A diver removes plastic waste from the sea floor in Hatay, Turkey on December 2, 2022. (Photo: Sebnem Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
“Every minute, a garbage truck’s worth of plastic enters the ocean,” researchers said.
The amount of plastic waste littering the Earth’s ocean floors could be up to 100 times the quantity floating on the surface, according to a study published this week.
Researchers at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO)—an Australian government agency—and the University of Toronto in Canada found that up to 11 million tons of plastic are polluting the planet’s ocean floors, including microplastics and larger objects like fishing nets, cups, and bags.
“We know that millions of tons of plastic waste enter our oceans every year but what we didn’t know is how much of this pollution ends up on our ocean floor,” CSIRO senior research scientist and study co-author Denise Hardesty said in a statement. “We discovered that the ocean floor has become a resting place, or reservoir, for most plastic pollution, with between 3 to 11 million tons of plastic estimated to be sinking to the ocean floor.”
"Every minute, a garbage truck's worth of plastic enters the ocean."
Study leader Alice Zhu, a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto, said that “the ocean surface is a temporary resting place of plastic so it is expected that if we can stop plastic entering our oceans, the amount would be reduced.”
“However, our research found that plastic will continue to end up in the deep ocean,” Zhu stated. “These findings help to fill a longstanding knowledge gap on the behavior of plastic in the marine environment.”
“Understanding the driving forces behind the transport and accumulation of plastic in the deep ocean will help to inform source reduction and environmental remediation efforts, thereby reducing the risks that plastic pollution may pose to marine life,” she added.
The study is part of CSIRO’s Ending Plastic Waste program, whose goal is “an 80% reduction in plastic waste entering the Australian environment by 2030.”
Humans produce approximately 440 million tons of plastics annually, or roughly the combined weight of every person on the planet. Plastic pollution harms not only the environment and ecosystems, but also human health and economies.
Plastic use is expected to double by 2040. Negotiations on a global plastics treaty have made little progress amid lobbying by the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries.
More than 90% of plastics disposed of between 1950 and 2015 were not recycled. (Photo: Laura Lezza/Getty Images)
“The oil industry’s lies are at the heart of the two most catastrophic pollution crises in human history,” one advocate said.
The petrochemical industry—including major oil companies like ExxonMobil—knew for decades that recycling was not a sustainable solution to the problem of plastic waste, yet continued to promote it in order to avoid regulation and deceive consumers into continuing to buy and use their products, a report released Thursday by the Center for Climate Integrity reveals.
The report, titled The Fraud of Plastic Recycling: How Big Oil and the Plastics Industry Deceived the Public for Decades and Caused the Plastic Waste Crisis, includes newly disclosed industry documents proving that companies and trade groups knew that plastics could not be recycled indefinitely in the 1980s and 90s even as they launched a massive public relations campaign to sell voters and policymakers on the process.
“This evidence shows that many of the same fossil fuel companies that knew and lied for decades about how their products cause climate change have also known and lied to the public about plastic recycling,” Center for Climate Integrity (CCI) president Richard Wiles said in a statement. “The oil industry’s lies are at the heart of the two most catastrophic pollution crises in human history.”
Big Oil and the plastics industry 🤯knew decades ago that recycling plastic is not viable at scale 🧐deceptively promoted plastic recycling as a false solution 😡directly fueled the plastic waste crisis
Plastic pollution is a major environmental and public health crisis. If current trends continue, plastics are expected to outweigh fish in the ocean by 2050, and the toxic fumes from plastic production facilities and incineration are a major environmental justice hazard for frontline communities. Humans in general also ingest an estimated credit-card’s worth of plastic each week, with unknown but potentially serious health impacts.
Recycling is often touted as a solution for keeping plastic out of the environment, but this has proven to be ineffective and insufficient: More than 90% of the plastics disposed of between 1950 and 2015 were either burnt, sent to landfills, or dumped into the environment. There are several technical and economic reasons why plastic recycling doesn’t work at scale. Plastics lose quality as they are recycled and can only really be reused once or potentially twice. The decline in quality also means that recycled plastics are more likely to leach toxins added during production or picked up from other waste items. Economically, it is cheaper to produce new plastics than recycle older ones, and only two types of plastic—PET and HDPE—actually attract markets that will recycle them.
