Hey there, fam. Today’s spotlight story is a collaboration with The Green Fix, a Europe-focused climate newsletter managed by Cass Hebron. Cass and I have been following each other’s work for a while now, and we teamed up to bring you this story about the world’s first master’s program in degrowth.
The spotlight
In 2018, one of Spain’s top-ranked universities, which trains its graduates for careers in everything from neuroscience and biomedicine to government and economics, launched a first-of-its-kind master’s program in a more nascent and explicitly nontraditional field: a degree in degrowth.
Degrowth is a movement that calls for intentionally scaling down overdeveloped economies, like those in the U.S. and Europe, focusing instead on citizens’ well-being, ecological sustainability, and providing for basic needs without extracting every last resource. The idea has been gaining momentum, particularly in Europe where it originated, and its proponents argue it offers the best path to a lifestyle that is compatible with addressing climate change — one that respects the planet’s limits and avoids unnecessary emissions by simply producing and consuming less.
The master’s program and a separate online master’s in degrowth that was started in 2021 have now seen hundreds of graduates. But what does it mean to train people for a career in disrupting the whole idea of careers? And what happens when graduates of a program designed to reimagine the system have to find their place within that system?
Big questions, but ever since we at Looking Forward and The Green Fix first learned about this unique degree program, we’ve been wanting to find out what it’s really like to study degrowth — and what happens afterward.
A meetup of degrowth master’s students, from both the in-person and online programs, in June 2022 in Can Masdeu, an occupied social center in Barcelona. Jana Kenkel
The university is called the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, or Autonomous University of Barcelona, which is a way of saying a university not controlled by the government. And the degree is technically in political ecology, degrowth, and environmental justice. In other words, studying sustainable alternatives to the modern economic system.
One of the masterminds behind the program is Giorgos Kallis, a prominent researcher and advocate in the field of degrowth. Kallis, an academic with a warm and approachable air, describes his research as “un-disciplinary,” in the sense that it has spanned many topics, from droughts and water policies to ecological economics. It was his work on water management that led him to question the paradigm of continuous and necessary growth.
He became a professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in 2010 and, along with colleagues at the Research & Degrowth association, launched a summer school program in degrowth. “There were many people who would come for the summer school and they would say, ‘We wish there was also a full master’s,’” Kallis said. At the same time, there were plenty of researchers in the field who were eager to teach.
Students at the master’s program in Barcelona take theoretical classes in degrowth, environmental justice, and alternative economics and governance structures, and also receive practical training in skills like group facilitation, how to run a social justice campaign, and how to set up a cooperative. All backgrounds are welcomed, but the program tends to attract radically minded students — “at least in terms of the need for transformation in order to confront climate change,” Kallis said. Around two-thirds of the students who attend the in-person program are from Europe. The online program, which is solely focused on theory, tends to reach a more diverse mix.
Kallis and his colleagues also designed the in-person program specifically to prepare students for the job market. It offers career development with three main paths in mind: policy and advocacy work; work in the social and cooperative economy; and research.
“I mean, we don’t mind someone working in the private sector and bringing these ideas wherever they want,” he said. But it tends not to attract the kind of person who’s interested in climbing the corporate ladder, so to speak.
A class on group facilitation techniques in October 2022, with students from the in-person master’s program. Jana Kenkel
France-based graduate Adélaide Cadioux had been jumping between jobs for years before enrolling in the Barcelona program. “I was feeling very dissatisfied with the way that companies were working. My values were seemingly constantly misaligning with people’s needs for profit.” She found the program by pure chance while searching on the university website, and described it as a moment of revelation. “I was like, ‘I need to quit my job and do that master’s.’”
There, she said, “I found people who understand what it feels like to constantly feel like you don’t fit in and your values are not represented in whatever job you’re going for.” Many of the students there shared her desire to find an alternative to traditional capitalist ways of working. “There’s also a form of radical acceptance,” she said. “It’s normal that you feel like this. Let’s work together on something else.”
Valerie Costa, a recent graduate from the U.S., was feeling burned out after working in the nonprofit and social good sectors for around two decades. “I wasn’t even really actively wanting to be a grad student,” she said, “but I was like, ‘Oh, wow. I could take a year and really think about everything I’ve been working on, but in a deeper way.’”
Recent Belgian graduate Emilie de Bassompierre had already encountered the concept of degrowth in their previous studies and was looking for a way to put it into practice. “I had teachers who were very keen on studying critiques of capitalism,” they said. “My studies helped me gain an understanding of not only how that system came to be from a historical perspective, but also, if we want alternatives, what are the elements of the system that we have to think of dismantling?”
Post-graduation, de Bassompierre is facing down the reality of balancing their values with their need to pay the rent — and how to make use of having the privilege of being able to prioritize their values for at least a while; a privilege many other students share. “It’s already been a few years that I’m aware that whatever I want to do, it’s not going to be something that brings me a lot of money,” de Bassompierre said. Following graduation, they are pursuing an internship in climate justice at a European nongovernmental organization. After that, they are considering a future in either advocacy or academia. But the most important thing, they said, is that they can pursue a life that makes them happy — and they don’t anticipate working full time forever.
“Before, I was always looking at what I ‘should’ do or what was the ethical, moral thing to do. But that can lead you to burning out. I think it’s possible to deconstruct the idea that we have to define ourselves through our work,” de Bassompierre said. “I want to have free time for activism and independent projects.”
Cadioux and Costa are also weighing how degrowth fits into their future plans. Cadioux is still searching for a job. “If something comes along the lines of what I want … I [would] find ways to amp up my activism or give back to the community, where it just feels like a sort of equal relationship between what you take from capitalism and what you give back to your community,” she said.
For Costa, incorporating degrowth principles and advocacy into her work has been challenging in other ways. After graduating, she returned to the U.S., where the concept is still fairly novel. “I’m not gonna walk down the street with a degrowth flag,” she said. She added that, from a policy perspective, the U.S. lacks the kind of social safety net that is a prerequisite to effective and equitable degrowth. “I’m not going to campaign for austerity,” she said. “What I do want is more livable communities for people. I want people to be more connected with each other. I want better services and supports in place, better housing.”
After completing the program, her activism has remained focused on resistance, with an element of community-building as well. She co-founded a Seattle-based network called Troublemakers that weaves those two things together. “For me, the degrowth program really illuminated the absolute critical importance of community and connection,” she said.
While he believes that this specialized training in degrowth and political ecology is valuable, and was previously missing from the academic landscape, Giorgos Kallis also recognizes that studying degrowth may be something of a hard sell when job hunting. “Would the ministry contract someone who has studied how to degrow the economy, when no one wants to degrow it?” he said.
