Category Archives: Land

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

Jan. 2, 2022 10:57 am ET

KALAMAZOO, Mich.—When a new building-size machine cranks up this month, it will begin turning mountains of recycled cardboard into paperboard suitable for greener forms of packaging. The $600-million project, the first new paperboard production line built in the U.S. in decades, represents an enormous bet by owner

Graphic Packaging Holding Co.

GPK 2.33%

on a future without foam cups, plastic clamshell containers or six-pack rings.

Graphic wants to be able to offer more environmentally friendly packaging so that the consumer-goods companies that buy its products can tout a cleaner supply chain to their own investors and consumers. Once Graphic shuts down four smaller and less-efficient machines, including one at its Kalamazoo complex that is 100 years old, it will use a lot less water and electricity, it says, and emit 20% less greenhouse gases. ESG investing has put trillions of dollars into the control of funds that promise to invest it with environmental, social and governance goals in mind, as the abbreviation implies. That, in turn, has companies striving to operate with less waste and greenhouse-gas emissions. Graphic says green investing has opened up a market worth more than $6 billion a year for replacing plastic with paper on store shelves, even if that might result in consumers seeing slightly higher prices. Graphic’s gamble is a big test of whether the flood of ESG capital can transform supply chains. Plastic packaging is frequently less expensive than paper, is more effective in many applications, and sometimes even has a smaller carbon footprint. Consumer-goods companies will have to be persuaded that their customers will pay more and that paper packaging really is greener.

Graphic CEO Michael Doss, right, and finance chief Stephen Scherger say their customers are seeking cleaner supply chains.

Photo:

Kendrick Brinson for The Wall Street Journal

Graphic executives contend their customers have little chance of meeting emissions and waste targets without substantially cleaner supply chains. “A lot of those goals flow through us,” said finance chief

Stephen Scherger.

Plastic makers, for their part, say that they are investing in recycling and waste-collection technologies, and that their products compare favorably with paper once factors such as shipping weight and avoided food waste are considered.

Graphic, based in Sandy Springs, Ga., sells packaging material to the nation’s biggest food, beverage and consumer-products companies:

Coca-Cola Co.

and

PepsiCo Inc.,

Kellogg Co.

and

General Mills Inc.,

Nestlé SA and Mars Inc.,

Kimberly-Clark Corp.

and

Procter & Gamble Co.

Its beer-box business generates about $1 billion annually. It sells some 13 billion cups a year. Graphic and other producers of paperboard, a single-sheet cardboard used mainly in packaging, are working to introduce newfangled products such as fiber yokes for six-packs and microwavable meal trays molded from cardboard. Graphic has announced plans for a line of cups with a water-based coating to replace the polyethylene lining, one step closer to the holy grail of a compostable cup. When Graphic announced plans for the new paperboard plant in 2019, investors initially questioned the cost and necessity. Green investing has since gained momentum, though, and new investors have lined up behind the project.

A conveyor belt carries bales of recycled cardboard at the Kalamazoo plant.

Photo:

Emily Elconin for The Wall Street Journal

In September, Graphic sold $100 million of so-called green bonds to help pay for it. The green designation, earned through a Michigan state program to promote recycling facilities, allowed it to sell debt with interest payments not subject to federal and state taxes. Demand for the bonds outstripped supply by a factor of 20, Mr. Scherger said. Elsewhere, the company is adding $100 million of equipment to its Texarkana, Texas, mill so it can pulp more loblolly pine trees into extra-strong paperboard for cups and beer cartons. In July, Graphic paid $280 million for seven converting facilities, which fold paperboard into packaging, bringing its total to 80. In November, it gained even more when it purchased a $1.45-billion rival in Europe, where trends in sustainable packaging often start. It has spent about $180 million moving several Louisiana facilities under one roof to eliminate millions of miles driven between them each year. It installed a boiler that burns tree tops and other organic waste from its Macon, Ga., pine-pulp operations to power its mill there. Energy consumption and emissions at both Southern facilities factor into the carbon footprints for the paperboard yokes that Graphic is selling in Europe to replace shrink wrap. In July, hedge-fund manager

David Einhorn

disclosed that his Greenlight Capital had taken a $15-million stake in Graphic. Greenlight predicts paperboard is set for sustained price gains because too little has been invested in production. “The U.S. has added so little paperboard capacity that the average mill in this country is over 30 years old,” Mr. Einhorn wrote to investors. He said demand should rise with consumption and the ESG-driven push to remove plastic from supply chains. Plastic became ubiquitous after World War II, when shortages of natural materials touched off a race for synthetic replacements, including nylon and plexiglass. Extracting fossil fuels and turning them into plastic produces a lot of greenhouse gases. Only 14% of plastic packaging is collected for recycling and just a portion of that winds up in new products, while about one-third isn’t collected at all, according to a 2016 report by the World Economic Forum, Ellen MacArthur Foundation and McKinsey & Co. Research published in 2019 by

Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

said only 12% of plastic is recycled, while 28% is incinerated and 60% remains in the environment. The 2016 study, which is cited regularly, depicted oceans in crisis, fouled by soda bottles, shopping bags and clothing fibers, with a garbage truck worth of plastic winding up in the water every minute. By 2050, the study said, there would be more plastic in the sea, by weight, than fish. With governmental authorities from California to China cracking down, stock analysts list plastic use as one the biggest threats to packaged-goods firms. Companies including Coca-Cola and

Anheuser-Busch InBev SA

have mentioned plastic-to-paper moves in the sustainability reports they produce for investors and outside firms that calculate corporate ESG scores. “It takes us a full year to use as much plastic as a leading beverage company uses in just two weeks,” cereal maker Kellogg’s chief sustainability officer boasted at an investment conference earlier last year, as beverage-company executives waited to pitch the same audience.

