As the world begins to wean itself off of fossil fuel for transportation, Big Oil giants from Texas to Saudi Arabia are turning to plastic to support future growth. The International Energy Agency predicts that “oil demand related to plastic consumption overtakes that for road-passenger transport by 2050,” and its top executive warns plastics are “one of the key blind spots in the global energy debate.”

The industry is counting on a tidal wave of new demand from emerging economies. A 2018 IEA report underscores that advanced economies use up to 20 times more plastic per capita than consumers do in India or Indonesia. And it warns that increased recycling and single-use bans in places like Europe and Japan “will be far outweighed by developing economies sharply increasing their shares of plastic consumption (as well as its disposal).”

Global plastics production and incineration currently creates the CO2 pollution of 189 coal plants. By 2050, that’s expected to more than triple, to the equivalent of 615 coal plants. At that rate, plastics would hog about 15 percent of the world’s remaining “carbon budget,” or what can be emitted without crossing the 2-degrees Celsius threshold in global temperature rise that scientists warn can trigger calamity.

The plastic industry’s damage to the planet is vast, but not immeasurable. In fact, the industry has published a detailed accounting that reveals its pollution is on pace to cause trillions in environmental harm by midcentury………

“The environmental cost to society of consumer plastic products and packaging was over $139 billion in 2015,” the report reveals. Without a dramatic change in course, Trucost predicts, that annual figure will soar to “$209 billion by 2025.”………

Much of the world is waking up to the plastics crisis. As China has shut its doors to the global plastic-waste trade, the European Union, Canada, and India are stepping up bans on single-use plastics like cutlery, plates, straws, and ear swabs. “How do you explain dead whales washing up on beaches across the world, their stomachs jam packed with plastic bags?” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau asked, introducing his country’s initiative. “As a dad, it is tough trying to explain this stuff to my kids.”

But under President Trump, the United States is lurching in the opposite direction, promoting the plastic industry’s aggressive expansion. “It’s war,” says Puckett of BAN, “between policies that are totally at odds with each other — of making more plastics and banning plastic.”

American fracking is literally fueling the global surge in plastics. The glut of cheap natural gas here has sparked an explosion in new plastics infrastructure. Since 2010, according to the ACC, U.S. companies have ramped up “334 chemical and plastics projects cumulatively valued at $204 billion.” Europe has built new plastics plants fed by fracked U.S. exports. Environmentalists warn that these facilities will lock in demand for fossil-fuel consumption for a generation.

Trump is an unabashed booster of plastics — in keeping with his service to the fossil-fuel industry. The former CEO of Dow led Trump’s manufacturing council. And last July, the president visited a new Shell plastics complex outside Pittsburgh. “This facility will transform abundant natural gas — and we have a lot of it — fracked from Pennsylvania wells into plastic,” Trump said. That material, he boasted, would be embossed with “that very beautiful phrase: ‘Made in the USA.’”

With the president championing its interests in Washington — and even triggering the libs with Trump 2020 campaign-branded plastic straws — the plastics industry is working to undermine grassroots activism in cities and states across the country.

The Plastics Industry Association, or PLASTICS, is a top trade group headquartered on K Street in Washington, D.C. Hiding its handiwork inside a nesting doll of front groups, PLASTICS has worked to thwart state and municipal bans on single-use plastics. PLASTICS has gotten an assist from the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, which pushes right-wing state legislatures to pass nearly identical bills. In 2013, the plastic trade group wrote a pitch to ALEC members, arguing a ban on plastic “results in the picking of winners and losers in a ‘not-so-free’ marketplace.” By 2015, ALEC began advocating state laws best known for “banning bans” on plastic bags, but which are often far more sweeping, prohibiting limits on styrofoam and “auxiliary containers” — a catchall term for to-go packaging.

