Peak oil may be on the horizon. But peak plastic is nowhere in sight. In a new book, “Plastic Inc. ,” the journalist Beth Gardiner digs into an industry that mostly flies below the radar but has huge impacts on human health, environmental pollution and global warming.
She reveals a set of corporate actors, including some well-known names like Exxon Mobil and Saudi Aramco, that are doing everything in their power to get the world to use as much plastic as possible.
It’s a sobering read that exposes disinformation campaigns, efforts to foist responsibility onto individual consumers and brutally effective political lobbying, all of it very similar to the playbooks used by Big Tobacco and Big Oil.
I spoke with Gardiner on Monday, ahead of the book’s release today. Her remarks were lightly edited for clarity. What do most people misunderstand about plastic.
So much of the way that we talk about plastic focuses on one of two things: either where it ends up, beaches covered with trash or a turtle with a straw up its nose, or how we can personally use less of it.
But we’ve lost the focus on where plastic is coming from, and that obviously is the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries. While you and I are taking our canvas bags to the grocery store, Exxon and Saudi Aramco are actually going the other direction.
They are ramping up to increase plastic production in the years to come. I’m trying to shift the lens to who built this system that we are all living in. We are having trouble retrieving the article content. Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.
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