January 2025 Networker: The Plastics Pollution Crisis |
| Volume 30 (1), January 2025 |
| Los Angeles is my hometown. I recognized my own experiences in Patti Davis’s recent reminiscences. I, too, “watched as the storms rolled in during the winter months, the land turning green and lush, then blossoming in wild colors and sweet scents in spring, browning and drying out in summer before the air turned crisp in autumn and orange leaves fell from trees to blanket the ground.” Of course, the Santa Ana winds howled then, too, and were especially fierce where we lived. I hated them, particularly the screeching noise they made through a gap between a northward-facing door and its frame. My mom tried to stop it with a towel. Every fall we'd watch fires burn in the foothills or in the mountains beyond. But it wasn’t as worrisome. Far, far fewer people lived at the urban-wildland interface then. And then the rains would come, sometimes more, sometimes less, but without fail—usually by sometime in November. This January, especially strong—at times hurricane-force—Santa Anas followed the third hottest summer and fall since 1895, with no appreciable rainfall to date, and none in the forecast. |
|
|
View of Palisades fire from the San Fernando Valley, January 10, 2025.
Credit: Aviv Orenstein. Used with permission.
|
|
| Just a year ago I was in Los Angeles during one of the “atmospheric rivers,” when a foot of rain fell within a few days. “Hydroclimate volatility” is described by UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain and colleagues in a paper published just as the recent Los Angeles fires ignited. They say these “sudden, large and/or frequent transitions between very dry and very wet conditions” will increase in the coming decades, “owing to the fundamental thermodynamics of a warming atmosphere.” Swain explained the relationship to the fires in an interview: That wet-to-dry whiplash sequence of hydroclimate actually helped facilitate the preconditions for these fires. Not only did we add more potential fuel, literally, to the fires, based on the wet conditions, but then we followed those up with some of the driest conditions on record in the very same places that had this huge accumulation of grass and brush. Meanwhile, my Los Angeles family and friends—who are, as I write, safe—are mourning others’ losses of homes, neighborhoods, whole communities. They are still monitoring the wind direction and air quality, watching and abiding by the evacuation orders and warnings, enduring power outages, checking on each other, and offering mutual aid both instinctively and through organized efforts, at once impressive, generous, and beautiful. |
|
|
Mutual aid hub at Octavia's Bookshelf in Pasadena, California, named for Octavia E. Butler, author of Parable of the Sower, mentioned above. Octavia Butler was born and raised in Pasadena.
Credit: Lydia Horne, lydiahorne.com. Used with permission.
Please see the full piece where this photo collage originally appears.
|
|
| Even as my Los Angeles rabbi, Sharon Brous, along with the congregation, spared no effort in providing relief to impacted communities, she cut to the chase about the main culprit in this catastrophe: [T]houghts and prayers not only ring hollow after a calamity, but constitute a moral offense. Because failing to address root causes of human suffering will only allow that suffering to endure…. [W]hen I saw those fires Tuesday night, tearing over the hills I have hiked in with my family for twenty years, savaging the homes of my friends, our community members, I was filled not only with sadness and fear, but also with rage. Rage because I recognized the images on the screen from Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and from the Ministry for the Future, from An Inconvenient Truth and power point presentations by climate scientists more than thirty years ago modeling out potential climate outcomes, warning that this is what today would look like, if we didn’t change course, immediately. And we didn’t change course, of course. Instead, we witnessed the most powerful people in the world engage in a campaign of denial, obfuscation, and outright lies, threatening our future on this planet with no guardrails and near impunity. And now our city burns. Yes, I felt rage. And I still do.
