For decades, the fossil fuel industry has pushed for recycling as an alternative to bans or cuts in filling landfills and oceans with single-use plastic.
Now, with the annual UN Climate Change Conference (COP28) just around the corner, the industry is making publicity on a global scale – and using it to blunt efforts to reduce fossil fuel use.
This strategy was made clear last week at the third meeting of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC-3) in Nairobi, Kenya – part of a process legally required to reach an international agreement on plastics by 2024.
It began with high hopes and soaring rhetoric as President William Ruto of Kenya – a country that has banned a wide range of single-use plastics – called on negotiators to be “the first domino” in the “inevitable” shift towards a world of strength reduced plastic consumption.
Instead, negotiations ended in deadlock and confusion as countries like Saudi Arabia and China joined trade groups like the American Chemistry Council to fight the idea of restricting the production of plastics in any way.
More than 140 registered fossil fuel and plastics lobbyists were in attendance, many of them part of six national delegations – making them by far the largest bloc at the conference.
The army of fossil fuel and petrochemical advocates also outnumbered independent scientists 4 to 1 and outnumbered the collective delegations of the 70 smallest countries combined.
They joined a conference whose agenda included the possible “phasing out” of particularly harmful and replaceable plastics – and then argued that this was not necessary. Instead, petrochemical companies are hoping for a “circular economy” in which plastic waste is reused indefinitely to make new plastic products.
Their weapons in this campaign: innocuous-sounding phrases such as “national priorities,” “national circumstances,” the push for “a bottom-up approach,” and a plea for “technological innovation.”
All of this, anti-plastic activists argued, aimed at diluting the original goal of the treaty, namely a binding and solid agreement that would significantly reduce the amount of plastic entering the environment.
This number is staggering: the equivalent of 2,000 dump trucks per day are dumped into the world’s lakes, rivers and oceans. A groundbreaking 2017 study in Science found that 8.3 million tons of plastic have been produced so far, virtually all of which still ends up in landfills or the environment – and is still dwarfed by the 12 million tons of plastic which, according to the study authors, would be in landfills or the environment by 2050 if nothing changes.
This abundance of plastic is an issue of “great concern,” wrote a confederation of 60 UN member states called the High Ambition Coalition to End Plastic Pollution.
The country alliance, led by Norway and Rwanda, advocated for expanded recycling and new types of plastics that are easier to break down and convert into other products. However, this took a backseat to their call for binding measures for countries to produce less plastic.
In particular, they urged the Presidency to “eliminate and limit unnecessary, avoidable or problematic plastics,” starting with those most harmful to human health and the environment.
In addition to trash disposal — which one activist likened to mopping the floor of an overflowing bathtub — “we also need to turn off the faucet,” wrote a representative from the Coalition of Small Pacific Nations.
For this group, “there is no difference between plastic and plastic pollution – plastic is pollution,” as Rafael Eudes of Brazil’s Aliança Residuo Cero, or Zero Waste Alliance, said in a statement.
This coalition called on the INC-3 Chair to take decisive action to transform the hodgepodge of conflicting proposals that made up the previous session’s “zero draft” into a streamlined and condensed first draft ready for the next session would.
But none of that happened. Negotiations ended with a “zero draft” that massively expanded both pro- and anti-plastic proposals – a draft that, in another setback to the momentum, members were banned from working on before they committed meet again in April in Ottawa, Canada.
With only two sessions remaining before time runs out on the contract process, the real possibility of failure increases – a possibility that plastic reduction advocates saw as a target of the far smaller coalition of participating states and lobbyists, which depends heavily on plastic reduction Fossil fuel profits.
This coalition of about half a dozen countries – including China, Russia and Iran – tried to convince members that production restrictions on even the most harmful and dangerous plastics were unnecessary – and that the solution lay in better “waste management” of the plastic flood still planned to produce.
“Primary plastics have become a cornerstone of modern society,” the Saudi delegation wrote before the meeting, referring to new “new” plastics derived directly from fossil fuels.
“An exit from supply and demand would not only stifle technological innovation, but also threaten economic growth and stability,” the Saudi team wrote.
That push was joined by China, a major plastics producer, whose negotiators wrote before the conference that “limiting the production of plastic polymers is not a direct solution to plastic pollution” and called for such bans to be removed from the final deal.
Although the United States has not officially joined the bloc, its negotiators in Nairobi sought to “replace concrete global commitments with catchy slogans and unenforceable promises,” according to a summary by the Center for International Environmental Law.
The Biden administration’s own proposed plastic waste plan also does not mention any binding measures to reduce plastic production. Instead, the government is relying on “voluntary” measures to reduce single-use plastic, new purchasing guidelines that discourage government agencies from single-use products, and an expansion of recycling – measures roughly equivalent to those of the petrochemical industry.
