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PLASTIC 2

4/18 age of trump

see pfoa pfas

SEE MICRO-PLASTICS 12 25

see formaldehyde

see asbestos

see greenwash exxon SLAPP climate lawsuits3 legal suppress ctr-suits

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NOTE EXXON FAIL GREENWASH

MMA

Maria Bartiromo omits MAHA calls for EPA Secretary Lee Zeldin’s resignation in interview on the agency’s action on forever chemicals

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Ilana Berger

Published 12/10/25

In a December 8 Fox Business segment, host Maria Bartiromo asked EPA Secretary Lee Zeldin about the agency's recent approval of a number of “forever chemical” pesticides but ignored a petition from major “Make America Healthy Again” influencers over the move, citing only concerns from “environmental advocates” that she said the EPA has fact-checked “as misinformation.”

Just a few days earlier, The New York Times reported on a petition spearheaded by MAHA influencers calling for President Donald Trump to oust Zeldin, but Bartiromo did not mention the petition or specify who is involved.

Since Zeldin’s appointment, the EPA has approved pesticides that contain several different pesticides that are classified by many as PFAS, or cancer-linked “forever chemicals,” a move that the petition authors say “has prioritized the interests of chemical corporations over the well-being of American families and children.”

Video

Citation

From the December 8, 2025, edition of Fox Business' Mornings with Maria

The petition represents a boiling point in the ongoing tensions between MAHA champion Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., members of the movement, and other parts of the Trump administration.

Bartiromo said during the segment, “Environmental advocates and critics are calling these forever chemicals” and warning of “long-term risks like reproductive issues and liver toxicity.” She added, “The EPA fact-checking that as misinformation. … What can you tell us?”

Not only did Bartiromo fail to mention the MAHA component of those “environmental advocates” — a broad public health effort that helped Trump win the election — but she also referred to a November 26 “fact check” on the EPA’s website claiming to debunk “false claims that agency recently approved ‘Forever Chemical’ Pesticides” with PFAS. However, the most widely accepted definition, from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which was developed by an international group of scientists, does classify these recently approved substances as PFAS. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, a similar definition is “already in use in 23 states.”

Zeldin defended the agency, saying, “It’s not forever chemicals. It’s actually better and safer than what it is replacing.” Zeldin continued, “There are some people, though, whenever they see something on the internet, they just take it at its word.”

Earlier in the interview, Bartiromo brought up Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, saying she’s “leading a charge with six other Democrat governors, urging the EPA to monitor and collect data on microplastics in drinking water by adding them to the unregulated contaminants list under the Safe Drinking Water Act.”

Again, she avoided mentioning MAHA, even though Kennedy has called attention to the issue, and a September strategy report from the “MAHA Commission to President Donald J. Trump” highlighted the need to evaluate “the risks and exposures of microplastics and synthetics, including in common products such as textiles.”

Zeldin dodged the question about microplastics, saying, “This isn’t a new issue,” and then praised an ExxonMobile refinery for “innovation with plastic recycling,” saying it’s “taking a plastic and they are getting it right down to its original raw chemical compound.”

Zeldin was describing chemical recycling, a process that experts say is not an effective way to reduce plastic pollution. The facility he praised, in Baytown, Texas, has faced strong opposition from Texas residents. Environmental groups also sued Exxon for repeated violations of federal air pollution limits at the facility, leading to a $14.25 million civil penalty.

“You’ve been doing a great job there running the EPA,” Bartiromo concluded.

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~ DAGEN M

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gmail icc 12 25

Plastic recycling has “largely failed” despite polluters’ claims otherwise, a new report from Greenpeace shows. The report adds to the growing evidence of petrochemical and oil companies’ deception around the viability of plastic recycling that the industry has used to avoid public scrutiny for fueling the plastic pollution crisis.

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2 25 ymail exxonknews

Nearly five years ago, the United States Department of Energy, or DOE, began an unusual partnership with the country’s largest lobbying group for the plastics industry.

In a memorandum of understanding with a plastics industry trade association called the American Chemistry Council, or ACC, the Energy Department pledged to “collaborate on the development of innovative plastics recycling technologies and strengthen the domestic plastics supply chain.”

According to a press release, the collaboration would involve research into “novel collection technologies” to keep plastics out of waterways, as well as new types of plastic that are “inherently designed for recycling.” But perhaps the most significant part of the agreement referred to research on so-called “advanced recycling” — a suite of technologies also known as “chemical recycling” that are favored by the ACC and other industry groups, and intensely scrutinized by environmental advocates.

Chemical recycling refers to processes that use high heat, pressure, or solvents to break plastics into their constituent building blocks, so they can — in theory — be turned into new plastic products again and again. This differs from conventional “mechanical” recycling, in which plastics are shredded or melted before being turned into new products. Under fire for the failure of conventional recycling to mitigate the plastic pollution crisis, the petrochemical industry has turned to chemical recycling, heavily promoting it in public communications and to state legislators despite difficulties getting it to work at a large scale. Environmental groups and many scientists say the technology will never work, and that it’s a diversion from calls to reduce the production of plastic, which is made out of oil and gas.

The agreement’s initial five-year term is scheduled to expire early this month, just days into President Trump’s second term.

According to Ross Eisenberg, vice president of the ACC’s plastics division, the agreement never amounted to much. “The onset of COVID-19 postponed discussions, and with the subsequent change in administration, no work was conducted” under the memorandum of understanding, Eisenberg said.

But public records indicate the Department of Energy has collaborated with the plastics industry to fund and promote chemical recycling research and projects in the years since the agreement was signed. Scientists and environmental advocates say that the department’s partnerships with the industry lack transparency and represent a conflict of interest. The ACC, whose members include dozens of petrochemical companies that stand to benefit from the rapidly increasing production of plastics, has continued to lobby the department — which has a responsibility to work on behalf of the public — every year since the memorandum was announced.

The ACC sought “to influence the policy agenda of the DOE and move it toward funding chemical recycling research and policy development as a priority over other issues,” said Lee Bell, a policy adviser for the nonprofit International Pollutants Elimination Network. “It is clearly not an appropriate relationship for an industry lobby group to have with a department charged with the expenditure of millions in public funds.”

The DOE’s chemical recycling initiatives are part of a long series of government attempts to deal with the overwhelming amount of plastic waste the country generates — and fails to recycle. As of 2019, the U.S. produced 44 million metric tons of plastic waste and recycled only 5 percent of it, according to the Energy Department. The rest was sent to landfills or incinerators, or wound up as litter in the environment. In a July 2024 report, the Biden administration said plastic pollution was “one of the most pressing and consequential environmental problems in the U.S. and around the globe.”

The Energy Department’s role in U.S. plastics strategy has mainly been to support research, much of it on recycling and the cleanup of existing plastic waste. In 2019, it launched a "Plastics Innovation Challenge” to “accelerate energy efficient technologies that reduce plastic waste in oceans and landfills.” A month later, the department held a workshop to discuss “Plastics for a Circular Economy” — including a review of the challenges and possibilities of chemical recycling. Workshop attendees included representatives of various members of the ACC, including ExxonMobil, Shell, and Dow — but no environmental organizations or citizen groups.

According to the ACC’s Eisenberg, after the Plastics Innovation Challenge was announced, “American Chemistry Council members spoke with DOE to explore ways to support the initiative from a technology perspective, leading to the development of a memorandum of understanding in February 2020.” The agency’s partnership with the ACC was described in a 2020 press release as an opportunity to “position the U.S. for global leadership in advanced recycling technologies, including plastic-to-energy conversion” — meaning the conversion of plastic waste back into fuel instead of new plastic products.

Daniel Simmons, then the DOE’s assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy, praised the industry and its products during the memo’s public signing. “What does energy efficiency and renewable energy have to do with plastics recycling? It’s one: because plastics are awesome,” he said at the time. “Obviously plastics can result in greater energy efficiency, food efficiency, a whole number of wonderful things. … The problem with plastics is not that they are bad, but because they are so good, and how do we make them better for the future?”

Environmental groups were immediately skeptical. Judith Enck, president of the nonprofit Beyond Plastics and a former regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency, said she had “never seen this before,” referring to a multi-year agreement between a government agency and what is essentially an “advocacy lobbying group.” More typically, she said, if the government is interested in supporting a particular type of research it can funnel money to state agencies or conduct independent research through its network of national laboratories.

Nearly a year after the agreement was announced, the memo had still not been posted publicly. In 2021, the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC, filed a public records request for the memo and other communications between the DOE, ACC, and any other outside parties relating to chemical recycling and the department’s “Plastics Innovation Challenge.” The request was filed under the Freedom of Information Act, which entitles the public to access any federal agency records unless they are specifically exempt from public view.

Daniel Rosenberg, director of federal toxics policy at the NRDC and the author of that request, said the group is still seeking answers about how the Department of Energy’s focus on chemical recycling came about — and the role industry players continue to have in shaping the department’s approach to managing plastic pollution.

“There’s no transparency on how DOE is developing their policies around plastic waste,” said Rosenberg. “They seem very much in line with the industry agenda that’s clearly formalized in the memorandum of understanding.”

It wasn’t until six months later that the DOE sent the NRDC the official memo — but not any related documents answering the group’s other questions. Last year, the NRDC sued the Energy Department for failing to respond to its requests and repeated outreach. “They’ve done a pretty good job over the last five years of keeping public scrutiny at bay,” said Rosenberg, who has since filed a second freedom of information request with the agency. “What DOE does on plastic, how they spend their research money, the solutions they’re promoting, all of which is consequential — we’re just trying to get to the bottom of how it all came about and how it’s continued to develop.”

The lawsuit is ongoing, but the DOE has agreed to process hundreds of documents per month regarding the original records request and deliver relevant documents to the NRDC. Though a January status report to the court shows the department has delivered more than 200 pages of documents to the NRDC since the lawsuit began, Rosenberg said he’s so far received a “small fraction” of the communications he’s sought. A public records request filed on behalf of ExxonKnews and Grist in October has not yet yielded any documents.

Even if the formal agreement between the DOE and the ACC never got off the ground, as the lobbying group claims, the Energy Department’s backing of chemical recycling research suggests that the agency has embraced the industry’s characterization of the plastic waste problem as an issue that can be solved through innovation. By January 2026, the department is set to have spent $10 million funding the “Chemical Upcycling of Waste Plastics,” a center for chemical recycling research and academic collaboration that includes 20 industrial partners, including ACC member companies and another plastic industry trade group that sits on the center’s “industrial advisory board.” The DOE’s latest “Strategies for Plastic Innovation” report calls for more research into chemical recycling, deeming the technologies “crucial to begin addressing the global plastic crisis.”

Last year, as part of an initiative by the Biden administration to “decarbonize energy-intensive industries,” the DOE awarded a grant of up to $375 million to a controversial chemical recycling project from the Eastman Chemical Company, an ACC member. Eastman has since asked the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to permit the release of an additional 114 tons of annual air pollution at its facility in Longview, Texas, where the new project is being built.

“These are extraordinary amounts that are going to high-priority serial violators of the Clean Air Act,” said Cynthia Palmer, senior analyst for petrochemicals at the nonprofit Moms Clean Air Force. At its Kingsport, Tennessee, petrochemical refinery, where Eastman’s other chemical recycling facility is housed, the EPA documented high-priority violations of the Clean Air Act every quarter of the past three years.

Working with the Energy Department was just one prong in the ACC’s campaign to legitimize chemical recycling. In the U.S., the group has also spent years lobbying state legislatures to reclassify chemical recycling as a manufacturing process, rather than waste disposal. Two dozen states have passed such reclassification bills, as of last year.

The ACC has also promoted the inclusion of chemical recycling in the United Nations’ global plastics treaty, which was scheduled to be completed last December but has been stalled by disagreements over its scope. Provisions for chemical recycling haven’t yet been incorporated into the agreement’s draft text, but experts say the compact between the ACC and the Energy Department was part of the industry’s attempt to change that by creating research to demonstrate that chemical recycling is environmentally sound.

Scientists have criticized some of the specific research conducted by the Energy Department’s national laboratories with ACC funding, like a life cycle analysis from the Argonne National Laboratory showing reduced carbon emissions from chemical recycling, compared to other waste management options. The ACC has cited this study in public communications arguing against plastic reduction.

In a 16-page rebuttal to the study shared with ExxonKnews and Grist, Bell, with IPEN, called out the study's use of "nonreproducible data based on 'discussions' with industry.”

Neil Tangri, research and policy director for the nonprofit Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, said the study built in “wildly unrealistic assumptions” about the possibility of substituting pyrolysis oil — a main output from the most popular chemical recycling method — for the current fossil fuel feedstock, naphtha. He also criticized the study for using confidential data that is “not transparent" and “not replicable”: “That is completely inimical to the way science works,” he said.

Palmer, of Moms Clean Air Force, added that such life-cycle analyses don’t take into account significant environmental and public health concerns caused by plastic production or chemical recycling, making them “highly misleading.”

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“National laboratories should not be aiding and abetting the deceptive practices of the petrochemical industry,” Tangri said.

In recent months, the ACC and several of its member companies were sued by state and local governments and individuals, arguing that the industry deliberately misled the public about the viability of mechanical and chemical recycling despite knowing it would never be able to manage the waste generated by growing plastic production.

Jeffrey Seay, a chemical engineering professor at the University of Kentucky, said the prospects for some sort of chemical recycling breakthrough — the kind industry groups imply is just around the corner — are slim. “I’d love to tell you I’ve seen that research, but I haven’t,” he said. “I think it’s something worthwhile to be looking at, but I’m just not of the opinion that there’s a technology on the horizon that’s going to allow us to consume plastic the way we have always consumed plastic.”

Seay added that, contrary to industry claims, he’s “not aware of a technology where you can just dump a bunch of mixed plastic in there and get clean polymers out on the other side. There’s a lot of research going on in this area … but to commercialize that, you’d be decades away.”

A 2023 peer-reviewed study conducted by DOE also acknowledged that three chemical recycling technologies — glycolysis, hydrolysis, and methanolysis — are “an order of magnitude” more polluting and energy-intensive than conventional recycling.

The Biden administration Energy Department declined to comment on the status of its memorandum of understanding with the ACC, citing “the upcoming administration transition.” The agency did not respond to additional requests for comment after Trump’s inauguration.

As a newer, bolder Trump administration returns to office with fracking executive Chris Wright set to helm the DOE, Enck and other advocates are skeptical — but still hoping — that the Trump DOE will stop propping up the plastic industry altogether.

“If the DOE was really interested in energy savings, they should be putting resources into waste reduction, refill, and reuse,” said Enck, of Beyond Plastics.

Rosenberg, of the NRDC, expressed concerns that the Trump administration could continue working with the industry behind the scenes. Either way, he said, the DOE owes Americans clarity about the nature of its work on chemical recycling.

“Whether it’s the Trump administration or the Biden administration, I don’t really care — the public should have transparency on what this department is doing on this issue, which has such serious implications for pollution and health and environment,” he said. “We’ll just keep pursuing it.”

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Sierra Club’s Response to ExxonMobil’s Countersuit

January 7, 2025

Contact

Jonathon Berman, jonathon.berman@sierraclub.org

Beaumont, Texas – On Monday, ExxonMobil filed a countersuit against the Sierra Club, California Attorney General Robert Bonta, and others in the Eastern District of Texas. This comes in response to a lawsuit the groups filed in September against the company, which is the world’s largest producer of single-use plastic polymers. The original complaint, which was filed in San Francisco County Superior Court, alleges violations of California nuisance law and California unfair competition law and alleges ExxonMobil concealed the harms caused by plastics.

In response, Sierra Club spokesperson Jonathon Berman issued the following statement:

“Exxon is clearly confused about the difference between defamation and accountability. This lawsuit is a shameless attempt at intimidation by a multibillion dollar polluter corporation that covered up its climate change denial for decades. The Sierra Club will not sit back as ExxonMobil attempts to use their billions to bully those standing up for the health of working families.”

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[### Profit Over Planet: Exxon Sued for Hiding the Truth About ...

Sierra Club

https://www.sierraclub.org › press-releases › 2024/09 › p...](https://www.sierraclub.org/press-releases/2024/09/profit-over-planet-exxon-sued-hiding-truth-about-plastic-harms)

Sep 23, 2024 — ... Sierra Club, Surfrider Foundation, Heal the Bay, and San Francisco Baykeeper, filed a lawsuit against ExxonMobil (“Exxon”), the world's ...

Sierra Club's Response to ExxonMobil's Countersuit

Sierra Club

https://www.sierraclub.org › press-releases › 2025/01 › si...](https://www.sierraclub.org/press-releases/2025/01/sierra-club-s-response-exxonmobil-s-countersuit)

Jan 7, 2025 — The Sierra Club will not sit back as ExxonMobil attempts to use their billions to bully those standing up for the health of working families.”.

[### ExxonMobil Lied About Plastics Recycling, Lawsuits Claim

Sierra Club

https://www.sierraclub.org › sierra › exxonmobil-lied-ab...](https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/exxonmobil-lied-about-plastics-recycling-lawsuits-california-sierra-club-claim)

Sep 24, 2024 — The State of California and environmental groups including the Sierra Club say the petrochemical giant always knew recycling wouldn't work.

[### Sierra Club v. ExxonMobil Corp.

Climate Change Litigation Databases

https://climatecasechart.com › Case Bundles](https://climatecasechart.com/case/sierra-club-v-exxon-mobil-corp/)

Environmental organizations filed a complaint against Exxon Mobil Corporation asserting nuisance and violation of California's Unfair Competition Law in ...

[### Surfrider, the Sierra Club, Heal the Bay, and San Francisco ...

Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy, LLP

https://www.cpmlegal.com › news-Surfrider-the-Sierra-...](https://www.cpmlegal.com/news-Surfrider-the-Sierra-Club-Heal-the-Bay-and-San-Francisco-Baykeeper-Sue-Exxon-for-Hiding-the-Truth-About-Plastic-Harms)

Sep 23, 2024 — Surfrider, the Sierra Club, Heal the Bay, and San Francisco Baykeeper Sue Exxon for Hiding the Truth About Plastic Harms.

[### Environment Texas, Sierra Club v. ExxonMobil

National Environmental Law Center

https://www.nelc.org › Cases](https://www.nelc.org/cases/environment-texas-sierra-club-v-exxonmobil/)

Following trial and appeal, ExxonMobil ordered to pay record $19.95 million civil penalty; penalty provisionally reduced to $14.25 million, pending final ...

[### CalPERS must hold ExxonMobil accountable

Sierra Club

https://www.sierraclub.org › articles › 2024/03 › calpers-...](https://www.sierraclub.org/articles/2024/03/calpers-must-hold-exxonmobil-accountable)

Mar 22, 2024 — Investors who want to preserve their shareholder rights must hold the oil major accountable. And we need CalPERS to lead the way.

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1 15

e xxon resorts to “intimidation” in legal battle over plastics recycling

The oil giant is accusing its opponents of engaging in a “deliberate smear campaign” at the cost of Exxon’s reputation and business prospects.

Months after California Attorney General Rob Bonta and a group of nonprofits separately sued ExxonMobil for a “decades-long campaign of deception” about the viability of plastic recycling, Exxon is suing them back, accusing Bonta and the nonprofits of defaming the oil giant and intentionally harming its efforts to develop new “advanced” recycling technologies.

Bonta’s lawsuit argues that despite knowing that recycling couldn’t effectively handle significant amounts of plastic waste, Exxon marketed it to the public to assuage environmental concerns and delay limits on plastic production. Now that it’s clear traditional recycling methods are insufficient, California’s lawsuit says, Exxon is once again deliberately misleading the public to believe that “advanced” or chemical recycling technologies are a safe and effective solution to plastic waste. A group of environmental nonprofits — including Sierra Club, Surfrider, Heal the Bay, and Baykeeper — filed a similar lawsuit against Exxon on the same day in September.

Exxon’s new complaint says those cases and accompanying public statements amount to a conspiracy between Bonta, advocates, and “foreign interests” to falsely “attack and defame ExxonMobil’s integrity and reputation.” But others say Exxon’s case is a textbook SLAPP — or strategic lawsuit against public participation — intended to ensnare its opponents in lengthy legal battles and prevent them from speaking out.

“This is a classic lawfare and SLAPP suit,” said Pat Parenteau, an environmental law professor and senior fellow at Vermont Law School. “Intimidation is the whole point of lawsuits like this.”

Exxon’s chemical recycling claims have come under sharp scrutiny in recent years, with government and nonprofit reports and Exxon’s own internal documents obtained by California’s attorney general revealing a widening gap between the company’s promotion of chemical recycling and the technology’s capacity to work as promised, even in the future. Those reports also documented the harm caused by the process of chemical recycling, which involves releasing toxic and carcinogenic pollutants, in close proximity to people — and how these facilities have been most often sited in low-income communities and communities of color.

According to Exxon’s complaint, such criticism — and the legal actions that followed — have derailed Exxon’s existing and prospective business deals, and “further threaten to derail advanced recycling by preventing it from achieving the scale necessary to ensure effective and efficient recycling.” But advocates say that’s a diversion from the fact that chemical recycling doesn’t work to significantly reduce plastic waste, and would only perpetuate the increased production of plastic.

"There is consistent data showing that plastics recycling does not achieve a high level of recycling and that chemical recycling is not a real solution to the growing problem of plastic waste,” said Judith Enck, president of U.S. nonprofit Beyond Plastics and former EPA regional administrator. “It would be so much more productive if ExxonMobil simply told the truth and refrained from attempting to intimidate elected officials and advocates who are working to actually solve the problem."

In the complaint against Bonta, Exxon reports having recycled 70 million pounds of plastic waste to date — just 7% total of its goal of recycling one billion pounds per year via chemical recycling by year-end 2026, which appeared on its website as recently as October 31, 2024. Their website now says that goal will be reached by 2027.

A history of retaliation

The new lawsuit was filed Monday in a federal court in Texas, where Exxon’s chemical recycling operations are focused and where the company says defendants’ “disparaging and defamatory conduct” was targeted. According to law professor Parenteau, the venue was more likely seen as a friendlier court than where the original cases were filed, as “California has one of the strongest anti-SLAPP laws in the country to protect constitutional rights of free speech and access to justice.”

It isn’t the first time that Exxon has dragged its critics into a Texas court. In 2016, the company asked a federal court in Dallas to block investigations by New York and Massachusetts attorneys general into whether Exxon deceived investors and the public about climate change. That case was eventually transferred to New York, where it was dismissed.

After California municipalities sued Exxon for climate deception in 2017, the company requested that a Texas state court allow pre-suit depositions of municipal officials and lawyers involved in the case to determine whether they were aiming “to suppress the Texas energy sector’s Texas-based speech.” Their request was ultimately denied.

Since California brought its plastics suit against Exxon, the oil giant has been named in two separate class-action suits that focus on plastic recycling deception, one filed by Ford County, Kansas, and the other by four individuals in a federal court in Missouri. By Exxon’s own admission, the oil giant “is likely to become involved in additional legal matters bringing similar allegations against ExxonMobil in the near future.” To protect the company from facing “a multiplicity of suits in various forums throughout the country,” Exxon is asking the Texas court to issue a declaratory judgement making clear that the company has a legal right to “engage in and promote advanced recycling.”

