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The Plastic Problem

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  • THE PROBLEM Plastic pollution is growing exponentially.

  • WHY IT MATTERS Plastic’s harm to the planet is a global problem.

  • THE SOLUTION A global set of rules to manage the material’s life cycle.

By Meghan Walsh

See the latest issue of Briefings at newsstands or read the full magazine in digital format here.

Nick Sandland is a man on a mission. For 35 years, he has worked in the petrochemical industry, including the last 18 years with a supplier of polymer compounds, a substance that helps form the base of materials such as plastic, paper, and glass. Sandland’s job for the past couple of years was to scout emerging-science and entrepreneurships that might disrupt the plastics market.

As the world grapples with climate change and burgeoning pollution, plastic alternatives have become a hot topic. Over the years, Sandland estimates that he has connected with at least 40 startups seeking a way to reduce plastic’s climate impact. Some had a compelling story, but flimsy science. Others had promising science, but no economic viability or potential to scale. “There was always some piece of the puzzle that was missing,” he says.

“It’s a global problem. It doesn’t see borders.”

Then Sandland discovered an outfit called Algenesis Labs, and he was hooked. In fact, he joined the company earlier this year as chief business officer. Founded in 2016 by a biotech professor at the University of California, San Diego, the company helped pioneer the use of a renewable source, algae oil, to create a high-performing polyurethane plastic that is compostable. When Algenesis Labs realized the infrastructure didn’t exist to scale up algae harvesting, the company expanded feedstocks to include crops like hemp, castor, and other plant oils. Last year, it launched the first-ever fully biodegradable footwear brand, Blueview. “We created this shoe as proof of concept to show it can be done,” Sandland says. The company also offers other polyurethane technologies that are being used to make furniture foam, fashion accessories, cell-phone cases, and sporting equipment.

Modern civilization runs on plastic. This all-purpose material delivers our food, water, and medicine; it binds our clothing and protects the soles of our feet; it forms our cars, computers, and solar panels. It has immeasurably altered human existence by making possible medical technologies that have extended the human lifespan. Plastic is cheap, lightweight, and versatile. Plentiful, pliant, and strong. It’s precisely that strength that has made it both a valuable commodity and also one of the 21st century’s great environmental challenges.

A Brief History of Plastic

While steel and glass have been in use for more than 3,000 years, plastic is a relatively new invention. A short history of the material that created the modern world.

1869 The first partially synthetic polymer made of cotton and camphor is invented as a replacement for ivory in billiard balls.
1907 Made from phenol and formaldehyde, the first fully synthetic plastic is created to replace shellac, an electric insulator. It's called "the material of a thousand uses."
1930s Nylon, Teflon, polystyrene (styrofoam), and polyethylene (bags and bottles) emerge onto the scene. Plastic use increases 300 percent during World War II.
1960s Industry shifts focus from mostly long-term, durable plastic goods to single-use packaging.
1971 Plastic is found in the ocean, and concerns begin to arise about plastic pollution.
1972 The first plastic-recycling mill is built in Pennsylvania, but recycling doesn't become mainstream in the US until the late 1980s.
1996 The "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" is discovered.
2002 Bangladesh becomes the first country to ban plastic bags.
2014 California becomes the first US state to prohibit light-weight plastic bags.
2022 United Nations member states adopt a mandate to negotiate a global plastics treaty.
2024 Global-plastics treaty negotiations are planned to conclude. Each year, the nations of the world discard more than 440 million tons of plastic.

Plastic takes hundreds, even thousands, of years to decompose, but every year, the world produces more than 462 million tons of it—a pace expected to triple by 2060. Currently, less than 9 percent of that haul gets recycled. The remainder is incinerated, sits in landfills, or makes its way into the ocean. Products that often get used for minutes live on for centuries—with little understanding of the data on their impact to ecological and human health. 

