EMILY FENG, HOST:
Plastic is woven into pretty much every part of our lives. In her new book "Plastic Inc," environmental journalist Beth Gardiner traces the history of how fossil fuel companies turned petrochemical waste into plastic gold and how it became so ubiquitous after World War II.
BETH GARDINER: You see the industry kind of gaining this awareness that, No. 1, they're going to be able to ramp up production as they shift towards a peacetime economy. And No. 2, who are they going to sell all this plastic to? So it really sort of intersects with the world of marketing and advertising.
FENG: My colleague Emily Kwong spoke with Beth Gardiner recently about what else she learned about oil companies and the plastics industry, including the relationship of fracking with increased plastic production.
GARDINER: In fact, the American fracking boom, which has been going on for about 20 years now, has also driven an American plastic production boom because when you are pumping that methane gas - what we call natural gas - out of the ground used for heat and electricity generation, you also get byproducts, including a gas called ethane, which turns out to be really handy for producing polyethylene plastic.
EMILY KWONG, BYLINE: Which is the most common type of plastic. Yeah.
GARDINER: The world's most common plastic. And I followed it back to the source. I went to Washington County, Pennsylvania. It is one of, if not the most heavily fracked counties in Pennsylvania, which is a major fracking state. And I visited the Bower-Bjornson family, whose children have all suffered a variety of health problems, and they've watched the landscape around them be changed by fracking. There are fires, sometimes from pipelines and waste ponds. There's problems with contaminated water.
KWONG: Yeah.
GARDINER: The impacts are so much more widespread than you might imagine when you look at that plastic bottle in your hand, right?
KWONG: Yeah. For a lot of people, the plastics problem can seem distinct from the climate change problem, but you argue that they are inextricably linked. Can you explain why?
GARDINER: First of all, plastic is made from oil and gas derivatives. And the very process of turning those derivatives into plastic is a very, very heat- and pressure-intensive process. It's conducted in these giant petrochemical plants that are massively energy hungry and their emissions are enormous. A big plant outside of Pennsylvania that's new in the last few years was estimated to produce climate-warming gases equivalent to almost half 1 million cars.
We know that fossil fuels are a very volatile industry. The price goes up, the price goes down. It's often influenced by big geopolitical events. It's a hard industry to kind of keep the books in order, right? So if you have another revenue stream, you're getting that methane gas, and you're selling it for whatever price you can get. But you also can now take what started out as a waste product - ethane - and sell it to make plastic. Well, in good times when the price of methane gas is high, you're just making more money, and in bad times when the price of methane tanks, that ethane can help keep your well pumping and keep your business going.
So plastic as a revenue stream is helping to float the fossil fuel industry as it starts to be undersold by clean energy, like solar and wind, electric vehicles and batteries. These are posing real economic challenges now to the oil and gas industry. So any additional source of money is a way to keep drilling.
KWONG: You provide an example of this in the epilogue of your book. You talk about a teenage activist in Honolulu, Hawaii, Dyson Chee, who just got so frustrated by endlessly cleaning up the beach where he swims. He went to Honolulu City Council. What happened?
GARDINER: It's a really salient issue in Hawaii because of where the islands are located in relation to ocean currents. Their beaches just get carpeted with plastics that are washing up from, you know, literally thousands of miles away. This young high school student named Dyson Chee was really upset about that. The ocean was, you know, part of his life. It was very distressing to go there every time and see more plastic.
So he got involved with activism. He started going to other high schools and talking to students. His mom would have to drive him because he was too young for a driver's license. And in 2019, they got a pretty landmark single-use plastics law passed in the City Council of Honolulu, and subsequently, all the other counties in Hawaii passed similar legislation.
KWONG: Why do you think local law and the copycat effect in other counties is more effective than the state pathway?
GARDINER: I think when you talk to people about plastic, you do realize that it is something that so many people who are not even really necessarily super engaged in environmental issues otherwise are really upset about, and I think it's because it's such a tangible presence in our lives and we feel so directly what it feels like to be constant throwing all that packaging and wrapping and stuff into the trash.
So I think it's something where individual citizens are often very concerned, and it's easier to kind of make your voice heard at the local level, whether it's, you know, a city council or a county government or something like that. And we've seen that across the country.
KWONG: That's Beth Gardiner, the author of "Plastic Inc." Thank you so much for joining us.
GARDINER: Thanks for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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