As we shop this season, we need to be awakened to the fact that we are drowning in refuse – plastic, clothes, electronics, shoes, etc. These are things that “go away” to landfills and incinerators and are shipped around the world to poorer countries. They eventually end up in rivers and flow whole or in their chemical parts to litter beaches and then flow into the oceans. Garbage is all around us. Watch the film “Buy Now” on Netflix or in theaters to get a graphic view of this process and an explanation of why we are in this fix.

Plastic, in nearly all manufactured goods, is everywhere – mountain-sized heaps in landfills, jamming up rivers, and continent-sized islands in the oceans. It breaks into tiny particles that are in the food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe. So it is inside us as well, even in mothers’ breast milk and the placentas of new born babies. What is it doing to our DNA and all the planets’ organisms? That’s under investigation.

People who live near garbage land- fills and those near refineries that make the chemicals for plastic have shortened lives from the toxic pollution.

People who try to make a living from polluted waters and lands are struggling to feed their families. Meanwhile, the plastic is piling up higher. We produce about 400 million tons of plastic waste each year, and global production of primary plastic is forecasted to reach 1,100 million tons by 2050. Most gets sent “away” to poor countries in Africa or Asia.

Alarms about plastic are being raised around the world, and people are trying to address the problems. In Washington State the Rewrap Bill was introduced last year and will come up again during this legislative session. Packaging manufacturers will be responsible for paying for the full lifecycle of their products, including disposal and recycling.

At the federal level, the Break Free from Plastic Pollution Act has been around for several years and will, hopefully, come up again this year. The bill will shift the burden of cleanup and waste management to where it be- longs: on the corporations that produce this waste. It establishes source reduction targets for single-use plastic products, creates a nationwide beverage container refund program, and bans certain single-use plastic products that are not recyclable. It will pause plastic manufacturing facilities until critical environmental justice and health issues are addressed.

The fifth Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee, “The High Ambition Coalition to End Plastic Pollution,” just ended their meeting in Busan, Korea. It had one job – to come up with a treaty to curb plastic pollution. Since 2022 there have been five of these meetings, but the attendees reached no agreement. They will reconvene in 2025.

At every level, oil producing countries and oil companies block any agreement that cuts down on the amount of plastic produced or phases out certain problematic chemicals and products. At this meeting, it was Saudi Arabia and Russia who blocked progress. The Biden administration joined them in refusing to ask for a cap on plastic production. The US reversed their position from August 2024, when Biden administration representatives raised hopes that the US would join countries like Norway, Peru, and the United Kingdom in supporting limits on plastic production. But United States delegates supported a “flexible” approach in which countries set their own voluntary targets for reducing plastic production. We are very aware that “voluntary” targets get us nowhere.

The plastic producers work hard to convince us that things would be clean and pristine if we just recycled

our plastic refuse. Less than 10 percent is being recycled, so they say it is the consumer’s fault. This is a big lie. Most plastic cannot be recycled. It cannot be broken down and safely reused. PET, the type in most beverage containers, can be reformed into clothing and bottles, but it is expensive. Coca-Cola, a top plastics polluter, has completely dropped its 2022 goal of achieving 25 percent reusable packaging by 2030. Instead, Coca-Cola continues to focus on failed recycling goals that will do little to address the plastic crisis.

The high costs of recycling, coupled with low oil prices, means that recycling plastic now costs more than manufacturing virgin plastic. So the producers want to keep on filling our lives, lungs, and gut with polyethylene terephthalate (PET – what Coke bottles are made of) and high-density polyethylene (HDPE – the material for milk cartons and toys). Then there is polyvinyl chloride (PVC – used in medical applications and construction and known to leach dangerous toxins like lead, dioxin, and vinyl chloride throughout its entire lifecycle). These are the most common types but there are others, like the plastic of shopping bags and cling wrap, which are almost impossible to recycle.

We can fight this by getting the WA Legislature to pass the Rewrap Bill and also pressuring Congress to pass the Break Free from Plastic Pollution Act. We should not be stopped by a House and Senate controlled by Republicans. Those reps and senators have families who are ingesting and breathing plastic, and their babies and grandchildren are being affected even before they are born. There really is nowhere to hide from this plague of plastic, and they should be open to correcting the situation by lowering the amount of plastic produced. Let’s demand that they do!