Tape and other materials rejected during the cardboard recycling process.

Photo:

Emily Elconin for The Wall Street Journal

In 2019, Graphic’s executives unveiled plans to take market share from plastic and build the state-of-the-art recycled-board machine in Kalamazoo. “You’re not going to see islands of paper floating around the ocean,” said

Joe Yost,

Graphic’s head of Americas, at a meeting with stock analysts. Yet even with a rush of companies promising to cut emissions and reduce waste, the new mill was a hard sell. It was a huge expense that would take two years before it was operational and earning money. In an era in which the average holding time for stocks is measured in months, two years is a long time for investors. Graphic Chief Executive

Michael Doss

prepared the board of directors for blowback. “Not everyone is going to like this,” he recalled telling them. “Our industry has a track record of overexpanding and making poor capital allocations.” Graphic began as a unit of Colorado’s Coors Brewing Co. that manufactured boxes that wouldn’t get soggy in refrigerated trucks. Coors spun off the box business as a separate public company in the early 1990s. Acquisitions followed, giving Graphic its big presence in the Southern pine belt, where its mills make paperboard from sawmill scraps and trees unfit for lumber. Graphic holds about 2,400 patents and has more than 500 applications pending, which protect its package designs and machines installed on customers’ manufacturing lines to fill and fold cartons.

A wall of patents in a hallway at Graphic’s office outside Atlanta.

Photo:

Kendrick Brinson for The Wall Street Journal

Its executives say research and development is focused these days on expanding the use of paperboard from grocery shelves to deli, produce and beer coolers. “We are attacking anything that is plastic,” said

Matt Kearns,

a packaging designer for Graphic. Plastic, though, is less expensive than paperboard. Advancements in paper packaging, such as compostable cups, will likely add to costs. Paperboard producers have increased prices several times over the past year to cover their own rising expenses. Some buyers are exploring less expensive alternatives to paperboard, said

Adam Josephson,

a paper and packaging analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets. “Can companies such as Graphic sell more products when the cost is considerably higher than the products they’re already selling?” Mr. Josephson asked. “That is very much in question.”

Share Your ThoughtsWhat can other companies learn from this plant’s environmental efforts? Join the conversation below.

For some companies, going green means using more plastic. Plastic wrap is lighter than boxes, which means less fuel burned in transit. Plastic has relatively low recycling rates, but so do cups and takeout containers that are made of paper but also fused to polyethylene. It takes an industrial process to peel away the reusable tree pulp.

Wendy’s Co.

said its restaurants will dump plastic-lined paper cups next year and replace them with clear plastic, which it said more consumers will be able to recycle. “This demonstrates how plastic can be viewed as an environmental opportunity instead of a liability,” said

Tom Salmon,

chief executive of

Berry Global Group Inc.,

BERY 1.03%

which is making the cups.

A reject chute for baling wire and plastic separated during the recycling process.

Photo:

Emily Elconin for The Wall Street Journal

Paper doesn’t always have a smaller carbon footprint, either. Making paperboard consumes power and water, and it generates greenhouse gases. One of Graphic’s most promising new products is the KeelClip. The paperboard yoke folds over the top of cans and has finger holes. It is fast replacing plastic wrap and six-pack rings in Europe’s beverage aisles. KeelClips are as easy to recycle as cereal boxes, and Graphic says they can have about half the carbon footprint of shrink wrap, a common way to bundle beers in Europe. Graphic is bringing the KeelClip to America, where it must contend with the ubiquitous plastic six-pack ring. Dirt cheap and light-as-a-feather, the six-pack ring endures despite decades as a symbol of humanity’s abuse of nature. Generations of American school children have been shown photos of ensnared wildlife.

The KeelClip, a paperboard yoke for carrying cans, is tested in a company lab.

Photo:

Kendrick Brinson for The Wall Street Journal

The KeelClip eliminates the need for a lot of plastic wrap in transit, and it is much less likely to muzzle a dolphin. However, Graphic says KeelClip’s carbon footprint—the emissions generated by every step of its manufacture and distribution—is slightly higher than a six-pack ring. Each KeelClip generates the equivalent of 19.32 grams of carbon dioxide, compared with plastic rings’ 18.96 grams, according to Sphera, an ESG-consulting firm that Graphic hired to analyze the packages. Graphic says it is working on that. The DiamondClip, aka the EnviroClip, is under development. It will be strong enough to hold six sweaty beers, the company says, but skimpy enough to have half the carbon footprint of the plastic rings.

The new paperboard production line under construction in November.

Photo:

Emily Elconin for The Wall Street Journal

Write to Ryan Dezember at ryan.dezember@wsj.com

Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the January 3, 2022, print edition as ‘Packaging Giant Bets on Paper.’

