The trillions of pieces of plastic currently roving through the global ocean are known to be an assault on life. Turtles get tangled up in discarded plastic fishing nets. Whales open their mouths to eat and unwittingly fill their stomachs with shopping bags. Filter-feeding fish and other organisms gobble up tiny plastic particles, poisoning themselves with the plastic’s toxins and passing that toxicity along to any animal that consumes them.

And now, new research suggests that plastic pollution could be harming the ocean in an additional way: by contributing to its acidification.

Through a series of laboratory experiments, scientists from the Marine Sciences Institute in Barcelona, known as ICM-CSIC by its Spanish acronym, found that when plastic — especially aged, degraded plastic — interacts with sunlight, it releases a cocktail of chemicals, including organic acids, into the ocean. Organic acids are known to lower the pH of seawater, causing it to become more acidic. In addition, the sun’s degradation of plastic can lead to carbon dioxide (CO2) release, which can cause pH to plummet further.

In highly polluted parts of the ocean, such as coastal areas, plastic could contribute to a drop of up to 0.5 pH units, which is “comparable to the pH drop estimated in the worst anthropogenic emissions scenarios for the end of the 21st century,” says Cristina Romera-Castillo, a postdoctoral researcher at ICM-CSIC and lead author of the study documenting the findings.

“The main factor producing the acidification is the greenhouse gas emissions that are dissolved in the ocean,” Romera-Castillo told Mongabay. “But I think it’s interesting to know that plastic is also contributing to the acidification.”

The world’s oceans absorb about 30% of humanity’s carbon emissions, which has resulted in a decrease in pH across the globe. Lowered pH obstructs the ability of marine organisms, such as corals, planktons, oysters and urchins, to build skeletons and shells out of calcium carbonate and to generally survive. The weakening of these calcifying organisms can impact other species that depend on them for food and habitat.

Like other climate change impacts, ocean acidification doesn’t occur uniformly across the world’s seas. But it’s estimated that, on average, the pH of surface waters has fallen by about 0.1 pH units. That may not sound like a lot, but scientists say this drop has already resulted in numerous and widespread changes across the global ocean. And things are set to get much worse if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.

Some scientists even warn that ocean acidification represents a planetary boundary since it could significantly disrupt the functioning of Earth’s natural operating systems. According to the planetary boundaries theory, Earth’s ability to support life as we know it could be threatened if humanity pushes ocean acidification past a certain threshold — a limit beyond which the planet cannot cope with the changes and stresses humans place on it. When the impacts of high levels of ocean acidification interact with other Earth systems and processes, the resulting destabilization could place human life at risk.

While plastic pollution would not have nearly as much of an impact on ocean acidification as greenhouse emissions would, Romera-Castillo said it’s something to keep an eye on.

“There are many reasons why we should be concerned about plastic, and this is one more thing,” Romera-Castillo said. “This is not the only one or maybe not the worst, but it’s one more thing.”

Romera-Castillo and her coauthors conducted their lab experiments with new plastics, as well as aged plastic collected from Canary Island beaches. They placed the plastic waste inside glass bottles filled with seawater, and then exposed the bottles to ultraviolet light similar to the amounts occurring in sunlight. They found that the older plastic released a higher amount of dissolved organic carbon and did more to lower the pH of the seawater.

Right now, nearly 13 million metric tons of plastic reach the ocean each year, but this number could increase dramatically in the near future. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, plastic production could triple in the next 40 years, going from about 460 million metric tons in 2019 to 1.23 billion metric tons in 2060. More than likely, much of that plastic will end up in the natural environment, including the ocean. A UN plastics treaty which is currently in the works could potentially reduce those waste amounts.

Plastics, lumped in with roughly 350,000 other types of artificial chemicals in the global marketplace, are also categorized under another already breached planetary boundary. These so-called novel entities have become so pervasive as pollutants in the world — with new ones being engineered and introduced all the time — that they have violated the novel entity boundary’s critical threshold, with governments no longer able to keep up with evaluation or regulation of synthetic chemical risks.

Jason Hall-Spencer, a marine biologist and ocean acidification expert at the University of Plymouth, who was not involved in the new study, says the research shines a light on an important finding: that plastics do break down in seawater, releasing organic compounds and CO2 in the process.

“I think it’s important that people know about this phenomenon,” Hall-Spencer told Mongabay, “because what we’re often told is that plastics, once they get into the ocean, will last for millions of years, won’t break down or be there effectively forever.”

However, he questioned whether plastic would significantly contribute to acidification in the actual ocean. For instance, he suggested that waves and currents could mix the water and dissipate the impacts of plastic acidification. He also pointed out that ocean plastics are often encrusted with biological organisms that consume carbon dioxide and produce oxygen, which might also reduce the plastic’s contribution to acidification.

Furthermore, Hall-Spencer noted that a lot of ocean plastic ends up in places far from sunlight — like on the seafloor.

“It’s important that we know these plastics break down, and in doing so, they lower the pH,” he said. “But what’s needed as a next stage is verification that plastics in the ocean are lowering the pH.”

Stephen Widdicombe, a marine ecologist at Plymouth Marine Laboratory and co-chair of the Global Ocean Acidification Observing Network, who was also not involved in the new study, said the findings are noteworthy since they indicate that plastic could be a potential driver of ocean acidification in coastal regions. But like Hall-Spencer, he said more research would need to be done to understand if these processes would happen outside the lab in real world situations and on a larger scale.

The study “does show us the importance of monitoring for multiple threats,” Widdicombe told Mongabay. “Often we get fixated on thinking, ‘Oh, we’ve got to go and monitor how much plastic there is there,’ or ‘We’ve got to go and monitor for ocean warming or deoxygenation,’ when really what we should be monitoring for is everything.”

