NPR went with “Plastic Junk: Researchers Find Tiny Particles in Men’s Testicles.” EHN wrote “Microplastics Found in the Testicles of Both Man and Man’s Best Friend” (picking up on the fact that the study in question measured both human and dog samples). Last week, late-night talk show host Stephen Colbert implored his audience to “Recycle your testicles! They can be ground up and made into new soda bottles.”

But though some of the commentary was tongue-in-cheek, the subject matter of the study that provoked the headlines couldn’t have been more serious. In a selection of human testicles from New Mexico, all samples had measurable levels of microplastics, representing 12 different types of plastic. The researchers speculated that the presence of these toxic particles in male reproductive organs might be driving declines in male fertility, which has halved around the world over the past 50 years, with the pace of decline more than doubling since 2000.

Though this study is the first prominent one to find plastic pollution in this most personal and unlikely of locations, it’s only the latest research to find that plastic pollution has become so ubiquitous, so overwhelmingly common, that it’s actually penetrating our own bodies. In the last few years, scientists have found microplastics in human breast milk, human blood and human lungs, to name only a few. In a March 2024 issue of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, scientists announced they had detected microplastics clogging the arteries of heart and stroke patients for the first time. And in the new documentary film Plastic People: The Hidden Crisis of Microplastics (which I have the honour of executive producing), we reveal new evidence showing, for the first time, microplastics in the human brain. The researchers behind this groundbreaking work are now investigating possible links between this pollution and diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

For the moment, the problem is getting worse, not better. Late last year, scientists in Hawaii showed that levels of microplastics in human placentas have increased over the past decade: a clear outcome of our society’s accelerating plastic addiction. An incredible 50% of all plastic produced by humans has been created in the past 15 years. Less than 10% of this is recycled, and the vast majority winds up jettisoned into the environment. Over time, bigger pieces of plastic (like disposable water bottles) degrade into tiny particles that are then so light we inhale and ingest them on a minute-by-minute basis.

To put it mildly, this recent but rapidly mounting evidence of a causal connection between plastic pollution and negative impacts on human health is a game changer.

Throughout history, different types of pollution problems have started to be solved only once they were clearly understood to be impinging on our quality of life. That’s why lead was removed from gasoline (it was shown to be harming the brain development of kids). That’s why the government of former prime minister Stephen Harper banned BPA in baby bottles (it’s not a good idea to make baby bottles out of a hormonally active chemical). And that’s why coal plants are being shut down (more smog means more asthma and heart disease).

The same moment of truth is now here for plastic pollution.

Endangered sea turtles are mistakenly eating plastic grocery bags? I’m concerned.

My wife has plastic in her placenta? I have plastic in my testicles? Make it stop.

Unsurprisingly, given that eight out of 10 Canadians support a crackdown on plastic pollution, the federal government has been moving to solve the problem. It banned a number of single-use, easy-to-replace, plastic items and is now constructing a common-sense registry to better track how much plastic is being created and disposed of.

Retailers are also acting. You know something serious is happening when Tim Hortons starts modifying its iconic packaging. I can confirm, from personal experience, that their new cardboard coffee cup lids work very well with my double-double.

The smart play for the plastic industry, now, is to start reducing its risk. This month’s blockbuster testicle headlines are the tip of the iceberg. Rather than stonewalling all new regulation, as Canada’s plastic sector has been, there is plenty of room for the industry to proactively make plastic safer. To do so will require banning the most toxic plastic formulations and reducing surges in production that are swamping efforts to find solutions.

We’re not recycling our way out of this problem. The scientific evidence could not be more clear and worrisome: plastic pollution is a human health hazard and a threat to our future. Hopefully, our self-preservation instinct kicks in any second now.

Rick Smith is executive producer of the new documentary Plastic People: The Hidden Crisis of Microplastics and the co-author of two bestselling books on the human health impacts of pollution. He is also president of the Canadian Climate Institute.

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A report released last week by the nonprofit Center for Climate Integrity, or CCI, chronicles a “decades-long campaign of fraud and deception” from Big Oil and the plastics industry to promote recycling as a solution to the plastic pollution crisis. New documents show that industry executives pushed plastics recycling despite knowing since the 1980s that it “cannot be considered a permanent solid waste solution,” and that recycled plastics would never be able to compete economically with virgin material.

Today, the U.S. recycling rate for plastics sits at about 5 or 6 percent. It has never risen above 10 percent.

The report’s authors liken the plastics industry’s recycling campaign to Big Oil’s tactics to convince the public that its products don’t cause climate change. Many companies have been involved in both efforts, since plastics are made from fossil fuels. “The oil industry’s lies are at the heart of the two most catastrophic pollution crises in human history,” Richard Wiles, CCI’s president, said in a statement.

