This partial transcript was computer-generated. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.
Alexis Madrigal: Welcome to Forum. I’m Alexis Madrigal. When you get a hold of the basic premise of Beth Gardiner’s book, Plastic Ink, it may transform how you see the products you buy, the way you use them, and how you discard them. Her book points out a truth that’s so big it was hiding in plain sight. Oil companies know that the world — slowly or quickly — will stop burning fossil fuels to power cars and homes because of climate change. But they have no intention of not making profits from whatever they can pump out of the ground. So what’s their future plan? Got one word for you: plastics.
For all that we consumers have been sold recycling as a solution to plastic waste, for all that many of us have tried to reduce the amount of plastic in our lives for environmental and/or health reasons, the oil and chemical and plastics companies have been working in the exact opposite direction, embedding plastic in every single product they can — and the packaging for that product too. Beth Gardiner joins us this morning to talk about her book. Welcome to Forum.
Beth Gardiner: Hi, Alexis. Thanks so much for having me.
Alexis Madrigal: So why don’t we just talk about the core argument of your book and how you kind of put it together from, you know, the documents that oil companies themselves have produced about what they see in their futures?
Beth Gardiner: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, I think the big picture here is that, you know, I have always been the person — and I’m sure so many of your listeners are that person too — who’s kind of carrying my canvas bags to the grocery store. Every time I go, I feel bad if I forget them. I’m toting around my water bottle with me. You know, I don’t want to buy a plastic water bottle.
And I saw this article — it was in The Guardian, like, seven or eight years ago — and the headline just knocked me over. It was about the plastic industry, the petrochemical industry, which is really a subsidiary and offshoot of the oil and gas industry, fossil fuels — who we’re sort of accustomed to thinking of as villains, right, in the climate sense, but not so much in the area of plastic. I read the article. It was about how plastic producers were pouring billions of dollars into plans to increase plastic production in the years to come. The particular article was to do with fracking. There’s a big connection between fracking and plastic production, which we can talk about later.
But I think the thing that really hit me — and it was just like a gut punch to read this article — was, like, here I am so focused on my own personal use of plastic, trying to use less, feeling bad every time I throw more plastic out. I know I am one of so many people who feel that way. And it just kind of hit me that, well, I’m an environmental journalist — why have I never actually thought about where plastic is coming from?
I think so much of the way that this issue — the plastic and plastic pollution issue, which is something that people are very concerned about, it’s so tangible in our lives — so much of the way that it gets covered, and the way that I think we often think about it, focuses either on where plastic ends up — you know, these terrible pictures we’ve seen so many of, of beaches covered with plastic, turtles tangled up in nets or what have you — or on how we can personally use less of it. And so little of our focus, I think, is on where plastic comes from.
Alexis Madrigal: Right.
Beth Gardiner: You know, this industry — big oil — is ramping up to make more, not less, in the years to come. So I wanted to kind of shift the lens a little bit away from personal responsibility and towards a corporate lens.
Alexis Madrigal: I think it’s worth laying a little foundation for folks about what plastics — kind of plural — actually are, because it comes into play about both why oil companies are so interested, but also when we get into things about the life cycle of these products. I mean, plastic is not one thing. Right? It’s all these different combinations of hydrocarbons.
Beth Gardiner: Yes. Absolutely. And in some sense, that is the miracle of it. So, you know, that was sort of part of my astonishment too in writing this — that’s sort of the genesis of this book. Like, I’m an environmental journalist. I realized I don’t really know what plastic is, you know, before I started on this reporting. I certainly had a sense that it comes from oil and gas, but it didn’t really go much deeper than that. And I think in some sense, you know, we all know — right? — if you look at a cardboard box or a wooden table, you just get on some intuitive level —
Alexis Madrigal: You’re like, yeah, that’s, uh, walnut.
Beth Gardiner: That was a tree. That was a tree at some point. Right? But plastic — we look at it, and it almost feels like it kind of comes from nowhere. Of course, it doesn’t. So plastic is a petrochemical. Plastics are chemical products produced from derivatives or byproducts of oil and gas. So when you drill oil out of the ground, you put it into a refinery and you are taking off the products that we know as fuels — the gasoline, the diesel, the jet fuel, the ship fuel — and you’re left with a bunch of chemical substances at the end, maybe ten, fifteen, twenty percent of the total barrel. And these chemicals — a big one of them is called naphtha, it’s a building block for plastic — are sent to petrochemical facilities, which are gigantic industrial furnaces that heat these products at very high heat. It’s a multistage process. They’re then recombined into all different kinds of configurations. Other chemicals are added in, and you can give these plastics any kind of property. Right? They can be hard or soft or firm or foamy, like styrofoam, or filmy, like a plastic bag. They can be any color, extremely durable.