The problem has become so unwieldy that United Nations member states are currently negotiating a global plastics treaty. The biggest names in business, from 3M to Unilever to Walmart, are showing their support through the Business Coalition for a Global Plastics Treaty, which has more than 300 signatories. The coalition is advocating for a plan that addresses the entire life cycle of plastic, from incentivizing materials innovation to developing infrastructure that supports responsible end-of-life management. While there is not yet consensus on the details of the treaty, there is agreement on this: Tackling plastic pollution is a massive undertaking that is going to require the collaboration of numerous stakeholders, including governments, businesses, and consumers. “Countries are regulating all over the world, sometimes in wild and fantastic ways,” says John Duncan, the coalition’s secretariat co-lead. “If we don’t step up, the complexity is going to become phenomenal. Consumers will lay the blame at the feet of businesses.”

And the clock is ticking: In the two years since negotiations have begun, scientists estimate that the equivalent of 6 trillion plastic bags have entered the oceans.

A brief primer on plastic: In the early 1900s, a Belgian chemist mixed formaldehyde with phenol, a petroleum byproduct, to create the synthetic polymer that’s the earliest ancestor of today’s plastic. Called Bakelite, it was used to make jewelry, knobs, and radios. Still, not until after World War II did plastic make its way into daily life. Compared to glass and steel, both of which date back more than 3,000 years, plastic is a newcomer to the world stage. Indeed, in the last 10 years we’ve produced more plastic than in the previous 100.

Plastic is a generic term referring to a polymer, or chemical compound, with a double carbon bond. Most commonly, that carbon is derived from fossil fuels, but it can also be made from other sources, such as seaweed, bamboo, mycelia, corn, and sugarcane. Many people don’t realize that we can currently produce both compostable fossil-fuel plastics and immortal bioplastics. Chemical additives are what determine a product’s longevity, and ultimately its circularity. “It’s crucial to recognize that the biodegradability of a plastic is entirely disconnected from the origin of the carbon in the plastic,” says Ramani Narayan, a chemical engineering and materials science professor at Michigan State University.

Over time, plastic breaks down into small pieces known as microplastics. These have made their way not only into soil and water, but also into the bodies of almost all life forms on earth. Often-quoted research estimates that every week humans consume the equivalent by weight, in microplastics, of a credit card. “We’re still learning a lot about these bits of plastic—where they go, and what the effects of them are,” says John Virdin, director of the Ocean and Coastal Policy Program at Duke University. “This is going to be something society grapples with more and more.”

While consumers are eager for healthy and sustainable product options and business leaders are keen to satisfy those demands, a number of factors prevent bioplastics from becoming mainstream. For starters, their supplies are limited and they’re expensive to manufacture. Because the processing infrastructure is already in place and the oil tap flowing, virgin petroleum-based plastics are significantly cheaper to produce than bio- or recycled options. There’s also functionality. About half of all plastic goes toward single-use purposes, such as food packaging, straws, grocery bags, and bottles. Scientists are still figuring out the chemistry to make compostable plastics perform reliably, particularly in hot, moist conditions. Meanwhile, waste disposal remains fraught.

Compostable plastics, such as those that Algenesis Labs and numerous other startups are experimenting with, are only useful, experts warn, if there is composting infrastructure in place—which, even in developed countries, is rarely the case (only a quarter of residents in the United States have access to composting programs). If left to decompose in a landfill or the natural environment, these products can take just as long to degrade as standard plastics, while also creating methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, in the process. Then there’s this conundrum: Compostable products are designed to look exactly like their everlasting counterparts, but if they end up in the wrong disposal bin, they can wreak havoc on the recycling process, which is why some places ban their use. The opposite is also true: Traditional plastic that ends up in the compost pile will contaminate it.

All of these issues exemplify the need to coordinate approaches and, experts say, not only to focus on more environmentally neutral products but also to change consumer behavior. “There is not just one innovation or solution,” Virdin says. “It’s such a complex problem. We need an all-of-the-above approach.”

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From August through October, about 60,000 residents of a Northern California city became test subjects in the first large-scale experiment in reuse. Through the Petaluma Reusable Cup Project, more than 30 local businesses and large chains swapped out their usual disposable drinkware for reusable cups. Each year, 50 billion single-use cups are disposed of in the US—and the average lifespan of each is less than one hour. Every minute, the world throws away 1 million plastic bottles. For these three months in Petaluma, though, consumers were encouraged to return their to-go beverage containers to bins throughout the city, to be washed and put back into circulation. The findings haven’t yet been published, so the question remains: Can customer routines be redirected? “Packaging is the next frontier,” says Kate Shattuck, global coleader of impact investing, ESG, and sustainability at Korn Ferry. “It’s the next LED light bulb when it comes to consumer habits.”

