Chances are right now you are sitting on, eating from, reading off, travelling in or wearing something containing plastic. And microplastics are almost definitely in your brain.
“It is an inescapable, physical reminder of a frightening global mess—one we feel complicit in yet powerless to change”, is how author Beth Gardiner puts it in her new book, Plastic Inc.
In one of the book’s most surreal passages, Gardiner attends the annual conference of the Gulf Petrochemicals and Chemicals Association in Dubai. The event was underwritten by SABIC, the Saudi Arabian state-owned petrochemical conglomerate. Gardiner describes how plastics executives used green-sounding language to discuss their industry’s future. Talk of sustainability and social responsibility abounded. But their real concern was with public relations: how to boost production in a world where the climate crisis, and the role of plastic within it, is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
Saudi Arabia’s participation in this greenwashing spectacle speaks to an ominous trend. In anticipation of a global drop in fuel consumption, Saudi Arabia is leaning into plastics production. If, like me, you traded chemistry for English at school, it might take a second to see what relevance colourful dog toys and cling wrap have to oil. Turns out plastics are produced from crude oil, only with different spells and incantations cast upon it than those which make fuel.
Saudi Aramco is the biggest oil company in the world; four times more valuable than its closest competitor ExxonMobil. It is also the number one corporate source of greenhouse gas emissions. The fuel refineries operated by Saudi Aramco are gigantic. If repurposed towards plastics production, their output could be vastly greater than typical petrochemical plants. Gardiner quotes a leading petrochemicals analyst who says, “It will only take a few of these projects to significantly affect global supply and demand”.
Fossil fuel companies, then, are responding to the climate crisis by pumping more plastic into the world.
While this destructive and self-serving behaviour is abhorrent, it is not new. Plastic Inc tracks how corporations have fostered deliberate lies about plastic being safe despite having known, from the very beginning, the dangers it posed to the environment and human health.
In the 1940s and 1950s, the plastics industry drove a shift towards single-use disposable plastics. Individual packaging became an expression of a new culture of mass consumption in the postwar economic boom. Coke, for example, made an iconic and disastrous transition to plastic bottles and cans, effectively rendering the option of reusable glass bottles defunct. Fast forward to 2025, and Coke is selling 137 billion plastic bottles annually.
Gardiner tries her best to get the scale of plastic waste to sink in. At current rates of growth, by 2050, the cumulative total of world plastic will be enough to coat the United States in an ankle-deep layer. She visits a plastic disposal facility in Serang, Indonesia, and describes the view from the top of a twelve-metre high mountain of plastic where mounds of waste “stretch over an area as big as ten football fields, at least”.
This environmental vandalism is all the more nauseating because it is the conscious work of mega-corporations and their political allies. The chemists who developed the early forms of plastic knew this material cannot be easily disposed of. The durability of plastic—water resistant, flexible, able to carry many times its own weight—is the appeal, after all. When overflowing waste began to pollute cities, plastics corporations spent fortunes on anti-littering campaigns; measures that blamed pollution on waste management techniques and consumer behaviour without ever calling plastics production into question.
In 1954, the Keep America Beautiful alliance was formed by nearly two dozen beverage, cigarette, candy and packaging companies. Its Australian offshoot is highly recognisable on beaches and other public places. The corporate message was that, so long as people put their rubbish in the bin, there was no damage done.
As public consciousness about pollution nonetheless mounted, the plastics industry pivoted towards recycling and launched the most effective greenwashing scam in history. The explicit aim was to stop legislation that sought to halt or lower plastic production.
Gardiner highlights an episode of corporate skullduggery in Minnesota in 1989. The city councils of Minneapolis and St Paul had created a national stir by banning many kinds of plastic packaging. In response, a plastics industry association body, the Council for Solid Waste Solutions, set up local recycling programs in the Twin Cities and flooded media with advertisements promoting the green ethos of recycling. The plastic bans were never enforced, even as the recycling programs fizzled after splashy launches.
But Gardiner shows that the very concept of plastics recycling is fraudulent. Only plastics of the same compound can be recycled together. Given there are tens of thousands of plastic variants, effective sorting is prohibitively labour intensive and often plain impossible. Recycled plastic also breaks down quickly such that very few items, like milk jugs, can reasonably be repurposed multiple times. Plastic could never be recycled enough to outmatch new production and curb waste—which is precisely why corporations can advocate it.
