The idea of “Plastic-Free July” may not seem at first to measure up to matters at hand, with COVID-19 continuing to unfold and with our nation at a pivotal point in addressing racial injustice. But on closer examination, curbing plastic production is an intrinsic part of achieving social justice, and it’s achievable, even in the context of a pandemic. It will likely take longer to break free from plastic than it will to develop a vaccine for COVID-19, but we have no time to waste.
This is a crisis that has been in the making for decades. It’s not about necessary medical uses of plastic. It is primarily about the 40% of all plastic that is made for packaging and disposable food and drink containers — all designed to be used once. Engineering that relies on a material made to last forever to create millions of products that are meant to be tossed after a single use is wasteful, frivolous and backward. Recycling can barely address a tenth of all plastic waste. And when you consider that this single-use plastic is destroying natural environments and threatening communities — not just in impoverished U.S. neighborhoods, but also in developing countries that are not equipped to deal with it — it’s more than wasteful. It’s unethical. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
Plastic use is skyrocketing. It has already become so ubiquitous that it has been found in the ocean’s deepest depths, Arctic ice, our rainfall and even air in the world’s most remote places. It’s entangling and choking endangered sea turtles around the world, and as much as 80 pounds of plastic has been found in a single whale. Humans aren’t spared plastic consumption either — it’s made its way into our food, water and air, and scientists are still learning about how this may be affecting human health. It's safe to say this will only get worse as plastic production quadruples between 2014 and 2050.
It’s important to understand why plastic production is growing. Plastic is another use for a raw material that is controlled by powerful corporate interests, concerned about continuing to grow their bottom lines even at the expense of the oceans, the environment and us. That raw material is petroleum, and new uses for it are constantly being sought.
But petroleum is a commodity that we should be phasing out as we shift our energy paradigm toward clean, renewable energy, an absolute must to address climate change. And it should be noted — especially in light of recent, long overdue concerns about social justice — that this system of using petroleum, whether for plastic or otherwise, drives climate change, which places a disproportionate burden on poor communities, many of them of color. This is another reason why the need to address both plastic pollution and climate is a moral imperative.
Louisiana is a notorious example of this. For decades, industry has been establishing petrochemical plants along an 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River — a stretch consisting primarily of African-American and low-income neighborhoods — dubbed the “petrochemical corridor.” By the late 1980s, it had earned an even worse moniker, “Cancer Alley,” after residents noticed unusually high numbers of cancer cases within their communities. Now the world’s largest-ever plastic plant is being built along this same strip and is expected to release 800 tons of toxic pollutants into the air every year.
We can’t end any of these problems this July. But we can begin to recognize that unnecessary plastic — single-use, non-medical plastic — is not essential. There are alternatives, and we have the ingenuity to design systems that alleviate the need for this. We have a responsibility to protect both the planet and the minority communities being disproportionately impacted by the production of plastic. Let’s declare our independence from plastic this month and commit to break free from plastic increasingly more every month hereafter.
Jacqueline Savitz is the chief policy officer at Oceana, the largest international organization dedicated solely to ocean conservation.