That may be an unusual request. “Courts do not normally issue that kind of blanket declaration on an emerging technology with all kinds of technical, economic and environmental considerations that are better left to the legislative and executive branches,” said Parenteau.

The case could be part of a growing trend — by Exxon and other fossil fuel majors including Chevron, Italian oil giant Eni, and oil pipeline company Energy Transfer — to use SLAPPs, and defamation claims in particular, as a way to silence opposition and dodge accountability.

Rebecca Tushnet, a First Amendment professor at Harvard Law School, said Exxon’s lawsuit against Bonta and advocates should be considered a SLAPP. “Under current doctrine, the First Amendment strongly protects the speech at issue,” she said. “Even though we're in a period of rapid constitutional change, speech in connection with a lawsuit is really at the core of First Amendment protection, and this is pretty appalling (though perhaps not surprising).”

A matter of public concern

In its complaint, Exxon argues that chemical recycling is in fact “part of the solution to plastic waste,” and that the company “has not engaged in a decades-long secret mission to brainwash or deceive the public.” But the complaint hinges on another central point: that criticisms about chemical recycling have gotten in the way of Exxon’s business deals.

“As a result of Defendants’ false statements, major international brands have refused to jointly promote advanced recycling with ExxonMobil,” the complaint reads. “Potential customers have expressed concern and hesitancy to work with ExxonMobil and explicitly referenced statements by Bonta and the US Proxies as the cause of that concern. And, a number of companies have backed out of proposed transactions with ExxonMobil for advanced recycling.”

Exxon claims Attorney General Bonta worked in concert with U.S. nonprofits and Australian-based Intergenerational Environmental Justice Fund (IEJF) — a charity initiative of nonprofit group Minderoo, funded by Australian mining company Fortescue, a competitor of Exxon’s in the “low carbon solution” sector — to falsely malign Exxon’s chemical recycling business and file their lawsuits as “proxies.” Exxon also accuses IEJF of hiring the nonprofits’ law firm, Cotchett, Pitre, & McCarthy, LLP, to “recruit and enlist willing plaintiffs to stand in for the foreign interests’ agenda.” Bonta, IEJF, Minderoo, Fortescue, and the law firm have refuted Exxon’s descriptions of their connections and work

The company is now asking for an injunction requiring the named parties to “take down and retract defamatory statements and to cease interfering with existing and prospective business relationships.”

Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, suggested that the case could face challenges for its attempts to rein in public debate — even in Texas. “The anti-SLAPP laws adopted by almost every state, including Texas, are designed to protect citizens from defamation and similar claims over matters of public concern,” he said. “The viability of plastics recycling is certainly a matter of public concern.”

12 24 exxonknews

...

in October.}:

ExxonMobil went on the offensive.Executives at Exxon lashed out as the oil giant faced mounting pushback from the public, policymakers, shareholders, and governments.

New communities sued Big Oil and others took new fossil fuel defendants to court.More governments sued Exxon and other oil companies for climate damages and fraud.

Members of Congress investigated Big Oil and exposed new evidence.

Local lawmakers pushed new legislation aimed at polluters. U.S. governments tested ways to take on Big Oil at the local level.

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mma 4 24

a recent incident in which Meta blocked links to an article critical of the company’s ad policies highlighted climate advocates’ concerns that they are unfairly impacted by these policies compared to Big Polluters.

Meta has maintained that the links were flagged due to a system error and has since restored them. However, the incident appears to be part of a larger pattern in which Meta requires climate groups to adhere to its strict ad guidelines while allowing some fossil fuel-linked companies to circumvent them.

In 2022, Meta began prohibiting users from targeting audiences with specific interests when running ads about social issues. “We used to be able to find people who are interested in environmental protection and environmentalism—those [options] have evaporated,” Nathaniel Baker, a digital director at an ad agency representing climate groups, told Climate Nexus in 2022. Meta, accessed [4/10/24; PBS, 3/14/22]

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recycle puffery greenwash?

https://theintercept.com/2022/04/26/plastic-recycling-bottled-water-poland-spring/

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https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/california-ag-subpoenas-exxon-details-role-plastic-waste-crisis-**2022-04-28/**

no lnx

wASHINGTON, April 28 (Reuters) - California's attorney general announced on Thursday he issued a subpoena to ExxonMobil (XOM.N) for information on its role in causing the global plastic waste crisis.

The subpoena is part of a broader investigation led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta into the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries' role in "causing and exacerbating the global plastics pollution crisis."

"For more than half a century, the plastics industry has engaged in an aggressive campaign to deceive the public, perpetuating a myth that recycling can solve the plastics crisis. The truth is: The vast majority of plastic cannot be recycled," Bonta said in a statement.

The investigation will resemble ones launched by several state attorneys general into the role that fossil fuel companies played in causing and exacerbating climate change, which focused on what the industry knew decades ago and how companies misled the public about their role.

In this investigation, the attorney general will focus on the "half-century campaign of deception and the ongoing harm caused to the State of California" by companies that produce plastics, a petroleum-based product, and how they perpetuate "myths around recycling". Exxon is the first company to receive a subpoena, but officials said they will also target other companies in the industry.

A spokesperson for Exxon was not immediately available to comment.

Matthew Kastner, a spokesperson for the American Chemistry Council, which represents the plastics and petrochemical industry, said in response to the investigation that "America’s plastic makers are committed to a more sustainable future and have proposed comprehensive and bold actions at the state, federal, and international levels."

More than 90% of plastic waste globally ends up in landfills or is incinerated, according to a landmark study in Science Advances. The U.S. recycling rate has never gone higher than 9%, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

There is growing momentum to tamp down plastic production as a way to address plastic waste. The UN in February outlined the blueprint of a future treaty that could seek restrictions on production. read more

Bonta said that the petrochemical industry has been aware for decades that recycling was infeasible at scale, even as plastic production skyrocketed and has pushed back against state, local and national efforts to issue plastic bans and other measures.

The industry has promoted "advanced recycling" - a method of burning plastic to convert it into fuel or other products - as a solution to the plastic waste crisis but a Reuters investigation showed that the leading projects have had little to no success.

Carroll Muffett, president of the Center for International Environmental Law, said the investigation is significant.

"Companies like Exxon have been instrumental in persuading the public we can recycle our way out of the plastic crisis even when evidence suggestions they know it is not the case," he said, adding that states bear the brunt of costs associated with plastic waste cleanup.

California has passed several bills in the last few years aimed at curbing plastic waste and attempting to crack down on deceptive recycling claims.

Last December, the California Statewide Commission on Recycling Markets and Curbside Recycling asked Bonta to crack down on what it claims is illegal labeling that is undermining the state’s efforts to tackle plastic pollution. read more

Reporting by Valerie Volcovici Editing by Diane Craft

aha recall that someone desmog? said plastic is the next big revenue stream for frack/fossil fuels, so must be defended and blk ppl get cancer collateral damage?

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/28022022/biden-plastics-treaty/

...As one of the world’s leading producers of plastics and plastic waste, the United States is expected to play a key role in the negotiations.

Jane Patton, the Louisiana-based campaign manager for the Center for International Environmental Law, sees a robust plastics treaty as something that could give Biden an opportunity to deliver on twin promises to make gains against global warming and for environmental justice, while reducing the scourge of plastic waste.

The president’s Build Back Better legislation with its substantial climate provisions hasstalled in Congress. But last year, Patton recalled, Biden specificallymentioned heath and environmental impacts from “cancer alley,” Louisiana’s petrochemical corridor, where plastics are manufactured and there are proposals for building moreplastics plants.

A global plastics treaty, Patton said, “is absolutely an opportunity where the Biden administration can have a very clear environmental win, and a justice win, in a space where they have been backsliding since promises that were made.”

She added, “One of the key ways that they can address the environmental injustice of industrial pollution in cancer alley and other places like it is to negotiate an ambitious treaty that addresses emissions from plastics production. And that is what we hope that the administration will do.”

Not Too Specific, but Not Too Vague

What happens in the negotiations in Nairobi could determine the eventual scope or framework of a global plastics agreement.

To be hammered out by diplomats are questions such as whether the agreement should be limited to dealing only with managing plastic waste in the ocean or whether it should address the more expansive problem of pollution across the plastics life-cycle, from manufacture to disposal, including what to do about the tiny pieces of plastics debris known as microplastics.

Another point of contention is whether an agreement should somehow set limits on the production of plastics altogether.

Any outcome by early March, Patton said, “has to be vague enough that all countries can sort of see themselves in those negotiations and see their preferences in those negotiations. But it also has to be specific enough to where we can actually talk about the things that we need to talk about to get this problem solved.”

A Potentially Greener U. S. Position

Some nations have already crafted their position papers, with the European Union and many countries lining up behind a strong proposal from Rwanda and Peru for a legally binding agreement that addresses the full lifecycle of plastics.

India and Japan have put forward weaker resolutions, and two weeks ago, the United States and France weighed in with positions close to the Rwanda-Peru resolution but with vague enough wording to allow for plenty of diplomatic wriggle room.

Still, environmental advocates who are looking to the United States to back a treaty with a broad scope were pleased. They noted that last November, when Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced that the Biden administration would join the talks—reversing the position taken by the Trump administration—Blinken’s comments appeared to limit the Biden administration’s concerns to plastic waste in the ocean.

But the Feb. 11 joint statement with France goes further, saying that the United States supports the crafting of an agreement “to address the full lifecycle of plastics.” The statement called for an agreement that curbs plastic pollution “at its source,” wording that environmental advocates take to mean at the point plastics are manufactured, not just after they are disposed of.

There have also been calls from environmentalists and industry for legally binding commitments, and the joint statement says the agreement “should include binding and non-binding commitments,” while calling on countries “to develop and implement ambitious national action plans.”

Tim Gabriel, a Paris-based lawyer who is closely following the issue and is attending the talks in Kenya, called the new American position “a subtle yet seismic shift.

“This is the type of language that the U.S. has not until now put its name behind,” Gabriel, who works for the Environmental Investigation Agency, a non-profit organization based in London and Washington, said.

Björn Beeler, the international coordinator for the International Pollutants Elimination Network (IPEN), comprising more than 600 public interest nongovernmental organizations in 128 countries working to eliminate toxic pollutants, said“This is an opening of a posture of a major, major actor, so that is good.”

“The U.S. has huge responsibilities and huge liabilities in this conversation,” Beeler said, adding that the earlier statement from Blinken, focused only on keeping plastic waste out of the ocean, “was very irresponsible.”

Three days after the announcement by France and the United States, the American Chemistry Council, a lobbying group that has emerged as a leading voice for industry in the treaty debate, also found some language to its liking in the joint statement, and said it saw “significant alignment” between the council’s goals and those of the two countries.

The ACC also favors an agreement with binding and non-binding elements, and wants to work toward a “circular economy,” another term mentioned by the U.S. and France, according to a statement from Joshua Baca, the ACC’s vice president of plastics. A circular economy means different things to different people, but the Environmental Protection Agency, citing language in the Save Our Seas Act,describes it as an

economy that “reduces material use, redesigns materials to be less resource-intensive and recaptures waste as a resource to manufacture new materials and products.”

Still, the ACC remains opposed to any agreement that attempts to put caps on plastics production or consumption.

Matthew Kastner, an ACC spokesman, declined to elaborate on how ACC views the United States’ opening position, or to go beyond the wording in its own public statements.

“We are focused on the actual negotiations, not on speculating about the word choice of a statement,” Kastner said. “ACC’s statement should be taken at face value—we want a legally binding agreement and are pleased to see U.S. leadership on this matter.”

Businesses Make Their Plastics Views Known

Erin Simon, head of plastic waste and business for World Wildlife Fund, the U.S. arm of a conservation group that operates in 100 countries, said she is “fairly confident” that there will be a mandate for naming an international negotiating committee. The mandate, she said, is likely to include a timeline and a scope. “We are prepared for all eventualities,” she said.

Meanwhile, businesses are joining in, with more than80 companies, including Coca-Cola, Pepsico, Starbucks and Walmart,calling for a global plastic treaty with legally binding provisions.

They are part of a “large global discussion about how we address this issue,” Simon said.

Also in recent weeks, the U.S. Plastics Pact, a consortium of The Recycling Partnership and the World Wildlife Fund that includes companies that depend on plastic packaging, like Coca Cola, Unilever and Walmart,identified 11 plastic packaging items that should be phased out by 2025 because they are “not currently reusable, recyclable, or compostable at scale.”  They include single-use plastic cutlery and plastics made with toxic chemical additives.

“We proliferated our use of plastics for decades without any controls in place,” Simon said. “We are starting to narrow what can go in the shared system.”

‘Things That Cost Money Are Hard to Do’

Global environmental treaties can take years to achieve. A plastics agreement potentially would be the most significant since the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change.

University of Oregon political science professor Ron Mitchell, whose research includes studying environmental treaties, said people should not underestimate the difficulty of the task confronting negotiators, and cautioned against inflated expectations.

But, he said, just getting the nations of the world to formally recognize the plastics problem is a big first step.

“Cleaning up plastic is going to cost a lot of money,” he added. “And things that cost money are hard to do.”

International agreements are also difficult to legally enforce, Mitchell said, adding that they often rely on peer pressure for countries to follow social norms. Still, he said, such treaties are worthy endeavors.

Difficulties aside, the UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen on Feb. 9 made a case for a comprehensive treaty, writing in The Times of London that “no corner of the Earth, from mountaintop to sea trench,” has been “left unsullied by plastic.”

Changes are needed to address “the full life cycle of plastics, from the extraction of raw materials to alternatives to improved waste management,” Andersen wrote. That includes changing and eliminating products, designing products for reuse and recycling, and removing hazardous additives.

"By doing this we could reduce the volume of plastics entering our oceans by over 80 percent by 2040, and reduce virgin plastic production by 55 percent,” Andersen wrote, adding, “We could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent and create 700,000 additional jobs, mainly in the global south.”

On Feb. 16, the global Break Free From Plastics Coalition delivered a petition to the U.S. State Department, signed by more than 67,000 people and calling for the United States to support a legally binding plastics treaty covering measures across the entire life cycle of plastics

Such political pressure is working, as evidenced by the new statement from the Biden administration, said Patton, with the Center for International Environmental Law.

“This is a significant shift in U.S. foreign policy toward plastics,” she said. “And I think that that is in response to the public outcry and the fact that there is a significant and organized constituency within the United States that is pushing for this change.” James Bruggers

Reporter, Southeast, National Environment Reporting Network

https://theintercept.com/2020/01/12/cancer-trump-administration-epa-carcinogens-regulations/

the war on the war on cancer

no pix no lnx many no graf

Sharon Lerner

January 12 2020,

WHEN ANGELA RAMIREZ was 38, she felt a slight pain in her chest. At first she thought she had pulled a muscle, but when it didn’t go away, Ramirez went to her doctor, who diagnosed her with stage 2 breast cancer. A mother of three and a parent educator in a local public school in Lake County, Illinois, Ramirez had to undergo a double mastectomy, chemotherapy, radiation, and five follow-up surgeries.

Eight years since the diagnosis, her family is still recovering. Because of complications, Ramirez is awaiting several more reconstructive surgeries. Her daughter Ada, now 15, was recently diagnosed with PTSD, in part, Ramirez thinks, because she spent much of her childhood worrying that her mother wouldn’t survive. And her husband is working 80 hours a week to cover medical expenses and lost income. “Cancer changes your whole life,” she said recently.

Ramirez used to think of her ordeal as random bad luck — an inexplicable series of genetic mutations that just happened to derail her life. But that changed in 2018, after she learned that she both lived and worked near two facilities that were emitting a cancer-causing chemical called ethylene oxide.

Two years earlier, the Environmental Protection Agency released an assessment of ethylene oxide performed by a small division of the agency known as IRIS, which crunched numbers showing that exposure to ethylene oxide caused elevated rates of tumors in the brain, lungs, uterus, and lymph systems. The technical report from IRIS, which stands for the Integrated Risk Information System, changed the classification of ethylene oxide, an odorless gas used to make other chemicals and sterilize medical equipment, from probably carcinogenic to plainly carcinogenic to humans. Based in part on several studies showing that female workers exposed to ethylene oxide had higher breast cancer rates, the report calculated a safety threshold that was 30 times more sensitive than previous estimates. Combined with agency data about local emissions, the new threshold allowed the EPA Office of Air and Radiation to identify the census tracts where residents were at increased risk of cancer from breathing ethylene oxide.

As Ramirez could plainly see on the EPA’s interactive map, the cancer risk was elevated both where she lived and, even more extremely, at the office where she worked for several years before her diagnosis, which was less than a mile from one factory that emitted the carcinogenic gas and less than three miles from another. The news was like a missing puzzle piece. “I had always found it kind of strange that I was the only one in my family who ever had cancer,” said Ramirez, who had moved to the suburbs from Chicago in 2005 in part because she wanted to be closer to nature.

Ramirez still suffers from chronic back pain and weakness. But the realization that her cancer may have resulted from emissions from the local factories has caused a different kind of suffering. “Every time I open the windows I think about it now,” she said. “I’m so angry. My kids at 2nd and 3rd grade shouldn’t have had to wonder whether their mother was going to die.”

Angela Ramirez's neighborhood is seen in this photo. The neighborhood in Waukegan, Ill., is located in a census tract that is at high risk for cancer. Jan. 2, 2020. Pat Nabong for The Intercept.Construction at Medline's facility in Waukegan, Ill. is underway on Jan. 2, 2020. In May 2019, Medline submitted a proposal to build new equipment that would control air pollution, after they came under fire for emitting ethylene oxide, a gas linked to cancer. Pat Nabong for The Intercept.]

Left/Top: The Ramirez's neighborhood in Waukegan, Ill., is part of a census tract that is at high risk for cancer. Right/Bottom: Construction at Medline's facility in Waukegan, Ill. is underway on Jan. 2, 2020. In May 2019, Medline submitted a proposal to build new equipment that would control air pollution, after they came under fire for emitting ethylene oxide.Photos: Pat Nabong for The Intercept]

The chemical industry also reacted strongly to the reports on ethylene oxide. In September 2018, after the National Air Toxics Assessment pinpointed the areas affected by the chemical, the American Chemistry Council, or ACC, a trade group that represents U.S. chemical manufacturers, asked IRIS to change its assessment of ethylene oxide. Dow Chemical, the biggest producer of ethylene oxide in the country and the second biggest in the world, also disputed the EPA’s assessment.

Now, political appointees at the EPA are engaged in what appears to be an end-run around the agency’s own science. While IRIS, which is staffed by career scientists, hasn’t officially backed away from its 2016 report, theTrump EPA recently announced that it would not be calling for the level of pollution reductions IRIS laid out during the previous administration, leaving people around the country more vulnerable to the known carcinogen. And that’s only one of the changes made under the Trump administration that promise to weaken protections for Americans’ health, many of which were intended specifically to stave off cancers.

Virtually no sector of the EPA’s work has escaped reversals that will cause disease and death among the U.S. population. The agency scrapped the Clean Power Plan and a rule to improve fuel efficiency standards for cars, depriving the public of not just the climate benefits but also the improvements to air quality and health both would have brought. The EPA rejected its own science in deciding not to ban chlorpyrifos, a pesticide linked to autism and other neurodevelopmental problems in children. Dozens of other EPA rollbacks — including the gutting of the Clean Water Act, the undermining of guidelines on emissions of methane from landfills, the loosening of restrictions on toxic air pollution from industrial facilities, the disbanding of a panel on air pollution — will have dire health consequences, as will the dramatic reduction in the enforcement of environmental laws.

The erosion of these protections may leave Americans at greater risk of all kinds of health effects, including fertility issues, birth defects, and neurodevelopmental problems — all of which have been linked to chemical exposure. But among the most devastating of Trump’s legacies will be an increase in cancers.

Trump’s Cancer Gang

With the election of Donald Trump, a small and previously marginalized group of toxics apologists suddenly and unexpectedly took control over health and environmental regulations in the United States. Considered too fringe, too craven, and too fact-averse for mainstream politics, this closely connected group had long been dismissed for taking the idea of environmental deregulation well past the point of absurdity. Under Trump, the EPA has begun executing some of these extremists’ schemes to undercut the federal government’s ability to protect the public from life-threatening toxic chemicals.

Way back in 1996, a lawyer named Christopher Horner working for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company came up with an ambitious plan to fight back against scientific studies linking cancer to secondhand smoke. Such studies, he realized, were based on the private health data of thousands of individuals. And without that data, scientists would be unable to prove a connection between cigarette smoke and cancer. Imagine if the government required that the data used for regulations be public. If that were the case, none of the crucial private health information used by scientists would be usable. Problem solved!

Horner, who worked at the firm then called Bracewell & Giuliani, recognized that the approach had “global applicability to industry” beyond tobacco and could make it nearly impossible to regulate a wide variety of cancer-causing chemicals and pollution. Within a few years, a group funded by the Koch brothers tried to use the strategy to undermine the Clean Air Act, demanding that researchers produce their data so a pivotal study could be repeated.

That attempt to destroy air pollution protections ultimately failed, and the idea hovered on the sidelines until 2014, when a few Republican House members introduced the “Secret Science Act.” Because most members of Congress recognized the gambit as a bald attempt to subvert science — then-Sen. Barbara Boxer called it “insane,” Sen. Bernie Sanders dismissed it as “laughable” — the bill didn’t come close to becoming law that year or the next, when it was introduced again. Even in mid-2016, the only support for the idea came from the fringe.

But with the election of Donald Trump later that year, the prospects of the “secret science” scheme — and others hatched over the years to help free industry of what it saw as profit-hampering regulations — suddenly became deadly serious. Trump, who had already been dismissive of science, named Horner and others interested in undermining environmental protections to his EPA transition team and then staffed the agency with political appointees who used to work for the industries they would be regulating. In April 2018, then-EPA administrator Scott Pruitt proposed a rule based on the “secret science” plan, and Horner’s wildest dreams of dismantling environmental and health regulations were set to become reality.

Andrew Wheeler, administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), speaks to members of the media after signing the Affordable Clean Energy Rule at EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Wednesday, June 19, 2019. President Donald Trump is scaling back sweeping Obama-era curbs on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants burning coal, his biggest step yet to fulfill his campaign promise to stop a "war" on the fossil fuel. Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesEPA administrator Andrew Wheeler, center, speaks to members of the media at EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C., on June 19, 2019. Photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images]

The war on cancer was meant to help banish a disease that by 1970 had become the second-leading cause of death in the United States. The Environmental Protection Agency, created that year, was part of the government’s assault on the rising tide of cancer cases. For some contaminants, such as asbestos and chemicals used in dye-making, the link to cancer was already clear. Scientists were beginning to understand that even tiny amounts of certain chemicals could alter cells, setting off a series of mutations that grow into cancerous tumors. The hope was that the agency could counter increasing cancer rates by limiting environmental exposures.

Yet 50 years after the federal government took up arms against cancer, the disease is still the second-leading cause of death. Even though cigarette smoking, the leading cause of cancer in the 1970s, has declined sharply, the American cancer rate has actually gone up over the past 40 years. Among children, who are particularly vulnerable to environmental exposures, the cancer rate has risen dramatically, increasing nearly 50 percent since 1975.

