Each week, Ghana receives 15 million items of used clothing sent from the West. But 40% of the products get discarded due to poor quality. They end up at landfills and in bodies of water, polluting entire ecosystems.

The Kantamanto market in Ghana’s capital Accra is West Africa’s hub for used clothing from the West. Here, traders hastily sort through piles of clothes daily in order to grab the best bargain. But often, there are more rags than riches.

“We didn’t get any good clothing at all,” a trader told DW after one of these hasty routines.

Recently, the deliveriesfrom the West have increasingly been focused on so-called fast fashion items. These clothes usually wear out after only a few weeks. To some traders, it is actually an imposition to sift through the,.

“The goods that are coming now are really affecting our business,” another trader said, stressing that such cheap items cannot be resold in the local market.

Scavenging for quality clothes donated from the West is part of the local economy in Accra

Environmental catastrophe in the making

While most of these secondhand clothes are typically donated with good intentions from industrialized countries, many have now become an environmental hazard in Ghana and beyond.

The OR Foundation, and NGO from the United States, has estimated that about 15 million individual items of used clothing now arrive in Ghana weekly, while 40% end up discarded due to poor quality. With no use for them, the discarded clothing items first end up at landfills and then travel further into the ocean. 

Environmental activists say this is a major catastrophe in the making; groups like the Ghana Water and Sanitation Journalists Network (GWJN), are trying to raise awareness about this underreported issue.

“Because it is secondhand clothing, some of them wear out very quickly, and then they get thrown all over the place. You get to (the) refuse dump, and you find a lot of them dumped over there,” Justice Adoboe, the national coordinator of the organization, told DW.

“You go even near water bodies, you realize that as rainfalls and erosion happen, (they carry) a lot of these second hand clothing wastes towards our water bodies,” Adoboe added, highlighting that because some of the items include toxic dyes, “those who drink from these bodies (of water) downstream might not be drinking just water but chemicals.”

Furthermore, the discarded clothing items that are flushed into the sea later get washed back up on the country’s beaches. For UN Goodwill Ambassador Roberta Annan, this is a disaster in the making for marine life:

“You can’t take it out. You have to dig. It’s buried. It’s stuck. Some of these clothes are polyester and, I would say, synthetic fabrics that also go into the waterway and choke the fish and marine life in there,” Annan told DW, as she tried to pull some of the clothing out at beach in Accra.

Nearly half of all used clothes are thrown away – but the other half provide a lifeline to many Ghanians

Finding alterative uses for waste clothing

Meanwhile. some fashion designers are looking into finding alternative solutions to this growing problem. Elisha Ofori Bamfo focuses on upcycling discarded secondhand clothes. But even he is not happy with the quality of some of the clothes he found in recent times.

Bamfo told DW that it is even difficult to upcycle and recycle some of the second hand clothes that are imported into the country these days: “Sometimes when you go to the market, there are some clothes that can’t be upcycled or can’t be sold,” Bamfo said, adding that local authorities have to take the lead and ensure that only quality secondhand clothing items are imported.

Other African nations have indeed taken a more proactive and bold approach – especially on part of authorities and regulations – when it comes to the waste created by secondhand clothing, issuing bans.Rwanda, for example, has banned secondhand clothes imports in 2018 in order to boost its own textile industry. And other nations have followed suit.

To ban or not to ban

When the coronavirus pandemic emerged in 2020, Kenya also banned the importation of secondhand clothing to prevent the potential spread of the virus. That ban has, however, since been lifted because of its economic impact on people’s livelihoods.

Bamfo agrees that in Ghana, an absolute ban on these products would likely also impose extra economic hardship on many people dependant on them: “Thousands of people depend on second hand clothing to survive to feed their families,” he said.

Adoboe meanwhile believes that Ghana might indeed benefit from a total ban, but says that there is no political will to see such an initiative through. He believe that until political leaders start to take the impact of these used clothing on the environment seriously, Ghana will continue to remain helpless in this battle against pollution.

Roberta Annan, however, is resolute in wanting a quick solution to protect not just the environment but the local fashion industry as well: “The fashion industry actually loses $500 billion a year due to fashion waste.” Annan said.

Ghana’s government has remained silent so far on the issue, and there is no sign that it might take any action to deal with the endemic of secondhand clothes and the impact they have on the local textile industry as well as environment.

Whenever authorities might want to decide to join the fight against this growing issue, it might perhaps be to late.

After you finish your fries, eat the ketchup packet. When you add your pasta to boiling water, toss the bag into the pot, too.