There’s a whole other set of chemical processes that make plastics out of not oil, but natural gas. This is where the link to US fracking comes in. So what I think is important to understand is that this industry — big oil and gas — is selling a chunk of what they drill as fuels, right, the gas and the diesel and the jet fuel. But there is another chunk, and therefore another revenue stream for the industry, which is becoming plastic.
Alexis Madrigal: And we probably won’t get into it here, but of course they have plans to take crude oil and make more of it into chemicals and less of it into fuel, as they’re sort of seeing where the world is going — not just the US, but China, Europe, other places — in terms of using fuels to power homes and cars and other things. You know, because plastics is so plural, so many different products, this is really complicated — at least for me to think about, and I think for many people in our listening audience — to think about what we do with these things when we’re done with them. Right?
Beth Gardiner: Yep.
Alexis Madrigal: Because we think we can recycle plastics. We’re kind of told — we’ve been sold this story over time, as you tell in the book, about recycling. But of course, if we have hundreds of different things, they can’t all go and be reused in all the same way, because they’re actually really fundamentally different.
Beth Gardiner: Yeah. Exactly. So I don’t want to say that recycling has no value here. But in some sense, I think it is a distraction from the bigger picture, which is that there is so much unnecessary plastic being foisted on us all the time. And the industry has understood, from the very beginning — from the earliest years of the modern era of plastics, which goes back to the post-World War Two period — that people are worried about this. As we were throwing more and more of our plastics in the trash as the years and decades went by, and the amount of single-use plastics and disposable items increased, the industry really could see that this was something that people were worried about. And they understood that worry to be a threat to their business model of selling more and more plastic year after year — because public concern about any issue always holds the potential to translate into political action and policy that might shrink the markets they’re able to sell into.
And the industry understood very clearly that recycling was a very, very powerful way of easing people’s worries. The writer Susan Freinkel, in her book about plastic ten or fifteen years ago, spoke to an industry lobbyist who used the phrase “guilt eraser” for recycling, and I think that is such a powerful term. It just sums up everything.
So, you know, when you talk about recycling — if you’re talking about aluminum cans or cardboard boxes or glass or paper — recycling is really valuable, and —
Alexis Madrigal: It’s a thing that happens. It’s a real thing.
Beth Gardiner: Exactly. I mean, it’s actually always better to use less, right? We need to be producing fewer cardboard boxes. Recycling still has an environmental footprint. But if you are recycling those materials, they are going around again and again and being reused, turned into new cans, boxes, whatever. It’s a lot more complicated when you are talking about plastics, and this gets back to your original question — which is that this is actually so many different materials.
So there are a couple of kinds of plastic that can be pretty effectively recycled. There’s PET plastic, which is like the drink bottles, the water bottles. And there’s another kind called HDPE, which tends to be like the milk containers. Those can be recycled somewhat effectively — though not as much as glass or aluminum. You sort of send it around the cycle a couple of times, the quality begins to degrade, and it pretty quickly ends up getting turned into, like, a plastic bench rather than a new bottle. So it’s not that it’s valueless, but it’s very hard to do it effectively, because as you said, there are so many different kinds of plastic.
In some sense, the bigger challenge is logistical and actually economic rather than technical. You know, technically, sure, you can recycle that water bottle a few times and use it again. But if you think about the volume of stuff that we throw out — and the industry has really encouraged people to think of all plastics as recyclable — so you’re putting that blueberry crate or that plastic film or the bag even into the recycling bin. These are actually chemically different substances, and they have to be separated. And, you know —
Alexis Madrigal: They actually decrease the value of the waste stream.
Beth Gardiner: Yes. And some products and packaging actually contain multiple kinds of plastic. It’s very hard to really do that in an effective way.
Alexis Madrigal: Yeah. We’re talking with Beth Gardiner, environmental journalist, about her latest book, Plastic Ink, which chronicles the rise of plastic production and why oil companies want to increase plastic output. She’s also the author of the book Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution. We want you to join the conversation. What are your questions and concerns about how the plastics industry works and the amount of plastic we consume? We’re also curious if you’ve found ways to escape disposability culture that you feel are making a substantial difference, at least in your own life. The number is 866-733-6786. forum@kqed.org. I’m Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned.