During that time, environmental exposures have been mounting. More than 140,000 chemicals and pesticides have been introduced since 1950. Even though the vast majority have not been evaluated for safety, 5,000 of them are made in such great quantities practically everyone is exposed to them. Yet most of the government spending on cancer has remained focused on treating the disease rather than preventing cancer by limiting exposure to carcinogens, such as pesticides and other environmental contaminants.

graf:

Left/Top: Federal political contributions by members of the American Chemistry Council,including parent companies and individual employees, 2008 - 2019. Compiled for The Intercept by MapLight. Right/Bottom: Federal political lobbying expenditures by members of the American Chemistry Council, including parent companies and individual employees, 2008 - 2019. Compiled for The Intercept by MapLight.Graphics: Soohee Cho/The Intercept

Since the first major law that attempted to regulate toxic chemicals passed in 1976, chemical companies have spent billions of dollars on lobbying. The member companies of the American Chemistry Council have spent more than $1.4 billion on lobbying and $77.8 million on political contributions since 2008, according to an analysis by MapLight for this story. The ACC by itself has spent $103 million on lobbying. Though staggering, these numbers are a small fraction of the trillions generated by chemical sales over that same period.

Throughout its 50-year existence, the EPA has faced the daunting task of regulating industries that are far better resourced than the agency. But the effort to rein in powerful companies, which has been met with varying degrees of success under previous administrations, has been largely abandoned under Trump. The EPA, now headed by a former coal lobbyist and run by other former lobbyists, executives, and lawyers from polluting industries, has set about undoing health protections, some of which were specifically designed to prevent cancer.

Trump, who recently tried to take credit for a 2017 dip in cancer mortality rates and announced that he would be “curing childhood cancer very shortly,” at a rally in Cincinnati last August, presumably isn’t interested in actively causing disease and death. But his eagerness to please the polluting chemical and fossil fuel industries that support him comes at the expense of American lives.

A Mess in Texas

For ethylene oxide, the chemical that Ramirez was exposed to, the road to deregulation passes through Texas. It was there, in the summer of 2018, that regulators led by state toxicologist Michael Honeycutt began working with the producers of ethylene oxide on their own standard for the chemical.

Honeycutt, who has overseen chemical assessment for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality since 1996, is known for his extremely industry-friendly approach to chemicals. Until this administration, Honeycutt made his name fighting the EPA, challenging the limits the agency tried to place on emissions of chemicals, particularly those released by the oil and gas industry. He has argued that particulate air pollution, which causes lung cancer and other diseases, can help people live longer. And working with his longtime colleague and fellow toxicologist Michael Dourson, Honeycutt loosened state protections on dozens of chemicals — rollbacks that were encouraged and welcomed by chemical manufacturers. Now, under Trump, Honeycutt’s Texas agency has essentially become a shadow EPA and he has assumed a national role in cancer policy.

The assessment of ethylene oxide that Honeycutt oversaw and the TCEQ released last year no doubt pleased the companies that make the chemical — not least because it appears to have been written by them. In June 2018, before issuing a new safety limit for ethylene oxide, Honeycutt and members of the TCEQ’s toxicology staff met in Austin with Joanna Klapacz, a toxicologist from Dow; Bill Gulledge, a senior director at the American Chemistry Council; and three scientists from Exponent, a consulting company paid by the ACC to help fend off regulation of the chemical, among them two toxicologists named Abby Li and M. Jane Teta. Representatives of Shell, BASF, and Balchem, which together with Dow released more than 200,000 pounds of ethylene oxide over the previous six years, joined the conversation by phone, according to emails of TCEQ staff released in response to a FOIA from the Sierra Club.

Dr. Mike Honeycutt is an Air Toxicologist for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the world's second largest environmental agency. RALPH BARRERA/ AMERICAN-STATESMANTexas state toxicologist Michael Honeycutt. Photo: Ralph Barrera/Austin American-Statesman]

At the meeting, a presentation from the American Chemistry Council recommended adopting estimates of safety thresholds from a paper written by Ciriaco Valdez-Flores, a Texas-based consultant who received funding from both the ACC and the Ethylene Oxide Sterilization Association. The TCEQ had considered — and rejected — the paper in an assessment of ethylene oxide it released less than two years earlier because, it said, Valdez-Flores hadn’t captured all the cancer risk from ethylene oxide. Although an EPA summary of the 2016 IRIS report on ethylene oxide characterized its confidence in the breast cancer data as “particularly high,” and noted that the breast cancer component “is based on over 200 incident cases for which the investigators also had information on other potential breast cancer risk factors,” the Valdez-Flores paper didn’t include the breast cancer studies in its evaluation. And in a presentation to the group, Teta also argued against the inclusion of the breast cancer data.

Gulledge, who manages the ACC’s panel on ethylene oxide, emailed TCEQ toxicologist Jessica Myers after the meeting and offered to draft the assessment of the chemical for the state agency. “Thank you for hosting us this week,” Gulledge wrote. “We are working on several ‘white papers’ on the risk assessment modeling and our alternative approach that should be ready in the next month or so with the goal to have a draft risk assessment manuscript ready shortly thereafter.”

Asked about the email, Tom Flanagin, director of product communications for the American Chemistry Council, denied that the group drafted the risk assessment for the TCEQ. “Mr. Gulledge is referring to a separate, independent effort … for publication in a peer reviewed journal. TCEQ acted independently in preparing their risk assessment.” Flanagin did not explain why Gulledge would be communicating with TCEQ about a purportedly separate, independent effort. Ryan Vise, director of external relations for the TCEQ, also denied that the ACC drafted or edited the state agency’s assessment. Exponent did not respond to requests for comment.

Yet the proposed ethylene oxide standard that TCEQ released this summer included many of the elements that the ACC and its scientific consultants recommended at the Texas meeting. The state agency omitted the breast cancer studies and adopted the paper by Valdez-Flores as its key study, just as the industry scientists had recommended.

And minutes from a meeting of the Ethylene Oxide Sterilization Association held the next month also indicate that the chemical industry, led by Teta and Li, who were both at the Texas meeting, drafted the state’s assessment of the chemical. According to the minutes, first reported by the Chicago Tribune, the assessment, which would provide an alternative to the IRIS ethylene oxide value, was funded and led by the industry groups. “Jane Teta and Abby Li (Exponent) will be leading” the recasting of the assessment to the industry’s liking, the minutes explained, and “TCEQ has indicated its receptiveness to considering an alternative to the IRIS value.”

The result of this collaboration between the ethylene oxide industry and Texas was a proposed standard that was 3,500 times weaker than the IRIS threshold. The Texas number was also 50 times less protective than the standard the state had released only two years earlier. While Texas offered no scientific reason for weakening its 2017 standard, regulatory developments can help explain the oddly timed reassessment: the EPA’s recognition of ethylene oxide as a carcinogen in 2018 had led to public pressure on companies that emit the gas, which had in turn led to the industry group to ask the TCEQ to issue an alternate standard.

Just as the ACC has done, the Texas agency also attempted to justify its new number by arguing that IRIS’s calculations couldn’t be correct because the body produces some ethylene oxide on its own — an idea dismissed by scientists who are not supported by the ethylene oxide industry.

“They make a big deal of endogenous exposure and say that’s why EPA numbers can’t be meaningful,” said Jennifer Jinot, a toxicologist who worked for EPA for 26 years, 12 of which she spent working on the IRIS assessment of ethylene oxide. Jinot described the TCEQ’s focus on purportedly natural levels of the chemical as “disingenuous” and said it was just one of several tricks the state agency used to make the chemical appear safer than it actually is.

“Texas has done something completely unreasonable,” said Jinot. “They’re just low-balling the whole thing.”

In an emailed response to questions, Dow spokesperson Ashley Mendoza acknowledged that Joanna Klapacz attended the 2018 meeting at TCEQ, but noted that “she was not part of the technical presentation.” The email also said that “Dow has continued to improve our [ethylene oxide] emission reduction as part of our own sustainability goals. As science advances, our ongoing collaboration with other manufacturers and multiple agencies continues to ensure maximum human safety while delivering products consumers want and need.”

The TCEQ responded to questions for this piece with an email saying that its assessment of ethylene oxide was “on the side of the best available science.” The email also said that the more protective ethylene oxide standard, which the state agency issued in March 2017, was never intended to be permanent, but instead was “to be used until a thorough multi-year systematic review and dose-response assessment could be conducted under the extensive TCEQ toxicity factor guidelines.”

The proposed safety level could have a dramatic effect on people in Texas, where at least 27 facilities emit more than 48 tons of ethylene oxide every year. At one of these facilities, a Huntsman Petrochemical Plant in Conroe Texas, the EPA estimated the cancer risk due to the release of ethylene oxide and other chemicals to be 3,000 in a million, according to a risk assessment report the agency released in December. Nationwide, the average risk of cancer from air pollution is 32 in a million.

The Texas standard could also weaken protections for people far beyond Texas, since states often consider one another’s regulations when issuing their own. “It could mess with the legal landscape globally,” said Tracey Woodruff, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California, San Francisco school of medicine who studies how chemical exposures affect health. “Even if other states don’t adopt Texas’ levels, they tend to average them.”

Scenes from Freeport, Texas on Wednesday, December 18th, 2019. Todd Spoth for The Intercept.Dow Chemical’s plant can be seen just beyond homes in Freeport, Texas, on Dec. 18, 2019. Photo: Todd Spoth for The Intercept]

While Honeycutt was once one of EPA’s main opponents, the Trump administration is now relying on his agency’s industry-biased assessment of ethylene oxide to guide the federal government’s approach to the carcinogen.IRIS spent years calculating its safety threshold for ethylene oxide and noted in its 2016 report that scientists have been studying the chemical’s “DNA-damaging properties” since the 1940s. Yet in early November, the EPA indicated it would not be calling for the reduction of emissions as much as the IRIS report would suggest is necessary. Instead, the EPA’s proposed rule, which it is required to finalize by March, calculated risk levels that were six to nine times weaker than those issued in 2016. An explanatory document released by EPA cited the Texas estimate as well as the request for correction from the American Chemistry Council and attributed its decision to change its safety level to “uncertainties” in the science.

The people who will be affected by the weakening of ethylene oxide protections are disproportionately poor and nonwhite, as the EPA’s own analysis shows. While the U.S. population overall is 12 percent African American, the areas with elevated cancer risks due to ethylene oxide are 21 percent African American, according to the document the agency released in November. Latinos are also at greater risk of exposure, making up 18 percent of the U.S. population and 31 percent of those living in areas with elevated cancer risk due to the chemical.

Those demographics aren’t unusual. While black and Latino people produce less pollution, people of color have a higher burden of pollution and are more likely to live near industrial facilities. Penny Dryden, who grew up near several polluting plants in the Rosegate section of Wilmington, Delaware, was for years unaware of the disparity. Dryden, 62, has had cancer three times. The first, breast cancer, was diagnosed when she was just 19. But this seemed to be a fact of life in her mostly African American neighborhood. Many of her friends and relatives as well as both of her parents had cancer.

In 2018, a facility near Dryden’s home that makes chemicals used in antifreeze and some processed foods released so much ethylene oxide into the air that the nearby Delaware Bridge had to be temporarily shut down. That was a temporary inconvenience to commuters, but for people who live within a three-mile radius of the plant — 52 percent of whom are people of color, and 31 percent of whom are below the poverty level — the chemical poses an ongoing health threat.

Although the cancers have taken a toll, Dryden still considers herself lucky. “Lots of people here have died of it, whole families, so many of my friends,” said Dryden, who has come to recognize and fight against the extra burden of both pollution and disease that are clustered in several communities of color in Delaware. And while she has no experience living in a pollution-free area, she feels certain the people making decisions that affect pollution levels around the country have no idea how it feels to live with polluted air. “The people in D.C. don’t go into communities like ours,” said Dryden. “They probably have never heard of Rosegate.”

For people like Dryden and Ramirez, who live near the facilities around the country — more than 100 — that emit the carcinogenic gas, the weakening of the ethylene oxide standard will result in even greater risks of cancer. “By undermining the way risk assessments are done, Texas has allowed these plants to put out more pollution because it’ll look like it’s safe when it’s not,” said Woodruff, the reproductive health professor. “They’re resetting the bar to allow more pollution going out into the world.”

Children will also disproportionately bear the burden of this additional pollution. As the EPA has pointed out, children may also be especially vulnerable to the mutagenic effects of ethylene oxide — as they are for other carcinogens. Simon Strong came to recognize kids’ particular vulnerability after his son, Oliver, died suddenly in June 2015. An exuberant 12-year-old who played saxophone and tended goal for his soccer team, Oliver was diagnosed with leukemia a week after he complained of his first symptom: a headache. He died just 36 hours later, leaving his parents bereft and filled with questions.

Oliver-1578521871Oliver Strong. Photo: Courtesy of Simon Strong]

“We were there with his oncologist in floods of tears, and I said, ‘What caused this?’ and she just burst out, ‘It’s the environment,’” Strong remembered recently. He had no idea what she meant and had never thought much about cancer before Oliver’s illness. But after his son’s death, Strong, a reporter turned investigator, began researching the causes of pediatric cancer. He read with dismay about the alarming numbers of soccer players, particularly goalies, who have developed cancer; about the connection between cancer and Roundup, a weed killer he had used liberally in the family’s backyard in Florida; and about several pediatric cancer clusters in his home state.

The problem, as he learned, was also worsening. While pediatric cancer rates were increasing overall, there had been a particularly large jump in the number of cases in infants and children under 5. Yet the government seemed to be doing little to understand what was causing these cancers or to prevent them.

So Strong launched a project along with the Baylor College of Medicine to collect information about the environmental exposures of children with cancer from their families. It’s work he wishes the federal government was doing. But as Strong’s urgency about the problem was growing, the Trump administration was going in the opposite direction, unraveling the little work that was being done on the issue.

Indeed, in May, the EPA decided to pull its funding for a network of centers that had researched the effects of various substances, including chemicals, on children. One of those research hubs, the Center for Integrative Research on Childhood Leukemia and the Environment at Berkeley, had found that exposure to pesticides, traffic emissions, tobacco smoke, and solvents are associated with childhood leukemia, the most common children’s cancer. Staff there were continuing to research the environmental causes of the disease and to educate parents and physicians, according to the physician and epidemiologist who directs the center, Catherine Metayer. “There is still so much work to do,” said Metayer. But the center lost the $1.5 million per year it had been receiving from the EPA and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Barring intervention from Congress, the last of its federal money will be spent by this summer. “After that, our work will have to stop,” she said.

Known Killers

The closure of the pediatric environmental health centers is only one of many backward steps we’ve taken in our decades-long battle against cancer and cancer-causing exposures. The first major one came after the EPA attempted to use the Toxic Substances Control Act to ban asbestos in 1989. The ban was exactly what the EPA and the chemicals law were created to do: protect Americans from a substance that had been known for decades to cause cancer. But after the agency began the process, asbestos mining and manufacturing companies sued. A court struck down most of the government’s ban in 1991 and, since then, the agency has been wary of taking on regulatory battles it might not win. As a result, the EPA has not regulated a single chemical under the law in the almost 30 years after the 1991 ruling.

So, while 67 countries have already banned asbestos, we’re still importing it. And last year, the Trump EPA decided — against the advice of its own scientists — to continue to allow its use.

In a statement, an EPA spokesperson wrote that the agency “along with our state partners, is covering ALL bases under our legal authority to protect people’s health from asbestos exposure.” The spokesperson went on to explain an April 2019 rule that allows the agency to restrict or prohibit the use of products containing asbestos. But she declined to say why the EPA had chosen not to ban the substance altogether, as its own scientists and attorneys had recommended.

While the continued use of asbestos has deadly consequences, causing an estimated 39,000 deaths in the U.S. each year, it is just one of the chemicals the Trump administration is now in a position to greenlight. In 2016, Congress tried to improve our abysmal record on chemicals by fixing the broken Toxic Substances Control Act. The update of the law aimed to bring about greater protections by requiring the EPA to identify and restrict the most dangerous substances.But under Trump, the opposite is happening— and the opportunity to fix chemical regulation, 40 years in the making, has instead turned into another massive step backward. The assessment process, begun in the Obama era, is being carried out by an administration that is friendlier to the chemical industry than any other administration in history.

“There is no daylight between this EPA and what the big chemical companies want,” said Daniel Rosenberg, director of the federal toxics program for the Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC. “Whatever the term is for government by corporation, that’s what we’ve been living under for three years.” Lots of small decisions are involved in implementing the new law, including the choice of which chemicals to assess, what sources of information about them to use, and how to quantify the risks they pose. “And these details are all essentially being worked out by companies like Dow and DuPont and Chemours,” said Rosenberg. “It’s the worst-case scenario.”

Asbestos is now one of 10 compounds the EPA began assessing in 2016 under the new law. In August, the EPA announced that it was considering assessing an additional 20 chemicals and added another five in September. How these chemicals are assessed will affect Americans’ exposure levels and ultimately their risks for a range of health outcomes.

Scenes from Freeport, Texas on Wednesday, December 18th, 2019.Todd Spoth for The Intercept.Dow Chemical’s Freeport plant is the largest chemical production facility in the western hemisphere. Photo: Todd Spoth for The Intercept]

Having the Trump administration at the helm during a once-in-a-generation reassessment of toxic pollutants is especially disastrous for the effort to protect Americans from cancer. Of the 35 chemicals the EPA is now scrutinizing under the updated TSCA, 19 are widely considered by researchers to be carcinogenic. While only a tiny exposure can set off disease, more than 135 million pounds of these carcinogens were released in this country between 2014 and 2018, according to the most recent data from the EPA. And how dangerous they are found to be may ultimately impact federal and state limits on their use.

Obama administration officials were scrupulous when they began the assessment process back in 2016. “They clearly said we have to look at all the ways people are exposed because if we ignore even a single pathway, that can result in the difference between acceptable and unacceptable risk,” said Eve Gartner, an attorney who directs the toxics program at Earthjustice. But when Trump appointees came in to replace them at the EPA, that changed. Nancy Beck, who had been trying to convince the EPA to narrow the range of exposures it considered in chemical assessments when she was director of regulatory policy for the American Chemistry Council, joined the EPA in April 2017 and remade the rule exactly as industry wanted it.

Just as the environmental advocates feared, the first of the assessments under Beck’s rule, which were released over the past several months and will likely be finalized within the coming year, have minimized the risks posed by chemicals. “We’re seeing massive exclusions of known pathways for exposure,” said Gartner. “EPA is finding that chemicals that are universally understood to present massive risk are fine.”

Environmental groups, including Earthjustice, NRDC, and the Environmental Defense Fund, sued the EPA, arguing that the agency was wrong to rule out certain pathways of chemical exposures. In November, a federal appeals court agreed with them. If the ruling stands, EPA will be forced to consider exposures to chemicals through uses that have been phased out, which will affect the assessment of asbestos, for example, andPFOA, an industrial contaminant found in drinking water, even though the chemical is no longer used in the U.S.

Excluding consideration of certain exposures is just one of the ways industry insiders at the EPA appear to be underestimating the harms of toxic substances. “The specifics vary from one chemical to another, but by ignoring certain evidence, EPA uses the risk assessment process to put its thumb on the scales and come out with a result that is weaker and less health protective than it would otherwise be,” said Richard Denison, lead senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund. “Each time we see one of these assessments, there are ways in which the science has been played with.”

Denison pointed to the EPA’s recent handling of a likely carcinogen called 1,4-dioxane, which is used to make other chemicals and forms spontaneously in some shampoos, cosmetics, and cleaning products. In 2013, IRIS set a safety threshold for the chemical based, in part, on studies showing that female mice exposed to it developed cancerous tumors in their livers. Yet when the EPA released its draft risk assessment of 1,4-dioxane under the new TSCA law in June, “they conveniently omitted those tumors,” said Denison. “They removed the most sensitive endpoint and as a result came up with five-fold less protective risk value.”

Another dishonest technique the EPA has used to deem chemicals safe is to change safety thresholds when chemicals don’t meet them. Although the 1963 Clean Air Act mandated that the lifetime cancer risk to an average individual should be no greater than 1 in a million, since 2008 the agency has used a much less protective risk standard for carcinogens in the air: 1 in 10,000. NRDC sued in an effort to get the EPA under George W. Bush to stick with the more protective number, but a three-judge panel that included Brett Kavanaugh ruled against the environmental group in 2008. “They gutted the law and set the course for the next two decades,” said John Walke, the NRDC attorney who argued the case. When testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2018, Kavanaugh lied about the case, describing it as one in which he’d ruled for environmentalists.

Although previous administrations have used the 1-in-a-million standard when evaluating the safety of toxic chemicals, the Trump administration recently began using the 1-in-10,000 standard, Denison said. In several recent reports issued under the updated chemicals law, including a draft assessment of the deadly paint stripper methylene chloride, the EPA inexplicably used this lower bar for determining when a cancer rate for workers is unacceptable. “It looks to me like some scientists were doing the number-crunching, and somebody came up and said, ‘Yikes, look at all this risk. How do we make it go away?’” said Denison.

The EPA insists that it “is following the legal process in TSCA, which ensures that our risk evaluations are transparent and include a robust review of the available science,” according to an emailed statement from an EPA spokesperson. The statement also said, “The draft risk evaluations released so far represent the agency’s preliminary conclusions on these chemicals. EPA goes beyond what TSCA requires by peer reviewing the risk evaluations it releases in order to increase public transparency in the risk evaluation process and receive expert feedback on the science that underlies the risk determinations. If EPA’s final risk evaluations find there are unreasonable risks associated with these chemicals, the agency will propose actions to address those risks within the timeframe required by TSCA.”

Scenes from Freeport, Texas on Wednesday, December 18th, 2019.Todd Spoth for The Intercept.Dow’s Freeport facility released more than 200 air pollutants in 2017 and has violated its permits in every quarter of the past three years, making it a high-priority violator of the Clean Air Act. Photo: Todd Spoth for The Intercept]

A Polluter’s Paradise

There may be no better place to see the consequences of the unraveling of chemical regulation than in Texas.Home to roughly two-thirds of the nation’s petrochemical industry and a fast-growing number of factories that make plastic and its feedstocks, Texas is a hub for the production of carcinogenic compounds as well as a leader in the movement to weaken regulations of them. For years, Texas has been a polluter’s paradise. As the oil, gas, and petrochemical industries have exploded throughout the state, the TCEQ’s Honeycutt has presided over an easing of restrictions on their emissions even as his staff has been reduced.

With 1.7 million new cases estimated for 2019 in the United States, cancer is a particular problem in Freeport, Texas.Rates of Hodgkin lymphoma are elevated in this small town on the Gulf Coast, as are cancers of the liver and bile duct, lung, stomach, and nasal cavity and middle ear, according to a report that the Texas Department of State Health Services quietly released in 2018.