CCI traces industry support for plastics recycling back to the 1980s, when it was proposed as a response to widespread public concern over the material’s proliferation — especially as litter. With the threat of regulation looming large, industry representatives felt they had little choice but “to recycle or be banned.”

Even then, the industry acknowledged major and potentially insurmountable hurdles to plastics recycling. Most significantly, there was no market for recycled plastic — it was too expensive and low-quality to compete with virgin material. One document uncovered by CCI — a 1986 report from the plastics industry trade group the Vinyl Institute — noted that “purity and quality demands set for many applications preclude the use of recycled material.” In the end, the report concluded that recycling “merely prolongs the time until an item is disposed of.”

Plastics and petrochemical company representatives repeatedly shared similar concerns at industry conferences, in meeting notes, and elsewhere: that plastics recycling consumed too much energy, that it would only work for a small fraction of plastic waste, and that a quickly growing supply of virgin materials would “kick the s–t out of” recycled plastic prices, as one official of the now-defunct American Plastics Council wrote in meeting notes obtained by CCI.

Davis Allen, an investigative researcher for CCI and the lead author of the report, said many of the new documents came from a former American Plastics Council staffer. Others came from industry document databases maintained by Columbia University, New York University, and the University of California, San Francisco.

The documents, Allen said, strongly suggest that the plastics and petrochemical industries saw recycling as little more than a way to tame public outrage and ward off anti-plastic legislation. One 1994 document quotes a representative of Eastman Chemical saying that, while plastics recycling might one day become a reality, “it is more likely that we will wake up and realize that we are not going to recycle our way out of the solid waste issue.” Another document — handwritten notes from a meeting between Exxon Chemical and the American Plastics Council — quotes Exxon Chemical’s then-vice president saying that, when it came to recycling plastics, “we are committed to the activities, but not committed to the results.”

Still, trade groups and large petrochemical companies invested heavily in public relations to improve plastics recycling’s image. They touted ambitious goals to increase the recycling rate, and then remained quiet when they failed to meet them, or changed the way they measured their progress. Advertisements “simply repeated the same lies about the viability of plastic recycling,” according to CCI. For example, one 1991 ad in Ladies’ Home Journal claimed that “a bottle can come back as a bottle, over and over again.” Meanwhile, educational materials created for use in schools implied that recycling could assuage students’ guilt over using disposable plastic foodware.

By the mid-1990s, the results seemed to have paid off. Industry polling showed that public opinion on plastics had greatly improved and state-level efforts to ban or restrict plastic production had waned considerably — even though the dismal state of plastics recycling had not significantly improved.

Today, the U.S. recycling rate for plastics sits at about 5 or 6 percent. It has never risen above 10 percent.

Today, most plastic waste gets incinerated or sent to landfills, where it creates hazardous air and water pollution that disproportionately affects low-income communities and communities of color. Meanwhile, environmental advocates say the “myth” of plastics recycling has facilitated the industry’s unmitigated expansion — plastic production has grown by nearly 230 times since 1950. Plastics are expected to drive nearly half of the growth in global oil demand between 2017 and 2050.

CCI isn’t the first group to document the plastics industry’s deceptive communication practices around recycling. A 2020 investigation from NPR and Frontline found ample evidence that the plastics industry and its trade groups promoted plastics recycling despite knowing it was “costly” and “infeasible.” Two former industry executives told the outlets that recycling was used to “advertise our way out of” negative PR.

Since the mid-2010s, a second wave of anti-plastic outrage has spurred the plastics industry and its lobbying groups to again promote the promise of plastics recycling — only this time, they’re pushing so-called “chemical recycling,” which can supposedly melt plastic into its constituent polymers so it can be turned back into new products. Although chemical recycling technologies have existed for decades, most existing facilities — and there are only a few — are still unable to create new plastic products; they mostly turn plastic into chemicals or fossil fuels to be burned.

Lew Freeman, the Society of the Plastics Industry’s former vice president of government affairs, told Grist in an interview last year that there are “serious questions” about the degree to which chemical recycling can ever work. “The industry seems to be doing the same thing it did 30-some-odd years ago,” Freeman said.

Ross Eisenberg, president of America’s Plastic Makers — a subgroup of the petrochemical industry trade organization the American Chemistry Council, which absorbed the American Plastics Council in 2002 — criticized the CCI report as “flawed.” In a statement, he said it “works against our goals to be more sustainable by mischaracterizing the industry and the state of today’s recycling technologies.” Eisenberg did not specifically refute any of the claims made by CCI.

The oil industry’s lies are at the heart of the two most catastrophic pollution crises in human history.

