Water Scare Latest Attack on Pa. By Plastics | Will Bunch Newsletter
Will Bunch | March 28, 2023 | The Philadelphia Inquirer
Sometimes random headlines in the news aren’t as random as you think. Consider these three seemingly unrelated stories, all from Pennsylvania.
The first is the news that everyone around these parts is talking about this week: the roughly 8,100-gallon spill of hazardous chemicals at a plant in lower Bucks County that entered the Delaware River, threatens to enter a main water plant for Philadelphia, and has caused a massive run on bottled water across the region.
Also this weekend, across the state: Officials at Shell’s brand new $6 billion plastics plant on the Ohio River north of Pittsburgh warned residents that maintenance problems would cause another round of elevated flaring — the latest in a string of incidents since the facility’s November opening that have turned the night sky orange while exceeding the expected yearly limit for air pollution in little more than a month.
Meanwhile, nearby in East Palestine, Ohio, the fallout from February’s toxic train wreck of chemical cars on the Norfolk Southern line continued last week as Pennsylvania’s Blackhawk School District, roughly 15 miles away, filed a federal lawsuit claiming that its schoolchildren were endangered after “toxic fires and deadly plumes dumped a lethal cocktail on its buildings, property soil, and water supplies where deposits of the toxic materials have been found.”
But there is a connection between those three environmental calamities and a lot of things you do every day — from the bag that came home with your items from the drug store to the rubber duckie in your kid’s bathtub — and it can be summed up in one simple word: plastics.
Unfortunately, this boomer journalist has used up his lifetime quotient of Benjamin Braddock jokes from 1967′s The Graduate, but suffice it to say that what was the substance of the future more than a half-century ago is now looming large over your present — and not always in a good way.
Look, we can stipulate that a lot of positive and innovative things — I’ll mention life-saving medical devices, at the risk of sounding like an oil lobbyist — are made from plastics, and these polymers shouldn’t or won’t ever be totally banned. But when so much of a $600 billion global market goes toward excess packaging, store bags or that rubber duck, is it worth the pollution pain? I’d suspect there’s a growing number of Philadelphia residents terrified that a glass of tap water this week might cause cancer who would answer, “No!”
And here’s the thing we’re not talking about here in Pennsylvania: If you feel like suddenly we’re hearing a lot more about the witches’ brew of toxic or hazardous or just plain dirty and smelly chemicals used to make these polymers, there’s a reason for that. Worldwide production of plastic has nearly doubled since the start of the 21st century, as oil-and-gas giants look for profitable uses of their fossil fuels while a climate-change-weary world looks increasingly to transition toward wind or solar power or electric cars.
In Pennsylvania, where billions invested in fracking natural gas has teetered on the edge of being a boondoggle despite rising well production, industry officials have looked to the process that uses ethane, a component of natural gas that’s prevalent in this region’s Marcellus Shale rock formations, to make plastics as an economic savior. That’s why Shell located its plant — highly sought after by economic development officials — in Beaver County, and it’s why more trains carrying chemicals like the highly toxic vinyl chloride, which derailed in East Palestine on its way to a yard near Pittsburgh, are crisscrossing Pennsylvania.
And it’s why more bad things are happening to the environment.
“This has been a very bad month for people in Pennsylvania who want to drink clean water and breathe clean air,” Judith Enck, a former regional administrator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency during the Obama years who now teaches at Bennington College and heads a group called Beyond Plastics, told me on Monday.
The problem is that Big Oil and Gas, with its massive war chest, lobbyists, and campaign contributions, remains committed to pushing cheap plastic in developing parts of the world such as Africa or Asia as part of what Enck has called “Plan B” for an industry determined to keep drilling even as traditional uses of fossil fuels fade.
