ERIE, Pa. — On an overcast day in this Great Lakes city, semitrucks pulled alongside railcars parked at a tree-lined siding. One by one, drivers jumped out, connected thick hoses from underneath their trailers and vacuumed up shipments from the Gulf Coast and Ohio River Valley.
Sherri Mason sifted through what they left behind: Amidst the gravel rail bed, thousands of translucent white pellets littered the ground, throwaways from American industry’s insatiable appetite for plastic.
“Like stars in the night sky,” Mason, a Gannon University educator and researcher who goes by Sam, said as she waved a hand above the detritus. “Seemingly beautiful, until you realize what they are.”
Then she nodded toward nearby storm drains that flush unfiltered into Lake Erie, one of five freshwater seas sustaining more than 40 million people in the United States and Canada.
Reporting for this story was supported by the Pulitzer Center’s StoryReach U.S. initiative.
More plastic bits, each barely larger than a grain of rice, scattered across asphalt outside a stop on delivery routes from the railroad.
Plastic pellets, also known as nurdles, are manufactured by petrochemical plants specifically for the purpose of making new products. At least 15 factories here melt and mold the raw materials into water bottles, yogurt cups, fast-food packaging and scores of other goods.
Erie is among hundreds of communities in the U.S. and Canada where nurdles spill into the Great Lakes from chemical plants that make them, trains and trucks that transport them and factories that turn them into consumer products.
Untouched by everyday people, nurdles that don’t get used in the manufacturing process, either because of wasteful transportation or production practices, are write-offs for global oil and chemical conglomerates plotting to dramatically expand the use of plastic in every aspect of life.
When confronted about their pollution, industry executives often have blamed consumers, using tactics borrowed from and shared with Big Tobacco, according to a Chicago Tribune review of thousands of government, scientific and internal industry documents.
Some of the world’s most powerful companies downplay the dangers posed by plastics and overstate the ability to recycle them, the Tribune found.
Lack of oversight
Already more than 8 billion tons of plastic waste clog the planet, a gobsmacking figure that continues to grow unabated.
If stacked within Chicago’s Millennium Park, plastic dumped into the environment since the middle of the last century would rise beyond the edge of outer space.
Nurdles are found on the most remote, seemingly pristine shorelines, including National Park Service beaches around the Great Lakes. In Lake Michigan, the chief source of drinking water for Chicago and its suburbs, the pellets spread from tributaries and pour out of dozens of sewage treatment plants ringing the lake.
By one estimate, at least 22 million pounds of plastic waste end up in the Great Lakes every year. Lake Michigan is rivaled only by Lake Erie in concentrations of nurdles and other tiny bits known collectively as microplastics. That makes sense, scientists said, since the two lakes are the most urbanized.
Plastic pellets are light enough to travel long distances through the air. Fish mistake them for food.
Academic studies increasingly suggest the ingestion and inhalation of plastics, nearly all of which are made from climate-changing fossil fuels, contribute to or outright trigger heart disease, dementia, Parkinson’s disease, impaired fertility and premature births, among other health problems.
“Never operate under the misconception that the plastic industry covers these costs,” said Philip Landrigan, a pediatrician and director of the Global Public Health and the Common Good program at Boston College, who during his long career has documented the dangers of brain-damaging lead, pesticides and other toxic chemicals.
“They externalize these costs,” Landrigan said, “which is to say they dump them on taxpayers, on governments, on individual citizens who end up paying the healthcare bills.”
Unlike other forms of pollution, neither nurdles nor plastic waste in general are regulated, in part because decades of industry lobbying and advertising have persuaded elected officials and the public that voluntary efforts by manufacturers and taxpayer-funded recycling programs are working.
“I have to believe we are smarter than this,” said Heather McTeer Toney, a former regional administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency who leads the nonprofit group Beyond Petrochemicals. “I have to believe we have the ingenuity, the innovation and the God-given common sense to figure out how to move forward and be sustainable.”
There are fleeting signs the lack of government oversight is changing.
