Plastic-Free July: The Harmful Truth about Plastic’s Beginnings

By Schyler Brown, Bird-Friendly Communities Program Manager, Houston Audubon

It’s Plastic-Free July, which means acknowledging and finding ways to reduce our plastic use and waste. Each week in July, we will be sharing a different kind of plastic pollution and how it impacts birds and wildlife. This week, we are talking about plastic production and how it produces harmful toxins and emits greenhouse gases.

Over the last seventy years, production and consumption of plastics has increased more than 230 times, from 2 million tons in 1950 to 460 million tons of plastics produced as of 2019. Plastic today is nearly unavoidable, as it is used to package our food, to make our appliances, and it’s even in our clothes. While many plastics have brought us a lot of convenience and improved our ability to provide medicine and medical care safely, overuse has resulted in a lot of micro and macro plastic pollution as we discussed in the previous two blog posts. Waste management is not the only hazard to our environment that plastics have created though; such a massive increase in plastic production has brought with it massive increases in greenhouse gas emissions and toxic chemical hazards that pollute both the air and the water.

Plastic production is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. Greenhouse gases are those that, put simply, trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere, leading to long term climate changes. This is dangerous for wildlife because they rely heavily on typical climactic patterns that they’ve evolved with. When a migrating bird flies over the Gulf of Mexico expecting to munch down on spring mulberries, it may find that the mulberries have already fruited and fallen due to an earlier spring season, leaving no food for the bird. This is just one example of many that wildlife experience due to climate change. Plastics alone are responsible for almost 5% of all global emissions, the result of about 1.79 billion tons of greenhouse gases emitted in just one year. Greenhouse gases are not the only chemicals emitted into the atmosphere from plastics and plastic production.

Far too often do community members of Baytown, La Porte, Pasadena, League City, Deer Park and other areas in East Houston receive “stay in” orders from their cities, instructing everyone to stay indoors due to a high level of dangerous environmental hazards that were leaked into the air, such as benzene. This is the result of air pollution emitted from plastic producing companies (and other industries such as pesticide, fuel, etc.) contaminating our breathing air to such dangerous levels that it is recommended to stay indoors. Other toxic chemicals released into the air include ethylene oxide, toluene, xylene, monoxide, formaldehyde, and much more. Air pollution of this nature leads to greater rates of asthma, cancer and smog in our cities. Plastic production can also affect water quality and suitable habitat for wildlife on land and in the water.

Toxins in water are often the result of chemical discharge from plastic companies. When products are made, waste is produced and discharged into waterways. These chemicals persist for centuries, leading to dead zones and conditions that are unsuitable for wildlife. Some of these chemical pollutants can even cause deformation in wildlife, as the chemical alters the hormonal properties of the animal, leading to missing limbs, lesions, and body parts attached or growing in places that they shouldn’t be. Finally, there is a cost to habitat when a company decides to expand its site of production or open another site. Most plastic producers situate themselves on waterways so that they can discharge chemical wastes into bodies of water. Because they build their operation on waterways, erosion occurs due to loss of important wetland plants that hold the soil in place.

This may seem like an insurmountable problem, but you can help.

• Call your local representatives and demand stricter plastic regulations, such as a plastic bag fee or plastic product tax, to discourage the purchase of plastics.
• Use less plastic in your own day to day life. Reduce comes first in the classic Reduce, Reuse, Recycle motto for a reason – it is the most effective way to lower your personal impact.
  • One way to reduce your plastic consumption is to ask yourself before each purchase if you really need this product or if it’s a want, or consider an alternative.
  • Bring your reusable utensils, including reusable water bottle, fork, spoon, and straw.
• Join a litter cleanup in your area. Stopping Plastics and Litter Along Shorelines (or SPLASH) hosts litter cleanups in both Houston and along the coast, and they pick up hundreds of pounds of plastic at each cleanup, leaving our natural environment a little safer for wildlife. Sign up for their newsletter to learn more about when their cleanups are »
• Share the message with your friends, family and community, starting with this blog post!