PLASTICS obscures its involvement in these state fights through a “special purpose” front group called the Progressive Bag Alliance, which rebranded in January as the American Recyclable Plastic Bag Alliance. The organization runs public relations through another front group, Bag the Ban, which touts plastic as “the most environmentally friendly option at the checkout.” (The bag alliance claims it is self-funding, but PLASTICS employs its director, per IRS filings, and the groups share offices and overhead.)……

The success of blue states, from Hawaii to New York, in banning plastic bags has been countered by the industry-led push. PLASTICS says it has parted ways with ALEC, but some 15 red states now have laws pre-empting local plastic bans, with Oklahoma, North Dakota, and Tennessee joining the pack in 2019. (ALEC did not respond to questions from Rolling Stone.)

For now, the state bans on bans are holding up in court…….

As the global plastics crisis grows — and photos of albatross chicks decomposing around the indigestible plastic waste that killed them go viral — the industry is quietly agonizing over backlash from the metal-straw and Hydroflask-toting members of Generation Z. “The [plastic] water bottle has, in some way, become the mink coat or the pack of cigarettes,” a senior sustainability manager for Nestlé Waters confessed at a conference last year. “It’s socially not very acceptable to the young folks, and that scares me.”

In contrast to climate change, the plastics crisis has not been met with corporate denial. The companies of Big Plastic are instead seeking to convince consumers and regulators that — despite having unleashed this torrent of pollution on the planet — they can be trusted to pioneer solutions that will make plastic use sustainable. They’re touting a “circular economy,” in which used plastic doesn’t become waste but, instead, a feedstock for new products. A cynic might translate the concept into: Recycling, but for real this time. “There are a lot of different corporate commitments,” says Shilpi Chhotray, a leader of the Break Free From Plastics movement. While some show promise, others “are just greenwashing,” she insists, with the intent of giving the industry cover for its true aim: “growth.”………

The industry’s voluntary actions to curb plastic pollution are driven by two clear motives: One is protecting the environment, the other is protecting profits from regulation……..

In Washington, the plastics industry is asking government, and American taxpayers, to foot the bill to revitalize the moribund recycling industry. The RECOVER Act — backed by both PLASTICS and the ACC — would offer $500 million in federal-matching funds for investment in new infrastructure…….

For Sen. Tom Udall, our involuntary ingestion of plastic waste is proof that the country can’t wait decades for plastic polluters to reform their own practices, or rely on half-measures to bolster the current recycling system. “We are beyond the crisis point on plastic waste,” he says, “and people are starting to wake up.” Udall wants consequences for an industry that has sloughed its environmental harms onto the rest of us for long enough.

Washington is late to the game when it comes to plastics regulation, and Udall’s strategy is to adopt best practices from across the globe.  . The Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act would mimic Europe in banning commonly polluted single-use plastics, including plastic bags, styrofoam cups and carry-out containers, and plastic utensils. Plastic straws would be allowed only by request.

The bill would expand the market for recycled plastics by creating a minimum recycled content for beverage containers, while also imposing a 10-cent deposit on each container sold — roughly nationalizing the models of Michigan and Oregon, where residents return nearly nine in 10 containers for recycling.

The bill would create “extended producer responsibility” — making the industry responsible for the waste it creates by requiring that producers “design, manage, and finance programs to collect and process waste that would normally burden state and local governments.” Udall emphasizes that today’s industry is hardly trying, often slapping an unrecyclable label on an otherwise recyclable bottle…..

The companies of the plastics industry, Lowenthal says, are ultimately “going to have to deal with the sticker shock that they are now responsible and they’re going to have to pay” to keep plastics out of the environment. The alternative, he insists, has become untenable: “What we have in plastic is something that has made our lives more convenient and easier. But unless we figure out how to keep this out of the waste stream, it’s just going to kill us.” https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/plastic-problem-recycling-myth-big-oil-950957/?fbclid=IwAR2i19CqoMXj7HMbvmzM6uGkEx02ESd69vjlxVVgpUZV-VMbhPQJ_iZ3o3w