All of a Piece: Moving Past Fifty Years of Piecemeal Approaches to Plastic Pollution

By Rebecca Altman, writer and environmental sociologist, SEHN Board member

One Hundred Billion

Last August marked the fiftieth anniversary of plastic pollution landing the cover of Science. 

The August 1974 issue pictured a petri dish teaming with plastic particles netted from the Caribbean and the waters off the eastern United States. Depending on the location, sometimes half, sometimes two-thirds of the researchers’ plankton samples contained plastic particles, ranging from preproduction pellets to smaller slips of foam, film, and even fragments of (what the researchers surmised were) former tableware, food containers, and other disposable items. The feral plastics had been collected during the summer of 1972, as worldwide production of plastics approached 100 billion pounds per year* and atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) climbed to 327 parts per million (ppm).

One Hundred Ninety Billion

A decade later, in 1984, 150 marine scientists gathered in Hawaii to discuss the proliferation of plastic debris. The conference caught the attention of the New York Times, which on Christmas Day ran the headline: “Deadly Tide of Plastic Waste Threatens Worlds’ Oceans.” The plastics industry produced 190 billion pounds of plastics that year. Carbon dioxide topped 334 ppm.

Soon Ronald Reagan’s White House convened an Interagency Task Force on Marine Debris. The marine biologist Kathryn O’Hara founded the International Coastal Cleanup and published A Citizen’s Guide to Plastics in the Ocean. Beach cleanups became popular, even regular events.

Three Hundred Billion

Richard Thompson organized one such cleanup in the early 1990s as global production rates exceeded 300 billion pounds per annum. Thompson was a graduate student at the University of Liverpool. He busied himself carting plastics off UK shorelines where he’d meant to be studying algae and limpets. As Thompson cataloged the gleanings – some 20,000 items –  he assigned them to categories: “bottles, bags, rope, netting.” But much more of what he’d found wasn’t identifiable. He couldn’t parse their former function or what product they once contained, he wrote in The Conversation last year. Absent a category, he worried, a predominant kind of plastic pollution was going un- or underreported.

Eventually, he wondered: as plastics fragment into smaller pieces, how small do the pieces get? At the University of Plymouth, he challenged his graduate students to investigate. They placed sand and other shoreline sediment under the microscope; they looked in the guts of marine life and in plankton samples from the 1960s and 1970s. Everywhere the researchers found tiny fibers and trace fragments, their levels increasing as time passed. 

Five Hundred Sixty-Four Billion

In 2004, Thompson, joined by seven others, published their findings (also in Science), naming the category: microplastics. That year, the global industry produced more than 564 billion pounds of plastics. CO2 levels approached 378 ppm.

Microplastics research bloomed. In just two decades, seven thousand research publications have documented the planetary spread of microplastics into the deep sea, the atmosphere, or mixed into soil. Research showed microplastics weren’t just the result of pellet releases or the environmental weathering of larger items, but also intentionally added to products and generated during use, shedding from tires and painted surfaces, from wearing and not just washing synthetic fabrics, and from the mundane acts of twisting open plastic-capped bottles or ripping into plastic-bagged foods. Now researchers are developing even more sensitive methods to detect particles as small as viruses in bodies, in organs, and even cells. (See Thompson and colleagues' twenty-year retrospective in Science and Dr. Ted Schettler’s piece in this issue). 

The year Thompson coined the term microplastics, I was a twenty-something graduate student finishing my second of a six-year program in environmental sociology. I had applied to graduate school in hopes of studying plastics, but coursework wasn’t (yet) focused on primary plastic polymers and their breakdown; my attention was trained on the associated chemicals that went into making them. 

In classes, I learned about the exposures born by vinyl chloride workers and the dioxin releases secondary to burning chlorinated medical plastics. When it came time to conduct research of my own, I traced the peregrinations of persistent pollutants that had made modern plastics perform—chemicals like chlorinated and brominated flame retardants, and PFAS chemicals like PFOA, once a critical processing aide in the production of fluorinated plastics like Teflon. I wanted to understand everything else a plastic plant produces besides plastics—the toxic brew of effluent and emissions and drummed wastes that have burdened fenceline (and surrounding) communities since the advent of mass plastics.

What strikes me now is how often the responses to plastics have been as fractured as plastics become: proceeding polymer by polymer, chemical by chemical, product by product, media by media, and place by place, though plastics have always been totalizing, and as I wrote with my colleague Tridibesh Dey in The Atlantic, “plastics have always been global”: 

At the industry’s outset, [U.S.] Civil War-era rubber goods were fashioned from latex extracted from the Amazon and later through Belgium’s brutal regime in the Democratic Republic of Congo. England imported gutta-percha from Southeast Asia for undersea telegraph wires. Celluloid depended on [Jim Crow-era cotton] and Taiwanese camphor as a solvent and plasticizer. Today, tankers ferry hydrocarbons siphoned from beneath Appalachia’s shale basin to become plastics in Europe [while] much of the plastic waste from Europe and the US streams back toward Southeast Asia, Africa, or South America.

Importantly, industrial plastics have encroached on human health and human rights (and faced public criticism as a result) since their origins in the 19th century, a historical argument I made in the special issue on plastics curated by Science in 2021. But beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, a rising number of municipalities proposed measures to curtail their use. Often, these were met by swift, coordinated industry campaigns to overturn them, many initially successful. 