In addition to plastic-reduction efforts in Canada and several states, a commission overseeing a Great Lakes treaty between the U.S. and Canada is considering whether to add nurdles and other microplastics to its list of toxic substances deemed hazardous enough to merit routine monitoring, and potentially enforceable limits.
Bad actors already on the International Joint Commission’s list of “chemicals of mutual concern” include flame retardants, forever chemicals (PFAS), mercury and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).
“There is evidence that microplastics are harmful at concentrations found in the Great Lakes,” said Chelsea Rochman, a University of Toronto biologist who helped draft a petition urging the treaty commission to take action.
“They are persistent, bioaccumulative (meaning microplastics can build up in people and wildlife) and toxic,” said Rochman, also one of the leaders of a scientific advisory panel that outlined the problem for the commission.
Undermining public health
Oil, gas and chemical magnates want Americans to think this isn’t a big deal. Or that wasteful personal habits and the paltry rate of household plastic recycling are to blame.
The Tribune found details about a decades-long deception during searches of industry documents archived at several university libraries.
Big Chemical, Big Oil and Big Tobacco jointly finance advertising campaigns scolding Americans for littering, including in materials distributed to schoolchildren, the documents show. The industries have shared public relations consultants and back front groups that attempt to undermine public health protections.
“Pollution is everybody’s business,” an executive at Imperial Oil, the Canadian subsidiary of Exxon (now ExxonMobil), declared in a 1970 memo.
“Every household, every business, every office — indeed every American — contributes to the refuse stream every day,” Mobil proclaimed in a 1988 newspaper advertisement. “To zero in on … the plastics industry is to engage in scapegoating, not problem-solving.”
A year later the Council for Solid Waste Solutions, a newly formed industry front group, took out a 12-page ad in Time magazine entitled “The Urgent Need to Recycle.” The ad called plastic “a miracle product” and “an important part of our daily lives.”
“Already post-consumer plastics are one of the most valuable materials found in the waste stream,” the ad continued. “Far too valuable to be disposed of in the country’s dwindling landfills.”
Yet industry insiders had strived for decades to transform the economy so they could sell more and more single-use plastic products.
“The happy day has arrived when nobody any longer considers the plastics package too good to throw away.” Lloyd Stauffer, editor of the trade publication Modern Packaging, told industry executives at a 1963 conference in Chicago.
By the 1970s and 1980s, plastic garbage had become too glaring to ignore. The first Earth Day in 1970 and the passage of major federal environmental laws were seen as threats to the industry’s profits. Its leaders privately concluded recycling wouldn’t work, though, despite what their advertising told the public and their lobbyists told lawmakers.
“Recycling cannot be considered a permanent solid waste solution, as it merely prolongs the time until an item is disposed of,” the Vinyl Institute, an industry trade group, concluded in a draft of a 1986 fact sheet. “At that point, recycled products also become (municipal solid waste) components.”
Lewis Freeman remembers being in meetings around the same time where industry officials voiced skepticism about plastic recycling, largely because they thought it wasn’t economical.Freeman was vice president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, a lobbying group for top oil and plastics executives.
“Their principle expenditure at the time was television advertising touting the virtues of plastics,” Freeman recalled in an interview with the Tribune. “In other words, trying to divert attention from the problem of solid waste.”
Born with microplastics
More than a half-century of plastic — everything from water bottles to deflated party balloons to food packaging to synthetic clothing fibers to cigarette butts to dust from paints and automobile tires — have despoiled the Great Lakes and over time broken down into tiny, long-lived particles.
The worn, weathered bits are microplastics, defined by scientists as any plastic smaller than 5 millimeters long. Nurdles, the raw materials used to make new plastics, also are considered microplastics. Even smaller particles called nanoplastics are tinier than the diameter of a human hair.
These bits of plastic, many of which are undetectable by the naked eye, are in treated Great Lakes water drawn from faucets. Significantly higher concentrations are found in bottled water, studies have found.
