by Joel Martin
Whether you call it growing up or adulting, the most important thing adults learn to do is to pick up after themselves. If you want to be a responsible member of the community you don’t leave your garbage on your neighbor’s lawn. This is evidently not the case for businesses like the petroleum and plastics industries who treat the entire planet as their own personal toilet. That shirking of duty is the ultimate reason why we have both the climate crisis and the plastic waste crisis. It’s not at all complicated. Companies evade responsibility for the existential mess they’ve created and they expect everyone else to clean it up. The simple fix is to force large companies to clean up after themselves at their cost, not ours. In other words, it’s time to “adult” capitalism into the 21st century.
Here’s the crux of the problem, the central dogma of modern capitalism is maximizing shareholder value. That’s the onlytrue goal of every publicly traded company in the world. They pay lip service to “stakeholders” such as employees and the community but it’s all just that, lip service, window dressing, or BS. As they say, “talk is cheap” and companies, particularly big companies, do like cheap.
Petroleum and petrochemical companies, namely those that produce oil, gas and plastics have essentially zero responsibility for the eventual disposal of their products. In fact, the onus on these companies from a shareholder perspective is to evade costs wherever possible. They are supposed to act within the law, but they make very cold hearted calculations of which laws they can break and which laws they can fight ad nauseam in court. Why clean up after yourself if (a) you don’t have to anyway, or (b) the fines are trivial or (c) you can drag things out forever. The sad truth is that executives in these companies are financially incentivized, indeed obligated, to shift the cost burden and the corresponding suffering to a third party - namely, you.
Petroleum and plastics companies have accomplished an impressive sleight-of-hand by either greenwashing or blaming consumers for environmental problems. As we now know, the whole idea of plastic recycling was promoted by the plastic industry to assuage consumer guilt over single-use plastics. The industry knew that recycling was a sham and they’ve lied to us about it since at least the 1970s. To be clear, only an insignificant amount of plastic ever gets recycled. Petroleum companies have lied to us about climate change for even longer and, as to carbon dioxide, zero gets recycled by industry. Only nature steps in to recycle carbon dioxide.
Here’s where we are today. We have a planet that is heating out of control, we have plastic waste absolutely everywhere on earth and microplastics in our lungs, blood, human breast milk and maternal and fetal placental issues. As to the microplastics within us, we have no real understanding of what they are doing to us. Plastics and associated chemicals may be causing cancer, early sexual maturity, cognitive problems such as autism, and low sperm counts to name a few. All the costs are ours - the fires, deadly heat waves, and garbage in the air, the ocean, and our bodies - while all the profits are theirs.
There is an easy fix. Make companies accountable for the proper disposal of their products. Put the onus on them, not the consumer. For example, enact laws to make plastic manufacturers responsible for actually recycling their products. I’m not talking about about the companies that make plastic bottles, I’m talking about the gigantic polymer manufacturing companies such as Exxon Mobil and LG Chemicals who make the raw plastics used in single-use containers. Not only oblige them to recycle but make them account for the recycling in the same way as financial statements - namely, everything should be auditable. The same goes for oil and gas producers (we can safely name bad actor Exxon again), make them pull carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere or make them pay someone else to do it on their behalf.
Of course we would be immediately subjected to crocodile tears and a massive PR campaign from industry stating that forcing responsibility would result in higher costs to consumers. Fine, let’s start small. Let’s enact laws that start at 5% recycling and gradually increase over time. Let the wonders of capitalism solve the problem. A requirement to recycle even a modest amount would spur profound innovation. For example, we would very quickly shift to plastic formulations and packaging that can actually be recycled and, as for oil and gas, we would see carbon capture technology advance quickly. We would create a lot of green jobs too.
The companies responsible for the utter destruction of our planet are financially incentivized to dump their garbage everywhere because it costs them nothing. That equation has to change if we hope to survive as a species. It’s time that they clean up after themselves. Congress must do this if we hope to survive. They can either do it now when there is still a very limited window of time or they can do it later when people across the planet are dying in droves. If our leaders don’t act, we must change those leaders.
Let corporate environmental criminals know: if you make a mess, you clean it up! We are no longer your maids!
Joel Martin is a climate activist. He is a scientist, semi-retired biotech entrepreneur, and long-time San Diego resident.