The report makes no mention of pollution as a possible cause of the elevated number of cancer cases, yet Freeport is home to the largest chemical production facility in the western hemisphere: 12,800 acres of holding tanks, machinery, canals, deep-water ports, and pipelines, owned by Dow. Alongside it are chemical production facilities owned by other companies, including BASF, Shintech, Huntsman, and the Olin Corporation, the largest chlor-alkali producer in the world, which bought part of its Freeport manufacturing site from Dow in 2015.

Dow’s Freeport plant produces more than 40 billion pounds of chemicals and other products, including the components of much of the world’s plastics. In the process, the plant emits hundreds of toxic chemicals. The facility released more than 200 air pollutants in 2017 and has violated its permits in every quarter of the past three years, making it a high-priority violator of the Clean Air Act. Between 2015 and 2018, the complex emitted more than 3 million pounds of unpermitted air pollution on top of what it was allowed to release, according to a report by the Environmental Integrity Project.

Cancer-2-08-1578686568On-site manufacturing releases of 18 of the 19 carcinogens currently being reviewed by the EPA under the revised 2016 Toxic Substances Control Act. All data drawn from the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory, 2014 – 2018, as reported by manufacturers. Locations include facilities within 50 miles. Data does not include releases at waste disposal/recycling facilities or on-site underground injection wells. Graphic: Soohee Cho/The Intercept]

Among the pollutants being released by Dow in Freeport are 11 carcinogens that are now being assessed or considered for assessment by the EPA under the new toxic chemicals law, according to EPA data. Of those chemicals, five have been shown to increase levels of the very cancers that are elevated in Freeport. Over the past five years, the Dow plant released more than 221,000 pounds of these five chemicals, including 1,2-dichloropropane, which causes bile duct cancer and is a probable cause of cancer of the nasal cavity and inner ear; 1,3-butadiene, which has been shown to increase rates of stomach cancers (and was recently released in an explosion at another chemical plant on the Texas coast); 1,1,2-trichloroethane and 1,1-dichloroethane, both of which have been linked to liver cancer in mice; and 1,2-dichloroethane, a probable carcinogen that has been linked to stomach, liver, and lung cancers.

But initial reports that the EPA recently released on the chemicals it’s investigating omit information that the agency has in its own databases about where and in what quantities these chemicals are produced, which companies make them, and how they’re used. As a result, most people in Freeport — and other polluted communities — do not realize that the industrial facilities near them are releasing dangerous amounts of these carcinogens. Also, because they omit this critical information, the assessments themselves may not reflect the true dangers posed by these substances.

Dow has done little to address the prevalence of cancer in the area, though the company did sponsor a “Sparkles and Spurs” fundraiser in 2018 to help buy a CT scanner for the CHI St. Luke’s Health cancer center in Brazosport, Texas, which is just a 15-minute drive from the Dow Chemical plant. Some residents call it the “Dow Cancer Center” because it was built on land donated by the giant chemical company. The evening of food, fun, and “foot stompin’” country music helped the center purchase the CT scanner, which the hospital is still using to diagnose new cancer cases.

Although they are more likely to get certain cancers, residents of Freeport — where the median household income is less than $37,000 a year — may have a difficult time getting care at the local hospital. “The Dow cancer center won’t take indigent patients,” said Melanie Oldham, a Freeport resident and physical therapist who said that she has worked with hundreds of clients in the area who have had cancer. “People who don’t have good insurance end up having to drive back and forth to either Galveston or to MD Anderson, which is an hour away.” Many of them are workers at the Dow plant, according to Oldham. “These are great jobs until you’re 50 or so,” she said. “That’s when a lot of my patients develop cancer.”

Physical therapist, Melanie Oldham, in her Freeport, Texas home, Wednesday, December 18th, 2019.Todd Spoth for The Intercept.Physical therapist Melanie Oldham at her home in Freeport, Texas, on Dec. 18, 2019. Photo: Todd Spoth for The Intercept]

Oldham pushed for years to get the state to conduct the cancer incidence study it released in 2018. The results confirmed her hunch that cancer rates in Freeport continued to exceed state and national rates. But the vindication brought no relief. “Dow could prevent a lot of these cancers,” said Oldham, “but instead it’s ‘Let’s put money into the local cancer center.’ It’s all about PR for them.”

The CHI St. Luke’s Health-Brazosport Hospital emailed a statement in response to inquiries from The Intercept saying, “CHI St. Luke’s Health is committed to serving all in our community including the poor and vulnerable. We have a consistent stewardship policy across our division that outlines our process for caring for underserved and vulnerable patients who can’t afford healthcare services.”

The Texas Department of State Health Services said it has not investigated the environmental causes of the increased number of cancer cases in Freeport. “Our protocol is to continue to monitor the situation and re-evaluate as more data becomes available,” department spokesperson Chris Van Deusen wrote in an email to The Intercept. In a separate email, Van Deusen wrote that the health department could not provide any earlier reports on cancer rates in Freeport because it doesn’t retain them after four years.

For Clarence Thompson, cancer came as no surprise. Many of the people he worked with at the Dow plant in Freeport have already died of the disease. Thompson, who was employed by a company that contracted with Dow, did pipe-fitting, welding, and machine operation at the Texas plant for more than 25 years and worked there when a cluster of brain cancer cases was identified among workers. Back then Thompson was in near constant motion, according to Eve Thompson, his wife of 43 years. “Even when he’d come in from work, he’d keep working, mow the yard, or tinker with something,” she recently recalled. “I did not marry a lazy man.”

Clarence Thompson stands outside of his Brazoria, Texas home assisted by a walking stick, on Wednesday, December 18th, 2019.Todd Spoth for The Intercept.Clarence Thompson stands outside of his home in Brazoria, Texas, assisted by a walking stick, on Dec. 18, 2019. Photo: Todd Spoth for The Intercept]

The front yard of Clarence Thompson’s home in Brazoria, Texas, Wednesday, December 18th, 2019.Todd Spoth for The Intercept.Willie Leona Willow applies lotion to her father, Clarence Thompson’s face prior to going outside, at Clarence’s home in Brazoria, Texas, Wednesday, December 18th, 2019.Todd Spoth for The Intercept.

Left/Top: The front yard of the Thompson’s home in Brazoria. Right/Bottom: Thompson's daughter, Willie Leona Willow, applies lotion to her father's face prior to going outside.Photos: Todd Spoth for The Intercept]

At 68, Thompson still wants to work, but these days he can barely walk. He has trouble remembering things and difficulty eating, and suffers from near constant pain in his lower back. At first Thompson thought his symptoms were just part of growing older. But Eve suspected that something was wrong. And when she took him to a doctor in June, he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a cancer of the white blood cells. In the months since, Thompson, who is almost 6 feet tall, has lost 50 pounds and has been hospitalized with several life-threatening infections. Thompson said he was exposed to several carcinogens while working at the Dow plant, including ethylene oxide and asbestos, both of which have been linked to multiple myeloma.

Yet even as his vitality is draining away, Thompson worries about the dangers that chemicals from the plant may pose both to other workers and neighbors.

Residents of Freeport are not the only people living dangerously near facilities that emit the carcinogenic chemicals now under scrutiny from the EPA. An analysis performed for this story by Material Research, an environmental data analysis company, shows that the chemicals are being released in particularly large quantities in eight hubs for the production and disposal of plastic. Among the most polluted hotspots are industrial areas in Lake Charles and Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Port Arthur and Houston, Texas; El Dorado, Arkansas; and Louisville and Calvert City, Kentucky.

Many people living in these highly polluted communities don’t know what chemicals they’re breathing, let alone the dangers they present, according to Wilma Subra, an environmental consultant who has worked in all of these hotspots. “But when you go there and say these are the chemicals and these are their known human health impacts, people start saying Oh, I have that, I have that, and I have that,” said Subra. “Most of those facilities have been there two or three generations and people are able to tell you not just what cancers they have but what cancers their parents and aunts and uncles had.”

More Leukemia, Please

While some carcinogenic chemicals that have already gone through the IRIS process are getting a more forgiving assessment through TSCA, the EPA is also refusing to release one IRIS report — on formaldehyde — even as it performs a new assessment of the chemical. Formaldehyde, used in building materials, glue insulation, and fabric, has been widely recognized as a cause of leukemia. In 2018, IRIS’s assessment of the chemical, which was expected to confirm the link to the blood cancer, was ready for “imminent release,” as then-EPA administrator Scott Pruitt told the Senate.

Formaldehyde already accounts for more than half the nationwide cancer risk from air pollution. Because it’s so widespread — more than 93 million pounds have been released in the U.S. since 2014 — and because its safety threshold is now 30 years old and evidence of its carcinogenicity has mounted during that time, updating the number IRIS calculated would likely increase the official cancer risk in many places around the country and drive up the number of census tracts where the cancer rate is officially problematic. But in April, EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler announced that the agency would not be releasing the IRIS report on the chemical, which had been in the works for more than a decade.

The IRIS assessment was one of 11 the agency withheld from publication, according to a March report from the Government Accountability Office. (In its statement, the EPA described these reports as “reduced from the IRIS workflow.”) Wheeler said that the EPA would instead assess formaldehyde through the new toxic chemicals law, thus indefinitely delaying the bad news about formaldehyde and cancer.

It’s worth noting that the Trump appointee who now heads the EPA’s Office of Research Development where IRIS assessments are produced, David Dunlap, used to work for Koch Industries. Georgia-Pacific Chemicals, a subsidiary of Koch, is one of the country’s largest producers of formaldehyde. Before working for Koch, Dunlap handled regulation for the Chlorine Institute, a trade group to which Dow and Olin belong. Dunlap also served on the ACC’s formaldehyde panel, which has disputed the link between the chemical and leukemia. Nancy Beck, the political appointee at the EPA who rewrote the rule determining how the agency would assess chemicals, also worked for the ACC. And David Fischer, the person who replaced her at the agency after she left this summer, is an ACC alum as well, having spent a decade working there on the TSCA.

Honeycutt, who gave the keynote address at the ACC’s “premier” regulatory conference in 2018, also has strong ties to the trade group. Even though he remains in Texas, Honeycutt has had an outsized impact on chemical policy beyond the state and is in close touch with EPA staff. Before the TCEQ publicly released its ethylene oxide assessment, Honeycutt sent it to Anne Idsal, a former TCEQ employee who is now running the EPA’s Air Office, which is steering the agency’s policy on ethylene oxide. A Texan with close ties to the oil and gas industry, Idsal’s father owned the ranch where Dick Cheney shot a Texas attorney while hunting quail.

Honeycutt also emailed an explanation of the assessment to Erin Chancellor, another former TCEQ employee who now heads the EPA’s regional office in Texas, telling her to “hold it close.” Texas’s top toxicologist may have written about ethylene oxide to other EPA staff and industry representatives, but the Texas agency has refused to provide some documents in response to a Sierra Club public records request specifically asking for communications between TCEQ staff and a long list of interested parties, including the American Petroleum Institute, the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, Chevron Phillips, Exxon Mobil, Formosa, Georgia-Pacific, and Dow/DuPont. In September, after the Sierra Club pushed to get the documents the TCEQ had withheld, the attorney general of Texas ruled in its favor. In response, the TCEQ took the unusual step of suing the attorney general rather than complying with the decision. That case is now pending.

Asked about Honeycutt’s emails to Idsal and Chancellor, the TCEQ’s spokesperson wrote in an email that “TCEQ routinely interacts and share information with EPA.” His email also said that the state attorney general didn’t rule on whether certain documents “fall within exceptions to disclosure under the Texas Public Information Act” and that the only way to get him to address the question was to sue.

Meanwhile, Honeycutt is also making changes that will affect how all cancer-causing chemicals are treated throughout the country. In 2017, then-EPA administrator Scott Pruitt named Honeycutt chair of the agency’s influential Science Advisory Board. The group is supposed to provide scientific advice to the administrator, but under Trump it has been stacked with industry apologists. This summer, Honeycutt, along with fellow advisory board members from Dow Chemical, Exxon Mobil, and the American Chemistry Council, quietly began proposing profound and lasting changes to the EPA’s cancer guidelines.

Throughout the EPA’s almost 50-year history, the agency has held that there is no safe level of a carcinogen. But Honeycutt and his colleagues on the advisory board have proposed reversing that assumption. “They want to flip it so there can be safe levels of cancer-causing chemicals,” said Jen Sass, a senior scientist at NRDC, who sees the move as a ruse for allowing companies to freely release pollutants. “Their presumption is that low levels of carcinogens aren’t harmful and might even be good for you. And industry wants to define low level as whatever level you’re exposed to.”

In an emailed response to questions about the cancer guidelines, a spokesperson for the agency wrote, “The EPA is currently considering the SAB member’s individual comments as well as those provided by the public as they consider next steps for this project.”

Because the nation’s cancer guidelines are rewritten very infrequently — the most recent version was published in 2005 — Sass fears that the new ones will have an enduring impact. “Guidances like this last for decades,” she said. “I don’t know how this could be undone later.”

[A white substance resembling steam billows out of Vantage's factory in Gurnee, Ill. on Jan. 2, 2020. Vantage is one of the factories in Lake County that emits ethylene oxide, a gas known to cause cancer. Pat Nabong for The Intercept.Steam billows out of Vantage’s factory in Gurnee, Ill., on Jan. 2, 2020. Vantage is one of the factories in Lake County that emits ethylene oxide. Photo: Pat Nabong for The Intercept]

Making America Sick Again

Other hard-to-reverse plans that could result in increased cancers rates throughout the country are also quietly moving ahead. On December 31, the deregulatory dream of tobacco industry attorney Christopher Horner took another step closer to becoming national policy. While Trump was preparing to ring in the new year at Mar-a-Lago with Rudy Giuliani, Honeycutt released an analysis of the proposed secret science rule — now rebranded “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science” — on behalf of the EPA’s science advisory board.The EPA now has to answer several questions the board posed in that document. Once it is finalized, the rule will have to undergo a 60-day comment period. But after that, the once pie-in-the-sky scheme is likely to become the law of the land.

If and when it does get finalized and survives the legal challenges it will certainly face, the secret science rule will be even more crippling to health-based regulations than Horner first envisioned. His original idea was to require that studies used to make regulatory decisions be reproducible — which sounds fine in theory until you understand that they are often based on confidential private health data of thousands of individuals. And an earlier version of the EPA’s proposed rule called for placing these restrictions only on certain studies. But the EPA amended the proposal last year to require that all raw data and models underlying regulatory decisions be made available for reanalysis, with exceptions possible only on the administrator’s whim.

The requirement would mean that even science that was used to guide past regulations may be up for grabs. The EPA’s 2016 ethylene oxide assessment was partially based on breast cancer incidence data that contained confidential personal information, so under the proposed secret science rule that data could be ruled illegitimate. The rule could also undercut the utility of all the data that Simon Strong is collecting in honor of his son. Because that information will be collected in accordance with standard privacy protocols, it wouldn’t be considered in regulatory decision-making.

And the EPA could be prevented from basing any regulation on studies of cancer clusters like the one near the Dow plant in Freeport, Texas. “The way you show a cluster is to go to a community and enter their confidential health information and compare that to other areas,” said Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, one of dozens of groups that oppose the proposed rule. “But you wouldn’t be able to release that raw data because it’s confidential.”

The rule could render other groundbreaking science useless for protecting public health, too, such as studies showing the link between air pollution and lung cancer, between smoking and various cancers, or between the industrial contaminant PFOA and testicular and kidney cancer. The change would mark a profound shift both for the U.S. government and for the American people. “It’s saying what’s important is no longer the public interest but the industrial interest,” said Rosenberg. “Cancer is the most obvious and feared sign of ignoring public interest. And this will lead to more cancer.”

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/24032021/formosa-petrochemical-plant-cancer-alley-louisiana-report/

https://theintercept.com/2020/06/25/environmental-activists-charged-terrorizing-louisiana-formosa/

TWO LEADERS OF the long-running fight for environmental justice in Louisiana turned themselves in to police in Baton Rouge Thursday morning. The activists, who work in a part of the state known as “Cancer Alley,” faced charges of “terrorizing” related to a nonviolent protest action. Civil liberties attorneys are calling the charges a dramatic escalation of a yearslong effort by the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries to criminalize efforts to halt the expansion of polluting facilities in the state — part of a nationwide trend of cracking down on dissent around climate change issues.

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The accusations against the activists, Anne Rolfes and Kate McIntosh, stem from a seemingly innocuous activist stunt carried out in December, the day after a festival designed to draw attention to the environmental misdeeds of Formosa Plastics. The Taiwanese petrochemical company plans to build a massive plastics manufacturing complex in a largely Black Louisiana community that has already suffered health problems linked to local industry. In October, Formosa agreed to a $50 million settlement for dumping pollutants, including the small pellets that form the building blocks for plastic products known as nurdles, into Texas’s Lavaca Bay — the largest settlement of a Clean Water Act lawsuit filed by private citizens.

with a key environmental permit still pending for Formosa in Louisiana, the action — dubbed “Nurdlefest” — was meant to pressure the state’s Department of Environmental Quality to scrutinize the company’s record. Boxes of the plastic pellets, used as evidence in the Texas case, were carted to the front of the agency, where around 75 people gathered in the rain.

What apparently terrorized community members, however, was a container of the pellets that appeared on the porch of an oil and gas lobbyist, with a detailed note attached, explaining what they were and their Texas origin. “We have delivered this package of nurdles as a reminder – Louisiana does not need anymore pollution, plastics or otherwise,” the letter said. “We demand that LDEQ DENY Formosa’s air emissions permit application.”

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The letter was signed by Concerned Citizens of Louisiana and included the phone number of Bill Quigley, the activists’ pro bono attorney.

The Baton Rouge Police Department apparently agreed that the plastic particles were threatening. “A note was observed on the top of the package indicating not to open the container as the contents could be hazardous. Police requested Hazmat to be contacted,” spokesperson Don Coppola told The Intercept. Although the note discouraged against removing the nurdles or leaving them around children or pets, it did not describe them as “hazardous.” It included a Formosa phone number for safely recycling the material.

Rolfes and McIntosh, who are respectively the director of and a program assistant at the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, which provides support to groups of community members living near polluting facilities, face a maximum of 15 years in prison and $15,000 in fines for so-called terrorizing — defined as “the intentional communication of information that the commission of a crime of violence is imminent or in progress or that a circumstance dangerous to human life exists or is about to exist” — with the intention of causing members of the public to fear for their safety.

“This is an unwarranted escalation because they are using the term ‘terrorizing,’” said Pam Spees, senior attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, who is representing McIntosh and Rolfes. “It is imposing unfairly and inappropriately a label on people that have been peacefully working for years to raise awareness of the impact of industry on frontline communities. To use that word in a context like this is potentially damaging and chilling to others.”

THE CHARGES AGAINST Rolfes and McIntosh come on the heels of a series of incidents where environmental activists have been dealt hefty charges for actions challenging the petrochemical, oil, and gas industries in Louisiana.

In August 2018, Louisiana legislators passed a law establishing a new felony charge for anyone who trespasses on critical infrastructure facilities, including chemical manufacturing facilities and oil and gas pipeline construction sites. Over the following couple months, police used the new law to charge 14 people protesting the oil company Energy Transfer’s Bayou Bridge pipeline, as well as a journalist. Local prosecutors have not yet acted on the charges.

[pix Taiwanese petrochemical company Formosa agreed to a $50 million settlement for dumping small pellets that make up the building blocks for plastic products, known as “nurdles,” into Texas’s Lavaca Bay.

Photo: Courtesy of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade

Last October, police charged Gregory Manning, the legally blind pastor of Broadmoor Community Church and a member of the Coalition Against Death Alley, with a felony for allegedly inciting a riot. Authorities said Manning failed to immediately leave a hallway outside the office of the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry during a protest against the association’s influence over state politics. A prosecutor later dropped all charges.

This spring, legislators passed an enhanced version of the critical infrastructure law, which would have ramped up charges for trespass during a state of emergency. Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards vetoed the bill.

To Rolfes and McIntosh’s attorneys, the timing of the latest charges is particularly suspect. At 9:30 a.m. on Juneteenth, the June 19 holiday celebrating the emancipation of slaves in the U.S., Quigley — Rolfes and McIntosh’s pro bono lawyer, who is also a professor at Loyola University New Orleans — received a phone call from a Baton Rouge Police Department detective, notifying him that a warrant was out for the pair’s arrest. (Formosa and the Baton Rouge Police Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)

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“It seems more than a little suspicious that this long dormant warrant was activated 12 hours after Formosa lost in court. It seems like it’s clearly retaliation.”

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Both the activists were en route to a ceremony at a burial site for enslaved people, located in a field where Formosa plans to build one of its facilities. The right to carry out the ceremony had been hard-won: Formosa had fought in court for the past week to prevent community members from holding the gathering. A judge denied the company’s final appeal only the night before.

The detective told Quigley that the charges had been filed in April, but they’d held off on issuing the warrant because of risks associated with the coronavirus pandemic. “It seems more than a little suspicious that this long dormant warrant was activated 12 hours after Formosa lost in court,” said Quigley. “It seems like it’s clearly retaliation.”

Spees, the Center for Constitutional Rights attorney, said, “If there’s such a danger, why wait seven months and pick the day of a community celebration of its liberation from slavery to send that message?”

In response to the latest charges, local organizers are launching the Alliance to Defend Democracy to push back on the increasing criminalization.

“Five years ago — maybe three years ago — this kind of charge against an activist would have had an isolating effect. The movements are stronger now,” said Spees. “It’s an overreach, and it’s going to backfire.”

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big Plastic Asks for $1 Billion Coronavirus Bailout

Sharon Lerner

The companies seeking taxpayer dollars to fund recycling already have hundreds of billions at their disposal to pay for the processing of their products.

READ MORE →

Toxic PFAS Fallout Found Near Incinerator in Upstate New York

Sharon Lerner

PFAS contamination was found in soil and water near an incinerator in New York state that has been burning firefighting foam for the Department of Defense.

READ MORE →

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it  took Maine Governor Janet Mills 12 days since the first case of novel coronavirus hit to implement the type of restrictive social distancing policies scientists overwhelmingly recommend to halt disease spread, including the closure of nonessential businesses.

It took her only five days, however, to delay the state’s ban on single-use plastic bags, using a scientifically questionable theory that reusable bags pose an outsized risk of spreading COVID-19.

Since Mills’ March 17 order, reusable grocery bags in Maine have become taboo. City officials are now discouraging shopping from bringing them to the store, claiming they will threaten grocery story workers. “According to current research and understanding, COVID-19 can survive on various surfaces for hours and in some cases days,” Portland City Manager Jon Jennings said in a news release last week.

And though Mills was the first state governor in America to give credence to this theory, she hasn’t been the last. Over the weekend, New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu outright prohibited shoppers from bringing reusable bags to stores. Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker did the same on Wednesday. “From now on, reusable bags are prohibited and all regulations on plastic bag bans are lifted,” he said.

This, however, is likely just the beginning of the plastic industry’s war on reusable bags. Because as the pandemic has picked up steam in America, so too has the industry’s push for policy and culture shifts to encourage single-use plastics, and ban reusable alternatives. Their allies in the news media, oil and gas industry, and conservative think tank world are all quickly lining up behind them—and together, they’re putting pressure on the public and the federal government get on board.