Romera-Castillo said it would be much harder to conduct the same experiments in the ocean due to the multiple factors one has to consider, such as the respiration of microorganisms and the movement of the water. However, she said she and her team would like to try this in the future.

“This [study] is the first step,” she said. “Now, there are many questions opening up.”

Banner image: A coral reef in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt. Lowered pH obstructs the ability of marine organisms, such as corals, planktons, oysters and urchins, to build skeletons and shells out of calcium carbonate and to generally survive. Image by Renata Romeo / Ocean Image Bank.

Citations:

Romera-Castillo, C., Lucas, A., Mallenco-Fornies, R., Briones-Rizo, M., Calvo, E., & Pelejero, C. (2023). Abiotic plastic leaching contributes to ocean acidification. Science of The Total Environment, 854, 158683. doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2022.158683

Persson, L., Carney Almroth, B. M., Collins, C. D., Cornell, S., De Wit, C. A., Diamond, M. L., … Hauschild, M. Z. (2022). Outside the safe operating space of the planetary boundary for novel entities. Environmental Science & Technology. doi:10.1021/acs.est.1c04158

Rockström, J., Steffen, W., Noone, K., Persson, Å., Chapin III, F. S., Lambin, E., … Foley, J. (2009). Planetary boundaries: Exploring the safe operating space for humanity. Ecology and Society, 14(2). Retrieved from https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol14/iss2/art32/

Elizabeth Claire Alberts is a staff writer for Mongabay. Follow her on Twitter @ECAlberts.

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

Lisbon sits at the mouth of the Tagus River where it flows into the Atlantic. This confluence of waters welcomed thousands of people in June, who gathered in the Portuguese capital’s Altice Arena for the second United Nations Ocean Conference.

“Sadly, we have taken the ocean for granted, and today we face what I would call an Ocean Emergency,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said at the opening of the conference, which aimed to mobilize science-based solutions to the crisis. “We must turn the tide. A healthy and productive ocean is vital to our shared future.”

Human actions have burdened the ocean and its inhabitants with serious problems, including more acidic and hotter waters from emissions and global warming, which represent existential changes for many ocean-dwelling organisms. Meanwhile overfishing, pollution and industrial activities have depleted and damaged ocean ecosystems. Through these combined threats, we’ve robbed marine communities of their resilience at the very moment they need it most.

Could granting the ocean inalienable rights help turn all of that around — and protect people who depend on the ocean in the process?

Experts at the conference argued that a declaration of oceanic rights from the United Nations could recognize the ocean as a living entity that has its own inherent entitlements, such as those to life and health, along with the right to continue its vital natural cycles.

Participants included representatives of the Earth Law Center, a Colorado-based nonprofit dedicated to the growing Rights of Nature movement. The organization has spent the past five years spearheading the concept of ocean rights.

In 2017 the center secured support from more than 70 nonprofit organizations in 32 countries for its Ocean Rights Initiative. That year, at the UN’s first ocean conference, then-executive director Darlene Lee explained that the initiative recommended “the United Nations governments, organizations and stakeholders, promote and adopt holistic and rights-based governance of the ocean, including incorporating the inherent rights of the ocean into law and policy.”

There’s historic precedent for establishing far-reaching rights principles through the United Nations. In 1948 the UN passed the groundbreaking Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which enshrined certain rights and freedoms — such as liberty and equality — as basic entitlements of all people across the globe.

Although that declaration of human rights is not legally binding, Earth Law Center oceans campaign director Michelle Bender says it has served as a powerful tool for embedding human-rights principles in laws and policies, including international treaties, national constitutions, and legal codes around the world.

Similarly, this summer the General Assembly adopted a groundbreaking resolution declaring access to a clean and healthy environment as a universal human right. And in 2010 a resolution was passed on the human right to water and sanitation.

Activists hope to extend the notion to the ocean we all share.

The effort took a step forward at the UN Ocean Conference, where The Ocean Race — a round-the-world sailing contest that also advocates for a healthy ocean — organized a panel discussion where advocates could discuss ways to advance the declaration and raise awareness of its importance.

Speakers included Prime Minister Ulisses Correia de Silva of the Republic of Cabo Verde, Earth Law Center representative Callie Veelenturf, and Ocean Race chairman Richard Brisius.

Addressing a packed audience, speakers argued that establishing legal rights for the ocean could start a cascade of societal shifts in peoples’ attitudes toward, and understanding of, the ocean. They called on the public to urge their UN ambassadors to support ocean rights and get a declaration on the UN’s agenda.

Although these speeches were given in a dimly lit, hushed venue — one of two adjacent rooms where everyone had to listen through headphones so as not to disturb proceedings next door — the audience was enthusiastic. Many attendees clustered around the speakers as the event came to close, eager to hear more.

Experts and national leaders speaking at the panel, and those I talked to after the event, said the declaration would prioritize the ocean’s interests alongside those of people.

This is a fundamentally different approach from most of today’s ocean-related decision-making, which is typically “anthropocentric in nature,” says marine biologist Guillermo Ortuño Crespo, who attended the event. He’s not involved in the ocean rights initiative, but his research has involved scrutiny of management of the ocean. He says the current approach puts humanity at the center, valuing and protecting the marine environment based on the services it provides to people.

Crespo describes this anthropocentric paradigm as “a limited value system that psychologically removes us from nature.”

Other experts said a declaration of ocean rights could upend that value system by giving the ocean a voice. It would represent, in Bender’s words, “a fundamental shift in our relationship with the ocean.”

