With dozens of new plastics manufacturing and recycling facilities in the works, the U.S. plastics industry will release more greenhouse gas emissions than coal-fired power plants by 2030, say the authors of a new report.
Emissions from the plastics sector equaled that of 116 coal-fired power plants last year, according to the report out Thursday from Bennington College's Beyond Plastics project. Meanwhile, 42 plastics manufacturing and recycling facilities have opened, or are in the process of being built or permitted, since 2019.
“As the world transitions away from fossil fuels for electricity generation and for transportation, the petrochemical industry has found a new market for fossil fuels: plastics," Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics, told reporters on Thursday.
With the U.S. coal industry in decline, the report authors say policymakers at home and at the upcoming COP26 climate summit, a conference happening at the end of month where world leaders will hash out the details of climate pledges, need to factor the climate toll of plastics into emissions reductions efforts.
“Leaving out plastics is leaving out a giant piece of the problem," Enck said. “We would like the national leaders that are gathering in Glasgow, Scotland, to take the plastics issue just as seriously as they are taking transportation and electricity generation."
Climate costs of U.S. plastics The report authors calculated emissions from 10 stages of plastics production, from hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for the raw material—ethane in natural gas—all the way up to burning waste in incinerators. Cracker plants, where natural gas is heated at such high temperatures that it fractures into plastic building blocks like ethylene, have the heaviest emissions toll, producing around 70 million tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent pollutants, which is equal to the emissions of 35 coal-fired power plants. Because the report looks at emissions from a range of greenhouse gases, the authors converted the warming potential of all the pollutants into an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas. The authors say that emissions reports from the plastics industry are incomplete as they don't adequately account for leaks of methane—a greenhouse gas that's 84 times more climate-warming than carbon dioxide in the short-term—and other gases from the transport and production of plastics feedstocks. Related: The US falls behind most of the world in plastic pollution legislation They note that while so-called "chemical recycling," which uses large amounts of energy to melt used plastics into building blocks for fuel and other products, is uncommon now, new plants could add up to 18 million tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent pollutants by 2025. Enck referred to chemical recycling as plastics' "new deception" now that Americans are aware that less than 9% of plastics are recycled. Shipping resins and other plastics building blocks overseas accounts for a significant amount of emissions as well, said Jim Vallette, president of Material Research, the firm that Beyond Plastics hired to do the report analysis. "Plastic is very much like the new coal because the coal industry also is counting on exports to stay alive," he added.Harmful plastics pollution Plastics facilities don't just create planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. They also release benzene, formaldehyde, and the carcinogen ethylene oxide, among other harmful pollutants. The plastics industry has come under fire in recent years for building its polluting plants in poorer parts of the country: 90% of the climate pollution from U.S. plastics plants occurs in just 18 communities that are mostly in Texas and Louisiana, according to the report. "The health impacts of the emissions are disproportionately borne by low-income communities and communities of color, making this a major environmental justice issue," Enck said. Banner photo credit: Bob Doran/flickr
The report authors calculated emissions from 10 stages of plastics production, from hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for the raw material—ethane in natural gas—all the way up to burning waste in incinerators.
Cracker plants, where natural gas is heated at such high temperatures that it fractures into plastic building blocks like ethylene, have the heaviest emissions toll, producing around 70 million tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent pollutants, which is equal to the emissions of 35 coal-fired power plants. Because the report looks at emissions from a range of greenhouse gases, the authors converted the warming potential of all the pollutants into an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas.
The authors say that emissions reports from the plastics industry are incomplete as they don't adequately account for leaks of methane—a greenhouse gas that's 84 times more climate-warming than carbon dioxide in the short-term—and other gases from the transport and production of plastics feedstocks.
They note that while so-called "chemical recycling," which uses large amounts of energy to melt used plastics into building blocks for fuel and other products, is uncommon now, new plants could add up to 18 million tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent pollutants by 2025. Enck referred to chemical recycling as plastics' "new deception" now that Americans are aware that less than 9% of plastics are recycled.
Shipping resins and other plastics building blocks overseas accounts for a significant amount of emissions as well, said Jim Vallette, president of Material Research, the firm that Beyond Plastics hired to do the report analysis. "Plastic is very much like the new coal because the coal industry also is counting on exports to stay alive," he added.
Plastics facilities don't just create planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. They also release benzene, formaldehyde, and the carcinogen ethylene oxide, among other harmful pollutants. The plastics industry has come under fire in recent years for building its polluting plants in poorer parts of the country: 90% of the climate pollution from U.S. plastics plants occurs in just 18 communities that are mostly in Texas and Louisiana, according to the report.
