University of New Mexico researchers tested the testicles of 47 dogs and 23 dudes earlier this year and every single pair contained microplastics.
The finding wasn’t too surprising since microplastics have also turned up in hearts, lungs, blood and the uteruses of women who’ve suffered multiple miscarriages. We appear to be evolving toward a worldwide BodyWorlds exhibit if a globally declining fertility rate doesn’t stop us first.
ExxonMobil is perhaps the most to blame as the leading producer of single-use plastic waste, according to the Plastic Waste Makers Index. It’s one of just 20 companies responsible for more than half of this garbage globally, according to the report.
The petroleum giant has known for decades that its plastics can’t really be recycled, and it has gone to great lengths to cover up this technical and economic reality, according to a lawsuit filed by the state of California last week.
Everyone paying extra for recycling services, and feeling good about their contributions to save the planet, is simply getting ripped off.
The truth is that only about 5% of plastics are actually recycled. The rest goes just about everywhere, including our nuts.
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Hitting the bottle
I worked at the Houston Chronicle with a copy editor who was upset after concluding that the newspaper wasn’t properly recycling.
At the end of each shift, he’d gather up as many plastic bottles as he could find in the newsroom and eventually take them to a recycling center.
He also spent some of his days off rescuing plastic bottles from public garbage cans. He told me someone once mistook him for a homeless man and offered him money. He thought this was amusing since he was really just a friendly neighborhood recycling enthusiast doing his part for the community.
I warned that these feel-good efforts were futile. He thought I was cynical, but I’d read that most of our plastic refuse had been shipped to China in compacted bundles where it languished for years. Then China eventually got wise and stopped accepting our waste in 2017.
Now our used plastic goes to some of the world’s poorest countries, including Bangladesh, Laos, Ethiopia and Senegal, where it is poorly managed and spills into rivers and oceans.
Some of it is burned as fuel and goes up in smoke, or it stays piled up right here in the U.S., only to be broken down into microplastic particles that increasingly find their way into our bodies.
What microplastics will do to us is largely unknown, but several studies link them to metabolic disorders, endocrine disruption, insulin resistance, DNA damage, neurotoxicity, lung inflammation, and dwindling reproductive capability.
The way it’s going, human evolution charts may one day look like this: Homo erectus > Homo sapien > Homo plasticaneous.
Recycling theater
In 2022, ExxonMobil formed the Houston Recycling Collaboration with the city, LyondellBasell, Cyclyx International and FCC Environmental Services.
It promised to “collect all plastic—no matter the type—from water bottles and bubble wrap to dry cleaner bags and takeout containers.” The waste was said to be headed for ExxonMobil’s Baytown, Texas, “advanced recycling” plant.
Last year, an environmental group called The Last Beach Cleanup slipped Apple Airtags into the program’s recycling bins and showed that the garbage merely ended up in an open-air dump.
ExxonMobil responded to the group’s report with more boasts about its “advanced recycling” being a “proven” solution.
The lawsuit that California filed last week called the program nothing more than a “public relations stunt.” From the state’s complaint:
“ExxonMobil relies on the same public deception playbook: boasting about the technical and economic viability of ‘advanced recycling,’ announcing steps towards establishing recycling ventures, then ultimately failing to recycle any substantial percentage of the plastic waste generated by ExxonMobil itself, let alone the plastics industry. However, there is no pathway through which ‘advanced recycling’ can become technically or economically viable.”
Taking out the trash
You know that recycling symbol with the chasing arrows? That’s kind of how this dispute is going. ExxonMobil in turn blames California for having a shoddy recycling program.
“They failed to act, and now they seek to blame others,” the company said in an emailed statement to media. “Instead of suing us, they could have worked with us to fix the problem and keep plastic out of landfills."
ExxonMobil has long faced a barrage of legal actions from the federal government and several states over its alleged deceptions about climate change. So far, these actions have yet to be heard in court.
A complaint about plastics pollution just adds to the workload in its ever-busy legal department.
While paper, glass and metals can all be economically recycled, the evidence is piling up around us that plastics can not. The solution is to use less plastic and be more careful about where it goes, but we live in a plastic world, and no major polymer pusher is going to lead that effort.
Consumers, meanwhile, are happy to pay for someone to take their trash away. They like the idea of recycling, but they don’t really want to know where their garbage is going.
So by now, the world is brimming with plastics. They’re in the water, they’re in the air, they’re in the food supply.
And if it doesn’t bother people that plastics are getting into their reproductive gear, a growing global garbage dump won’t bother them either.
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Polymers/plastics are petroleum products (like nylon, rayon, etc). Why can't the same method be used that refines these substances out of crude oil in the first place? Seems that catalytic crackers - essentially giant cauldrons boiling crude oil and causing its various byproducts to separate - could be used in reverse? Then, also, there would never be a shortage of fossil fuels ... oh. Never mind.