Granting the ocean legal rights would be a step toward “a more ecocentric value system,” Crespo says, “which is still upheld by innumerous coastal and Indigenous peoples across the ocean. These communities recognize the intrinsic right that the ocean and its many species and features have to exist and be protected.”

The UN panel didn’t occur in a vacuum — the Ocean Race is also in the middle of a series of summits, running through 2023, examining ocean rights as a solution to restoring ocean health. The organization has held summits since 2015 to bring together country leaders, industry figures, ocean experts and others to discuss critical marine issues.

Johan Strid, director of Ocean Race Summits, says the race has a “unique and neutral platform to host a dialogue and drive this discussion in a constructive way.”

The summits  and associated workshops, events and “action labs” are components of a strategic program that the Ocean Race, the Earth Law Center, the nonprofit organization Nature’s Rights and other partners ramped up earlier this year.

One major event took place in March in the Italian coastal city of Genova. There the partners started a consultation process to create a draft resolution. The consultation will “gather stakeholders from all backgrounds, regions and expertise to gain feedback on the process, partnership in outreach and raising awareness, as well as drafting of the principles themselves,” says Bender.

Moving forward, a series of workshops will allow consultation participants to analyze the  ideas discussed in the ocean rights summits. The workshops will then feed into a working group that will finalize the resolution.

The push for ocean rights resonates with other Rights of Nature efforts, but its scale is particularly ambitious.

“It would apply to the ocean as a whole, including in areas beyond national jurisdiction,” says Bender.

That’s an important distinction, as international waters — those beyond individual countries’ control — are currently “almost completely ungoverned and unprotected,” as the International Institute for Environment and Development highlighted in March. The United Nations is working to address this, with member countries negotiating a legally binding treaty on the conservation and use of the high seas under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.

But conventional safeguards for the ocean often exist in silos, piecemeal and poorly enforced. Provisions such as Marine Protected Areas only shield selected parts of the ocean, while frameworks currently under discussion like the UN’s proposed plastic treaty tackle individual issues affecting the marine environment.

Bender commends all these efforts as “great steps forward,” but contends that we also need a whole-ocean approach.

This is essential, she argues, because every impact in the ocean is interconnected: Pollution that originates on land enters the ocean and affects the entire planet. A declaration of ocean rights would provide an opportunity to encompass all ocean governance issues and align related frameworks under one overarching umbrella.

Ocean rights would be based on principles that reconnect humans “to the systems that sustain us,” she says. The application of these principles could help to put the brakes on activities like deep-sea mining, and potentially have ramifications for related issues like CO₂ emissions. Meanwhile, the standards it upholds could be systems-based. For example, recognizing humans as predators could result in efforts to guide fisheries management.

As discussions continue, organizers aim to have a draft resolution ready to present to the United Nations in September 2023.

Bender says deliberations so far have addressed principles such as intergenerational equity, connectivity and reciprocal responsibility.

Another principle in discussion boils down to “when in doubt, favor the ocean.”

This is similar to the in dubio pro natura standard adopted in Panama and elsewhere, which translates to “when in doubt, err on the side of nature.”

Strid says the resolution would be the starting point for a process within the United Nations itself, assuming the international body agrees on the concept in the first place. Even if that happens, he says, getting “all states in the world to agree on a matter takes time.” They hope that can be accomplished by 2030.

Strid accepts that the timeline is “highly ambitious,” but history shows it’s not impossible. The Universal Declaration on Human Rights took around two years from initial introduction to adoption.

The endeavor has some wind in its sails already, with committed support from the nations of Cabo Verde, the Seychelles and Panama, along with the city of Genova.

In the panel discussion, former Seychelles’ president Danny Faure argued that the support of nations like theirs — known as Big Ocean or Small Island Developing States — is important if ocean rights are to be achieved.

Strid agrees. “Small island states are significantly impacted by the issues concerning the ocean,” he says. Their participation, he adds, can raise awareness of these devastating effects.

Public support will also prove essential. The Ocean Race has launched a campaign called One Blue Voice through which people around the world can sign on to a petition that organizers will present to the United Nations.

Strid stresses that “we are in the early stages of the work.” As the process of shaping the resolution develops, they will focus efforts on gathering formal support from relevant organizations and policymakers.

Despite the immensity of the challenge ahead, both Bender and Strid say they remain hopeful.

“The nature of our sport is to overcome the impossible,” Strid says.

Bender, meanwhile, finds optimism in the successes of the rights of nature movement and the fact that ocean rights have been featured for the first time this year at the Blue Climate Summit and other events. She sees all this as essential momentum that will eventually achieve planetary support for nature and the people who rely on it.

“Humankind is a part of nature, and we cannot realize human rights without a healthy environment to support them,” she says.

This story was produced as part of the 2022 UN Ocean Conference Fellowship organized by Internews’ Earth Journalism Network with support from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (UK Branch).

Could Property Law Help Achieve ‘Rights of Nature’ for Wild Animals?

CHICAGO—Plastics executives embraced climate solutions at a major industry conference here last week and said they were betting on “advanced recycling” as a green response to the plastic waste problem, despite market headwinds and growing opposition from environmentalists.

But their version of climate solutions involves making and using more plastic products, and their push for advanced recycling—also known as chemical recycling—will require industry-friendly legislation and subsidies, company officials said at GPS + PEPP, the industry gathering put on by a Dow Jones Company, Chemical Market Analytics by OPIS. 

For too long, the plastics executives acknowledged, their industry has been a “linear” economy, in which plastic products are made from fossil fuels and then end up as litter or waste in landfills, waterways and incinerators. In the United States, less than 6 percent of plastic waste is recycled.

