By B. Cooper
Plastic pollution is one of the major environmental problems we face on Earth today and will be a challenge for generations to come. Plastic pollution is pervasive in our environment and our bodies. Forbes, a mouthpiece of big business, recognizes the threat, and Food & Water Watch lists microplastics on its top five threats to safe drinking water.
All major industrial nations make plastic. The main inputs for plastic production are a byproduct of fossil fuel refinement, making its production cheap for fossil fuel economies. Due to its cheapness and versatility, corporations use plastics for virtually all packaging, and in almost all consumer products. The profit motive crowds out any concern for sustainability or public health considerations, prioritizing cheap and convenient over safe or durable. In short, because of capitalism we live in a highly dangerous situation.
The only certain way to stop plastic pollution and begin the process of cleaning the planet is to stop plastic production at the source. This requires a planned economy where all plastic producers, recycling companies, and adjacent industries are nationalized under workers’ control. Working people can decide how to manage a just transition away from plastics, fossil fuels, and war without undermining needs such as health care and transportation, and we can do so better than the billionaires. We must make rational decisions soon about how and where plastics should be used, or else we will sleepwalk into tragedy.
The scope of the problem
Plastic garbage exists in huge refuse piles all over the planet, including the well-known Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a 1.6 million square kilometer area of the ocean where tiny particles of trash are collected by ocean currents and float “decomposing” in the water. Of course, this is not the only place plastic pollution collects; there are countless landfills and “natural” refuse zones all over Earth. There are also uncounted instances of plastic being burned.
Much of this plastic pollution has broken down into unseen microplastics, defined as pieces that are smaller than a fingernail, but can be as small as five nanometers in size. For comparison, 0.1 millimeters is still 100,000 times longer than one nanometer. These microplastics have accumulated in the human body by eating polluted fish, drinking polluted water, breathing polluted air, and by skin contact with plastics. It has been found in rivers, oceans, soil, crops, etc.
Microplastics are pervasive in the extreme. You, dear reader, have plastic in your body. Research has found that everyone consumes the equivalent of a credit card each week by ingesting, breathing, and touching plastics. You did not need to drink brown-looking water or eat credit cards to get it there. Microplastics don’t just come from landfills, as any plastic we drink, cook, build, or play with can shed these particles. Testing has revealed microplastics in most human tissues, including the human brain, which has been found to be in higher concentrations for those with a dementia diagnosis. Other health effects potentially include hormone problems, fetal complications, and heart disease.
Listing all sources of microplastics is out of our scope here but it is worth mentioning polyester, nylon, and latex clothing, which contribute a substantial amount of microplastics to the water each time they are washed. Corporations produce more and more polyester-based clothes due to their cheapness. Cosmetics and cigarette butts are also substantial sources of microplastics. While virtually all drinking water is contaminated to a degree, bottled water has higher concentrations of microplastics, as do all drinks bottled in plastic.
Plastics and nature
Plastics are not biodegradable like paper and are less stable than most metals. Therefore, when plastics “decompose” all they are really doing is breaking into smaller, and ever smaller, pieces. This has led to the total infiltration of microplastics into the human body and the ecosystem.
Plastics are made from hydrocarbons extracted from refining crude oil. In chemistry they are called monomers (single molecules) and are bound together in strings of molecules called polymers. Different polymers can be used to make different plastics. Life on Earth did not evolve to use these polymers and hence they are not biodegradable. They are suspected to take over 500 years to disappear if not longer. As a result, the continued production of plastics by humans leads only to an ever greater amount of space, originally for biology, being taken up by inert plastic matter… microbes in our bodies as well as microbes in the soil cannot metabolize it.
But can’t plastics be recycled?
Some 91 percent of all plastic ever made was not recycled. It remains in landfills, the ocean, or in unseen particles all around us. Even if it was recycled, the process would not totally eliminate the risk of plastics shedding microscopic particles.
Part of the problem is logistics. For convenience and profitability, capitalism worldwide produces plastic for every conceivable use, yet major governments such as the U.S. and China have not enforced strict enough regulations on its plastic disposal, nor have municipal governments provided robust enough infrastructure to handle the amount and variety of plastics that consumers come across.
Further, the 9% of recycling that does happen is often outsourced to workers in the global South, under questionable conditions and miserable pay. Shipping this plastic overseas involves further carbon emissions.
