Trash piles pressure on plastics
WASHINGTON — Each day, the growing complex of petrochemical plants lining the Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast churns out thousands of tons of miniature plastic pellets, destined for manufacturing plants around the world to be turned into items ranging from soda bottles to car bumpers to the casings of smartphones.
But with the plastics industry’s meteoric rise comes a waste stream that has far exceeded society’s ability to manage it.
In the wake of stagnant recycling rates and damning scientific reports of marine life choking on plastic waste in the world’s oceans, consumers and govern
ments worldwide are beginning to turn away from single-use plastics and plastic packaging, a massive chunk of a $1.2 trillion-a-year global industry that has transformed consumer culture and become an increasingly vital component of the Texas economy.
Plastic bag bans are in place in at least 32 countries, including large swaths of Europe and Africa, as well as the world’s second largest economy, China. In the United States, some 300 municipalities have similar bans, as do the states of Hawaii and California.
The next wave of regulation already is underway, as American cities from Seattle to Charleston, S.C., and a number of European nations, ban single-use plastics such as straws and fliptop meal containers in what many industry executives see as a growing threat to their future. It is also posing a threat to the broader energy sector — the mainstay of Houston’s economy — which has counted on plastics and petrochemicals made from oil and natural gas as a source of new demand to offset weakening consumption of gasoline and diesel as electric vehicles multiply.
“We’re seeing local ordinances going much further than bags,” said Matt Seaholm, executive director of the American Plastic Bag Alliance, an industry lobbying group. “They’re saying we need to get rid of it all.”
Scientists estimate the plastic waste stream at 275 million metric tons a year worldwide — about the weight of 135 million cars stacked one atop another.
Only a fraction of that plastic will be recycled. In wealthy nations such as the United States the vast majority is destined for landfills or incinerators. But in developing nations in Southeast Asia, Africa and South America trash collection systems are less developed, leaving millions of tons of plastic bottles and bags unaccounted for, left to be scattered by the wind and washed by rains into the ocean.
Math problem
As new plastics plants comes online at a fast clip worldwide, that waste stream is expected to grow in kind. By 2025 U.S. production capacity for polyethylene, which is used to make bottles and bags and is the most common type of plastic, is expected to grow to more than 70 percent above 2015 levels, according to the research firm IHS Markit. And the vast majority of those new plants are being built along the Gulf Coast, tapping the glut of cheap natural gas — a feedstock for plastics production — coming from U.S. shale fields.
“We have an enormous math balance problem,” said Jan Dell, a Houstonbased environmental consultant who has advised federal agencies on climate change. “Already we have a system that can’t keep up, so where’s all that new plastic going to go? The plastics industry is opening up the spigot into the sink, but the pipe isn’t getting any bigger so its going to overflow even more into the environment.”
At the center of the push for banning plastics is the worldwide failure of recycling programs, which promised to re-purpose a material that by most scientific estimates takes hundreds, if not thousands of years to disintegrate. Decades after the slogan “reduce, reuse, recycle” spread across the United States, the plastic recycling rate in the United States is 9 percent, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
The rest of the world isn’t doing much better. Even in Europe, where recycling policies rank among the most comprehensive in the world, the recycling rate is only about 30 percent, said Roland Geyer, an ecology professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
“This linear production model — drill for the oil and gas and make the plastic, use it and put it in the ground — seems very outdated and not appropriate for a small planet,” he said. “We used to think of the planet as giant, but it is becoming an ever smaller planet, with the population density and the living standards we all have grown accustomed to.”
Scientists estimate approximately 8 million metric tons of plastic waste — nearly 20 billion pounds — end up in the world’s oceans each year. The plastic is broken down into smaller and smaller pieces by the combination of saltwater, waves and sun, slowly poisoning the fish and other marine creatures that eat it.
Plastic’s environmental impact can be seen driving down any highway in America. In Laredo, residents are again seeing grocery bags and bottles strewn along roadways and clogging up creeks after the Texas Supreme Court overturned a 2015 bag ban that was the subject of a lawsuit by local merchants aligned with the plastics industry.
“It was drastic after the bag ban. We didn’t have empty lots or trees or creeks filled with plastic bags anymore. It was a very different landscape,” said Tricia Ortiz, executive director of the nonprofit Rio Grande International Study Center. “Now, we’re reversing course and the plastic bags are everywhere.”
With media coverage and activist campaigns on the rise, the plastics industry has pledged to try to do its part to solve the crisis. Earlier this year, an industry group that includes the major oil companies Exxon Mobil and Chevron, and the Houston petrochemical company LyondellBasell, pledged a combined $1 billion to expand recycling and trash operations worldwide and develop next-generation products like biodegradable plastics.