The industry has long been aware of these limitations. In 1969, the American Chemical Society declared, “It is always possible that scientists and engineers will learn to recycle or dispose of wastes at a profit, but that does not seem likely to happen soon on a broad basis.”
“We are committed to the activities, but not committed to the results.”
Despite this, petrochemical companies and their trade groups began to push plastic recycling in the 1980s and 90s as a response to growing public concern over plastic waste, and the threat that this would lead to bans on plastic products.
“No doubt about it, legislation is the single most important reason why we are looking at recycling,” Wayne Pearson, the executive director of industry front group the Plastics Recycling Foundation and a DuPont marketing director, said in 1988.
The plastics industry used various strategies to sell the public on recycling, according to the report. These included:
Funding front groups to promote recycling;
Running ad and PR campaigns;
Investing in recycling research to convince the public that it was taking action;
Setting unrealistic internal recycling goals;
Writing educational material promoting recycling to school children;
Advocating for “advanced recycling,” a term for breaking plastics down to chemical components that can theoretically be reused but are not in practice; and
Claiming, against evidence, that recycling can be part of a “circular economy.”
CCI provides new evidence that, while the industry was employing these strategies, it was simultaneously aware of recycling’s limitations.
For example, a report from the Vinyl Institute trade group concluded in 1986 that “recycling cannot be considered a permanent solid waste solution, as it merely prolongs the time until an item is disposed of.”
In 1994, Exxon Chemical Vice President Irwin Levowitz told employees of the American Plastics Council that “we are committed to the activities, but not committed to the results.”
CCI argued that the petrochemical industry should face legal consequences for its “campaign of deception” similar to suits brought against tobacco and opioid companies.
“When corporations and trade groups know that their products pose grave risks to society, and then lie to the public and policymakers about it, they must be held accountable,” Wiles said. “Accountability means stopping the lying, telling the truth, and paying for the damage they’ve caused.”
CCI vice president of legal and general counsel Alyssa Johl added: “Big Oil and the plastics industry’s decades-long campaign to deceive the public about plastic recycling has likely violated laws designed to protect consumers and the public from corporate misconduct and pollution.”
“Attorneys general and other officials should carefully consider the evidence that these companies defrauded the public and take appropriate action to hold them accountable,” Johl said.
Advocates warn plants like the latest addition to the Texas complex generate hazardous pollutants and provide cover for oil giants to produce new plastic products
Exxon plant at Baytown, Texas
ExxonMobil just launched one of the largest chemical recycling plants in North America – but environmental advocates say the technology is a dangerous distraction from the need to reduce plastic production.
On the surface, the latest addition to ExxonMobil’s giant petrochemical refinery complex in Baytown, Texas, sounds like it could be a good thing: An “advanced recycling” facility capable of breaking down 36,000 metric tons of hard-to-recycle plastic each year. But plastic waste advocates warn that plants like it do little actual recycling, and instead generate hazardous pollutants while providing cover for oil giants to keep producing millions of tons of new plastic products each year.
The facility, which began large-scale operations in December of last year, is one of the largest chemical recycling plants in North America. Chemical recycling works by breaking down plastic polymers into small molecules in order to make new plastics, synthetic fuels and other products. Companies like ExxonMobil have rebranded the technology as “advanced recycling” and are now touting it as the latest hi-tech fix to address the plastic crisis, as traditional, mechanical recycling has failed to slow the tide of plastic piling up in landfills and the ocean.
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ExxonMobil’s Baytown complex – which includes the third largest oil refinery in the US and a plant that manufactures 2.3m metric tons of plastic a year – is a major contributor to regional airand water pollution. It also has a long history of emitting chemicals above its permit limits, including the carcinogenic compound benzene. In recent years, ExxonMobil’s Baytown complex has been the site of fires and explosions that have injured workers and triggered shelter-in-place orders for nearby residents.
“Exxon has a terrible track record of polluting the Baytown community,” Luke Metzger, the executive director of Environment Texas, told the Guardian. “This false ‘chemical recycling’ will only produce more toxic misery for Baytown.”