The U.S. District Court and post office building on West Street in Rutland in 2016. File photo by Andrew Kutches/VTDigger
Updated Dec. 30 at 12:16 p.m.
Residents who complained of water and soil contamination from two shuttered Bennington factories are one step closer to receiving compensation in a class-action suit.
On Dec. 17, the federal court preliminarily approved a $34 million settlement in the lawsuit against factory owner Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics Corporation.
Under the November settlement agreement, the French multinational company would pay $26.2 million to eligible property owners affected by PFOA contamination.
The company also would spend up to $6 million to monitor certain diseases among residents adversely exposed to the chemical, used to coat fiberglass fabrics at its defunct factories in North Bennington and Bennington. The rest of the money would cover a portion of the attorneys’ fees.
Area residents allege that the industrial plants emitted PFOA, or perfluorooctanoic acid, which contaminated their drinking water, groundwater and soil. Saint-Gobain denies the accusation and any wrongdoing under the settlement.
The preliminary approval, given by U.S. District Court Chief Judge Geoffrey Crawford, includes a timeline of actions leading up to the final approval hearing April 18.
The notice of settlement will be mailed to potential claimants starting Jan. 3. They can begin submitting claims Jan. 18, and claim approvals will be done after the final approval hearing.
If the rest of the process goes smoothly, plaintiff attorney Emily Joselson said, approved claims can start to be paid around the end of May.
That would be six years since the lawsuit was filed in May 2016.
The PFOA contamination affected an estimated 2,700 properties and 9,000 residents in the towns of Bennington and Shaftsbury and the village of North Bennington, according to attorneys for the complainants. 
Jim Sullivan, a North Bennington resident who has been working to organize other residents affected by the contamination, said they are glad the civil case has reached this juncture. 
“It’s been a long road,” he said.
Sullivan said the complainants are particularly eager to start the medical-monitoring process called for in the settlement.
This free monitoring service will be available to residents who ingested PFOA-contaminated water and who have more than 2.1 parts per billion of PFOA in their blood. The PFOA background level for the U.S. general population is 2.08 parts per billion.
Property owners within the “zone of concern” also would be eligible to claim compensation if they meet the qualifications: They either owned residential real estate within the zone as of March 14, 2016, or after that date bought property that was later added to the zone.
The preliminary approval also lays out February deadlines for potential claimants to opt out of the class-action suit and to file objections to the settlement.
Joselson, a partner at one of the three law firms representing the plaintiffs, describes the agreement as “an extraordinarily good settlement.” She said she hopes potential claimants will recognize its benefits and that there won’t be a significant number of objections.
Another plaintiff attorney, David Silver, said the only reason he can think of for people deciding to opt out is if they want to file their own lawsuit against the French plastics company.
“To go against Saint-Gobain on your own would be, to put it mildly, cost-prohibitive,” he said. “The firms, we’ve spent over a million dollars in expenses to get this far.”
Their expenses over the past five and a half years include payments for expert witnesses, deposition fees and filing fees with the court, Joselson said.
Forms are available through benningtonvtclassaction.com.
When asked for comment, Saint-Gobain said in a statement it is “pleased that Chief Judge Crawford has given preliminary approval to the settlement agreement, allowing the process to move on to the next phase.”
The final approval hearing before Crawford is scheduled to take place April 18 at the federal courthouse in Rutland.