“Consumers will lay the blame at the feet of businesses.”

Sporting venues, cinemas, and music festivals have also been experimenting with reuse programs, as have multinational companies—including Nestlé, Coca-Cola, and Pepsi—throughout the world. The consensus so far is that government regulation and industry-wide collaboration are required to shift consumer behavior at scale. “Consumers are quite reliable,” Duncan says. “They will buy the thing that is 50 cents cheaper, so we have to design systems to move in this new direction.” Parents won’t be surprised to learn that one Nestlé study in the United Kingdom found that the only people practicing reuse and refill in meaningful ways are those without children.

There are also cases when refill and reuse isn’t practical; plastic can only be recirculated so many times before it starts to degrade. Enter the need for compost and recycling infrastructure. So while companies like Algenesis Labs innovate on the front end of the plastic life cycle, and others address consumer habits, startups like Ridwell are addressing end of life.

Ridwell began when a Seattle father and son started looking for solutions to get rid of various items that weren’t supposed to go in the trash. They started collecting stuff from their neighbors, too, and found people were eager—and willing to pay a few extra bucks—for a waste solution they could feel good about. Eventually that grew into a business, currently operating in eight states, that collects many of the items municipal recyclers don’t handle, like plastic bags, granola-bar wrappers, and bottle caps. Ridwell partners with companies that are able to repurpose these plastics into new forms, such as building materials.

“Trash is often out of sight, out of mind,” Ridwell founder Ryan Metzger says. His company aims to make the process more transparent. In addition to employing more modern recycling technology, Ridwell has created an app that allows users to take a picture of a product and get a direct response telling them which disposal bin it goes in. The company also shows customers exactly where their items end up. “We’re a different way of doing things,” Metzger says. “People are looking for better alternatives.”

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Each of these solutions is limited and can be effective at scale only if a host of other shifts take place as well. The plastics problem is a systems problem. To solve it will require a massive reworking of modern life, including how we eat, what we wear, and the ways we live. “Isn’t it better to move toward the utopian goal even if it’s not going to happen overnight?” Narayan asks.

In 2019, when researchers at Duke University started building a database of global plastic regulations, they cataloged 270. Today, they’ve listed more than 900. But researchers say there is little evidence that any of these policies have done anything other than create regulatory complexity. Over the last five years, despite the 60 percent increase in regulations, plastic pollution has increased by 50 percent. And in some cases, the solutions simply replace plastic with an equally harmful alternative. “There is growing awareness that patchwork solutions don’t work,” Duncan says. “It’s a global problem. It doesn’t see borders.”

“The treaty is the beginning of the story, rather than the end.”

As it stands, international companies have to navigate a mixed bag of plastic-management policies that vary drastically from one country, state, or municipality to the next. In some places, it’s against the law to use recycled plastic in bottles; in others, compostable products aren’t allowed. Plastic bags have been banned in major metropolises, like Mexico City; in the biggest US state, California; and in the world’s second-most populous nation, China. Meanwhile, the European Union has passed new laws banning single-use plastic from being produced domestically. Business leaders are hoping that a global treaty will create a uniform set of rules, reducing operational complexity and costs across markets. “Businesses want a level playing field, fair enforcement, and a transition plan,” Shattuck says.

There might still be hope for such a plan. The world has united before to protect its most valuable commodity of all: the planet. When concern grew over a hole in the ozone layer, countries came together in 1987 to pass the Montreal Protocol, which phased out more than 99 percent of ozone-depleting substances. Since then, the ozone layer has continued on a gradual path to recovery.

When it comes to plastics, Virdin, of Duke University, says, “The treaty is the beginning of the story, rather than the end.”

Photo Credits: Mirage C/Getty Images; Media Production, Nenov/Getty Images; West Light, Nenov/Getty Images; Daniel Grizelj, Nenov/Getty Images

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