Plastic is everywhere – wrapped around our food, stitched into our clothes, even coursing through our veins. What began as a marvel of modern science has become a toxic industry that is affecting our health, polluting our planet, and driving climate change.
Now Judith Enck, President of Beyond Plastics, and reporter Adam Mahoney are out with a new book, The Problem with Plastic (New Press, 2025), laying out the problem and the solutions in a 180 page book that could serve as the basis of a prosecution, a lawsuit or a movement.
According to a recent report in The Lancet, the world is in a plastics crisis, causing disease and death from infancy to old age, and covering the planet with 8 billion tons of plastic waste.
Without bold new laws, the problem will only worsen.
Plastic production has increased exponentially since single-use plastics’ start just 75 years ago, from 2 million tons per year in 1950 to 450 million tons per year today.
And production is expected to triple by 2060.
Given that less than 6% of plastic is actually recycled in the United States, all that plastic will continue to harm us, our communities, and our environment.
Enck argues that plastic is poison — to our bodies, to our communities, to our air, soil, and water, and to our rapidly warming planet.
“While the headlines about plastic tend to focus on pollution and microplastics, the crisis is about so much more. Plastic’s entire life cycle – from fossil fuel extraction to production, use, and disposal – spins a toxic web of harm,” Enck writes. “And while the scale of this problem can trigger feelings of guilt, this crisis was created by companies, not consumers. It’s the deliberate result of an alliance between fossil fuel, chemical, and plastics companies, all driven by a singular mission – to sell more and more plastic, regardless of the consequences for public health or the environment.”
What is the problem with plastic?
“There are many problems,” Enck told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview last week. “It is made with fossil fuels and we need to reduce our use of fossil fuels. Historically, plastic was made from oil and chemicals. Today it is made from 16,000 different chemicals and a byproduct of hydrofracking – methane.”
“The reason we have a glut of plastic on the market is not because consumers voted for more plastic. It is because there is a glut of fracked gas.”
“Typically, at a fracked gas site, waste ethane is vented into the atmosphere, which is not good because it’s a potent greenhouse gas. Now, new pipelines are being built and the waste gas is being sent via the pipeline to gigantic industrial facilities called ethane crackers facilities. Those are now in places like Beaver County, Pennsylvania where Shell constructed an ethane cracker facility.”
“They heat the ethane gas at a high temperature and it’s cracked. And the results are massive amounts of little tiny plastic pellets called nurdles and they are shipped all over the country, typically by rail, to companies that make plastic products.”
“That’s a long way of saying that plastics is a fossil fuel industry. The largest plastic producer in the United States today is ExxonMobil. The second problem is it is turning our ocean into a watery landfill. Large amounts of plastic waste from the land gets washed through city streets, into streams and rivers and ultimately into the ocean. There is a huge build up of plastics in the ocean. Some people may have seen the gigantic plastic islands known as gyres. But in fact, most of the plastics settle to the ocean floor. And most of it is not intact.”
“You can have one plastic water bottle littered on your community street. It gets into the stream, the river and ocean. It’s exposed to sunlight so it gets brittle. The wave action is almost like a paper cutter. And so one plastic water bottle becomes hundreds of little pieces of plastic and then thousands of little pieces of plastic. They are known as micro plastics. Those microplastics are often consumed by fish, by sea turtles, by sea birds and it’s already having a very negative impact on our marine environment. That’s the second big problem.”
You say that 90 percent of plastics that end up in the ocean is from littering on land?
“Yes. Littering or a buildup of plastics somewhere on land.”
One problem is fossil fuels. Second is pollution in the ocean. What’s the third?
“The third major problem is environmental injustice. Most plastic is manufactured in low income communities and communities of color in Louisiana, Texas and Appalachia where people are being poisoned by plastic production facilities, particularly a stretch of the Mississippi River called cancer alley. That’s between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. There is a heavy concentration of petrochemical facilities. Same for an area called the Houston Ship Channel in Port Arthur, Texas. And then in different places in Appalachia.”
“Not only are environmental justice communities being harmed during the production of plastics, but because most plastic does not get recycled, that means that plastic is either littered in the environment, as we have discussed, or it goes into landfills and garbage incinerators. And landfill and garbage incinerators are disproportionately located in low income communities and communities of color.”
