Beth Gardiner has long done what is expected of the “good” eco-friendly consumer: canvas tote bag for shopping, stainless steel water bottle always in the bag, guilty conscience whenever she buys a plastic water bottle. And then, a little over eight years ago, she came across an article explaining that oil companies had invested more than $180 billion (€153 billion) in plastic factories in the United States since 2010.It was a stabshe tells the Guardian. They tell me that while I feel guilty about having forgotten my water bottle, these huge oil companies are pouring out billions…”
This dissonance between small individual gestures and the enormity of industrial flows is the starting point of his new book, Plastic Inc: Big Oil, Big Money and the Plan to Trash Our Future (“Plastic Inc: Big Oil, Money, and the Plan to Destroy Our Future”). Beth Gardiner, an environmental journalist based in London, thought she already knew the tactics of the fossil fuel industry, but her investigation into plastic introduced her to a new level of cynicism and greed.
“What struck me most was the will, the deliberate strategy with which they injected plastic into our lives, she explains in this interview with the Guardian. They built this world of disposable products with full knowledge of the facts, because they understood the profit it offered.”
On the ground, this strategy has several faces. In Reserve, Louisiana, on the Mississippi, Beth Gardiner meets Robert Taylor, an octogenarian activist who has lived for decades in the shadow of a huge plastic factory. His predominantly black neighborhood only learned in 2016, thanks to federal action, that toxic gas levels there were extremely high. Robert Taylor talks about the cancers that strike his wife, his daughter, his neighbors, his cousins. “When we talk about plastic, we think of the packaging in our daily lives, not of those who live stuck to production sites,” summarizes the journalist.
Halfway around the world, in Indonesia, she walks on a hill of plastic waste “as far as the eye can see”. She picks up packaging from well-known brands in Europe or the United States, which came in bales of recycled paper contaminated with pieces of plastic. In other words, what we sort religiously on this side of the planet can end up in an open dump on the other side. Indonesia, like other countries after China, is starting to ban these imports of plastic waste, forcing the West to finally manage its own waste.
A massive climate cost
For Beth Gardiner, plastic is not a simple slippage in the fossil economy, but its survival plan. In twenty years, global production has doubled, and is expected to double again – or even triple – in the decades to come. Petrochemicals intended for plastic are “tipped to become the biggest driver of oil demand”she writes. The majors have perfectly understood that the energy transition threatens their model, and that plastic is “a way to keep drilling and cashing out”. Focus on solar or wind power, “it’s not as profitable as selling oil and gas, so they’re sticking with the current model, and plastic perpetuates that”.
The climate cost of this gamble is massive. In 2019, plastics generated 1.8 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases, or 3.4% of global emissions, almost all linked to the production and processing of fossil fuels. And this is only part of the problem: in addition to microplastics already detected in the abyss and on Everest, there is a cocktail of substances that migrate into our food, our water, our body. “We don’t yet know everything about microplastics, and that’s normal, science is doing its job, nuance Beth Gardiner. But there is a long history of research into plastic chemicals, which disrupt the endocrine and cardiovascular systems and are linked to cancer. Microplastics are only part of the health damage.”
Defuse crises
To understand how we got here, Beth Gardiner goes back to the 19th century, when the first plastics were presented as ecological progress – less ivory, less rare wood – then to the moment when the by-products of refining became the raw material of a single-use economy. “Plastic is driven by supply rather than demand”she explains. Companies have lured the public with the promise of convenience and disposability. From the bottle to the lighter, from the diaper to the cup, the reusable object shifts into the single-use all-purpose, because “disposability means more profit”.
Each time the public becomes aware of the damage – panic over landfills in the 1970s and 1980s, images of strangled turtles and polluted seas – the industry deploys a well-rehearsed toolbox to defuse the crisis. It finances campaigns that transform a problem of overproduction into a problem of “pollution”, of poorly disposed waste, placing the blame on the user.
Powerful lobbies
It massively pushes recycling, while knowing since the 1970s how difficult it is to make such a system work. “They pushed so many myths and lies about recycling”laments Beth Gardiner. Result: we feel virtuous by throwing away in our yellow bins, while most plastics are too complex, too contaminated or too degraded to be recycled effectively, and end up incinerated or in landfill.
At the same time, the same actors are fighting any serious regulation step by step. Lobbyists have interfered with UN negotiations on a global treaty against plastic pollution, in order to empty the text of its substance. The European Union, despite its limitations, remains one of the few to tackle single-use plastics and chemicals from petrochemicals. The post-Brexit United Kingdom is distancing itself from these norms. As for the United States of Donald Trump, they have turned their back on any effective regulation.
Initiatives then come from cities or states like California, which has extended its ban on single-use bags or required producers to finance the recycling of their products – measures against which the industry is fiercely fighting.
Beth Gardiner has not given up on small everyday gestures, but she explains that she has changed her focus: “They matter, but I have shifted my focus. What I’m trying to do with this book is help people look less at the personal and more at the political, because that’s where the difference can be made.”
