The Movement to Ban Plastic Production
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Flames shoot out across an area bigger than a football field, and the glare can be seen in the sky for miles. The sound is like hundreds of thousands of gas burners in concert, and a terrible smell permeates the air.
“It kind of looks like the end of the world at times,” said Elida Castillo, program director of Chispa Texas, a Latinx grassroots organizing program. This apocalyptic scene from 2021 plays out regularly in San Patricio County in Texas at a plastics manufacturing plant operated by Gulf Coast Growth Ventures, a joint venture between ExxonMobil and Saudi Basic Industries Corporation.
The Growth Ventures plant is the largest ethane steam cracker facility in the world, making nurdles—small plastic pellets—that are the building blocks for plastic manufacturing. Gulf Coast Growth Ventures did not respond to a request for comment, but in a video the company posted online, these ground flares are compared to “a giant barbecue” used to burn off excess gas whenever nurdle production is started or stopped.
Castillo says the flares usually last about two days, during which time local community members have reported their windows shaking. Community members see a correlation between the plant and worsening health, too. “We have people who are dying from all types of cancer, cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, lung disease,” Castillo says. “The amount of kids with asthma in our communities … it’s always been high, but it just seems to increase every year.”
That’s in addition to the environmental impacts of plastic manufacturing. Castillo says most of the nurdles produced at the Texas plant are exported to China, where they are turned into plastic products. But in the past four years, more than 2 million nurdles have been collected in the Gulf of Mexico after having leaked from production facilities like Gulf Coast Growth Ventures.
Gulf Coast Growth Ventures alone consumes 12.5 millions of gallons of water a day to operate in the region, which has been under drought restrictions for the past two years. In March 2024, the region advanced into Stage 2 drought restrictions, which limit residential use of water sprinklers to one day every other week. Meanwhile, industries use up more than 50% of the water supply in Nueces and San Patricio Counties, according to the Texas Water Development Board.
The harmful intersection of environmental justice and plastics is keenly felt in communities of color like Castillo’s, where these industries are disproportionately concentrated. Around the world, frontline communities like this one are paying the price for plastics every step of the way: the production, manufacturing, purported recycling, pollution, and ultimate disposal of single-use plastics.
By the time that straw gets stuck in that turtle’s nose, it has left a wake of destruction in its path.”
More than 99% of plastic is produced from chemicals that come from fossil fuels. In addition to nurdles, San Patricio County is also a major exporter of liquified natural gas, which countries like China are now using to manufacture plastics. The war in Ukraine has allowed gas corporations to push demand for liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports, in the name of energy security, locking countries into an even longer term commitment to fossil fuels (and their emissions and pollution).
Negotiations are underway for a global plastics treaty, but its contents are still murky and hotly debated.
Marce Gutiérrez-Graudiņš is the founder of Azul, a grassroots organization that works with Latinx communities to protect coasts and oceans. She has participated in the plastics treaty talks and says that the sea turtle with a plastic straw stuck in its nose has become a symbol of the plastics crisis in the public’s mind, but the problem is much, much more pervasive.
“The fact is, by the time that straw gets stuck in that turtle’s nose, it has left a wake of destruction in its path,” she says. “It is very sad, but that is only the last part of it.”
Can Countries Agree on a Solution?
Nearly 500 miles east of San Patricio County, between Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and New Orleans, an industrial corridor along the lower Mississippi River has come to be known as “Cancer Alley” because of the concentration of petrochemical plants and refineries—about 150 industrial facilities—and the resulting outsized rates of health harms, including cancer.
“Those communities are 47 times more likely to have cancer. So for them, what they need is for us to produce less [plastic],” says Erin Simon, vice president of Plastic Waste and Business at the World Wildlife Fund and a delegate at the most recent round of global plastics treaty talks—the fourth of five rounds of treaty discussions, which took place in April 2024 in Ottawa, Canada.
The talks have been taking place since 2022, when the United Nations adopted a resolution to develop a legally binding instrument on plastic pollution. Confoundingly, a number of plastics industry representatives attended the talks in Ottawa and were afforded more access than journalists. By the end of the negotiations, there was no clarity on a crucial provision: reducing new plastic production. Plastic production continues to rise exponentially.
“When you walk into a bathroom and a tub is overflowing, you don’t start mopping. You have to turn off that tap,” says Jackie Nuñez, the founder of The Last Plastic Straw and advocacy and engagement manager for the Plastic Pollution Coalition.
Activists see any form of recycling without reducing production as deeply ineffective at addressing the underlying injustices of plastic. Chemical recycling, for example (which is being touted by some politicians in Washington), breaks down plastic waste and can potentially remake it to the same quality as virgin materials—an arguable material improvement over plastic’s normal down-cycling. But critics say the process is just a euphemism for burning plastic, creating more toxic output—along with all the negative health effects that accompany it.
Recycling can only be a small part of the solution—if at all—because it is premised on magical thinking.
Many advocates say there is no place in a circular economy for single-use plastic, decrying plastic recycling as the recirculation of toxic chemicals, which then accumulate and exacerbate the problems.