Microplastics are in beer. And in perch, walleye and whitefish fillets — staples of iconic Midwestern fish fries and fish boils.
Babies are born with microplastics in their bodies. Plastic bits lodge in every organ — the brain, the heart, ovaries and testicles. They course through blood and pass from mother to child through the placenta and breast milk.
Studies show microplastics can trigger inflammation, which contributes to a variety of diseases that together account for more than half of all deaths globally.
Other potential culprits are more than 16,000 chemicals that can leach out of plastics. At least a third are toxic to humans or animals, including hormone-mimicking bisphenols, phthalates, flame retardants and PFAS, commonly known as forever chemicals.
Most of the other plastic-related chemicals haven’t been tested to judge if they are safe.
Some scientists think increased production of these chemicals, and plastics absorbing or releasing them, are contributing to rising levels of certain diseases.
“The primary cause of disease used to be a living organism that transmits a pathogen like malaria from one person to another,” said Tracey Woodruff, a Stanford University researcher. “Now we have corporate organisms that lead to chronic, non-communicable diseases.”
Bans on microbeads
When Mason, the Gannon University researcher, began studying plastic pollution in the Great Lakes a little more than a decade ago, foundations, governments and researchers were focused on the world’s oceans.
At the time, TV news programs drew attention to harrowing images of plastic waste clogging the dissected stomachs of dead sea birds. Documentaries explored the collection of plastic debris swept into massive gyres — dubbed garbage patches — swirling in seawater.
Mason, then an atmospheric chemist at the State University of New York at Fredonia, an hour away up the lake from Erie, paid close attention to the ocean research and one day decided to search scientific databases for anything related to plastic pollution in freshwater.
Nothing turned up.
She worked the phones and found somebody willing to loan her a manta trawl, a fine-meshed, aluminum-framed net Mason and other researchers towed around Lake Erie, Lake Huron and Lake Superior during the summer of 2012 behind the U.S. Brig Niagara, a replica of the tall ship Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry sailed to victory during the War of 1812.
The trawl captured plastic after plastic, including pebbles from polystyrene coolers, weathered shards of water bottles and whole cigarillo tips.
Other findings: plastic spheres known as microbeads added to toothpaste, hand soap, exfoliating facial scrubs and other personal care products.
Discoveries by Mason and others shocked world leaders and prompted bans on microbeads. Manufacturers swapped the tiny plastics for natural alternatives such as ground seeds and nutshells.
“Lake Michigan and the many rivers and lakes across our state are among our most important natural resources,” then-Gov. Pat Quinn said in 2015 when he signed the Illinois microbeads ban into law. “We must do everything necessary to safeguard them.”
Tackling other forms of plastic waste proved far more difficult.
In a 2016 study published as governments across the world were banning microbeads, Mason found high levels of plastic fibers throughout Lake Michigan — remnants of petroleum-based fabrics such as polyester and nylon that shed from fleece jackets, athletic wear and other synthetic clothing when laundered.
Conventional sewage treatment filters some microplastics, including microfibers, but millions upon millions still pass through into lakes, oceans and rivers every day. Minuscule fibers also blow out of household dryer vents and drift into sources of drinking water, more recent studies have found.
Mason’s research about microfibers in the Great Lakes muddled a feel-good story about business executives, government leaders and health advocates working together to ban microbeads.
“From the bottom of the Mariana Trench to the top of Mount Everest, we find plastic everywhere,” Mason said during a recent interview. “We know now it pollutes at every single stage of our life cycle.”
She went back in 2024 to five of the same spots she had sampled on Lake Erie a decade earlier. Concentrations of microfibers were up to 21 times greater than what Mason found during her earlier round of testing.
All of the samples she collected were snapshots taken in a constantly changing lake, Mason acknowledged, but the results suggest there is an urgent need for the same type of routine monitoring conducted for toxic chemicals, heavy metals and other types of water pollution regulated under environmental laws in the U.S. and Canada.