Still, at least two alumni of the master’s program have gone on to be assistants to members of the European Parliament, Kallis noted. Others have organized an annual festival that brings together LGBTQ+ rights with elements of degrowth. And others are working as activists, teachers, nonprofit leaders, and more.
Kallis believes that there is value in studying the principles of degrowth whether or not students go on to find their lifelong path in bringing it to fruition. “I want to think that increasingly there will be demand for out-of-the-box thinking,” he said. “And I also want to think that, degrowth or not degrowth, our students are getting good training in fundamental theories, models, ecological economics, political ecology. So even if they don’t work on degrowth per se — but they work on some other framework or transition or climate mitigation — they have the skills to be critical and good thinkers.”
For Angela Huston, who, like many other graduates of the online program, is mid-career and less willing than some of the in-person students to spend several years just pondering how to change the system, this was exactly the point.
Huston had been working in public services and international development in Italy for 10 years before doing the virtual master’s. She said she valued how the program forced her to question the cultural expectations to make money and be financially comfortable. “I was super-radical hardcore in my university days,” she said. “And then, I think over time, I started to conform more with the world. And that’s part of the reason I’ve gone back to degrowth. We need more of this radical thinking that’s not trying to align with and appease current systems.”
Given the urgency of the climate crisis and how challenging it is to change the current economic system in the timeframe needed, Huston said she is open to working with for-profit companies, where she can influence their climate-transition strategies from inside and help mitigate their climate impacts.
Applications for the seventh cohort of the Barcelona program are now open. The program was restructured this year, based on feedback from students and faculty, to include things like a stronger focus on activism skills and more intersectional frameworks, such as feminism and decolonization.
The coordinators of both the online and in-person degrees are currently focused on making them more accessible to people from different backgrounds, especially those from outside Europe and the U.S. They are also working to more actively steward the network of alumni, and are looking toward an alumni conference next year.
And as for the graduates who are still trying to figure out what their degrowth studies mean for their path out in the current working world? “I don’t think that it’s because we studied degrowth that now we’re lost,” de Bassompierre said. “It’s more the opposite: figuring out how to work toward the world we want to see.”
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A parting shot
While Valerie Costa noted that she wouldn’t necessarily march down a street in the U.S. with a degrowth sign, that sight is much more commonplace in Europe. Here’s a photo from a Fridays for Future protest just last month in Munich ahead of the European elections.
It’s Earth Day 1990, and Meryl Streep walks into a bar. She’s distraught about the state of the environment. “It’s crazy what we’re doing. It’s very, very, very bad,” she says in ABC’s prime-time Earth Day special, letting out heavy sighs and listing jumbled statistics about deforestation and the hole in the ozone layer.
The bartender, Kevin Costner, says he used to be scared, too — until he started doing something about it. “These?” he says, holding up a soda can. “I recycle these.” As Streep prepares to launch her beer can into the recycling bin, Costner cautions her, “This could change your life.”
Recycling, once considered the domain of people with “long hair, granny glasses, and tie-dyed Ts,” as the Chicago Tribune described it at the time, was about to go mainstream. The iconic chasing-arrows recycling symbol, invented 20 years earlier, was everywhere in the early 1990s. Its tight spiral of folded arrows seemed to promise that discarded glass bottles and yellowing newspapers had a bright future, where they could be reborn in a cycle that stretched to infinity. As curbside pickup programs spread across the United States, the practice of sorting your trash would become, for many, as routine as brushing your teeth — an everyday habit that made you feel a little more responsible.
A woman sorts plastics at the Santa Monica Recycling Center in California in 1992. Joe Sohm / Visions of America / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
What no one anticipated was just how emotionally attached people would become to recycling as the solution to America’s ugly trash problem. When the chasing arrows’ promise of rebirth was broken, they could get angry. One cold winter day in 1991, people in Holyoke, Massachusetts, chased after garbage trucks, yelling for them to stop, after the drivers had nabbed their sorted glass, cans, and cardboard from the curb. Strained by an influx of holiday-related trash, the city had instructed workers to forgo recycling and just throw everything away.
Today, the recycling icon is omnipresent — found on plastic bottles, cereal boxes, and bins loitering alongside curbs across the country. The chasing arrows, though, are often plastered on products that aren’t recyclable at all, particularly products made of plastic, like dog chew toys and inflatable swim rings. Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency said that the symbol’s use on many plastic products was “deceptive.”
Recycling rules can be downright mystifying. For years, people were told pizza boxes were too greasy to be recycled, but now many recycling centers accept them. Some cities accept juice boxes lined with invisible layers of aluminum and plastic; others don’t. And do the screw-on caps stay on plastic bottles or not? Recycling experts ask people to do a “little bit of homework” to figure out what their local recycling system can handle, but since households have hundreds of items with different packaging to keep track of, that’s asking a lot.
The resulting confusion has made a mess of recycling efforts. Plastic wrap tangles around sorting equipment at recycling facilities, shutting down operations as employees try to cut it out of the equipment. Huge bales of paper shipped overseas can contain as much as 30 percent plastic waste. “Contamination is one of the biggest challenges facing the recycling industry,” the EPA said in a statement to Grist. It takes time and money to haul, sort through, and dispose of all this unwanted refuse, which makes recycling more of a burden for city budgets. Many cities have ended up cutting costs by working with private waste companies; some don’t even bother trying at all. About a quarter of Americans lack access to any recycling services.
So where did the three arrows go wrong? The trouble is that their loop has ensnared us. If some recycling is good, the thinking goes, then more recycling is better. That creates enormous pressure for packaging to be made recyclable and stamped with the arrows — regardless of whether trying to recycle a glass bottle or plastic yogurt container made much sense in the first place. David Allaway, a senior policy analyst at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, says that the facts just don’t support the recycling symbol’s reputation as a badge of environmental goodness. “The magnetic, gravitational power of recycling,” he said, has led “policymakers and the public to just talk more and more and more about recycling, and less and less and less about anything else.”
A poster from the first Earth Day, 1970. Getty Images
Crowds of people sit in a park during celebrations for Earth Day in 1970. Harold M. Lambert / Getty Images
In the spring of 1970, an estimated 20 million Americans — 10 percent of the population — showed up for the first Earth Day, taking part in rallies, marches, and teach-ins, calling for clean air and clean water. Pollution had pushed its way into the national conversation. The year before, oil-soaked debris had caught fire in the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, sending flames towering five stories high, and a drilling accident in Santa Barbara had spread an oil slick over more than 800 square miles of water. Smog regularly clouded skies from Birmingham, Alabama, to Los Angeles, dimming cities in the middle of the day.