Fears of backlash
Chet Thompson, former deputy general counsel at the Environmental Protection Agency who now leads the trade group American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, said finding a solution soon was critical, even if expanded recycling programs cut into plastic production.
“It’s better for business than not addressing it and having our demand crushed later,” he said. “Folks realize, even if it’s not their fault, none of that matters if there’s going to be a backlash that takes the form of bans.”
The world’s increasing intolerance for plastic waste is already catching the attention of financial institutions, for whom plastics was one of the great success stories of the 20th century — immortalized in the 1967 film “The Graduate” when Dustin Hoffman’s wayward character is advised by a friend of his parents, “Just one word … plastics.”
Last year, Citibank sent a report to investors cautioning that new petrochemical plants could face slower than expected demand growth, noting that packaging — the form of plastic most commonly targeted in the government bans — represented one-third of the industry’s output, surpassing construction materials, consumer products and automobile components.
At the same time, the industry’s corporate customers, wary of eliciting the attention of government and activists, are moving on their own to reduce the amount of plastic they use. Dunkin’ Donuts said it will replace polystyrene cups and containers with paper versions by 2020. CocaCola has pledged to get is plastic containers to 50 percent recycled content by 2030. The consumer products company Procter & Gamble has introduced a new “eco-box” for its line of Tide laundry detergent, which it claims uses 60 percent less plastic than standard containers.
“The consumer backlash is only going to intensify,” said Rob Gilfillan, a plastics analyst with the energy research firm Wood Mackenzie. “The pressure the industry is under means we have to taper long-term forecasts.”
Before the rise of plastics after World War II, households bought food and drinks in glass bottles, metal cans or paper bags, which tended to be reused or, if sent to landfills, broke down in a matter of decades, if not years.
But scientists discovered that by manipulating the carbon molecules in oil and other fossil fuels, they could produce synthetic substances mimicking the properties of natural materials. While wood and metal had to be harvested or mined, plastic could be produced cheaply in a factory and easily molded into whatever shape the customer demanded.
Plastic quickly took off, with production rising to the point that plastics represent more than half of all the packaging material used worldwide each year. In the United States alone, the industry generated more than $400 billion in 2017, employing close to 1 million people — more than 75,000 in Texas.
Few incentives
The problem is that plastic is so durable and cheap to make, there is little economic impetus to reuse or recycle packaging and containers. While nearly 3 of every 4 U.S. households have access to curbside recycling, more than 90 percent of plastic doesn’t get recycled. Often, it’s because the plastics are contaminated by food waste or mixed with plastics that are not recyclable, such as plastic grocery bags.
In other cases, recycling equipment is outdated and incapable of sorting the increasing volumes of paper, plastic, glass and metal that end up in a modern family’s recycling bin.
“The infrastructure is light years behind the stream mixes today,” said Steve Alexander, president of the Association of Plastic Recyclers, which represents companies that produce and buy recycled plastic.
For now, low demand for recycled plastic offers little incentive to waste management contractors to invest in better equipment. Recycling plastic, unlike metal or glass, is costly, forcing recycling firms to charge more for recycled plastic than new or “virgin” plastic pellets cost.
And demand has only weakened after China, which scientists estimate took about half the developed world’s scrap plastics in 2016, banned the importation of all but the purest forms of plastic scrap last year. At the same time the glut of cheap natural gas coming from U.S. shale formations has allowed U.S. producers to sell their plastic pellets even cheaper, further imperiling the economics of recycling.
Plastic and product manufacturers argue the world’s middling recycling efforts can be turned around through investment in technology and education campaigns. At the same time, industry lobbyists are making the case to lawmakers in Washington and state capitals that waste management policies need to be adjusted to increase recycling rates, said Scott DeFife, vice president of government affairs at the Plastics Industry Association, a trade group in Washington.
“For instance, (trash) haulers get paid by weight, not by carbon reductions or diverting waste from landfills,” he said. “I’m looking for gaps in the system where we can improve and make the system much more efficient. It’s completely doable, but we have to make some fundamental changes.”
Ultimate solution
But many scientists are skeptical that recycling is the answer. Some are beginning to wonder whether the answer doesn’t lie in incinerators, which burn trash to generate electricity. Sweden now incinerates about 86 percent of its plastic waste, which the government has promoted as a better alternative to landfills.
Some argue the solution lies in reducing plastic consumption itself, banning the plastic packaging and single-use items that have become so fundamental to modern existence.
“Plastic recycling simply doesn’t work,” said Geyer, the California ecology professor. “We’ve tried for several decades now, and the economics just don’t seem to work out.”