In the late ’90s, many Western nations, including Australia, began shipping plastic waste to China. By 2015, China’s annual plastic scrap import was 110 million tonnes, with the US sending 1,500 shipping containers of waste daily. For a short period, China had vast reserves of labour willing to undertake the arduous task of sorting and recycling plastics for low wages and at great risk to their health.
In 2018, China decided it would no longer be the world’s garbage bin. Waste once destined for China ended up in the streets of poor countries—Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. This is technically illegal, but webs of middlemen and brokers in international shipping, in rich and poor nations alike, have found ways around environmental laws and are profiting from the waste trade.
While school children in Australia carefully sort their rubbish into appropriate bins, less than 9 percent of plastic produced has ever been recycled (and this based on questionable accounting). Plastic is more likely to end up on the outskirts of an Indonesian coastal town than to be reused or recycled.
Contrary to the exhortations of industry executives, Gardiner points out that plastic is not sustainable at any stage of the production process, from refining to waste. She also sheds light on the hazards of plastic for workers, an issue that is often overlooked in environmental circles.
Chemical conglomerates are notoriously unregulated; in the US, companies do not have to prove their products are safe before they go to market. Petrochemical workers live with the fallout from toxic spills, explosions and leaking infrastructure, all in the face of obstinate companies refusing to admit wrongdoing.
Gardiner travels to a parish called St John in Louisiana, part of a stretch of the lower Mississippi River nicknamed “Cancer Alley” from the 150 petrochemical plants and refineries in the area. In 2016, the Environmental Protection Agency met with residents of St John and informed them that for decades they had been breathing over ten times the safe limit of chemicals like chloroprene—used to create synthetic rubber—from a complex established by DuPont in the 1960s.
This explained a lot. Eighty-five-year-old Robert Taylor, a lifelong resident of St John, told Gardiner that his uncle, brother, sister, mother and cousin all died of cancer. His wife got cancer and moved to California for cleaner air. He stayed behind to care for his daughter, debilitated by an autoimmune disease common among women in the area. “I still haven’t been able to wrap my mind around that and understand who had the authority to decide that we were expendable”, Taylor said.
Taylor’s story is repeated by workers in town after town that Gardiner visits, who also detail the intimidation they faced by factory stooges when they tried to raise the alarm about safety. She interviewed two Texas residents who fished bags of nurdles—plastic waste pellets—out of their neighbourhood lake every morning for over a decade to gather evidence against Taiwanese plastic producer Formosa.
Petrochemical workers and their families living near refineries are in many ways at ground zero of a terrible experiment the whole world is subject to, looking at exactly what plastic does to the human body. It might take generations to know for sure what is happening to us as we ingest microplastics through our skin, food, drink and the air we breathe. But it’s unlikely to be good.
For all the terrifying detail with which Gardiner exposes how the plastics industry and its political allies are knowingly destroying the planet, her solutions come across as somewhat utopian given the scale of the problem. While highlighting how industry circumvents government directives—when politicians even have the will to try to take on profitable businesses—Gardiner advocates primarily for increased regulation of plastic to curb its preponderance. In the final chapter, Gardiner highlights a number of stores where all products are based on reusability as the economic alternative to a world gone single-use mad.
The problem is that the plastic catastrophe, and the climate crisis more broadly, persist because capitalists have the social power to direct the economy in the first place, to pressure governments to loosen regulations and flout them when necessary. The chemical executives conferencing in Dubai, boosting plastics in fear of falling fuel usage, run the world. This minority is too blinkered by the greed of short-term profit to be morally swayed by public outcry and have the resources to influence or ignore legislation. To stop the madness of climate destruction, transition to sustainable production and even begin to reverse the damage caused in two and a half centuries of capitalism, the capitalist economy needs to be overturned and the power of its overlords broken.
Plastic Inc nevertheless provides a powerful insight into the dangerous sham of greenwashed capitalist solutions to the climate crisis. Gardiner’s interviews with profiteers and victims of the plastic trade alike are often harrowing, as are her dystopian portraits of the invasion of plastics into the natural world. Readers will have difficulty avoiding the conclusion that there is crying need for radical change, however difficult it might currently seem to achieve.