The idea of recycling seemingly burst onto the scene in 1970. Earth Day organizers educated people about the value of sorting through their trash and advocated for community recycling programs. People would gather up their bottles and cans in plastic crates and bags and drive to designated sites to drop them off, sometimes earning a few bucks in return. “The environmental crisis has come into the public consciousness so recently that the word ‘recycle’ doesn’t even appear in most dictionaries,” the environmentalist Garrett De Bell wrote a couple weeks before the Earth Day event. He pitted recycling as “the only ecologically sensible long-term solution” for a country “knee-deep in garbage.”
It wasn’t long before the concept acquired its signature symbol. At the time, Gary Anderson was finishing up his master’s degree in architecture at the University of Southern California. He came across a poster advertising a contest to design a symbol for recycling, sponsored by the Container Corporation of America, a maker of cardboard boxes. Inspired by M.C. Escher’s Möbius strip, Anderson spent just a couple of days coming up with designs using the now-famous trio of folded, rotating arrows. The simplest of his designs won, and Anderson was awarded a $2,500 scholarship in 1970. The Container Corporation quickly put the logo in the public domain, hoping it would be adopted on all recycled or recyclable products in order to “spread awareness among concerned citizens.”
From left: Hans Buehler, a regional representative of the Container Corporation, with designer Gary Anderson in the Design Studio at the University of Southern California in 1970. Courtesy of Gary Anderson
The Möbius loop he created soon passed from his mind. “I just didn’t really think of the symbol that much,” he recalls. “It wasn’t used very much in the first couple of years.” One day several years later, however, Anderson was wandering through the streets of Amsterdam in the haze of jet lag when he came across a row of oversized bins emblazoned with a beach ball-sized version of his logo. The Netherlands, purportedly, was the first country to launch a nationwide recycling program in 1972. “It just really shocked me into a realization that there must be something about this symbol,” he said.
Refashioning old materials into new things is a longstanding American tradition. Paul Revere, folk hero of the American Revolution, collected scrap metal and turned it into horseshoes. In the 19th century, used rags were turned into paper, and families stitched together scraps of fabric to create quilts. The desperation of the Great Depression taught people to make underwear out of cotton flour sacks, and the propaganda posters of World War II positioned recycling as a patriotic duty: “Prepare your tin cans for war.”
“It was not in our DNA to be this wasteful,” said Jackie Nuñez, the advocacy program manager at the Plastic Pollution Coalition, a communications nonprofit. “We had to be trained, we had to be marketed to, to be wasteful like this.”
A letter Gary Anderson wrote to his mother using a discarded Xerox copy of an early draft recycling symbol. “This is the closest thing I have to a preliminary sketch,” Anderson said. The original sketch, made using only drafting instruments, was destroyed in a fire in Anderson’s garage. Courtesy of Gary Anderson
One of the first lessons of “throwaway society” came in the 1920s, when White Castle became the first fast-food restaurant to sell its burgers in single-use bags, advertising them as clean and convenient. “Buy ’em by the sack,” the slogan went. In 1935, the big breweries that survived the Prohibition era started shipping beer in lighter, cheaper-to-transport steel cans instead of returnable glass bottles. Coca-Cola and other soda companies eventually followed suit.
All those paper sacks and cans soon littered the sides of American roadways, and people started calling on the companies that created the waste to clean it up. Corporations responded by creating the first anti-litter organization, Keep America Beautiful, founded in 1953 by the American Can Company and the Owens-Illinois Glass Company. Keep America Beautiful’s advertisements in the 1960s looked like public service announcements, but they subtly shifted the blame for all the garbage to individuals. Some featured “Susan Spotless,” a girl in a white dress who would wag her finger at anyone who soiled public spaces with their litter.
The pressure on American businesses didn’t go away, though. On the Sunday after Earth Day in April 1970, some 1,500 protesters showed up at Coca-Cola’s headquarters in Atlanta to dump hundreds of cans and glass bottles at its entrance. Two years later, Oregon passed the country’s first “bottle bill” requiring a 5-cent deposit on bottles and cans sold in the state, incentivizing people to return them, while Congress was considering banning single-use beverage containers altogether. Manufacturers successfully lobbied against a federal ban, arguing that jobs would be lost, as the historian Bartow J. Elmore recounts in the book Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism. But corporations still wanted to relieve the public pressure on them and outsource the costs of dealing with the waste they were creating. Luckily for them, recycling was in vogue.
Workers in South Boston load can and bottle returns onto a waiting truck in 1980. Ren Norton / MediaNews Group / Boston Herald via Getty Images
In New York City, the war on waste was spearheaded by the Environmental Action Coalition, an organization raising funds for its “Trash Is Cash” community recycling program, with the long-term goal of getting recyclables picked up by city workers outside homes. Curbside recycling seemed to serve everyone’s interest: Environmentalists wanted to waste less, and companies could use it as an opportunity to shift the cost of dealing with waste onto city governments. Businessmen who volunteered with the Environmental Action Coalition solicited millions in donations from their colleagues in the 1970s, writing that recycling had “substantial promise” to fend off any legislation to ban or tax single-use containers.
The campaign was a deliberate attempt to divert attention from more meaningful solutions like bottle bills, yet environmental groups embraced it, according to Recycling Reconsidered, a 2012 book bySamantha MacBride, who worked in New York City’s sanitation department for two decades. The New York City Council started its mandatory curbside pickup program in the late 1980s, several years after the first one began in Woodbury, New Jersey, requiring residents to set out their paper, metal, glass, and some types of plastic in bins at the curb. The idea picked up in cities across the country, with the number of curbside programs growing from 1,000 to 5,000 between 1988 and 1992, spreading the chasing arrows along with them.
“It was in the late ’80s and early ’90s that this thing just becomes everywhere,” said Finis Dunaway, a professor of history at Trent University in Canada. America was running out of places to put its trash, a dilemma captured by the story of a nomadic garbage barge in 1987. In March of that year, a barge teeming with 6 million pounds of trash left Long Island, New York, looking to unload its freight where the landfills weren’t already full. States from North Carolina to Louisiana turned it away, and the barge spent months traveling around the Atlantic coast — all the way to Mexico, Belize, and the Bahamas — looking for a place to dispose of the garbage.
In October, the barge made its way back to Brooklyn, where a court ordered that its contents be incinerated — but not before Greenpeace activists hung a giant banner on the boat: “NEXT TIME … TRY RECYCLING.” Annie Leonard, the former executive director of Greenpeace, told PBS Frontline in 2020 that she wonders whether that banner was a mistake. “I think we were overly optimistic about the potential of recycling,” she said, “and perpetuating that narrative led us astray.”