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A West Coast cleanup project wrapped up operations in time for Christmas after removing 50 tonnes of marine debris from the shores of B.C.’s Discovery Islands. The amount of garbage collected by a small but determined team from 357 kilometres of shoreline on Quadra, Cortes, Read, Maurelle, and Marina islands from October to late December was staggering, said project co-ordinator Breanne Quesnel. “We’re really proud we were able to help get that volume of material off the beaches,” said Quesnel, co-owner of Spirit of the West Adventures, the wilderness tourism company that secured the provincial funds to do the cleanup. Get top stories in your inbox.Our award-winning journalists bring you the news that impacts you, Canada, and the world. Don’t miss out.“But we’re really disheartened that it’s there in the first place.”Plastic waste from shellfish farms and other aquaculture operations, as well as commercial fishing ropes and nets, made up the bulk of the garbage collected, Quesnel said. Other ubiquitous offenders were large blocks of Styrofoam and tires typically used to float docks or for mooring devices, she said. The Styrofoam, or polystyrene plastic, is particularly bad because as it degrades and crumbles, the small, lightweight bits are easily and widely dispersed by wind and waves, Quesnel said. And they are almost impossible to collect, she added. What people are reading A team funded by B.C.’s Clean Coast, Clean Waters initiative works to loosen a massive tire lodged on the beach at Rebecca Spit Park on Quadra Island. Photo courtesy of Spirit of the West Adventures The cleanup crews also found a number of partially filled and leaking oil drums that needed to be carefully disposed of. The focus of the operation was to get the largest, most difficult to remove items from more remote beaches, which required specialized transport on land and water, she said. “And we need to be smarter about what (plastics) we’re using, how we’re using it, what its life cycle is,” says Breanne Quesnel, co-ordinator of the B.C. coastal cleanup in the Discovery Islands. The largest item by far was a massive 6,000-pound tire, most likely from a mining vehicle, that required two cranes to lift onto the dock and a specialized vehicle to take it away.The goal was also to collect items that would degrade into microplastics and cause havoc in the marine food web, Quesnel said. Though much of the bigger debris items on island shores came from marine industries, a lot of consumer items are finding their way into the ocean, too. “We found more than 200 shoes,” she said. Quesnel’s pet peeves are all the plastic tampon applicators, straws, plastic dental floss picks, shotgun shell casings, plastic bags and Starbucks stir sticks littering island beaches.“Anyone who has ever used a plastic tampon applicator should have to spend a day or a week cleaning up a beach … because those are just plentiful.” The fact so much plastic debris is still being found on the shores of Quadra demonstrates how pervasive the problem of plastic marine debris is, Quesnel said. The recent intensive shore sweep follows years of dedicated effort by Quadra residents who conduct an annual community beach cleanup, except the past two years because of the pandemic. And island volunteers constantly walk the beaches and pick up plastic. But the waves of detritus continue, even on the most recently cleaned beaches, Quesnel said. While beach cleanups are important and need to continue beyond being a COVID-19 relief measure, any real resolution involves choking off plastic use, she said. There needs to be much stricter policy from all levels of government around plastic production and use, and more responsibility from industries that use them, Quesnel said. “There needs to be better systems in place for tracking those materials and accountability for where they’re coming from,” she said. “And we need to be smarter about what we’re using, how we’re using it, what its life cycle is.” Styrofoam blocks used to float docks are some of the worst forms of plastic pollution on B.C.’s beaches, says Discovery Islands coastal cleanup co-ordinator Breanne Quesnel. Photo courtesy of Spirit of the West AdventuresThe problem of ocean plastics is rising Plastic pollution in aquatic ecosystems across the globe has grown sharply in recent years and is anticipated to more than double by 2030, according to a recent report by the UN Environmental Program.Plastic accounts for 85 per cent of marine debris, and 23 million metric tonnes to 37 million metric tonnes of plastic will pollute the ocean per year by 2040 — which translates to 50 kilograms of plastic per metre of coastline worldwide with dire implications for human health, biodiversity, and the climate and global economy, the report said. Canada spearheaded an international effort to reduce plastics in marine ecosystems with the 2018 Oceans Plastic Charter. But the accord is voluntary and not enough to meet the severity of the problem plastics pose, experts suggest. Ottawa has said it is supportive of current negotiations for a global treaty to mandate change for the entire life cycle of plastic, including its production, use, and disposal. The initiative is slated for discussion at a UN environmental assembly in February, but the federal government hasn’t clarified support for any specific measures or whether it would support a legally binding agreement. Quesnel said that one of the most positive aspects of the Discovery Islands beach cleanup was that 50 per cent of the garbage collected was diverted from landfills through recycling or reuse. “That’s why it was so labour-intensive,” she said. “Every piece that we picked up off of a beach came back to our yard and was dumped onto a tarp and sorted into one of 16 categories for recycling.” The cleanup was funded by the province’s $18-million Clean Coast, Clean Waters initiative, and is one of nine similar projects across much of the coast. More than 550 tonnes of garbage has been removed from coastal shores and created employment during the pandemic, according to the B.C. Ministry of Environment.Aside from protecting marine ecosystems, Quesnel said the coastal cleanup initiative is important given much of the local economy, her marine tourism business included, relies on keeping plastics out of the ocean. The islands, sandwiched between the B.C. mainland and eastern Vancouver Island, are known for their beauty and are a popular wilderness destination for kayakers, boaters and fishing enthusiasts, she said. “We really appreciated working with the local youth, community and First Nations,” Quesnel said. “But I’d rather not be cleaning up beaches, (I’d) rather be helping find better solutions for plastics and debris before they become a problem.” Rochelle Baker / Local Journalism Initiative / Canada’s National Observer

Let’s take a look back at media coverage in 2021 on sustainable healthcare.We promise, in 2022, to get more sophisticated in these analyses. But even a rough cut at the data yields some pleasant surprises.For starters, our search of the LexisNexis database found 53,000 articles touching on sustainability and healthcare. The database picks up a lot of press releases and trade articles, so the number of “mainstream” reported articles that, say, our researchers at EHN.org would aggregate is considerably smaller.

Healthcare coverage, 2021 edition

Still, within that pile we can find some insight. Our system sorted those articles into different clusters, based on an AI scan of the article text and coded by color, then plotted on a timeline.That colorful graph is shown above. The x-axis shows the months of the year, while the y-axis shows the number of stories published. Several trends are apparent.

Healthcare manufacturing & materials

The teal blocks at the base of each bar show stories focused on sustainable manufacturing and materials – about 15 percent of the coverage. That coverage was fairly consistent over the year.

Covid-19 waves

That’s not the case for stories about healthcare systems getting swamped by Covid-19, right above the teal, in red blocks. Note, of course, that this is just the fraction of the stories published about Covid overrunning our health system; what’s pictured above are just those stories that that also mention sustainability or plastics or recycling.Whether even these belong in this analysis is debatable, but what’s sobering is that we saw just a brief, one-month ebb in the tsunami of coverage this issue generated – in June, when vaccines were rolling out and we all thought we had this pandemic licked.Sigh.These stories represent about 14 percent of all the sustainability coverage.

Healthcare climate emissions

Far more positive are the purple blocks, showing stories about healthcare’s carbon footprint, and – two blocks above those – the peach ones showing efforts to reduce healthcare’s carbon emissions.Note the big spike in coverage in November, when nations gathered in Glasgow for the UN climate talks (You may recall that some 50 nations – but not the United States! – pledged to reduce healthcare emissions). Together these two blocks are about 20 percent of total sustainable healthcare coverage in 2021.

Healthcare waste & recycling

Two final nodes deserve mention: The light green and yellow blocks between the two climate-related ones. They show stories focused on healthcare waste and recycling, respectively, and together they represent almost a quarter of the coverage – a number we at EHN.org found surprising.We’ll be out in 2022 with reports and analyses breaking apart the myth of recycling. But the attention the sector is giving to waste – and the attention that focus is getting in the media – is worth noting.That’s a quick look at the media landscape, and an imprecise one; again, our goal is to get you more detail over this next year and to do what we can to increase the volume and depth of coverage – so we have more stories to analyze when we do this again at the end of 2022!Happy New Year!