"The health impacts of the emissions are disproportionately borne by low-income communities and communities of color, making this a major environmental justice issue," Enck said.
Banner photo credit: Bob Doran/flickr
The petrochemical industry has found a new market for fossil fuels: plastics."
A visit to a remote Maine island finds puffins and terns rebounding despite climate change
The title of supervisory wildlife biologist for the United States Fish and Wildlife Service does little justice to Linda Welch (pictured above). In practice, she is the housing and unusual development secretary for seabirds on Maine’s Petit Manan Island.
This was clear as she led me to nesting areas there for Atlantic puffins. Over the last half century, the bird has been restored from the brink of extinction in Maine, the only state where it breeds. Petit Manan is located about 20 miles east of Acadia National Park and is part of the Maine Coastal Islands National Wildlife Refuge.
The island has a shortage of “housing stock” that other puffin havens in Maine do not. On those other islands, breeding puffins enjoy the privilege of nesting year after year in the same burrow under massive boulders that probably have not shifted for centuries.
Petit Manan is not so blessed. The rocks around its rim are often much smaller. Puffins can still nest under them. But winter storms easily scramble them and obliterate burrow openings. Already an annual headache for a bird that is loyal to its nesting spot, the rearranging of rocks is now a figurative migraine as climate change from the world’s burning of fossil fuels intensifies rain, wind and crashing waves. During the last decade, one set of storms slashed the number of burrows from more than 90 down to 52.
“We had lot of burrows on the east side of the island three years ago,” Welch said. “Now they’re all gone. In the past we’ve always lost a few burrows to storms. But beginning with some storms in 2012, it’s become frustrating. Even this year, which is turning out to be a good year for seabirds, it’s been difficult. In March, we went out to look at the burrows and everything looked perfect. Then a huge storm came in April, and everything got smashed.”
Biologist Linda Welch places a puffin back inside one of the “condos” she built to promote successful breeding.
Given the fragility of puffin burrows and nature’s increasing fury, Welch 55, and a 25-year veteran of the the Maine Coastal Islands refuge, has long schemed of ways to build artificial burrows with every material possible to give puffins an inviting place to nest. She and her colleagues have tried bricks and chimney liners. She has tried flowerpots and corrugated pipe for septic systems. She has tried burying culvert pipe and plastic tote buckets and tunneling pathways through sod for the birds to get up and into her contraptions.
She covers them up with rocks and soil to make them look as natural as possible. Anticipating rising seas and longer reaches of reaches of tides and waves driven by storms, she has been moving artificial burrows higher up the island, so high that some puffins are nesting amid the twisted ruins of dwellings for lightkeepers.
“I go to Home Depot with my calipers and sit on the floor and measure materials to design puffin burrows and tern traps,” Welch said. “Initially, they thought I was a weirdo, but it’s a small Home Depot so the people got to know me and say, ‘She’s OK, she’s just designing tern traps.’ I keep believing in the idea of ‘if we build it, they will come.’ You try to be creative and keep improving the burrows, such as digging deeper in the soil to keep the birds cooler. As we continue to tweak our designs, we get to a more natural experience for the birds.”
Today, a third of burrows on Petit Manan are artificial. Among the most impressive was the most obvious. She walked me to a long wooden box. It was one of four puffin “condos,” rows of compartments on top of the soil with burrow openings lined were corrugated pipe dug underneath. They had removable covers for researchers to inspect the health of puffin chicks. Welch opened a couple and both times pulled out plump chicks that were about ready to fledge.
“Initially, I had a philosophical debate about whether to build burrows and intervene on the puffins’ behalf. Puffins want to be here, but the habitat is not great. But there are puffins on so few islands, every island we can attract them to feels important.”
A puffin brings its chicks fish on Maine's Petit Manan Island.
Petit Manan is important because it represents a unique and encouraging lesson in puffin restoration. The bird was slaughtered for its meat and eggs by coastal communities in Maine in the late 19th century. By 1902, only a single pair of puffins clung to existence on Matinicus Rock, an island 25 miles out to sea from Rockland, the nearest major town on the mainland.
In the early 1970s, Steve Kress, a young bird instructor at National Audubon’s Hog Island summer camp, ran across a 1949 book that said puffins bred in “considerable numbers” off multiple Maine islands in the 19th century. He set about to recreate that spectacle.