A tugboat pulls a garbage barge through New York Harbor on July 16, 1987. George Argeroplos / Newsday RM via Getty Images
There’s an iconic scene in the 1967 movie The Graduate, in which Dustin Hoffman’s character, Benjamin Braddock, gets cornered at his college graduation party by one of his parents’ friends. “I just want to say one word to you, just one word: plastics,” the older man says. “There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it.” One generation’s earnest advice for a successful career clashed with a new, skeptical attitude toward plastic, which had already become a byword for “fake.”
By the early 1970s, scientists had learned that whales, turtles, and other marine life were getting tangled up in plastic debris, a problem that was killing 40,000 seals a year. They knew, too, that small plastic fragments were making their way into the ocean, and that plastic residues had entered people’s bloodstreams, presenting what an official from President Richard Nixon’s Council of Environmental Quality deemed a significant health threat, “potentially our next bad one.” The more people learned, the more plastic’s reputation transformed from all-purpose, indestructible wonder into something that maybe shouldn’t be trusted in your new microwave. Between 1988 and 1989, the percentage of Americans who believed plastic was damaging the environment rose from 56 to 72 percent. Larry Thomas, the president of the Society of Plastics Industry, warned in an internal memo that companies were starting to lose business, writing, “We are approaching a point of no return.”
Beverage companies and the oil industry hoped to advertise their way out of the PR problem, laying out plans to spend $50 million a year to tout the polymer’s virtues with slogans like “plastics make it possible.” They also turned to recycling. Lewis Freeman, the former vice president of government affairs at the Society of the Plastics Industry, an industry group, told Grist that he has a vivid memory of a colleague coming into his office, saying, “We’ve got to do something to help the recyclers.”
Freeman tasked the Plastic Bottle Institute — made up of oil giants like BP and Exxon, chemical companies, and can manufacturers — with figuring out how to clarify to recycling sorters what kind of plastic was what. In 1988, they came up with the plastic resin code, the numbering system from 1 to 7 that’s still in place.
Polyethylene terephthalate, or PET (1), is used to make soft drink bottles; high-density polyethylene (2) is used for milk jugs; polyvinyl chloride (3) is used for PVC pipes in plumbing, and so on all through 7, the catch-all category for acrylic, polycarbonate, fiberglass, and other plastics. The Plastic Bottle Institute surrounded these numbers with the chasing arrows logo, giving the public the impression that they could throw all kinds of plastics into recycling bins, whether there was infrastructure to process them or not. The Connecticut Department of Environmental Conservation warned that the confusion it would cause “will have a severe impact on the already marginal economic feasibility of recycling plastics as well as on recycling programs as a whole.”
Once the symbol was operational, Freeman said, “then everybody started putting it on everything.” Companies worked to make it official: Starting in 1989, the Plastic Bottle Institute lobbied for state laws mandating that the code numbers appear on plastic products. Their express purpose was to fend off anti-plastic legislation, according to documents uncovered by the Center for Climate Integrity. The laws eventually passed in 39 states.
By the mid-1990s, the campaign to “educate” the public about plastic recycling had succeeded: Americans had a more favorable opinion of plastic, and efforts to ban or restrict production had died down. But recycling rates — the share of materials that actually get reprocessed — had barely improved. Instead, the United States started exporting plastic waste to China, where turning old plastic into new materials helped meet growing demand from manufacturers. Polling conducted for the American Plastics Council in 1997 showed that people who worked in waste management were losing hope that plastics could be recycled, while the public, journalists, and government officials believed they could be recycled at unrealistically high rates.
Actor Ted Danson poses with Recycle Rex, an educational character developed in cooperation with the California Department of Conservation, at an event in 1993. Vinnie Zuffante / Getty Images
The problem was, fulfilling what companies called the “the urgent need to recycle” wasn’t as easy as the advertisements made it look. For decades, industry insiders expressed serious doubts that recycling plastic would ever be profitable, with one calling the economic case “virtually hopeless” in 1969. There are thousands of plastic products, and they all need to be sorted and put through different processes to be turned into something new. The way packaging is molded — blown, extruded, or stamped — means that even the same types of plastic can have their own melting points. A PET bottle can’t be recycled with the clear PET packaging that encases berries. A clear PET bottle can’t be recycled with a green one.
The plastics that do happen to get sorted and processed can only be “downcycled,” since melting them degrades their quality. Recycled plastic, it turns out, is more toxic than virgin plastic, liable to leach dangerous chemicals, so it can’t safely be turned into food-grade packaging. It’s also more expensive to produce. The result of this morass is that there is virtually no market for recycled plastics beyond those marked with 1s and 2s; the rest are incinerated or sent to landfills. Only 9 percent of the plastics ever produced have gone on to be recycled.
As plastic waste piled up and public frustration mounted, the Sustainable Packaging Coalition — backed by corporate giants including Procter and Gamble, Coca-Cola, and Exxon Mobil — launched a bigger, more specific recycling initiative in 2008 called “How2Recycle.” It came with new labels that appeared to provide clarity about which elements of a product could be recycled, distinguishing between plastic wrap and coated trays, sometimes qualifying the recycling logo with “store drop-off” labels for plastic bags and film.
The plastic resin code with the chasing arrows certainly confused people — 68 percent of Americans surveyed in 2019 said they thought anything labeled with the code could be recycled. But the How2Recycle labels “put the lies on steroids,” said Jan Dell, the founder of the nonprofit The Last Beach Cleanup. It’s not just a tiny triangular indent on the bottom of a container anymore, but a large, high-contrast recycling logo that “stares you in the face.”
Workers sort plastic on the curbside-recyclables processing line at the Green Waste material recovery facility in San Jose, California, in 2019. Aric Crabb / Digital First Media / Bay Area News via Getty Images
Given the dismal state of plastic recycling, it might seem like the best thing to do is throw the chasing arrows in the garbage. But not all recycling is a failure. “Metals are the true success story,” said Carl Zimring, a waste historian at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. As much as three-quarters of all the aluminum that’s ever been produced is still in use, he said. Paper is also relatively easy to process, with more than two-thirds making its way into new products in the U.S. Even for a recycling standby like glass, though, less than a third gets broken down into fragments for new jars and bottles.
The recycling logo still gives anything it touches — whether feasible to recycle or not — a green aura. Surveys show that a majority of Americans believe recycling is one of the most effective ways they can fight climate change, when experts say it’s unlikely to make much of a difference in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. That’s a credit to the iconic triangle, which has had 50 years to entrench itself in our culture. “It’s easy to bash on the image, or bash on corporations, without seeing this as something that is very powerful,” said Dunaway, the environmental historian. So is there a way to give the recycling symbol meaning again?