Today, there is a growing, but still patchwork of municipal, state, and national policies, and a handful of international instruments relevant to plastics. Most of these are focused on a single issue, ranging from specific product bans to international treaties addressing dumping at sea, the transboundary shipment of waste, or restrictions on highly persistent plastics-associated chemicals, like PCBs, PBDEs, and some of the PFAS, and also heavy metals like mercury. (It’s worth remembering that The Minamata Convention on Mercury was named for a community in Japan polluted with mercury released from a factory making monomers, intermediates and additives for the vinyl industry.) Exposures continued. With each passing year, the volume of plastics produced continued to climb. More plastics entered the environment, weathered, and broke apart, likewise increasing the burden of micro- and nanoplastics, which now has its own acronym: MNPs.

The public has likewise been splintered on plastics. Across the middle decades of the 20th century, responsibility for mounting plastic pollution was placed on individuals, not industry. Through corporate-sponsored campaigns like Keep America Beautiful, individuals inundated with rising levels of disposable packaging were socialized not to litter, then how to recycle, and eventually spurred to be more discerning consumers—anything but citizens working toward policy change through organizing and collective action. As a 2024 Center for Climate Integrity report argued: the industry pushed fraudulent claims about plastics’ recyclability. And they did so while challenging citizen initiatives. In some cases, the industry sought to preempt municipal bans, as has been the case in states where plastic bag bans—and not the actual bags—have been banned.

One Trillion

Experts now understand plastics as a problematic system, one rooted in the extraction of fossil carbons and held aloft by toxics, and as such, plastics contribute to the triple planetary crisis of climate change, toxification of the biosphere, and biodiversity loss. But the plastics industry, supported by nations with petro-dominant economies, would prefer to address plastics as a problem stemming from mismanaged waste requiring more investment in better waste management technologies, and not as a matter of oversupply and overcapacity, or an affront to human health, human rights, and a stable climate.

This has been a central point of contention as nations convened by the United Nations have attempted to negotiate a global treaty to address plastic pollution. Back in March 2022—after global production levels topped a trillion pounds per year—175 nations passed a resolution calling for an ambitious, multilateral treaty to be negotiated and agreed upon in two years’ time: by December 2024. 

However, after multiple rounds of negotiations—meetings plagued by procedural and infrastructure issues, conflicts of interest, and where scientists and the most affected stake- and rights-holders were not regularly afforded the same meaningful avenues to participation as industry representatives—the fifth and should-have-been final meeting held in late November in Busan, South Korea, was suspended by the chair. Negotiations have been extended into 2025. Some media outlets claimed the treaty had failed. But others, myself included, arrived at a different conclusion. 

After more than a half-century of piecemeal approaches to plastics, a critical mass of nations were approaching plastics holistically and had begun—finally—to piece together a comprehensive, global response. 

I watched the closing plenary online and as the room erupted into a minutes-long standing ovation after Juliet Kabera, representing Rwanda, spoke on behalf of 85 countries. All were in agreement that, yes, to reduce the global burden of plastic and plastic-associated pollution, the treaty should—and indeed, must—address production levels, chemicals of concern, and problematic products. Over 100 countries were willing to take the next step by endorsing agreed-upon text that unequivocally called for regulating and reducing plastic production levels (see here and here).

Later in the plenary, Camila Zepeda, speaking for Mexico, elicited another round of elation after she listed—in alphabetical order—the 94 countries comprising the “coalition of the willing.” All had signed a declaration backing “a clear, legally binding obligation to phase out the most harmful plastic products and chemicals of concern in plastics.” 

As the delegate from Panama, Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez, summarized in the plenary’s final moments: “The momentum is with this overwhelming majority.”

The delegates returned home. The year ended. Global CO2 levels topped 420 ppm. The year’s average global temperature had risen 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels for the first time. Another trillion pounds of plastics entered the marketplace. Unfettered by coordinated action, production rates are projected to triple by mid-century. But within reach is an earnest opportunity to (begin to) correct course collectively.

What to watch when the world reconvenes is how the “coalition of the willing” will move forward despite the change in administration in the United States and despite the small minority of holdout states—predominantly petrostates, for whom plastics increasingly have become an outlet for their fossil fuels, given declining demand as the energy transition progresses. As recently reported in Politico, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and a handful of other nations have used financing as a wedge issue and pushed to negotiate based on consensus (rather than by majority vote). The call for consensus, which on its face seems reasonable, instead has been “weaponized,” says legal experts at the Center for International Environmental Law, and used to delay or altogether block progress. But as observer Magnus Lovold with the Norwegian Academy of International Law has noted, there are still “procedural routes available” by which a majority can “overcome spoiler tactics,” especially now that there are “clear signs that the intellectual and political leadership needed to pull an effective treaty out of the process is, at last, emerging.”

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*Global estimates of per annum synthetic plastics and fiber production were sourced from the supplemental data published by Geyer, Jambeck, and Lavendar Law in Science 2017 and updated by Geyer in 2020 in his contribution to the edited volume, Mare Plasticum - The Plastic Sea as well as from Baztan et al. 2024 in Cambridge Prisms: Plastics.  

**The author would like to thank Carmi Orenstein, Daniela Durán González and Andrés Del Castillo for their careful read and insightful comments on an earlier draft of this essay.

For more about the treaty and the negotiation process:

Follow the activities of The Scientists Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty; 

Listen to the podcast, The Plastisphere, hosted and produced by the Berlin-based journalist Anja Krieger;

And read updates from Magnus Lovold via his column, Points of Order, and from the University of Plymouth Global Plastics Policy Centre. 

Here are three NGOs also working toward a strong global treaty:
The Center for International Environmental Law
International Pollution Elimination Network
Break Free from Plastics