‘Ferocious opposition’
More than half of the plastic ever manufactured has been made since just 2010.
Worldwide production grew to 475 million tons in 2022 from about 2 million tons in 1950. A whopping 1.2 billion tons are expected to be manufactured every year by 2060, according to the international Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
In notices to investors and expenditures on new equipment, Big Oil and Big Chemical, sometimes the same companies, are clear about depending on plastics to preserve the industry’s multibillion-dollar profit margins as the world shifts away from burning fossil fuels for transportation and electric generation.
One example is Shell, which in 2022 opened a massive chemical plant in western Pennsylvania capable of producing 1.6 million tons of plastic pellets every year. Shell’s nurdles end up two hours north in Erie and are shipped to other manufacturing hubs around the Great Lakes, including the Chicago area.
By the end of the decade, Saudi Arabia Oil, the world’s largest oil company with a sizable footprint in the U.S., is planning to divert about a third of its production to make plastic-related chemicals, according to a 2018 speech by the company’s president and chief executive.
The sprawling petrostate-owned firm eventually could synthesize enough plastic to supply every automobile and airplane manufacturer in the world with the plastic parts both industries rely upon.
ExxonMobil, the largest U.S. oil company, is rapidly expanding its own dependence on plastics. It doubled its capacity in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, increased production in Beaumont, Texas, by 60% and invested $2 billion at its Baytown, Texas, complex to make new plastics for food containers, kitchenware and toys, according to documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
“None of us voted for more plastic,” Judith Enck, a former regional EPA administrator who leads the nonprofit group Beyond Plastics, said in a recent interview.
“But whenever we work to reduce exposure to plastics, either in state legislatures or at city council meetings, we are met with ferocious opposition by special interests that want to keep churning out more and more plastic, and continue the myth of recycling,” said Enck, whose organization has documented myriad problems with plastics recycling. “It’s not sustainable.”
Oil executives have said they are merely responding to consumers.
“(O)verseas markets are the motivation behind our investments,” Darren Woods, ExxonMobil’s chief executive, said in a 2017 news release posted on the company’s website. “The supply is here; the demand is there. We want to keep connecting those dots.”
“Shell Polymers’ customers will use our polyethylene to create products that we see and use every day — consumer packaging, pipe, conduit, and many more lifestyle solutions,” Hilary Mercer, senior vice president of Shell Polymers, said in a Facebook post when the Pennsylvania plant opened.
The number of plastic-oriented factories around the Great Lakes isn’t publicly available. Most apparently don’t make raw plastics and instead mold them into various products.
Based on a Tribune review of publicly available industry codes, there are more than 1,100 manufacturers of plastic products on the U.S. side of the Great Lakes region. Each of those factories pump waste into sewers that eventually drain into the world’s largest source of fresh surface water.
Untold others are classified under a “miscellaneous manufacturing” code that includes non-plastic factories.
Some of the products those companies produce end up breaking down in the Great Lakes or washing ashore.
“Almost everything we pick up is plastic,” said Andrew Scarpelli, a Chicagoan who leads beach garbage cleanups in coordination with the nonprofit Alliance for the Great Lakes. “I have to think people at these companies know what they are doing just isn’t right. But they’ve never been held accountable.”
Recycling misconceptions
Manufacturers note they provide components of lifesaving medical devices, wind turbines and solar panels, and parts that make automobiles more fuel-efficient.
“Plastics play a vital role in America’s economy, manufacturing strength, and the transition to a lower-carbon future,” the American Chemistry Council, the chief trade group for chemical and plastic makers, says on its website.
A tug-at-the-heart-strings statement is included in a paid online advertisement in The Washington Post and attributed to Ross Eisenberg, president of the council’s plastics division.
“(T)his summer my father was in the hospital,” Eisenberg is quoted saying in the ad paid for by the council, presented in a question-and-answer format. “Plastic helped keep him alive — his tracheotomy tube, his IV drips, the sterile instruments, they were all plastic. You don’t think of it, you don’t notice it, but plastic is there for all these amazing things.”
