2 Slow Violence The Erosion of Marine Plastic Debris and of Human Health

Plastics are seeping into our bodies. Microscopic plastic fibres in the air wend their way into our lungs (Gasperi et al. 2018). Nano- and microplastics in food are taken up through our digestive tracts (Lundquist 2016; Volkheimer 1975). Once inside us, they can move into the placenta (Wick et al. 2010) or even the brain (Mattsson et al. 2017) before making their way out of us again (Schwabl et al. 2018). What are these uninvited guests up to? The honest answer is that we have no idea. Science is much better at identifying acute effects than it is at understanding the delayed consequences of our long-term cohabitation with plastics and the chemicals associated with them.

One emerging area of research looks at how prenatal exposures can have consequences not evident until adulthood. One classic example of the “developmental origins of health and disease” is the case of diethylstilbestrol (DES). This synthetic estrogen was widely prescribed to pregnant women. It was assumed to be safe because the mothers and their babies appeared to be unharmed—until the exposed children reached puberty. As young adults, DES daughters had such high rates of an otherwise rare cancer, vaginal clear-cell adenocarcinoma, that physicians and epidemiologists were able to demonstrate a causal connection—a rarity in a discipline that sets such a high bar for what constitutes “proof” of causality.

Long lag times like these are expected when looking at cancer causation. It can take a decade or more, and the interaction of multiple exposures over time, for the cancerous cells to proliferate. What is new is that so many other health problems, from obesity to diabetes to asthma, might have long lag times too. Some of these problems can even persist from generation to generation through what is known as transgenerational epigenetic inheritance. In simple terms, exposures alter which genes are expressed and which genes are silenced. For example, laboratory studies in various species have found transgenerational inheritance of alterations in the brain after exposure to bisphenol-A (BPA), the monomer (building block) of polycarbonate (Drobná et al. 2018), as well as from styrene (the building block of polystyrene) (Katakura et al. 1999). When whole plastics were tested, nanopolystyrene was transferred to subsequent generations through the gonads, with deleterious effects (Zhao et al. 2017). The danger is that, outside the controlled conditions of the laboratory, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to connect the dots between exposures so far removed in time from their effects. When it is difficult to prove causality, it is impossible to demand accountability.

Not all plastics are alike, of course, and different plastics carry different toxicological risks. According to the database Chemicals Associated with Plastic Packaging (CPPdb),

of the 906 chemicals likely associated with plastic packaging, sixty-three rank highest for human health hazards and sixty-eight for environmental hazards according to the harmonized hazard classifications assigned by the European Chemicals Agency within the Classification, Labeling and Packaging regulation implementing the United Nations’ Globally Harmonized System. Further, seven of the 906 substances are classified in the European Union as persistent, bioaccumulative, and toxic, or very persistent, very bioaccumulative, and fifteen as endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDC). Thirty-four of the 906 chemicals are also recognized as EDC or potential EDC in the recent EDC report by the United Nations Environment Programme. (Groh et al. 2019, 3253)

Persistent and bioaccumulative chemicals do not go away. The expression “a moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips” was originally intended to warn against overindulging in desserts, but it could just as easily explain how toxics bioaccumulate—except that toxic chemicals can enter the body not only through our lips but also carried on our breath or absorbed through our skin. There are more ways in than out, however. Most persistent compounds are lipophilic, meaning that they are attracted to fat and oil. They hide in the fatty parts of our bodies. Unlike most compounds, they are not converted by liver enzymes into water-soluble forms, so they do not pass out of us in urine, sweat, and tears. Breastfeeding is one of the few ways to detoxify the body of its accumulated load of persistent organic contaminants, but the toxic compounds are transferred to the nursling.

Chemicals do not just store up in the fatty parts of people; they also bioaccumulate in other species, particularly in species high up on the food chain.¹ In each bite of prey, top predators take in all of the toxic compounds that the smaller creature had bioaccumulated over its lifetime. The higher up on the food chain, the more concentrated the poisons. This is called biomagnification.

