Fighting plastic pollution

For centuries, people have assumed that our vast ocean was limitless and immune to human impacts. It’s only recently that scientists have come to understand the devastating effects plastics have already had on the seas.

What is the plastic pollution crisis?

The flow of plastics into our environment has reached crisis proportions, and the evidence is most clearly on display in our oceans. It is estimated that up to 12 million metric tons of plastic enter our ocean each year.

However, plastic is not just an ocean and waste problem, it is also a climate, health and social justice problem. 99% of plastic is made from fossil fuels, like fracked gas and oil, and it contributes to climate change throughout its life-cycle.

Global demand for plastics

As global demand for oil declines, the fossil fuel industry is turning to plastics to stay afloat. Big plastic-polluting corporations like Coca-Cola, Nestlé and PepsiCo are driving this growth and their failure to end their reliance on single-use plastics and invest in reuse and refill is contributing to fossil fuel production expansion, and laying the groundwork for a devastating boom in single-use plastics. And if industry has its way, plastic production could double by 2030.

The fossil fuel industry’s increased reliance on plastics will be just as harmful for people and the planet. Beyond continuing to drive the climate crisis, petrochemical and plastic production have deadly health and environmental impacts and a long history of environmental racism, from the U.S. Gulf Coast’s “Cancer Alley” where the plastic industry is poisoning Black, Brown and frontline communities to China’s Cancer Village in the Global South.

How did the plastic pollution crisis happen?

In the 1970s, the petrochemical and fossil fuel industry, alongside consumer goods giants, spent millions of dollars on ads to push the myth of plastic recycling to trick customers into believing that recycling was a real solution for the explosion of plastic packaging.

We now know that over 90% of plastic is not recycled, and that rhetoric was an industry smokescreen in order to pump out more and more plastics for profit. Recycling is not — and has never been — a real solution for plastics, and our environment, oceans, and communities are paying the devastating price for the crisis.

What can we do about plastic pollution?

As the makers of plastic — the oil and gas industry — double down on plastics as the next frontier for future petrochemical production, we must fight back to expose the fossil fuel industry hiding behind plastics. And demand action from the biggest plastic polluting corporations fueling the plastic crisis by continuing to cut off a major lifeline of the fossil fuel industry: single-use plastics.

Right now, we also have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to match the scale of this crisis —A Global Plastics Treaty.

At the United Nations Environmental Assembly in March 2022, governments officially adopted a mandate opening negotiations for a global, legally-binding plastics treaty to address the whole lifecycle of plastics.

The negotiations for the Global Plastics Treaty have started, with the initial goal of completing the process by the end of 2024 — however, a deal has not been finalized yet. Delegates from over 100 countries, representing billions of people, rejected a toothless deal that would have accomplished nothing. 

The future treaty has a huge potential to put the world on a path towards a plastic-free future but it will be up to us to make sure that it delivers on its promises. The fight for a plastic-free future continues!