When recycling started taking off in the early 1990s, there was no definitive, agreed-upon definition of what it meant. “Anything is recyclable, at least theoretically,” one lawyer pointed out in a legal journal in 1991. The effort to impose some sort of order came from California, often the national laboratory for environmental protection. The state passed the country’s first restrictions on green claims in 1990, prohibiting advertisers from using terms like “ozone-friendly” and “recyclable” on items that didn’t meet its standards (though that stipulation didn’t survive a challenge in court).
Wider efforts to restrict the symbol, however, lacked strength and enforcement. In 1992, the Federal Trade Commission told advertisers they could call a product “recyclable” even if only 1 percent of their product was recycled. Not much else happened on that front until 2013, when the group that administers the plastic resin code, ASTM International, announced that it was replacing the chasing arrows with a solid triangle to reduce public confusion. It didn’t require manufacturers to rework their labels, though.
Today, that might finally be changing. When China banned the import of most plastics in 2018, it revealed problems that had long remained hidden. The United States had been shipping 70 percent of its plastic waste to China — 1.2 billion pounds in 2017 alone. States set about finding ways to fix the recycling system, with some focusing on the confusion generated by the symbol itself. In 2021, California — the world’s fifth-largest economy — passed a “truth in labeling” law prohibiting the use of the chasing arrows on items that are rarely recycled. To pass the test, 60 percent of Californians need to have access to a processing center that sorts a given material; on top of that, 60 percent of processors have to have access to a facility that will remanufacture the material into something else.
Though the bill faced opposition from companies right until it passed, the idea resonated with legislators, said Nick Lapis, the director of advocacy at Californians Against Waste. “It was pretty easy to understand that putting the chasing arrows symbol on a product that is not ever going to get recycled is not fair to consumers. Like, it just made so much intuitive sense that I think it kind of went beyond the lobbyist politics of Sacramento.”
Across the country, public officials in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois, Minnesota, and Washington state are considering similar legislation. This spring, Maine passed a law to incentivize companies to use accurate recycling labels on their packaging. New rules around the recycling logo are also brewing at the national level. Last April, Jennie Romer, the EPA’s deputy assistant administrator for pollution prevention, called for the FTC to put an end to the “deceptive” use of the iconic chasing arrows on plastics in its upcoming revisions to the Green Guides for environmental marketing claims. “There’s a big opportunity for the Federal Trade Commission to make those updates to really set a high bar for what can be marketed as recyclable,” Romer told Grist. “Because that symbol, or marketing something as recyclable, is very valuable.”
Once California’s law goes into effect next year, state laws will clash with each other, since many states still require the resin numbers on plastic packaging. “The question on everyone’s mind is, who’s going to win out?” said Allaway, the Oregon official.
A sign in Miami encourages people to recycle. Jeffrey Greenberg / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Talk of truth-in-labeling legislation has coincided with another trend — states trying to turn the costs for dealing with waste back on the manufacturers that produced it. Laws requiring “extended producer responsibility,” or EPR, for packaging have already been approved in Maine, Oregon, California, and Colorado. It’s already led to problems in California, since the EPR bill refers to the state’s truth-in-labeling law to determine which materials can be recycled, creating incentives for everything to be labeled as recyclable, Dell said.
Even if the Federal Trade Commission updates the Green Guides to prohibit the deceptive use of the recycling symbol, it doesn’t change the fact that the guides are just suggestions. They don’t carry the weight of law. “The FTC itself has never enforced a false recyclable label, ever, ever, on plastics, not once,” Dell said. One of Dell’s favorite metaphors: “It’s the wild, wild West of product claims and labeling, with no sheriff in town.”
So Dell has appointed herself de facto sheriff, suing companies over their false claims. In 2021, her organization reached a settlement with TerraCycle, Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, and six other companies that agreed to change labels on their products. Dell recently filed a shareholder proposal with Kraft Heinz in an attempt to force it to remove recyclability claims from marshmallow bags and mac-and-cheese bowls destined for the landfill.
Another promising legal push is coming from California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who has been investigating fossil fuel and chemical companies for what he called “an aggressive campaign to deceive the public, perpetuating a myth that recycling can solve the plastics crisis.” Despite mounting awareness of plastic’s threat to public health, oil and chemical companies around the world make 400 million metric tons of the polymer every year, and production is on track to triple by 2060. It’s the oil industry’s backup business plan in the expectation that wealthy countries will shift away from gasoline in an effort to tackle climate change, since petroleum is the basic building block of plastics. Exxon Mobil, the world’s third-largest oil producer, ranks as the top plastic polymer producer.
Stricter enforcement around the use of the chasing arrows could lead to more accurate labels, less public confusion, and better outcomes for recycling centers. But it’s worth asking whether more recycling should even be the goal, rather than solutions that are much better for the environment, like reducing, reusing, refilling, and repairing. As Anderson, the symbol’s inventor, says, “I don’t think it’s really fair to blame a graphic symbol for all of our lack of initiative in trying to do better.”
Correction: This story originally mischaracterized Samantha MacBride’s position.
With much of the southwest baking under record temperatures, immigrants’ rights advocates worry President Joe Biden’s decision to effectively close the border to asylum seekers for the foreseeable future will endanger lives and further marginalize climate-displaced people seeking refuge in the U.S.
Their concerns come as a heat dome lingering over Mexico and the southwestern United States has obliterated temperature records from Phoenix to Sacramento, California. The searing conditions had health officials urging people to limit their time outdoors and take other steps to protect themselves from a climate-charged high pressure system that has killed dozens of people across several states in Mexico. The promise of a hotter-than-average summer has raised fears that Biden’s directive, which allows the government to suspend border crossings when they surpass 2,500 daily, will lead to a surge in heat-related illnesses and possibly deaths.
“This executive order being issued at this time is an additional cruelty that will force more people into dangerous conditions where they’re exposed to a really severe climate impact,” said Ahmed Gaya, director of the Climate Justice Collaborative at the National Partnership for New Americans.
Biden’s decision to drastically regulate a legal pathway into the country for the bulk of migrants at the southern border, with limited exceptions such as unaccompanied minors, is “clearly a political stunt,” Gaya said. “Given the fact that many of the people at the border have climate driving the root cause of their migration and need to seek safety, they are now at the border being forced to wait in limbo indefinitely, while their asylum is shut down under this order, and being exposed to severe climate impacts that risk their lives,” he said.
