Plastic is our future. Kansas county’s lawsuit against the industry is a step backward | Opinion
In the 1950s, kids by the dozen were dying after suffocating themselves by putting plastic dry cleaning bags over their heads. So, if you can imagine this, plastic makers and bag companies told parents to throw away the bags. This was the beginning of an eeeeevil plan to make plastics “disposable.”
Industry groups and a litany of petrochemical companies including Dow, Chevron and DuPont followed their outrageous plan to save lives with an even more evil conspiracy to find ways to reuse notoriously hard-to-recycle plastics, and then advertised that they were doing it.
So Ford County, Kansas, and the state of California have sued the biggest makers of plastics alleging “decades long campaign of fraud and deception” to make Americans think that plastics can be recycled — as the world became polluted with microplastics from the peaks of the Andes to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, from the most pure mother’s milk to the most awful haggis. As a result, “plastic pollution is one of the most serious environmental crises facing the world today,” states the Ford lawsuit. against Exxon-Mobil. Plastics aren’t nearly as recyclable as the industry said.
I don’t mean to belittle claims of a crisis, but from the dawn of the post-war plastics age in the 1950s to today, the global average life expectancy has gone from 45 in 1950 to 73. Plastic production has gone from a few metric tons to 400 million.
Indeed, it might be that plastics — even single-use disposables — are one reason we are getting healthier. Take the polyvinyl chloride IV bag, which replaced glass bottles that were sterilized and reused. Plastic IVs never harbor infections from failed sterilizations. They don’t break. They are cheaper to produce, transport, store and use, making IVs available to more people and saving more lives. Whether it is on a battlefield or in a developing world medical clinic or at St. Luke’s in Kansas City, the plastic IV bag is just better than what came before.
Ditto for the tubing that takes medicine from the IV bag to your arm. Ditto for the plastic wrap that keeps surgical instruments free of contamination. Ditto for the plastic cartilage in knee replacements and the plastic connectors in an artificial heart. Ditto for all the plastic in a dialysis machine.
Liberal electric cars, MAGA Mars colony
Did you wear a N95 mask during COVID-19? That’s polypropylene — among the only fibers we can make at industrial scale at the 3 nanometer level to catch virus particles. It is disposable and one of the most common kinds of plastic made in an Exxon-Mobil plant in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Does it really matter that it can’t be recycled if it is saving your life? Nobody back then was wringing their hands about the evil of disposable plastics. The feds were demanding mask companies make more and lying to you to keep them for medical workers.
And that is really what Ford County and California Attorney General Rob Bonta are fighting — the future and our flexibility to confront all of its challenges.
It doesn’t matter whether your vision of the future is a liberal’s dreamland of electric cars powered by the endless wind and sun or Elon Musk’s MAGA-infused plan for a colony on Mars. You don’t get there without plastics, not even close.
Electric cars can be light enough for the heavy batteries to power for 300 miles because lightweight plastic replaces so many metal parts. The same is true for the interior of spaceships. The windows on the space shuttle and the space station are made of polycarbonate. How well do you think glass would work?
Want to build a wind turbine? You need plastics for the composite fiberglass blades. Want to build a solar farm? It is filled with plastic. What is light enough to carry to Mars and build a colony’s buildings out of? It is not brick. I’ll give you one guess.
If you care about your children … If you want them to have a better life than you do … If you care about your parents in their dotage … If you want them to be taken care of in their last hours … If you care about the future and want us to make it a better place than what we live with now, I have one word for you: plastics.
They are not among the biggest threats to our world. They are a key to opportunity, to a better life and a more prosperous future. You might as well file lawsuits against air. Yeah, it has downsides — for one it contains krypton and ozone and methane and ammonia and it is the fuel for fires that kill thousands — but you’re not going anywhere without it.
The bright lights in California and in upstart Ford County need to drop their suits and come back to reality.
This story was originally published December 31, 2024 at 6:10 AM with the headline "Plastic is our future. Kansas county’s lawsuit against the industry is a step backward | Opinion."