Starting with Eastern Egg Rock, a small, seven-acre island six and a half miles off Pemaquid Point, Kress worked with the Fish and Wildlife Service to control voracious gull populations that would have made restoration impossible. Beginning in 1973, he and colleagues began bringing down hundreds of 10-day-old puffin chicks from Newfoundland. They hand raised them on Eastern Egg Rock until they fledged out to sea.
Puffins stay out to sea for two or three years until breeding instincts kick in. Kress gambled that when the chicks became adults, they would pick Eastern Egg Rock over Newfoundland as home.
He guessed right. They began breeding in 1981 and today there are more than 1,300 pairs of puffins across several islands, mostly across Eastern Egg Rock, Seal Island and Matinicus Rock. What became known as Project Puffin was the world’s first restoration of a seabird to an island where humans had killed it off.
A common tern brings a large juvenile herring to its chick.
The presence of puffins on Petit Manan was a happy accident. There is no historical record of puffins ever having bred on that island. In the 1960s and early 70s, it was home to 1,500 pairs of common, Arctic and roseate terns, Maine’s largest tern colony. But the Coast Guard’s automation of the island’s lighthouse abruptly ended a human presence that had been incidentally protective of terns by keeping gulls at bay. After automation, herring and great black-backed gulls overran the island. By the late 1970s, terns abandoned their colonies.
In 1984, the Fish and Wildlife Service began to control gulls by removing nests and placing poison sandwiches on nests. Just one week into the program, terns begin returning and created a new colony of nearly 1,000 pairs. The calming of the island for terns was so successful that 13 puffins crashed the party and began to successfully breed chicks in 1987. By 2009, a record 104 pairs of puffins bred on Petit Manan, along with more than 2,500 pairs of terns.
That arrival of puffins was likely because of a phenomenon observed with the success of Project Puffin. The screeching and divebombing of terns, meant to dissuade predators such as gulls from swooping down to gobble chicks, also seemed to act as a protective cover for puffins to come onto the islands to prospect for burrows, hatch eggs and bring fish to their chicks.
“If we give nature the opportunity, birds will take advantage,” Welch said.
Trying to give nature the opportunity never stops on Petit Manan. As on many seabird research islands in New England, a team of young conservationists at the beginning of their careers live on them during the height of breeding season—from late May until early August—to monitor the health of the birds and combat any dangers that emerge.
There are prescribed burns and constant weed pulling to keep tern habitat from being choked. Several times even during my three-day stay on the island, the crew would make as much noise as it could to shoo away peregrine falcons—a species also rescued from extinction—from preying on terns and puffins.
Then there are laughing gulls. A colony last year built more than 800 nest in the same area as terns, threatening to crowd out the latter. Laughing gulls also try to harass terns and puffins into dropping the fish they bring onto the island for their chicks. This summer, island supervisor Hallie Daly, 25, a graduate of wildlife conservation at the University of California Davis, led her crew on a mission to destroy gull nests and give the gulls second thoughts about setting up shop on Petit Manan by firing off pyrtechicas and hoisting up dead laughing gulls on poles. “We went from 800 gull nests to four nests,” Daly said. “We hopefully saved 20 to 30 tern nests by doing that. Every nest counts.”
This summer, there was an avian flu scare that likely killed dozens of tern chicks and forced the shooting euthanasia of five great black-backed gulls which displayed the loss of body control associated with the virus. “One bird was just rolling over itself,” said Nick Giordano, 25, a graduate of wildlife science at the State University of New York in Syracuse. “It was really rough to witness. It’s so hard to shoot a beautiful animal. But we couldn’t let the disease spread.”
Fortunately, avian flu did not sweep through New England this breeding season in the way that it tore through gannet, skua and tern colonies in Europe and gannet and murre colonies in Atlantic Canada. This summer was also a relief from the roller coaster of climate change. The puffin islands of Maine, as well as Machias Seal Island, an island of between 5,000 and 6,000 breeding pairs of puffins that is administered by Canadian wildlife researchers, all sit in the Gulf of Maine, the fastest-warming body of ocean on Earth.
The effects of global warming on Petit Manan have been as dramatic as on any island. Besides the aforementioned “redecoration” of rocks from storms, water that is too warm drives the fish puffins and terns catch to feed chicks either too deep to find or so far out that parents are exhausted, and chicks are underfed, triggering starvation.
A decade ago, when summer surface water temperatures reached record highs, Petit Manan’s breeding puffin count was more than halved, from the 104 pairs in 2009 to 47 pairs in 2013. Then last year, when Maine recorded even a higher level of record water warmth, puffin and tern breeding was a disaster. Only 13 percent of common tern chicks fledged, compared to nearly 61 percent in the record puffin nesting year of 2009.
