In late July, early August, an environmental webinar series was launched on the impacts of plastic (called Tackling the A-Zs Impacts of Plastic). It’s a four part series that focuses on the health, economical, environmental and climate effects of plastic. It is also the inspiration for this month’s series. Each week this September, I will be breaking down a webinar from this series into the main points that you need to know. This week, I’ll be talking about the health impacts of plastic- specifically from how it’s made.
This week’s guest was a man called Ned Ketyer, a pediatrician and Climate Reality Project Leader who is working on fixing problems from fracking. So what is fracking? And how does it make the plastics we use? The definition of fracking is a well stimulation technique involving the fracturing of bedrock formations by a pressurized liquid. Adding on to that, it is where workers drill a hole into the earth and use diesel engines to pump water, sand and hydrocarbons up to the surface. These hydrocarbons are then refined and turned into ethylene, which is the main building block of many plastics. Ethylene is then used to manufacture plastic products such as toys, containers, textiles, and more.
Plastic in of itself is incredibly harmful to the environment, especially once it is broken down into microplastics that can find their way into our air, water, and food. The process that makes plastic is just as harmful. This is because plastic isn’t the only thing created from fracking. Solid waste buried in landfills and liquid waste put into injection wells find themselves contaminating drinking water. Gases leaked from fracking sites such as radon, methane and VOCs (volatile organic compounds- also released from cigarettes) hurt the Earth’s ozone layer and pollute the air around homes and schools.
On top of that, communities living nearby plants have reported symptoms from headaches to wheezing which scientists worry will grow worse as conditions fail to improve. Ned Ketyor specifically mentions the links multiple studies have found between the gases emitted from fracking plants to cancer.
Fracking plants must either be shut down or change their regulations so that workers and families are not put in harm’s way. There are too many health impacts to consider otherwise.
Here’s my challenge for this week- look for ways you can reduce your single use plastic consumption. Do you have a reusable water bottle you can use? Can you use a reusable bag on grocery trips. Avoid buying from companies that use excessive packaging and calling them out when you can’t? There are many small changes you can make to reduce your plastic consumption. Find them, and make the changes.