The alternative, they said, is a “circular” plastics economy that produces little or no waste once various plastic waste products are heated and treated with chemicals that turn them into fuels or new plastic feedstocks, although the processes for doing this are new and, so far, largely unproven.

“We are transforming from a linear to a circular economy,” said Nestor de Mattos, a vice president at Dow, the global chemical giant. “A smooth transition will be key to our success.” 

He said the industry is looking for “regulatory certainty,” especially around chemical recycling.

“The only reason,” de Mattos said, “a company like Dow will invest” in a circular economy is if there are policies to support advanced recycling. Without them, he said, it would be hard to reach their goals.

As he and other industry representatives described their vision for such a circular economy, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire businessman, climate hawk and philanthropist, announced a major initiative to target plastics manufacturing, having already spent more than $500 million to fight coal and natural gas plants. 

The plan, Bloomberg Philanthropies said, is to spend $85 million moving the United States “beyond petrochemicals,” including plastics manufacturing.

That means U.S. plastics producers can likely expect more permit challenges and lawsuits from grassroots activists targeting proposed or planned new plastic infrastructure along Gulf Coast petrochemical corridors in Louisiana and Texas, and in the upper Ohio River Valley. Shell Polymers is expected to soon fire up a major new plastics manufacturing complex in Beaver County, Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh.  

Bloomberg said the initiative would also fund efforts to establish stricter regulations for existing petrochemical plants to safeguard the health of communities near petrochemical facilities.

“Petrochemical plants poison our air and water—killing Americans and harming the health of entire communities. And with many heavily-polluting new projects planned around the U.S., we’re at a critical moment for stopping them,” said Bloomberg, who also holds the title of U.N. Secretary-General’s Special Envoy on Climate Ambition and Solutions.  

“Communities around the country are standing up to confront the petrochemical industry and defend their right to clean air and water,” Bloomberg said. “This campaign will help ensure more local victories, support laws that protect communities from harm, and reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are fueling the climate crisis.”

A Solution to Climate Change?

Inside a dimly lit conference room at the Raddison Blu Chicago hotel, speakers described the plastics industry as anything but an environmental health menace.

“It’s time for the industry to keep talking about not only are we against (plastics) bans, but what we can say ‘yes’ for,”  said John Thayer, senior vice president of sales and marketing for NOVA Chemicals, a plastics manufacturer owned by Mubadala Investment Company of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

And that, he said, includes defending plastics as a solution to climate change. Thayer cited a recent report from the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. that found in 13 of 14 applications it analyzed, plastics had a smaller carbon footprint than nonplastic alternatives, like paper, glass and wood.

Environmentalists say such life cycle analyses can be misleading and inaccurate because there are no widely agreed upon methods or standards for evaluation. Plastics, they note, are made from fossil fuels, which drive climate change.

The International Energy Agency has called plastics and petrochemical production “the blind spot” of the global energy system, with those sectors set to account for more than a third of the growth in world oil demand through 2030, and nearly half the growth through 2050, as well as spurring new natural gas production.

Other reports have found plastics production is actually replacing coal as a major climate threat. 

Beyond Plastics, a group working to end plastic waste has found that the U.S. plastics industry, as of 2020, was responsible for at least 232 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year—equal to the average emissions from 116 average-sized (500-megawatt) coal-fired power plants.

Hearing ‘A Plea to Fix the Problem’

With legislation, details matter. Some of the industry’s lobby efforts—for example, the American Chemistry Council touts legislative wins in 20 states to support advanced recycling—have been rebuked by environmental advocates.

States like Maine, Oregon and California have passed extended producer responsibility legislation aimed at getting the plastics industry to help pay to deal with plastic waste. De Mattos, with Dow, did not dismiss such laws outright but instead said the plastics industry needs to work with lawmakers to make sure they are fair to the industry.

Some speakers acknowledged the public is upset about plastic waste.

“What I hear is a plea for us to fix this problem,” said Roberto Fontanillas, vice president and general manager of Envision Plastics, a mechanical recycling company.

Judith Enck, founder and president of Beyond Plastics, did not attend the conference, which was held Sept. 20-22. But in an email, Enck, a former Environmental Protection Agency regional administrator, said the industry is feeling the pressure but is still in denial about the seriousness of the health, climate and environmental issues posed by plastics.

“They know the public wants action to reduce plastics so they are advancing very weak EPR bills that in the end will not reduce plastics,” Enck said. “They have misled the public about recycling for decades and people have figured it out. The future of plastics is not bright.”

Not the Easiest of Times

Despite the industry’s upbeat prognostications, presentations at the conference often came with an apology for bringing bad news to North American plastics producers—and an occasional nudge that the industry needs to do more to clean up its act.

Clearly, these are not the easiest of times. The industry must contend with high energy prices, a glut of plastic production, the Russian war against Ukraine, a disrupted Covid-19 supply chain, shipping woes, a forecast of lower-than-anticipated growth in demand and a global glut of plastic waste.

“Now, with regions teetering on recession, the downturn is here,” said Nick Vafiadis, the vice president of plastics for Chemical Market Analytics, focusing on the economic outlook. “How long will it last? How deep will it go?”

The key, he said, will be China, “the engine that drives the word,” which sharply dampened its own plastics demand with severe lockdowns from Covid-19 of in many of its big cities. China now expects to rapidly add as much polypropylene output as 60 percent of all U.S. production of this basic plastics building, adding to an oversupply and suppressing prices.

The industry’s changing economic outlook could slow the growth of new plastics manufacturing plants in the United States.