People fighting to reduce plastic use acknowledge it benefits society in multiple ways.
Yet half of all plastic manufacturing is for single-use, non-medical items — utensils, soda bottles, coffee cups, takeout containers, food wrap, shopping bags, online delivery packages and the like — that are quickly tossed away, according to the United Nations.
Some of the waste is burned, emitting cancer-causing air pollution. Most of it, the EPA has found, is dumped into landfills or ends up as litter washed into lakes, oceans and rivers.
Very little of it is recycled, the EPA has repeatedly found, despite the chasing arrows triangle embossed on plastic — an industry marketing tactic from the 1980s co-opted from the Earth Day movement’s utopian goal of a circular economy where everything could be repurposed over and over again.
“I’m a big fan of the industry, but I’m disappointed it hasn’t made more progress in the last 40 years,” said Freeman, the former industry lobbyist. “If they were dealing with some other kind of problem with these products, and it took them 40 years to not come up with a solution, the companies involved would go out of business.”Plastic marked No. 1 (polyethylene terephthalate or PET) or No. 2 (high-density polyethylene or HDPE) potentially can be reused in some fashion, say woven into fleece clothing, compressed into park benches or, if the plastic is clean enough, to make new water bottles.
However, additives that give color to products or make them rigid, flexible or resistant to other chemicals also make most plastic worthless to recyclers, said Sanat Kumar, a Columbia University polymer scientist who for most of his career worked to make the chemical chains in plastic more effective.
“I spent my life telling people how to use plastic,” Kumar said during a January conference of scientists studying microplastics. “I’m sort of approaching the end now, and so I’m switching gears to tell people how bad it is.”
Another problem is the quality of plastic degrades quickly, Kumar said. At best, it can be reused only once or twice, unlike aluminum that can be remade indefinitely without losing its strength and structural integrity, or paper that be recycled up to seven times.
Mostly there are economic incentives favoring more and more new plastic.
“If you talk to industry people they’ll tell you they don’t want to recycle because it’s too damn expensive,” Kumar said. “The cheap aspect (of making virgin plastic) is what’s going to come back and bite us.”
The American Chemistry Council now concedes traditional recycling methods often don’t work for plastic, even though decades of industry advertising claimed the waste problem would disappear if people just tossed more plastic into blue recycling bins.
“It’s not suited for complicated plastics, like a potato chip bag, which has seven layers of plastic and a layer of aluminum foil to keep the chips crisp,” Eisenberg, chief of the council’s plastics division, is quoted saying in the trade group’s November ad published online by The Washington Post.
Others noted a single fast-food meal includes multiple types of plastics that can’t be recycled together.
In an email response to questions from the Tribune, a spokesman for Eisenberg said the plastic industry is working to re-engineer its products to make them more recyclable.
“Better product design and increased investment in our recycling system can help increase recycling,” the council spokesman said in a statement attributed to Eisenberg.
Oil and chemical executives have sounded similar themes for decades. Time after time, when concerns about plastic pollution rise to the forefront of public consciousness, industry groups lean on well-honed tactics intended to fend off scrutiny.
During the late 1980s, for instance, manufacturers responded to cities and states moving to outlaw some of the industry’s products by pledging 25% of all plastic would be recycled by 1995.
A year before the self-imposed deadline, an Exxon Chemical executive told an industry group: “We are committed to the activities (of plastics recycling) but not committed to the results,” according to hand-written notes taken by an official at the now-defunct American Plastics Council and obtained by the nonprofit Center for Climate Integrity.
The same Exxon Chemical executive warned his colleagues not to write anything down revealing industry would fail to fulfill its promise. “HIGHLY SENSITIVE POLITICALLY,” the trade group official wrote in his notes, the records show.
More recently, the National Association for PET Container Resources or NAPCOR, a group representing manufacturers of No. 1 plastic, launched a “Positively PET” campaign.