If these instructions sound confusing to you, it’s only because you haven’t yet heard of Notpla, a London-based startup company that is designing a seaweed-based replacement for single-use plastic packaging. Founded in 2014, the company closed a £10 million ($13.5 million) Series A financing round last month, led by the VC firm Horizons Ventures, to scale and further develop its product line.

Notpla’s products are meant to be composted or dissolved after use — though some are edible, too. Current offerings include sachets for condiments, water and even alcohol; a film wrap for products in your pantry or bathroom, like coffee or toilet paper; and takeaway boxes that replace plastic-based coating with seaweed lining to make them fully biodegradable.

The Ooho can replace condiment packets and other single-serve liquids, while the seaweed-lined takeaway boxes are fully biodegradable. Credit: Notpla

Notpla design director Karlijn Sibbel says they look to nature as inspiration “for the ideal packaging,” like the skin on a fruit. “A peel will eventually be used (as nutrients) by nature, and disappear and become a part of the cycle,” she said.

The approach feels especially relevant as the world is coming to terms with the effects of decades of unfettered plastic production. According to the UN, 300 million tonnes (331 million tons) of plastic waste are produced globally each year, and out of the estimated 8.3 billion tonnes (9.15 billion tons) of plastic produced since the early 1950s, about 60% has been landfilled or discarded outdoors. Microplastics — tiny particles that are often the result of larger plastics breaking down — pollute the ocean, the air and our bodies.

Fruit peels served as inspiration for “the ideal packaging,” according to design director Karlijn Sibbel, because they decompose quickly and provide nutrients back to the earth. Credit: David Lineton/Notpla

Over the past few years, there has been a growing movement against single-use plastics as many experts have argued the products are unnecessary and harmful, and businesses have come under fire for using them excessively — like in 2019, when Whole Foods’ peeled and individually wrapped oranges went viral. In the US, some states and municipalities have taken action: New York banned most plastic shopping bags, and in Miami Beach, plastic straws have been outlawed. Overseas, the European Union put a broad ban on single-use plastics into effect this summer, and India plans to follow suit next year, the government announced in August.

“It’s getting more and more clear how big the plastic problem is,” Sibbel said. “Manufacturers are “using materials that last for thousands of years,” she explained, but for products that are only in use “for a few minutes.”

“That mismatch is something that we need to solve,” she added.

Rethinking plastic

Notpla’s founders, Rodrigo García González and Pierre Paslie, initially looked to seaweed as the solution to the world’s plastic problem because it is abundant, grows quickly, doesn’t compete with land crops, and sequesters carbon from the air, Sibbel explained.

There are also many different seaweed species, and it can be harvested or farmed. (Notpla uses farmed plants.)

“Seaweed doesn’t use land; it doesn’t use pesticides,” Sibbel said. “It can grow into the ocean and the sea, where it actually has a lot of positive benefits so it can create new ecosystems for other organisms to thrive in.”

Since its founding, the startup has been awarded grants from the British government agency Innovate UK and the circular economy nonprofit Ellen MacArthur Foundation for its first product, the Ooho sachet, which holds single servings of liquids. The new financing round will go toward ramping up the production of the Ooho and Notpla coating, while further developing their new seaweed paper and multipurpose film wrap.

The paper is made from the fibers left over from creating other Notpla products and can be used to make items like gift wrap or clothes tags, while the film wrap can hold most dry goods or wet goods with low water content.

Notpla’s flexible film can replace plastic wrap and packaging. Credit: David Lineton/Notpla

“The exciting thing is that this is a film that can replace most of the flexible packaging that you see around,” Sibbel said. The potential contents could include coffee grounds, toilet paper or the screws included for furniture assembly. For food items, such as pasta, they have even experimented with adding flavors to the packaging, so that dissolving the bag could add seasoning to the skillet.

“You can cook with it. And you can really start to rethink what we can do with these materials,” she explained.

Industry shifts

Some of Notpla’s products are available online, but the company has also landed some major partnerships in the UK and around Western Europe to provide beverages at festivals like DGTL in Amsterdam and Glastonbury in Somerset. In 2019, Notpla distributed 36,000 Oohos filled with the energy drink Lucozade Sport during the London Marathon, and it provided edible Glenlivet capsules at London Cocktail Week.

Runners at the London Marathon got a serving of Lucozade Sport to keep them hydrated. Credit: Notpla

Last year, the startup tested 30,000 takeaway boxes at different UK restaurants in collaboration with the online food ordering service Just Eat, and plans are underway to offer the boxes around Europe in 2022.

As they scale up, Notpla’s team hopes seaweed could replace single-use plastic in the supply chain more broadly, Sibbel said, but with the volume of plastics used around the world, she understands the enormity of such a task.