 

– Richard Wiles, president of Center for Climate Integrity

In response to Grist’s request for comment, the Vinyl Institute did not address any of the report’s claims but said it was “committed to increasing” the amount of polyvinyl chloride — a kind of plastic — that gets recycled each year. Eastman Chemical and Exxon Mobil did not respond to Grist’s requests for comment in time for publication.

CCI hopes that its report “lays the foundation” for more ambitious legal challenges against the plastics and petrochemical industries. According to Alyssa Johl, CCI’s vice president of legal and general counsel, most lawsuits so far have targeted the makers of specific products — for instance, Keurig, which misleadingly placed the “chasing arrows” recycling symbol on coffee pods that couldn’t actually be recycled.

These lawsuits “don’t go far enough,” Johl said. In her view, future cases should target the whole industry — including the fossil fuel producers themselves and their trade organizations, highlighting the integral role they played in promoting recycling as a solution to the plastic pollution crisis. Such lawsuits are mostly likely to be brought by cities or state attorneys general, Johl said, and they may invoke public nuisance, consumer fraud, racketeering, or conspiracy laws — similar to successful legal challenges that have been brought against the tobacco and opioid industries.

The most promising push so far has come from California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who in 2022 began investigating fossil fuel and chemical companies for their role in what he called an “aggressive campaign to deceive the public” about the viability of plastics recycling. That investigation is ongoing.

This article originally appeared in Grist. 

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

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It doesn’t take an industry insider to tell us the plastic sector is losing its license to operate. In early April, a pregnant sperm whale was found dead off the coast of Italy with 22 kilograms of plastic in its belly. This just weeks after another dead whale was found with twice that amount of plastic in the Philippines. As the reality of waterways drowning in plastic sinks in, a growing number of cities, countries and companies are joining the worldwide revolt against the ‘miracle’ material.  And yet at a front line in the battle against throwaway plastics, most Canadian grocers have yet to take meaningful action.

Food packaging is responsible for about a third of all Canadian household waste, and just 20% of that gets recycled, according to Industry Canada. Even less if it’s the plastic kind. There are no hard stats for how much plastic trash grocers alone create in Canada, but over 800,000 tonnes of plastic packaging are generated by supermarkets in Britain every year. And that doesn’t include the roughly 1.1 billion plastic shopping bags and 1.2 billion clear plastic produce bags that supermarkets dish out annually.

The plastic pushback by shoppers and campaigners has been so intense across the pond that nearly every major supermarket signed onto the UK Plastics Pact last summer, promising to oust unnecessary single-use plastics by 2025 and use only reusable, compostable or recyclable packaging. British grocers are already way ahead of the curve. UK’s sixth biggest grocer, Co-op, cut plastic packaging by 44% in the last decade. Last month, Britain’s largest supermarket, Tesco, started trials to remove plastic packaging from 45 produce items in a handful of stores. The likes of apples, onions, bananas and avocados will only be sold in all-natural packaging – their very own skins and peels.

Tesco will also be purging all hard-to-recycle packaging (cling wrap, black plastic and that #3 PVC stuff) six years ahead of the Plastics Pact.  “Ideally we would like to move to a closed loop system,” said the grocer’s Chief Product Officer Jason Tarry.

A lot of closed loop talk is bandied about in this country, too. And some efforts are underway. But so far, major Canadian grocers haven’t done a whole lot about it. Walk into a Loblaws, Sobeys or Metro store and endless bags of produce sit alongside pre-portioned, pre-cut fruits and veg of every variety, often Styrofoam-backed and shrink-wrapped. Grocers can rightfully argue that packaging some foods in cling wrap extends shelf life and curbs food waste – a significant greenhouse gas contributor. But do Loblaw’s “farmer’s market” cucumbers really need to come double-wrapped in two layers of shrink wrap?

One large British grocery chain has found a compromise. Last year, Morrisons opted to ditch plastic packaging from its loose English cucumbers when they can be sourced locally between March and October. Shortening the supply chain and getting fresh cucumbers from farm-to-shelves faster will save 16 million plastic sleeves a year. Said Morrisons, “While plastic can serve a purpose we believe this move will remove it from the environment without leading to food waste.”

Ready-to-eat trend fuels rise in single-serve plastics

In the lead up to SIAL Canada, North America’s biggest food innovation trade show (Toronto, April 30 to May 2), SIAL experts chipperly forecasted that “in 2030, ready-to-eat will be the dominant force in Canadian grocery stores, and it will take up more than 80% of retail space.” What goes unsaid is how much plastic is involved in fueling the food industry’s ready-to-eat megatrend. As Dalhousie U profs Sylvain Charlebois and Tony Walker have written, “Canada’s food industry continues to generate more waste from single-use plastic food packaging every year” in part because of the expanding single-serve economy feeding a growing population of Canadians living alone. A trend they say will increase “at alarming rates” – if left unchecked.