One of the group’s efforts to sway public opinion involved paying TikTok influencers to promote pro-plastic messages, according to internal industry documents leaked to Fieldnotes, a watchdog group focused on the oil and gas industry.
When all types of plastic are accounted for, the EPA has concluded, the annual rate of recycling in the United States has never exceeded 10%. In recent years the national rate of plastics recycling has hovered around 5%.
An earlier version of industry’s public relations tactics appeared during the 1970s when what became known as the “Crying Indian Ad” saturated television screens.
In the advertisement, an actor clad in Indigenous garb paddles through a garbage-strewn river. As he pulls the canoe ashore, surrounded by more trash, the camera focuses on his stern expression.
“Some people have a deep, abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country,” a narrator’s voice gravely intones as the ad cuts to a muscle car passenger blithely tossing a fast food bag that splatters at the actor’s feet. “And some people don’t.”
The message: Consumers, rather than manufacturers, are responsible for contaminating the environment.
A group called Keep America Beautiful financed the ad. Unbeknownst to viewers at the time, it was an industry front group for Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Dart — the manufacturer of ubiquitous red Solo cups — and other big plastic users in the beverage and packaging industries.
Big Tobacco was another major sponsor.
As recently as 2021, documents filed with the Internal Revenue Service show, the chief backer of Keep America Beautiful was Altria Group, the latest iteration of the tobacco company Philip Morris. Other top contributors that year included Dow Chemical and Anheuser-Busch.
More of the industry’s questionable tactics are outlined in a 2024 lawsuit filed against ExxonMobil by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who accuses the oil and chemical company of lying for decades about the ability to recycle plastics.
“Sometimes you have a ‘smoking gun’ that breaks a case open,” Bonta said in April during a Chicago conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists. “This case is full of them.”
In 1991, for instance, NAPCOR, the group representing manufacturers of No. 1 plastic, bought an advertisement in Ladies’ Home Journal proclaiming “a bottle can come back as a bottle, over and over again,” something documents show industry executives privately acknowledged isn’t physically possible.
A few months later, Wal-Mart took out a full-page ad in the Tribune urging readers to “recycle plastic to save landfill space” in celebration of Earth Day. Around the same time, industry records show, Shell reiterated its conclusion that “recycling is limited by collection, market and economic constraints.”
After Bonta sued ExxonMobil two years ago, the company responded by suing California, claiming the attorney general’s lawsuit seeks to thwart what the company calls “advanced recycling,” a new name for an old process that uses heat or chemicals to break down plastics.
“Our investment in advanced recycling is focused on meeting modern society’s need for everyday materials while also helping address the plastic waste challenge,” a company spokeswoman told the Tribune in an email response to a detailed list of questions. “We refuse to let others attack our reputation and technology for their financial and political gain.”
Imperial Oil, ExxonMobil’s Canadian subsidiary, sued the country’s government in 2021 for classifying plastics as toxic in Canada’s bedrock environmental protection law. An appeals court overturned a trial judge’s ruling that struck down the law, but a coalition of oil and plastic companies is pleading with Canada’s supreme court to make a final decision.
It remains unclear if Prime Minister Mark Carney will defend the law, enacted during the government of his predecessor, fellow Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau. In December, Carney scuttled a Trudeau-era ban on the export of Canadian-made, single-used plastics days before it was scheduled to take effect.
“Backing off the export ban is anathema to progress on a hugely important issue with global ramifications,” said Lindsay Beck, an attorney with the Canadian nonprofit group Ecojustice, who noted the Trudeau government had set a goal of zero plastic waste by 2030.
Julie Dabrusin, Carney’s environment minister, declined multiple requests for an interview with the Tribune.
For now, at least, the U.S. government favors plastics manufacturers. The most the Trump administration has been willing to do is begin testing for microplastics in public water systems.
Several chemical industry veterans are ensconced in top regulatory positions during President Donald Trump’s second term. Last year the administration, along with Saudi Arabia and Russia, thwarted attempts by other countries to cap global plastic production and consider every environmental impact of plastics as part of a United Nations treaty.