“This policy’s implementation collides with the hottest, most dangerous months on record as the climate crisis continues to accelerate,” said Kim Nolte, CEO of Migrant Clinicians Network. “We fear that this policy will result in more deaths as desperate people are pushed further and further into remote and lethally hot areas to cross the border.”
Past research on the risks of climate migration faced by people around the world suggest this could very well be the case. “As temperatures increase, we will absolutely see higher mortality, illness, death and injury for these asylum seekers that are coming to the U.S., seeking safety,” said Anne Junod, a senior research associate at the Urban Institute who studies climate migration.
The Biden administration’s directive is “actually more extreme” than similar policies the Trump administration enacted, and just as unlikely to hold up in court, said Sarah Rich, senior supervising attorney and interim senior policy counsel at the Southern Poverty Law Center. (The American Civil Liberties Union has announced its intention to sue the Biden administration over the order.)
Border Patrol agents have already begun turning back migrants at the international border to prevent them from reaching U.S. soil — a revival of a controversial Trump-era policy of physically blocking asylum seekers from entering the country, which is required to claim asylum.
Beyond barring entry, Biden’s proclamation denies asylum to all who enter between ports, increases the legal standards required to receive asylum, and gives those seeking it only four hours to prepare for their initial interview, including attempts to contact and consult with legal counsel, according to Rich. It also means that the only way to be granted asylum in the U.S. is to make an appointment via the CBP One app, which can take months and is “essentially a lottery system,” she said.
The immigrant rights community in the U.S., is, according to Rich, collectively opposed to the Biden administration’s latest executive action. “We are upset. We are disappointed. Many people are enraged by this. It feels like a real betrayal,” she said.
One of the Biden administration’s first actions coming into office was making climate-related migration a priority, noted Gaya, but the administration has since moved in the opposite direction. “This further goes down the wrong road, in the wrong direction, by cutting off more avenues for folks who are seeking asylum, often on grounds that include climate impacts, from doing so,” he said. “This executive order is both a deep disappointment on President Biden’s immigration promises, as well as on his hopes to be a climate leader.”
Corporations churn out single-use plastic packaging by the truckload — disposable yogurt cups, takeout food containers, shopping bags, mailers, cling wrap, and more. These items comprise much of the 19 million metric tons of plastic waste that ends up in the environment each year. As such, many companies have made vague promises to address the plastic pollution crisis by increasing the recyclability of their packaging and reducing the amount of virgin material they use.
But they’re not doing enough.
According to a new analysis published Wednesday by the shareholder advocacy nonprofit As You Sow, dozens of the world’s largest companies are falling short on both ambition and action to ensure plastic packaging doesn’t end up in landfills or littering the environment. Too few companies have quantitative sustainability targets for plastic, the report says, and those that do are either setting the bar too low or are failing to make significant progress — or both.
“Every company can be doing more,” said Kelly McBee, circular economy manager at As You Sow and one of the report’s co-authors. In particular, she said corporations should place more emphasis on reducing the plastic they use, rather than replacing virgin plastic with recycled content.
For its report, As You Sow looked at annual reports, sustainability reports, filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission, and other publicly available resources from 225 of the world’s most valuable companies across five sectors: apparel, food and beverage, household products, quick-service restaurants, and retail. The nonprofit evaluated these corporations on six criteria related to advancing a “circular economy for plastic packaging,” referring to a system that keeps plastic in use for as long as possible before it has to be thrown away.
These criteria included the recyclability of companies’ plastic packaging, whether that packaging is made from recycled material, and how much of it is reusable. The report also considered companies’ efforts to reduce plastic use and support extended producer responsibility, or EPR, policies that would make them financially responsible for managing their plastic packaging after it’s sold to consumers.
Each company got scores for overall ambition and overall action, which, combined, contributed to a letter grade. Measurable steps were weighted more heavily than targets “to elevate the importance of action over words,” as McBee put it.
No company got an A, and only nine got a B. Half got an F, and almost every industry was characterized by “unambitious to modest goals” with “slow progress” toward achieving them. The industries with the highest average scores were cosmetics, household products, alcoholic beverages, and consumer electronics. Those at the bottom were hospitality, chemicals, and motor vehicles.
It’s not the first time As You Sow has brought scrutiny upon companies that contribute to the plastics crisis. Previous reports in 2020 and 2021 ranked a smaller cohort of companies on their commitments to sustainable packaging and found similar shortcomings on reuse, data transparency, and financial contributions to waste management infrastructure.
In its most recent report, As You Sow also found that few companies had a quantitative, time-bound target for switching to reusable packaging, although many had pilot programs. And of the 147 companies with a package recyclability goal, only 15 percent were on track to meet it.
These findings line up with what some other groups have found about the gap between companies’ plastic promises and their actions. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for a circular economy, reported last year that corporations that had signed on to its “global commitment” to advance plastics circularity had collectively made no progress to reduce virgin plastic use since 2018.
Melissa Valliant, communications director for the nonprofit advocacy group Beyond Plastics, said these findings are in some ways unsurprising. “Historically, goals from the largest consumer goods companies have served as pretty PR stunts that generate headlines and reassure the public,” she told Grist. She said As You Sow’s findings emphasize the need for government regulation — not just voluntary corporate commitments — to expedite companies’ progress.
Of all the ways companies can make their plastic pledges more credible, McBee says her top recommendation is that they think beyond goals to reduce just their virgin plastic use, referring to plastics that are made directly from fossil fuels. Companies with such a goal tend to replace their virgin plastic with recycled material — a swap that may increase circularity, but does not address what As You Sow calls “a key driver of pollution”: the overuse of plastic.
Instead, As You Sow calls for companies to decrease their “plastic use intensity,” or the amount of plastic used for each dollar of revenue. This might be accomplished by redesigning packaging to have less surface area or thinner plastic layers, or by eliminating unnecessary types of plastic packaging.
Notably, reducing plastic use intensity is not the same as reducing net plastic use. If a company produces a lot more of a given product, its overall use of plastic packaging could grow even if it’s making less plastic per dollar earned. This is essentially what has happened with Coca-Cola, which said in its most recent sustainability report that it had “avoided half a million metric tons of virgin plastic” in 2022 but increased its total virgin plastic use due to “growth of plastic packaging.”
Plastic bottles of Coca-Cola and Sprite on a grocery store shelf.
Joe Raedle / Getty Images
McBee said absolute reduction targets would be ideal, but that intensity targets can give more flexibility to growing businesses. This is a position that is perhaps informed by As You Sow’s status as both a shareholder and an advocate. The organization buys shares in major companies and uses them as leverage, either to negotiate directly with executives or to file resolutions on environmental practices. As an advocacy group, As You Sow wants companies to adopt the most robust environmental policies; as a shareholder, McBee said As You Sow is “financially invested in the success of these companies.”