Last week, the Plastics Industry Association asked the Department of Health and Human Services to make a national pronouncement supporting single-use plastics and advocating against reusable grocery bags, claiming they will worsen the pandemic. “Study after study after study have shown that reusable bags can carry viruses and bacteria, spread them throughout a grocery store, and live on surfaces for up to three days,” they claimed.

But those three studies don’t actually say what the industry claims. Taken together, they do not provide sufficient evidence that reusable grocery bags pose a greater threat to consumers during the COVID-19 pandemic than single-use plastic grocery bags.

Let’s go through them one by one.

1) The 10-year-old American Chemistry Council-funded study that looked at 84 reusable bags in two states and found no disease-causing bacteria

The first piece of research that the plastic industry says strongly suggests a correlation between reusable grocery bags and coronavirus spread was this 2010 study funded by the American Chemistry Council, an industry group which represents plastics interests. Conducted by researchers at the University of Arizona, it was published in the journal Food Protection Trends in 2011.

Analyzing just 84 reusable bags collected in California and Arizona, the studies authors concluded that “Large numbers of bacteria were found in almost all bags and coliform bacteria in half.” They did not, however, find any pathogenic bacteria or strains of E. Colithat actually make you sick. As Consumer Reports noted at the time, “They only found bacteria that don’t normally cause disease, but do cause disease in people with weakened immune systems.”

“A person eating an average bag of salad greens gets more exposure to these bacteria than if they had licked the insides of the dirtiest bag from this study,” Michael Hansen, a senior staff scientist at Consumers Union, said in the article. “These bacteria can be found lots of places, so no need to go overboard.”

The reason there was bacteria on the bags was because people didn’t wash them. If people washed the bags, the study said, 99.9 percent of all bacteria was destroyed.

2) The study that looked at 30 reusable bags and said essentially the same thing

The second study, published in the international journalFood Controlin 2019, found microbes capable of causing food-borne illness on the bags. This time, half the bags tested had coliform bacteria on them and some even had E. coli.

This makes sense, again, because the bags had a bunch of food in them, and were not washed or sanitized. As Johns Hopkins University infectious disease specialist told Bustle at the time, “Reusable shopping bags, like anything, can accumulate micoorganisms from the environment. Unless the bag is visibly soiled, most of the risk is not worth worrying about.”

Of course, this means coronavirus could be on your bag, because coronavirus can live on plastic surfaces for up to 3 days. But neither of these studies indicate that it has any greater risk of being on your reusable bag than, say, your money, your phone, or your hands, which also get a lot of use at the grocery story. Nor do they indicate that reusable bags made of plastic have a greater risk of holding the virus than single-use plastic bags, which could be infected with pathogens during transportation, manufacturing, or handling.

Cameron Wolfe, an associate professor of medicine in the division of infectious diseases at Duke University, told the Wall Street Journal something similar, when talking about how companies like Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts have stopped filling customers’ reusable cups out of fear of coronavirus. “It’s drawing a pretty long bow to believe this will be meaningfully impactful,” he said. “It’s an incredibly low likelihood that the cup would be the primary vehicle for transmission to occur.”

The article added: “Coronavirus can survive for a period outside the body and is transmitted through droplets like those generated by a cough or a sneeze. If a cup is infected, its owner probably is too, said Mr. Wolfe, making handing over cash and touching door handles potentially just as risky.

“You’d have a better impact if you told customers with active coughs not to come in, or to use hand sanitizer before approaching the coffee stand,” he said.”

3) The study that looked at one reusable bag that someone had literally vomited next to in a bathroom and then gave to a group of children.

Yeah, honestly, like I can’t even go there with this one. You can read about that study here.

Also, coronavirus is not a norovirus. It is literally not the same thing.

No evidence, no problem

There is certainly a chance that coronavirus could live on our reusable grocery bags if those bags come in contact with an infected person—particularly if those bags are made of plastic. A study published recently in the New England Journal of Medicine found that the novel coronavirus ismoststable on plastic surfaces.

But that also includes single-use plastic surfaces, said Aaron Bernstein, the director of Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Center for Climate, Health and the Global Environment. “This suggests that relying on plastic bags may be the best way to ensure the virus persists in the environment and facilitates spread of the disease.”

Clearly, there is still a debate to be had over the efficacy of plastic bag policies for coronavirus—especially since plastic bag bans in themselves are attempts to address climate change and ocean pollution, two other pressing global crises. It would be foolish to prematurely stop an attempt to address two global crises without a baseline sort of consensus that it would even remotely help the other.

The right and its allies, however, appear to have made up their minds. Energy in Depth, a pro-oil-and-gas drilling industry front group formed by the American Petroleum Institute, wrote an article claiming coronavirus will spread without more single-use plastic bags. The New York Post and the Wall Street Journalhave written editorials in support of reversing bag bans. Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative anti-climate group, is taking out ads on Facebook claiming that plastic bag bans help spread the coronavirus infectio.

[graf twt]

it makes sense why so many right-leaning interest groups would come together on this issue. Before coronavirus, single-use plastic products were falling out of favor, as studies showed they were exacerbating climate change and destroying the ocean. Now, the industry is hoping COVID-19 will make everyone forget all that.

“As the coronavirus spreads across the country, single-use plastics will only become more vital,” Plastics Industry Association President Tony Radoszewski said in a statement last week. “We live longer, healthier, and better because of single-use plastics.”

Bernstein, however, is hoping that we remember something else. “In a crisis, we need science to guide us,” he said. “And that means science done by credible investigators who are supported by organizations without a vested financial interest in a specific outcome of their research.”

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20032020/appalachia-future-center-petrochemicals-coronavirus-plastic-ethane

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https://www.ecowatch.com/plastic-eating-caterpillar-2645437623.html

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**suing to stop the coming plastics surge**Louisiana regulators recently approved air permits to build what would be one of the largest plastics plants in the world, even though it would dump 800 tons of toxic pollution into a local community and contribute to the worldwide plastic pollution crisis. We’re representing people in St. James Parish, a region that’s already surrounded by industrial plants an

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congressional Democrats Join the Debate Over Plastics’ Booming Future

:{BY: JAMES BRUGGERS

A new bill would impose a three-year moratorium on new plant construction in parts of Appalachia and the Gulf Coast. Read More}:

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booming Plastics Industry Faces Backlash as Data About Environmental Harm Grows

BY JAMES BRUGGERS

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booming Plastics Industry Faces Backlash as Data About Environmental Harm Grows

BY: JAMES BRUGGERS

Environmentalists cite “an incredible disconnect” between government support for plastics manufacturing and evidence of the industry’s pollution and climate impact.
Read More

LNG, Plastics and Other Gas Industry Plans Would Add Climate Pollution Equal to 50 New Coal Plants

desmog 1.20

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https://theintercept.com/2019/07/20/plastics-industry-plastic-recycling/

many lnx

STUDENTS AT Westmeade Elementary School worked hard on their dragon. And it paid off. The plastic bag receptacle that the kids painted green and outfitted with triangular white teeth and a “feed me” sign won the students from the Nashville suburb first place in a recycling box decorating contest. The idea, as Westmeade’s proud principal told a local TV news show, was to help the environment. But the real story behind the dragon — as with much of the escalating war over plastic waste — is more complicated.

The contest was sponsored by A Bag’s Life, a recycling promotion and education effort of the American Progressive Bag Alliance, a lobbying group that fights restrictions on plastic. That organization is part of the Plastics Industry Association, a trade group that includes Shell Polymers, LyondellBasell, Exxon Mobil, Chevron Phillips, DowDuPont, and Novolex — all of which profit hugely from the continued production of plastics. And even as A Bag’s Life was encouraging kids to spread the uplifting message of cleaning up plastic waste, its parent organization, the American Progressive Bag Alliance, was backing a state bill that would strip Tennesseans of their ability to address the plastics crisis. The legislation would make it illegal for local governments to ban or restrict bags and other single-use plastic products — one of the few things shown to actually reduce plastic waste.

A week after Westmeade’s dragon won the contest, the APBA got its own reward: The plastic preemption bill passed the Tennessee state legislature. Weeks later, the governor signed it into law, throwing a wrench into an effort underway in Memphis to charge a fee for plastic bags. Meanwhile, A Bag’s Life gave the Westmeade kids who worked on the bag monster a $100 gift card to use “as they please.” And with that, a minuscule fraction of its vast wealth, the plastics industry applied a green veneer to its increasingly bitter and desperate fight to keep profiting from a product that is polluting the world.

[Read Our Complete Coverage

Bad Chemistry]

A Bag’s Life is just one small part of a massive, industry-led effort now underway to suppress meaningful efforts to reduce plastic waste while keeping the idea of recycling alive.The reality of plastics recycling? It’s pretty much already dead. In 2015, the U.S. recycled about 9 percent of its plastic waste, and since then the number has dropped even lower. The vast majority of the 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic ever produced — 79 percent — has ended up in landfills or scattered all around the world. And as for those plastic shopping bags the kids were hoping to contain: Less than 1 percent of the tens of billions of plastic bags used in the U.S. each year are recycled.

This is not to say that we shouldn’t try to properly dispose of the array of toys, single-use clamshells, bottles, bags, takeout containers, iced coffee cups, straws, sachets, yogurt tubs, pouches, candy bar wrappers, utensils, chip bags, toiletry tubes, electronics, and lids for everything that passes through our lives daily. We have to. But we are well past the point where the heartfelt efforts of schoolchildren or anyone else on the consumer end can solve the plastics problem. It no longer matters how many hoots we give. There is already way too much plastic that won’t decompose and ultimately has nowhere to go, whether it’s mashed into a dragon container or not.

China’s National Sword

China’s decision in 2017 to stop receiving the vast majority of plastic waste from other countries blew the flimsy lid off our dysfunctional recycling system. That year, when the Chinese government announced the National Sword policy, as it’s called, the U.S. sent 931 million kilograms of plastic waste to China and Hong Kong. The U.S. has been offloading vast bundles of scrap this way since at least 1994, when the Environmental Protection Agency began tracking plastics exports. The practice has served to both mask the mounting crisis and absolve U.S. consumers of guilt. But in fact, much of the “recycled” plastic scrap that the U.S. sent to China appears to have been burned or buried instead of being refashioned into new products.

Although China’s turnabout made the failure of the plastics recycling system suddenly and undeniably obvious, in truth the plastics problem has been with us as long as plastic has. Over the decades, as production has grown exponentially, we’ve never managed to repurpose even one-tenth of our plastic waste. Since the EPA began tracking plastics recycling in 1994, when the U.S. recycled less than 5 percent, the rate went up only about 5 percent, peaking at 9.5 percent in 2014. Although there is no data before 1994, the rate was almost certainly even lower then. Some of that failure can be blamed on careless consumers, but much of the waste that is dutifully put into recycling bins and bags also gets landfilled and burned because there’s no market for it.

Much of the “recycled” plastic scrap that the U.S. sent to China appears to have been burned or buried instead of being refashioned into new products.

The plastics problem has been growing exponentially for decades. In 1967, when Dustin Hoffman’s character in “The Graduate” was being advised to go into plastics, less than 25 million tons were produced each year. Even back then, the companies that made the plastic were already aware of the growing waste problem. Yet by 1980, production had doubled. Ten years later, it doubled again to 100 million tons, surpassing the amount of steel produced globally. Today, the plastics industry, estimated to be worth more than $4 trillion, generates more than 300 million tons of plastic a year according to the most recent records — nearly half of which is for single-use items, meaning that it will almost instantly become trash.

With the institution of China’s new policy in January 2018, the extent of the plastic waste crisis became dramatically more visible. Around the world, bales of used plastic that just a year earlier would have been destined for China began piling up. In the U.S., some cities have stopped their plastics recycling programs altogether.

Without good alternatives, the U.S. is now burning six times the amount of plastic it’s recycling — even though the incineration process releases cancer-causing pollutants into the air and creates toxic ash, which also needs to be disposed of somewhere. And poor people are stuck with the worst consequences of the plastics crisis. Eight out of 10 incinerators in the U.S. are in communities that are either poorer or have fewer white people than the rest of the country, and residents living near them are exposed to the toxic air pollution their combustion produces.

Globally, too, the problem is being dumped on the less fortunate and less powerful. Because the U.S. can no longer ship its plastic waste to China, much of that waste is going to Turkey, Senegal, and other countries that are ill-equipped to deal with it. In May, the most recent month for which data is available, the U.S. sent 64.9 million kilograms of plastic scrap to 58 countries. Thailand, India, and Indonesia — where more than 80 percent of waste is mismanaged, according to data published in Science — are among the countries that now find themselves besieged with U.S. plastic that’s being illegally dumped and burned.

All the Plastics in the Seas

The terrifying news about plastic seems to be as inescapable as the plastic itself, tiny bits of which are now almost everywhere. One study found these “microplastics” in the Pyrenees mountain air 100 miles from the nearest city. Another found that microplastics are being turned into sewage sludge and spread on fields that grow food. And, as we know from the plastic-filled whales that regularly wash up dead, the oceans are awash in plastic waste and now contain some 150 million tons of the stuff — a mass expected soon to surpass the weight of all the fish in the seas.

We humans also have plastic lodged in our bodies. The substance often sold to us as protection from contamination is in both food and water. Bottled water, sales of which are increasing in part because people are seeking alternatives to contaminated local water supplies, now contains plastic as well. A 2018 study found that 93 percent of bottled water samples contained microplastics. While all the big brands tested positive for microplastics, the worst was Nestlé Pure Life, which claims that its water “goes through a 12-step quality process, so you can trust every drop.”

It’s worth noting that in both 2017 and 2018, Nestlé ranked in the top three among brands whose plastic trash was most often collected in global cleanup effortsconducted by the environmental group Break Free From Plastic.

The confluence of terrible news has taken public outrage over plastic to a new level. Once regarded mostly as an eyesore or a nuisance, plastic waste is now widely understood to be a cause of species extinction, ecological devastation, and human health problems. And because more than 99 percent of plastic is derived from oil, natural gas, and coal — and because its destruction also uses fossil fuels — environmental groups now recognize plastic as a major contributor to climate change. Naturalist David Attenborough has likened the shift in public opinion over plastics to the process through which the public reached a consensus on the harms of slavery.

Once regarded mostly as an eyesore or a nuisance, plastic waste is now widely understood to be a cause of species extinction, ecological devastation, and human health problems.

Between extraction, refining, and waste management, the production and incineration of plastics will add more than 850 million metric tons of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere this year alone — an amount equal to the emissions from 189 500-megawatt coal power plants, according to a report from the Center for International Environmental Law.

Recycled plastics — once seen as a sign of environmental virtue — is increasingly recognized as posing threats to our health. Plastics contain additives that determine its properties, including stability, color, and flexibility. Most of the thousands of these chemicals aren’t regulated, but it’s clear that some of those additives, which end up in recycled plastics, are dangerous. One study found that half of recycled plastics in India contained a flame retardant associated with neurological, reproductive, and developmental harms.

Black plastic, used in everything from children’s toys to kitchen utensils, food packaging, cellphone cases, and thermoses, appears to be particularly dangerous.The plastic is often sourced from recycled electronics that contain phthalates, flame retardants, and heavy metals, such as cadmium, lead, and mercury. Even at very low levels, these chemicals can cause serious reproductive and developmental problems.

But most of the additives aren’t tracked or well studied. “The industry has no idea what they’re putting in the plastic and who’s putting it in,” said Andrew Turner, a British chemist who recently found toxic chemicals in 40 percent of the black plastic toys, thermoses, cocktail stirrers, and utensils he tested. In some plastic, he found the chemicals present at 30 times safety standards set by governments.

Even chemicals that are regulated often have limits set for electronics but not for recycled products. “You’ve got something that wouldn’t be compliant with the regulations as an electric item because its levels are too high, but because it’s turned into a fork, there’s nothing to stop it from being used,” Turner said. Antimony, which Turner found in food containers, toys, and office supplies, “is restricted in drinking water, but not in electrical waste.” Turner and Zhanyun Wang, another scientist I spoke with who studies chemical additives to plastics, told me that they no longer use black plastic utensils. “Given the option, I’d prefer something white or clear,” said Turner, adding that he tries to avoid utensils made of any kind of plastic.

The solution to this global mess clearly has to be much bigger than personal cutlery choices.Among the organizations demanding that we push past the idea of recycling and require corporations to limit plastics production are Greenpeace, the Surfrider Foundation, As You Sow, the Rainforest Alliance and 5Gyres, an organization started by a couple who sailed across the Pacific Ocean on a raft made out of discarded bottles. Fueled by a spike in consumer frustration with products that make them complicit in the problem, plastic-free restaurants and grocery stores are now emerging.

Taxes, bans, and fees on plastic products have been catching on around the world.In March, the European Union voted to ban single-use plastics by 2021. In June, Canada followed suit, with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau vowing to not just ban single-use plastics such as bags, straws, and cutlery, but also to hold plastics manufacturers responsible for their waste. One hundred and forty-one countries, including China, Bangladesh, India, and 34 African countries, have implemented taxes or partial bans on plastics.

In the U.S., the Trump administration has worked against international efforts to crack down on plastic waste, so cities and towns are leading the way. While only eight states have enacted plastic restrictions, more than 330 local plastic bag ordinances have passed in 24 states. Some federal lawmakers have also recognized that federal action is necessary to beat back the mounting tide of plastic. “Plastics recycling is not a realistic solution to the plastic pollution crisis. Most consumer plastics are economically impractical to recycle based on market conditions alone,” Rep. Alan Lowenthal and Sen. Tom Udall wrote in a letter to President Donald Trump in June, noting that the “spread of single-use plastic products has led to widespread pollution of plastic in the U.S. and has caused a growing financial burden on state agencies, local governments and taxpayers for remediation.”

Big Plastic Fights Back

Even the executives at a recent plastics industry conference admit how bad the crisis is — at least to one another. All we hear is “you’ve got to get rid of plastics,” Garry Kohl, of PepsiCo, said to his fellow members of the Plastics Industry Association at a conference in April. Gathered in the gilded ballroom of a Dallas hotel, the representatives of big plastics manufacturers, recyclers, raw materials providers, extruders, brand owners, and others in the plastics business grappled aloud about their role in the crisis. Especially difficult, said Kohl, who directs packaging innovation of PepsiCo’s snacks and foods, was the widely circulated picture of a dead plastic-filled albatross. “This is very emotional for our senior leaders,” Kohl said, as the now iconic picture of the albatross — really just a few feathers and a decaying beak arranged around an assortment of bottle caps, lighter parts, and plastic bits — flashed above him. “They’re all talking about the albatross.”

Patty Long, interim president and chief executive officer of the Plastics Industry Association, the group that convened the Texas meeting, also acknowledged the pain of being the public face of an industry held responsible for the devastation of the natural world. Long admitted that she squirmed her way through another social media phenomenon that, along with the albatross, has changed the course of the war over plastics: the video of the sea turtle with a plastic straw jammed in its nostril. Long isn’t the only one. Since it was posted in 2015, the eight excruciating minutes in which marine biologists yank at the plastic straw with pliers while the creature squirms and bleeds, has been viewed 36 million times.

In thisNov. 2, 2014 photo provided by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a black footed albatrosschick with plastics in its stomach lies dead on Midway Atoll in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. The remote atoll where thousands died is now a delicate sanctuary for millions of seabirds. Midway sits amid a collection of man-made debris called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Along the paths of Midway, there are piles of feathers with rings of plastic in the middle - remnants of birds that died with the plastic in their guts. Each year the agency removes about 20 tons of plastic and debris that washes ashore from surrounding waters. (Dan Clark/USFWS via AP)In this photo provided by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a black footed albatross chick with plastics in its stomach lies dead on Midway Atoll in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands on Nov. 2, 2014. Photo: Dan Clark/USFWS via AP]

All in all, Long admitted, it had been a tough year, in which some 376 anti-plastics bills were introduced, and the perception of the plastics industry has continued to “spiral down exponentially.” The Plastics Industry Association is taking its cratering image seriously, working to offset it with pro-plastics presentations for elementary and middle school students, a plastics ambassadors program and, so young people can “feel good about” working in the industry, Long said, a “future leaders in plastics” group.

But discomfort over the dead albatross, the bloody turtle, and industry’s public image notwithstanding, the companies that make billions from plastics have no intention of slowing down. Instead, the industry is gearing up for the fight of its life, which may explain why an expert in actual warfare gave the keynote at the plastics conference.

The industry is gearing up for the fight of its life, which may explain why an expert in actual warfare gave the keynote at the plastics conference.

In 2000, U.S. Navy Cmdr. Kirk Lippold guided his crew through a terrorist attack on the USS Cole, in which 17 sailors were killed and 39 injured. Now a crisis management consultant, Lippold told the audience at the Plastics Industry Association meeting a grueling story of mass casualties, near-death experiences, and a shrapnel-filled vessel taking on water. His tale, which ended with Lippold piloting his hobbled ship back into the open seas with the national anthem blaring, suggested that with enough fierce determination, the plastics executives too might be able to sail past the threats facing them.

At stake for them is not just the current plastics market now worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually, but its likely expansion. Falling oil and gas prices mean that the cost of making new plastic, already very low, will be even cheaper. The price drop has led to more than 700 plastics industry projects now in the works, including expansions of old plants and the construction of new ones by Chevron, Shell, Dow, Exxon, Formosa Plastics, Nova Chemicals, and Bayport Polymers, among other companies, according to a presentation from the regulatory affairs director of the BASF Corporation at the plastics industry conference.

The growing output of new cheap plastic further undermines the industry’s own argument that recycling can resolve the waste crisis. It’s already impossible for most recycled plastic to compete with “virgin” plastic in the marketplace. With the exception of bottles made of PET (No. 1) and HDPE (No. 2), the rest of the waste is essentially worthless. Around 30 percent of both types of plastic bottles were sold for recycling in 2017, though some of those may have wound up being landfilled or incinerated. The recent fossil fuel boom makes it even cheaper to make new plastic and thus, even more difficult to sell the recycled product. This, in turn, makes the plastics companies’ push for recycling that much more implausible — and their battle to kill efforts to limit plastics production even more desperate.

Banning Plastic Bans

Matt Seaholm, the executive director of the American Progressive Bag Alliance, seemed to relish his part in the fight. While others at the plastics industry conference tended toward hand-wringing and at least some acknowledgment of the problem of plastic waste, Seaholm was unapologetic in his antagonism of environmental groups that have been calling attention to it. In Texas, Seaholm, the former national director of the Koch brothers-led Americans for Prosperity, positioned himself as the enemy of environmentalists.

“They hate what we’re doing,” Seaholm told his plastics industry colleagues at the conference with a mischievous grin. “We wear this as a badge of honor.” The fact that environmental groups oppose the APBA’s tactics, Seaholm added, is evidence that his lobbying group “must be doing something right.”

The APBA began pushing back against plastics restrictions around the country in 2011. Around 2015, the industry group upped its game. Rather than just opposing individual bans, the APBA began lobbying for state preemption laws. The approach, which another Koch brothers-affliated group, the American Legislative Exchange Council, has used to fight local action on other issues, including pesticide restrictions and living wage laws, prevents cities and towns from passing local plastic bans. In the past eight years, the American Chemistry Council has helped pass preemption bills based on ALEC’s model in 13 states. According to Seaholm, who joined the group in 2016, 42 percent of Americans now live in states where they can’t pass local bans on plastics.