In April, the Trump EPA moved to relax federal air pollution limits for facilities that break down plastic waste through a high-temperature process called pyrolysis and produce a low-grade oily substance, which theoretically can be used to make new plastic. The EPA is seeking to remove the long-standing definition of pyrolysis facilities as incinerators in federal regulations — another industry goal.
Trump administration officials echo industry executives who call the process “advanced recycling.” They claim it will solve the global plastic waste crisis.
“Advanced recycling offers something conventional recycling never could — a way to truly undo plastic, breaking it apart piece by piece until nothing remains but the raw materials from which it was originally made,” Lee Zeldin, the Trump EPA administrator, said in an April opinion piece published by The Hill, a political website.
Some of the handful of pyrolysis facilities in operation have a checkered environmental record. Others have faded into bankruptcy. The California lawsuit against ExxonMobil alleges no more than 8% percent of the waste shipped to the company’s Baytown, Texas, plant is converted to new plastic.
Privately, industry executives have long been skeptical of any efforts other than making new plastic, the lawsuit alleges. Pyrolysis is a “fundamentally uneconomical process,” Irwin Levowitz, an Exxon Chemical vice president, told colleagues in 1994, according to the lawsuit.
The Trump EPA defended its proposed rollbacks in response to a detailed list of questions.
“Nearly 90 potential advanced recycling facilities are ready to be built across the U.S., but they are being held back by regulatory uncertainty,” the agency said in an email. “Inconsistent state-level frameworks have further compounded the problem.”
‘Rainbows and unicorns’
Several states are attempting to curb plastic pollution in the absence of federal action.
A California law demands limits on microplastics in drinking water. Some states have banned certain single-use plastics. Ontario and seven U.S. states have adopted “extended producer responsibility” laws that require manufacturers to bankroll programs intended to reduce the use of plastic and improve the effectiveness of recycling.
Other recently enacted laws in Illinois require bottle-filling stations at large event forums, prohibit the distribution of mini-toiletry bottles at hotels and clear the use of containers brought from home for takeout food. On Thursday, the General Assembly sent Gov. JB Pritzker legislation that would require Illinois companies using plastic nurdles to limit what they dump into waterways.
Big Oil and Big Chemical have blocked or stalled several other attempts to address the plastic waste crisis, including legislation that would ban polystyrene food containers statewide, define microplastics as pollutants under state law and require microfiber filters in washing machines.
Mason, the Gannon University researcher, learned the hard way how industry can stymie environmental initiatives and the people behind them.
During the successful campaign a decade ago to ban microbeads, she drew widespread attention to the problem and received awards from philanthropic organizations. An administrator at the Erie branch of Penn State University recruited Mason to become the school’s sustainability coordinator.
A few months after she took the job, Mason’s champion retired. His replacement: a former plastics engineer.
It turns out plastics engineering technology is a top major at Penn State Behrend in Erie. Three buildings on campus are named after founders of local plastic manufacturers.
“Initially it was all rainbows and unicorns,” Mason said about her Penn State interlude. “Then they told me if I wanted to keep my job I needed to do research that supported the plastics industry.”
She quit instead.
Robb Frederick, a campus spokesman, said Mason left to pursue other opportunities. “Academic freedom is foundational to Penn State’s role as a land-grant institution, so at no point was she told to end, suspend, or reorient her research,” Frederick said in an email.
Mason didn’t want to leave Erie. Her husband is a political scientist at Gannon, a local Catholic university. The school’s president liked her and decided she would be a good fit to lead a new center devoted to educating people about Lake Erie and researching threats to the Great Lake.
Now Mason alternates between encouraging schoolchildren to love the lake and wooing nonprofit foundations to help protect the sprawling freshwater ecosystem.
“It’s amazing we have kids who live less than two miles from Lake Erie but don’t know it exists,” Mason said during a drive around town. “Because we have so much plastic industry here there are a lot of people supported by it. But it’s also responsible for polluting the lake we love.”