Most types of plastic aren’t recyclable at all. Most recyclable plastic is either PET (water bottles) or HDPE (jugs). Corporations have printed the types of plastic on the bottom or sides of products but this is of little help when municipalities don’t have the will or means to properly separate the types of plastic or make this reality clear to consumers. There are also a dozen other types of plastic that instantly become garbage upon creation. Clear plastic wrap, styrofoam, microplastics in cosmetics, and polyester clothing cannot be recycled.
Bioplastics are an example of plastics made from sources other than fossil fuels. In principle, they are biodegradable. In practice, however, this is not always true, while this category represents an insignificant portion of the world’s plastics. Again, it comes down to cost. Bioplastics are not profitable for oil companies, who have a need to sell the byproducts of crude oil refining.
The plastic industry and fossil fuels
Recycling is useless when corporations don’t bother to make recycled products. 90% of plastic products are primary plastics. This is cheaper than making recycled goods, and more kinds of products can be made with primary plastics than with recycled ones. Besides, most recycled plastic goods are partially made with primaries.
Plastics pollution is as much the fault of the fossil-fuel industry, which in the search for profits has slyly marketed crude oil byproducts in the form of fossil-fuel-derived plastics. Since the end of World War II, plastics have been developed and marketed by the fossil-fuel industry so that this (then brand new) technology could make a profit. Getting the planet off of fossil fuels, and off of fossil-fuel-derived plastics is the same challenge.
In 2023, humans produced 413.8 million metric tons of plastics. Plastic production in 2010 was 270 million metric tons, and production has consistently increased every year. The biggest producer of plastics is China, with approximately 33% of production, followed by the rest of Asia with 20%, North American countries with 20%, and then Europe with 17%. Global capitalism’s supply chain, as it stands, demands that all industrialized countries participate in the production and sale of plastics—to the long term detriment of human health.
Production—and not mere littering or bad consumer choices—is the source of the pollution. It is here that the problem must be examined. No littering laws, while essential, aren’t at all sufficient, and asking consumers to buy “green” is an insult when corporations only produce and provide plastic products, provide food in plastic packaging, and continue to make plastic clothes! Go to any grocery store in the United States and try to find a loaf of bread not wrapped in plastic!
Plastics and capitalism
The overproduction of plastics threatens human, animal, and plant health and adds tremendously to our existential risk. Plastics in themselves are not an inherent evil, but the capitalist system has incentivized an addiction to plastics in almost everything and has created a self-destructive cycle of waste, while the plastic industry is inherently linked to the fossil-fuel emissions driving climate disruption.
Corporations (and the rich people who own them) choose plastics for different reasons. Sometimes plastic is an essential component of technology. This is particularly true for hospitals and computers. But most times, as with packaging, food storage, or clothing, plastic is chosen not because it is the safest or most effective material for the job but rather because it is cheap. Often new technology, such as asbestos, has been pursued with little or no regard for long-term consequences, and only years later do we learn how harmful it is to human health. Plastic is a modern example, but far more pervasive than asbestos.
Cost effectiveness is one of the only senses in which capitalist production—i.e., production of commodities for sale to a market, with the goal of generating private profit from the exploitation of labor power—is “rational.” It is precisely this “rationality” that has led to a world of planned obsolescence, disposable plastic products, and millions of people with the ability to consume products but no way of controlling how they are actually made. Those who control the process of production—the capitalist class—do so to make money, not to fulfill human needs.
Once we learn of the dangers of microplastics, does it remain rational to produce polyester or polyurethane in increasing amounts? Is this rational when we have no means of recycling the stuff and produce essentially millions of tons of toxic waste that are destined to poison bodies for generations? There are many more reasons to limit than to increase plastic production.
We should not trust the masters of big business to find a way out of our current mess. Working people must take up the mantle of economic and environmental planning and grab the major industries out of billionaire control.
Nationalize industry under workers’ control!
What is needed? In the short term, plastic production itself must be drastically reduced—if not eliminated—and restricted solely to what is absolutely essential. In the medium term, the economy must be re-organized to work without fossil fuels and without plastics—a daunting, but necessary task. Finally, the long-term goal, which is unlikely to be finished in our lifetimes, is to clean the planet of pollution and heal bodies damaged by microplastics and other pollutants.