Recycling can only be a small part of the solution—if at all—because it is premised on magical thinking, according to Vivek Maru, founder and CEO of Namati, which aims to advance social and environmental justice through the law. “The U.S. has such an outsized influence on the global economy, and so I think it’s absolutely crucial for justice for communities here, and for communities abroad, that the U.S. take a bold stance and support a strong plastics treaty that is about reduction.”
“I want to see everyone on the same page”—whether that’s banning plastics, or putting fees on plastic bags, or otherwise regulating them out of the picture—“because then we can see a real shift in the market-side dynamics of those materials,” says Trey Sherard, the Anacostia Riverkeeper, who leads advocacy and outreach work to restore the Anacostia River in Washington D.C.
Maru and other environmental justice advocates, as well as environmental groups like Greenpeace, are calling for a strong treaty that will cut plastic production by at least 75% by 2040. That means going a lot further than chemical recycling, which Gutiérrez-Graudiņš says “is wishful thinking at best and predatory at worst.”
Global South Impacts
On the other end of the plastic process, countries in the Global South have long borne the brunt of plastic waste. The World Wildlife Fund found that low-income countries incur a total lifetime cost of plastic 10 times higher than that of rich countries, despite consuming almost three times less plastic per capita.
Another pressing question in the ongoing treaty negotiations is whether higher-consuming countries will take commensurate responsibility for the plastic they create, consume, and throw away. Despite accounting for only 15% of the world population, consumers in the Global North account for 40% of global plastic consumption.
“One of the things we hear a lot is that we have to get this [treaty] done very quickly,” says Gutiérrez-Graudiņš, who attended all four sessions of negotiations to date—in Uruguay, Kenya, France, and Canada. “And I understand that it is a crisis, but I think that we have to do it the right way. Are we actually listening to the voices that are the most impacted? We have to look at the whole context of—I don’t like to say life cycle—the death cycle of plastics. We don’t want to be here 30 years from now looking at what could have been.”
The last day of talks in Ottawa went until 3 a.m. Many hours of deliberation were spent in working groups on particular issues so the following plenary, where decisions can be made, started late and ran long.
“We were all very tired and very hungry. But, at the same time, there’s a lot of excitement,” says Gutiérrez-Graudiņš. “All options are on the table. We can still—and we should—do right not just by our current generations but our future generations.”
Gutiérrez-Graudiņš remains optimistic for a binding treaty that could put a cap on plastic production. At the same time, she is concerned that the process requires a consensus, not just a majority vote.
“We have 170 parties, and we can have one or two that are just very vocal and throw a wrench in the work of everyone else,” she says.
With the last round of treaty discussions scheduled to take place in Busan, Korea, in November, the UN aims to have an agreement in place by the end of 2024, but there is a long way to go. It remains up in the air whether the treaty will include provisions to drastically reduce plastic production and address calls for distributive justice within and among communities disproportionately impacted by plastic.
Maru is advocating for a just transition, including a 75% reduction in plastic production that involves countries most burdened by plastic waste.
“There could be a real flourishing of industries that are more harmonious, more sustainable, to rise up and take the place of this toxic disposable industry that is poisoning all of us,” Maru says, pointing to the examples of raffia bags and gourds informed by his work in Sierra Leone.
Gutiérrez-Graudiņš continues to work toward solutions to the plastic problem in her community, including by advocating for a reusable bag initiative. She recounts the mock concern, the “condescension and paternalism” she and her fellow activists faced as lobbyists and pollsters told her that “people are too poor to care.” But these are the same people most affected by plastics, and they know the stakes are high.
Back in San Patricio County, Elida Castillo and her community are fighting for more of a commitment to environmental justice. She said she is fighting against decades of misinformation and manipulation from the oil and gas industry, and now the petrochemical industry.
And the pushback is becoming more sophisticated everywhere, says Gutiérrez-Graudiņš. “In our everyday lives, we need to question things. Why are they speaking? What are they profiting? Where is this coming from? From me to you to everything we see, we have to become very critical and well-versed citizens and people.”
The imperative of persisting through pushback to make solutions happen is universal. That’s true for everyone, not just those in communities feeling the harshest effects of these plastic injustices. “Just because we have these facilities where we live doesn’t mean your voice can’t also help us,” Castillo says. “What is happening where we live is impacting the world.”
CORRECTION: This article was updated at 4:06 p.m. PT on July 23, 2024, to clarify that Gutiérrez-Graudiņš has attended all four treaty talks, not just two. Read our corrections policy here.
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Khadija Ahmed
is a junior at Northwestern University studying journalism and environmental sciences with a passion for environmental justice. She is currently an apprentice with the Investigative Project on Race and Equity. She reported on environmental policy during an academic quarter in Washington, D.C., and has reported for the Medill Investigative Lab in Chicago, where her work was published in MindSite News and The Concord Monitor. In summer 2023, she completed an environmental justice internship where she focused on hyperlocal air quality monitoring and government accountability.
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