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Luke Haverhals wants to change how yoga pants are made. Most performance fabrics used in athletic clothing, like Spandex, are made from synthetic fibers—plastic, essentially. Those plastics are problematic for humans and the environment. Haverhals’ company, Natural Fiber Welding, offers an alternative to synthetic fabrics.NFW makes a performance cotton textile called Clarus that can be used for clothing. The fabric is made from cotton that has been treated to partially break down the organic material and leave it stronger and denser. The result is cotton yarn that behaves more like synthetic fibers.When asked if his company is a tech company or a textiles company, Haverhals responds without hesitation. “We’re a tech company … but our first focus is textiles.”Haverhals has a PhD in chemistry and began his career teaching at the Naval Academy in 2008. While there, he worked with a team of chemists and materials scientists researching ionic liquids, which are essentially melted salts. These salts usually remain liquid at room temperature and can be used as solvents for breaking down biomass, things like cotton and cellulose. In 2009, with funding from the Air Force’s Office of Scientific Research, the team realized a significant breakthrough in strengthening natural fibers using ionic liquids.The team asked what might happen if they partially broke down natural fibers and then welded or fused them together. The result is a kind of monofilament cotton. While the original fibers might be only a few centimeters long, the partially dissolved and fused fibers can be made much longer. This creates a stronger yarn that mimics the performance characteristics of synthetic fibers.In 2016, Haverhals left the Naval Academy and founded NFW with a grant from the Department of Defense and a license from the Air Force to produce yarns and textiles using the process that had come to be known as “fiber welding.” The company has been issued eight patents globally, and has 90 pending.Haverhals and NFW win praise from critics of plastics—and of marketing campaigns claiming to have eliminated them. There’s growing concern about the plastic microfibers synthetic materials like polyester shed with each turn of the washing machine. “I think he (Luke) is the real deal, and I think there are very few people out there that are the real deal,” says Sian Sutherland, founder of A Plastic Planet, a nonprofit that aims to eliminate the use of plastics. “This is not just about eradicating fossil fuels within the textile industry, but above and beyond that, it’s also about toxins.”NFW has attracted a handful of big-name investors, including Ralph Lauren, BMW’s iVentures, and Allbirds. In July, the company said it had raised $15 million from private investors, bringing its total to $45 million. Some of that money went to expand its factory in Peoria, Illinois, where it’s now working to scale up production to hundreds of thousands of square feet of Clarus per month. In September, NFW announced a partnership with Patagonia to bring Clarus fibers into some of the brand’s new products. Haverhals says hundreds of brands are in line to buy the company’s textiles for their own products. He says NFW will provide standardized products to manufacturers and work with brands hoping to develop specialized textiles.“I think he (Luke) is the real deal and I think there are very few people out there that are the real deal.”Sian Sutherland, founder, A Plastic PlanetMirum, NFW’s other product line, is a plant-based alternative to leather. It’s made from things like coconut husk, natural rubber, or cork and is cured, or enhanced for durability, using a patented chemistry with no petrochemical additives. This differentiates Mirum from other synthetics that rely on harsh chemical treatments to achieve a desired consistency or feel. The company pitches it as a substitute for leather in products such as auto interiors and shoes. Allbirds plans to start selling shoes made with Mirum soon.Kasper Sage, managing partner at BMW’s iVentures venture capital arm, says NFW is promising because its products are high quality and sustainable, and the technology is scalable, which is important to automakers. “This is the only company we have found … trying to tackle this problem, that has the potential to really make it in serious automotive production,” says Sage.