Given the sheer scope of what’s needed, and how we got here, it would be delusional to assume that “business as usual” will allow us to find a solution. “Business as usual,” i.e., capitalism, if not stopped, will result in our lives becoming much worse. Only a democratically organized socialist economy could begin the process of stopping plastic pollution. What would this look like in practice?
In the first place, all plastic producers, recycling companies, and adjacent industries should be nationalized. Nationalization of these industries is the first step that is needed to begin cutting the production of plastic and planning the re-organization of the economy. The corporations who make this trash should not have the “freedom” to produce it anymore, full stop. But this in itself is not enough.
Secondly, and more importantly, such nationalizations should take place under the directive of a workers’ government, a government in which the working people have a direct say in how (and why) an individual business, a factory, a municipality, or the entire country is run.
Furthermore, such a government would exclude the millionaires and billionaires and the duplicitous political group of elephants and donkeys they fund. It would be the most democratic government in history because the dictatorship at the workplace (and in turn the dictatorship of the whole class of rich people over working people) would end. A workers’ government in the United States would be the organization of the millions of workers all over the country towards rational economic planning to serve their needs, and not the requirements of capitalists.
Currently, workers are forced by the capitalist economy to get a job in industries that produce things we don’t need and—in the case of plastics—are actively harmful to life. We go to work every day and produce, for example, plastic bottles for soda, and these get sold to customers to drink, introducing plastics into their body, then to get discarded at landfills. This is not good for us or the Earth. Despite this, the demands of the capitalist economy, and the profit drive of the owners of corporations, and our own need to pay for rent and food, drive us inexorably to make toxic products!
There are, of course, a million other examples, besides plastic bottles, of toxic production. But other things, like latex or nitrile gloves in hospitals, can’t be eliminated immediately. Workers will be capable of deciding what makes sense here. For example, we could trade plastic drinking bottles for glass, while guaranteeing that medical plastics are made until a better solution is found. Many decisions like this must be made, and rational economic planning will allow us to accomplish these steps while preparing for the future.
The advantage of nationalizing industry under workers’ control and systematic planning would mean that for the first time we would be able to re-organize production to stop producing what is killing us and put our labor towards what would improve life and make it more wholesome. That is the goal of socialism.
Nationalized production under workers’ control would end the anarchy of the labor market by guaranteeing a job to all and guaranteeing income in the intervals between work. After we have shut down the plastic blow-molders of the world, the blow-molder operators would be able to pursue a new job without the uncertainty of unemployment that would be a guarantee under capitalism. As long as capitalism exists the ability to work a given machine (or work at all!) is a privilege given by the boss. Under a workers’ government the union or factory committee on the shop floor would now have total control of how the factory is run. The union could become a means for the workers to debate about how to re-allocate work to reduce the working hours for everyone.
With rational planning, a workers’ government would be the greatest “job creator” on Earth, as millions of jobs will be needed to repair the planet and also increase production of what’s really needed. Once we stop producing plastic-wrapped food, plastic packaging, and stop fossil fuels, new solutions will be needed to fill the void, and that means jobs!
Plastic is still a technically useful material, of course. A workers’ government would need to consult with scientists and engineers about how to best use the material in industry, as well as household products, safely (if at all). Corporations under capitalism already hire scientists and engineers to make the cheapest and most profitable products. These experts can also be hired by the workers, with an important twist: under rational planning, the safety and quality of consumer products would increase as we overcome the planned obsolescence and disposable products of capitalism.
For this future to happen, a revolutionary change has to occur in the consciousness of the working class. We need to stop identifying ourselves with the nation states that are preparing for war, and with the various confidence men who prey on our insecurities and fears. We must have our own policy and our own party. It is within our abilities to run the world, and that this world will be better than the capitalist dumpster fire we see today.
• Stop the production of plastics NOW! For recyclable and biodegradable alternatives!
• Organize the widespread collection and safe disposal, or storage, of plastics!
• Emergency measures NOW for environmental cleanup!
• Put industry, commerce, and the banks under workers control! For a planned economy to stop climate disruption!
• For a reduction of working hours without a reduction in pay! Guaranteed employment for all!
Sources
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33130380/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch
https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/microplastics-long-legacy-left-behind-plastic-pollution
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33130380/
https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2024/02/427161/how-to-limit-microplastics-dangers
https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/whopping-91-percent-plastic-isnt-recycled/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-its-so-hard-to-recycle-plastic/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/282732/global-production-of-plastics-since-1950/