Canadian grocers respond  

So, what are Canadian supermarkets doing about plastics?

Despite repeated requests for comment, Empire (the conglomerate behind Sobeys, Safeway, Farm Boy, IGA, Price Chopper and Foodland) didn’t respond to inquiries about its plastic policies. Neither did the Toronto-area chain Longo’s, which also owns Grocery Gateway. 

Walmart Canada’s gone further than most major food suppliers in this country, announcing back in January that it would joining Ellen MacArthur Foundation-led commitments to use 100% recyclable, reusable or compostable packaging by 2025 – at least for Walmart’s in-house private labels. Walmart Canada also says it’s developing design guides to help its private label suppliers “reduce unnecessary plastic packaging.”

Loblaw (No Frills, Valu Mart, Superstore, Maxi, Zehrs, Fortinos, T&T) has yet to announce any commitment to the 2025 targets that over 250 other companies have signed onto globally. A Loblaw rep said in a statement that the company is working with Canadian Stewardship Services Alliance Inc. and the Circular Economy Leadership Coalition to “promote a whole new approach to sustainable management of the use and ideally the re-use of product and packaging materials.”

Loblaw is right to call it a “huge task” and to note that the plastics challenge “requires the work of industry, government and consumers – and a system built to address the environmental, social and business opportunities and risks associated with waste.”

British grocers have, nonetheless, proven that individual supermarket chains can take the bull by the horns and eliminate plastic from thousands of products in their own stores, as has Toronto’s Organic Garage chain, which has already purged all of its bagged produce.

To its credit, Loblaw says it has reduced packaging in its private brand products by 4.9 tonnes since 2009. It’s taken some constructive steps, including using reusable produce containers to ship produce. But wander its aisles and you’ll still see plenty of unnecessary plastic (including those double-wrapped cucumbers).

Like Loblaw, Metro has yet to release an official packaging policy, but Metro’s VP of Public Affairs, Marie-Claude Bacon, says the grocer is finalizing a packaging policy to be launched in the first half of 2019. “We recognize that waste, including plastic waste, is a concern for our customers, as it is for us,” says Bacon.

In the meantime, all of its Quebec locations are, as of April, letting customers fill their own containers from home (glass containers excluded) when buying from Metro’s meat, fish, prepared foods and pastry departments. The practice is already common at indie bulk stores and zero waste stores like Unboxed in Toronto, Nada in Vancouver and Ottawa’s Nu, but large supermarkets have been resistant up until now.

Greenpeace’s plastic campaigner, Sarah King, says the move alone won’t necessarily cause a large reduction in plastic use, unless there’s a massive uptake by customers or Metro also removes single-use packaging in these departments. Still, she says, “It can help create the conditions for larger change.”

Canadian cities beat feds to the punch

The vast majority of Canadians believe the government should be doing more to tackle plastic –– 82%, according to an Angus Reid poll conducted for CBC Marketplace. So far, lower levels of government are taking the lead. Montreal, Victoria and soon PEI and Newfoundland are all outlawing plastic bags. Following in Vancouver’s footsteps, Montreal announced last week that it’s hoping to ban single-use plastics by 2020 (including Styrofoam-backed meat, fish and veg). Despite gutting other environmental regs, even Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government is considering a single-use plastic ban knowing the issue has broad support across political divides.

Environment Minister Catherine McKenna has promised a concrete plastic strategy is coming in June. Hopefully, the feds go beyond voluntary measures and half-baked solutions, including incinerating plastics (which disincentivizes reduction strategies) and biodegradable plastics that aren’t wanted in recycling or compost bins and, sadly, only belong in trash bins.

A federal EU style ban on a dozen single-use plastics would be a solid place to start. A coalition of nearly 50 environmental orgs, including Environmental Defence, Greenpeace and the David Suzuki Foundation, have called on the feds to ban all hard-to-recycle plastics and bring in a national 75% recycled content standard for single-use plastics, along with other measures that would help lay the foundation for a circular economy that doesn’t just trash its plastics.

Back in Texas, the plastics industry is already bracing for change. Bob Patel, CEO of LyondellBasell (one of the world’s largest plastics makers), told World Petrochemical Conference goers that the industry should prepare to sacrifice 1 to 2% of the plastic stream. “If certain single-use applications should no longer be in plastics, then let it be what it is.” Packaging consultant, Victor Bell, was less optimistic, suggesting the backlash against plastics could potentially cut growth in demand for new resin by half, as regs mandating more recycling come into force in the European Union and beyond.

If we do this right, Canadian grocers and governments can make sure this country is a leader in slashing demand for water-clogging disposables made of virgin resources. Let’s just hope they don’t let this crisis go to waste.

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