by Willy Blackmore
For all the work that can go into it — the cleaning, the sorting, the (depending on where you live) hauling to the dump — recycling plastic can feel futile. Even if you manage to dispose of used plastic properly, skimming the news or walking on a beach quickly makes it seem like practically no one else is.
It’s true that only a very small amount of plastic is ever recycled, just 5 to 6% in 2021, while the vast majority ends up in landfills, with the rest getting incinerated or ending up in the ocean.
And according to a report released last week, the plastic industry (which is an arm of the oil and gas industry) has known that recycling would never be a large-scale, widespread option for its products — but the industry went ahead and promoted it as an environmentally friendly solution nonetheless.
The report is full of maddening quotes, like the Exxon employee who, in 1994, told a plastic-industry trade group, “We are committed to the activities [of plastics recycling], but not committed to the results.”
Thirty years later, that mindset has led not only to the proliferation of plastics in every aspect of modern life, but it’s expected that by 2050, fully half of oil and gas production will be devoted to producing plastic that will not (and largely cannot) be recycled. And on both the front and back end of the plastic lifecycle, both production and disposal, it’s Black and brown Americans who bear most of the toxic pollution that is part and parcel with plastics.
A byproduct of refining fossil fuels, plastic production shares a geographic footprint with the oil and gas industry, with major concentrations along the Gulf Coast, as well as California and Ohio. Houston, a famously diverse city that is nearly a quarter Black, is home to more than 40% of U.S. petrochemical manufacturing (which included plastic production), while there is also infamously a concentration of plastics plants along the stretch of the Mississippi River in southeastern Louisiana known as Cancer Alley, where many of the towns are predominantly Black.
So-called fenceline communities that sit practically on top of industrial facilities in these areas are exposed to very high levels of the chemicals produced by the plastic manufacturing process, including carcinogens like benzene and vinyl chloride. Some communities in Cancer Alley have cancer rates that are 44% higher than the national average.
While the public health effects of plastic manufacturing are relatively well known, particularly since Black communities in Cancer Alley have had major victories in organizing against new plants in the area, the disposal end of the plastic lifecycle is talked about less. While the various ways of getting rid of plastic produce smaller amounts of pollution (relatively speaking), they do still affect nearby communities — and whether it’s a landfill or an incinerator, those communities are still disproportionately Black and brown.
When plastic items end up in landfills, the material breaks down without ever fully decomposing, generating more and more microplastics as time goes by. Those tiny plastic particles can then escape from the landfill in the leachate (as the contaminated water that seeps out from landfills is called) that runs off from it and into the surrounding vicinity.
When plastics are burned in incinerators as a means of disposal, they not only emit large quantities of greenhouse gas emissions but also a host of other chemical pollutants too (because facilities burn waste on the whole, not plastics specific, it’s harder to say what, specifically, the plastics are responsible for). And nearly 80% of the remaining waste incinerators in the country are located in communities that are poor and/or Black and brown, and are oftentimes the single largest source of pollution in the area.
With plastic production only expected to increase, and the notion of large-scale recycling of plastic now exposed to be a convenient myth, it seems clear that single-use is all the industry is really capable of — which is worse for Black people — and the planet.