Other plastics industry lobbying groups, including ALEC’s American City County Exchange and the National Federation of Independent Business, have also argued for preemption, or “uniformity” as they call it, on the grounds that bans hurt businesses that use plastic. While presenting bans as bad for both businesses and poor people, who they claim will be disproportionately affected, the industry has also used campaign donations to make its case. Over the past year, the Flexible Packaging Association, whose members include Dow, Exxon Mobil Chemical, SABIC, Chevron Phillips Chemical, and LyondellBasell, more than doubled its spending nationwide. The group significantly upped its contributions to Tennessee lawmakers, for instance, in the year leading up to the passage of the bag preemption bill there.

While the APBA is fighting hard to push plastics preemption, the group’s national spending is unclear because as a wholly owned entity of the Plastics Industry Association, there’s no federal requirement to make its expenditures public.But state lobbying disclosures show that it has spent millions fighting bag bans. This advocacy of plastic bans puts Plastics Industry Associations members, including PepsiCo, Walmart, and the Carlyle Group, in an uncomfortable situation. All these brands have made public sustainability pledges that appear to be at odds with the group’s fights against local laws limiting plastic.

Asked about the apparent dissonance between its sustainability pledge and participation in the Plastics Industry Association, Walmart provided an emailed statement saying that “Walmart’s aspiration is to achieve zero plastic waste. We are taking actions across our business to use less plastic, recycle more and support innovations to improve plastic waste reduction systems.” The statement also said that Walmart has “asked our suppliers to reduce unnecessary plastic packaging, increase packaging recyclability and increase recycled content, and to help us educate customers on reducing, reusing and recycling plastic.”

PepsiCo and the Carlyle Group did not respond to requests for comment.

Seaholm appeared not to care about the terrible optics of the industry’s fight against efforts to protect the environment with plastic bans, which he derided as “primarily driven by emotion.” “They’re doing it because it feels good,” Seaholm told the plastics executives in Dallas. “They get to high-five each other.”

[letter-1563484430At left, Kathy Kent with her daughter, Suzette Head, collecting garbage on the beach. At right is Suzette’s handwritten speech, which she delivered in front of the Isle of Palms, South Carolina, city council on May 26, 2015. Photos: Courtesy of Kathy Kent]

The Plastics Industry Vs. Two Little Girls

In Isle of Palms, South Carolina, the people who spearheaded the state’s first plastic bag ban in 2015 wouldn’t disagree that their effort was driven by emotion. Suzette Head and Mila Kosmos, who live in the small coastal town near Charleston, screeched with joy when their local ordinance passed. “I felt happy that the bags would be gone,” Mila, now 9, remembered recently.

The effort began with another emotion, when the two girls were in kindergarten: sadness. Suzette was at her local aquarium when a naturalist held up a jar with a gray swirl inside and asked what the kids thought it was. Suzette thought it was a jellyfish and said so. When she learned that it was, in fact, a plastic bag and that a turtle could die if it made the same mistake and ate the bag, she became distraught.

“Suzette loves animals,” her mother, Kathy Kent, explained. On their walk home from the aquarium after the demonstration, the two began talking about how they could stop people from throwing away plastic bags. “At first I said to her, Well, you just can’t change people,” said Kent. “But then I listened to myself and thought, Oh my God, what am I saying and quickly walked it back.” Without having any idea what exactly she was promising, Kent told her daughter that the two of them would do something to keep plastic bags from ending up in the ocean. Shortly afterward, they teamed up with Mila and her mother and several other Isle of Palms residents who were also upset about plastic. They’d walk the beach in the afternoons picking up bags and brainstorming. Eventually, they hit on the idea of drafting a petition to ban bags and walked door to door to get the support of several local shop owners.

“It was a piece of cake asking businesses to support us,” said Kent. “Everyone else knows that having a litter-free, clean beach is good for everyone and every business.” A little over a year after Suzette’s upsetting trip to the aquarium, the ordinance passed the city council in its first vote. Yet almost four years later, South Carolina is now considering legislation backed by the APBA that would not just ban future bag bans, but also undo the ordinance in Isle of Palms and 17 other local laws that have since restricted plastic in South Carolina.

The Crying Indian

If the image of giant multinational corporations destroying little girls’ efforts to protect sea creatures is less than flattering, the plastics industry can take comfort in the fact that it has successfully defeated environmentalists’ attempts to hold it responsible for plastic with similar tactics before. The trick has been to publicly embrace its opponents’ concern for the environment while privately fighting attempts at regulation.

The double-edged strategy dates back to at least 1969, when an editorial in Modern Plastics magazine warned about the impending waste crisis. The big plastics makers were already aware of the problem. That year, DuPont, Chevron, Dow, and the Society for the Plastics Industry were among the groups represented at a conference on packaging waste. And when the first Earth Day was launched in 1970 in part to tackle that crisis, the industry was ready.

That week, demonstrators held an “ecology trek” in which they dumped their nonreturnable bottles at Coca-Cola’s headquarters. The activists had a solution to the mounting waste crisis: bottle bills that would put the onus for cleaning up the waste on manufacturers. Coca-Cola, which had been tipped off about the protests by the National Soft Drink Association, met the demonstrators with free soda and trash bins. The big beverage and packaging companies fought the bottle bill and came up with a clever dodge that’s still paying off today. Not only did they tar supporters of the bottle bills as radicals, but they also launched a massive PR campaign that seemed to incorporate some of the anger about the mounting garbage that had fueled the Earth Day protests while shifting responsibility for the waste away from the companies that created it and onto consumers.

In 1971, Keep America Beautiful, an anti-litter organization formed by beverage and packaging companies, including PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, and Phillip Morris, teamed up with the Ad Council to create the now-infamous “Crying Indian” ad. Although the “Indian” who tears up when he sees a bag of litter thrown on the ground was really an Italian-American actor with a feather stuck in his hair, the ad’s sneakier deception was that its expression of concern about pollution was brought to the airwaves by many of the same companies that produced the pollution. Even as their ad was inducing guilt in viewers for spreading trash, Keep America Beautiful’s members were fighting legislation that could have done much to address the problem.

“What makes this all the more insidious is that these TV spots and other ads were presented as public service announcements — and thus appeared to be politically neutral — but, in fact, served the industry agenda,” said historian Finis Dunaway, who lays out the story of Keep America Beautiful’s PR efforts in “Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of Environmental Images.” “It was propaganda that did not appear propagandistic. It also shielded corporate polluters from blame by shifting responsibility onto individuals.”

“These TV spots and other ads were presented as public service announcements — and thus appeared to be politically neutral — but, in fact, served the industry agenda.”

Future Earth Days would continue to emphasize consumers’ personal responsibility for recycling, including the national commemoration of the 10th Earth Day in 1980, which was organized by Michael McCabe, a former legislative assistant who would go on serve as Joe Biden’s communications and special projects director before spearheading DuPont’s defense of a dangerous chemical used in many plastics, PFOA. In 1990, the 20th anniversary celebration was marked by a celebrity-studded TV special that emphasized the importance of individuals’ actions, including tree-planting and recycling, in protecting the environment.

To this day, Keep America Beautiful — which is still led by executives at beverage and plastics companies, including Dr Pepper, Dow, and the American Chemistry Council — continues to focus on litterbugs, prodding errant citizens to better dispose of their plastic waste while many of its members fend off regulation of their production of that waste. Several of the group’s corporate partners — including founding companies Coca-Cola and PepsiCo and their trade group, the American Beverage Association — have opposed bottle bills that have been shown to help solve the plastic waste problem.

Noah Ullman, chief marketing officer for Keep America Beautiful, disputes the idea that the organization was founded “as some kind of ruse. The intent was not there,” he said in a phone interview. Instead, Ullman wrote in an email to The Intercept, “the first objective of Keep America Beautiful was, and remains, encouraging people to ‘put it in the bin.’ Preventing litter is the basis for everything else — it helps keep communities beautiful (which has a long list of social and economic benefits) and helps protect animals and our environment from solid waste ending up in unintended places.” Ullman said that the organization does not take a position on bottle bills, but noted that while bottle bills improve the collection rates of refunded materials, the “unintended consequence is that [it] devalues the rest of the waste stream for recycling (e.g. glass, cartons, milk jugs, etc.) and those items become less likely to be recycled.”

The American Beverage Association, which has opposed bottle bills in the past, provided The Intercept with a statement, saying, “We are not opposed to any ideas that will get us to better recycling rates in the future if they do not harm the comprehensive curbside recycling systems that consumers prefer.”

In an email, a representative of Coca-Cola wrote that the American Beverage Association represents the company’s views on bottle bills. The email also said that “at Coca-Cola, our focus is on helping to collect and reuse the equivalent of 100 percent of the bottles and cans that we put into the marketplace. This includes ensuring that all of our packaging is 100% recyclable and using at least 50% recycled content in our packaging by 2030.”

With their focus on recycling and nonprofit status, Keep America Beautiful and other anti-litter organizations funded by the plastics and beverage industry, including the Recycling Partnership, offer companies both the opportunity to demonstrate concern about plastic pollution and a tax write off. The Coca-Cola Foundation gave $640,000 to the Recycling Partnership to improve recycling in 2017, for instance. The organization “works with thousands of communities all across the country to provide access to cart-based recycling and education to help residents understand how to recycle materials more and better, including paper, aluminum and steel cans, cardboard, cartons, glass and, yes, plastics,” according to an emailed statement from the organization.

While working to improve recycling and create end markets for recycled plastic, the Recycling Partnership also presents a particularly rosy view of recycling. In May, the group sent out an email that announced that “87% of People Think Recycling is Important,” while failing to mention the reality of single-digit recycling rates. The group’s other funding partners include ExxonMobil, Keurig, Dr. Pepper, Dow, the International Bottled Water Association, the American Beverage Association, and the American Chemistry Council.

“They’re trying to create the perception that there’s a viable way to recycle most plastic waste into new products, and that’s simply not true.”

In its statement, the Recycling Partnership noted that only half of Americans who have access to convenient recycling do everything they could. The statement also said that the group is working to create and support end markets for recycled plastic.

But according to Jan Dell, an engineer who worked as a corporate sustainability consultant before creating The Last Beach Cleanup, an organization that confronts plastics pollution, the Recycling Partnership and other nonprofits supported by the plastics industry are using misleading information to ease concerns that otherwise might lead consumers to stop buying plastic. “They’re trying to create the perception that there’s a viable way to recycle most plastic waste into new products,” said Dell, “and that’s simply not true.”

The “Recyclable” Scam

Much of the plastic waste that is amassing in the oceans, buried in landfills, and scattered throughout nature is “recyclable,” which is to say that it could, in theory, be refashioned into new products. Companies have latched on to the hopeful term to make their latest plastic products more palatable. Starbucks, for instance, has lavished praise on itself for its “recyclable lid” rolling out in six cities this summer, which the company predicted will eliminate a billion straws. But because the lids are made from polypropylene (also known as No. 5 plastic), and there is very little market for recycled polypropylene, that number has no basis in reality. Only 5 percent of polypropylene was recycled in 2015 — and that was before China decided to stop taking our waste. Since then, the percentage recycled is likely much lower still, meaning that the vast majority of the 1 billion new “recyclable” Starbucks lids will end up where the old ones did — in landfills, trash heaps, incinerators, and the oceans.

[Related

Starbucks Promised a Recyclable Drink Lid. Don’t Believe the Hype.]

In January, Taco Bell also crowed over its own new plastic lids, as if creating more plastic would somehow fix the plastics crisis. “Love the Earth? Yep, us too,” the company’s website announced, “which is why we’ve recently started to use recyclable cold cups and lids in all of our restaurants.”

Another company, Tempo Plastics, explicitly advertises its plastic pouches as “guilt-free.” Although they’re made from high-density polyethylene, or No. 2 plastic — only 5.5 percent of which is recycled in the U.S. — the company’s new “Harmony Pack” will feature reassuring green arrows and the imprimatur of How2Recycle.

A project of the Sustainable Packaging Coalition and recycling nonprofit called GreenBlue — whose board includes executives from Dow Chemical, Mars, Target, Amazon, and the Delfort Group — How2Recycle makes some plastic products seem far easier to recycle than they are. The Federal Trade Commission’s Green Guide makes it clear that “to misrepresent, directly or by implication, that a product or package is recyclable” is deceptive. In order to make unqualified claims that a product is recyclable, recycling facilities have to be available to at least 60 percent of the consumers to whom it’s sold. But the How2Recycle symbol is now affixed to several products that will be all but impossible for many consumers to recycle, including cups, plates, and containers made from plastics Nos. 3 through 7, all of which now have recycling rates close to zero.

Asked about the “guilt-free” pouch, Kelly Cramer, director of How2Recycle at GreenBlue, wrote in an email that the product was not “appropriately qualified” for the label and said that the organization would “reach out to this company immediately to rectify.” Regarding the pictures of plastic cups and plates that are not accepted by recyclers in most parts of the country but whose packaging bore the How2Recycle label, Cramer said that the label referred to the bags that contained the cups and plates, which is recyclable if brought back to an in-store recycling program, but acknowledged that the plates and cups inside them may not be recyclable.

Although How2Recycle provides “not recyclable” as well as “recyclable” labels, it is the member companies’ choice whether to apply them, she said. “That member chose not to label the product,” Cramer said. “This is an area where we’ve given the member a choice to label the product or not. If we were too strict in our requirements, we wouldn’t have as many members join the program.”

Cramer argued that another product, cups made of polypropylene, or No. 5 plastic, may or may not qualify as recyclable — a question that is now being litigated in a federal court in California. Cramer said that GreenBlue is conducting research into the recycling rates of polypropylene and defended the How2Recycle program as a way to minimize waste that is a fact of modern life.

“We don’t want people to think that recycling alleviates all their consumption guilt. But the truth of the matter is that we all consume, and packaging protects products that have to be moved to be sold,” she said. “In the future, it would be beautiful if we had robust reuse or novel delivery systems to rethink the entire product packaging system. But we’re not there yet.”

Although recycling does little to alleviate the mounting plastics crisis, the promotion of it has proven extremely useful to the industry when local bans on plastic bans have been proposed.The American Chemistry Council recently rolled out local campaigns for WRAP, or the Wrap Recycling Action Program, in several places where plastic bans have been proposed.

The public-private partnership run by the ACC, which encourages the recycling of plastic bags through 18,000 plastic film collection sites around the country and promotes the idea that plastic bags can be recycled, launched a new effort in Connecticut in 2017 that coincided with the state’s consideration of a tax on plastic bags. When Chicago was weighing a plastic bag tax in 2016, the ACC rolled out WRAP there too, announcing that locals can recycle plastic bags “at nearly 400 local grocery and retail stores.” This year, in Florida, the ACC made another local WRAP push just as a state-level bill to ban plastic straws was introduced.

The group teaches the public how to recycle plastic film — any plastic less than 10 mil thick — a process that turns out to be complicated enough to require its own educational organization. Most municipal recycling programs don’t accept shopping bags and other flexible plastic, which can snag machines. So WRAP directs consumers to bring it to local take-back centers, which collect the film and send it on to recyclers. The plastic first has to be washed and dried, according to WRAP, and even then only some of it can be recycled. The program can recycle the clear wrap you might put around food at home, as well as bags that contain most produce, groceries, and bread, but not candy-bar wrappers, six-pack rings, and the plastic bags that contain chips or frozen food.

But even as WRAP promotes the message that plastic film can and should be recycled, and scolds people who don’t put plastic bags in recycle bins, many of the used bags and other plastic waste it collects wind up being burned or sent to landfills. According to the most recent report on plastic film recycling published in July by the ACC, the amount collected in the U.S. and sold for recycling fell from 1.3 billion to 1.0 billion pounds between 2016 and 2017 — and that was before China’s restriction on plastic waste imports was fully implemented. The ACC report admitted that some of the bags wound up where they would have if they didn’t first make a brief stop in a bag-recycling bin. “Due to a lack of buyers — for the quality and amount of material available — towards the end of 2017, landfilling material started to be more economical (despite diversion or other environmental goals) than covering the handling and shipping costs of getting material to market.”

It’s not clear what happened to the 300 million pounds of film that were sold for recycling in 2016 but not in 2017. Because the ACC doesn’t report the total amount of plastic film collected, what proportion of the collected film that represents is also obscure. Nor is it clear why the ACC has not yet reported the 2018 numbers. But even within the 1 billion pounds of plastic film the ACC categorized as “recycled,” much is likely either burned or landfilled. According to the report, 378 million pounds of the film were exported, and the ACC said in an emailed statement to The Intercept that it doesn’t know what happened to the waste after that point.

Although the ACC doesn’t put an exact number on the total amount of bags that were burned or landfilled, a recent call to action from a group of plastics recyclers called Recycle More Bags does. The document, which came out in May and called for legislation that would require that new plastic bags contain recycled material, noted that “600 million pounds of plastic bags collected for recycling in North America in 2018 was landfilled or incinerated due to lack of end-markets.” A later version of the document changed the figure to “hundreds of millions of pounds.”

“Based on the two industry reports, it looks like we may have incinerated and disposed of the same amount of plastic film and bags that were reprocessed,” said Dell.

Recycling or Burning?

One of the latest solutions industry is offering to the plastics crisis isn’t recycling exactly. While many questions remain about what exactly the Hefty EnergyBag program is, it is making it clear how expensive and difficult it is to find a use for plastic waste.

In April, 49 years after protesters kicked off the first Earth Day by dumping single-use waste at Coca-Cola’s doorstep,Dow Chemical was a “forest green sponsor” of Omaha’s Earth Day event, despite the fact that it is the largest plastics manufacturer in the world. With a $5,000 gift, Dow’s Hefty EnergyBag program, a joint effort of Dow and Reynolds Consumer Products, was one of the two biggest donors for the event. Held in Omaha’s lush Elmwood Park, the day’s festivities were as green and wholesome as any corporate sponsor could want. Native American folk music played as locals strolled the grass from table to table learning about urban beekeeping, rain barrels, microchickens, and tree planting. Children stroked a soft gray rabbit. And dozens of environmentally concerned Nebraskans participated in an outdoor yoga class, bending and stretching in the sun along with their neighbors.

Dow and Hefty first rolled out the program on Earth Day 2016 as a way for Omaha residents to dispose of plastic forks and knives, chip bags, and other single-use plastics that the city hadn’t been able to process. They just had to put the plastic trash into special orange Hefty bags, put them out on the curb, and the city would pick up and recycle the trash. “They were very definitely calling it recycling,” recalls Richard Yoder, a local sustainability consultant. But Yoder and other Omahanians soon learned that rather than being melted down into reusable plastic, the contents of their bags were being burned in an incinerator in Missouri that had a history of Clean Air Act violations.

Last year, after Yoder argued at a local debate over the program that calling the Energybag program recycling was misleading, Hefty stopped using that term. Yet, in labored language, the company’s website still pitches the program as an environmental good, or “a groundbreaking initiative that collects hard to recycle plastics.” The Hefty EnergyBag program “complements existing recycling programs,” according to Ashley Mendoza, a spokesperson for Dow. “Our long-term vision is to keep more plastics out of landfills by collecting them for recycling or recovery if they cannot be reused.”

After the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives called out the Omaha program for creating more pollution, the Dow and Hefty initiative also stopped sending the orange bags to the incinerator. Since then, the plastic waste has been put to several purposes, including being compressed into fence posts and railroad ties and going “to a Canadian firm that made some sort of decking,” according to Dale Gubbels, CEO of FirstStar Recycling, the Omaha company partnering with Dow and Hefty on the project.

Because no one has learned how to remove additives from plastic, products made from recycled waste can release toxic chemicals as they degrade.

While Dow and Hefty promote the program as a way to convert plastic into “valuable energy sources,” it isn’t cheap, according to Gubbels. The expense has apparently disappointed some initial proponents, who expected the program to pay for itself. “I have to try to convince them if you want to recycle, you have to recognize that you’ve got to pay for it,” he said. All in all, he added, the program, which was pitched as an energy-efficient solution to plastic waste, has proven “far more challenging than anyone had envisioned when this thing got started.” According to an email from Mendoza, “The price of the Hefty® EnergyBag® orange bags cover the cost of running the program.”

Scientists point out another hitch in the energy bag plan: Because no one has learned how to remove additives from plastic, products made from recycled waste, such as the railroad ties, fence posts, and decks made from Omaha’s plastic, can release toxic chemicals as they degrade.“Until we do a better job of eliminating the hazards in its first use, you’re going to have problems managing the toxicity in every subsequent use,” said Pete Myers, a biologist and the founder and chief scientist of Environmental Health Sciences. “Some of the types of plastics that they’re proposing to recycle contain chemicals connected to a 50-year decline in sperm count, to type 2 diabetes, and to breast and prostate cancer. These are serious problems and we don’t know enough about the exposures to make it safe for the child sitting on that deck.”

When asked about this possibility, Gubbels said he hadn’t considered it and didn’t have expertise in toxic chemicals. In any case, Gubbels has been spreading Omaha’s plastic waste around. He sent one recent load to Renewlogy, a plant in Salt Lake City, Utah, that heats the plastic and extracts energy from it, and said he plans to send a load to a similar plastic-to-energy facility in Texas called New Hope Energy.

The Myth of “Chemical Recycling”

Renewlogy and New Hope are two firms offering what the plastics industry is putting forward as the newest solution to plastic waste: so-called chemical recycling. According to the American Chemistry Council, expanding plastics recovery into this realm could “result in billions of dollars of economic output.” Yet even the technology’s biggest proponents acknowledge that no one yet knows how to efficiently and economically convert plastic into its component parts and then back into fuel. If all the non-recycled plastics in the U.S. were converted to oil, “we could create enough fuel to power 9 million cars each year,” the Chevron Phillips sustainability director, Rick Wagner, argued in a recent article in Plastics Recycling Update magazine. That transformation would also allow Chevron, the second-largest plastic manufacturer in the world, to shrug off its responsibility for the massive quantities of pollution now choking the globe. But even Wagner admits that we’re still far from knowing how to chemically recycle. It’s sort of like going to Mars, Wagner wrote. “We’re not quite there yet. Not tomorrow, but someday. Hopefully soon.” Mendoza described pyrolysis, the method used by the Renewlogy plant to which Hefty EnergyBag waste has already been sent, as “a potential next step toward advanced recycling.”

The idea that plastic can be broken down into its elements, which can then be turned into fuel, waxes, and lubricants has been around for decades. But such waste-to-fuel plants have never proven economically or environmentally viable. According to a 2017 report of the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, most of the waste-to-fuel projects in the U.S., Canada, and Europe, which used either pyrolysis or a related technology called gasification, were closed or canceled before even getting off the ground. Among the impediments cited in the report were the inability to meet energy efficiency and pollution control goals. “In general, costs are higher and more uncertain than project proponents foresee and revenues are lower and more uncertain,” the report noted.

Waste-to-fuel plants have never proven economically or environmentally viable.

