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All this carbon has to come from somewhere, and that’s cheap, plentiful fossil fuels.
“When you’ve done the extraction of the oil and the refining of the oil, all the things that are left over then are basically used as the basis of pretty much all of our synthetic chemicals, says chemist Iseult Lynch of the University of Birmingham, who studies plastics. “So it’s actually much, much cheaper just to keep refining virgin plastic than it is to recycle or reuse or recover. And that’s the main problem, that if they’re extracting it for the oil and gas industry, then these byproducts are always going to just be cheap.”
This is why humanity has only recycled 9 percent of the 14 trillion pounds of plastic waste it has produced: it’s cheaper to just churn out more virgin plastic than it is to reprocess what’s already out there. The economics of recycling aren’t just busted—they’re preposterous.

A Poison Like No Other by Matt Simon. Copyright © 2022 Matthew Brian Simon. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C.
Island Press, Washington, D.C.
Every step of manufacturing virgin plastic also expels greenhouse gasses. It takes energy to drill into the earth and extract fossil fuels, plus wells leak methane, a greenhouse gas that’s 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide. (In fairness to methane, it also disappears from the atmosphere much quicker than CO2, on a timescale of decades, not centuries.)
Transporting fossil fuels takes energy. Turning them into monomers to make polymers takes energy: according to the Center for International Environmental Law, 24 ethylene facilities in the US emit as much CO2 in a year as 4 million passenger vehicles. The group further calculates that if the production and use of plastic continues to grow on its current trajectory, by 2030 the industry will generate as much greenhouse gas per year as 295 coal plants. By 2050, that will more than double to 615 coal plants. Plastics production is accelerating so feverishly that the industry’s emissions will overtake emissions from coal by 2030, according to the advocacy group, Beyond Plastics. So really, plastics are canceling out the gains humanity has been making on climate change by decommissioning coal plants and electrifying vehicles.
“The fossil fuel industry does not want to give up sales they are now making a very big play on plastic production” says Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics and a former Environmental Protection Agency regional administrator. “It’s rather alarming, and it's happening under the radar.”
Between 2019 and 2021 alone, at least 42 new plastics facilities either came online, were under construction, or were in the permitting phase. Which is not to say that you the consumer are what’s driving this boom in plastic production—no one’s asking for more of their stuff to be wrapped in single use plastic. Petrochemical companies and food and beverage giants are manufacturing the need for plastic because it boosts their bottom line, as plastic containers are lighter than glass and therefore cheaper to ship. If large-scale recycling worked, the industry would stop building plastic facilities, not build more of them.
“The petrochemical industry is still trying to fool people into thinking that plastics recycling is a solution, and it’s been an abysmal failure”. Says Enck. “We are dealing with both the fossil fuel industry and the chemical industry, neither of which wants to make less plastic.”
Excerpted from A Poison Like No Other by Matt Simon. Copyright © 2022 Matthew Brian Simon. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C.