Stockholm Environmental Institute Archives

Stockholm Environmental Institute

February 10, 2023

Single-use plastic waste is at record levels, with hefty climate toll, report warns

By Dana Drugmand

From grocery store bags and soda bottles to take-out containers and food packaging, single-use, disposable plastic is a pervasive problem that presents not just waste management problems, but considerable harmful climate impacts as well, according to a new report.

Lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions associated with single-use plastic amounted to roughly 450 million metric tons of CO2 -equivalent in 2021, comparable to the total emissions of the United Kingdom, a new analysis has determined.

The Plastic Waste Makers Index released this week by the Australian-based Minderoo Foundation reports that there is more single-use plastic waste than ever – 139 million metric tons in 2021, an increase of 6 million metric tons from the 2019 amount – and that this fossil fuel-based plastic generated hundreds of millions of metric tons of climate pollution. Conventional recycling can help reduce these emissions, but recycling is not scaling fast enough and is expected to remain marginal, the report finds.

“This is a much needed, if devastating report. It demonstrates more clearly than ever how much single-use plastics blight our environment, and are themselves a key driver of climate change. And also that recycling is far, far behind where it needs to be,” Toby Gardner, senior research fellow at Stockholm Environment Institute and a contributor to the report, said in a statement.

The report updates a previous analysis of single-use plastic waste released by Minderoo Foundation in 2021, which identified for the first time the 20 largest petrochemical companies that are the sources for much of the world’s single-use plastic production. According to the new report, ExxonMobil leads the pack, followed by Chinese petrochemical giant Sinopec, and then Dow.

As the report explains, the majority of the emissions occur upstream during the production process, including fossil fuel extraction and refining of the petrochemical feedstocks that go into plastics.

February 9, 2023

Biden misses the point on cancer fight

In President Biden’s state of the union address Tuesday night, he pledged his devotion to a fierce “fight against cancer,” invoking a heart-tugging story of baby “Ava,” who began battling kidney cancer at the age of 1.

Biden spoke of a reignited “Cancer Moonshot” search for a cure for cancers that are impacting far too many lives, and of measures to cut healthcare costs to make treating cancer more affordable. He outlined an ambitious goal to cut cancer death rates by at least 50% in the next 25 years, and to “turn more cancers from death sentences to treatable diseases, provide more support for patients and their families.”

But nowhere in his lengthy prime-time address did Biden speak of working to rein in the vast, virtually unchecked, flood of environmental chemical contaminants that scientists say cause cancer.

A new book scheduled for release in May written by journalist Kristina Marusic lays out in stark terms how already-staggeringly highly rates of cancer are sure to continue to climb if we don’t slash our exposure to the chemicals known to cause cancer.

The harsh statistics are detailed by Phil Landrigan, director of the Program for Global Public Health and the Common Good at Boston College, in the introduction to Marusic’s A New War on Cancer: The Unlikely Heroes Revolutionizing Prevention.

Landrigan writes: “From 1975 to to 2019, the number of new cancer cases per 100,000 Americans—the incidence rate—increased for multiple cancers. Incidence of multiple myeloma rose by 46%, incidence of non-Hodgkin lymphoma by 76%, and incidence of testicular cancer by 70%. In the same years, incidence of childhood leukemia increased by 35% and incidence of childhood brain cancer by 33%. These increases are far too rapid to be of genetic origin. They cannot be explained by better diagnosis.”