The Real Issue With Plastic

We often speak of plastics as if it were a problem of waste management, as though the crisis begins when a bottle is dropped. This is a great gift to the petrochemical industry, as it moves attention away from the globe-spanning corporations that make the waste in the first place. The real issue is production. Plastic is the material expression of an economic order built on the permanent transformation of nature into disposable commodities.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the chemical industry was still largely organised around coal. The First World War accelerated chemical research in ways that were inseparable from military needs, but as Adam Hanieh notes in his recent book Crude Capitalism, it was the Second World War that marked the real turning point. As wartime demand intensified, production shifted away from coal-based chemistry and toward petroleum as the decisive feedstock.

Oil companies had already been experimenting with cracking (a refining process that breaks hydrocarbon molecules into smaller ones) in the 1920s and 1930s to increase gasoline output, but during the war that same process became key to producing olefins and aromatics, the molecular building blocks of plastics and synthetic rubber. By the 1950s, this petrochemical revolution had begun to remake the material structure of capitalism. Thermoplastics made it possible to have materials that could be softened by heat and re-formed at scale, while injection-moulding allowed them to turn pre-production plastic pellets into endless numbers of identical objects with minimal additional labour. What followed was a permanent industrial transformation, locking society more deeply into fossil fuel extraction.

Annual Production of Plastics Worldwide from 1950 to 2021. Data from Statista

Plastic-related pollution and chemical exposure have been associated with asthma, cardiovascular disease, endocrine disruption, developmental disorders, reproductive harm, strokes, and multiple forms of cancer. Fine particulate matter emissions generated during plastic production are estimated to cause around 159,000 premature deaths globally every year, alongside health-related economic losses exceeding 200 billion dollars annually. It is important to note that these numbers are likely severe underestimates as global monitoring remains limited and the overwhelming majority of plastic chemicals have never been adequately studied.

The scale of chemical exposure is itself difficult to comprehend. A 2025 paper found that more than 16,000 chemicals are used in plastics, yet complete safety information is unavailable for over two-thirds of them. Of those that have been studied, thousands are considered highly hazardous. Nearly 1,500 are carcinogenic, mutagenic, or toxic to reproduction, while more than 1,700 damage specific organs such as the liver. Bisphenol A (used to make polycarbonate plastics and epoxy resins) alone has been associated with 5.4 million cases of ischaemic heart disease and 346,000 cases of stroke in 2015, killing 237,000 and 194,000 people, respectively.

Plastic is responsible for disease and death at every stage of its life cycle. Chemicals escape during production. Workers absorb exposure in factories and petrochemical complexes. Consumers ingest or inhale residues from packaging, containers, textiles, and household goods. Microplastics are shed through wear, abrasion, sunlight, and degradation. Waste systems then redistribute the damage through landfills, incinerators, open dumps, wastewater, ash, runoff, and airborne particles. Petrochemical complexes, dumps, incinerators, and waste-processing facilities are systematically concentrated near working-class communities, Indigenous territories, and racialised populations with limited political power. The entire industry survives by turning some places into sacrifice zones.

Existing waste legislation does not fundamentally respond to ecological or public health concerns. Its central purpose is increasingly to create economic instruments that transform waste itself into a profitable commodity. Under the language of “valorisation,” garbage becomes a new frontier for accumulation. The objective is to protect major polluters by opening new markets.

This is the political function of the (capitalist) circular economy discourse. Presented as ecological modernisation, circular economy policies often operate as mechanisms for stabilising the existing system of overproduction. Recycling is presented as the universal answer – the promise that consumption can continue without consequence as long as materials are collected and reprocessed. Under pressure from industry, governments develop programs and legislation that prioritise so-called energy recovery and waste valorisation, particularly the incineration of plastic waste under the guise of sustainability. The burden of handling contaminated or unrecyclable waste is pushed outward, while the exporting countries preserve the illusion that their own consumption can be made benign. 

In Mexico, reforms to waste legislation in 2021 redefined co-processing in cement kilns (burning of waste as industrial fuel) as part of the ordinary industrial production process rather than as waste disposal. This seemingly technical change had major political consequences as it exempted the cement industry from additional regulatory procedures when burning plastic waste in its kilns, legally reframing waste incineration as productive industrial activity.

This reform coincided with a dramatic increase in plastic waste imports into Mexico, particularly from the United States. After China closed its borders to much of the world’s plastic waste in 2018, global waste flows were reorganised toward countries in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. These regions became the new destinations for thousands of tons of contaminated and difficult-to-process plastics exported from wealthier economies. Even the implementation of international mechanisms intended to regulate hazardous plastic waste flows proved incapable of challenging the broader logic of displacement. The industry adapted quickly, rerouting waste toward regions with weaker bargaining power and fewer resources to resist.

Consumers are taught to believe that the crisis can be solved by individual responsibility and proper disposal habits. But most plastics are extremely difficult to recycle because of contamination, mixed polymers, additives, and degraded material quality. Much of what is called recycling merely delays disposal, downgrades plastics into lower-value products, or converts waste into fuel through thermal destruction. Recycling therefore serves less as a genuine solution than as a political strategy that protects virgin plastic production from meaningful restriction.

Plastic production is a major growth sector for fossil capital. As pressure grows around decarbonisation and energy transition, petrochemical expansion has become a key survival strategy for oil and gas corporations. Plastics absorb fossil fuels into new circuits of accumulation even as other sectors face greater scrutiny. This is precisely why fossil fuel and petrochemical corporations have intervened so aggressively in international negotiations over plastic regulation. 

During the recent 2025 UN plastics treaty negotiations, hundreds of industry lobbyists flooded the talks, exceeding the combined delegations of the European Union. Not surprisingly, Industry-aligned countries pushed for a treaty centred on downstream measures such as recycling, circular economy principles and waste management. The US delegation even circulated letters urging countries to oppose treaty provisions targeting plastic production limits and chemical restrictions, declaring that they “will not support impractical global approaches such as plastic production targets or bans and restrictions on plastic additives or plastic products – that will increase the costs of all plastic products that are used throughout our daily lives.” 

The future envisioned by the petrochemical industry is not post-carbon but hyper-synthetic. The industry does not need waste management and recycling technologies to solve plastic pollution, it needs them to defend the legitimacy of plastic production itself.