I feel rage for those same reasons and more, including for the lack of other kinds of good governance, which would include smarter zoning policies, prescribed burning, and mandated safer building and product materials. In this issue of the Networker we have detailed pieces from Drs. Rebecca Altman, Ted Schettler, and Sandra Steingraber on the plastics pollution crisis. As we’ve prepared this newsletter, we and our colleagues have noticed media attention paid to the fact that burning plastics and other toxic building materials and home furnishings are adding to the exposure burden Southern Californians—and firefighters—are suffering, as well as increasing the fires’ intensity: [T]he smoke is a toxic soup. It’s not just the brush that’s burning, but homes are burning and homes contain plastics that are built from petrochemical compounds. —Brian Rice, president, California Professional Firefighters Union, on CNN And what is really alarming—and it’s another thing people don’t talk about—is what excellent fuel the modern house is. So, these wildfires are raging through forest, which is natural. Fire is a normal part of the California landscape. But coming into these built environments, houses nowadays, the modern house, has so many petroleum products in it, in terms of vinyl siding and Formica counters and polyurethane stuffing and the rubber tires and the gas tanks in the garage. There are all kinds of explosive petroleum products built into our lives that we don’t even think about. Look at what your shoes are made out of. When they get hot enough, they are explosively flammable. It sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. And if you start looking around at your home, you’ll realize that petroleum and its products are everywhere. And these are really, really flammable. —John Vaillant, author of Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World, on Democracy Now! [T]here was “a tremendous amount of particulates and pollutants” in the building materials that burned in the Eaton fire area. Lead and arsenic readings are high. —Jen Croft, air resource adviser with California Wildland Fire Coordinating Group, in the New York Times I’ve kept a close watch on any fire activity near the heavily polluted Santa Susana Field Lab, on whose grounds the 2018 Woolsey Fire began and was later found to have deposited radioactive particles as far as 15 kilometers away, near my childhood home. The Kenneth Fire—which burned from January 9 to 12 of this year before being extinguished—began a few miles from the Lab. The winds sent that fire in the opposite direction (and no structures burned). The region’s fate hinges on the behavior of the Santa Anas… but not only. I fervently hope that sanity will prevail and that—with all respect to those who have suffered great losses and urgently need to be safe and rehoused—the city, county, and state will move forward with plans and policies informed by climate scientists, several of whom have made a newly personal, similar plea as they, too, have been evacuated or lost homes. Thank you for reading and working for a resilient and sustainable future.
Carmi Orenstein, MPH, Editor |
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. Continue Reading |
Micro- and Nanoplastics: Fatal Material Flaws |
| by Ted Schettler, SEHN science director |
| The United Nations convened international treaty negotiations in 2022 to address the growing global crisis of plastic pollution, a crisis that is most visible in littered streets, overflowing landfills, fouled rivers and streams, oceanic gyres and beaches. Plastics production is projected to double by 2050 and triple by 2060, promising to make the desecration worse. Whether the UN effort will have any success remains to be seen. Petro-states and chemical industry lobbyists vigorously oppose any curbs on plastic production and want to focus solely on waste management and recycling. Higher ambition countries recognize that this mess cannot meaningfully be addressed without turning down the production tap. Less visible than the grotesque images that sparked this sense of urgency, tiny plastic particles and their embedded hazardous chemicals flow through ecosystems everywhere. Persistent and pervasive, they are in the atmosphere, in soil across the land including farms and mountaintops, within glaciers, streams, lakes, rivers, oceans, deep-sea beds, wildlife, and people. Most microplastics (MPs, less than 5 millimeters in size) and nanoplastics (NPs, less than one micrometer) are degraded fragments of bottles, bags, surface coatings, tires, clothing, and other plastic products that we use daily—often only once before throwing them away, not knowing where they go. Some are purposely added to paints and personal care products. Inhaled, ingested, and potentially absorbed through the skin, micro- and nanoplastics (MNPs) contaminate human blood, urine, feces, breast milk, and semen. Human brains, hearts, blood vessels, livers, intestines, testicles, lungs, and placentas are flecked with MNPs. They affect our health in ways that we are just beginning to understand. Continue Reading |
RePercussion Section: Taking Plastics Personally |
| by Sandra Steingraber, SEHN senior scientist |