He helped perfect the manufacturing of compounds that are now used to make everything from plastics to pharmaceuticals, marking an advance in “green chemistry.”Robert H. Grubbs, an American chemist who helped find a way to streamline the manufacturing of compounds that are used to make everything from plastics to pharmaceuticals so that they produce less hazardous waste, a “green chemistry” breakthrough that brought him a share of the Nobel Prize in 2005, died on Sunday in Duarte, Calif. He was 79.His son Barney said the cause was a heart attack, which Dr. Grubbs suffered while being treated for lymphoma at the City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center.The process that Dr. Grubbs helped perfect is called metathesis (pronounced meh-TATH-eh-sis), which means “changing places.” It allows molecules to break and then form again as strong “double bonds” of carbon atoms, creating new compounds.Metathesis was first discovered and used in the 1950s, but how it worked remained a mystery until it was explained in 1971 by the French chemist Yves Chauvin and a student of his, Jean-Louis Hérrison.They showed how a metal-carbon catalyst can pair with the fragment of a molecule to create a temporary bond, like two dancers clasping their four hands. The newly created bond then finds another, similar pair of molecules — the two dancers are joined by two others — forming a ring. The ring then breaks apart, and the catalyst goes off with a molecular piece from the second pair, which rearranges its carbon bonds.Metathesis is extremely effective, but some of the early catalysts were difficult to work with and could be unstable. In 1990, Richard H. Schrock, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, made a breakthrough by developing catalysts based on the metals tungsten and molybdenum. The new catalysts were more efficient, but they still had shortcomings, notably that they fell apart when exposed to air.Working separately, Dr. Grubbs, who had begun his research on metathesis in the 1970s, in 1992 came up with catalysts that used the metal ruthenium. His catalysts were not always as efficient as Dr. Schrock’s, but they were stable in air and more selective in how they bonded with molecular chains.Dr. Schrock said of Dr. Grubbs’s work, “He was the one who really took what I did and turned it into something practical.”The remarkable thing about metathesis was that it worked at all, Dr. Grubbs said. “Carbon-carbon double bonds are usually one of the strongest points in the molecule,” he explained. “To be able to rip them apart and put them back together very cleanly was a complete surprise to organic chemists.”The work of Dr. Grubbs and Dr. Schrock paved the way for metathesis to become a cornerstone of chemical manufacturing. The catalysts they developed, which are named for them, are in wide use today in making chemicals for a variety of manufacturing processes.In addition to their other advantages, the new catalysts produced far less waste, particularly hazardous waste. In announcing that Dr. Grubbs, Dr. Chauvin and Dr. Schrock would share the 2005 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which manages the prizes, said, “This represents a great step forward for ‘green chemistry,’ reducing potentially hazardous waste through smarter production.”Dr. Grubbs attending a reception in Washington in 2005 honoring that year’s Nobel Prize winners. Throughout his career he mentored hundreds of Ph.D. students and postdoctoral associates.Mark Wilson/Getty ImagesRobert Howard Grubbs was born on Feb. 27, 1942, on a farm in western Kentucky between Calvert City and Possum Trot. He was the second of three children of Howard and Faye Grubbs.Robert’s maternal grandmother was well read and educated, and his mother became a schoolteacher, working for more than 35 years in small rural schools. She had received a teaching certificate when she was younger, but it took her 28 years to earn her bachelor’s degree by taking night and weekend classes, sometimes with Robert in tow.Dr. Grubbs’s father was a mechanic who built the farmhouse where his children were born. He worked for the Tennessee Valley Authority, operating and maintaining heavy equipment for dams in western Kentucky and Tennessee.In an autobiographical sketch for the Nobel committee, Dr. Grubbs wrote, “The academic model of my mother and grandmother and the very practical mechanical training from my father turned out to be perfect training for organic chemical research.”Enrolling at the University of Florida, he majored in agricultural chemistry, combining his interest in science, developed in junior high school, and his boyhood passion for farming.One summer, while working in an animal nutrition laboratory analyzing steer feces, he was invited by a friend to work in an organic chemistry laboratory being run by a new university faculty member, Merle Battiste. Around that time, Dr. Grubbs became absorbed in a book called “Mechanisms and Structure in Organic Chemistry,” by E.S. Gould, which explained how chemical reactions work. His lab experience and the book persuaded him to devote himself to chemistry, he said.It was a lecture at the university by Rowland Pettit, an Australian chemist, that inspired Dr. Grubbs to begin looking into the use of metals in organic chemistry, exploratory work that would lead to the Nobel.After earning his undergraduate and master’s degrees at the University of Florida, he moved to Columbia University in New York for his doctoral degree, working under Ronald Breslow. Dr. Battiste had been Dr. Breslow’s first Ph.D. student. While at Columbia, Dr. Grubbs met and married Helen O’Kane, who is a speech-language pathologist from Brooklyn.He obtained his Ph.D. in 1968 and then worked for a year at Stanford University as a National Institutes of Health fellow. In 1969, he joined the faculty of Michigan State University and worked there until 1978. During that time he started his research on catalysts in metathesis.Dr. Grubbs was hired by the California Institute of Technology in 1978 and worked there until his death, advising and mentoring more than 100 Ph.D. candidates and almost 200 postdoctoral associates over they years.In 1998, he and a chemistry postdoctoral fellow, Mike Giardello, founded Materia, a Pasadena-based technology company that has the exclusive rights to manufacture Dr. Grubbs’s catalysts. The business was sold in 2017 to Umicore and then to ExxonMobil this year.Dr. Grubbs received the Benjamin Franklin Medal from the Franklin Institute in 2000 and was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Royal Society of Chemistry.In addition to his wife and his son Barney, he is survived by another son, Brendan; a daughter, Kathleen; two sisters, Marie Maines and Bonnie Berry; and four grandchildren.As Dr. Grubbs wrote in his autobiographical sketch, his path toward the Nobel had been set as a boy.“As a child I was always interested in building things,” he recalled. “Instead of buying candy, I would purchase nails, which I used to construct things out of scrap wood.”Sometimes he would help his father rebuild car engines, install plumbing and build houses on the farms owned by his aunts and uncles, who mostly lived close by in Kentucky.But in the end, he wrote, he discovered that “building new molecules was even more fun than building houses.”

