replacing them with recyclable, reusable or compostable options.

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Compostable plastics are often made of polylactic acid or PLA, and come in two types: industrial and home compostable.

Industrial compostable plastics, which in Australia meet requirements of Australian Standard AS 4736–2006, need the hot, controlled conditions of a commercial facility to fully biodegrade.

Plastics that are certified home-compostable are required to completely biodegrade in a home compost after 12 months. 

Complete biodegradation means the plastic is broken down into carbon dioxide, water, and a small amount of biomass, which can be used as compost.

To get the “home-compostable” stamp of approval in Australia (AS 5810-2010), the plastic is tested according to standards — such as specific temperature, moisture content, airflow and microbe mix — to see if it biodegrades within a year. 

But if a home compost bin is, say, a little cooler or drier than the standard testing lab conditions, that same plastic might take longer to break down.

Home-grown experiment

Compostable plastics in the UK undergo similar tests to Australian standards.

To see how they fare in the real world, Ms Purkiss and her colleagues set up the Big Compost Experiment.

Over two years, more than 900 people in the UK placed a total of 1,307 home-compostable-certified plastic items, such as food trays and newspaper wrapping, in a loose non-biodegradable net bag before adding it to their home compost.

“The bags don’t affect the way plastic breaks down — the mesh gaps are big enough that worms and bacteria can get through,” Ms Purkiss said.

“The mesh bag just helps people find what’s left of the plastic material at the end of the experiment.”

Participants checked the state of the home-compostable plastic at three-month intervals.

As expected, longer composting times usually meant more biodegradation, but by the end of the experiment, 60 per cent of certified home-compostable plastics remained as fragments bigger than 2 millimetres.

Another 12 per cent disintegrated into pieces smaller than 2 mm, but were still visible.

“These are the most-keen people [when it comes to composting] and even they couldn’t get the materials to fully break down consistently,” Ms Purkiss said.

“That’s really telling.”

A random selection of photos also showed some people put industrial compostable plastic in their compost bin.

Time to shift from home composting (for now)?

CSIRO polymer chemist Pete Cass, who was not involved with the study, wasn’t surprised that many plastics that claim to be suitable for home composting don’t fully break down within a reasonable time.

If the UK study was conducted in Australia, the results would likely be similar, and maybe slightly better, Dr Cass said.

“Warmer climates tend to speed things up a bit.”

Ms Purkiss and her crew didn’t dig into what made some home composters more successful at breaking down plastics than others, but a spin-off study is examining the microbial make-up of those efficient bins to see if they share a common mix of bugs.

Many study participants reported feeling “disgusted” by how much plastic remained in their compost bin.

And there’s a lot we don’t yet know about how microplastics in compost interact with, for instance, worms when they’re spread on gardens, she added.

So for now, instead of designing plastics for the home compost bin, Ms Purkiss suggested more focus be placed on plastics destined for industrial facilities, where the environment can be tightly controlled.

There’s simply too much variation in factors such as moisture and microbial make-up when it comes to home composting, and designing plastics that can break down in a wide range of environments is a hard ask.

Just because the UK study suggests many “home-compostable” plastics don’t break down quickly enough in home compost, it doesn’t mean we should give up on them completely, Dr Cass said.

“Ideally, the best plastic would be very fast to disintegrate and biodegrade, it would be recyclable, renewable and have good barrier properties, which is a limitation of [current] compostable plastics — they tend to let oxygen and moisture through which can affect food shelf life.

“At the state of everything at the moment, [home-compostable plastic] won’t solve the plastic pollution problem alone, but technology is heading in the right direction.”