A few years ago, the Trump administration was urging that several new major plastics plants be built in the United States, in Louisiana and Texas, and in the Ohio River valley. Some of those proposed plants have stalled out, conference speakers noted. After a Bayport Polymers plant in Bayport, Texas, and the Shell plant near Pittsburgh start up this fall, one analyst said that could be it for new major plastics manufacturing plants for a while.

“It would not surprise me if nothing else was built here for the next decade,” said Joel Morales, vice president of polyolefins for Americas for Chemical Market Analytics. He specifically called out the $9.4 billion proposed Formosa Plastics complex to be located 55 miles west of New Orleans as “challenged.” 

Citing a litany of failures by Louisiana environmental regulators, including their analyses of environmental justice and climate impacts, a state judge last week tossed out the company’s out air permits for a giant plastics manufacturing complex.

Is Pyrolysis a Fancy Name for Burning Plastic Waste? 

Still, industry analysts and other speakers at the GPS + PEPP conference found plenty of room for long-term growth of plastics, as companies build chemical recycling into their business and sustainability plans.

Pyrolysis is among the chemical recycling technologies getting the most attention, much of it unflattering as companies struggle to overcome the challenges of converting complex and mixed-waste plastics into feedstocks for new plastic products.

Earlier this month, Inside Climate News reported on one such plant in Indiana, owned by Brightmark, that’s struggled to start up. In a document Brightmark filed in December with the Environmental Protection Agency, the company acknowledged that just 20 percent of the plant’s output is its primary product—what it described as fuels. Most of the rest, 70 percent, is the synthetic gas that the company said is combusted with natural gas to generate heat, with 20 percent of that “syngas” burned away in a flare. The rest is a land-filled waste product called char, according to the filing.

It’s numbers like those that have prompted critics to argue that chemical recycling is little more than another way to burn plastic waste, with a huge carbon footprint and potential health risks to plant workers and neighbors.

Brightmark says it is re-analyzing its own numbers.

Chemical recycling is getting more criticism now “because we are starting to get more real,” said Sheida R. Sahandy, the chief sustainability officer and general counsel for Encina, a Houston start-up that is trying to build  a “catalytic pyrolysis” plant in north-central Pennsylvania to produce benzene, toluene and xylene from waste plastic.

Inside Climate News reported that the Encina plant, announced as a $1.1 billion investment, has become the subject of considerable local discussion and concern amid a lack of transparency with some local officials.

Among local critics are those who do not want such plants near their homes. Sahandy said that’s understandable.  “A lot of us wouldn’t want [to be]  next door,” she said, “but these facilities have to go somewhere.” 

Some speakers acknowledged that economics do not favor plastic recycling.

Even with recent higher prices for virgin fossil fuels used to make plastics, those fossil fuels are still cheaper than using plastic waste, which needs to be collected and sorted from tens of millions of American homes.

But change is coming, said David Clark, vice president of sustainability for AMCOR, a company that makes plastic and other kinds of packaging and operates in 40 countries, citing new laws in Europe and California that are supported by environmentalists, but may provide new incentives for industry growth and evolution. The European Union is requiring all packaging to be recyclable or reusable by 2030, and California’s new law requires all packaging in the state to be recyclable or compostable by 2032. The industry, he said, can fight to resist the change, or it can adapt and grow.

“We need a pathway that’s credible,” he said.

Episode 37
September 21, 2022

(Conversation Recorded on August 19, 2022.)

On this episode, Professor of environmental chemistry Martin Scheringer joins Nate. Together, they discuss Scheringer’s most recent paper on PFAS – the ‘forever chemicals, their ubiquity in waterways all over the globe, and their numerous critical health effects.

More broadly, they outline the risks and scenarios of plastic pollution to planetary futures – and what we might do about it. Is it possible to live in a (mostly) plastic free world, and do we really have any other option?

About Martin Scheringer

Martin Scheringer is a professor of environmental chemistry at Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, and works in the research program on Environmental Chemistry and Modeling at RECETOX. He holds a diploma in chemistry from the Johannes-Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany, and a doctoral degree and a habilitation from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich, Switzerland.

Show Notes & Links to Learn More

PDF Transcript

00:37 – Martin’s works + info

01:03 – PFAS

02:14 – Outside the Safe Operating Space of a New Planetary Boundary for Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) – Martin’s newest paper

03:07 – Plastic outweighs all animals on earth

03:19 – Micro plastics

04:13 – Health advisory levels for PFAS

04:52 – PFAS Chemicals move with the water and outgas

05:16 – All the products PFAS are used for + more 

06:16 – Plastic containers last 700-800 years, and then once degraded last longer

06:34 – PFAS never degrade into anything and will never go away

08:30 – There are 5,000 chemicals of that type, and up to 300,000 chemicals on the market globally all with different properties and unknown health effects

11:01 – ‘The solution to pollution is dilution’

11:08 – The Graduate

12:45 – Chemical Health Advisories by the EPA

12:58 – These chemicals can lower immune response in babies 

13:17 – Chemicals can lower sperm counts in men

13:49 – Health effects of PFAS

14:29 – Dupont teflon production facility releasing PFAS waste water into open waters

15:42 – Dark Waters

16:09 – Endocrine disrupting chemicals

17:45 – Increase in non-communicable diseases over the last 15-20 years

18:03 – Increasing climate effects shown

19:22 – Endocrine disruptors on non-humans

19:59 – The challenge of communicating science

20:45 – Metabolic diseases potentially having origins from chemicals

23:00 – Steep discount rates

24:06 – Packaged food contains lots of these chemicals

24:10 – Food Packaging Forum

24:54 – We create 300 million tons of plastic each year, and half of that is single use plastic

25:35 – The chemicals added into plastics

25:53 – PVC, phthalates

27:22 – All the products that come from a barrel of oil

28:37 – Art Berman + TGS Episode

29:09 – Plastic takes ~12% of oil production

30:32 – Negatives of plastic alternatives

33:11 – 500 billion fossil workers added per year

33:35 – How did people used to live without plastic products?

