Harmful at Every Step
Plastics are made by combining gas, oil, or coal with synthetic chemicals. Every step in the supply chain releases harmful chemicals and climate-heating gases. It is predicted that by 2040, as much as 19 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions will come from plastics.
Plastics Feedstocks
In the United States, about 90 percent of plastics are made from fossil gas, nearly all of which is extracted by hydraulic fracturing of shale rock. This minimally regulated process involves drilling miles-long wells, detonating explosive charges in the rock, and injecting several million gallons of water, thousands of tons of sand, and thousands of gallons of chemicals. These include substances with extreme developmental and reproductive toxicity, such as arsenic, benzene, cadmium, lead, formaldehyde, chlorine, and mercury.
In 2011, despite the grave concerns of its own scientists, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) approved the use of PFAS chemicals as fracking fluids. Into more than 1,000 fracking wells, companies inject these “forever chemicals,” which are highly toxic, persistent, and bioaccumulative and are linked to cancers and immune, thyroid, kidney, and reproductive problems.
Many Americans, including nearly half the populations of Oklahoma and West Virginia, live within a mile of an active well.
Plastic Manufacturing
The fracked gases or other fossil fuels are distilled and ultimately “cracked” at very high temperatures, breaking the molecular bonds and rearranging the atoms. To these feedstocks are added combinations of the more than 16,000 chemicals used to make plastics. Many of these chemicals are toxic, flammable, and explosive.
Plastics manufacturing releases dioxins, ethylene oxide, formaldehyde and other extremely hazardous air pollutants. Researchers have identified elevated cancer risks as well as adverse respiratory and reproductive effects among those who work in or live near these facilities. EPA has a complicated patchwork of laws meant to limit the pollution from petrochemical facilities.
In addition, there is the danger of chemical disasters. These leaks, fires and explosions occur every other day in the United States, whether at petrochemical facilities or along the routes of the trucks, pipelines, and mile-long trains transporting the hazardous and volatile chemicals that are turned into plastic.
The Use of Plastic Products
Plastics harm consumers as well. The chemicals in plastic (such as PFAS, phthalates, bisphenols, and flame retardants) are not physically bound to the polymer and can leach from the plastic into our foods, our bodies, and our surroundings. In addition, each of us inhales and ingests hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of microplastic particles annually.
The wide-ranging sources of microplastic and nanoplastic pollution include everything from the plastic coatings on agricultural fertilizers and pesticides to the application of sewage sludge on farmland, to the microplastic beads in cosmetics (e.g., to exfoliate skin, to make lotion feel silky, to make it easier to comb your hair after shampooing, etc.). Other microplastic sources include tire abrasion, clothes, cleaning products, carpets, waste incinerators, and infill material on artificial turf fields. A recent study identified an average of 240,000 plastic particles in each one-liter bottle of water.
Microplastics have been found throughout the human body, including in the human placenta, breast milk, testicular tissue, heart tissue, and blood clots. A growing body of research suggests that plastics may be linked to the accelerating decline in the quantity and quality of human sperm—counts have decreased by more than 50 percent globally over the past half-century.
Plastic Waste Disposal
More than 40 percent of plastics are “disposable,” designed to be used just once, yet there is no way to safely and economically get rid of them. The industry has been promoting plastics recycling, a process hindered by the thousands of chemicals in plastic. Recycling generates stunning amounts of microplastics. The reclaimed plastic that emerges is of lower grade and higher toxicity.
The United States sends large volumes of plastic trash to Mexico, Malaysia, Vietnam, and other countries in the Global South, where much of it is landfilled or burned. Officially, this counts as recycling. The Basel Convention regulates the international trade in plastic waste, but the United States has not ratified it and has opposed its plastics export amendments.
Desperate to convince the public and regulators that it has solved the plastics crisis, the plastics lobby is now engaged in a high-stakes campaign to burn plastic trash. They are calling the process “advanced recycling,” yet most of these technologies involve a decades-old incineration process that turns the plastic into air pollution, toxic ash, and contaminated oils. The plastics lobby has pushed through legislation in 25 states and is now trying to convince Congress and the EPA that plastics burning is not incineration and that plastics waste is not solid waste, thus exempting “advanced recycling” from the federal Clean Air Act.