The environmental and financial viability of the latest energy-to-fuel plants is also unclear. When asked about the efficiency of the facilities used by the Hefty EnergyBag program, Mendoza wrote in an email that “material efficiency of a pyrolysis processing unit is dependent on the technology used and the types of materials fed into the facility.” Mendoza also wrote that “Dow has a vital interest and responsibility in making plastic materials beneficial throughout their lifecycle. We are working to improve the entire system where our products are used in order to maximize resource efficiency and the benefits derived from using our products.”

Neither New Hope or Renewlogy, two of the nine companies in the American Chemistry Council’s industry alliance for chemical recycling, would reveal what volume of plastics their plants require to produce fuel. Renewlogy did not respond to numerous emailed interview requests. But the company’s website says that between Omaha’s waste and that collected through a similar Hefty EnergyBag program in the city of Boise, a million pounds of plastic were “diverted” in 2018. A video on the site also describes Renewlogy’s process as cost-effective and “proven clean.” The New Hope plant in Texas issued a press release announcing that it will have a capacity to process 150 tons of plastic a day, but the company declined to comment on that facility’s efficiency. “It’s a brand-new industry and there are some things we can’t communicate about,” said Lee Royal, who answered the phone there. “How we do business is probably not something we’d like to share just now.”

In an emailed statement, the American Chemistry Council defended the value of chemical recycling, noting that “these technologies can produce a wide range of products beyond fuel, including higher value chemicals and other feedstocks” and that such products “have much greater value in the marketplace than in a landfill.”

The big open questions about the efficiency, safety, and economic viability of the chemical recycling process — and the admissions from its proponents that they haven’t figured out how to make it work — haven’t stopped the chemical industry from passing laws facilitating funding of the scheme. Texas recently became the sixth state to pass legislation (supported by Chevron Phillips Chemical, Exxon Mobil, and the American Chemistry Council) that would pave the way for new chemical recycling facilities.

Some of these laws have been designed to ensure that the facilities will be subject to minimal regulation. By categorizing them as manufacturing plants rather than solid waste disposal sites, chemical recycling operations may be exempted from limits on nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, particulate matter, heavy metals, and greenhouse gases that are imposed on solid waste sites.

Nevertheless, chemical recycling facilities are already being promoted — and, in some cases, funded — as sustainable fixes for the plastics problem. In Oregon, a waste management company is pushing to get its plastic-burning plant classified as renewable energy. And in Ashley, Indiana, a new chemical recycling plant is being financed with $185 million in green bonds from the state, funds that are earmarked for environmentally beneficial projects. Brightmark Energy, the company behind it, says its mission is to “rise up and meet the needs of our planet.”

Some have objected to the use of taxpayer money to back a process that has repeatedly failed financially when it’s been tried in the past. “Every one of these pyrolysis facilities has depended upon government largesse to even try to get off the ground,” said Andrew Dobbs, campaign director at Texas Campaign for the Environment, a group that opposed the Texas bill. “So-called chemical recycling doesn’t make economic sense. It’s a highly expensive and energy-intensive process that’s competing with burying things in a hole in the ground. On the other end, they’re producing fuel, which is competing with natural gas when natural gas is dirt cheap. The only way they’re going to make that work is for the costs to be paid by someone else.”

According to the email from the American Chemistry Council, chemical recycling “facilities are being developed by venture capital and investment firms, which is a vote of confidence in the financial promise of these technologies and business models.” The email also noted that “Chemical recycling technologies are developing very quickly and — like other technologies including wind and solar — will become more efficient as they reach commercial scale.”

Whether it can meet its goal of turning 288 tons of plastic per day into 778 barrels of diesel blend stocks, 418 barrels of naphtha blend stocks, and 360 barrels of industrial wax, this latest take on plastic recycling will, like all chemical recycling plants, use fossil fuels to convert fossil fuel products into additional fossil fuels. They will also almost surely ease the way for the continued production of even more plastic.

“This is all just a huge, incredibly expensive distraction,” said Denise Patel, U.S. program director at the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives. While China’s decision to stop taking U.S. plastic finally revealed the country’s plastics problem, the idea of chemical recycling — fanciful as it may be — could undermine public urgency about it, according to Patel. “China’s decision is an opportunity for cities to examine waste and double down on reducing,” she said. “Instead, these projects are exacerbating the problem by giving people the idea that there is a solution and it’s OK to keep buying them.”

At the industry conference in Texas, no one asked whether it was OK to keep producing more plastic. After the pictures of injured sea creatures were gone and an accountant spoke to the executives about how to best take advantage of Trump’s cuts to the top tax brackets, attendees learned about the bright prospects for their industry. Exports of the world’s most popular plastic, polyethylene, will not just continue, but will likely experience “healthy growth” over the next several years, as a presentation from the investment research firm IHS Markit explained. Nor was there much question where all that new plastic will be sold. An increasing share is expected to go to Asian countries other than China, since the growing awareness of plastics pollution in Europe and North America may slightly weaken markets there. The only real question about the proliferation of a product we know to be heating the planet, amassing all around and within us, and poisoning water and air around the world, is what new techniques its producers will adopt to make it seem fine.

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https://theintercept.com/2019/12/28/the-intercept-2019-environment/

https://theintercept.com/2019/07/20/plastics-industry-plastic-recycling/

https://theintercept.com/2019/10/18/coca-cola-recycling-plastics-pollution/

part of https://theintercept.com/collections/bad-chemistry/  series

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Jim Hightower: Can ‘powerless nobodies’ fight the corporate powers?

Written by Jim Hightower December 21, 2019

The many sparkling bays along the Texas coastline of the Gulf of Mexico have long provided both a working-class living and a valued lifestyle for generations of shrimpers, oysterers and other fishing families. People and seafood, however, are not the only creatures here, for such wildlife as alligators and snakes also call many of these interconnected waterways home. Yet, by necessity and experience, the hardy people of the water have figured out how to share the bays so all creatures can get along.

But in the 1980s, a strange and invasive new critter entered Lavaca Bay, near the town of Port Comfort. Far from getting along, this species proceeded over the years to devour whole harvests of seafood, along with the livelihoods of local Gulf communities. This marauder was not some monster from the deep but a massive, 45,000-acre factory looming over Lavaca Bay. It is the Formosa Plastics Corporation, founded by the richest man in Taiwan.

As its name implies, Formosa is not here for seafood. It is the world’s second largest fabricator of polyvinyl chloride,the tiny, highly toxic pebbles and powders used to make the gabillions of plastic bags, pipes, bottles, etc. that are choking the Earth. For decades, the Formosa plant has cavalierly been dumping trillions of these poisonous pebbles and tons of the polyvinyl powders into its wastewater — which end up in Lavaca Bay.

That poisonous content then spreads to other bays, nearby waterways, the Gulf itself … and into the shrimp, oysters, fish and other creatures living there. The result has been species vanishing from these waters, creating economic and social devastation for families and port communities that rely on nature’s bounty.

Wait, isn’t this against the law? Of course, but petrochemical behemoths like Formosa have corrupted the law, turning Texas lawmakers and environmental regulators into their puppets. When leaders won’t lead, The People must, and that’s exactly what’s happening in this case. A defiant, determined former fourth-generation shrimper named Diane Wilson, along with a scrappy environmental coalition on the Texas Gulf Coast, have just won the largest citizen environmental lawsuit in U.S. history, forcing Formosa to stop its gross contamination of the bay, the local economy and the law.

It’s good to have a happy-ending story for the holidays — one that’s not sugar-plum sappy but genuinely uplifting.

It “feels like justice,” said Wilson in early December when a federal district judge OK’d a $50 million pollution settlement against Formosa Plastics Corporation. Judge Kenneth Hoyt, a Ronald Reagan appointee, had previously ruled that the Taiwan plastics conglomerate was a “serial offender” whose violations of America’s Clean Water Act were “extensive, historical, and repetitive.” How the case got there is as important as his ruling.

Wilson, the indefatigable local shrimper, had been trying for some 30 years to get state and national officials to stop Formosa from dumping poisonous plastic chemicals into the Lavaca Bay ecosystem. The corporation’s deliberate contamination was destroying seasonal seafood harvests upon which she and thousands of Gulf Coast fishing families relied. She was ignored by those in power and then ridiculed and then demonized. Yet this lady of the sea wouldn’t quit.She kept speaking out, mounted hunger strikes and even tried to sink her own beloved shrimp boat in the bay as a public protest.

Nothing. But then, backed by a volunteer network of regional environmentalists and a savvy group of nonprofit legal service lawyers, Wilson filed the private citizens lawsuit in July 2017 that came to trial this spring in Judge Hoyt’s courtroom, finally producing an overdue measure of justice. The $50 million settlement doesn’t go to Wilson or the other plaintiffs but to projects that will revitalize local marine ecosystems and create a shrimping and oyster cooperative for local families. It also will pay for citizen-group monitoring of Formosa’s compliance with the judge’s orders for “zero discharge” of its plastic pollutants.

Even more significant than the money that the Formosa settlement provides, this victory sets a major legal precedent to advance other citizen lawsuits against polluters, requiring that the polluters (not taxpayers) pay for their messes. Who needs Santa Clause when “We the People” can deliver such democratic gifts to ourselves?  For information on the details and impact of this remarkable people’s victory, go to the Texas RioGrande Legal Aid website.

Populist author, public speaker and radio commentator Jim Hightower writes “The Hightower Lowdown,” a monthly newsletter chronicling the ongoing fights by America’s ordinary people against rule by plutocratic elites. Sign up at HightowerLowdown.org.

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R U S $

Plastic & Climate: The Hidden Costs of a Plastic Planet – EXTENDED INTERVIEW

FEATURING CARROLL MUFFETT - There has been tremendous concern around the pollution of our oceans, our soil and food systems, and ...

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1219 new method daTA 1 millx worse

https://earther.gizmodo.com/theres-literally-a-million-times-more-microplastic-in-o-1840175488

Pollution /:{ Plastic waste kills half a million hermit crabs on remote islands:(style="background-color:#f6f6f6;"):}:

https://yyy.theguardian.com/environment/2019/dec/05/plastic-pollution-hermit-crabs-species-decline-henderson-cocos-islands

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audio interview 12/19

1/3 US drink only bottled, 1/3 rarely drink tap

newark NJ putting in PVC, not tested, plastic feedstock lobbyist pushing

https://kpfa.org/episode/the-ralph-nader-radio-hour-december-2-2019/

seth siegel  What's Wrong w what we drink: troubled water book

On Tap: Seth Siegel's Masterful Examination of America's ...

https://www.ewg.org › news-and-analysis › 2019/11 › tap-seth-siegel-s-ma...

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

1.

:{Nov 1, 2019 - That's just the start of the story that Seth Siegel masterfully explores in his latest book, “Troubled Water: What's Wrong With What We Drink.:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

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rust belt --> plastic? penn

With Coal’s Decline, Pennsylvania Communities Watch the Rise of Natural Gas-fueled Plastics

https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/11/27/clairton-pennsylvania-air-pollution-shell-petrochemical

guk 1119 ghost gear #1?

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How Plastic Pollution Is Making Central American Communities Uninhabitable (good history of industry) ** 11/19.

How Plastic Pollution Is Making Central American Communities Uninhabitable (good history of industry) ** 11/19.

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desmog 919

New Warnings on Plastic’s Health Risks as Fracking Industry Promotes New 'Plastics Belt' Build-Out

A new report traces the life cycle of plastic from the moment an oil and gas well is drilled to the time plastic trash breaks down in the environment, finding “distinct risks to human health” at...

READ MORE

new report traces the life cycle of plastic from the moment an oil and gas well is drilled to the time plastic trash breaks down in the environment, finding “distinct risks to human health” at every stage.

Virtually all plastic — 99 percent of it, according to the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) report — comes from fossil fuels. And a growing slice comes from fracked oil and gas wells and the natural gas liquids (NGLs) they produce.

The report concluded that plastics bring toxic or carcinogenic health risks to people at every stage.

“Until we confront the impacts of the full plastic lifecycle, the current piecemeal approach to addressing the plastic pollution crisis will not succeed,” the report concludes. “At every stage of its life cycle, plastic poses distinct risks to human health, arising from both exposure to plastic particles themselves and associated chemicals.”

People can be sickened not only when plastics are produced, in other words, but also while plastic is actively used by consumers and then again after it’s thrown out, where plastic trash often breaks down into smaller and smaller bits that can contaminate the food chain and make its way into people’s bodies.

The scope of the risks requires an international response, the center said.

“Both the supply chains and the impacts of plastic cross and re-cross borders, continents, and oceans,” said David Azoulay, the center’s Director of Environmental Health. “No country can effectively protect its citizens from those impacts on its own, and no global instrument exists today to fully address the toxic life cycle of plastics.”

In the U.S., however, a major push is underway — and attracting hundreds of billions in investment, both foreign and domestic — to move in the opposite direction and produce more plastics and other petrochemicals.

The goal? To create new demand from industry for the raw materials produced by fracked shale wells.

..[hurts recycling b/c raw mat'l cheap]

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desmog 919

New Warnings on Plastic’s Health Risks as Fracking Industry Promotes New 'Plastics Belt' Build-Out

A new report traces the life cycle of plastic from the moment an oil and gas well is drilled to the time plastic trash breaks down in the environment, finding “distinct risks to human health” at...READ MORE

...Shale drilling industry officials have been busy organizing marketing efforts to encourage the production of more plastics and petrochemicals — not only along the Gulf Coast, where communities have long borne the brunt of toxic pollution from petrochemical manufacturing, but also in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia.

Industry groups argue that a shale-fueled plastics boom is a positive thing for the world environment because plastic-makers in many other countries operate under less stringent environmental controls than American manufacturers. It’s better, in other words, to make plastic here than in places like China, with its infamous air pollution problems.

Plus, they add, constructing a new “plastics belt” in the Rust Belt will help diversify the industry and protect against the impacts of severe storms along the Gulf of Mexico, which are predicted to be strengthened by climate change.

New plastic manufacturing plants, however, are also being built in China, and on the Gulf Coast. All told, this new investment is driving the world’s cumulative production of new plastic up so far that analysts warn there may not be enough demand from consumers.

Meanwhile, a Chinese policy setting strict standards for importing used plastics there has shaken the world’s plastic recycling market. In some cases, newly made plastic has become cheaper than recycled — meaning that new cheap plastic manufacturing could wind up pushing recycled plastics further out of the market.

[very long]

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New Concerns Raised by Opponents Delay Wanhua’s $1.25 Billion Plastic Complex in Louisiana

“Look at what is coming into the Parish, instead of saying ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah’—it is time to say ‘No,’” Pastor Harry Joseph told the St. James Parish Council on July 24. He implored councilmembers to consider freshly unveiled public health and economic concerns before they reaffirmed a permit allowing yet another petrochemical plant in a southern Louisiana community fed up with its already rapid industrialization.

Joseph, pastor of Mount Triumph Baptist Church in St. James, is one of the plaintiffs appealing the parish council’s permit granted May 20 to Wanhua Chemical, which is planning to build a $1.25 billion plastics factory on the banks of the Mississippi River. During the appeal, new information about the project caused the council to halt a vote on repealing the permit. Instead, it sent the matter back for reconsideration to the parish planning commission, which had previously granted the project permission. READ MORE

https://www.ecowatch.com/trump-campaign-plastic-straws-2639302658.html

Trump Campaign Is Selling Plastic Straws to ‘Make Straws Great Again’

Olivia Rosane Jul. 22, 2019 11:00AM EST POPULAR

The campaign to re-elect President Donald Trump has found a new way to troll liberals and sea turtles.

The campaign website is selling packs of 10 plastic straws for $15, Trump re-election campaign manager Brad Parscale tweeted on Thursday, as USA Today reported.

"Liberal paper straws don't work. STAND WITH PRESIDENT TRUMP and buy your pack of recyclable straws today," the straws' description reads.

Parscale further promoted the straws in an email Friday titled "Make Straws Great Again," NPR reported.

"I'm so over paper straws, and I'm sure you are too. Much like most liberal ideas, paper straws don't work and they fall apart instantly. That's why we just launched our latest product—Official Trump Straws," Parscale wrote. "Now you can finally be free from liberal paper straws that fall apart within minutes and ruin your drink."

Calls to ban plastic straws increased after a video of a turtle with a straw stuck up its nose went viral. Cities like Seattle have passed restrictions, and companies including Starbucks have vowed to phase them out. California became the first state to ban them in sit-down restaurants last September.

But conservatives aren't the only ones who have expressed frustration with the paper alternatives, which tend to become unusable as the liquid permeates them, NPR pointed out. Journalists across the political spectrum have complained about them on social media. For some people with disabilities, the flexibility and heat resistance of plastic straws are more than just a convenience: They enable people with mobility issues to hydrate on their own and drink independently when dining out.

When asked about straw bans on Friday, Trump gave an answer that was "oddly reasonable," according to The Guardian.

"I do think we have bigger problems than plastic straws," Trump answered. "You know, it's interesting about plastic straws: so, you have a little straw, but what about the plates, the wrappers, and everything else that are much bigger and they're made of the same material? So, the straws are interesting. Everybody focuses on the straws. There's a lot of other things to focus on. But it's an–it's an interesting question."

Plastic straws only account for about one percent of the plastic in the oceans, according to Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions co-director Jim Leape. The oft-cited statistic that Americans use 500 million straws a day was downgraded to between 170 - 390 million straws a day, according to market research firms cited in a New York Times article fact-checking the higher claim.

But Trump's uncharacteristically nuanced response seems to run against the tone his campaign manager was trying to set, The Guardian wrote, noting that Parscale was exploiting the straws' emerging position as a cultural-war battleground. Last summer, conservatives began taking defiant selfies of themselves drinking from plastic straws.

Some have joked that the Trump campaign's latest attempt to "own the libs" has become something of a self-own. That's because the straws sold by the Trump campaign, which are recyclable, BPA-free, U.S. made and laser engraved, also cost $1.50 per straw. The Washington Post noted that they are much more expensive than other plastic straw options on the market. Even extra-thick, reusable straws sell on Amazon for around $8 per pack of 12 to 30.

"Paying $1.50 a straw to own the libs," ProPublica journalist Jessica Huseman tweeted, as USA Today reported.

Despite the cost, the straws proved popular with Trump supporters. Republican National Committee spokesperson Elizabeth Harrington tweeted Friday that they had sold out.

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What’s Worrying the Plastics Industry? Your Reaction to All That Waste, for One 6/19

HOUSTON — One by one, they stepped to a clear plastic lectern at the Global Plastics Summit here and talked about what their companies were doing in response to the world's crisis in plastics waste.

Representing businesses all along the supply and packaging chain, the speakers suggested solutions ranging from new technology that would take plastic back to its molecular building blocks for repeated recycling to redesigning plastic bottles with caps that stay connected to the bottle.

But none of that is happening fast enough to keep pace with the global production of plastics, an analyst from IHS Markit told some 270 people attending the 2019 Global Plastics Summit.

Dewey Johnson, vice president for base chemicals and plastics at IHS Markit. Credit: James Bruggers

With recycling programs struggling, billions more tons of plastic waste could be headed to landfills or the environment, said Dewey Johnson of IHS Markit. Credit: James Bruggers

IHS Market, a co-host of the conference, expects plastics production to grow on average 3.5 to 4 percent per year through at least 2035. With recycling programs largely underfunded and ineffective, there's potential for billions more tons of plastic waste to be headed to landfills or out into the environment, said Dewey Johnson, an IHS Markit vice president. And new recycling technology is a decade or more away, he said.

"The solution isn't going to happen overnight," Johnson said. "The solution is going to happen over decades." The industry, he cautioned, will need to work to "maintain trust along the ride."

Don't delay, he said, because "this continuing increase in the plastics market increases the scale of the size of the solution."

Johnson's comment set the tone for a conference that, unlike past gatherings, revealed an industry that is recognizing the challenges ahead as the public becomes more aware of the growing waste problems and the climate change impact of plastics across their lifecycle. In an interview, Johnson said industry leaders are starting to recognize sustainability is part of their social license to do business.

The Visual Impact of Ocean Plastics

In the hallways and meeting rooms of a glitzy hotel that boasts a Rolls-Royce dealership, people from chemical manufacturers listened to presentations and talked business with representatives of plastic product makers, consumer products companies and recyclers. Government officials were also there for a meeting that was dominated by sessions on sustainability.

Industry has been taking a beating in the public's eye—and cities, states and some countries have begun to restrict, ban or regulate certain plastics. Analysts described all this as one of many risks to plastics' economic future.

Plastics "is in our air, our water, our food, our excrement," said Nina Butler, the chief executive officer of More Recycling, a research and consulting company that works with the plastics industry on recycling "It's very, very pervasive."

...

[scary graf increase diagonal]

Governments Banning Single-Use Plastics

The petrochemical industry sees plastics as a long-term growth opportunity. But right now, the industry is feeling pressure, said Jacqueline Savitz, a top official with the environmental group Oceana. "They realize the public has warmed up to the problem of plastics and that is going to be a real problem for them," said Savitz, who was not at the conference.

Just this week, a study in the American Chemical Society journal Environmental Science & Technology calculated that the average American ingests more than 70,000 particles of microplastics per year, though the authors said the health effects of that consumption were not clear.

Politicians are starting to respond to the concerns.

The United Nations late last year reported a surge in plastic bag bans—nearly two thirds of countries worldwide have adopted some form of legislation to regulate plastic bags.

In 2014, California became the first state to impose a statewide ban on single-use plastic bags at large retail stores. Since then, Hawaii and New York have enacted similar bans, and a newly passed limit on single-use plastics in Vermont, where the governor has said he would let it become law.

Cities like Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and Washington, D.C., have passed plastic bag bans or fees. In March, the European Parliament approved a new law banning single-use plastic items such as plates, cutlery and straws by 2021, and set a 90 percent collection target for plastic bottles by 2029.

We Were Missing Most of the Plastic in the Ocean: The highest levels of microplastics are found more than 650 feet below the surface. UC San Diego research video 6/19 see Plastic.

What’s Worrying the Plastics Industry? Your Reaction to All That Waste, for One 6/19

We Were Missing Most of the Plastic in the Ocean: The highest levels of microplastics are found more than 650 feet below the surface. UC San Diego researchvideo 6/19 see Plastic.

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https://www.ecowatch.com/plastic-pollution-agreement-2636986814.html

PLASTIC POLLUTION

Historic Agreement on Plastic Pollution Reached by 180+ Countries Without the U.S.

Olivia Rosane

May. 13, 2019 06:47AM EST

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icn 419

4 Ways to Cut Plastic’s Growing Greenhouse Gas Emissions

BY: PHIL MCKENNA

Every stage of plastic's life cycle, from fossil fuel extraction to disposal, produces greenhouse gases. These scientists looked at ways to reduce the climate damage.

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maine female dem  gov mills bans 519 styrofoam

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https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2019/03/the-us-is-accused-of-blocking-global-action-against-plastic-pollution/

Environmental groups involved in talks at a United Nations conference in Kenya have accused the US of blocking an ambitious global response to plastic pollution.

Representatives of countries at the UN environment conference in Nairobi this week agreed to significantly reduce single-use plastics over the next decade but the voluntary pledges fell far short of what was required, according to green groups.