| Last fall, California sued ExxonMobil for lying about plastic. More specifically, California’s state attorney, Rob Bonta, accused Exxon of carrying out “a decades-long campaign of deception that caused and exacerbated the global plastics pollution crisis.” At the heart of Exxon’s duplicity, Bonta said in his complaint, is ExxonMobil’s “advanced recycling” technology, which encourages consumers to keep purchasing single-use plastics even as they conscript themselves to dutifully filling up blue boxes with plastic waste every week and trundling them out to the curb. We labor under the belief that we are all collectively engaged in responsible citizenry, helping direct plastic waste into a raw material that can and will be transformed into other useful objects. Not so, according to the state of California. Instead, virtually all (92 percent) of the plastic waste processed through ExxonMobil’s advanced recycling technology becomes fuel for burning, not recycled plastic commodities. Further, the plastics that that ExxonMobil’s does produce via advanced recycling contain so little plastic waste that they are effectively virgin plastics misleadingly marketed as “circular,” a word that falsely implies sustainability. In the best-case scenario, “plastics produced through ExxonMobil’s ‘advanced recycling’ program… will only account for less than one percent of ExxonMobil’s total virgin plastic production capacity, which continues to grow.” Meanwhile, the oceans, our blood, the fish in the oceans, our breastmilk, the birds in the sky, the tea in our cup, the trees in the forest, our testicles and brains, and the undulating bodies of earthworms are all filling up with molecules of plastic. With bad consequences for health, survival, development, and reproduction for everybody, as Ted Schettler outlines in his essay in this newsletter. Plastics are an existential crisis. Continue Reading |
Blog for Iowa covered SEHN senior scientist and writer-in-residence Dr. Sandra Steingraber’s presentation for the Iowa Cancer Consortium: “‘Iowa is the number one corn-producing state. It’s the number one user of weed killers in the nation. So that is the context in which I think you should take a look at these really disturbing, disturbing cancer registry data,’ Steingraber said.” Quoted in a Reuters piece (which ran on several platforms) addressing the risks of injecting waste carbon into oil fields, SEHN executive director Carolyn Raffensperger said, “This is supposed to be permanent storage… If it can’t even contain it for 10 years, why do we think it can contain it forever?” “The longer we use fossil fuels, the less time we actually have to do something that respects the rights of future generations to inherit a habitable planet… When I think about carbon capture and storage—which is one of the most expensive [solutions], is funded by the public, and pays the polluter—it is actually delaying meaningful action.” Carolyn is quoted in the article, “Unrest in Carbon Country.” “CO2 cannot be put safely underground either for long-term sequestration or enhanced oil recovery… All of the plans around the world claiming that CO2 will stay put deep below the Earth’s surface need to be re-evaluated.” Carolyn is quoted in a CU-CitizenAccess piece on the leaking wells at Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) CCS sites Two Letters to the Editor about finalizing the CO2 fracking ban in New York State by SEHN’s Concerned Health Professionals of New York program director Carmi Orenstein and Valdi Weiderpass, chair of the Sierra Club Susquehanna Group, were published: “This project would create the risk of CO2 pipeline ruptures releasing ground-hugging, rapidly spreading, dense clouds of deadly CO2.” Letter 1; Letter 2 SEHN staff were quoted in Food & Water Watch’s press release following New York State Governor Kathy Hochul’s signing of the CO2 Fracking Ban bill. From Sandra and Carmi, respectively: “It’s great news, on the 10th anniversary of our state’s original ban on fracking, that our governor has closed this cynical loophole and protected us from a profoundly dangerous idea”; “As coordinator and co-author of nine editions of the fracking science Compendium, as well as a longtime resident of the Southern Tier, I can breathe easier knowing that the Governor has stepped forward to protect public health from well-documented risks.” Our two SEHN scientists, Sandra Steingraber and Ted Schettler signed a letter calling on California Governor Gavin Newsome to order the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) to close the Aliso Canyon gas storage facility by 2027 or earlier, as described in a Food & Water Watch press release. "US LNG exports harm the environment and communities across the full supply chain while fueling devastating global warming....This needs to end!" SEHN signed this European-organized letter requesting the current and future US Department of Energy to deny all (pending and future) authorizations for US LNG exports. "If history is any guide, by 2026 the public will become disillusioned with the MAGA billionaires and their followers, handing Democrats a huge opportunity." On the day following the U.S. presidential inauguration, SEHN Fellow Peter Montague published an essay with his analysis in Common Dreams, addressing the pathway to real improvements in the lives of Americans. |
|