The pyrolysis oils that emerge from these incinerators can be made into fuel. A 2023 investigation shows the elevated toxicity of such fuels: A Chevron refinery in Pascagoula, Mississippi, received EPA approval to use the pyrolysis oils to make jet and boat fuel. EPA scientists determined that air pollution produced from burning the jet fuel is expected to cause cancer in one in every four people exposed over a lifetime. The boat fuel ingredient is even more toxic: every person exposed over a lifetime would be expected to get cancer.
Plastic Industry Sacrifice Zones
Most plastics production takes place in Louisiana and Texas. Former slave plantations have been transformed into giant petrochemical fortresses, some the size of hundreds of football fields. The plastics industry has also gained a foothold in Appalachia and other regions.
People living in these areas—mostly Black, Brown, Indigenous, and low-income communities—wake up each morning to a thick haze of carcinogenic air pollution and to the stench, noise, and eyesore of plastics production, processing, and disposal facilities. Many neighborhoods have been demarcated for heavy polluters by the pernicious land use plans and zoning designations that have come to replace more explicitly racist segregation and redlining practices.
Roughly 200 fossil fuel and plastics-making facilities line “Cancer Alley,” an 85-mile stretch between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights has identified this strip as one of the most polluted and hazardous places on earth, a “sacrifice zone” plagued by unconscionable environmental injustices. Particularly noteworthy is St. John the Baptist, a parish in which the air is dense with chloroprene, ethylene oxide, and other potent carcinogens, subjecting residents to the highest cancer risk in the nation from air pollution, an astronomical 1,505 in a million.
Racist in Intent or In Effect
Like aggrieved communities across the nation, St. John the Baptist residents sought protection under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a law that bars recipients of federal funding from discriminating on the basis of race, color, or national origin. The discrimination does not have to be racist in intent so long as it has a discriminatory effect, known as “disparate impact.”
For decades, the EPA ignored, delayed, rejected, and dismissed civil rights complaints by communities. But in 2022, the U.S. Department of Justice opened a Title VI investigation into the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality’s permitting decisions, signaling a turning point in the EPA’s willingness to use civil rights law to address disparate impacts.
In response, Louisiana’s attorney general sued, countering that the “plain text” of Title VI prohibits only intentional discrimination and that Louisiana policies do not explicitly announce discrimination as the intent. In a devastating blow to fenceline communities, the EPA dropped the Louisiana case and has since backed down from similar investigations in Houston, Flint, Michigan, and elsewhere.
Petrochemical Profits vs. Brown and Black Health
An analysis of World Bank data found that the global oil and gas industry has been making $2.8 billion per day for the past 50 years. With that sort of capital in play, it is not surprising that many laws and regulations governing petrochemicals appear to favor the polluters.
Even the EPA’s theoretical goalpost for excess lifetime cancer risk for hazardous air pollutants is under-protective, aspiring to a 100-in-1-million risk level. Essentially, the risk is considered acceptable if each industrial air pollutant causes 100 cancers among every million people exposed over a lifetime. Such an approach to standards-setting dramatically undercounts the dangers, especially in the low-income communities of color that face the cumulative toxic emissions from dozens and even hundreds of facilities at once.
Some of the most absurd air pollution rules are those governing “startup, shutdown, and malfunction.” These laws enable industrial polluters to emit unlimited amounts of air toxics—sometimes far exceeding everyday levels—during the hours- or sometimes weeks-long malfunctions, maintenance events, and damaged operations due to hurricanes and other disasters. Such regulatory carve-outs are contrary to the plain language of the Clean Air Act, which calls for continuous application of emissions standards.
Another regulatory folly is the distinction between “major” sources of air pollution (those that emit 10 or more tons per year of a single hazardous air pollutant or 25 tons per year of a combination) and sources that emit anything less than those thresholds. The lesser-emitting “area sources” are commonly granted a free pass to pollute. Yet, even seemingly “minor” amounts (below 10 tons) of air toxics can have life-altering and life-ending effects.
The Path Forward
The weak and fragmentary oversight of the plastics industry is no match for the egregious harms underway. It will take political will and legal might to address the plastics crisis and to implement the systemic fixes that are so desperately needed.
No end-of-pipe fix can even begin to confront the enormous scale of the plastics crisis, the toxicity of the thousands of plastic chemicals, and the legacy of cancers and other human health outcomes. Yet the real solution is one that few regulators or politicians dare touch: Produce less plastic.