Valliant, with Beyond Plastics, pushed back on the idea of plastic intensity targets and called for “a solution that doesn’t bring more plastic into our lives and the planet and our bodies.”
“At the end of the day,” she told Grist, “we need less plastic overall.”
Either way, both McBee and Valliant agreed that companies should be investing more in reusable packaging and packaging-free product formats — for example, concentrated soap tablets that don’t need to come in a plastic bottle. Valliant said the need to prioritize reusable over recycled packaging is especially urgent given research suggesting that recycling plastic increases its toxicity.
As You Sow’s other recommendations for companies include eliminating toxic chemicals from plastic products, phasing out or dramatically reducing the use of flexible and multilaminate plastic packaging (like the plastic used in bags of potato chips), and making financial contributions to recycling infrastructure that are commensurate with the amount of plastic packaging they produce. To incentivize some of these measures, the report suggests that companies align CEO compensation with key benchmarks for circularity. According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, some companies like Mars and Coca-Cola are beginning to do this.
If the environmental costs of inaction on plastics aren’t persuasive enough, then perhaps the legal, regulatory, and reputational ones are. By failing to act more aggressively, companies may be exposing themselves to investigations and lawsuits from state attorneys general and to increasingly common bansand restrictions on whole categories of plastic. Plus, there’s the United Nations’ global plastics treaty, which environmental advocates are hoping will place a cap on the amount of plastic the world produces annually.
Stronger action on plastics can also appease consumers. According to McBee, customers are increasingly connecting the “ambiguous” issue of plastic pollution back to individual companies that are responsible for it. “They’re going out of their way to support the companies that are making a difference,” she said, “and facilitating the creation of the world they want to live in.”
Iceland has granted a 2024 whaling license to its one remaining whaling company, Hvalur hf., according to the government, drawing criticism from whale protection advocates.
The company will be allowed to kill 99 fin whales in West Iceland and Greenland and 29 of the gigantic mammals in East Iceland and the Faroe Islands, the fisheries ministry said, as Reuters reported.
“It’s ridiculous that in 2024 we’re talking about target lists for the second-largest animal on Earth, for products that nobody needs,” Patrick Ramage, director of International Fund for Animal Welfare, told Reuters.
In Iceland, the whaling season is from the middle of June to late September. Most of the whale meat is sold to Japan.
After Japan, Iceland is the second nation to allow the continuation of fin whaling this year.
During the mid-1900s, the whaling industry killed almost 725,000 fin whales in the Southern Hemisphere, NOAA Fisheries said. Though their numbers have improved and are said to be increasing since hunting bans were implemented by many countries during the 1970s, they are nowhere near what they once were.
A recent report by the food and veterinary authority of Iceland, Mast, said no significant improvement had been made to the animal welfare status of whale hunts last year compared with 2022, despite new regulations, The Guardian reported.
“It’s hard to fathom how and why this green light to kill 128 fin whales is being given,” Ramage said. “There is clearly no way to kill a whale at sea without inflicting unthinkable cruelty.”
The Mast report found that some whales who had been harpooned did not die for two hours. The report questioned if the hunting of large whales would ever be able to meet animal welfare standards.
“It is unbelievable and deeply disappointing that the Icelandic government has granted [this], defying extensive scientific and economic evidence against such actions,” said Luke McMillan, an anti-whaling activist with Whale and Dolphin Conservation, as reported by The Guardian.
On June 20 of last year, Iceland instituted a two-month suspension on whaling after a government-commissioned inquiry found that the hunting methods being used did not meet animal welfare laws, AFP reported.
In October, Hvalur said 24 whales had been killed during the shortened three-week whaling season.
Whether Bjarkey Olsen Gunnarsdottir, Iceland’s food, fisheries and agriculture minister, would grant a whale hunting license for this year’s season had been unclear.
“It is devastatingly disappointing that Minister Gunnarsdottir has set aside unequivocal scientific evidence demonstrating the brutality and cruelty of commercial whale killing and allowed whales to be killed for another year,” Adam Peyman, wildlife programs director for Humane Society International, told AFP.
“Whales already face myriad threats in the oceans from pollution, climate change, entanglement in fish nets and ship strikes, and fin whale victims of Iceland’s whaling fleet are considered globally vulnerable to extinction,” added Peyman.
The United States Supreme Court has asked the Biden administration to weigh in on oil companies’ efforts to avoid a lawsuit brought by Honolulu. The suit alleges the companies misled the public regarding the contribution of their fossil fuel emissions to climate change and could potentially cost them billions.
The request by the Supreme Court will delay the justices’ decision on whether to hear an appeal by the fossil fuel companies after Hawaii’s highest court ruled the litigation could go to trial.
“Big oil companies are fighting desperately to avoid trial in lawsuits like Honolulu’s, which would expose the evidence of the fossil fuel industry’s climate lies for the entire world to see,” said Richard Wiles, Center for Climate Integrity president, as reported by Reuters.
Defendants in the lawsuit include Sunoco, BP, Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhillips, Chevron, Shell, Marathon Petroleum and BHP Group.
The legal position of the Biden administration will be filed by the Justice Department’s solicitor general.
The original lawsuit — filed four years ago by the county and city of Honolulu, along with the city’s water supply board — said the oil majors’ misleading statements regarding the impact of their products opened the door for infrastructure and property damage brought about by human-induced climate change.
The Supreme Court’s order comes after conservative supporters of the companies published a host of advertisements and op-eds, The Guardian reported.
“I have never, ever seen this kind of overt political campaign to influence the court like this,” professor Patrick Parenteau, Vermont Law School senior climate policy fellow, expressed last week to The Guardian.
Climate litigation advocates have said the solicitor general should reject the petition and affirm the earlier decision of Hawaii’s supreme court.
American and Hawaiian flags atop the Ali’iolani Hale, the former royal residence and now Supreme Court of Hawaii. jewhyte / iStock / Getty Images Plus
Honolulu is one of many cities and states to have brought legal action against oil companies for concealing the hazards of their products.
The fossil fuel companies insisted federal law should govern the problem of greenhouse gas emissions.
“[T]he Hawaii Supreme Court’s decision flatly contradicts U.S. Supreme Court precedent and federal circuit court decisions, including the Second Circuit which held in dismissing New York City’s similar lawsuit, ‘such a sprawling case is simply beyond the limits of state law.’ These meritless state and local lawsuits violate the federal constitution and interfere with federal energy policy,” Chevron’s lawyer Ted Boutrous said in a statement, as reported by The Hill.
