“If we could think locally, we would do far better than we are doing now. The right local questions and answers will be the right global ones. The Amish question, ‘What will this do to our community?’ tends toward the right answer for the world.” -Wendell Berry, 1991

The WRAP Act

You go to the grocery store. You have a dozen items on your list: cartons of milk, packages of pasta, bags of rice, a bag of carrots. You try to be responsible, so you bring a reusable shopping bag—this is Washington, after all—but you see how much waste is in the products themselves, how much food is already in plastic packaging that can only ever be thrown away.

You look at products touting the percentage of recycled plastic their packing is made of, how much non-plastic material is utilized. You want to be responsible, but your options are so limited. You wish that someone could, just once and for all, mandate that corporations be the ones to fix this problem—shouldn’t they be the ones to produce better packaging, instead of placing the guilt of trash production on you? You’re only one person, after all.

And you’re right! Corporations spent decades advertising the recyclability of plastic, but recent studies have shown that “around 85% of plastic packing worldwide ends up in landfills,” and that’s not just from a lack of willpower to recycle it, but because so much plastic cannot be recycled at all.

Some states have made efforts to compel corporations to minimize their plastic waste. Unfortunately, Washington’s own such effort, the Washington Recycling and Packing Act, has failed to advance out of its committee, and is essentially dead as we near the end of the legislative session.

The WRAP Act would have modernized Washington’s recycling program by requiring producers of plastic packaging to be financially responsible for the full life-cycle of packaging materials, alleviating the cost from citizens of plastic waste’s GHG emissions, transportation, sorting, and landfilling. 

One of the essential outcomes of this kind of legislation would require producers to redesign single-use packing to be either reusable, compostable, or recyclable. This kind of Extended Producer Responsibility policy is decades-old. Many European municipalities and four US states have passed such policies already. 

While it’s disappointing that Washington will not be joining the growing coalition to hold companies responsible, on May 6, Spokane Zero Waste will host a funeral of sorts for the WRAP Act, not to look to the past but to come together as a community and ensure that Producer Responsibility Legislation makes its way to the Governor’s desk as soon as possible. 

This is certainly not the end of the fight. But for now, it is worth noting why reducing plastic production needs to be understood as a key battleground for combatting the climate crisis.

Global Context

While plastic pollution has long been identified as an environmental hazard—from trash islands in the Pacific Ocean to the detrimental impact of plastic products on endangered species—the actual process for producing plastic requires the extraction, transportation, and refinement of fossil fuels.

Known in the industry as petrochemicals, plastics are made primarily from natural gas, as well as crude oil. The plastic used to wrap fresh food, the plastic gloves cooks use when preparing ingredients, and the plastic used in buttons on shirts all begin as the same fossil fuels responsible for climate change.

The refining process is especially carbon-intensive. According to the Center for International Environmental Law, plastic refinement produces “significant emissions through the cracking of alkanes into olefins, the polymerization and plasticization of olefins into plastic resins, and other chemical refining processes.” This process releases greenhouse gas emissions that are just as harmful to the atmosphere as the traffic on I-90.

While transportation remains the number one source of CO2, for now, the fossil fuel industry is looking to plastic as the next excuse to continue extraction as electric vehicles become increasingly popular and inexpensive to make. The founder of the nonprofit Beyond Plastics, Judith Enck, even referred to plastics as “Plan B for the fossil fuel industry.”

Structural Solutions

We’ve fallen for the recycling myth before. It’s crucial not to fall for it again. Even if we rapidly switch to renewable energy, the fossil fuel industry is already counting on plastic production to keep their profits up, to keep the gas flowing. This is why reducing plastic needs to be framed around the production process, the moment CO2 is released.

Legislation like the WRAP Act is a great model for future legislative (and even executive) action because it forces consumers and producers alike to recognize the problem of plastic refinement. It forces us to remember that, as a 2021 NPR article suggested, plastic pollution is the fault of producers, not consumers, even if producers pass off the environmental cost onto consumers.

In early 2019, legal experts from UCLA testified before congress about the many negative effects of plastic waste on American communities, noting that a broad federal ban on single-use plastic production would have the biggest impact. While such a ban would certainly be an uphill battle no matter which party controls congress, the experts’ report also noted that congress could easily draw on existing policies implemented at state and local levels. Another option the panelists noted was to hold corporations responsible for the plastic they produce, incentivizing them to invest in alternative packaging methods.

Plastic has become a feature of everyday life, so embedded in the social background that it’s impossible to name every object that requires plastic. Steering wheels, children’s toys, modems, nametags, wheelchair frames, hearing aids. Life is plastic. It’s fantastic.

Here, I think it’s worth remembering what our ultimate goal is: Reducing global CO2 levels to below 350 parts per million. In other words, while we cannot afford, for now, to cut off all plastic production, we can conceptualize plastic within a narrow budget. Our task, then, is to balance the books. Carbon dioxide is a part of our world, but we cannot and should not tolerate its excess.

What You Can Do

I think that Wendell Berry’s 1991 article in The Atlantic about the role of thinking locally in arriving at global solutions is a helpful way of addressing plastic. As simple as it sounds, maybe one of the best places to start tackling the problem is to simply ask, What relationship to plastic is good for Spokane?

A simple answer may be less waste. It’s worth remembering that in the three Rs, reduce, reuse, recycle, recycling is the last strategy. Before recycling, consider ways to 1) reduce the plastic you purchase in the first place and 2) reuse the items you already have. Spokane has numerous resources available with information and activities dedicated to reusing and repurposing products: Spokane Zero Waste, Zero Landfill Spokane, mutual aid distribution for clothing to those in need, and repair shops can help us get the most out of what we buy. 

What can we afford to do without? What can we afford to give up? While there are a number of alternatives to plastic available, the fossil fuel industry is deeply entwined in just about every sector of the economy through plastic alone, which often goes under-looked in the larger debate about fossil fuel extraction. Pens, computers, phone chargers, medical supplies, sanitation, the way that vaccines are distributed—it’s all so overwhelming. It’s worth rethinking the question altogether: How much longer can we afford not to take action? 

This brings us back to the consumer going grocery shopping. Washington State’s plastic bag ban is proof enough that targeting single-use plastic is a) relatively popular when explained properly and b) successful in fostering a culture of community-minded care. Like masking during the pandemic, local mandates worked as reminders that taking care of your community can be as simple as bringing an extra object with you when you go out in public. What does that culture of care look like when applied to pollution, littering, and fossil fuel extraction? What if we saw bringing reusable coffee mugs and reusable bags for bulk dry goods to the Co-Op as a matter of serving the community, rather than following a rule legislated from the west side?

There are a number of practical steps we can take to reduce plastic consumption, but at the end of the day, it won’t amount to much if corporations are still purchasing fossil fuels to refine into polymers to make gloves, chip bags, and water bottles. While it helps to bring reusable water bottles to work, just as it helps to bike instead of drive, the structural problem remains.

As always, what’s good for Spokane is what’s good for Washington. Taking the time to contact your legislators to encourage them to support future producer-responsibility bills like the WRAP Act can help direct the energy we all feel buying plastic toward tangible outcomes. Direct action, regular conversations, contacting corporations if not outright shaming them in public testimonies—the more pressure we exercise, the more obviously necessary we can show plastic reduction to be.