The key talking point of this pro-plastics coalition was summarized by Matthew Kastner of the American Chemistry Council (ACC), a leading petrochemical lobbying group whose members include fossil fuel giant Exxon and plastics manufacturers Dow and DuPont.
Kastner told Portal last week that “the plastics deal should focus on ending plastic pollution, not plastic production.”
This depends on the idea that the plastic waste stream – more than 80 percent of which ends up in landfills and the environment and half of the rest is simply burned – can be transformed into a closed “loop”.
As a groundbreaking 2020 report from NPR and Frontline found, this is a pitch the industry has been making for decades — even though it knew it couldn’t execute.
“There are serious doubts about that [recycling plastic] can ever be made profitable on an economic basis,” an industry insider wrote in a 1974 speech, NPR and Frontline found.
But recycling, a leader of a plastics trade group told them, has an important quality: It increases public acceptance of plastics, or what is now called their “social license.”
“If the public believes that recycling works, they won’t be as concerned about the environment,” Larry Thomas, former president of what is now the Plastics Industry Association, told NPR.
The cornerstone of the modern version of this pitch is “chemical recycling,” which aims to replace the grueling manual sorting of mushy and smelly plastic waste into various recycling streams with a streamlined, automated process.
According to the industry, this could enable the production of new plastics from the building blocks of the old ones. ACC’s Kastner pointed The Hill to a list of 79 chemical recycling plants worldwide that are “planned, operating or under construction.”
“Chemical recycling is a proven technology used on a commercial scale around the world,” Kastner told The Hill.
He pointed to “many products in the global market that use chemically recycled plastics,” including a Dow initiative to use ground plastic to replace some asphalt in road tar and a project by ExxonMobil where discarded fishing lines are transformed into transport boxes.
But compared to the plastic waste stream, these projects are tiny: Of the 22 million tons of plastic released into the environment annually, the Dow and Exxon projects each reused about 1,000 tons — about one part of 22,000.
The amount the industry is investing in advanced recycling — $8.7 billion, according to ACC — is also matched by the $164 billion it is pouring into the pipeline for new factories producing virgin plastics in the U.S. alone put in the shadows.
In other words, the petrochemical industry has spent nearly 20 times as much on virgin plastics as it has on advanced recycling, which they say is critical to the industry — and which they say is the reason such new production does not need to be restricted.
A report by the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) found that of the 37 “chemical recycling” plants proposed since 2000, only three were still operating in 2020. The plastic stream is broken down into a chemical slurry under the heat provided by fossil fuels , which can be added to fuels or burned to generate energy.
As a ProPublica report shows, this can be massively carcinogenic: A Chevron boat fuel additive made from melted plastic was a million times more toxic than most new chemicals approved by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
EPA scientists found that anyone exposed to the fuel during their lifetime would develop cancer – six times more likely to develop lung cancer than lifelong smokers. The authority ultimately decided to allow the fuel anyway.
And then there are the climate costs. The energy needed to produce one kilogram of recycled polyethylene plastic from reused materials requires seven times as much energy as it takes to produce one kilogram of similar plastics from virgin fossil fuels, Taylor Uekert, a scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, told The Guardian.
Uekert and other researchers at the federal government’s National Renewable Energy Lab in Colorado found that the main technologies used to make most plastics into fuels – pyrolysis and gasification – were so polluting and energy-intensive that they could not reasonably be considered circular. According to the National Recycling Plan, the EPA no longer considers this recycling.
“They extract fossil fuels that take a short break as a piece of plastic – before being converted back into fossil fuel and burned, using fossil fuels to power the process,” GAIA’s Claire Arkin told The Hill.
Arkin described the push for chemical recycling and “circular economy” as a reason to avoid production restrictions, as akin to a “Pied Piper situation” and as part of the same 50-year evolution that “got us into the dire situation that required one. “Plastic agreements first and foremost.”
She added: “Any time and money spent on waste management may as well be thrown in the trash if it is not accompanied by reduction measures. Otherwise we will be cleaning up forever while the world drowns in plastic.”
At the Nairobi conference, plastics speakers argued that plastics – still made almost entirely from chemicals and energy from fossil fuels – are actually a climate solution.
“Plastic products have tremendous value and benefits – they are more affordable and versatile than alternatives and have fewer benefits [greenhouse gas] emissions profiles and require less water and raw materials for manufacturing,” the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM) wrote in a press release addressed to Nairobi.
The AFPM added that American companies were pushing for more recycling and the ability to use more recycled materials – but said bans or restrictions on plastic production would deter them.
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