Big Oil's plastic conspiracy is starting to affect global health outcomes

Gardiner's rigorous new book, Plastic Inc., answers by way of a compelling true-crime story: Plastic took over the globe through decades of intensive marketing, political manoeuvring, flat-out deceit

PLASTIC INC.: The Secret History and Shocking Future of Big Oil's Biggest Bet

by Beth Gardiner 

Published by Avery 

340 pages  $32

  Last year, researchers at the University of New Mexico studying brain samples from two dozen people who died in 2024 estimated that each person’s brain contained around seven grams of plastic — an entire disposable spoon’s worth. Those who suffered from dementia had more plastic in their brains than those who did not. That’s correlation, not causation, and it will be years before scientists understand the health consequences of these synthetic particles in our tissue, but it is worrying all the same. When the researchers compared the 2024 brains with those of people who had died eight years earlier, the more recently deceased contained nearly 50 per cent more plastic.

 

 

The study encapsulates the whole story of our planet awash in the stuff: Plastic has seeped into the most intimate recesses of our bodies, is implicated in a range of horrifying health outcomes and is rapidly accumulating in our environment in ever larger amounts. How did we get here — to the spoon in our brains?

 

Beth Gardiner’s rigorous new book, Plastic Inc., answers by way of a compelling true-crime story: Plastic took over the globe through decades of intensive marketing, political manoeuvring and flat-out deceit. Originally, plastic was a way for oil and gas companies to wring value out of petroleum. Today, Gardiner argues, oil and gas makers see plastic as a safeguard against falling revenue in a world reckoning with the climate consequences of burning its products, and aim to increase production significantly.

 

“It’s not a secret,” she writes, but, rather, “the industry’s openly declared plan.” (Among other evidence, Gardiner cites ExxonMobil’s analysis that it could buffer a projected dip in gasoline demand by investing more heavily in its chemicals business. Developing countries, after all, will only demand more plastic as they gain wealth.)

 

By-products of drilling can be molecularly rearranged to make plastic, to which additives can be incorporated, yielding any number of remarkably useful properties. Around the middle of the 20th century, companies realised they could make virtually any household item out of the stuff. But how to sell enough of it?

 

Plastics manufacturers had to invent the “lucrative idea of disposability,” Gardiner, an environmental journalist and former Associated Press reporter, writes. In 1945, a vice president at DuPont, an early leader in the business, told his peers that “a satisfied people is a stagnant people,” and they had to “see to it that Americans are never satisfied.” One way was to convince Americans to throw their products away. Companies set about coaxing a generation that had endured the Depression and years of wartime thrift that the fairly durable plastic objects flooding the marketplace should be, as one historian Gardiner quotes put it, discarded “without a second thought.” In 1956, the editor of Modern Packaging  magazine told industry leaders that “the future of plastics is in the trash can.”

 

Today, disposability has gone global. Half of all plastic is made for single-use items, discarded almost as soon as they are acquired. American cities saw this shift as a waste-management crisis, but thanks to relentless lobbying, plastics companies were mostly never made to assume responsibility for this new burden. Instead, a plastics-funded advertising push set out to persuade the public to blame themselves for the scourge of litter, despite the fact that most plastic packaging could never meaningfully be processed for reuse.

 

Recycling plastic was a palliative fiction, and a useful one. As of 2017, just 9 per cent of plastic waste had been recycled.

 

Yet the sheen of recycling allowed the industry, unencumbered by the enormous costs of plastic waste, to continue to expand unchecked. One exception is plastic soda bottles: In theory, these could be recycled efficiently. But Gardiner details how in many cities and states so-called “bottle bills” — which would require companies to process used bottles by charging a deposit that consumers would get back upon returning them — have been shot down after lobbying efforts by the industry.

 

Some of the clearest consequences of plastics production are showing up in public health. Proximity to fracking wells, which extract ethane to feed plastics plants, has been linked to increased rates of childhood leukemia, heart failure and other maladies. At the other end of the material’s life cycle, degrading splinters of plastic seep into waterways, soil, crops and even the air. At the same time, bisphenols and phthalates — additives used to make plastic durable and flexible — are linked to hormonal disruption, which in turn is linked to cancers, metabolism dysfunction, neuropsychiatric problems and diminished fertility.

 

So much of what has driven plastic’s growth has been “blinkered and distorted by powerful interests, working to obscure their own role,” Gardiner writes. She recounts how in 1969 a New York City sanitation official suggested that producers of packaging be charged a fee for its collection. It’s impossible to imagine where we might be today had that idea become policy. But it’s not too late. The first best time was probably 57 years ago. But the next best time is surely now.

 

The reviewer is an environmental journalist and the author of The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth.