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Speech on Plastic Pollution

Long and Short Speech on Plastic Pollution

Plastic waste makes its way from our homes and workplaces to landfills and bodies of water, resulting in plastic contamination. There is an immediate need to correctly dispose of such plastic waste and to reduce its widespread usage in the interests of health and the environment. Here we have provided both long and short speeches on plastic pollution for students of Class 5 to 12 along with 10 lines for a speech on plastic for students of Class 1 to 4.

Long Speech on Pollution by Plastic Bags

Today, I am here to deliver a speech on plastic pollution. Plastic has very seriously impacted the health and life of human beings in the last decade. Several events have drawn the attention of the whole world and placed a question mark on the use of plastic in everyday life.

Plastic, the wonder material we use for anything that pollutes our atmosphere, is probably the most destructive waste deposited in the sea by sailors and sea-goers because it does not break down easily. The plastic that goes in the river today might still be around to ruin the fishing gear, ship propellers, and beaches for future generations.

Plastic is non-degradable material, it does not completely mix up with the natural elements unlike degradable materials like food, clothes, paper etc Hence, it persists in nature for a longer time than other materials. India generates around 9 million tons of plastic waste annually. It is so sad to know that 40% of the total waste generated is not even collected from the source. Most of the plastic waste generated is single-use plastic which is discarded by people with minimal use of it.

Plastics can be broadly divided into microplastics and macroplastics. Microplastics are smaller in particle size with less than five millimeters. They include microbeads that are used in making cosmetics, personal hygiene products, industries, and microfibers which are used for sanitation. On the other hand, macroplastics are particles with more than five millimeters. Comparatively, microplastics cause more damage as they are easily transferred from one trophic level to another trophic level.

According to the Central Pollution Control Board in India, we generate around 26,000 tons of all types of plastics every day and half of it is not even collected from the source. They choke the drains, get eaten by animals, enter the water resources and pollute the environment. On average, every Indian consumes 11 kgs of plastic every year. Though it is 10 times less than the USA, as India has more population, we seem to generate a lot of waste comparatively.

Careless plastic handling can have dire repercussions. For an indiscriminate feeder like the sea turtle, a plastic bag seems like a delicious jellyfish, but plastic is indigestible. It can choke, block the intestines of those animals that eat it or cause infection.

A plastic bag can clog the cooling system of an outboard engine as well. Monofilament fishing lines lost or discarded may foul propellers, break oil seals and lower engine units, or may become an enveloping web for fish, seabirds, and marine mammals.

More and more plastic is collected in our oceans every day. Recreational boaters are not the only party to dispose of plastic refuse at sea improperly. Through waste outfalls, merchant shipping, commercial fishing activities, and beachgoers, plastics are also entering the marine environment.

It is very flexible in the middle stage and, depending on temperature and pressure, any shape can be provided. In the practice of plastic waste preparation, urea, formaldehyde, polyethene, polystyrene, polycythylcholide, phenolic compounds and other substances are used.

The most widespread plastic contamination nowadays is caused by polyvinyl chloride (P.V.C.). The soluble chemical is eventually dissolved in them when any food substance or blood is deposited in the aforementioned plastic containers, causing death due to cancer and other skin diseases.

The fertility of animals and their respiratory systems have also been found to be destroyed by polyvinyl chloride. It causes paralysis when combined with water and also affects bones and causes skin irritation.

Here are several steps we should take to reverse the tide of harmful, non-biodegradable waste so that our world will not be overtaken by it.

Use of paper, canvas, and other healthy-fiber containers, placed produce.

Using bags of wax paper, cloth napkins, or reusable sandwich boxes (e.g., tiffins, described below).

Using bottles or cans of glass only.

We need to acknowledge that we only have one planet, which we are supposed to pass down to our future generations. It is our responsibility to keep it safe and clean.

Short Speech on Plastic Waste Management

Today, I am here to deliver a speech on plastic waste management. The influx of plastics into our environment has reached crisis levels, and it is evident through the pollution of our oceans. Up to 12 million metric tons of plastic are expected to flood our ocean each year.

Our oceans are increasingly becoming plastic broth, and the effect on the survival of the oceans is chilling. Discarded plastic fishing lines entangle turtles and seabirds, and bits of plastic of all sizes choke and clog the stomachs of animals, from small zooplankton to whales, which confuse it for food. Plastic is now entering all layers of the food chain and is even showing up on our plates with seafood.

Our world can no longer accept throw-away plastics as a society. Our landfills are being filled up with single-use plastics, choking our waterways, and contaminating our oceans. Corporations have been blaming us all for far too long to deal with their own failed design problem. We have been advised that citizens should simply recycle the billions of tons of output from plastic companies and that it will make the required difference to sustain our world.

We were told a lie.

There is no recycling of over 90 percent of plastics. Recycling alone will simply never solve this problem. A radical change in how they deliver goods to people must be faced with the size of the problem companies have developed. It is up to all of us to demand more, to tell these industrial companies that the plastics they impose on us will no longer be accepted. Our planet deserves better and if they fail to adapt, we don't need their goods.

For a lifetime, nothing that is used for a few minutes should end up polluting our oceans. It's time for us to denounce the old corporate story that we are content with a throw-away lifestyle and build a better future.

10 Lines for Speech on Plastic

Plastic is a synthetic substance that is non-bio-degradable.

We use it indiscriminately in almost all day-to-day products.

Environmental contamination comes from plastic accumulation.

Land, rivers and oceans are plagued by its accumulation.

It releases poisonous gases such as nitrogen oxide and sulphur dioxide upon burning.

It also contributes to the loss of marine life and wildlife.

We ought to use biodegradable materials instead of plastic.

It is compulsory to use advanced incinerators for successful waste disposal.

In the soil, chlorinated plastics emit harmful chemicals that seep into the groundwater and damage us.

If we want to preserve Mother Earth, we should stop using plastic and use only natural biodegradable materials.

FAQs on Speech on Plastic Pollution

1. What are the sources of Plastic Waste?

One major invention that changed the entire manufacturing sector and industries is “Plastic”. It helped in increasing the concept of consumerism as plastic is cheap and has many advantages to use in industries compared to its alternatives. Following are the major sources of plastic:

Most of the plastic debris is found in ocean and land base

They enter the ocean or wastelands from the urban and stormwater runoff from the towns and cities.

Inadequate waste management plans, improper disposal of waste materials also contribute to this issue

Main sources for ocean-based plastic pollution are the fishing industry, aquaculture, naval activity, letting the wastewater from nearby places into the water bodies

When the UV rays, wind and other agents act on the plastics, they remove the plastics and turn them into microplastics which are comparatively much more harmful.

2. What are the impacts of Plastic Waste?

Plastic is a non-biodegradable substance. They either take a lot of time to get degraded or they never get degraded completely. Hence they lead to persistent ill effects on the environment including biotic and abiotic components. Following are some of the effects:

Plastics that persist on the shoreline will ruin the scenery of the beach and damage the revenue obtained from the tourism sector of a place

When plastic is ingested by aquatic animals, they get stuck in the digestive tract and leading to their death or starvation.

Animals can get trapped in the plastic materials like bottles and covers. They can not come out by themselves and thus die due to suffocation and starvation

Plastics can have toxic elements and thus they damage the vital organs of the animals. Sometimes plastics have carcinogenic agents leading to the death of the living being

Chemicals and toxins that are leached from the plastics might contain anti-androgen and other hormones that affect the human reproductive system badly.

The toxins leached from the plastic enter the land, water and other natural resources and pollute them. They turn unfit for human consumption.

3. What are the measures taken to reduce the Pollution caused by Plastic?

Plastic pollution affects not only the finite natural resources but also animals, plants and humans directly. Following are the measures to reduce plastic pollution:

Most of the plastic items we use in our daily life are single-use plastics. Try to trace such items and replace them with reusable alternatives.

20 billion plastic bottles are generated every year and simply tossed after using them. Try to replace them and carry your bottle when you go out

Microbeads are a type of microplastics, they are used in scrubs, cosmetics and many personal hygiene products. They are very minute and cause enormous damage to the animals, especially to the aquatic animals when they are consumed. Try buying products that do not have microbeads.

4. What is the International Agreements made to control Plastic Pollution?

Plastic pollution is a much wider issue and requires a global solution. Any effect of pollution is felt across the geographical area. Hence international cooperation is needed to control plastic pollution. Following are some of the measures and targets taken up to control plastic pollution:

170 countries have decided to reduce plastic usage by 2030. This was done after the UN assembly held at Nairobi.

Initially, an attempt was made to ban single-use plastic by 2025 but this was discarded by many members

Plastic wastes are considered harmful under the Basel Convention and measures were taken to stop dumping them into water resources and targets were fixed accordingly.

5. How are Plastics made?

The use of plastic has changed the entire production process. It has reduced our dependence on paper to some extent and we need to cut down the trees. But excessive dependence and improper waste management mechanisms led to plastic pollution. Plastic is made from oil, natural gas and plants which are processed into ethane and propane. These elements are further treated by applying enormous heat energy to convert them into ethylene and propylene. Several ethylene and other materials are combined to form “polymers”. It is sent into an extruder and then into a pipe after melting. They're made into tubes, cubes after settling them down.

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Green Cities

Don’t let the plastic get into the ocean.

Don’t Let the Plastic…

May 2, 2018

Water: If you use a reusable water bottle, you personally could avoid an average of 156 plastic bottles annually—this sounds like a small thing but it’s doing your part and multiply it by everyone in your office, home, or school, and it really starts to add up. Likewise, bring your coffee mug with you—the go-cup might be paper, but the lid is probably not.
Carriers: Bringing your own bag to shop (and carrying one with you just in case) can help make a dent in those 4 trillion plastic bags used each year. Bag fees and bag bans do work to reduce waste—with immediate effect on cleanup statistics as to what is collected following their implementation.
Straws: Remembering to ask for no straw can become a habit. Straws only by request is a huge first step—and a great thing to ask of your favorite restaurant. Paper and reusable straws are an option too—and the movement is slowly growing.
Clothing: Limit how often you wash synthetic clothing, including fleece. Seek out natural fibers (bamboo, cotton, wool, etc.).
Entertainment: Remember our roots—we can use glasses, cloth napkins, and real cutlery at events as much as we can. We can use compostable tableware, napkins, and other products (and compost them).
Prevention: Beach, stream, and river clean ups actually help, even though they seem like a drop in the bucket. Many organizations host regular clean ups and we need everyone to pitch in and pick up in their own neighborhood.
multiple movies, events, and other outreach seems to have drastically increased ocean plastics awareness,
educated/mobilized citizens demand less plastic, and
increased public awareness of the role of NGOs in working towards change, especially where NGOs are working with governments at every level in Southeast Asian countries, and
increasing the public expectation that solutions will be implemented.
aim to PREVENT the generation of waste
contribute to the REUSE of waste
REDUCE the adverse effects of waste management
Earth Day Network
end plastic pollution

The World's Plastic Pollution Crisis Explained

Much of the planet is swimming in discarded plastic, which is harming animal and possibly human health. Can it be cleaned up?

Conservation

Children Play among Plastic

While plastic pollution is a worldwide problem it is most obvious in less-wealthy African and Asian nations, like the Philippines. Here, children play among plastic waste on the shore of Manila Bay.

Photograph by Randy Olson

Plastic pollution has become one of the most pressing environmental issues, as rapidly increasing production of disposable plastic products overwhelms the world’s ability to deal with them. Plastic pollution is most visible in less-wealthy Asian and African nations, where garbage collection systems are often inefficient or nonexistent. But wealthy nations, especially those with low recycling rates, also have trouble properly collecting discarded plastics. Plastic trash has become so ubiquitous it has prompted efforts to write a global treaty negotiated by the United Nations. How Did this Happen? Plastics made from fossil fuels are just over a century old. Production and development of thousands of new plastic products accelerated after World War II to the extent that life without plastics would be unimaginable today. Plastics revolutionized medicine with life-saving devices, made space travel possible, lightened cars and jets—saving fuel and lessening pollution —and saved lives with helmets, incubators , and equipment for clean drinking water. The conveniences plastics offer, however, led to a throw-away culture that reveals the material’s dark side: Today, single-use plastics account for 40 percent of the plastic produced every year. Many of these products, such as plastic bags and food wrappers, are used for mere minutes to hours, yet they may persist in the environment for hundreds of years. Plastics by the Numbers Some key facts:

Half of all plastics ever manufactured have been made in the last 15 years.
Production increased exponentially, from 2.3 million tons in 1950 to 448 million tons by 2015. Production is expected to double by 2050.
Every year, about 8 million tons of plastic waste escapes into the oceans from coastal nations. That’s the equivalent of setting five garbage bags full of trash on every foot of coastline around the world.
Plastics often contain additives making them stronger, more flexible, and durable. But many of these additives can extend the life of products if they become litter, with some estimates ranging to at least 400 years to break down.

How Plastics Move around the World Most of the plastic trash in the oceans, Earth’s last sink, flows from land. Trash is also carried to sea by major rivers, which act as conveyor belts, picking up more and more trash as they move downstream . Once at sea, much of the plastic trash remains in coastal waters. But once caught up in ocean currents, it can be transported around the world. On Henderson Island, an uninhabited atoll in the Pitcairn Group isolated halfway between Chile and New Zealand, scientists found plastic items from Russia, the United States, Europe, South America, Japan, and China. They were carried to the South Pacific by the South Pacific gyre , a circular ocean current. Microplastics Once at sea, sunlight, wind, and wave action break down plastic waste into small particles, often less than half a centimer (one-fifth of an inch) across. These so-called microplastics are spread throughout the water column and have been found in every corner of the globe, from Mount Everest, the highest peak, to the Mariana Trench, the deepest trough . Microplastics are breaking down further into smaller and smaller pieces. Plastic microfibers (or the even smaller nanofibers), meanwhile, have been found in municipal drinking water systems and drifting through the air. Harm to Wildlife Millions of animals are killed by plastics every year, from birds to fish to other marine organisms. Nearly 700 species, including endangered ones, are known to have been affected by plastics. Nearly every species of seabird eats plastics. Most of the deaths to animals are caused by entanglement or starvation. Seals, whales, turtles, and other animals are strangled by abandoned fishing gear or discarded six-pack rings. Microplastics have been found in more than 100 aquatic species, including fish, shrimp, and mussels destined for our dinner plates. In many cases, these tiny bits pass through the digestive system and are expelled without consequence. But plastics have also been found to have blocked digestive tracts or pierced organs, causing death. Stomachs so packed with plastics reduce the urge to eat, causing starvation. Plastics have been consumed by land-based animals, including elephants, hyenas, zebras, tigers, camels, cattle, and other large mammals, in some cases causing death. Tests have also confirmed liver and cell damage and disruptions to reproductive systems , prompting some species, such as oysters, to produce fewer eggs. New research shows that larval fish are eating nanofibers in the first days of life, raising new questions about the effects of plastics on fish populations. Stemming the Plastic Tide Once in the ocean, it is difficult—if not impossible—to retrieve plastic waste. Mechanical systems, such as Mr. Trash Wheel, a litter interceptor in Maryland’s Baltimore Harbor, can be effective at picking up large pieces of plastic, such as foam cups and food containers, from inland waters. But once plastics break down into microplastics and drift throughout the water column in the open ocean, they are virtually impossible to recover. The solution is to prevent plastic waste from entering rivers and seas in the first place, many scientists and conservationists—including the National Geographic Society—say. This could be accomplished with improved waste management systems and recycling, better product design that takes into account the short life of disposable packaging, and reduction in manufacturing of unnecessary single-use plastics.

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Yale Climate Connections

How plastics contribute to climate change

The problem starts with extraction and transportation

“When people think about plastics, they really don’t tend to think about the beginning of its life cycle. And the beginning of its life cycle really begins with oil and gas development,” said Matt Kelso, manager of data and technology at FracTracker Alliance, a nonprofit that addresses extraction concerns in the United States. He co-authored the extraction and transport section of the report.

Oil, gas, and coal are the fossil-fuel building blocks of plastics. Natural gas and oil can be extracted from the earth through fracking. Companies drill wells into the ground until they hit a rock layer, then they turn 90 degrees and drill horizontally. Injecting sand, chemicals, or water breaks up the rock to release gas and oil, which are transported to other facilities via pipelines, trains, and trucks.

Extraction and transportation of these fossil fuels is a carbon-intensive activity. Authors of the CIEL report estimated that 12.5 to 13.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent are emitted per year while extracting and transporting natural gas to create feedstocks for plastics in the United States.

Land disturbance also contributes to greenhouse gas emissions associated with extraction. Kelso said each mile of pipeline must be surrounded by a “right of way” zone of cleared land. About 19.2 million acres have been cleared for oil and gas development in the United States. Assuming just a third of the impacted land is forested, 1.686 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere as a result of clearing, authors of the CIEL report said.

“These figures really add up over time because you’re talking about millions of miles of pipelines in the United States,” Kelso said. “You have to clear cut. So you’re taking all of the carbon from the trees and from soils and removing that from the earth basically and introducing it to the atmosphere.”

Refining and manufacturing cranks up emissions

Plastics refining is also greenhouse-gas intensive. In 2015, emissions from manufacturing ethylene, the building block for polyethylene plastics, were 184.3 to 213 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, which is about as much as 45 million passenger vehicles emit during one year, according to the CIEL report. Globally, carbon dioxide emissions from ethylene production are projected to expand by 34% between 2015 and 2030.

Waste management affects community health

Globally, about 40% of plastics are used as packaging. Usually, packaging is meant for a single use, so there’s a quick turnaround to disposal. This packaging can be processed in three different ways: landfill, incineration, or recycling.

Waste incineration has the largest climate impact of the three options. According to the CIEL report, U.S. emissions from plastics incineration in 2015 were 5.9 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. Based on projections from the World Energy Council, if plastics production and incineration increase as expected, greenhouse gas emissions will increase to 49 million metric tons by 2030 and 91 million metric tons by 2050.

The climate impact isn’t the only concern. Incineration facilities are disproportionately built near communities of color and low-income populations.

“Incineration is a massive environmental injustice – not just in the United States, but all over the world,” Arkin said. “The people who are subjected to the pollution from these incinerators often are the ones who are least responsible for the waste in the first place and have to bear the brunt of the impacts.”

Burning waste can release thousands of pollutants. Incinerator workers and people living near facilities are particularly at risk to exposures.

Landfilling has a much lower climate impact than incineration. But the placement of landfills can be associated with similar environmental injustices.

Recycling is a different beast with an entirely different set of problems. Compared to the low costs of virgin materials, recycled plastics are high cost with low commercial value. This makes recycling profitable only rarely, so it requires considerable government subsidies.

Research from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation suggests that only 2% of plastics are recycled into products with the same function. Another 8% are “downcycled” to something of lower quality. The rest is landfilled, leaked into the environment, or incinerated.

Recycling facilities also commonly receive low-quality materials. Wishful recycling makes people recycle items that they think should be recyclable but are actually not. This puts a huge responsibility on the recycling facilities to process and sort the waste.

For many years, the United States and many other Western countries sent a lot of their contaminated waste to China, transferring the responsibility of waste management. In 2018, China closed its doors to the West’s contaminated recycling. Rather than increasing domestic recycling capacity, the United States now sends the waste to other countries like Thailand, Malaysia, and Vietnam. But some of these countries have started to turn down Western recycling, too.

Recycling could be an important bridge on the way to waste reduction, but Arkin said the Western world needs to address its plastics addiction at the source.

“We can’t recycle our way out of the plastic pollution crisis,” Arkin said. “There’s simply too much plastic – single-use plastic – being produced and consumed.”

When plastics enter the environment, they don’t stop polluting

After plastics have been used, people may dump them into the environment, sometimes purposefully and other times accidentally. Even if plastics go to a landfill, some are light enough to blow in the wind and enter waterways.

Plastics can break down into smaller pieces, called microplastics, through biodegradation or exposure to the sun, heat, or water. These microplastics scatter across the globe, even to the depths of the ocean. Toxic chemicals can bind to microplastics and create poison pills that aquatic animals eat. Plastics also harm animals through entanglement and ingestion at all levels of the food chain.

Sarah-Jeanne Royer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography has found that low-density polyethylene – one of the most common types of plastics found in the ocean – releases greenhouse gases as it breaks down in the environment.

But beyond the direct emissions from plastics in the environment, there’s another issue with microplastics. Historically, the ocean has sequestered 30-50% of carbon dioxide emissions from human-related activities. However, evidence suggests that plankton are ingesting ever-greater quantities of microplastics.

Researchers at the Ocean University of China found that microplastics reduced the growth of microalgae and the efficiency of photosynthesis. So producing more microplastics could degrade plankton’s ability to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

What is the solution?

For every phase of the plastics life cycle, there are ways to reduce emissions. But it may take systemic shifts to slow the growth of plastics production. For example, some advocate for using bio-based feedstocks to reduce emissions in the refining stage. According to 2018 analysis by Material Economics – a sustainability management consulting firm – using only zero-carbon energy sources, such as wind and solar, in the manufacturing phase would decrease overall emissions by 50%. That may not be enough to offset emissions associated with the rapid rise of plastics production.

When developing solutions, it’s important to think critically about the materials that will replace plastics. Authors of a 2011 study from the Environment Agency in the United Kingdom assessed the life cycle environmental impacts of different bags – such as paper, plastic, and cotton – used in U.K. grocery stores. Their study found that the key to reducing global warming impact is to reuse the bags as many times as possible. But the number of times the bag must be reused depends on the material it’s made from. The paper and cotton bags need to be reused three and 131 times respectively to ensure their global warming potential is lower than a typical plastic grocery bag.

Ultimately, cutting emissions associated with plastics may require an all-of-the-above strategy: reducing waste, retaining materials by refurbishing or remanufacturing, and recycling. Under this type of circular business model, authors of the CIEL report say carbon dioxide emissions would decrease by 62 million metric tons per year.

Brooke Bauman is an intern at YCC and a student at UNC-Chapel Hill studying environmental science, geography, and journalism.

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Speech On Beat Plastic Pollution for Students and Children in English

February 8, 2024 by Prasanna

Speech On Beat Plastic Pollution: Plastic pollution can be defined as the build-up of plastic or plastic materials or particles in the Earth’s environment, which harms nature, living organisms, ecosystems, and wildlife.

Plastic acting as pollutants can be classified into micro and meso, or micro debris based on the size. One of the leading causes of marine litter is plastic waste, as the countries that import plastic waste are not capable of processing all the material. A ban has been imposed on synthetic waste trade by the United Nations unless it meets a few criteria.

Students can also find more English Speech Writing about Welcome Speeches, Farewell Speeches, etc

Long and Short Speeches On Beat Plastic Pollution for Kids And Students in English

We are providing a long Speech On Beat Plastic Pollution of 500 words and a short Speech On Beat Plastic Pollution of 150 words on the same topic along with ten lines about the issue to help readers.

These speeches will be helpful for students and organisations to understand the serious threat that is being imposed on the environment due to plastic waste trade. These speeches can also help in creating awareness about the terrible effects of plastic waste on the environment.

A Long Speech On Beat Plastic Pollution is helpful to students of classes 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12. A Short Speech On Beat Plastic Pollution is helpful to students of classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.

Long Speech On Beat Plastic Pollution 500 Words In English

Greetings and Salutation!

Plastic pollution in today’s world has become one of the most alarming environmental issues. The world is being overburdened with the rapid increase in the production of disposable plastic products.

Plastics are low-cost and long-lasting, which leads to high plastic production by humans. The chemical structure of plastics makes them resistant to many natural processes of degradation. As a result of which they are not easily degraded.

Plastic becomes a problem as it acts like a sponge. It soaks up other toxic chemicals and pollutants present in the ocean. Eventually, when the plastic breaks down, these chemical and harmful substances get released into the environment along with additives such as colour, which turns out to be highly toxic.

After World War II, the production and development of numerous new plastic products had been accelerated. In the modern age, life without plastic is unimaginable. Even though plastic was very convenient, as people started engaging in the throw-away culture, the dark side of the product was disclosed. The lifespan of many plastic products, such as plastic bags or polythene, is of mere minutes to hours. However, they persist in the environment for hundreds of years.

Major rivers act as conveyor belts carrying the trash, which includes plastic waste into the seas. Once the plastic trash reaches the sea, it remains in the coastal waters. However, if it gets caught in ocean currents, it can be transported around the globe.

Every single year millions of birds, animals, fishes, and other marine organisms are being killed due to plastic. Plastic is known to have affected around 700 species, including endangered ones. Almost every species of sea bird eats plastic.

Entanglement and starvation is the primary cause for the death of the marine animals. Plastics have been found to have blocked digestive tract or torn organs, causing death. Starvation was created as the stomachs were filled with plastics, which reduced the urge to eat. Land-based animals such as elephants, zebras, tigers, camels, etc. have consumed plastic and, in some cases, died.

Plastic also hampers human lives in many ways. One of them being that most of the food that we consume comes in plastic containers that contain BPAs. It is an endocrine disruptor. The body functions that are regulated by the human endocrine system are metabolism, heart rate, digestion, and fertility.

Research done in the year 2018 by the World Health Organisation (WHO) showed that 90% of the bottled water that people consume had microplastics in them. Although the effect of microplastics on human health is not known as such, scientists agree that as microplastics hurt the health of other species, it can’t be good for us as well.

Burning trash in the open air is a widespread practice in many parts of the world where there is no proper waste management system. This practice allows chemicals from plastic that are released during the process to enter our bodies even when we naturally are breathing.

Short Speech On Beat Plastic Pollution 150 Words In English

Good morning to everyone present here.

Plastic pollution is the collection of plastic in the environment, which adversely affects ecosystems and wildlife. The developing Asian and African countries are where plastic pollution is the most visible as the garbage collection systems are non-existent or not very efficient.

Every year the world produces 380 million tons of plastic entering the surroundings eventually, which may end up as pollutants.

Even though the burning of plastic reduces the amount of trash being dumped into the oceans and lands, it still generates toxic fumes, which also contribute as greenhouse gases.

Plastics and plastic products are present everywhere. These products are approximately used only once before they end up as wastes.

Plastic is an epidemic and does not have any particular solution to its pollution. 10% of the total waste that we generate is plastic. Reusing, recycling, and reducing plastic waste are the most efficient ways to protect from plastic pollution.

10 Lines On Beat Plastic Pollution Speech In English

In the last 15 years, almost 50% of all the plastics that was ever produced since mankind has been manufactured.
From 2.3 million tons in the year 1950, the production rate exponentially increased to 448 million tons by 2015.
By the year 2050, the production of plastic is expected to be doubled.
Plastic is around 73% of the beach litter worldwide.
Each year an average person eats 70000 microplastics.
Every year nearly 1.1 million birds and animals are being killed by plastic.
It is illegal to use plastic in a few parts of the world.
2 million plastic bags are used every day worldwide.
There are a few types of plastics that are not recyclable.
More than 5 trillion pieces of plastic are floating in the oceans.

FAQ’s On Beat Plastic Pollution Speech

Question 1. What is the solution to throw away or single-use plastics?

Answer: Products need to be made with reusable materials; the packaging should be plastic-free. Companies need to rethink and bring sustainable products to customers.

Question 2. Discuss the biodegradability of plastics.

Answer: Some plastics are biodegradable, and some are not. It also depends on the place where the plastic ends up. A few plastics can be degraded to a significant degree very slowly when exposed to water or air or light. Many are not degraded at all, even on exposure.

Question 3. What are the products of recycled plastic?

Answer: Plastic can be recycled to make furniture, cooking utensils, new packaging, and even used in fashion. Plastic that remains non-recycled can be used as fuel.

Question 4. What can a person do to help in reducing plastic pollution?

Answer: A person can contribute to reducing plastic pollution by:

Switching from plastic bags to reusable bags whenever shopping.
Replacing plastic bottles and cups with aluminium bottles and reusable containers, respectively.
Skipping straws and using reusable straws.
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Children play on the shore of Manila Bay in the Philippines, which is polluted by plastic waste.

ENVIRONMENT

The world's plastic pollution crisis, explained

Much of the planet is swimming in discarded plastic, which is harming animal and possibly human health. Can it be cleaned up?

Why was plastic invented?

Plastics made from fossil fuels are just over a century old. Production and development of thousands of new plastic products accelerated after World War II, so transforming the modern age that life without plastics would be unrecognizable today. In plastic, inventors found a light, durable material that can be used in everything from transportation to medicine.

Plastics revolutionized medicine with life-saving devices, made space travel possible, lightened cars and jets—saving fuel and pollution—and saved lives with helmets, incubators, and equipment for clean drinking water.

The conveniences plastics offer, however, led to a throw-away culture that reveals the material’s dark side: today, single-use plastics account for 40 percent of the plastic produced every year. Many of these products, such as plastic bags and food wrappers, have a lifespan of mere minutes to hours, yet they may persist in the environment for hundreds of years.

Plastics by the numbers

Some key facts:

Half of all plastics ever manufactured have been made in the last 20 years.
Production increased exponentially, from 2.3 million tons in 1950 to 448 million tons by 2015. Production is expected to double by 2050.
Every year, about eight million tons of plastic waste escapes into the oceans from coastal nations. That’s the equivalent of setting five garbage bags full of trash on every foot of coastline around the world.
Plastics often contain additives making them stronger, more flexible, and durable. But many of these additives can extend the life of products if they become litter, with some estimates ranging to at least 400 years to break down.

How plastics move around the world

Most of the plastic trash in the oceans, Earth’s last sink, flows from land. Trash is also carried to sea by major rivers , which act as conveyor belts, picking up more and more trash as they move downstream. Once at sea, much of the plastic trash remains in coastal waters. But once caught up in ocean currents, it can be transported around the world.

On Henderson Island , an uninhabited atoll in the Pitcairn Group isolated halfway between Chile and New Zealand, scientists found plastic items from Russia, the United States, Europe, South America, Japan, and China. They were carried to the South Pacific by the South Pacific gyre, a circular ocean current.

Microplastics—a new health threat

Once at sea, sunlight, wind, and wave action break down plastic waste into small particles, often less than one-fifth of an inch across. These so-called microplastics are spread throughout the water column and have been found in every corner of the globe, from Mount Everest, the highest peak, to the Mariana Trench , the deepest trough.

The world’s nations agree to fix the plastic waste crisis

speech on pollution caused by plastic bags

How a dramatic win in plastic waste case may curb ocean pollution

The Haunting Art of Plastic Pollution

Microplastics are breaking down further into smaller and smaller pieces. Plastic microfibers, meanwhile, have been found in municipal drinking water systems and drifting through the air.

It's no surprise then that scientists have found microplastics in people. The tiny particles are in our blood, lungs, and even in feces . Exactly how much microplastics might be harming human health is a question scientists are urgently trying to answer. ( Learn more. )

Harm to wildlife

Millions of animals are killed by plastics every year, from birds to fish to other marine organisms. Nearly 700 species, including endangered ones, are known to have been affected by plastics. Nearly every species of seabird eats plastics.

Most of the deaths to animals are caused by entanglement or starvation. Seals, whales , turtles, and other animals are strangled by abandoned fishing gear or discarded six-pack rings . Microplastics have been found in more than 100 aquatic species, including fish, shrimp, and mussels destined for our dinner plates. In many cases, these tiny bits pass through the digestive system and are expelled without consequence. But plastics have also been found to have blocked digestive tracts or pierced organs, causing death. Stomachs so packed with plastics reduce the urge to eat, causing starvation.

Plastics have been consumed by land-based animals, including elephants, hyenas, zebras, tigers, camels, cattle, and other large mammals, in some cases causing death .

Tests have also confirmed liver and cell damage and disruptions to reproductive systems, prompting some species, such as oysters, to produce fewer eggs. New research shows that larval fish are eating nanofibers in the first days of life, raising new questions about the effects of plastics on fish populations.

Stopping plastic pollution

Once in the ocean, it is difficult—if not impossible—to retrieve plastic waste. Mechanical systems, such as Mr. Trash Wheel , a litter interceptor in Maryland’s Baltimore Harbor, can be effective at picking up large pieces of plastic, such as foam cups and food containers, from inland waters. But once plastics break down into microplastics and drift throughout the water column in the open ocean, they are virtually impossible to recover.

The solution is to prevent plastic waste from entering rivers and seas in the first place, many scientists and conservationists—including the National Geographic Society —say. This could be accomplished with improved waste management systems and recycling , better product design that takes into account the short life of disposable packaging, and a reduction in manufacturing of unnecessary single-use plastics.

We Made Plastic. We Depend on It. Now We’re Drowning in It.

In a first, microplastic particles have been linked to heart disease

One Stanley bottle helps the environment. But a whole collection?

‘Forever chemicals’ are hiding in your kitchen. Here’s where—and what you can do

We got rid of BPA in some products—but are the substitutes any safer?

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Expert Commentary

The good and the bad of plastic bag bans: Research review

Government bans on lightweight plastic shopping bags have spread in recent years amid fears about plastic’s negative impact on the environment. But alternatives are not necessarily better.

Republish this article

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License .

by David Trilling, The Journalist's Resource December 13, 2016

This <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org/environment/plastic-bag-bans-grocery-shopping-environment/">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org">The Journalist's Resource</a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.<img src="https://journalistsresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/cropped-jr-favicon-150x150.png" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

Plastic bags kill wildlife, clog waterways and pack landfills. Discarded bags can spread malaria if they collect rainwater, offering mosquitos a casual breeding ground. In recent years, local and national governments have begun phasing out or banning lightweight plastic shopping bags. But alternatives are not necessarily greener: People buy more plastic trash bags when shopping bags are unavailable. And a British government study found single-use paper bags contribute more toward global warming than plastic bags.

Not so straightforward:

For some activists, the effort to reduce the use of plastic shopping bags is both urgent and too late. According to a 2008 estimate in Waste Management, people around the world discard between 500 billion and 1 trillion plastic bags a year. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) lists single-use plastic bags as a major contributor, along with food wrappers and fishing nets, to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — vast, shifting waves of trash that often arrive via storm drains and rivers and can entangle marine life or be ingested . According to a 2014 estimate published in PLOS ONE , more than 5 trillion pieces of plastic (not all from bags) weighing a combined 250,000 tons are floating in the world’s oceans.

Yet substitutes also offer cause for concern. A comprehensive 2011 study by the British environmental agency argued that plastic bags are greener than many alternatives. A paper bag must be used four or more times “to reduce its global warming potential to below” that of conventional plastic bags. The reason is that paper production — from the felling of trees to the emissions and effluent from paper factories — is dirty. The study found “no significant reuse of paper bags,” not even as trash-can liners.

Legislation:

With a referendum in November 2016, California became the first state to ban single-use plastic bags, according to the National Conference on State Legislatures, which keeps an active list of American laws. Thicker, reusable bags are still available for purchase for 10 cents. Before California, cities often organized the bans: In 2016, for example, Cambridge became the first Massachusetts city to ban plastic bags altogether and require merchants to offer paper bags for a fee of no less than 10 cents. By contrast, Missouri’s legislature in 2015 forbid cities and counties in the state from enacting plastic bag bans.

The European Union passed legislation in 2015 aiming to cut plastic bag use in half by 2019 and half again by 2025. E.U.-member France went further, banning single-use plastic bags on July 1, 2016, and phasing in other , more restrictive bans in the upcoming years – including the prohibition of plastic cooking utensils by 2020.

Do these bans work? They do appear to reduce the number of shopping bags used, but the effect on demand for (potentially pernicious) alternatives is unknown.

Five years after Ireland instituted a 15 Euro cent levy on plastic bags in 2002 – Irish stores had been giving out 1.2 billion each year for free – a paper published in Environmental and Resource Economics suggested a 90 percent reduction in use.
One year after its ban San Jose reported “a reduction in bag litter of approximately 89 percent in the storm drain system, 60 percent in the creeks and rivers, and 59 percent in city streets and neighborhoods.”
Researchers at Cardiff University, in the United Kingdom, found that a fee for plastic bags introduced in October 2015 has led to a sharp decline in the number of shoppers who take single-use bags at checkout, from 25 percent to 7 percent after one year.
China, which banned many types of plastic bags in 2008, claims some successes. But some reports suggest the rule has been difficult to enforce.

Academics have measured consumer behavior and public opinion on plastic bags in many countries, including Turkey , Uganda and Canada . A 2016 study in Social Marketing Quarterly examines how shoppers respond to different incentives for bringing their own shopping bags – such as avoiding a fee or paying a tax – and remarks “that a penalty framed as a tax may be more effective in motivating shoppers to bring reusable bags.”

“Biodegradable” plastic bags:

In 2010, raw plastics production in the U.S. used the energy and natural gas equivalent of 172 million barrels of oil, government figures suggest. But some newer plastics are made from vegetable matter, allowing manufacturers to claim their plastics are biodegradable. In theory, that means these plastics can be used to feed bacteria that convert them into water, carbon dioxide and biological matter. But the process rarely works in a landfill – these products need to be composted with the right microbes. When they’re not, they may not break down at all or can release methane, a greenhouse gas. So-called starch-polyester bags, made from a blend of vegetable matter and synthetic plastics, had the highest global warming impact in the 2011 study conducted by the British environmental agency “due to the high impacts of raw material production, transport and the generation of methane from landfill[s].”

The European Union hosts an online forum to discuss biodegradable plastic bags.

Researchers have looked into the policy challenges of biodegradable plastics, how they break down in the ocean and wider environmental impacts .

Our health:

Besides assuming a deviant place in marine ecosystems, there are concerns about the synthetic compounds in plastic that may be oozing into our food. One of the main building blocks of plastics, bisphenol A (also known as BPA), has been shown to stimulate breast cancer cells and damage the quality of rat sperm. Phthalates are another subject of disquiet.

Microbeads:

Another plastic causing concern is the microbeads found in some exfoliating facial scrubs and toothpastes, which are rinsed down drains into rivers, lakes and oceans . A 2015 study in the Marine Pollution Bulletin estimated that between 4,594 and 94,500 microplastic particles pass into the sewer during each use (between 16 and 86 metric tons annually in Britain alone). A forthcoming study in Chemosphere finds that microbeads do not accumulate in the gut when fed to goldfish, though both studies recognize their chemical effect in the food chain is unknown. In 2015, President Obama signed the Microbead-Free Waters Act to ban microbeads in hygienic products, though they continue to be used in other countries.

Arguments for plastic:

Proponents of plastic bags argue that they are hygienic and cheap and preserve foods that would otherwise spoil. A number of lobbies have worked to confound legislation that would reduce the availability of plastic bags. In California, for example, The Washington Pos t found that the American Progressive Bag Alliance – a Washington-based group run by a plastics lobby – spent over $3 million in the fourth quarter of 2014 to oppose California’s attempts then to legislate a ban.

Plasticfilmrecycling.org (a project of the American Chemistry Council ) is supported with funds from large multinationals like Dow Chemical and ExxonMobil. Some organizations – such as the Plastics Industry Association , which directs visitors to the American Progressive Bag Alliance and bagtheban.com — support recycling as a solution, rather than less plastic.

Plastic shopping bags are widely reused as trash-can liners, the British environmental agency study points out. When they are banned, the study adds, consumers purchase more plastic trash bags: “The reuse of conventional HDPE [plastic] and other lightweight carrier bags for shopping and/or as bin-liners is pivotal to their environmental performance and reuse as bin liners produces greater benefits than recycling bags.”

Anti-plastic lobbying and activism:

The California plastic bag ban received support from the California Grocers Association . Grocery stores stood to benefit because the law mandated they charge 10 cents for reusable bags.

The American Forest and Paper Association argues for the use of paper bags and against the imposition of fees on paper bags.
A website – plasticbaglaws.org – founded by a California lawyer who consults for activist organizations, has a number of useful links .
The Worldwatch Institute , another nonprofit campaigner, estimates at least 267 animal species have suffered “from entanglement or ingestion of marine debris, and plastics and other synthetic materials.”

Other resources:

This 2011 E.U. study shows, among other things, that residents of eastern E.U. members and Portugal use the most plastic bags in the union.
Journalist’s Resource profiled a 2016 paper on gender stereotypes and environmentally friendly behavior that found some people think recycling is feminine.
A 2015 paper in the Journal of Marketing found that people who bring reusable grocery bags on their shopping trips may purchase more junk food.
NOAA has fact sheets on microplastics in the ocean and plastic marine debris .

Keywords: Trash, pollution, waste, plastics, regulations, petrochemicals, chemical lobby

About The Author

David Trilling

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Speech about plastic pollution [1,2,3,5 minutes], 1 minute speech about plastic pollution.

Plastic is a threat to the environment and it’s not going away anytime soon. The amount of plastic that is being produced is increasing and there are no signs that it will slow down.

While the use of plastics has increased, so has our awareness of the damage they do to our planet. There are many ways to reduce your plastic use, such as recycling and reusing plastic bottles, using cloth bags instead of plastic bags, and avoiding single-use plastics like straws or coffee cups.

Disadvantages of Plastic Pollution are many. It takes a long time for the plastic to decompose and can harm wildlife.

Plastic is used in many different industries, including packaging, manufacturing, construction, transportation, and more. The use of plastic has increased exponentially over the past few decades. This has led to an increase in plastic pollution in our oceans and landfills.

The production of plastics uses large amounts of oil that can harm our environment by increasing greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution.

2 Minutes Speech about Plastic Pollution

As the use of plastic has increased, so has the amount of waste it produces. The world is now faced with a huge problem of plastic pollution.

Plastic Pollution is an environmental issue that has been increasing in recent years. It can be seen in oceans, rivers and even the air we breathe. With this problem, many people are looking for ways to reduce their plastic consumption and help reduce this pollution.

There are many ways to reduce your plastic consumption such as recycling and reusing plastics, reducing the use of single-use plastics, or simply buying products that are not made of plastic.

Plastic pollution is a global issue that has the potential to harm almost every living thing in the world. It can cause a variety of health problems, such as cancer and heart disease.

Plastic pollution is a growing problem in the world that has many adverse effects on human health and the environment. The most common type of plastic pollution is packaging, which makes up about 60% of all plastic waste.

There are many disadvantages associated with plastic pollution. There are also many ways to reduce it from happening or lessen its impact on our environment.

Plastic pollution is a growing issue in our society. It has been found that around 8 million tons of plastic are dumped into the ocean every year.

Plastic pollution has many disadvantages, such as:

– The pollution causes harm to marine life and the environment

– It takes up to 500 years for plastic to degrade

– Ingesting or swallowing plastic can cause health problems for humans and animals

3 Minutes Speech about Plastic Pollution

Plastic pollution is a global issue that is worsening every day. It has been estimated that the amount of plastic in the world’s oceans will outweigh fish by 2050.

With this in mind, it is more important than ever to reduce the amount of plastic waste we generate. One way to do this is to use reusable bags and bottles when going out shopping or travelling so you can avoid buying unnecessary items that contribute to the problem.

Plastic pollution is a global issue that is affecting the environment and human health. It’s estimated that there are up to 300 million tons of plastic waste produced every year.

Plastic pollution is not just an issue in the ocean; it can also be found in rivers, lakes, and even our own backyards. There are many disadvantages of plastic pollution, including:

– Plastic doesn’t decompose easily and can take up to 1000 years to break down completely

– Plastic breaks down into smaller pieces which then become microplastics and enter the food chain through animals eating them or getting caught in their gills

5 Minutes Speech about Plastic Pollution

Plastic pollution is a major issue that affects the Earth’s ecosystem. It can get in the food chain and cause harm to animals, humans, and even plants.

Plastic pollution is one of the most pressing environmental problems today. The use of plastic has increased exponentially over the last few decades, but it has also become a global crisis as its production has not been curbed by other means.

Plastic pollution is a growing global problem. It has been estimated that by 2050 there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean.

It is estimated that there are over 300 million tons of plastic waste in the world, and it is expected to double by 2025. This means that by 2050, there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean.

Plastic pollution can be seen as a threat to our planet’s ecosystem and biodiversity due to its detrimental effects on marine life.

Plastics are a big part of our lives, from the food we eat to the clothes we wear. The problem is that it is not always easy to dispose of them. We have to find ways to reduce the amount of plastic pollution and find alternatives for our products.

Plastic pollution has become a global problem with no end in sight. It has even been called “the world’s most pressing environmental issue.” The amount of plastic waste in the ocean is increasing by 8% every year, and there are millions of tons of it floating on top of water bodies around the world.

Disadvantages: Plastic pollution can be harmful for humans because it can contain toxic chemicals that may cause cancer or other diseases if ingested or inhaled by humans or animals. It also harms animals as they consume or get tangled in plastics, which can lead to death as well as other health problems such as intestinal blockage and tissue damage

The disadvantages of plastic pollution are endless. One major problem is that it takes up a lot of space and can cause environmental damage. The other is that it lasts for a long time, even if we dispose it properly, which means we will have to deal with its effects for a long time to come.

Plastic pollution can also be hazardous to our health and the environment as pieces of plastic can break off and get into food chain or water sources, which could cause serious harm in the future.

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Plastic production | Plastic Recycling
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Should Plastic be Banned Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on should plastic be banned.

Plastic bags are a major cause of environmental pollutio n. Plastic as a substance is non-biodegradable and thus plastic bags remain in the environment for hundreds of years polluting it immensely. It has become very essential to ban plastic bags before they ruin our planet completely. Many countries around the globe have either put a ban on the plastic bag or Levi tax on it. However, the problem hasn’t been solved completely because the implementation of these measures hasn’t been as successful.

Problems Caused by Plastic Bags

Here are some of the problems caused by plastic bags:

Non-Biodegradable

Plastic bags are non-biodegradable. Thus, disposing of the plastics is the biggest challenge. T

Deterioration of Environment

They are destroying nature due to their harmful effect. Plastic bags have become the main cause of land pollution today. The plastic bags entering into the water bodies are a major cause of water pollution . Hence we can conclude that these are deteriorating our environment in every possible way.

Harmful for Animals and Marine Creatures

Animals and marine creatures unknowingly consume plastic particles along with their food. Research shows that waste plastic bags have been a major reason for untimely animal deaths.

Cause of Illness in Humans

The production of plastic bags releases toxic chemicals. These are the main cause of serious illness. The polluted environment is a major reason for various diseases which are spreading easily in human beings.

Clogged Sewage

Waste plastic bags are the main reason for trapping the drains and sewers, especially during rains. This can result in a flood-like situation and disrupt the normal life of people.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Reasons to Ban Plastic Bags

There are numerous reasons why the government of various countries has come up with strict measures to limit the use of plastic bags. Some of these include:

Waste plastic bags are polluting the land and water immensely.
Plastic bags have become a threat to the life of animals living on earth as well as in water.
Chemicals released by waste plastic bags enter the soil and make it infertile.
Plastic bags are having a negative impact on human health.
Plastic bags lead to the drainage problem.

Public Support for Plastic Bag Ban

Although the Indian government has imposed a ban on the usage of plastic bags in many states. But people are still carrying these bags. Shopkeepers stop providing plastic bags for few days only in the beginning.

It is time when we all must contribute our bit to make this ban a success. Thus we the educated lot of society must take it as our responsibility to stop using plastic bags. In this way, we can support the government in this campaign.

Some contributions that can be made by people are as follows:

In order to be successful in this mission, we must keep reminding ourselves about the harmful effects of the plastic bags on our nature and keep a tab on their use. Gradually, we will become habitual to doing without these bags.

Seek Alternatives

There are many eco-friendly alternatives to plastic bags like reusable jute or cloth bag.

We must reuse the plastic bags we already have at home as many times as we can before throwing them away.

Spread Awareness

While the government is spreading awareness about the harmful effects of plastic bags, we can also spread awareness through word of mouth.

Although plastic is becoming a big threat for all of us, still this problem has often been overlooked and underestimated. This is because people do not look at the long term effect of these small, easy to carry bags they use in their everyday life. Besides all of these people keep using bags due to their convenience. But now everyone has to completely stop using the plastic bag to save our environment and earth.

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Creating a throw-away culture: How companies ingrained plastics in modern life

Michael Copley

Your future's in the trash can: How the plastic industry promoted waste to make money

A trash can overflows as people sit outside of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C. Jacquelyn Martin/AP/AP hide caption

Just for a minute, think about how much of the plastic you use today will end up as trash. Drink bottles? Grocery bags? Food wrappers? If you live in the United States, it’ll probably add up to about a pound of stuff — just today.

Most plastic is dumped in landfills or becomes pollution in places like rivers and oceans, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Along the way, it sheds microplastics that can make their way into animals and people . Just 4% of plastic in the U.S. is recycled.

It wasn’t always this way. But over the past 70 years, plastic has become embedded in nearly every aspect of human life. The world produces around 230 times more plastic now than it did in 1950, according to Our World in Data.

As production soared, so did pollution. Many scientists and activists say chemical and fossil fuel companies make too much plastic now for society to manage sustainably. The United Nations says the problem is also being fueled by a “worrying shift” toward single-use products and packaging , which are designed to be used once and thrown away.

Plastic became ingrained in modern life in large part because the plastics industry started working in the 1950s to convince people to embrace the material as cheap, abundant and disposable.

The marketing campaign worked so well that litter soon became a problem across the U.S., and there was a public backlash. The industry responded by pitching recycling. But almost from the outset, corporations knew that recycling probably wouldn’t work to rein in waste, multiple investigations have shown.

Now, faced with spiraling plastic pollution, the U.N has set out to write a legally-binding agreement to deal with the problem. But the negotiations are fraught.

And even if nations can broker a deal, it’ll be a daunting task to actually reduce the world’s consumption of plastic, which is in almost everything, from clothing and diapers to medical devices.

“We’ll continue to need plastic for specific uses,” Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, said at the latest round of U.N. negotiations in Canada in April. “But there’s a growing agreement,” she said, that a lot of single-use plastic “can probably go.”

Vintage Bakelite and other plastic objects at a museum in England. Matt Cardy/Getty Images/Getty Images Europe hide caption

The plastics industry pitched disposability to make more money

As part of the treaty talks, some countries want to cap production of new plastic, which is made from oil and gas. However, those efforts are opposed by big fossil fuel producers that are determined to keep plastic demand growing. State and local governments in the U.S. have tried to limit pollution by passing laws that ban plastic shopping bags or single-use plastic bottles .

The industry has responded by fighting regulations that could hurt demand for its products. It says the solution to environmental problems is better recycling, not using less plastic.

Matt Seaholm, chief executive of the Plastics Industry Association, says his group is advocating on behalf of plastic producers and consumers alike, since “it is an essential part of society at this point.”

Synthetic plastic was patented in the early 1900s. It was known as Bakelite, and it sparked a boom in durable and affordable consumer goods. Soon, companies started selling different kinds of plastic. At first, most of it was marketed as sturdy and reusable. One television ad from 1955 — about a made-up homemaker named Jane in a made-up place called Plasticstown, USA — touts how plastic containers are ideal for families because they won’t break if kids accidentally drop them.

But soon, the messaging started to change. In 1956, the industry learned about a new way to boost sales — and profits. At the plastics industry’s annual conference in New York, Lloyd Stouffer, the editor of an influential trade magazine, urged executives to stop emphasizing plastics’ durability. Stouffer told the companies to focus instead on making a lot of inexpensive, expendable material. Their future, he said, was in the trash can.

Companies got the message. They realized they could sell more plastic if people threw more of it away. “Those corporations were doing what they’re supposed to do, which is make a lot of money,” says Heather Davis, an assistant professor at The New School in New York who’s written about the plastics industry.

Garbage is dumped at the Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island, New York, in 1989. David Cantor/AP/AP hide caption

Throw-away living was a foreign concept in 1950s America

But getting people to throw away items after a single use took a lot of work.

Adults in the 1950s had lived through The Great Depression and World War II, and they were trained to save as much as possible, Davis says.

“It was a really difficult sell to the American public in the post-war period, to inculcate people into a throwaway living,” she says. “That is not what people were used to.”

A solution companies came up with was emphasizing that plastic was a low-cost, abundant material.

A 1960 marketing study for Scott Cup said the containers were “almost indestructible,” but that the manufacturer could still convince people to discard them after a few uses. To counter any “pangs of conscience” consumers might feel about throwing them away, the researchers suggested a “direct attack”: Tell people the cups are cheap, they said, and that “there are more where these came from.”

A few years later, Scott ran an advertisement saying its plastic cups were available at “‘toss-away prices.”

In a 1963 report for another plastics conference in Chicago, Stouffer congratulated the industry for filling dumps and garbage cans with plastic bottles and bags.

“The happy day has arrived,” Stouffer wrote, “when nobody any longer considers the [plastic] package too good to throw away.”

Workers remove garbage floating on the Negro River in Manaus, Brazil. Edmar Barros/AP/AP hide caption

A booming market hit a consumer backlash

By the early 1970s, plastics were booming. The market was expanding faster than the “rosiest of predictions,” and its growth prospects were “out of sight,” an executive at the chemical company DuPont told the Chamber of Commerce in Parkersburg, West Virginia , in 1973. Soon, big soft drink companies introduced plastic soda bottles.

But the industry faced a growing public-relations problem that was especially threatening to beverage companies, whose names were stamped on the packaging: Plastic litter was becoming an eyesore across the country.

“Even if you’ve convinced people that maybe the disposability of plastics isn’t such a bad thing, people are still seeing this waste out in public,” says Bart Elmore, a professor of environmental history at Ohio State University.

So drink makers went on offense. Elmore says they fought bans on throw-away bottles and joined the plastics industry in pushing recycling as an environmental solution.

However, multiple investigations, including by NPR , have shown that plastics industry representatives long knew that recycling would probably never be effective on a large scale. Officials have said they encouraged recycling to avoid regulations and ensure that demand for plastic kept growing.

Trade groups for plastic companies say those investigations don’t accurately reflect today’s industry.

There isn’t evidence that drink makers were part of those internal discussions about recycling’s viability. But Elmore says they should have had enough information at the time to know recycling was a risky bet.

In 1976 — two years before big soft-drink makers introduced plastic soda bottles — a study by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration concluded that “substantial recycling of plastics is unlikely in the near future.” That echoes the agency’s 1975 draft report that found “recycling of plastic bottles is unlikely to be commercially feasible.”

“To make a gamble like that, where public agencies and public documents are saying this at the time, I think raises real questions about culpability, accountability in an era when I think a lot of people are asking for that,” Elmore says.

Less than 10% of plastic waste is recycled globally. As countries try to negotiate a global waste agreement, activists and scientists are focusing a lot of their attention on chemical and fossil fuel companies that make plastic. But Elmore says consumer goods companies like beverage makers also deserve scrutiny, because they use a ton of plastic packaging and rank as some of the biggest plastic polluters globally .

“If they take a stand, one way or the other, it has a huge global impact,” Elmore says.

A business group called the American Beverage Association said in a statement to NPR that one of its highest priorities is creating a so-called circular economy where plastic is recycled and reused to prevent waste.

An aerial view of Buffalo, New York, facing Lake Erie. Bruce Bennett/Getty Images/Getty Images North America hide caption

A lawsuit aims to hold a major plastic polluter accountable

The disposable culture that was fostered by the plastics industry is playing out in places like the Buffalo River, which empties into Lake Erie in western New York. Plastic debris litters the banks of the river, and it breaks down into fragments called microplastics that accumulate in the lake , contaminating drinking water for about 11 million people .

One morning this spring, volunteers met at the river to clean up some of the pollution. “We see plastic tops, bottles, we have single-use plastics from takeout food,” says Jill Jedlicka, who leads Buffalo Niagara Waterkeeper, a nonprofit that organized the event.

It’s constant work. The debris that volunteers collected will be replaced in weeks by more plastic trash. “It’s an onslaught,” Jedlicka says.

A lot of the plastic waste around the Buffalo River is packaging sold by the food and beverage giant PepsiCo, according to a lawsuit that New York State Attorney General Letitia James filed last year against the company. New York prosecutors say plastic pollution around the Buffalo River is a public nuisance, and that Pepsi contributes to the problem by selling tons of single-use packaging.

Activists say lawsuits like the one New York filed against Pepsi are a way to try to hold corporations accountable.

In a court filing, Pepsi said it isn’t responsible for the Buffalo River pollution, and that it shouldn’t have to warn people that plastic waste poses environmental and health risks.

“Consumers are more than capable of purchasing a beverage or snack product, consuming it, and placing the packaging in a recycling or waste bin,” the company said.

Researchers say companies often blame consumers when plastic waste gets into the environment.

Pepsi said in statements to NPR that “no single group or entity bears responsibility for plastic pollution,” and that it is trying to improve recycling and reduce how much new plastic it uses.

However, in its latest sustainability report, Pepsi said its use of new plastic increased slightly in 2022 , partly because recycled material was expensive and hard to find. Pepsi isn’t alone: Despite growing public pressure, companies increased their use of new plastic by 11% between 2018 and 2022 , according to data compiled by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

“There is so much that the plastics industry needs to do to improve the sustainability of plastics,” says Shelie Miller, a professor at the School for Environmental Sustainability at the University of Michigan. But she says consumer culture is also part of the problem.

“If our stance is, consumers should be able to consume whatever they want in whatever quantity they want and it’s someone else’s job to deal with it,” Miller says, “that’s not a path toward sustainability.”

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Speech on Land Pollution

Land pollution is a serious issue that affects our planet. It’s when harmful substances like trash and chemicals damage the earth’s surface. You might see it as litter on the streets or waste dumped in fields.

This problem harms our environment and health. It’s vital for everyone, including you, to understand and address this issue. By learning more, you can help make a positive change.

1-minute Speech on Land Pollution

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Have you seen a garbage dump? It’s filled with plastic, metal, paper, and food waste. This is a big part of land pollution. When we don’t recycle or compost these things, we are hurting our planet. Imagine if your backyard was filled with garbage. Would you like it? No, right? Just like us, plants and animals don’t like living in dirty places.

Factories and farms can also cause land pollution. Factories often produce harmful chemicals and waste. If not handled properly, they can seep into the soil. Farms use pesticides and fertilizers. These can hurt the soil too. They kill bugs and weed but can also harm good bugs and plants.

In conclusion, land pollution is a big problem but we can all help solve it. By reducing, reusing, and recycling, we can keep our earth clean. So, let’s do our part and take care of our planet. Remember, it’s the only one we’ve got! Thank you.

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2-minute Speech on Land Pollution

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, we stand here today to talk about a problem that’s right beneath our feet – land pollution. When we throw away things that we don’t need anymore, they don’t just vanish. They pile up on our Earth, making it dirty and unhealthy. This is what we call land pollution.

Our first point is about what causes land pollution. There are many things that contribute, but let’s focus on a few important ones. Trash from our homes, like plastic bags, bottles, and food waste, is a big part of the problem. Then, there are factories that produce lots of waste. If they don’t dispose of it properly, it ends up polluting the land. Construction sites also contribute by clearing land and not cleaning up properly.

Next, we must ask ourselves, “What can we do to stop land pollution?” The good news is, we can all help! First, we should reduce the amount of waste we produce. This could mean using a reusable water bottle instead of buying a new one each time. Second, we should reuse things as much as possible. For example, we can use both sides of a piece of paper before throwing it away. Finally, we should recycle. When we recycle, we give our trash a new life instead of letting it pollute the land.

Of course, these are just small steps. We also need big changes from our leaders and businesses. They must make sure factories and construction sites handle their waste properly. They should encourage everyone to recycle and reduce the amount of trash we create.

To wrap up, land pollution is a serious issue that affects all of us. It’s caused by many things, including our own trash, waste from factories, and debris from construction sites. It hurts animals, plants, and can even make people sick. But remember, we can all help fight land pollution. By reducing, reusing, and recycling, we can make a big difference. Let’s all work together to keep our Earth clean!

Thank you for your attention. Let’s take care of our land, for ourselves, for the creatures we share it with and for the generations yet to come.

We also have speeches on more interesting topics that you may want to explore.

In campaign against plastic pollution, the world is making tentative progress

In 2018, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) joined forces with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation to tackle what environmental experts call one of the world’s most dangerous addictions: single-use plastics.

Now, nearly half-way through the seven-year timeline of that Global Commitment to the New Plastics Economy , UNEP and partners find that, while progress has been made, the world needs to ramp up actions to curb plastic pollution.

Humanity dumps its own combined weight in plastics annually into ecosystems. That’s 300 million tonnes every year choking waterways and seas, clogging streets, harming wildlife and, ultimately, doing serious damage to public health.

To stem that tide, UNEP and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation lobbied private and public sector decisionmakers to commit to cultivating a circular economy around plastics, one in which plastics are made to last and to be reused – not simply thrown away. This would involve new products and business models, as well as enhanced recycling and composting systems.

Every year, the toxic trail of economic growth – pollution and waste – results in the premature deaths of millions of people while doing untold damage to the planet.

In a progress report published late last year , there was demonstrable improvement across numerous parameters in 2019:

The number of signatories, including plastics producers, financial institutions and governments, has expanded by 25 per cent to nearly 500.
Two areas have seen significant progress: the recycled content of plastic packaging has grown by 22 per cent, and 81 per cent of business and a full 100 per cent of government signatories have pledged to phase out the worst categories of plastic packaging, including PVC and single-use plastic bags and straws.
Fifty-six per cent of signatories have or are developing pilots to test reuse models in their value chains.

"Every year, the toxic trail of pollution and waste results in the premature deaths of millions of people while doing untold damage to the planet,” says Elisa Tonda, Head of UNEP’s Consumption and Production Unit. “The world has made progress in the last few years in the battle against plastic pollution, but much work remains to be done.”

In the past 50 years, plastic production has increased by more than 22 times and about US$180 billion has been invested in production facilities in the last decade alone. Meanwhile, the global COVID-19 pandemic has caused a surge in plastic medical masks, gloves and protective goggles, while many of the policies intended to limit single-use plastic products have been reversed.

While the private sector is responsible for the lion’s share of signatories to the Global Commitment, experts say one of its most valuable contributions is in providing governments with a framework to develop standards for a circular plastic economy.

As Tania Bishara of Chile’s Environment Ministry said: “Since its signing, the Global Commitment has helped us work on initiatives towards a transformation of our relationship with plastics and to work with actors from the private sector, civil society, municipalities and academia to develop a circular economy roadmap.”

Women searching for plastics to recycle at Dandora dumpsite, Nairobi, Kenya

Mixing policy instruments for success

While the Ellen MacArthur Foundation tracks progress in the private sector, UNEP has been supporting the 20 national, sub-national and municipal governments that have so far joined the Global Commitment to develop policies to limit plastic pollution.

“The commitment has been integral at a local level,” says Cristina Helena Fabris Pinheiro, a city official from Sao Paolo, Brazil. It has brought together City Council and City Hall to produce instruments, especially legal frameworks, on the reduction and non-generation of single-use plastic products. That includes municipal decrees that forbid the distribution of plastic straws and single-use plastic utensils by commercial establishments.

In Copenhagen, the Global Commitment is helping city officials to limit single-use plastic products at major sporting events taking place in the city, like the Euro Cup in 2021.

“These events are being held by private organizations and private service providers. Working under a framework like the Global Commitment towards the same goals and having the same language for it helps,” says Malene Møhl, of the city’s Technical and Environmental Administration.

The 2020 report also highlights Extended Producer Responsibility, or EPRs, a type of integrated policy approach that is beginning to take hold with governments at all scales. These policies place a shared responsibility for the end-of-life of plastic products on plastic producers and other actors in the supply chain, instead of placing the burden on the public. Properly designed EPRs create strong incentives for producers to design products that can be retained within the economy, instead of being disposed of, as well as a means for them to be cycled back into new products or new uses.

About a quarter of government signatories are developing policies around EPR, most notably the Netherlands and Chile.

“We are currently working on the approval of the EPR packaging regulation, which is now in its final stage,” says Chile’s Bishara. The regulation is expected to include goals for producers to increase the recycling rate of household plastic packaging from 4.5 per cent to 45 per cent as well as an obligation to cover 80 per cent of homes with door-to-door collection for packaging waste.

Only the beginning

The progress report makes it clear that there is still a long way to go. It finds that COVID-19 has further exposed the drawbacks of the linear economy. Rocketing demand for takeaway food containers and bubble wrap – most of it not recyclable – and the reversal of policies limiting single-use plastic products are an ongoing problem.

The world is not on track to meet the Global Commitment’s 2025 targets. Progress on expanding the recyclability of plastic packaging and ending the need for single-use plastic products is still moving far too slowly, says the report. Furthermore, disparities in rates of progress between signatories are stark.

“When it comes to plastic pollution, there are no borders,” said Tonda from UNEP. “We need a common approach to the unsustainable consumption and production of plastic and transformative action at every level. Partnerships and multilateralism are critical.”

The Global Commitment to the New Plastics Economy is part of a broader effort by UNEP to stem the flow of plastics into the environment. For more information on plastic pollution, take an interactive look at the damaging effects these chemicals are having on the planet.

Chemicals & pollution action
Waste management

Further Resources

UNEP’s Clean Seas campaign to tackle marine plastic pollution
Using a life-cycle approach to single-use plastic product pollution
Legislative Guide for the regulation of single-use plastic products

Related Sustainable Development Goals

Justice & Health

Lawsuits targeting plastic pollution pile up as frustrated citizens and states seek accountability, new litigation from state ag offices raises the stakes in court battles focused on fighting greenwashing and misleading claims about recycling..

