OPINION:
All talk, no deals. Such is life at the United Nations, which recently failed for the sixth time in three years to secure a treaty addressing plastic pollution. Call it the latest example of hope triumphing over experience. Hundreds of negotiators from various countries sought consensus while in Geneva, Paris, Punta del Este and other hardship locations. If you had hoped the U.N.-assembled experts would agree on anything more controversial than declaring kittens and puppies cute, you can stop holding your breath. It’s not happening.
Although the U.N. conferences were all about scary pollution headlines (“We’re drowning in plastic!”), we sensed a shift in the conversation last year to health threats. We repeatedly read that we were all eating the equivalent of a plastic credit card a week. That claim was quickly debunked, showing that the proper number was not 5 grams weekly but 4 millionths of a gram.
Yet the lie kept being repeated with no retractions and little coverage of the truth. One person typically ingests 0.000000184 grams of plastic per day. A single grain of salt weighs 60,000 nanograms, 326 times more than the projected microplastic ingestion. Plastics materials expert Dr. Chris DeArmitt says it would take more than 20,000 years to ingest a credit card’s worth of plastic.
Microplastic ingestion accounts for only 0.001% of the intake of other particles, such as titanium dioxide, commonly found in paints and paper. Yet there are no alarming news stories about people sniffing fresh paint or children eating their homework. Silica particles are harmful to the lungs. These micro sand aliens are in your every breath at every beach you ever visit. With more than 5,000 tons of micro meteor dust hitting Earth daily, shouldn’t we be wearing N95 masks outdoors? Where is the U.N. commission on these threats?
All this is understood when you realize the dose makes the poison. Were it otherwise, we would have all died by now from the naturally occurring arsenic in our tap water. Life expectancy is longer than ever, not shorter. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s latest data from 2023, death rates from the top 10 leading causes of death are all down. However, cold, hard facts are immaterial when emotions run hot.
At the United Nations, the plastic jihad on pollution has been driven mainly by nongovernmental organizations with a long-term agenda: shutting down fossil fuels. You may not think of Exxon and plastic in the same sentence, but plastic production starts with those fuels. NGOs such as Greenpeace know that killing off plastic is a twofer with the resultant impact on oil and natural gas.
However, capping plastic production doesn’t eliminate pollution or the need for new packaging. We would just replace one material with another, perhaps something worse. Recent studies have shown that four times more alternative material (by weight) is needed to perform the same function as plastic. The Trump administration saw the light and opposed a global production cap.
Those who target producers want to return to a world where plastic is nonexistent. They ignore the diseases and deaths that have been avoided because of plastic inventions. From food safety wraps and gloves to syringes, heart valves and blood bags, plastics have saved millions of lives. The movie “The Graduate” was correct in 1967 when it predicted the plastic revolution.
Activists claim aluminum is more “sustainable,” but the devil is in the details. With new artificial intelligence data centers consuming enormous amounts of electricity, we are forgetting that aluminum production consumes 5% of America’s electricity.
Environmental protection means using more efficient materials, not less. Polyethylene terephthalate is the most widely used plastic and the easiest to recycle. Multiuse plastic is also widespread, with water bottles, food storage containers and shopping bags all having second and third lives while providing risk-free convenience and safety.
If the anti-plastic lobby spent its time and money persuading people not to litter, the world would be a better place. The best idea is for governments to support a greater recycling infrastructure, complementing greater awareness. Let’s make recycling cool for kids who influence their parents on more than breakfast cereal choices. “Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires” and “This Is Your Brain on Drugs” were effective campaigns because they were widely distributed and discouraged bad behavior.
Solving these pollution problems requires finally understanding them first. To quote former Supreme Court Justice Frankfurter, “Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.”
When it comes to litter, people are the problem, not plastic.
• Rick Berman is president of RBB Strategies.
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