Organizers Fight the Greenwashing of Plastic Pollution With Grassroots Power

By now, it’s indisputable that we’re experiencing a global crisis of plastics production and plastics waste. There may be as much as 200 million tonnes of plastic in our oceans. Humans annually consume thousands of plastic particles and their harmful chemicals. The Global North dumps massive amounts of plastic waste on the Global South.

Powerful corporate interests, especially in fossil fuels and petrochemicals, are driving the ongoing boom in plastics production. The plastics industry is pushing false solutions like chemical recycling, even as it’s clear that we can’t recycle our way out of this crisis. And now, with an incoming Trump administration that is unabashedly friendly with oil, petrochemical and plastics interests, the struggle to curb plastics waste faces added hurdles.

Truthout spoke to several organizations that have spent years taking on the corporate forces behind plastics production, as well as frontline organizers from the Gulf Coast and Appalachia who are resisting fossil fuel and petrochemical interests.

While they anticipate new challenges from the Trump administration, they remain determined, clear-eyed and even optimistic about their mission: to organize popular movements and campaigns, especially at the local and state levels, that can push back against endless plastics production and plastics waste.

“The plastics industry has a lot of political influence and resources, but we are countering that with grassroots organizing,” says Judith Enck, the founder and president of Beyond Plastics, a nonprofit group working to reduce plastic pollution. “The antidote to despair is activism.”

Producers Are Purposefully Deceiving the Public

The proliferation of plastic waste originates at the point of production. Globally, we produce around 430 million metric tons of plastics each year, and plastic waste is set to triple by 2060.

But powerful corporate forces say we’re merely facing a waste management problem, and they have a solution they’re aggressively pushing: “advanced” or “chemical” recycling, which heats plastic down to its molecular components for new use.

While chemical recycling is being widely touted (and lobbied for) by the plastics industry, it’s come under major scrutiny by investigators and environmental advocates as a “delusion” that falls far short of its self-professed hype. Beyond Plastics released a comprehensive 2023 report which found “there is no evidence that [chemical recycling] will contribute to resolving the plastics pollution crisis” and that it “creates large amounts of toxic waste.”

California has sued ExxonMobil, the world’s largest producer of polymers found in single-use plastics, for “allegedly engaging in a decades-long campaign of deception that caused and exacerbated the global plastics pollution crisis,” and the lawsuit points out that ExxonMobil has also “deceive[d] the public” through promoting chemical recycling.

“I think the plastics industry has taken a page from the tobacco industry, and they are peddling disinformation when it comes to plastics recycling and chemical recycling,” says Enck, who served as a regional Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator before founding Beyond Plastics.

The plastics industry has resorted to secretive influence campaigns to push back against rising anti-plastics sentiment. One consultant specifically named Enck in industry efforts to “combat environmental NGOs.”

“More than anyone, the plastics industry knows that most plastics don’t get recycled, but that didn’t stop them from spending millions of dollars in advertising, telling people just the opposite,” says Enck.

Communities of Color Have Become Plastics Sacrifice Zones

The fossil fuel and petrochemical facilities that drive plastics production are concentrated along the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast and across Appalachia, in communities — often called “sacrifice zones” — that are disproportionately poor and home to people of color.

One of these communities is Port Arthur, Texas, the site of several fossil fuel and petrochemical plants, including the 2nd- and 10th-largest U.S. oil refineries.

Port Arthur is an overwhelmingly Black and Brown city, and nearly 30 percent of its 55,000 residents live in poverty. Sections of Port Arthur have “cancer risk from industrial sources” that are 190 times the EPA’s acceptable risk, according to ProPublica.

John Beard Jr. is a former petrochemical refinery worker who founded the nonprofit Port Arthur Community Action Network (PACAN). When Truthout spoke to Beard Jr. in February, he noted that PACAN had received federal funding to monitor air emissions. But nearly a year later, he’s sorely disappointed at the Biden administration’s inadequate response to the crisis in his community.

“We should have had at least four or five monitors in addition to the ones we have, because the pollution is so rapid in those areas,” he said. “The money is still barely getting here. What are communities like mine and others across the country supposed to do?”

Another petrochemical hub stretches across the Ohio Valley in northern Appalachia. West Virginia, afflicted by mountaintop removal and black lung disease, is considered the birthplace of the petrochemical industry that is the foundation for plastics production.

Morgan King, the climate and energy program manager at West Virginia Citizen Action, was born and raised in Kanawha County, home to massive chemical facilities like the Dow (formerly Union Carbide) and Chemours (formerly DuPont) plants that sit on opposite sides of Charleston, the state’s capital.

“We still are a significant producer of these chemicals that are key for plastic production, and they’re continuing to pollute and cause this cumulative impact on local communities,” she told Truthout.

While West Virginia is an overwhelmingly white state, the fallout from chemical plants disproportionately impacts its small Black population. Institute, one of the two majority-Black towns in the state, has sued the EPA over air pollution.

More lawsuits are expected to pile up against chemical plants in Kanawha County and beyond for exposing residents to cancer-causing ethylene oxide, which is involved in plastics productions. West Virginia, long a center of fossil fuel and chemical production, has one of the highest cancer rates among U.S. states.