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A collection of plastic pellets known as nurdles that washed up on a beach in Charleston, South Carolina. Credit: Andrew Wunderley/Charleston Waterkeeper

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The plastic pellets washing up on beaches and in marshes around Charleston, South Carolina, became very obvious about five years ago.

Called nurdles, these pebble-sized particles that are the raw material for many plastic products floated, too, in the aquamarine waters of the harbor, many carried at high tide to Sullivan’s Island, known for its white sand and million-dollar homes, where they caused alarm.

“We had been working to enact single-use plastic bans and then we started to see this nurdle problem,” recalled Andrew Wunderley, the executive director of Charleston Waterkeeper, part of the national Waterkeeper Alliance, an environmental organization. “Now we had industrial-like plastic pollution.”

Andrew Wunderley, executive director of the Charleston Waterkeeper, an environmental nonprofit. Credit: Cheryl Carmack/Charleston Waterkeeper

So Charleston Waterkeeper joined with the Southern Environmental Law Center, a nonprofit law firm, and the Charleston-based Coastal Conservation League, to identify what they believed to be the source of the nurdles and then to take that company, Frontier Logistics, L.P., to federal court, in March 2020. A year later, the environmental advocates and Frontier reached a settlement that included $1 million to improve water quality in the Charleston Harbor watershed.

From South Carolina to California, nearly 60 lawsuits have been filed since 2015, mostly by citizens or environmental groups, targeting the plastics industry. The litigation comes amid a rapidly expanding body of scientific knowledge detailing how burgeoning plastics production damages the planet and threatens public health.

Most recently, attorneys general in Connecticut, Minnesota and New York have raised the stakes with their own plastics lawsuits, bringing with them considerable legal firepower.

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And, in California, a two-year-old investigation by Attorney General Rob Bonta into the plastics industry and its claims about recycling shows signs of concluding, potentially resulting in a case pitting the largest state in the nation against one of the largest plastic makers in the world, ExxonMobil, and powerful industry trade associations such as the American Chemistry Council (ACC) and the Plastics Industry Association (PIA).

In late May, the ACC and the PIA filed their own lawsuits in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., objecting to Bonta’s effort to obtain through subpoenas certain internal documents from the associations, including some involving the controversial practice of “advanced” or “chemical” recycling, while claiming California was infringing on their first amendment rights to advocate for their preferred public policy.

Bonta’s media office declined to comment on the status of the California investigation. Still, in April, the attorney general told a Reuters reporter that a decision on whether to proceed with the plastics litigation could be made “within weeks.”

Typically, these plastics lawsuits attempt to hold the companies that use plastic packaging or stores that use plastic bags accountable for alleged deceptive marketing claims about the environment or recycling.

Plastic pellets are scattered around a beach in Charleston, South Carolina. Credit: Andrew Wunderley/Charleston Waterkeeper

Most are still working their way through the courts, though some have been dismissed, and environmental advocates count a few victories, such as the nurdle case in South Carolina.

“There has been zero action at the state or federal level to stop pollution from the plastics industry,” Wunderley said, four years after the South Carolina settlement. “It’s left to the citizens to pick up the slack. When the state and federal government won’t act or haven’t acted, we can step in and hold these polluters accountable.”

Plastics Lawsuits Follow Climate Lawsuits

Plastic pollution has found its way to the highest mountains and deepest parts of the ocean, into the bellies of marine mammals, the placentas of new mothers and human blood. Made of more than 16,000 chemicals, there’s a growing field of medical research that links plastics to obesity, infertility, an increased risk of miscarriage, cardiovascular disease and cancers.

Plastic production continues to soar, with petrochemical companies producing 460 million metric tons of plastic in 2019, an amount that could triple by 2060, according to the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Across the globe, less than 10 percent gets recycled.

The plastics litigation follows an explosion of similar lawsuits responding to the global climate crisis. A report , compiled by the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) and Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change, last year identified 2,180 “climate change” cases between 2020 and 2022 alone.

The climate cases are typically aimed at holding governments accountable to their climate commitments, challenging governmental action or inaction about emissions or adaptation to climate change—or attempting to establish liability primarily of fossil fuel companies for harm caused by the effects of climate change, such as extreme weather events.

The UNEP report found that the litigation had influenced policy in some European countries, but many cases in the United States have faced lengthy procedural delays and climate litigation has not yet translated into systemic shifts in climate governance.

The New York University School of Law launched a plastics litigation tracker in 2022 and has observed a variety of plastics-related lawsuits in federal and state courts. Plaintiffs have included individuals as well as environmental groups such as Greenpeace, Sierra Club and Earth Island Institute. Some cases, like the South Carolina lawsuit, cite provisions of the federal Clean Water Act. But others take on the industry on grounds that the plastic waste is a public nuisance, or that companies are making false claims about their business practices or products.

In one such early case, filed in Superior Court in California in 2018, a resident of Lafayette, a San Francisco suburb, targeted Keurig Green Mountain, Inc., now Keurig Dr. Pepper, and the recyclability claims for its individual serving plastic coffee pods, called K-Cups, in what became a class action case.

“From a false labeling standpoint, Keurig was almost as good as it gets.”

The lawsuit alleged that most recycling facilities were not properly equipped to capture items as small as K-Cups and, even in rare cases where they could, they ended up in landfills because there was no recycling market for them.

Without admitting any wrongdoing, the company agreed in February 2022 to a $10 million settlement and to add a qualifying statement to its recyclability claims that it still uses: “Check Locally—Not Recycled in Many Communities.”

“From a false labeling standpoint, Keurig was almost as good as it gets,” said retired California attorney Howard Hirsch, the lead lawyer on that case and several other plastics lawsuits. “When we started that case, they had emblazoned in large letters on the box, ‘Have your cup and recycle it, too.’” The plastic pods had become controversial, he said, “and clearly, they were responding to the backlash over the environmental impacts of their packaging.”

A Keurig spokeswoman, Katie Gilroy, said the company is working with communities and recyclers to more widely recycle its coffee pods, and later this year, Keurig will offer a mail-back recycling program. The company is also testing pods of ground coffee pressed and wrapped in a compostable plant-based coating, she said.

Hirsch has also represented the California nonprofit environmental group The Last Beach Cleanup, which over the last five years has filed three lawsuits related to recyclability claims, settling two of them with the third still making its way through the courts.

The main connection he sees between plastics litigation and climate litigation is the source of the issue—the petrochemical industry—since nearly all plastics are made from fossil fuels, the same primary contributor to global warming.

“It’s really all part of the same story, with the petrochemical industry sort of shifting the blame for its operations and trying to make American consumers feel as though they are the ones that need to take responsibility for these companies,” Hirsch said.

Ross Eisenberg, president of America’s Plastic Makers, part of the American Chemistry Council lobby group, called the rise in plastics litigation “disappointing.” In a written statement, Eisenberg said that “legal action has diverted attention away from the importance of recycling. Regardless, we remain steadfast in our mission to advocate for effective policy, collaborate with communities, and invest in new technologies that help to increase plastics recycling for a cleaner, more sustainable future.”

Minnesota, Connecticut Challenge Hefty Bag Maker

Beyond private civil lawsuits including class actions, state attorneys general are now filing lawsuits, raising the stakes, said Bethany Noll Davis, executive director of the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center, which manages the litigation tracker with the Guarini Center for Environmental, Energy & Land Use Law, both of which are housed at the NYU School of Law.

Significant recent filings, she said, came in Connecticut and Minnesota, where the attorneys general have sued the manufacturers of Hefty bags, Reynolds Consumer Products.

In the Minnesota case, filed in June 2023, in state court, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison claims the bags are marketed for collecting waste plastic to be recycled. But, according to the complaint, “the otherwise recyclable items placed into the bags do not get recycled, and that the bags themselves are not recyclable anywhere … when contaminated by waste residue.”

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison filed a complaint against the manufacturers of Hefty bags in June 2023. Credit: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

The Connecticut lawsuit, filed in January 2023 in state court in Hartford, claims that any Hefty bags containing waste plastic are in practice “diverted to landfills or incinerators.”

Reynolds Consumer Products did not respond to requests for comment on the lawsuits.

New York Attorney General Letitia James filed suit in November against PepsiCo Inc., claiming the food and beverage giant had harmed the public and the environment with its single-use plastic packaging.

“PepsiCo has long known of the harms caused by its single-use plastic packaging, acknowledging on its website that there is a ‘plastic pollution crisis’ and that its own packaging has ‘potential environmental impacts,’” the lawsuit claims. “By its continued manufacturing, production, marketing, distribution, and sale of vast quantities of single-use plastic packaging, PepsiCo has significantly contributed to, and continues to contribute to, the existence of a public nuisance that injures the community living in the city of Buffalo and surrounding area,” according to the lawsuit.

A PepsiCo representative responded in a written statement: “Packaging waste is a serious issue that requires collaboration from many stakeholders. PepsiCo is focused on being part of the solution and is pursuing goals to improve and enhance recycling programs.”

A dearth of federal policy on recycling complicates matters and invites litigation, said Steven Cook, an attorney with the law and government relations firm Bracewell, with clients that include fossil fuel and other energy companies. He worked three years as a deputy assistant administrator for the Office of Land and Emergency Management with the Environmental Protection Agency, and more than two decades as a lead counsel at LyondellBasell, one of the world’s largest plastic, chemical and refining companies.

But plastics remain essential to society, he said. “Our modern society doesn’t run without (plastics). You can’t run a hospital without plastics. You can’t get to zero emissions from cars without plastics. Consumers … wanted packaging that does certain things.”

Companies, he said, are attempting to address the problem of plastic waste, “but Congress will make a policy choice at some point. Until they do then you go to the courts.”

Plastic Makers’ Liability Questioned

Greenwashing cases against companies that use plastic packaging are scattered across the country, with their outcomes uncertain, said Alyssa Johl, vice president and general counsel at the Center for Climate Integrity, an environmental group seeking to hold fossil fuel companies and other climate polluters accountable for the damages they have caused.

In the future, plastics litigation appears headed toward the petrochemical companies that make plastic that gets turned into packaging or bags, she said.

The Center for Climate Integrity published a report in February that concluded “petrochemical companies, independently and through industry trade associations and front groups, have deceived consumers, policymakers, and regulators into believing that they could address the plastic waste crisis through a series of false solutions,” such as recycling.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta, flanked by his legal team, announce that his office has launched an investigation into the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries alleged role in the plastic pollution crisis on April 28, 2022 in Playa Del Rey, Calif. Credit: Gary Coronado/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

When Bonta, California’s attorney general, announced his investigation two years ago, his office said it had issued a subpoena to ExxonMobil, seeking information relating to the company’s role in deceiving the public.

ExxonMobil responded with a denial.

“We reject the allegations made by the Attorney General’s office in its press release,” the company said at the time. “We share society’s concerns and are collaborating with governments, including the State of California, communities, and other industries to support projects around the world to improve waste management and circularity.”

