End Plastics
Why Back to Plastic is the Last Straw
March 12, 2025
The recent Executive Order promoting plastic straws while undoing the former administration’s plan to phase them out of federal buildings by 2027 may seem insignificant in the face of global challenges like peace in the Middle East or the war in Ukraine. But the plastic issue is far from trivial.
Why? Well because plastic pollution isn’t just about straws up turtles’ noses. It is about so much more. It’s about the trillions of microplastics that have now contaminated our water, our food chain, the air, soil, oceans and even our own bodies. Plastic particles have been found in human brains, lungs, even placentas.
There is growing research that links these microparticles and the toxic chemicals that leach from them, like BPAs and phthalates, with cancer, heart attacks and strokes and dementia. Perhaps most worrying of all studies are even finding associations with miscarriage, which for a self-declared Pro-Life President should be a serious cause for concern in its own right. Our own report, Babies Vs. Plastics, highlighted the elevated risk plastics pose to the health of infants.
The truth is that there is more plastic now than there has ever been, and production is increasing globally. In 2021, over 390 million tons of plastic were produced with a market value of $593 billion US dollars. 50% of all this plastic, like plastic straws, is single-use and will be used for less than a few minutes and tossed away as trash.
Even more shocking is the massive financial drain plastic waste imposes on U.S. taxpayers every year. In 2019 alone, the U.S. economy lost at least $7.2 billion due to landfilled plastic waste, according to the Department of Energy. Let’s hope Elon Musk’s DOGE tackles that utter waste of money and backs our call to cap plastic production and make polluters pay.
The best-case scenario for plastic trash, and it’s not a good one, is it ends up in a landfill and degrades into million more microplastic particles that poison our soil, air and over time gradually leach into the water table, and impact not just wildlife but all of us too. Especially poorer communities that often live near landfill sites.
The worst-case scenario is that all this single use plastic ends up desecrating our forests, fields, rivers, oceans and communities. I should know because as someone whose life is dedicated to fighting plastic pollution as the Coordinator of the Great Global Cleanup, for EARTHDAY.ORG the organization behind Earth Day itself, I’m the unashamed king of trash.
I spend my life leading an army of volunteers, picking it up wherever we can. It’s dirty, exhausting, and sometimes dangerous, and for a long time, I believed it was the most effective way to fight plastic pollution. I was wrong.
Over the past three years, I’ve rallied communities worldwide to pick up plastic trash. I’ve raked through Armenia’s Yerevanyan lake to fish for plastic Jermuk bottles; I tripped into a river full of fecal matter in Gainesville just to retrieve a single Styrofoam cup and I’ve cleaned beaches up and down the East Coast. Once with the cast of the Bravo series Southern Charm and the Hollywood actress Amanda Seyfried helping me.
After years in this work, you start to notice what has now become blindingly obvious — the same beaches, rivers, lakes and the same parks, forests, and communities are all being polluted repeatedly with plastic waste. We are bailing out a tsunami of plastic, but the tide keeps washing more over us.
This is why in 2024 EARTHDAY.ORG launched, Planet vs. Plastics, to expose the human health impacts of plastic pollution because it is clear that picking up the trash isn’t the only problem – it’s what the trash is made of – a toxic mix of oil and chemicals like PFAS, BPA, and phthalates.
Predictably, the US has failed to deliver in managing our plastic pollution and human health crisis. Having led the world into believing that we would sign the United Nations Global Plastic Treaty in Busan in November 2024, the new heads at the US State Department have now quietly walked back on that promise. Not only will we NOT be joining the rest of the world in trying to manage our epic global plastic waste problem, but we also reneged on our position to support measures to cap plastic production globally.
We must commit to reducing plastic production by 60% by 2040 to protect our health, the environment, and future generations. Returning to plastic straws is not just a nostalgic mistake—it’s a dangerous step back for the well-being of our planet and its people. Plastic sucks.
