We Can’t Ignore Plastic’s Climate Footprint Any Longer

It’s summer again in the Northern Hemisphere and with it comes the seasonal dread that grows worse each year. Dread of weather so severe it might make us sick or even kill us, in addition to seriously hampering life as we’ve known it. The planet logged a new hottest day on record this July 4, and as scores of residents in the Northeast and Midwest are finding out, wildfire smoke is another climate change-related factor to contend with, and sometimes the two things happen all at once. Extreme heat isn’t just uncomfortable and dangerous, it’s also extremely expensive for societies as heat-related illnesses climb with the mercury bulb.

This all comes at us as we are trying to collectively get a grip on what we’ve wrought and bring our global emissions down. Yet as we create policies and incentives to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, we have a plastic-shaped hole in our vision. The enormous cost to our climate from petrochemical plastics production is beginning to turn heads, but the conversation is still nascent at a time when we should be leaps and bounds ahead in reigning in this sector’s enormous emissions.

We run the risk of working at cross-purposes by spending copious time and money making greenhouse gas reductions in some sectors, while ignoring the fact that the oil and gas industry is ramping up the production of petrochemical plastics.

In North America the making of PET plastics results in greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to running two million cars for a year.

The entirety of plastic pollution includes the toxic air and water pollution at sites of extraction and manufacture, the risk of exposure by toxic chemicals from the end product, the climate pollution of the manufacturing process, and plastic waste. Take for example the seemingly benign plastic beverage bottle made of a type of plastic called PET. In North America the making of PET plastics results in greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to running two million cars for a year. And that’s just one type of plastic, the sixth largest by production volume. Once we add it all up and take into account the explosive growth projected for the plastics sector, it becomes clear that plastic is undermining our climate ambitions.

The severe impacts from climate change are and will be felt by all, yet those impacts are not evenly spread. Unjust systems in place ensure that communities who are already burdened with insecurity will bear the brunt of the climate crisis. In a cruel irony, this includes the communities most affected by plastic manufacturing pollution, the majority of them Black and low-income communities, most of them in the Southeast and Gulf Coast.

While multinational fast moving consumer goods corporations are busy sponsoring beach clean ups, touting the recycled content of their plastic packaging, and setting climate plans to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, many of them are missing their own targets as their plastics use balloons. Plastic is a carbon bomb and we risk crashing our civilization if we fail to see it for what it is. Petrochemical plastic production must be cut 75% by 2050 in order to keep global warming below 1.5℃. Those reductions should start with the most unnecessary plastics, much of which were not on the market until recently. If we could live without all this needless plastic in the recent past, we can do it now.