King says two chemical recycling plants have opened in West Virginia, with one of them in her county. She says that chemical recycling is wrongly being framed as a solution to the plastics waste crisis.

“They’re taking plastic waste and then burning it to make fuel and chemicals for reuse,” she said. “It causes a lot of dangerous emissions and risks of air and water pollution to communities nearby these facilities.”

Rollbacks Coming Under Trump

Powerful corporate interests across multiple sectors are vested in plastics production. This makes efforts to address the plastics crisis particularly challenging, says Enck.

“When you work on plastics, you’re taking on the fossil fuel industry, the chemical industry, and consumer brand companies like Coca-Cola and Starbucks and McDonald’s,” she said. “So the politics is formidable.”

The Biden administration ramped up oil production and refused to support a global plastics production cap, but the incoming Trump administration promises to be even more industry-friendly.

Trump rode to reelection promising to accelerate fossil fuel production. He raked in over $75 million in campaign donations from a handful of oil billionaires and executives. So far, Trump has appointed industry-allied politicians and fossil fuel executives to key posts like interior secretary and energy secretary.

The American Chemistry Council — the U.S. plastic industry’s most formidable lobbying group — congratulated Trump on his victory, and its PAC donated nearly $600,000 to congressional candidates, especially Republicans, with top amounts going to key committee chairs.

An industry-backed bill recently introduced in Congress would support chemical recycling and limit transparency and regulations around plastics production and waste management.

Enck anticipates “a full-scale policy assault on environmental protection coming from both the administration and possibly Congress,” and she worries that the Trump regime will reverse the Biden administration’s classification of chemical recycling processes of pyrolysis and gasification under the Clean Air Act as incineration, which subjects them to stricter emission requirements. “We’re going to see some rollback of regulations on the plastics front,” she told Truthout.

Globally, hopes for curtailing plastic production at the INC-5 negotiations in Busan, South Korea, in December were dashed by a bloc of powerful oil-producing nations and fossil fuel and chemical companies, including ExxonMobil and Dow, and no treaty was reached on addressing plastics pollution.

Beard Jr. was in Busan with the Break Free from Plastic delegation, joining other groups to sit in on meetings and discussions. But he says core talks were exclusionary and opaque, dominated by closed-door meetings of member states, with civil society groups from Panama and Brazil to Rwanda and the Philippines shut out.

“The member states talk ad nauseam and give very little opportunity to frontline organizations demanding that we phase down and phase out certain types of plastics and chemicals that are toxic to the environment,” he said.

Beard Jr. was especially upset at the U.S.’s role during the talks. “They’re basically going along with whatever the powerful oil and plastics interests come up with,” he told Truthout.

Grassroots Organizing Is the Answer

While the challenges ahead are daunting, all the organizers that Truthout spoke to were upbeat as they discussed their determination to strengthen their grassroots organizing efforts around the plastics crisis, especially at the local level, despite the incoming administration.

“Our strategy is not going to be any different,” said King, who emphasized her group’s focus on statewide organizing efforts, door-knocking and “meeting people where they’re at.”

West Virginia Citizen Action is part of the regional People Over Petro Coalition, and King says two current organizing focuses of the coalition are getting the EPA to enforce Section 129 of the Clean Air Act to regulate chemical recycling facilities, and, more broadly, grassroots education and organizing against chemical recycling and other so-called clean technologies advanced by fossil fuel and plastics interests.

“These are just a form of greenwashing to keep on polluting and have the same corporations and executives do the same old game of exploiting Appalachian communities for profit,” says King.

Even in a conservative-ruled state like West Virginia, King is hopeful that grassroots organizing can make advances. “It’s not going to happen through our political leaders,” she said. “It’s going to happen through everyday people rising up and working through collective action.”

In Port Arthur, Beard Jr. continues his local advocacy efforts and his well-known Toxic Tours. And while the collapse of the talks in Busan was disappointing, Beard Jr. says he left South Korea deeply inspired from the sense of solidarity and common cause he felt with other national delegations.

As a key hub of fossil fuel and petrochemical production, Port Arthur is at the center of the generation of both the climate crisis and the crisis of plastic waste. Many groups and organizers today — Beard Jr. included — view both these fights as closely interconnected.

“Plastics are fossil fuels,” he said. “The plastics we use come from oil and gas.”

Heading into a new Trump era, Beard Jr. remains unflagging. “We’ve got to continue to work in spite of the administration,” he told Truthout. “It’s not about who’s in office. It’s about what we do in fighting for what we know is right.”

Enck says that Beyond Plastics is focused on training and organizing local activists to win victories like plastic bag bans and polystyrene bans that can be scaled up statewide. The group supports campaigns in New York City and Pennsylvania, and its website is a hub for organizing resources, reports and facts sheets, and sample legislation. Enck says Beyond Plastics currently has around 250 local groups and affiliates around the U.S.

Enck remains hopeful for the movement around plastics pollution. “We’ve got facts and we’ve got the public on our side,” she said, “and now we have to convince policy makers that they can stand up to the special interests.”