Five Firms in Plastic Pollution Alliance 'Made 1,000 Times More Plastic Than They Cleaned Up'

Oil and chemical companies who created a high-profile alliance to end plastic pollution have produced 1,000 times more new plastic in five years than the waste they diverted from the environment, according to new data obtained by Greenpeace. The Guardian:The Alliance to End Plastic Waste (AEPW) was set up in 2019 by a group of companies which include ExxonMobil, Dow, Shell, TotalEnergies and ChevronPhillips, some of the world's biggest producers of plastic. They promised to divert 15m tonnes of plastic waste from the environment in five years to the end of 2023, by improving collection and recycling, and creating a circular economy.

Documents from a PR company that were obtained by Greenpeace's Unearthed team and shared with the Guardian suggest that a key aim of the AEPW was to "change the conversation" away from "simplistic bans of plastic" which were being proposed across the world in 2019 amid an outcry over the scale of plastic pollution leaching into rivers and harming public health. Early last year the alliance target of clearing 15m tonnes of waste plastic was quietly scrapped as "just too ambitious."

The new analysis by energy consultants Wood Mackenzie looked at the plastics output of the five alliance companies; chemical company Dow, which holds the AEPW's chairmanship, the oil companies ExxonMobil, Shell and TotalEnergies, and ChevronPhillips, a joint venture of the US oil giants Chevron and Phillips 66. The data reveals the five companies alone produced 132m tonnes of two types of plastic; polyethylene (PE) and PP (polypropylene) in five years -- more than 1,000 times the weight of the 118,500 tonnes of waste plastic the alliance has removed from the environment in the same period. The waste plastic was diverted mostly by mechanical or chemical recycling, the use of landfill, or waste to fuel, AEPW documents state.

Sigh

[Calydor]

But my personal use of a plastic straw is what's REALLY killing the environment.

Re:Sigh

[Pseudonymous Powers]

Exactly. It's like I told my parole officer, my traditional shitting in the middle of Main Street once a year is having a negligible effect on sanitation.

Re:

[ObliviousGnat]

The plastic straw ban is not really about the straws, it's about raising awareness and getting people talking. To that end, thank you for helping!

Re:

[thegarbz]

But my personal use of a plastic straw is what's REALLY killing the environment.

Yeah it really is. The size, shape and plastic type of a plastic straw makes it exceptionally bad for the environment in terms of plastic waste. That's why they were targeted first along with plastic bags and bottle caps. These 3 objects make up the overwhelming majority of improperly disposed of waste.

To be clear your use of the plastic straw wasn't the issue, it was what you did with it afterwards.

It's not all on them

[dbialac]

People and companies downstream have to actually make an effort to put the plastic in the recycling stream.

Re:

[Pinky's Brain]

We are not Japanese. Just burn the mixed waste, or shred and AI sort it and hydrocrack the mixed plastics.

Mandate non fabric plastic bags and frequently littered plastic items have to decompose in a year or so into molecular components or have deposits.

Ecomonics

[Retired Chemist]

If you want recycling to work, you have to make it economically viable. The cost of collecting and sorting the plastic waste is still far too high compared to the cost of manufacturing new plastic. A significant refundable per bottle charge were help with getting bottle to recycling but does nothing about the sorting and shipping costs. A shift back to glass packaging is probably impractical without massive government intervention, which is not happening in the US at least. Glass is cheap and easy to d

Re:Ecomonics

[fortfive]

If you want it to be economically viable, you have to ensure that producers and consumers are not able to externalize the cost of production and use. When regulations are weak and weakly enforced, producers and consumers are easily able to force much of the true cost of production and use to others or to society as a whole. Regulation does not have to be all about government enforcement of laws and statutorily enabled regulations. "Don't Mess With Texas" was a very successful way to persuade people through pride to act right. We have built an entire society around externalizing the true costs of our production and consumption, mostly onto more economically desperate communities (even within the wealthy countries, see, e.g., West Virgina). Changing that is not something that a few or even many corporations will do without heavy pressure, even if it is in the long term interest of their heirs.

Re:

[Retired Chemist]

True, but very difficult to do. You can but a disposal fee on plastic items at the point of purchase. This does not fix the externalization problem but would make the plastic items less competitive with alternatives. The problem, of course, is that there is tremendous resistance to anything that increases consumer costs. Charging plastic makers a disposal fee is almost certainly a non-starter for similar reasons. The basic problem is that there is no economic incentive to solve the problem and no one h

Re:

[Pinky's Brain]

If a clean sorted waste stream like plastic bottles isn't economically recyclable, just shred and stockpile it till you can.

Landfilling mixed waste when we could stockpile sorted waste is a waste. Recycling technology will improve, but undoing jumbling everything together will be almost impossible for a long time.

Re:

[Retired Chemist]

It is the collection and sorting that is the issue. That is where the unsustainable costs arise. No one has found a mechanical way of sorting plastic waste and doing it by hand is prohibitively expensive.

Re:

[Pinky's Brain]

For bottles people will do it for free to get a deposit back. After that supermarkets can get them in huge numbers and put them in a crusher before hauling, they will want some money for that but the overhead per bottle is small.

In theory voters should be massively against deposits, because it's essentially taxation but they don't really see it like that ... so the sorting is a free lunch.

Meh. Not bothered anymore.

[TigerPlish]

People have pointed out that such efforts are merely greenwashing to give the appearance that the industry is doing things to protect the environment.

When it is pointed out that this is greenwashing, you lot downmod people who say it.

Why is this?

Of course the corporations are doing nothing or worse than nothing. Go after them, not the people who told you it's just greenwashing.

Second Law of entropy

[deep-400]

the total entropy of any system does not decrease other than by increasing the entropy of some other system

Responsibility

[ThurstonMoore]

Seems like people what to blame these plastic producers while not taking responsibility for their plastic consumption.

Re:

[ET3D]

You've missed the entire point.

> a key aim of the AEPW was to "change the conversation" away from "simplistic bans of plastic"

These companies wanted to convince people that they don't need to reduce plastic consumption; that they'd recycle plastic so that using and discarding plastic would become viable.

They failed to do this.

Of course it's better for people to reduce plastic dependency, but the plastic producers are definitely to blame in misleading people. Without their effort to mislead there would li

Re: Responsibility

[ThurstonMoore]

I didn't know it was in there until my gf pointed it out to me recently. I bet a lot of people also don't realize that the woman in Gimme Shelter is singing "rape and murder".

Question/Opinion

[ElizabethGreene]

I agree with industry that ban on new plastics is a terrible idea, and while I'm not ready to give them a complete pass, I will be the first to point out we had some *minor* disruptions to business conditions in 2020 that could be a factor.

The obvious questions seem to be:

Is the volume of plastic removed by the alliance flat or increasing,? If it's increasing, is it linear or exponential? If it's not exponential, is there a realistic plan to increase it by several orders of magnitude and how long will that take?

Fixing this at scale probably means spending many billions on automation to divert plastics and recyclables in waste streams on the way to landfills and simultaneously changing public opinion on waste energy conversion so that waste has somewhere to go. The latter will not make the degrowthers at Greenpeace or AEPW happy, but it is a solid way to solve the problem.

Re:

[thegarbz]

Is the volume of plastic removed by the alliance flat or increasing,?

It's flat trending towards decreasing. The problem ultimately is the alliance is made up of producers and the producers have virtually all but confirmed they can't make the economics of it work given the customer demands, it just ended up being too expensive. Both Shell and Exxon have dropped projects to build and expand plants, and the former declared a pilot project a failure along with a financial writedown.

Unless you get a big company on board to create demand this is not a supply side problem to be fix