STORY BY TERESA MCGOFFIN/Climate Action Coalition

PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

The presence of plastic in our lives increases every year.  The flexible, inexpensive material is used to manufacture millions of everyday household products, food containers, packaging, electronics, clothing, and more.

Plastics have created revolutionary progress in chemistry, physics, biology, and medicine but, unfortunately, there is a large price to pay.  

Greenhouse gas emissions occur at every stage of the plastic life cycle, from extraction to transportation, to manufacturing and then waste treatment. These greenhouse gas emissions, such as carbon dioxide and methane, create a blanket over our atmosphere that traps heat from the sun, causing the earth and ocean temperatures to rise, intensifying our droughts, heat, floods, and creating extreme and prolonged weather events.

Plastics’ production and the conversion of fossil fuels into plastic takes place primarily in the U.S. and is responsible for 3.4% of total global greenhouse gas emissions. Most plastic is disposed of in landfills, which then accounts for another 15 percent of emissions due to methane.

The environmental damage of plastics that don’t make it to landfills or recycling impacts our lands and  waterways. Just as salmon make their way inland from the ocean, plastics travel in the opposite direction on these same waterways to end up in the ocean.

More than 8 million tons of plastic ends up in the ocean every year--a garbage truck’s worth of plastic every minute. The devastating impact on marine life is often seen in photos of the huge islands (gyres) of plastic throughout our oceans, beaches covered in plastics and micro-plastics and the sad shots of dolphins with their heads in plastic jugs and dead whales’ stomachs full of plastics.  

The ocean’s environmental pollution combined with the global rise in ocean temperatures reduces the ability of oceans to absorb carbon as they have in the past. Oceans have previously absorbed roughly 30 percent of the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, but warming oceans have decreased that ability.  And, of course, increased temperatures are causing sea levels to rise as ancient glaciers melt, flooding shoreline communities and submerging island nations.

The earth’s delicate web of ecosystems is altered by our ever-growing overuse of unnecessary plastic and, while the United States has primarily supported the growth of plastics, other countries and some U.S. states have already banned many types of single-use plastics.  

Hopefully, governments will band together to finalize an effective global plastics policy and adopt our planet’s first Global Treaty to End Plastic Pollution.  Meanwhile, each of us can decrease our environmental and climate impact in our shopping carts and in our homes by searching out more benign and bio-degradable alternatives to the plastic products and packaging we support as consumers.