The Climate Crisis: Interview With Judith Enck
By Bill McKibben | 1/22/21 | The New Yorker
Judith Enck has spent her career working on crucial environmental issues. During the Obama Administration, she was a regional administrator for the E.P.A. She’s currently a visiting professor at Bennington College in Vermont and the president of Beyond Plastics, a campaign that seeks to engage young people and citizens in what’s emerged as one of the biggest environmental fights on the planet.
Plastic has gone from watchword in “The Graduate” to curse word in our moment. Just how worried should we be about plastic pollution?
Very. The effects of plastic pollution are more far-reaching than most people realize. In addition to the fifteen million metric tons of plastic entering our oceans each year, scientists have found plastic particles in the most remote places on earth, from the peak of Mt. Everest to thirty-six thousand feet underwater, in the Mariana Trench.
Microplastics can be found in everything from drinking water to soil to beer to table salt to a cup of tea. In fact, we’re all ingesting roughly a credit card’s worth of plastic each week. Stunningly, scientists recently found plastics in human placentas. That study just stopped me in my tracks.
We know that plastics are literally everywhere, but we don’t yet know the full extent of the danger they pose to our health. We do know that plastics are made with a host of toxic chemicals that can interfere with endocrine systems, fertility, and more. And we also know that plastic production and “disposal” are major contributors to climate change.
How does this tie into the fossil-fuel industry?
Plastic production is the fossil-fuel industry’s Plan B. With the demand for fossil fuels falling—due to the increased use of renewable energy, electric cars, and the like—the industry is banking on plastics to boost its profits and provide a market for all the ethane created as a byproduct of hydrofracking. And it’s important to note that the fossil-fuel industry, the chemical industry, and the plastics industry are one and the same: a three-headed monster.
The industry is planning a massive build-out, with hundreds of new ethane-cracker facilities [that turn fossil fuels into the plastic pellets that can be made into many products] proposed in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Louisiana, and Texas. Almost all these plastic-production facilities would be built in low-income areas and communities of color, continuing our nation’s sad history of environmental racism. If they were proposed in more affluent communities, they would never be built.
Most policymakers do not know that this is happening. If plastic production continues to grow, by 2030 the greenhouse-gas emissions from plastic production will be the equivalent of two hundred and ninety-five new coal plants.
How do we bring real pressure to bear?
There’s a promising piece of federal legislation called the Break Free from Plastic Pollution Act that we’re suddenly feeling a lot more optimistic about. A key feature shifts responsibility for dealing with plastic waste to where it belongs—the companies that produce it. This concept is known as extended producer responsibility, and it’s required by law in parts of Canada and Europe.
The bill also recognizes that we can’t recycle our way out of the plastic-pollution crisis—we have to turn off the plastics tap and make a lot less of it. Plastics had a paltry 8.5 per cent recycling rate even before China closed its doors to our waste, in 2018. The bill would spur innovation and press the pause button on new plastics facilities. The bill bans plastic bags nationwide and some polystyrene food packaging; it also requires deposits on beverage containers—known as “bottle bills”—which have successfully reduced litter and boosted recycling in nine states.
But, for those who don’t want to put all their eggs in a basket held by Congress, I’m a big advocate for what I call the “Plastics Trifecta”—a city-, county-, or state-level law that prohibits three of the most common single-use plastic items that are major sources of plastic pollution: plastic bags, plastic straws, and polystyrene foam (a.k.a. Styrofoam). It’s a really important first step that helps get some of these nonessential plastics out of our waste stream (and our actual streams), while raising awareness and building the political will for more far-reaching action on plastics. In the past two years, both Vermont and New Jersey have adopted the Plastics Trifecta—this makes me very happy. We have a top-notch sample bill and a step-by-step guide to passing the Trifecta at BeyondPlastics.org.
The U.S. makes up four per cent of the world’s population, uses seventeen per cent of the world’s energy, and, not surprisingly, creates twelve per cent of the world’s solid waste. This is not sustainable. It is not ethical. And it must change.
I have met climate-change deniers, but I have never met a plastic-pollution denier. Plastic pollution is visible everywhere. The time to turn off the plastic spigot is now.