I’m not perfect. For years, I’ve been calling plastics a pollution problem, not a climate problem.
After all, when we think of plastics, we think of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, plastic straws in turtles’ noses, or microplastics in literally everything. But by focusing on plastic pollution, I also ignored the very real climate problem that comes with plastic.
For so long, I’ve only thought about where plastics end up, wasting away for hundreds of years in an ocean or forest, a discarded reminder of humanity’s lasting polyethylene imprint. But globally, that’s not the case. Nearly 70% of the world’s plastic ends up in landfills or incinerated, and 22% becomes litter. Only 9% is recycled.
So, if nearly all plastic is buried, burned, or littered, at least some carbon or methane is emitted. But how much? And is it worth calling it a climate problem? That’s when I stumbled on this data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development:
In 2019, plastics generated 1.8 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions, or 3.4% of global emissions.
By 2060, these emissions are set to reach 4.5% of global emissions.
Most of this comes from producing and converting fossil fuels into plastic, accounting for 90% of plastic’s lifecycle emissions.
End-of-life emissions (incinerating, landfilling, and recycling) account for the remaining 10% of plastic’s lifecycle emissions.
Though I’ve always thought that burning fossil fuels is the problem, I ignored the extremely carbon-intensive process of making plastics. And that 1.8-billion-ton oversight isn’t simply a rounding error: If plastic production were a country, it would be the sixth-highest emitting country in the world, slotted between Russia and Japan.
So, yes, plastic is a climate problem. But how did I get duped into thinking it wasn’t?
For one, I think it’s easy for climate communicators to latch onto the simplest explanation for something.
Plastic pollutes the environment in a piling-up-in-river way, not in a carbon-emissions-in-atmosphere way. Right?
The former is easy to explain because you can see it; the latter requires more time and explanation (who has seen plastic being made?).
That tendency to simplify has merits: For climate communication to be effective, we need simple, accessible messaging. And so we paint with a broad brush, and along the way, we unintentionally muddle the truth — as I have with plastics for the last several years.
But there’s also a more damning explanation: I didn’t know plastic was a climate problem because Big Oil didn’t want me to know plastic was a climate problem.
A new report by the Center for Climate Integrity offers some context:
The report finds that for 50 years, Big Oil and the plastics industry used fraudulent marketing and public education campaigns to promote recycling as a solution to plastic pollution — even though they knew that plastic recycling is not technically or economically viable at scale.
Put another way, by framing pollution as something to be solved by you or me (e.g., through recycling), Big Oil “empowered” us, while distracting us from questioning why there’s so much plastic in the first place.
And that framing — which focused on cleaning up physical pollution, not climate pollution — also distracted me from ever seeing plastic as a climate problem. Add plastics to the long list of examples of greenwashing, or when companies label a false solution as green to distract us from the real problem.
I’ll end with a short story from my first month living in Washington, D.C. It was 2019, and I was covering a youth-led climate protest outside the Plastic Industry Association’s downtown headquarters on K St.:
A dozen or so teenagers lined the sidewalk with posters and megaphones, bashing single-use plastic and pollution.
They had hardly started, when a woman who worked in the building came out and started yelling.
For about 10 minutes, she lambasted these children, shouting over them about how plastic saves lives.
I know I shouldn’t put too much stock in anecdotal evidence, but having just moved to D.C., it left a mark. And it got me thinking: If plastic lobbyists will yell at kids, then they won’t hesitate to invest in more nefarious, Planet-harming forms of disinformation.
I fell for it this time, but you can learn from my mistake.