However, plaintiffs Honolulu and its water supply board said the suit is “not seeking to solve climate change or regulate emissions,” but trying to get big oil to “stop lying and pay their fair share of the damages they knowingly caused,” said Alyssa Johl, vice president and general counsel at the Center for Climate Integrity, as The Guardian reported.
Napa Valley, a famous wine region in northern California, is facing pollution risks from a local landfill.
The Clover Flat Landfill, which has been operating since the 1960s, is located near two streams that flow into the Napa River. According to a news report by The Guardian, the landfill may be contributing to pollution runoff into the nearby waterways.
The Napa River is an important source of water for local agriculture, including vineyards, as well as for recreation.
“The Napa valley is amongst the most high-value agricultural land in the country,” Geoff Ellsworth, the former mayor of St. Helena, a city in Napa County, and a former employee at the landfill, told The Guardian. “If there’s a contamination issue, the economic ripples are significant.”
Emails and reports from former employees and regulators have raised concerns over contamination from the landfill and waste company Upper Valley Disposal Services (UVDS), both of which were once owned by the Pestoni family, according to The Guardian.
As Waste Dive reported in 2022, the landfill and waste disposal service companies were acquired by Texas-based Waste Connections.
Christina Pestoni, the former chief operating officer for Upper Valley Disposal & Recycling and current director of government affairs for Waste Connections, previously shared a statement contradicting the claims made against the landfill and the waste disposal company, asserting that the companies complied with regulations and operated at the “highest environmental standards.” The statement specified that no waste from the Clover Flat Landfill reached or impacted the Napa River.
In December 2023, a group of 23 employees and former employees of the landfill and UVDS filed a complaint to the California Environmental Protection Agency over “impacts from concerning and unlawful environmental practices at UVDS/CFL” with complaints about treatment of Latino workers, threats of retaliation, exposure to untreated garbage wastewater, and ghost piping — which was described in the filed complaint as unmapped piping to divert wastewater and leachate into public waterways.
The complaint also raised concerns over per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) that were found in samples from the landfill’s leachate and groundwater and waste and compost fires that have broken out at the landfill, according to documents obtained by The New Lede, a reporting initiative from Environmental Working Group (EWG).
“Both UVDS and [CFL] have no business being in the grape-growing areas or at the top of the watershed of Napa county,” Frank Leeds, operator of an organic vineyard near UVDS, told The Guardian. “There are homes and vineyards all around that are affected by them.”
Eileen White, executive officer of the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board, told The Guardian that the potential environmental impacts liked to the landfill and UVDS are under investigation.
Since the 1980s, the 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River that connects New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, has been known as “Cancer Alley.” The name stems from the fact that the area’s residents have a 95 percent greater chance of developing cancer than the average American. A big reason for this is the concentration of industrial facilities along the corridor — particularly petrochemical manufacturing plants, many of which emit ethylene oxide, an extremely potent toxin that is considered a carcinogen by the Environmental Protection Agency and has been linked to breast and lung cancers.
But even though the general risks of living in the region have been clear for decades, the exact dangers are still coming into focus — and the latest data show that the EPA’s modeling has dramatically underestimated the levels of ethylene oxide in southeastern Louisiana. On average, according to a new study published on Tuesday, ethylene oxide levels in the heart of Cancer Alley are more than double the threshold above which the EPA considers cancer risk to be unacceptable.
To gather the new data, researchers from Johns Hopkins University drove highly sensitive air monitors along a planned route where a concentration of industrial facilities known to emit ethylene oxide are situated. The monitors detected levels that were as many as 10 times higher than EPA thresholds, and the researchers were able to detect plumes of the toxin spewing from the facilities from as many as seven miles away. The resulting measurements were significantly higher than the EPA and state environmental agency’s modeled emissions values for the area.
“From over two decades of doing these measurements, we’ve always found that the measured concentrations of pretty much every pollutant is higher than what we expect,” said Peter DeCarlo, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University and an author of the study. “In the case of ethylene oxide, this is particularly important because of the health risks associated with it at such low levels.”
There is no safe level of ethylene oxide exposure. The EPA calculates exposure thresholds for various chemicals by assessing the level at which it causes an increased incidence of cancer. For ethylene oxide, the EPA has determined that breathing in nearly 11 parts per trillion of the chemical for a lifetime can result in one additional case of cancer per 10,000 people. The higher the concentration, the higher the risk of cancer.
DeCarlo and his team found that, in three quarters of the regions where they collected data, ethylene oxide levels were above the 11 parts per trillion threshold. On average, the level was roughly 31 parts per trillion. In some extreme cases, they observed area averages above 109 parts per trillion. The findings were published in the peer-reviewed academic journal Environmental Science & Technology. The study was funded in part by Bloomberg Philanthropies, which launched a campaign in 2022 to block the construction and expansion of new petrochemical facilities.
“We definitely saw parts per billion levels at the fence line of some of these facilities, which means people inside the fence line — workers, for example — are getting exposed to much, much higher concentrations over the course of their day,” DeCarlo said.
Ethylene oxide is emitted from petrochemical manufacturing and plants that sterilize medical equipment. Earlier this year, the EPA finalized rules for ethylene oxide emissions from bothtypes of facilities. The rule that applies to the manufacturing facilities in Louisiana requires companies to install monitors and report data to the EPA and state environmental agency. If the monitors record concentrations above a certain “action level,” companies will be required to make repairs. The rule is expected to reduce emissions of ethylene oxide and chloroprene, another toxic chemical, by 80 percent. Companies have two years to comply.
Heather McTeer Toney, who heads the campaign against petrochemical facilities at Bloomberg Philanthropies, told Grist in an email that the new measurements provide a baseline understanding as the EPA’s new regulations take effect. “The EPA’s new rule was necessary but should only be the start of how we begin to make things right here,” she said. “I’m hopeful to see levels go down, but the data suggest we have a long way to go.”
Tracey Woodruff, a professor studying the impact of chemicals on health at the University of California in San Francisco, said that the study “affirms that EPA is doing the right thing to regulate” ethylene oxide and that the agency “needs to improve their modeling data.” The levels identified by the researchers are 9 times higher than those estimated by the EPA’s models.
For residents in the area, the study’s findings confirm their lived experience. Sharon Lavigne, the founder of Rise St. James, a community organization battling the expansion of the petrochemical industry in St. James Parish, told Grist that the study “is a step in the right direction” and helps the community get a deeper understanding of what they’re being exposed to. But ultimately, without accountability and follow-through, monitoring data will do little to help her family and neighbors.
“These monitors are good, but in the meantime, people are dying,” she said.