“I don’t think one material (or) one solution is going to solve everything, but we think that seaweed really ticks the right boxes,” she said.

After the seaweed is stripped of the materials to make Notpla’s sachets, films and coatings, the leftover fibers can be used to make paper. Credit: Notpla

Rethinking when and why we used plastic will be crucial to Notpla breaking into other industries, Sibbel said. “Plastic can do a lot of things,” she added. But it’s about asking, “Is it really necessary for this application?”

She points to packaging for produce like tomatoes, which have holes to let the food breathe.

“You don’t have to have the properties of plastic. Why are we using plastic?” Sibbel asked, laughing. “I really hope to see the industry move and also embrace (change) in a positive way.”

Can new year’s resolutions to go vegan and fly less help stop climate change — or are individual lifestyle changes a distraction from real solutions?

Turn off lights. Eat less meat. Walk to work. Fly less. Buy less. Recycle.

These are some of the solutions popularized over the last decade in an effort to cut people’s carbon footprints. If those in rich countries were to change their lifestyles, the thinking goes, they would emit fewer gases that act like a greenhouse around Earth, thereby preventing it from heating to ever more deadly levels.

That might not sound controversial, but climate activists are increasingly dismissing the focus on personal carbon footprints as a distraction. Many scientists, meanwhile, see tweaking individual lifestyles as a vital step to changing systems. At the heart of the debate is a simple question: how much does anything we do for the climate actually matter?

What is a carbon footprint?

A carbon footprint is the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere through the actions of an individual, organization or country. The idea of a footprint came from two Canadian researchers in the 1990s as a metaphor for humanity’s impact on the planet.

A decade later, oil and gas giant BP took what was still an obscure term to the public. They popularized carbon footprints as part of an estimated $100 million annual marketing campaign. They took out whole-page adverts in newspapers like The New York Times, stuck posters on billboards in airports around the world and ran commercials on TV asking viewers “What size is your carbon footprint?” They created a calculator to let people work it out themselves.

In doing so, they shifted responsibility for the damage caused by their products onto the public. At the same time, they and other fossil fuel companies were extracting millions of barrels of oil a day.

Talking about a company’s footprint in the same way you talk about a person’s “levels the playing field in a way that’s misrepresentative of the true nature of the climate challenge,” said Geoffrey Supran, a researcher at Harvard University who studies how fossil fuel companies have misled the public on climate change. “The footprint literally personifies greenhouse gas emissions. It brings it down to the scale of a human footprint.”

Oil and gas companies have emphasized society’s role in cutting emissions

What do cigarettes and plastic have to do with it?

Fossil fuel companies promoted the idea of personal carbon footprints and individual action even while lobbying to weaken regulations to limit their pollution.

But they weren’t the first industry to do so.

As early as the 1970s, the environmental group Keep America Beautiful made adverts that criticized people for littering and encouraged them to recycle. But the organization was funded by corporations churning out plastic bottles who were fighting regulation to address the root of the problem.

The tobacco industry then took these tactics further. It distanced itself from the damage that cigarettes cause by downplaying the science and running adverts centered around the idea of an individual’s “freedom to choose.” When companies got taken to court by doctors, they argued that deaths from heart and lung disease were the smokers’ fault for buying their products.

A study Supran co-authored in the journal,One Earth found that oil giant ExxonMobil targets individuals while downplaying the reality of climate change.  “These patterns mimic the tobacco industry’s documented strategy of shifting responsibility away from corporations — which knowingly sold a deadly product while denying its harms — and onto consumers,” the authors wrote.

Fossil fuel companies have used similar tactics to the tobacco industry

Is it the fault of big business?

When asked whether the industry is passing blame onto consumers, ExxonMobil told DW it is committed to working to decarbonize high-emitting sectors by investing in technologies that help society achieve a net-zero emissions future.

“Ultimately, changes in society’s energy use, coupled with the development and deployment of affordable lower-emission technologies, will be required,” the company wrote in a statement.  

Two other fossil fuel companies, BP and Shell, did not respond to a request to comment.

But along with French oil giant Total, these four privately-owned companies are indirectly responsible for 11% of the CO2 and methane emissions from burning fossil fuels between 1965 and 2018, according to a September study published in the journal Energy Research & Social Science. Together with state-owned companies in Saudi Arabia, Russia and Iran, just seven companies are behind 20% of emissions.

“You and I contribute relatively little to the climate crisis,” said Emily Atkin, a climate journalist who runs a newsletter highlighting hypocrisy in the fossil fuel industry. “Our personal carbon footprints don’t actually matter that much in the grand scheme of climate change.”

