Inside the Plastics Industry Playbook: Delay, Deny, and Distract

Yale Environment 360: Last month, negotiations on an international agreement to reduce plastic pollution failed, once again, after oil-producing nations refused to cut their plastics production. Will the oil states ever come around?

Saabira Chaudhuri: In 2024, the IEA said 70 percent of the growth from oil had actually come from plastics. And if you look at the future, [those nations] seem to be betting everything on the fact that plastics will continue to grow. So I think any agreement that tried to get the whole world on board was always doomed to fail. But the consensus seems to be that a smaller group of countries can still come together and commit to making big changes, phasing out dangerous chemicals, mandating minimum recycled content, designing for recycling and reuse, things that will naturally cut back on demand for virgin plastic.

e360: Do individuals have a role to play?

Chaudhuri: We have an immense amount of power to influence what consumer goods companies do by either buying or not buying their products, by speaking to them, whether it’s their customer service people or calling them out on social media. If you start to change the culture of what’s acceptable, and it starts to show up in the profit lines of these companies, they will be motivated to make changes that [will] trickle back to this whole very murky world of chemical companies, oil companies, and resin producers.

e360: What is the industry’s playbook? How do companies manage to keep selling plastic, despite all that we know about its threats to our health?

Chaudhuri: The first tactic is to say [that abandoning plastic] will drive up prices for consumers. It’s going to make everything more expensive. You also see them funding lifecycle analyses and studies that generally seem to be drawing conclusions, cherry-picking assumptions, that confirm that disposability is the best option, that plastic is the best option. And if you did anything differently, it would be really terrible for both consumers and the environment.

And then the third thing is the long-running “plastics make it possible” campaign. And the whole idea is to showcase the many positives of plastics: how helmets protect children, and plastics make cars and planes lighter, and plastics are necessary for medical devices. Again, all things that are very true. But none of them are the areas that people are concerned about. People are most concerned about unnecessary single-use plastics — the straws, the bottles, the lids, the bags, all the food containers — that are rampantly overused.

And the fourth one is obviously putting forward solutions that sound very promising. Like, “We’re going to make our bottles from recycled plastic. We’re going to invest in collection infrastructure to raise recycling rates. We’re going to make containers from compostable plastic.” For a variety of reasons, all of these things have failed for decades and decades, but that hasn’t stopped companies from offering up exactly the same solutions with a slightly different wrapper on them a few years later. 

e360: How did the idea of disposability take hold?

Chaudhuri: The plastics industry made this very concerted shift in the 1950s when Lloyd Stouffer, the editor of Modern Plastics, said it is much better to sell a product 1,000 times over than to sell it once. The idea is that with disposability you have a consistent large market.

Disposability also allows you to expand your supply chains in a way that you couldn’t otherwise do if you had to return a container to be washed and reused. With disposables, companies don’t have to worry about the reverse logistics of how do I get something back. They cut out a hell of a lot of cost and complexity for themselves.

The flip side, of course, is they just offload this [cost] onto taxpayers, because it’s usually municipal governments, paid for by us, that have to deal with the waste. [For industry,] it’s immensely profitable.

e360: Disposable plastic is ubiquitous today, but the industry had to build demand for it and teach people how to throw things away.

Chaudhuri: When plastics first came about, they were actually extremely expensive. People stored cellophane in a safe because it was used just for upscale chocolate and perfume, and then later cigarettes. As prices came down, that is when you started seeing plastics appearing absolutely everywhere. And companies spent a lot of money pushing the message that plastic was necessary for hygiene, that unwrapped products were dirty and prone to germs. And I think that is not something that came naturally to people. 

Companies pushed the idea that the way you are doing it is wrong, and here is a much better way of doing things. A lot of money was spent on ideas about convenience. A lot of money was spent on the idea that repairing things was unfashionable. Why repair something when you could just buy something new for cheap? Reuse was fusty, something your grandparents did, or your parents did. It wasn’t something that the modern post-war generation should have to do.

e360: And why did plastics eventually supplant other packaging materials, like glass or paper?

Chaudhuri: Its raw material, for the most part, was plentiful and pretty cheap. [Plastic feedstock] was a byproduct of [oil refining] that would otherwise just be thrown away. Disposability existed before plastics, but plastics brought about a level of portability, a level of affordability, a level of functionality that I think these other materials just couldn’t. 

One of my favorite examples is the paper coffee cup. Paper coffee cups had existed since the turn of the century, and they had been developed to curb diseases at shared water fountains. But they were never really used for hot drinks because their wax liner would make the coffee taste of wax.

Then in the 1940s, a company called Lily-Tulip added a plastic liner to the paper coffee cup. And all of a sudden, you could put hot coffee in a disposable container. And that was a game-changer. Hot coffee became the largest-selling beverage in the U.S. in the 1950s, bigger than every other beverage combined. And that was all down to the addition of the plastic liner.

e360: Companies like to promise that plastic goods are recyclable, but a lot of them aren’t. Why is it so hard to recycle plastic?

Chaudhuri: Even though we use the word “plastic,” there is no such thing as just plastic. There are many different types and subtypes. There is also the inclusion of color, which can’t then be taken out.

It’s too expensive to separate your orange plastics from your pinks, from your greens, from your blues. So anything that is a colored plastic, by and large, just gets downcycled into this gray mass of resin that can then be turned into pipes or construction material.

One of the big reasons why plastics recycling rates are so low is this panoply of materials on the market, and the expense of sorting them all, cleaning them, reprocessing them. Why would you pay for this entire process and turn it into something new if you could get a higher quality version made from virgin plastic, which is cheap because of subsidies on oil? So without the demand, you don’t have the markets.

e360: Would the world be better off if plastic had never been invented?

Chaudhuri: If we took plastic away, what would our world look like today? It’s unimaginable. We probably wouldn’t have computers. We wouldn’t have phones. You and I wouldn’t be having this conversation. We wouldn’t have blood bags and IV tubes and all of these things. 

If we all somehow switched from plastic to paper, there would be mass deforestation. Paper still uses chemicals. It’s still very water intensive. As for compostable plastics, the whole point is that somehow, they will break down at the end of their life and turn into compost that we can then use to make our soil better. But for the most part, there is no infrastructure for these compostable plastics to actually compost. 

Plastics have brought us these immensely good things, undeniably good things. They’ve also brought us these undeniably bad things. I think it’s probably more useful to say, “Where do we go from here now that we are in this mess?”

e360: So where do we go from here?

Chaudhuri: Going back to that 1950s pivot that the industry made where it went from reusables to disposables, that triggered a complete rewiring of supply chains. Everything was built around disposability. I think the shift that we could conceivably make is to start to unwind some of that so that we are going back to that moment in time.

I think that recycling has a role. I think reuse has a role. I think alternative materials have a role. And I think as consumers, we need to have a complete rethink of why we are consuming. There’s a psychological dimension to this, which is this need to consume endlessly.

We’ll probably always need some sort of plastic. It’s just that the plastic we do use should ideally be highly recyclable and recycled many times over. It should be very standardized so that we’re not using 100 colors. We might be using only two or three types of plastic.

I do think people are starting to worry about the health impacts from plastics, which could motivate a shift back towards more durable materials. Nobody likes the idea of microplastics in our brains and in our lungs. So I feel like in some ways everybody’s on the same side. People worry about this, and they want to get it under control.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.