What comes around goes around: Your discarded plastic water bottle may soon become part of your next car.Automakers are racing to make their vehicles more sustainable — the industry’s favorite buzzword — by turning environmentally unfriendly materials into seat cushions, floors, door panels and dashboard trims. First it was reclaimed wood. Then “vegan” leather. Now, plastic waste from the ocean, rice hulls, flaxseeds and agave are transforming the manufacturing process.”Everyone is awakening to the problems of plastic and waste,” Deborah Mielewski, a technical fellow of sustainability at Ford, told ABC News.Ford in particular has been championing the use of renewable materials in its vehicles. In 2008 it replaced the petroleum-based polyol foam in its Mustang sports car with seat cushions made from soy, an industry first. More recently Mielewski and her team started examining how to transform some of the 13 million metric tons of ocean plastic, which threaten marine life and pollute shorelines, into parts for future Ford vehicles. The result? Wiring harness clips in the new Ford Bronco Sport that were once nylon fishing nets.”Two years ago there was a lot of publicity around ocean pollution and we felt an obligation to do something,” Mielewski said.The wiring harness clip in the Ford Bronco Sport, made from recycled ocean plastic, is as durable as petroleum-based clips, Ford says.Ford acquires the recycled plastic from its supplier DSM, which collects the nets from fishermen who are paid to return them. The nets are harvested, sorted, washed and dried before they’re cut into small pellets and injection-molded into harness clips, which weigh about 5 grams and guide wires that power side-curtain airbags in the Bronco Sport.Mielewski said Ford is currently testing the recycled plastic’s durability for the Bronco Sport’s wire shields, floor side rails and transmission brackets.”My hope is we can replace many parts with this material,” she said, adding that more than half of Ford customers “care deeply about the environment and want to understand what companies are trying to minimize their footprint.”Brian Moody, executive editor of Autotrader, said automakers like Ford have been attempting to produce environmentally responsible vehicles for years. He recalled Ford’s Model U concept which premiered on Jan. 5, 2003, at Detroit’s North American International Auto Show. It had a hybrid engine and its door panels were built with a natural fiber-filled composite material.Ford Motor Company shows off the Model U concept car during a press conference at the North America International Auto Show, in Detroit, Jan. 5, 2003.”This is not just a passing trend. Sustainability is here to stay,” Moody told ABC News. “Environmental regulations are likely to become more strict in the years to come [and it’s] another incentive for automakers to start looking for a solution right now.”Automakers deliberately added plastics to reduce the weight and cost of vehicles and increase performance and fuel economy, according to Gregory Keoleian, director of the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan.”About 40 different types of basic plastics and polymers are commonly used to make cars today and state-of-the-art separation technologies are very capital intensive,” he told ABC News. “The majority of plastics are derived from petroleum and natural gas feedstocks and when vehicles are retired these materials are generally disposed of in landfills.”For German automaker Audi, sustainable materials are a launching point to becoming net CO2 neutral by 2050. Recycled PET bottles are ground up and transformed into a polyester yarn, accounting for 89% of the seat material in Audi’s fourth-generation A3 car. An additional 62 PET bottles were recycled for the carpet in the A3. The carpet and floor mats in the all-electric e-tron GT are made from Econyl, a recycled nylon fiber constructed from fishing nets. The e-tron GT’s 20-inch wheels are also assembled from low-CO2 emission aluminum.In August, the company showed off its skysphere electric roadster concept, which featured sustainably produced microfiber seat fabric, environmentally certified eucalyptus wood and synthetically produced imitation leather.The Audi skysphere concept features sustainably produced microfiber fabric in the seats, environmentally certified eucalyptus wood and synthetically produced imitation leather.”Audi is committed to sustainable materials and we’re implementing these changes in new vehicles,” Spencer Reeder, director of government affairs at Audi, told ABC News. “We have very high standards and fully vet these products.”Reeder, however, said Audi’s top priority is expanding its lineup of electrified vehicles. By 2025, 30% of Audi vehicles in the U.S. will be full battery electric or plug-in hybrid.”We’re delivering on things that really truly matter to the environment,” he said. “The focus right now in the industry is on battery materials — nickel, lithium, magnesium — and sustainably sourcing those materials.”Keoleian pointed out that 17% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions are from automobiles.”Automakers leading in sustainability are companies accelerating their launch of EV models,” he said.Stephanie Brinley, an analyst at IHS Markit, said automakers are promoting these green efforts aggressively because consumers are more curious and aware of the manufacturing process. These eco-friendly materials “have to look good and be durable and work” to win over consumers, she told ABC News.”If the material performs just as well, consumers will be happy,” she noted, adding, “You’d be hard-pressed to find a consumer who is against sustainable materials.”Volvo, the Swedish automaker, said it’s addressing all areas of sustainability — not just carbon emissions — in its vehicles. The company said it will go leather-free by 2030 and use a material it developed called Nordico that consists of textiles made from recycled material such as PET bottles, bio-attributed material from sustainable forests in Sweden and Finland and corks recycled from the wine industry.The carpet in the Volvo C40 Recharge EV is made of 100% recycled PET plastic bottles.The automaker has even been “looking to reduce the use of residual products from livestock production which are commonly used within or in the production of plastics, rubber, lubricants and adhesives, either as part of the material or as a process chemical in the material’s production or treatment,” according to Rekha Meena, Volvo’s senior design manager for color and material.”We see a growing trend in consumer demands for more sustainable materials, particularly alternatives to leather, in most of our key markets due to concern over animal welfare and the negative environmental impacts of cattle farming, including deforestation,” she told ABC News. “We share these concerns and are choosing to transition away from leather and focus on high-quality sustainable alternatives, like Nordico, to meet this customer need.”Polestar, Volvo’s electric performance brand, cut plastic from its car interiors by choosing a composite made from flax.The Polestar 2 EV. features seats made from recycled plastic and the plastic panels inside the cabin have been replaced with natural materials.The instrument panel in BMW’s all-electric iX SUV is treated with a natural olive leaf extract to avoid any production residue that is harmful to the environment, according to the company. BMW also chose FSC-certified wood and a large chunk of the iX’s door panels, seats, center console and floor are manufactured from recycled plastics.Each BMW iX contains some 132 pounds of recycled plastic in total.For its all-new MX-30 EV, Mazda wanted to use materials that “show an even greater respect for environmental conservation,” a spokesperson told ABC News. The center console and door grips in the MX-30 EV are made of cork and the seats feature leatherette and a fabric that uses 20% recycled threads. The door trims also use recycled PET bottles.The center console and door grips in the all-electric Mazda MX-30 are made of cork, and the seats feature leatherette and recycled threads.Environmental aesthetics will certainly attract a discerning segment of drivers, according to Brinley.”Some consumers will feel much better about their vehicles,” she said. “But we’re still pretty far away from having a car made entirely from renewable materials.”Geoffrey Heal, a Columbia Business School professor, said automakers could make an even greater impact by powering their factories with renewable electricity and building cars that are easily recyclable at the end of their life cycle. Reusing plastic and biodegradable materials is laudable but would have to be done at a significant scale to truly be effective, he argued.”Automakers are doing this because they feel pressure both by consumers and the government. But there is genuinely some concern [by automakers] to make the world a better place,” Heal told ABC News. “These are small steps but every little step helps.”Ford’s Mielewski said the company will continue experimenting with innovative and earth-friendly materials — agave, potato peels, coffee chaff — to try to reduce Ford’s impact on the planet.”We’ve been doing this for quite a long time. I hope everyone will join us,” she said.