34:29 – Making glass thinner and lighter

34:55 – Our supply chains are going to have to localize and regionalize

35:45 – Nate’s story on The Great Simplification

36:29 – Potential of small scale farms feeding everyone in the world

36:40 – The centrality of fertilizers and pesticides

37:50 – Petrochemicals in pharmaceuticals

39:54 – RoundUp controversy – Patrick Moore willing to drink it and then refusing to

41:05 – PCBs

41:18 – PCB damage to whales, Orca found dead on beach with high level of PCBs

42:08 – Mercury Biomagnification in fish

43:06 – Average golden retriever in 1950s lived to 15 years old

43:35 – Prevalence of cancer currently

44:50 – List of diseases connected to PFOA  

46:30 – Persistent chemicals

47:37 – Environmental Justice and chemical pollutants

48:46 – Persistence and Spatial range

49:25 – Ocean acidification

49:45 – Chemical stressor effects on animal populations and recent study: Impacts of endocrine disrupting chemicals on reproduction in wildlife and humans

50:18 – Insect down by 50-70% in mass

51:28 – Higher temperatures cause chemicals to outgas more easily

51:51 – There is very minimal testing of chemicals before they are released as products

56:45 – The New Car smell is phthalate, flame retardants, EDCs… 

58:20 – Standing stock in the US grows at 2.5-2.8%/year

1:01:27 – IPCC, IPCC biodiversity, IPCC for chemicals

1:09:06 – Fridays for Future

1:11:55 – Destruction of the Amazon

In April 2022, a Texas company unveiled a plan to transform a tiny Pennsylvania town into an industrial hub: it would invest $1.1 billion into building a manufacturing plant that will annually convert around 450,000 tons of plastic waste — an amount 40 times as heavy as the Eiffel Tower — into feedstock for new products, a process dubbed by the plastics industry as “advanced recycling,” though also known as “chemical recycling.”

In a press release, the company, Encina, says the facility will help the world transition toward a circular economy and achieve carbon neutrality. But critics say the company is simply burning plastic to make fuel and that these actions will endanger the environment and human health.

Encina has yet to open its new plant in Point Township, Pennsylvania, but there could be about eight other facilities currently operating across the U.S. that use so-called advanced recycling processes, according to a brief by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Environmental experts say the facilities operate under the guise of being recycling plants, when they’re really producing hazardous toxic waste, some of which is converted into fuel. Moreover, they say these facilities are able to evade a number of environmental regulations due to 20 state laws that define advanced recycling as a manufacturing process, rather than as a more strictly regulated waste disposal process.

Now, environmental experts say they anticipate an even greater problem: the possibility of a federal bill being introduced that, if passed into law, would strengthen the chemical recycling industry across the U.S.

Daniel Rosenberg, director of federal toxics policy at the NRDC, said the plastics and chemical industries would see the approval of a federal bill as the “holy grail.”

“Essentially, federal legislation similar to what has been passed in many of the states would apply nationwide, and would remove federal health protections,” Rosenberg told Mongabay in an email.

While no bill has yet been introduced at a federal level, Rosenberg said that the American Chemistry Council (ACC), an industry association based in Washington, D.C., that represents plastic manufacturers, has been saying “that they are going to introduce a bill,” and representatives from ACC have been “talking to Congressional offices about it.”

In response to these reports, a coalition of more than 200 organizations, including the NRDC, recently submitted a letter to the U.S. Congress, urging officials to reject any bill that would enable the plastics and chemical industries to forge ahead with advanced recycling.

“The last thing Congress should be doing is weakening regulations for toxic technologies,” Sarah Doll, national director of Safer States, an NGO that’s part of the coalition, said in a statement. “As a nation, we should be focusing on real solutions to the plastic crisis, like bending the curve down on the use of plastic and solutions like nontoxic reuse and refill systems.”

Activists say the very best way to curb the massive plastics pollution now escalating around the globe is to reduce plastics production, not to incinerate the waste, which can potentially cause air, ground and water pollution.

What exactly is ‘advanced recycling’?

The world has a plastic problem. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) estimates that global society produces about 400 million metric tons of single-use plastic products and other plastic waste each year, and that less than 10% is recycled. In the U.S., the recycling rate is even worse — one study suggests that only 5% is truly recycled.

Plastic pollution has gotten so bad that scientists have suggested that we have crossed a planetary boundary for plastics and other chemicals entering the environment — meaning that we have transgressed a limit beyond which our Earth may not be able to cope with the environmental stress that humans inflict. This boundary crossing could destabilize Earth’s natural operating systems, especially when the unrestrained release of chemicals interacts with other Earth systems and processes. Ultimately, human survival could be at risk.

So what do we do with all of this plastic waste, much of which is polluting our oceans, waterways, land, and even the atmosphere? The chemical and plastics industry says a solution lies in “advanced recycling.”

America’s Plastic Makers, an association of plastic producers and fossil fuel companies that claims to seek the end of plastic pollution, says that “advanced recycling” is a sustainable process that “creates new top-quality plastics out of used plastics,” including 90% of “hard-to-recycle plastics.” Chemical recyling is described as a process of breaking down solid plastic into liquid or gas form through gasification (the heating of waste in a low-oxygen environment) or pyrolysis (the heating of waste without oxygen) to “remake plastics or products for other industries.”