That feeling is echoed widely. A statistic that holds 100 companies responsible for 71% of CO2 emissions has become a viral rallying cry for people arguing that personal action is useless. But while these companies extract the oil, gas and coal that is used to generate those emissions, the responsibility for burning it is still shared with people who buy their products. 

Structural changes make it easier for people to cut their emissions

What can individual action achieve?

The International Energy Agency projects that 40% of emissions cuts needed to decarbonize the global economy by 2050 will come from policies over which the public has little control — like making more electricity from renewable energy or using cleaner technologies in industry — while just 4% are expected to come from purely personal actions like flying less or walking to work.

The remaining 55% comes from changes that need a mix of government action and active consumer choices. That means — with the help of subsidies and advances in technology — buying electric cars, installing a heat pump or better insulating homes. 

In rich countries, that would still require enormous changes to lifestyles. A study published in the journal Nature in November found such solutions can cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2050 and improve quality of life at the same time.

Plant-based alternatives to meat have become more popular as people try to cut their carbon footprint

What’s more, experts say, every action taken to cut emissions has a bigger impact on society than simply shrinking one person’s carbon footprint. The rise of veganism, for instance, has encouraged companies to invest in tastier meat alternatives that make it easier for meat-eaters to choose a plant burger over a steak. Individual action is also not limited to consumer choices: voting and putting pressure on politicians can also trigger policy changes that shift society.

People say their actions are a “drop in the ocean” and the system needs to change, said Stuart Capstick, deputy director of the Center for Climate Change and Social Transformation at the University of Cardiff in the UK. “Well, my response to that is how is that system going to change? Systems don’t change unless people push for them to change.”

Edited by: Tamsin Walker

• 

  Veggie discs and bloody beets: Future of meat

  Big appetite

  With climate concerns growing, many people are trying to reduce their environmental impact. Increasingly, they’re turning to plant-based meats — and investors are taking notice. When Beyond Meat debuted on Wall Street in early May, share prices more than doubled the first day. “Investors recognize … a huge business opportunity,” Bruce Friedrich, director of the Good Food Institute, told AFP.

• 

  Veggie discs and bloody beets: Future of meat

  Spot the difference

  Backed by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and stars like Leonardo DiCaprio, meat alternatives including Beyond Meat and Impossible Burger, seen here at left, use new food technology and ingredients like peas, fava beans and soy. Unlike earlier veggie burgers, these meatless patties are said to taste, look, smell and even “bleed” like real meat (the secret is beet juice). They can also be healthier.

• 

  Veggie discs and bloody beets: Future of meat

  Good for the planet

  But eating less meat isn’t just a healthy decision. A 2018 WWF report said cutting animal products from diets would be a “relatively easy and cheap way” to fight climate change. A study by the University of Michigan found the Beyond Burger generates 90% less greenhouse gas emissions, requires 46% less energy to produce and has far less of an impact on water scarcity and land use than a beef patty.

• 

  Veggie discs and bloody beets: Future of meat

  Crowded market

  Beyond Meat is already sold in thousands of US supermarkets and restaurants, and major brands are also looking for a piece of the action. Nestle launched its take on the beef patty in Europe in April, and Unilever took over Dutch plant-based meat producer The Vegetarian Butcher in late 2018. Burger King is rolling out a Beyond Meat option US-wide, and McDonald’s is testing its own vegan burger.

• 

  Veggie discs and bloody beets: Future of meat

  Not all positive

  Industrialized soy crops have been flagged as a contributing factor to widespread deforestation. As Brussels-based environment group Fern points out, more than 1 million square kilometers of land are used to grow soy, almost three times the size of Germany. Only a very small percentag of this, however, is used in meat alternatives. Most goes to animal feed.

• 

  Veggie discs and bloody beets: Future of meat

  Health food?

  There are also nutritional concerns about these highly processed foods. Leading brands can have more than double the saturated fat and as much as seven times the amount of sodium as a lean beef burger. And environmental groups are worried about Impossible Burger’s inclusion of GMO yeast, which adds a meaty flavor. Excessive consumption has been linked to cancer — but that goes for real meats too.

• 

  Veggie discs and bloody beets: Future of meat

  Today’s special: Quorn tubes

  In Europe, meat alternatives may soon have to be sold as “discs,” “tubes” and “slabs” as opposed to burgers, sausages and steaks. The EU Parliament’s agriculture committee has backed a move to ban producers of vegetarian food from using terms that usually describe meat. The full parliament is yet to vote on the measure however.

  Author: Martin Kuebler

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.

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.

Plastics’ 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.”

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What 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.

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 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.

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.’

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.