A puffin flies a meal back to its chick.
This summer, relatively cooler waters have resulted in a breeding bonanza of 93 puffin burrows with 73 chicks hatching. As the research team took me around to investigate puffin burrows and pulled out healthy chick after healthy chick, the caretakers’ broad smiles told the story. “It symbolizes that we are not yet at the point of no return,” Daly said. “We’ve had so much doom and gloom that nothing can be done and this is proof that it can. One of the adults we’ve recaptured was a bird I banded as a chick in 2019. That is the proof.”
Similarly, Jill Tengeres, 29, who has periodically worked summers on Petit Manan and studied Aleutian terns for her masters degree at Oregon State, talked of a bird she recaptured that she banded as a chick 10 years ago. “You get this warm and fuzzy feeling,” Tengeres said. “I’ve seen some bad years where we were down to 40 puffin burrows and dead tern chicks all around. But they still keep coming back. To see their resolve is amazing.”
Also helping to manage the island this summer were Tasha Gownaris, 35, an assistant professor of environmental studies at Gettysburg College, and two of her students, Kaiulani Sund, a 21-year-old senior, and Jehan Mody, a 21-year-old junior. Gownaris has studied Magellanic penguins, fisheries in Kenyan lakes and the importance of forage fish for commercial fisheries and ecosystems.
For her, to see the varieties of nutritious fish being brought this summer by adult puffins and terns to their chicks was nothing short of thrilling. Last year at the peak of water warmth, puffins often brought only tiny hake or butterfish, a species more traditional of the mid Atlantic, which is too oval for small chicks to eat. Terns often brought insects.
This year, puffins were bringing in beak loads of thick, juicy hake, herring, haddock and sand lance several inches long. Both puffins and terns were even bringing in Atlantic saury, a fish as long and thick as a school ruler. Gownaris said seabird chicks were growing at double the rate of last year. She, Sund, Mody and Giordano all remarked how terns will need that fill of fish for their first winter out to sea. Common terns often head to tropical coasts as far south as Argentina and Peru. Arctic terns that breed in the Gulf of Maine may have 20,000-mile migrations that may take them around South Africa into the Indian Ocean and between the tip of South America and Antarctica before returning to places like Petit Manan. One 35-year-old Arctic tern was estimated to have traveled 2.3 million miles in its lifetime.
Giordano said that the fortitude of the birds is all the more humbling when he reads a band on a tern perching on a rock and realizes that it was hatched 20 years ago, or records the return of a puffin that is nearly 30 years old. Project Puffin has seen one puffin make it to 35 years old. “When you hold that band,” Giordano said, “You wonder what that bird has seen. Sund added, “When you hold a bird that travels like it does and it looks into your eyes and you look into its eyes, I constantly wonder what is going on it its mind.”
Mody added, “These birds fight so hard for themselves, we have to fight for them.”
The team and Welch all hope that the “we” who fight for the birds becomes all of us, as climate change from the burning of fossil fuels threatens all their building of artificial burrows, tending to the weeds and scaring off predators. “Until about 10 years ago, the normal cycle was many good years with a bad year here and there,” Welch said. “Now we’re in a situation of multiple bad years and then a good year that is still not a great year.
“When you’ve been here to see thousands of chicks starving to death in a bad year, it’s hard not to think of the consequences if this is the new normal. Every spring I get incredibly anxious, worrying about how many bad years can they take before this is the year they don’t come back. We don’t have the luxury of waiting to do something on climate change. It’s happening all around us, right now.”
Until that day happens, you can find Linda Welch, the secretary of puffin housing and development, on the floor at Home Depot, trying to build a burrow.
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When I tell bird-loving audiences what puffins mean to me, I start with the expected.
I show my photos of them either with fish in their orange, yellow, and blue-black beaks, gathered in kaleidoscopic multitude, or nuzzling in affection. I always get oohs, ahhs, and a choral, “sooooo cute.”Then I show images that are not so cute.
They are of mothers and children of southeast Chicago, with toxic industries at the end of their block. They live in what environmental justice advocates decry as “sacrifice zones.” In the last decade alone, this primarily brown and Black community has suffered choking clouds of dust from oil refining byproducts, lead in lawns, and neurotoxic manganese dust in the air. Just last month, the Department of Housing and Urban Development blasted an attempt to relocate here a scrap metal recycling facility ousted from the predominately white north side. HUD said it was an example of “shifting polluting activities from white neighborhoods to Black and Hispanic neighborhoods.
Activists march to stop an industrial metal shredder from relocating half a mile from two public schools in Southeast Chicago.