Norway, Japan and Sri Lanka had put forward proposals for a legally binding agreement for nations to coordinate action against plastic litter in the oceans and microplastics. India also suggested strong action with a resolution to phase out single-use plastic across the world.

But a coalition of environmental groups at the conference condemned the US for blocking the ambitious attempts to tackle plastic pollution at source as well as downstream.

An initial ministerial statement at the beginning of the event had proposed a commitment to “phase out single-use plastics … by 2025”, a far stronger promise than the compromise nations reached.

On Friday, a series of non-bindingproposals were agreed, including the adoption of an action plan by the International Maritime Organization’s marine environment protection committee to reduce plastic litter from ships, and suggestions for better global management of data on plastic pollution. A final statement said countries would “address the damage to our ecosystems caused by the unsustainable use and disposal of plastic products, including by significantly reducing single-use plastic by 2030”.

In response, environmental groups including Break Free From Plastic, IPEN, Plastic Change, No Waste Louisiana and Coare said the proposals did not go far enough.

“Despite sweeping agreement by the majority of countries that urgent, ambitious and global action is needed to address plastic across its lifecycle, from production to use to disposal, a small minority led by the United States blocked ambitious text and delayed negotiations,” they said in a statement.

Countries most affected by plastic pollution including the Philippines, Malaysia and Senegal were against the resolution being watered down.

Large oil firms in the US are investing billions of dollars in petrochemical production over the next decade, particularly shale gas.

The new facilities, which are being built by ExxonMobile Chemical and Shell Chemical, among others, will help fuel a 40% rise in plastic production in the next decade, according to industry experts.

The world already produces more than 300m tonnes of plastic a year.

“It’s hard to find one solution for all member states,” Siim Kiisler, the president of the UN environment assembly, told Agence France-Presse before the final decision. “The environment is at a turning point. We don’t need verbose documents, we need concrete commitments.”

When asked whether the US had pushed to have the commitments watered down during the week’s negotiations, Kiisler said: “I will not answer that question.”

David Azoulay, from the Center for International Environmental Law, condemned the weakening of the commitment.

He said: “The vast majority of countries came together to develop a vision for the future of global plastic governance. Seeing the US, guided by the interests of the fracking and petrochemical industry, leading efforts to sabotage that vision is disheartening.”

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https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2019/03/this-is-how-the-age-of-plastics-began/

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TJ ban

https://climateheroes.org/heroes/isatou-ceesay-queen-plastic-recycling-gambia/

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We Can't Recycle Our Way Out of This Problem': Ben & Jerry's Bans Single-Use Plastics

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uk guard

The plastic backlash: what’s behind our sudden rage – and will it make a difference? – Stephen Buranyi

Decades after it became part of the fabric of our lives, a worldwide revolt against plastic is under way.

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australia cut bags 80% 3 mos

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bad news, not bio-remediation?

https://www.ecowatch.com/scallops-absorb-microplastics-2622356072.html

Why Plans to Turn America’s Rust Belt into a New Plastics Belt Are Bad News for the Climate

The petrochemical industry anticipates spending a total of over $200 billion on factories, pipelines, and other infrastructure in the U.S. that will rely on shale gas,...

READ MORE

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The petrochemical industry anticipates spending a total of over $200 billion on factories, pipelines, and other infrastructure in the U.S. that will rely on shale gas, the American Chemistry Council announced in September. Construction is already underway at many sites.

This building spree would dramatically expand the Gulf Coast’s petrochemical corridor (known locally as“Cancer Alley”) — and establish a new plastics and petrochemical belt across states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.

:{

}:

If those projects are completed, analysts predict the U.S. would flip from one of the world’s highest-cost producers of plastics and chemicals to one of the cheapest, using raw materials and energy from fracked gas wells in states like Texas, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania.

Those petrochemical plans could have profound consequences for a planet already showing signs of dangerous warming and a cascade of other impacts from climate change.

The gathering wave of construction comes as the Trump administration works to deregulate American industry and roll back pollution controls, putting the U.S. at odds with the rest of the world's efforts to slow climate change.

Trump announced in June 2017 that the U.S. had halted all implementation of the 2015 Paris Agreement and intends to fully withdraw. America is now the world’s only state refusing participation in the global agreement to curb climate change (after Syria, the final holdout, signed in November 2017).

This petrochemical industry expansion — much of it funded by foreign investors — makes America’s refusal to participate in the Paris Agreement all the more significant, because much of this new U.S. infrastructure would be built outside of the greenhouse gas agreement affecting the rest of the globe.

If American policy makers approve this wave of new plastics and petrochemical plants with little regard to curbing climate change and reducing fossil fuel use, environmentalists warn, they’ll be greenlighting hundreds of billions of dollars of investment into projects at risk of becoming stranded assets.

From Rust Belt to Plastics Belt

Some of the largest and most expensive petrochemical projects in the U.S. are planned in the Rust Belt states of Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York, a region that has suffered for decades from the collapse of the domestic steel industry but that has relatively little experience with the kind of petrochemical complexes that are now primarily found on the Gulf Coast.

In November 2017, the China Energy Investment Corp., signed a Memorandum of Understanding with West Virginia that would result in the construction of $83.7 billion in plastics and petrochemicals projects over the next 20 years in that state alone — a huge slice of the $202.4 billion U.S. total. Those plans have run into snags due to trade disputes between the U.S.and China and a corruption probe, though Chinese officials said in late August that investment was moving forward.

The petrochemical industry’s interest is spurred by the fact that the region’s Marcellus and Utica shales contain significant supplies of so-called “wet gas.” This wet gas often is treated as a footnote in discussions of fracking, which tend to focus on the methane gas, called “dry gas” by industry — and not the ethane, propane, butane, and other hydrocarbons that also come from those same wells.

Those “wet” fossil fuels and chemical feedstocks are commonly referred to as “natural gas liquids,” or NGLs, because they are delivered to customers condensed into a liquid form — like the liquid butane trapped in a Bic lighter, which expands into a stream of flammable gas when you flick that lighter on.

Ethane can represent a surprising amount of the fossil fuel from a fracked shale well, particularly in the Marcellus.For every 6,000 cubic feet of methane (the energy equivalent of the industry’s standard 42 gallon barrel of oil), Marcellus wet gas wells can produce up to roughly 35 gallons of ethane, based on datareported by the American Oil and Gas Reporter in 2011.

And U.S. ethane production is projected to grow dramatically. By 2022, the region will produce roughly 800,000 barrels of ethane per day, up from 470,000 barrels a day in 2017,according to energy consultant RBN Energy.

That supply glut is driving down ethane prices in the Rust Belt.

“The lowest price ethane on the planet is here in this region,” Brian Anderson, Director of the West Virginia University Energy Institute, told the NEP Northeast U.S. Petrochemical Construction conference in Pittsburgh in June.

Chemicals and the Climate

Image projected onto Houston petrochemical plant during the Houston Toxic Tour, 2017.Credit: Backbone Campaign, CC BY 2.0]

The petrochemical and plastics industries are notoriously polluting, not only when it comes to toxic air pollution and plastic waste, but also because of the industry’s significant greenhouse gas footprint — affecting not only the U.S., but the entire world.

“The chemical and petrochemical sector is by far the largest industrial energy user, accounting for roughly 10 percent of total worldwide final energy demand and 7 percent of global [greenhouse gas] emissions,” the International Energy Agency reported in 2013. Since then the numbers have crept up, with the IEA finding petrochemicals responsible for an additional percentage point of the world’s total energy consumption in 2017.

Carbon emissions from petrochemical and plastics manufacturing are expected to grow 20 percent by 2030 (in other words, in just over a decade), the IEA concluded in a report released October 5. A few days later, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that by 2030, the world needs to have reduced its greenhouse gas pollution 45 percent from 2010 levels, in order to achieve the goal of limiting global warming to a less-catastrophic 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

The petrochemicals industry has so far drawn relatively little attention from oil and gas analysts and policy makers. “Petrochemicals are one of the key blind spots in the global energy debate, especially given the influence they will exert on future energy trends,” Dr. Fatih Birol, the IEA’s Executive Director, said in a statement this month.

“In fact,” he added, “our analysis shows they will have a greater influence on the future of oil demand than cars, trucks and aviation.”

The new investments, which will rely on decades of continued fracking in the U.S, offer the oil and gas industry a serious hedge against competition from renewable energy, even in the event that climate policies push fossil fuel energy to the margins.

“Unlike refining, and ultimately unlike oil, which will see a moment when the growth will stop, we actually don’t anticipate that with petrochemicals,” Andrew Brown, upstream director for Royal Dutch Shell,told the San Antonio Express News in March.

The planned infrastructure could also help bail out the heavily indebted shale drilling industry financially by consuming vast amounts of fossil fuels, both for power and as a raw material.

The American Chemistry Council has linked 333 chemical industry projects, all announced since 2010, to shale gas — that is, gas that is produced using fracking. Forty-one percent of those projects are still in the planning phase as of September, according to the council, and 68 percent of the projects are linked to foreign investment.

State regulators in Texas and Louisiana have already issued permits that would allow a group of 74 petrochemical and liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects along the Gulf Coast to add 134 million tons of greenhouse gases a year to the atmosphere, an Environmental Integrity Project analysis found in September. The group said that was equal to the pollution from running 29 new coal power plants around the clock.

The expansion of plastics manufacturing in America also has environmentalists worried over a plastics pollution crisis. “We could be locking in decades of expanded plastics production at precisely the time the world is realizing we should use far less of it,” Carroll Muffett, president of the U.S. Center for International Environmental Law,told The Guardian in December 2017.

This story is part of Fracking for Plastics, a DeSmog investigation into the proposed petrochemical build-out in the Rust Belt and the major players involved, along with the environmental, health, and socio-economic implications.]

Petrochemical Paradox

The petrochemical industry transforms ethane and other raw material into a huge range of products, including not only plastic, but also vinyl, fertilizers, Styrofoam, beauty products, chemicals, and pesticides.

The petrochemicals industry itself straddles an uncomfortable fence when it comes to renewable energy and climate change. A significant portion of its revenue comes from “clean” technology sectors, as it provides materials used to make batteries and electric cars.

One report last year concluded that roughly 20 percent of the industry’s revenue comes from products designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, the American Chemistry Council cited the industry’s role supplying “materials and technologies that improve energy efficiency and reduce emissions,” as it opposed Trump’s decision to drop out of the Paris Agreement.

But petrochemical manufacturers are also heavily reliant on fossil fuels. They need them to power and supply a dreamed-of “manufacturing renaissance,” as the ExxonMobil-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute explained as it pushed for Trump to abandon the Paris Agreement.

Plans to use American shale gas would also link petrochemicals to the expansion of fracking, which carries its own environmental concerns. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s landmark study on fracking and drinking water concluded in 2016 that fracking has led to water contamination and poses continued risks to American water supplies.

In addition, though conversations about climate change usually focus on carbon emissions, the gas industry hassuch a bad methane leak problem that using natural gascan be even worse for the climate than burning coal.

“We share IEA’s view that the production, use and disposal of petrochemical-derived products present a variety of environmental challenges that need to be addressed,” the American Chemistry Council said in a statement sent to DeSmog, which also cited the use of petrochemical products in the renewable energy industry and the manufacture of products that raise energy efficiency like home insulation and lighter auto parts. “We are committed to managing energy use in our companies and manufacturing facilities.”

Pittsburgh and Paris

Climate implications make a petrochemical build-out risky, not only from an environmental perspective, but also from a fiscal perspective, Mark Dixon, co-founder ofNoPetroPA, which opposes fracking-based petrochemicals projects, told DeSmog.

One plant, Shell’s $6 billion ethane “cracker” plant currently under construction in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, has permits to pump 2.25 million tons of CO2 equivalent per year into the air near Pittsburgh, roughly equal to the annual carbon pollution from 430,000 cars.

Industry advocates say the region can produce enough ethane to support up to seven more ethane cracker plantslike Shell’s.

“We’re trying to drop our emissions 50 percent by 2030,” Dixon said, referring to Pittsburgh’shighly touted plans to comply with international climate targets despite the federal government’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. “The Shell cracker alone will decimate that.” [no cracker sign]

Stranding Assets

International negotiators met in Bangkok in September to hash out details on how the Paris Agreement will be implemented. The U.S., which participated in talks despite the Trump administration’s intention to withdraw from the accord, faced criticism over working to delay clarity over the agreement’s financing (nonetheless, a top UN negotiator praised “good progress” from the talks).

While the Paris Agreement is not directly binding, globally there has been discussion of using trade agreements and tariffs to pressure countries that fail to keep up with their carbon-cutting commitments.

In February, the European Union (EU)declared that it will not sign new trade agreements with any country that refuses to get on board with the Paris Agreement.

“One of our main demands is that any country who signs a trade agreement with EU should implement the Paris Agreement on the ground,” France’s foreign affairs minister Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne told the French Parliament. “No Paris Agreement, no trade agreement.”

“They’re already shooting across the bow, saying look, you’ve got to implement the Paris climate agreement,” Dixon told DeSmog. “We could very well spend 10 years building an infrastructure to support fracking all over the region, crackers, ethane, plastics, everything, then have Europe say, ‘sorry, you can’t do that. You have to shut it down.’”

In other words, whether or not the U.S. puts its signature on the climate pact’s dotted line, the pressure from trading partners to reduce greenhouse gas pollution — and the underlying concerns about the rapidly warming climate — could remain the same.

That said, while the U.S. is the only country to reject Paris on paper, it is far from the only country on track to miss its targets aimed at warding off catastrophic climate change. Only Morocco and The Gambia are projected to hit “Paris Agreement Compatible” targets, according to the Climate Action Tracker (whose rating tracker includes many major polluters but not all countries worldwide).

The EU itself currently earns a rating of “insufficient” from the group (China is ranked “highly insufficient,” while the U.S. and four other nations earned the worst “critically insufficient” grade).

Closing Windows

The next several years will determine the future of petrochemical production for decades to come, crucial years when it comes to the fate of the climate, if industry gets its timing right — particularly in the Rust Belt.

“The window to make this all work is not forever,” Charles Schliebs of Stone Pier Capital Advisors told the NEP Northeast U.S.Petrochemical Construction conference in June. “It’s maybe two to five years.”

That means key decisions may be made while Donald Trump remains in office — though state and local regulators will also face important calls over permits and construction planning.

For some living near the center of the planned petrochemical expansion, the problem is readily apparent.

“We’re not going to be able to double down on fossil fuels,” Dixon said, “and comply with the Paris climate agreement.”

Follow the DeSmog investigative series, Fracking for Plastics, and get your questions answered with our :{Field Guide to the Petrochemical and Plastics Industry:(style="font-weight:700"):}:

Dirty Diapers Could Be Recycled Into Fabrics, Furniture Under P&G Joint Venture 10/18.

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https://www.ecowatch.com/worst-plastic-polluting-companies-2611144880.html

no lnx

10 Worst Plastic Polluting Companies Found by Global Cleanups

Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Nestlé were identified as the world's biggest producers of plastic trash in global cleanups and brand audits, a new report from Greenpeace and the Break Free From Plastic movement reveals.

Over the span of nine months, an international team of volunteers sorted through 187,000 pieces of plastic trash collected from 239 cleanups in 42 countries around the world.

The results, released Tuesday, shows that these multinational food and beverage giants were the top 10 offenders:

Coca-Cola

PepsiCo

Nestlé

Danone

Mondelez International

Procter & Gamble

Unilever

Perfetti van Melle

Mars Incorporated

Colgate-Palmolive

The organizers behind the effort are calling out these brands for their contribution to plastic pollution.

"These brand audits offer undeniable proof of the role that corporations play in perpetuating the global plastic pollution crisis," Von Hernandez, global coordinator of Break Free From Plastic, said in a press release emailed to EcoWatch. "By continuing to churn out problematic and unrecyclable throwaway plastic packaging for their products, these companies are guilty of trashing the planet on a massive scale. It's time they own up and stop shifting the blame to citizens for their wasteful and polluting products."

Greenpeace Southeast Asia conducts plastic brand audit activity at Wonnapa beach, Chonburi province on World Cleanup Day, September 15, 2018.

Greenpeace

In the U.S. specifically, a total of 70 cleanups determined that Nestlé, PepsiCo and Coca-Cola were the worst corporate plastic polluters, in that order.

The three companies have each pledged to cut their packaging waste. Coca-Cola has a global goal to help collect and recycle the equivalent of 100 percent of its packaging by 2030. Nestlé aims to make 100 percent recyclable or reusable packaging by 2025. PepsiCo has a goal to design 100 percent of its packaging to be recyclable, compostable or biodegradable and to reduce its packaging's carbon impact by 2025.

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https://ic.ucsc.edu/college8core/c8wiki/index.php/Plastic

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https://www.ecowatch.com/how-we-can-turn-plastic-waste-into-green-energy-2609844770.html

...Plastics are among the most valuable waste materials—although with the way people discard them, you probably wouldn't know it. It's possible to convert all plastics directly into useful forms of energy and chemicals for industry, using a process called "cold plasma pyrolysis."

Pyrolysis is a method of heating, which decomposes organic materials at temperatures between 400℃ and 650℃, in an environment with limited oxygen. Pyrolysis is normally used to generate energy in the form of heat, electricity or fuels, but it could be even more beneficial if cold plasma was incorporated into the process, to help recover other chemicals and materials.

The Case for Cold Plasma Pyrolysis

Cold plasma pyrolysis makes it possible to convert waste plastics into hydrogen, methane and ethylene. Both hydrogen and methane can be used as clean fuels, since they only produce minimal amounts of harmful compounds such as soot, unburnt hydrocarbons and carbon dioxide (CO₂). And ethylene is the basic building block of most plastics used around the world today.

As it stands, 40 percent of waste plastic products in the U.S. and 31 percent in the EU are sent to landfill. Plastic waste also makes up 10 percent to 13 percent of municipal

solid waste. This wastage has huge detrimental impacts on oceans and other ecosystems.

Of course, burning plastics to generate energy is normally far better than wasting them. But burning does not recover materials for reuse, and if the conditions are not tightly controlled, it can have detrimental effects on the environment such as air pollution.

In a circular economy—where waste is recycled into new products, rather than being thrown away—technologies that give new life to waste plastics could transform the problem of mounting waste plastic. Rather than wasting plastics, cold plasma pyrolysis can be used to recover valuable materials, which can be sent directly back into industry.

How to Recover Waste Plastic

In our recent study we tested the effectiveness of cold plasma pyrolysis using plastic bags, milk and bleach bottles collected by a local recycling facility in Newcastle, UK.

We found that 55 times more ethylene was recovered from [high density polyethylene (HDPE)]—which is used to produce everyday objects such as plastic bottles and piping—using cold plasma, compared to conventional pyrolysis. About 24 percent of plastic weight was converted from HDPE directly into valuable products.

Plasma technologies have been used to deal with hazardous waste in the past, but the process occurs at very high temperatures of more than 3,000°C, and therefore requires a complex and energy intensive cooling system. The process for cold plasma pyrolysis that we investigated operates at just 500℃ to 600℃ by combining conventional heating and cold plasma, which means the process requires relatively much less energy.

The cold plasma, which is used to break chemical bonds, initiate and excite reactions, is generated from two electrodes separated by one or two insulating barriers.

Cold plasma is unique because it mainly produces hot (highly energetic) electrons—these particles are great for breaking down the chemical bonds of plastics. Electricity for generating the cold plasma could be sourced from renewables, with the chemical products derived from the process used as a form of energy storage: where the energy is kept in a different form to be used later.

The advantages of using cold plasma over conventional pyrolysis is that the process can be tightly controlled, making it easier to crack the chemical bonds in HDPE that effectively turn heavy hydrocarbons from plastics into lighter ones. You can use the plasma to convert plastics into other materials; hydrogen and methane for energy, or ethylene and hydrocarbons for polymers or other chemical processes.

Best of all, the reaction time with cold plasma takes seconds, which makes the process rapid and potentially cheap. So, cold plasma pyrolysis could offer a range of business opportunities to turn something we currently waste into a valuable product.

The UK is currently struggling to meet a 50 percent household recycling target for 2020. But our research demonstrates a possible place for plastics in a circular economy. With cold plasma pyrolysis, it may yet be possible to realize the true value of plastic waste – and turn it into something clean and useful.

Reposted with permission from our media associate The Conversation.

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World’s Largest Sovereign Wealth Fund Raises Standards for Oceans, Sustainability

Norway's $1 trillion sovereign wealth fund, the largest in the world, released two documents Wednesday stating it wants the companies it invests in to follow more rigorous rules on oceanplastic pollution and overall sustainability, Reuters reported.

Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM), which manages the fund that invests in more than 9,000 companies in 72 countries, said it expected companies to consider ocean sustainability when creating strategy, take ocean-related risks into account and be transparent and responsible in managing the oceans, CNBC reported.

"The ocean is a vital part of the biosphere and an important part of the global economy," NBIM CEO Yngve Slyngstad said in a statement reported by CNBC. "We expect companies to manage the challenges and opportunities related to sustainable use of the ocean."

The fund's ocean "expectation document" is focused on companies that benefit from or impact the ocean in some way, from plastic producers to fisheries to shipping. These companies are worth $56.5 billion total and represent around 8 percent of the fund's global equities portfolio, Reuters reported.

Ocean plastic pollution has emerged as a major environmental problem in recent years, and plastic producers make up about half of the companies targeted by the new document.

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kpfa UCS? says as we wean off FF burn corps will boost output for plastic, next big mkt?!

EW  Study Finds New Reason to Ban Plastic: It Emits Methane in the Sun

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https://www.ecowatch.com/india-plastics-ban-2575628410.html

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UK Inventor Launches Campaign to Get Eco-Friendly, Plastic-Free Bottle Into Stores

https://www.ecowatch.com/plastic-free-water-bottle-2565228202.html

Earth Day 2018: Ending Plastic Pollution in the Oceans, Land & Our Bodies 4/18. microbeads, Marcus Eriksen of the 5 Gyres Institute, who has led 20 expeditions around the world to research plastic marine pollution, and Priscilla Villa of the #BreakFreeFromPlastics movement.

More Than 40 Companies Sign Onto Historic UK Plastics Pact, a groundbreaking alliance of companies, non-governmental organizations and governments working to transform packaging in the UK by 2025. 4/18

Scientists Accidentally Develop 'Mutant' Enzyme That Eats Plastic 4/18.

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https://www.democracynow.org/2018/4/20/earth_day_2018_ending_plastic_pollution

 We speak to Marcus Eriksen of the 5 Gyres Institute, who has led 20 expeditions around the world to research plastic marine pollution, and Priscilla Villa of the #BreakFreeFromPlastics movement.

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cracker EJ houston and gulf exxon

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Indonesia Calls in the Army to Fight Plastic Enemy

In March, a diver's video of masses of plastic floating off the Indonesian coast went viral. But that plastic often reaches the ocean through the country's rivers, clogging them to such an extent that Indonesia had to call in the army, the BBC reported Thursday.

The BBC spent time on the ground in Bandung, Indonesia's third largest city, and observed a concentration of bottles, plastic bags and styrofoam packaging so large it looked like an iceberg.