America’s Plastic Makers argues that advanced recycling facilities do not emit more air pollution than facilities that produce cars or food, and that the process is “key to meeting circularity goals while keeping plastics out of landfills and our environment.”

Environmental experts view things very differently. First of all, they dispute the idea that advanced recycling is recycling at all, at least not in the traditional sense of turning an old plastic product into a new one. Instead, they say it’s a highly polluting, energy-intensive process that incinerates plastic waste, and in most cases, turns it into fuel, such as diesel and aviation fuel.

According to a Greenpeace report published in 2020, less than half of 50 surveyed recycling projects that were approved by the ACC — some of which are currently operational and some of which are yet to open — would be considered “credible plastic recycling projects,” while most of the rest turned plastic waste into fuel.

“Very little, if any, plastic is being recycled at the ‘chemical recycling’ facilities in the U.S.,” Rosenberg said. “These are plastic-to-fuel operations, which is not recycling. The industry is selling a fantasy of recycling plastic, but they are primarily making dirty aviation fuel.”

‘Advanced recycling’ – Neither ‘advanced,’ nor ‘recycling’

Critics say that advanced recycling processes can produce toxic air pollutants that pose considerable health and safety risks for workers and local communities located near these facilities, many of which are low-income communities and communities of color.

Data collected by the Environmental Protection Agency indicated that a pyrolysis plant in Tigard, Oregon, produced nearly 500,000 pounds (227 metric tons) of hazardous waste in 2019, which was then burned to produce energy at plants located in six different U.S. communities. The main component of the waste was said to be benzene – a liquid hydrocarbon that has been identified as a carcinogen – as well as other dangerous elements like lead, cadmium and chromium.

The plastic-to-fuel process also has a “Goliath-sized carbon footprint,” according to a report published by the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) in 2020. This is because it requires fossil fuel energy to burn solid plastic to create fuel; the burning process itself also releases greenhouse gases and other chemicals, the report says.

New research published by Zero Waste Europe (ZWE), a group of experts and organizations working to eliminate waste, found that greenhouse gas emissions from facilities that use pyrolysis were nine times higher than plants that conducted traditional, or mechanical, recycling.

Other parts of the plastic life cycle emit greenhouse gases — from the fracking of gases to plastic production and disposal. A report published last year by the NGO Beyond Plastic found that the plastics industry in the U.S. currently emits 232 million metric tons of greenhouse gases every year, the equivalent of 116.5 gigawatts of coal plants — and that plastics will release more greenhouse gas emissions than coal plants in the U.S. by 2030.

Joshua Baca, vice president of plastics at the ACC, said he believes the many criticisms of advanced recycling “represent a total lack of understanding [and a] purposeful misrepresentation of both advanced recycling processes and basic economics.”

“Advanced recycling converts used plastics into saleable feedstocks to remake into new plastics,” Baca told Mongabay in an emailed statement. “If all the plastics were incinerated as falsely alleged, there would be no products to sell or viable business models for the multiple advanced recycling companies across the globe.”

Baca also disputed the characterization of advanced recycling as incineration, arguing that pyrolysis and gasification units operate without combustion either in low oxygen or without oxygen.

“ACC will continue to engage lawmakers on the basic facts about advanced recycling, and we encourage public officials and journalists to critically review the false claims and self-cited publications perpetuating old myths,” he said.

Fewer regulations, easier operations

Rosenberg said most state laws encourage chemical recycling in three main ways: by reclassifying plastic waste as “feedstock” to avoid environmental laws targeting waste disposal processes; changing the definition of “recycling” to include chemical recycling and its products; and making chemical recycling facilities eligible for state subsidies and other financial incentives.

“Generally speaking, having fewer regulatory requirements and receiving tax-payer subsidies is likely to make operations easier, which is why the chemical industry is pursuing them aggressively,” he said in his email. “It is also a way of laying the groundwork for eliminating protections at the federal level.”

Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics and former EPA regional administrator, told Mongabay that federal legislation would result in “more chemical recycling facilities created around the country,” and that many would likely end up in low-income communities and communities of color, which is where many current petrochemical facilities are located.

While it’s unclear how many new advanced recycling plants are planned for the U.S., Rosenberg said there are “new announcements almost weekly of plants that companies say they intend to build.”

Jessica Roff, a campaigner and policy advocate for GAIA, said a federal bill could also help advanced recycling facilities evade rules around incineration processes, which the EPA has been regulating for 30 years.

“If these plastic incinerators by another name can avoid being regulated as incinerators, they can escape Clean Air Act requirements altogether and their toxic pollution would be unfettered,” Roff told Mongabay in an email. “A federal law would also limit … community member rights, making it impossible for them to find out what toxic pollutants they’re being exposed to, let alone to stop them.”

In the letter sent to Congress by the coalition of groups, the authors say the concept of advanced recycling is a “dream come true” for chemical industry lobbyists.

“Having an eco-sounding way to make plastic waste vanish from sight helps the industry justify exponential growth in plastics production,” the authors write.

According to the OECD, plastic production could triple in the next 40 years — from about 460 million metric tons in 2019 to 1.23 billion metric tons in 2060 — in the absence of policies and action.

Environmental experts say the key to solving the plastic pollution issue is stopping plastic being produced in the first place. Earlier this year, 175 countries agreed to adopt a U.N. framework to fight plastic pollution by addressing the entire life cycle of plastic, including its production. But nations have yet to agree upon the details of the treaty, which may not be finalized until the end of next year.

