Excerpts from Untangling Plastics
Most people consider plastic consumer items or packaging as beneficial and generally inert or innocuous—not harmful.
Yet the plastic products in our household are made from hundreds of chemicals originating from petrochemical factories that also produce oil and gas products. The very companies that are directly impacting the warming of Earth and causing climate change are also producing plastics through the extraction, processing, and production of petrochemicals.
What is the relationship between plastics and climate change?
How are consumers of plastics complicit in the complicated web of environmental climate impacts?
How can individuals change their consumer practices to slow the effects of climate change?
These are all questions I hope to address in this book.
All forms of synthetic plastics are made from fossil fuels, and every step of the fossil fuel trail impacts the climate and degrades Earth’s environment—from the extraction of minerals and gas; to transport, processing, and refining; to the manufacturing of plastics. Then there are environmental and climate impacts in the packaging and sales of plastic products, consumer usage and disposal habits, and the perpetual impact of plastics on the environment.
From the moment of creation through the infinite lifespan of each plastic product, there are continuous environmental impacts that are unmitigated and infinitely ongoing—impacts that ultimately affect the climate and the livability of Planet Earth.
The plastic industry “has known for more than 30 years that recycling is not an economically or technically feasible plastic waste management solution,” as demonstrated in a report from the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI)1 and numerous other scientific reports.
These reports validate what other investigations and news reports have been saying for decades: that the industry has long known that the vast amounts of plastics manufactured cannot be addressed through recycling.
It’s not a consumer problem; it’s a plastics problem.
These principles are explored in this book as I do a deep dive into the various harms plastics exhibit.
Untangling Plastics: The Missing Link to Mitigating Climate Change