“A fourth major problem is that most plastic is not recyclable. In your home, you might have a bright orange bright plastic laundry detergent bottle. And in your refrigerator, you might have some polystyrene take out food containers. Those two plastics cannot be recycled together. There are so many types of plastics. Even if you had the same type of plastic, but one is red and one is blue, you can’t recycle them together. By design, plastics are not recyclable like paper, metal, glass and cardboard are recyclable.”
“We encourage people to keep recycling your paper, metal, glass and cardboard. Please compost yard waste and food waste. But plastic recycling has been an abysmal failure. The people who know this the best are the people in the plastic industry. They know that the different kinds of plastics means that you cannot recycle them together. And yet, they have spent millions of dollars deceiving the public, making people feel good about single use plastics. They slap the iconic three arrow logo on their product, tell people to put their plastics in a recycling bin, knowing full well that most plastics don’t get recycled.”
“The deception is so extreme that in September 2024, California Attorney General Rob Bonta sued ExxonMobil for deceptive advertisement.”
“The final major problem is the health impacts. We are all swallowing and breathing in large amounts of microplastics – five millimeters or less. Just in the last few years, scientists have been looking at the presence of microplastics in human bodies. And unfortunately, microplastics have been found in our blood stream, in our heart arteries, in our kidneys and lungs, in testicles, in breast milk, in our brain and hair and saliva. And what I find most shocking is that microplastics have been found in the human placenta – both on the fetal side and the maternal side. The fetus is already being exposed to microplastics.”
“But you might ask – don’t we just excrete microplastics? What’s the problem? We excrete some of it, but not all of it. There are two important recent studies. One in the New England Journal of Medicine that identified microplastics in heart arteries heart plaque. And it found that people with microplastics in their arteries and plaque had an increased risk of stroke, heart attack and premature death.”
“And there was a study in microplastics in the brain which identified microplastics passing through the blood/brain barrier and linking the presence of microplastics in the brain to Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s and other neurological disorders. The studies found that the cadavers they looked at had an amount of plastics in them that was the equivalent of a plastic spoon. That’s a lot of plastic in our brain.”
“This is a health issue not just for people living in front line communities where plastics are made or near garbage incinerators, but for the general public writ large because we all are exposed to plastics, either from packaging or building products or carpet or clothing. This is emerging as a quite serious health concern.”
In your book, you use the term Big Plastic to the corporations in the plastics industry. Which are the big companies?
“Fossil fuel companies like Shell and ExxonMobil. It is chemical companies like Dow and DuPont and then thousands of smaller companies that make PVC plastic pipes for drinking water or companies like Mattel that use plastics for children’s toys. Home Depot that sells PVC plastic home products. Clothing companies. Most clothing sold in the United States is made from polyester – that’s plastic. Consumer brand companies. You go into any supermarket and you see lots of plastic packaging. Kraft Food and General Mills. But it’s also dominated by beverage brands like Coca-Cola and Pepsi.”
“That’s why it’s so difficult to solve this problem politically. It’s a vast universe of large companies that make plastics. And then you have the companies using plastics for their products. And they all have an army of lobbyists in state legislatures, Congress and even when a local small town is considering passing a plastic bag ban. Trade associations like the American Chemistry Council and the Plastics Industry Association – they show up everywhere to try to discourage any legislative action that would reduce plastics in any way.”
You would phase out the use of plastics. What would you replace them with?
“The most important thing is to build, reuse and refill infrastructure. It wasn’t that long ago that milk was sold in glass bottles and Coca-Cola was sold in glass bottles. And they were then returned to the retailer – because there was a mandatory deposit on them – washed, sterilized and used over and over again.”
“Those approaches were abandoned by Coke and Pepsi and the dairy companies. They thought – we are a throwaway society and we can use single use plastics. And they have no financial responsibility for what happens after you use their packaging.”
“The most important thing is waste reduction. We are overpackaging things now. If you can’t reduce, reuse and refill, we don’t need a space age breakthrough. I like mycelium – a type of mushroom. There is agricultural waste. But there is also tried and true paper, cardboard, metal and glass. All of those can be used from recycled materials. And you can put them in your home recycling bin.”
“We have alternatives to plastics. But the companies who are using plastics use them because they think they are cheap. And it might be cheap for them, but it’s not cheap for our health and environment.”
(A spokesperson for the Plastics Industry Association did not respond to an inquiry seeking comment about the allegations in the book.)
[For the complete q/a format Interview with Judith Enck, see 39 Corporate Crime Reporter 45(12), November 17, 2025, print edition only.]