“The answer to the plastic waste crisis is not to make more plastic, and then burn it, but to make less plastic,” Rosenberg said. “It is a very simple equation that does not yield a result pleasing to, or profitable for, the chemical industry. They are proposing an alternative ‘solution’ using funny math that will make things worse and benefit nobody but the industry itself.”

Banner image: Sorting through plastic in a plastic recycling plant. Image by ILO/M. Fossat via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

Citations:

Milbrandt, A., Coney, K., Badgett, A., & Beckham, G. T. (2022). Quantification and evaluation of plastic waste in the United States. Resources, Conservation and Recycling, 183, 106363. doi:10.1016/j.resconrec.2022.106363

Möck, A., Bulach, W., & Betz, J. (2022). Climate impact of pyrolysis of waste plastic packaging in comparison with reuse and mechanical recycling. Retrieved from Zero Waste Europe and the Rethink Plastic alliance website: https://zerowasteeurope.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/zwe_2022_report_climat_impact__pyrolysis_plastic_packaging.pdf

Persson, L., Carney Almroth, B. M., Collins, C. D., Cornell, S., De Wit, C. A., Diamond, M. L., … Hauschild, M. Z. (2022). Outside the safe operating space of the planetary boundary for novel entities. Environmental Science & Technology. doi:10.1021/acs.est.1c04158

Schlegel, I. (2020). Deception by the numbers. Retrieved from Greenpeace website: https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/GP_Deception-by-the-Numbers-3.pdf

Vallette, J. (2021). The new coal: Plastics and climate change. Retrieved from Beyond Plastic website: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5eda91260bbb7e7a4bf528d8/t/616ef29221985319611a64e0/1634661022294/REPORT_The_New-Coal_Plastics_and_Climate-Change_10-21-2021.pdf

Elizabeth Claire Alberts is a staff writer for Mongabay. Follow her on Twitter @ECAlberts.

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St. James Parish, located on a stretch of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans dubbed “Cancer Alley” due to the high concentration of petrochemical plants, is home to the country’s largest producer of polystyrene — the foam commonly found in soft drink and takeout containers.

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Now, the owner of that plant wants to build a new facility in the same area that would break down used foam cups and containers into raw materials that can be turned into other kinds of plastic. While there’s limited data on what kinds of emissions this type of facility creates, environmental advocates are concerned that the new plant could represent a new source of carcinogens like dioxin and benzene in the already polluted area.

The proposed plant comes as the U.S. federal and state governments and private companies pour billions into “chemical recycling” research, which is touted as a potential solution to anemic plastics recycling rates. Proponents say that, despite mounting restrictions on single-use packaging, plastics aren’t going away anytime soon, and that chemical recycling is needed to keep growing amounts of plastic waste out of landfills and oceans.

But questions abound about whether the plants are economically viable — and how chemical recycling contributes to local air pollution, perpetuating a history of environmental injustices and climate change.

Skeptics argue that chemical recycling is an unproven technology that amounts to little more than the latest PR effort from the plastics industry. The Environmental Protection Agency is deciding whether or not to continue regulating the plants as incinerators, with some lawmakers expressing concerns last month about toxic emissions from these facilities.

“They’re going to be managing toxic chemicals…and they’re going to be putting our communities at risk for either air pollution or something worse,” Jane Patton, a Baton Rouge native and manager of the Center for International Environmental Law’s plastics and petrochemicals campaign, told EHN of the proposed new plant in Louisiana.

The air of St. James Parish, where the new plant will be located, has among the highest pollution levels along the Mississippi River corridor dubbed “Cancer Alley.” A joint investigation in 2019 by ProPublica, The Times-Picayune and The Advocate found that most of the new petrochemical facilities in the parish –including the recycling plant– will be located near the mostly Black 5th District.

St. James Parish, located on a stretch of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans dubbed “Cancer Alley” due to the high concentration of petrochemical plants, is home to the country’s largest producer of polystyrene — the foam commonly found in soft drink and takeout containers.

---

Now, the owner of that plant wants to build a new facility in the same area that would break down used foam cups and containers into raw materials that can be turned into other kinds of plastic. While there’s limited data on what kinds of emissions this type of facility creates, environmental advocates are concerned that the new plant could represent a new source of carcinogens like dioxin and benzene in the already polluted area.

The proposed plant comes as the U.S. federal and state governments and private companies pour billions into “chemical recycling” research, which is touted as a potential solution to anemic plastics recycling rates. Proponents say that, despite mounting restrictions on single-use packaging, plastics aren’t going away anytime soon, and that chemical recycling is needed to keep growing amounts of plastic waste out of landfills and oceans.

But questions abound about whether the plants are economically viable — and how chemical recycling contributes to local air pollution, perpetuating a history of environmental injustices and climate change.

Skeptics argue that chemical recycling is an unproven technology that amounts to little more than the latest PR effort from the plastics industry. The Environmental Protection Agency is deciding whether or not to continue regulating the plants as incinerators, with some lawmakers expressing concerns last month about toxic emissions from these facilities.

“They’re going to be managing toxic chemicals…and they’re going to be putting our communities at risk for either air pollution or something worse,” Jane Patton, a Baton Rouge native and manager of the Center for International Environmental Law’s plastics and petrochemicals campaign, told EHN of the proposed new plant in Louisiana.

The air of St. James Parish, where the new plant will be located, has among the highest pollution levels along the Mississippi River corridor dubbed “Cancer Alley.” A joint investigation in 2019 by ProPublica, The Times-Picayune and The Advocate found that most of the new petrochemical facilities in the parish –including the recycling plant– will be located near the mostly Black 5th District.