![]() All told, this new investment is driving the world’s cumulative production of new plastic up so far that analysts warn there may not be enough demand from consumers. New plastic manufacturing plants, however, are also being built in China, and on the Gulf Coast. Plus, they add, constructing a new “plastics belt” in the Rust Belt will help diversify the industry and protect against the impacts of severe storms along the Gulf of Mexico, which are predicted to be strengthened by climate change. It’s better, in other words, to make plastic here than in places like China, with its infamous air pollution problems. ![]() Industry groups argue that a shale-fueled plastics boom is a positive thing for the world environment because plastic-makers in many other countries operate under less stringent environmental controls than American manufacturers. Shale drilling industry officials have been busy organizing marketing efforts to encourage the production of more plastics and petrochemicals - not only along the Gulf Coast, where communities have long borne the brunt of toxic pollution from petrochemical manufacturing, but also in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia. This story is part of Fracking for Plastics, a DeSmog investigation into the proposed petrochemical build-out in the U.S. and the major players involved, along with the environmental, health, and socio-economic implications. The goal? To create new demand from industry for the raw materials produced by fracked shale wells. In the U.S., however, a major push is underway - and attracting hundreds of billions in investment, both foreign and domestic - to move in the opposite direction and produce more plastics and other petrochemicals. “No country can effectively protect its citizens from those impacts on its own, and no global instrument exists today to fully address the toxic life cycle of plastics.” ![]() “Both the supply chains and the impacts of plastic cross and re-cross borders, continents, and oceans,” said David Azoulay, the center’s Director of Environmental Health. The scope of the risks requires an international response, the center said. People can be sickened not only when plastics are produced, in other words, but also while plastic is actively used by consumers and then again after it’s thrown out, where plastic trash often breaks down into smaller and smaller bits that can contaminate the food chain and make its way into people’s bodies. “At every stage of its life cycle, plastic poses distinct risks to human health, arising from both exposure to plastic particles themselves and associated chemicals.” “Until we confront the impacts of the full plastic lifecycle, the current piecemeal approach to addressing the plastic pollution crisis will not succeed,” the report concludes. The report concluded that plastics bring toxic or carcinogenic health risks to people at every stage. And a growing slice comes from fracked oil and gas wells and the natural gas liquids (NGLs) they produce. Virtually all plastic - 99 percent of it, according to the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) report - comes from fossil fuels. A new report traces the life cycle of plastic from the moment an oil and gas well is drilled to the time plastic trash breaks down in the environment, finding “distinct risks to human health” at every stage.
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