Recent studies show that fertility in both male and female has decreased over the past few decades. According to research, this is linked to the effects of toxic chemicals in plastics that have gone unregulated. Plastics contain hazardous chemicals, including endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) that threaten human health.

In most African countries, a majority of the people use plastic products daily. Most used plastic items include plates, cups, toys, shampoo bottles, food packaging tins, and office equipment.

Unbeknownst to many, some of the products contain harmful chemicals and additives that negatively impact their health and the environment. It’s hard to control the exposure of some of the additives in plastic for they occur during the entire life span of the products, from the manufacturing process to the consumer contact, recycling, to waste management and disposal. This makes it even harder for circular economy to thrive for it turns toxic if the plastics recycled contain toxic chemicals.

Waste recycling

Many of these additives are known to interfere with hormone functioning thus are commonly referred to as endocrine disrupting chemicals. These chemicals are deadly and life threatening. The can cause cancer, diabetes, liver, metabolic disorders, alterations to both male and female reproductive development, infertility and neurological impacts.

According to research, young women today at 25 are less fertile than their grandmothers were when they were 45. The number of sperms per milliliter of semen has dropped more than 50 per cent among men in western countries in just under 40 years. Some of the known chemicals that leach from plastic and threaten general health include the phthalates, PFAS, flame retardants, dioxins and UV-stabilisers.

Children spend a significant amount of time on the ground in indoor areas having hand-to-mouth contact and playing with contaminated toys. Regulations are needed in ensuring some of the additives are not used for they are costing the lives of many children.

Although waste recycling is a good practice, it should not apply to waste containing toxic chemicals and additives. The burden of plastics needs to be addressed from the source as many African countries have turned into dumping sites. 

The amount of plastic traded between countries has the carbon footprint of a mid-sized European country, according to a new study from the University of Pittsburgh.
Almost half of all plastics are traded across international borders – usually from oil- and gas-producing countries to those with big manufacturing sectors, like China.
Oil and gas are harvested and refined to make that plastic. The study found that internationally-traded plastics created 350 million metric tons of carbon dioxide – about the same footprint as France or Italy.
“This is a huge problem,” said Vikas Khanna, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Pittsburgh, and the study’s lead author.  “But at the same time, it’s a huge opportunity.”
Better recycling could lower that footprint, to promote a “circular” economy, Khanna said. Only around 9 percent of all plastics are recycled.

Opportunities to reduce plastic
By 2050, plastics are on track to account for 15 percent of all global greenhouse gases. Scientists say lowering our greenhouse gas emissions is imperative to limiting the worst effects of climate change.
Khanna said most recycling now is a form of  “downcycling,” where materials like plastic bottles are repurposed as lower-grade materials.
“Maybe you shred it into smaller particles and it may become fillers for something else,” Khanna said.
He said chemical recycling, where plastics are broken down into their building blocks, is one way to keep more virgin plastics out of landfills and the environment. A plastic bottle can then become…another plastic bottle.
“That way, we’re not losing the value, we’re recovering the building blocks” of the material, Khanna said.
Khanna said for that to happen, there will need to be government action to fund research and offer incentives for companies to improve recycling techniques.
“Right now, I think there’s a lack of incentives and there’s no policies, at least in the U.S.,” Khanna said. Those policies are starting to take hold in Europe in other countries, he said.
In addition to greenhouse gases, plastics pose other problems. Scientists estimate around 10 million metric tons of plastic end up in the ocean every year, and microplastics – tiny particles that escape into the environment as materials degrade–have been found in Arctic ice, the Mariana Trench, and in baby feces.
Video: As the World Grapples with Plastic Pollution, Pa.’s Ethane Cracker Promises More Plastic

The study found that since a handful of countries, like the U.S., China, Saudi Arabia and Germany are responsible for the majority of plastics trade, policies in just a few countries could have a big impact on reducing plastic waste. Improving worldwide recycling practices “may only require interventions in a few key countries,” the authors state.
Make producers responsible for plastic waste
Daniel Posen, assistant professor in civil and mineral engineering at the University of Toronto, who was not involved in the study, said there’s no silver bullet to solving the world’s plastics problem.
He said one potential part of the solution is to cut down on the circulation of plastics by banning some single-use plastics – like shopping bags and utensils – as many countries around the world have begun doing.
Another possible solution is a regulatory concept, also gaining popularity in Europe, of “extended producer responsibility,” which places the onus on companies – rather than local governments and consumers – on ensuring plastics are properly disposed of.
“As soon as you flip the responsibility, it’s no longer on the consumer or on governments to deal with it but on you as a company,” Posen said. “If you are responsible as a company for proper disposal, you are going to design a product that is much easier to be disposed of.”
Following Pennsylvania Gas to Scotland

This story is produced in partnership with StateImpact Pennsylvania, a collaboration among The Allegheny Front, WPSU, WITF and WHYY to cover the commonwealth’s energy economy.