That investigation has been kept tightly under wraps, but there are indications that Bonta could be investigating claims around both mechanical recycling, where waste plastic is sorted, cleaned, melted and molded into new plastic products, as well as what the industry now dubs “advanced recycling,” a term used to describe a variety of chemical-based, industrial processes, that seek to turn plastic waste back into basic plastics building blocks.

But so far such technologies remain unproven, and environmentalists say most of them are polluting, energy-intensive and ineffective, turning the waste into new, dirty synthetic gases or oils.

Meanwhile, legal experts expect to see a new genre of plastics lawsuits emerge dealing with how plastics may be making people sick as plastic breaks down into micro- and even more tiny nano-plastics, carrying toxic chemicals into the body.

With scientists raising alarms about plastics and health, it’s only a matter of time before the lawyers weigh in, said Davis, the executive director of the NYU Law School’s State Energy & Environmental Impact Center. “And the minute we find more out about that, I think we could see a new frontier of lawsuits,” she said.

Lawsuit Outcome ‘Extraordinarily Positive’

In South Carolina, Wunderley, the Waterkeeper, describes plastic as “Charleston’s dirty little secret,” affecting salt marshes, oyster beds and beaches. “We do cleanups and it’s almost all plastic and almost all single-use plastic,” he said.

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The company, without admitting any fault or wrongdoing, moved its nurdle-handling operations away from a pier in Charleston Harbor, according to the settlement agreement, and consented to prevent the pellets from its new facility from escaping into the environment and allowed for an independent audit of its control measures.

Wunderley said he still finds some nurdles when he patrols the harbor and tries to identify the source. But he considers the outcome of the 2020 lawsuit a success. The new $1 million Healthy Harbors fund has helped some low-income families near Charleston better maintain their septic systems, thereby reducing sewage overflows, and funded an urban gardening program. It has also helped keep the Charleston Waterkeeper program on the water and looking for sources of pollution.

It’s part of an ongoing effort, Wunderley said, to take a bite out of Charleston’s “little sliver of this global plastic pollution crisis.”

James Bruggers

Reporter, southeast.

James Bruggers covers the U.S. Southeast, part of Inside Climate News’ National Environment Reporting Network. He previously covered energy and the environment for Louisville’s Courier Journal, where he worked as a correspondent for USA Today and was a member of the USA Today Network environment team. Before moving to Kentucky in 1999, Bruggers worked as a journalist in Montana, Alaska, Washington and California. Bruggers’ work has won numerous recognitions, including best beat reporting, Society of Environmental Journalists, and the National Press Foundation’s Thomas Stokes Award for energy reporting. He served on the board of directors of the SEJ for 13 years, including two years as president. He lives in Louisville with his wife, Christine Bruggers.

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Muhammud Abu-Kass demonstrates how to work the training equipment at Guilford Tech Community College. The equipment trains him to be ready to work at Toyota’s first and only battery manufacturing plant in the U.S. Credit: Nicole Norman/Medill News Service

Toyota Opens a ‘Megasite’ for EV Batteries in a Struggling N.C. Community, Fueled by Biden’s IRA

By nicole norman, louisville, kentucky, moves toward cleaning up its ‘gully of the drums’ after more than four decades.

The long-ignored dumpsite is the country cousin of the notorious “Valley of the Drums,” which helped lead to the federal Superfund law.

The International System That Pits Foreign Investors Against Indigenous Communities

A proposed nevada lithium mine could destroy critical habitat for an endangered wildflower found nowhere else in the world.

Sam Satterly investigates a hazardous waste dump site known as Gully of the Drums in Jefferson Memorial Forest, a public park in Louisville, Ky. Credit: Courtesy of Sam Satterly

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Speech on Plastic Pollution in English For Students
Long Speech on Pollution by Plastic Bags. Today, I am here to deliver a speech on plastic pollution. Plastic has very seriously impacted the health and life of human beings in the last decade. Several events have drawn the attention of the whole world and placed a question mark on the use of plastic in everyday life.
Speech on Plastic Pollution
1-minute Speech on Plastic Pollution. Good day, everyone! Let's talk about something important - plastic pollution. It's a big problem, even though it's simple to understand. Plastic is everywhere. We use it daily - from water bottles to food wrappers. But, do we ever wonder where it goes after we throw it away?
Everything you need to know about plastic pollution
Watch on. Overall, 46 per cent of plastic waste is landfilled, while 22 per cent is mismanaged and becomes litter. Unlike other materials, plastic does not biodegrade. This pollution chokes marine wildlife, damages soil and poisons groundwater, and can cause serious health impacts.
This Earth Day, Plastic Pollution is Among the Planet's Biggest ...
Plastic pollution deprives corals, sponges, and bottom-dwelling species of light, oxygen, and food. Whole ecosystems, such as coral reefs and mangroves, are put at risk due to plastic pollution.
Don't Let the Plastic Get into the Ocean
Small pieces of plastics e.g. microplastics (microbeads, microfibers) can serve as vector for chemicals to get into the bodies of marine animals, where they can accumulate in fat cells. These can damage tissues and organ function. They can be absorbed into the brains of fish, altering behavior.
Acting together against plastic pollution
Through the Global Commitment and through backing for a global agreement to tackle plastic pollution - which is on the table at the fifth meeting of the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA-5). Since September 2021, over 150 countries have expressed an interest in negotiating a global agreement. 83 leading businesses have urged them to ...
The World's Plastic Pollution Crisis Explained
Production increased exponentially, from 2.3 million tons in 1950 to 448 million tons by 2015. Production is expected to double by 2050. Every year, about 8 million tons of plastic waste escapes into the oceans from coastal nations. That's the equivalent of setting five garbage bags full of trash on every foot of coastline around the world.
How plastics contribute to climate change
The paper and cotton bags need to be reused three and 131 times respectively to ensure their global warming potential is lower than a typical plastic grocery bag. Ultimately, cutting emissions associated with plastics may require an all-of-the-above strategy: reducing waste, retaining materials by refurbishing or remanufacturing, and recycling.
Speech On Beat Plastic Pollution for Students and Children in English
February 8, 2024 by Prasanna. Speech On Beat Plastic Pollution: Plastic pollution can be defined as the build-up of plastic or plastic materials or particles in the Earth's environment, which harms nature, living organisms, ecosystems, and wildlife. Plastic acting as pollutants can be classified into micro and meso, or micro debris based on ...
Uniting to end plastic pollution
If we act with unity of purpose, we can virtually eliminate plastic pollution by 2040. Reduce social, environmental and human health costs. Create hundreds of thousands of new jobs, mainly in developing countries, and new markets and business opportunities. Everybody wins, provided we ensure a just transition.
Plastic pollution facts and information
Some key facts: Half of all plastics ever manufactured have been made in the last 20 years. Production increased exponentially, from 2.3 million tons in 1950 to 448 million tons by 2015 ...
Plastic Bags Are a Problem. Are Plastic Bag Bans a Solution?
Now that's just one set of data, but I hope my point is clear: the production of our plastic bags causes harmful air pollution, and that pollution disproportionately hits low income and minority ...
Speech on Say No To Plastic
For example, carry a cloth bag when you go shopping instead of taking a plastic one. Drink water from a glass or metal bottle, not a plastic one. And if you have toys or things you don't need anymore, don't throw them away. Give them to someone who can use them. Schools can help too. Teachers can teach children about the harm caused by plastic.
The good and the bad of plastic bag bans: Research review
The European Union passed legislation in 2015 aiming to cut plastic bag use in half by 2019 and half again by 2025. E.U.-member France went further, banning single-use plastic bags on July 1, 2016, and phasing in other, more restrictive bans in the upcoming years - including the prohibition of plastic cooking utensils by 2020. Do these bans work?
Essay on Plastic Bag for Students and Children
Firstly, plastic bags are a major source of plastic pollution. As they are non-biodegradable, they take years to decompose. They contribute to a lot of waste which keeps collecting over the years. Plastic takes thousands of years to break down and decompose. It remains in the land which contributes to the rising problem of land pollution.
This is how plastic pollution causes climate change
Image: McKinsey & Company. In 2019, the CIEL estimated that production and incineration of plastic would add 850 million metric tons of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere - equivalent to 189 coal-fired power plants. By 2050 this could rise to 2.8 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year - or 615 coal plants' worth.
Speech about Plastic Pollution [1,2,3,5 Minutes]
5 Minutes Speech about Plastic Pollution. Plastic pollution is a major issue that affects the Earth's ecosystem. It can get in the food chain and cause harm to animals, humans, and even plants. Plastic pollution is one of the most pressing environmental problems today. The use of plastic has increased exponentially over the last few decades ...
Should Plastic Be Banned Essay for Students
500+ Words Essay on Should Plastic be Banned. Plastic bags are a major cause of environmental pollutio n. Plastic as a substance is non-biodegradable and thus plastic bags remain in the environment for hundreds of years polluting it immensely. It has become very essential to ban plastic bags before they ruin our planet completely.
Plastics industry worked for decades to create a throw-away culture
State and local governments in the U.S. have tried to limit pollution by passing laws that ban plastic shopping bags or single-use plastic bottles. The industry has responded by fighting ...
Speech delivered at Stakeholders Engagement Forum on the Plastic ...
Because whales aren't the only ones with a belly full of plastic. At abattoirs in Western Kenya, vets are finding an average of 2.5 plastic bags and other plastic waste inside the stomachs of cows. And third, those first two points are particularly intriguing, because all that discarded plastic is actually very, very valuable.
The problem with plastic
Impact of plastic. Once in the environment, plastic can take hundreds of years to break down. Animals can become caught in pieces of plastic or mistakenly see it as food. If they cannot digest it ...
Speech about Ocean Plastic Pollution
Speech about Ocean Plastic Pollution. This essay sample was donated by a student to help the academic community. Papers provided by EduBirdie writers usually outdo students' samples. We live in a world that is full of plastic. Plastic shopping bags, water bottles, toothbrushes, and even parts of your clothes are among the everyday items that ...
Speech on Land Pollution
The answer is simple. Reduce, reuse, recycle. Reduce means using less. Less plastic, less paper. Reuse means using things more than once. A shopping bag can be used many times. Recycle means turning waste into something new. Paper can be made into new paper. In conclusion, land pollution is a big problem but we can all help solve it.
In campaign against plastic pollution, the world is making ...
The world is making tentative progress in the battle against plastic pollution, according to a new report from the United Nations Environment Programme. ... including PVC and single-use plastic bags and straws. ... Meanwhile, the global COVID-19 pandemic has caused a surge in plastic medical masks, gloves and protective goggles, while many of ...
Lawsuits Targeting Plastic Pollution Pile Up as Frustrated Citizens and
The plastics litigation follows an explosion of similar lawsuits responding to the global climate crisis. A report, compiled by the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) and Columbia Law School's ...
The plastics industry says chemical recycling could help banish ...
Plastic pellets created by chemical recycling at ExxonMobil's plant in Baytown, Texas, in 2023. The industry is pitching the technology as an answer to the plastics pollution crisis.