I then give the audience a glimpse of the shift that should be happening. I show images from my coverage of offshore wind farms and facilities in Europe. I show them families of color from San Diego to Washington, D.C., who enjoy rooftop solar power through various programs. I show them Black and brown workers in the green economy, installing solar panels on roofs.
I then return to puffins. I say if you really care about the threats to them and whether they’ll be around for our grandchildren and great-grandchildren, then you must care about those families in southeast Chicago. Like thousands of birdwatchers, my journey with puffins began with simple admiration of a beautiful bird. Today, I see that their destiny is directly bonded to dumped-on families. They are bonded to the speed we curb the fossil emissions that scorch the planet and sear the lungs.
My first story on Atlantic puffins was 36 years ago for Newsday, where I reported from Eastern Egg Rock, a tiny 7-acre island 6.5 miles out from Pemaquid Point in Maine. The rock was the site of the world’s first restoration of a seabird to an island where humans killed it off.
It was almost a fairy tale. Puffins were slaughtered off the island in the 1880s for meat and eggs. Nearly a century later, Steve Kress, a young summer camp bird instructor for the National Audubon Society, got it in his head to bring them back.
Beginning in 1973, he and colleagues brought chicks from Newfoundland more than 800 miles away. They fed them until they fledged into the Atlantic. Kress hoped that years later, when puffins seek islands to breed, they would pick Eastern Egg Rock instead of Newfoundland. To make the birds feel at home, his team put up decoys and mirrors.
A pair of puffins at the Gulf of Maine
Kress succeeded. Puffins returned and began breeding in 1981. During my 1986 visit, I contributed to the cause by spotting a puffin zoom in off the ocean with herring in its mouth for a chick. The parent disappeared under a boulder to a nest not yet charted. Kress considered my discovery a big deal as the nest count in those days was still under 20.
Today, the bird is 1,300 pairs strong in the Gulf of Maine and an economic engine. Last year, 20,000 people circled Eastern Egg Rock on tour boats for a glimpse of the bird. But the fairy tale is now a drama. A symbol of what we can restore from 19th-century destruction, puffins are now a canary of 20th- and 21st-century self-destruction. Climate change is making these waters perhaps the fastest warming major body of ocean on the planet, as the Gulf Stream strengthens against weakening currents coming down from the Arctic.
Last year was a nightmare with the warmest waters on record and intense storms also associated with a warming planet. Warm water drove the fish puffins and other seabirds need to feed chicks too deep or too far out to catch. Relentless rain triggered hypothermia. Between starvation and shivering, seabird islands were a climate war zone, with bird carcasses everywhere and some of the lowest chick productivity recorded by researchers.
Conversely, this current summer brought calmer weather conditions and plentiful fish. It was a reminder that there is still a chance of a forever-ever-after. In a recent conference call, researchers in the Gulf of Maine Seabird Working Group reported record numbers of tern species across many islands and a rebounding of puffin nesting. In my visit to the islands, I held a symbol of resilience in my hands, a puffin chick being raised by a 33-year-old parent. The parent is one of the last-known puffins that was plucked off Newfoundland as a chick and hand reared by Kress’s team.
The question now is whether we assist such resilience with a resolve to cool their waters. It requires the same effort needed to preserve ourselves from deadly heat, storms, floods, desertification, and the daily soot shortening our lives. As one who covers many angles of the environment, formerly for the Globe’s editorial board and currently for the Union of Concerned Scientists, I no longer see a distinction between traditional notions of environmentalism and environmental justice.
Curbing carbon pollution for families in Chicago calms the climatic conditions that drive fish away from puffins. Every new wind turbine and solar panel installed is one less mountain of fossil fuel waste fouling city blocks and rural rivers and one less set of emissions inflaming the ocean. With the majority of the under-18 population now people of color, the conservation world by necessity must recruit new caretakers for puffins and threatened species from communities living with Superfund sites, lead poisoning, and asthma-causing particulates. That surely would spawn a new generation of environmentalists who cease to make distinctions between the climate threats to animals and us.
Just as Martin Luther King Jr. wrote nearly 60 years ago that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” stopping climate change for people on land saves puffins at sea. The puffin fairy tale can still have a happy ending, if we realize we’re all in the same sacrifice zone.
This story was originally published in the Boston Globe and is reprinted here with permission of the author.
Derrick Z. Jackson is co-author and photographer of Project Puffin and The Puffin Plan. He is a fellow at the Union of Concerned Scientists and a frequent contributor to Environmental Health News and The Daily Climate.
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