The chemicals, then, are indeed “dispersed across time and space.” They build up vertically, bioaccumulating within a single organism over its lifetime and then moving into its progeny. They also build up horizontally, moving from species to species and between air and water and soil. Just as the toxic chemicals add up, so too does the damage. Repeated assaults overwhelm the capacity of the body, or of the environment, to repair itself. Chronic low-dose exposures lead to cumulative effects.

Of course, the production, use, and disposal of plastics are not the only sources of toxic chemicals in the environment. They are, however, an illustration of slow violence: causing harm across time and space in ways that might be difficult to trace given our current tools of analysis. It is difficult to trace in the sense that epidemiology will continue to struggle to demonstrate a causal relationship between impaired health and plastics, and it is untraceable in that the victims of this slow violence often die unremarked and uncounted.

Nixon opens his book with an epigraph from Arundhati Roy: “I think of globalization like a light which shines brighter and brighter on a few people and the rest are in darkness, wiped out. They simply can’t be seen. Once you get used to not seeing something, then slowly, it’s no longer possible to see it” (2011b, 1). Those most affected by the slow violence of plastics are the invisible people who work in some of the most dangerous industries: extraction, chemical production, and waste management. Insofar as their invisibility contributes to the perception that they are disposable, one strategy for resistance is to shine the light back on them and on the processes by which they are put at risk.

From extraction to use to disposal, plastics are inextricably entangled in a linear economy that exploits humans, non-humans, and the planet. Since 99.8 percent of plastic is derived from fossil fuel, it is apposite to consider the impacts of fossil fuel extraction (Künkel et al. 2016). From the regional scale to the global scale, from Ogoniland in the Niger Delta to Yasuní, Ecuador, there is a legible pattern of disproportionate exploitation of fossil fuels on Indigenous lands and in other vulnerable minority communities. In the United States, 20 percent of fossil fuel reserves are found on Native American reservations even though they comprise only 2 percent of the American land base (Osborne 2018). Each nurdle² that bobs on the tide represents more than careless “matter out of place” (Douglas 1978). It carries a story of embodied toxicity and embodied injustice.

I will use hydrofracking³ as an illustration since a recent increase in plastics production in the United States has been linked to an increase in domestic fracking (Taylor 2017). Nearly $180 billion US have been invested since 2010 in new “cracking” facilities that turn natural gas, or crude oil, and their derivatives into raw ingredients for plastic synthesis: ethylene, propylene, butadiene, and benzene (Plotkin 2016).

Fracking well pads are no longer hidden in remote locations. They can be found in dense urban neighbourhoods without a buffer zone (Sweas 2018). Residents nearby complain of incessant noise, of light pollution, and of the diesel fumes of the hundreds of trucks coming to and going from the well pad. Investigation of the human health effects is ongoing, but studies suggest that air and water pollution associated with fracking might increase the likelihood of adverse reproductive outcomes, asthma, and childhood leukemia (Boulé et al. 2018; Epstein 2017; Sapouckey et al. 2018; Shamasunder et al. 2018).

Workers involved in fracking under routine conditions can come into contact with airborne crystalline silica and a proprietary mix of chemicals while handling the hundreds of thousands of pounds of “frack sand” (American Public Health Association 2010). They are also exposed to the emissions of diesel trucks and equipment and to established risk factors such as excessive noise and vibration (Schneider 2013). Spills and accidents are ever-present risks. At least four deaths have been reported when workers monitoring flowback (the fracking fluids that return to the surface) were exposed to lethal concentrations of hydrogen sulphide gas and volatile hydrocarbons (Snawder et al. 2014).

One of the increasingly scarce resources depleted by the production of plastics (and, of course, by other uses of oil and gas) is water. Fracking requires 9.6 million gallons (36,339,953 litres) of fresh water per well (Gallegos et al. 2015). This is one reason that 22 gallons (186 litres per kilogram) of water are required to produce each pound of plastic derived from unconventionally drilled oil (Grace Communications Foundation 2017). The spoiled water returns to the surface along with some of the chemicals⁴ from the fracking operation itself and the salts, chemicals, and naturally occurring radioactive material (with the euphemistic acronym NORM) that leach from the earth into the high-pressure flow of water. This brine is typically either reused in another frack or injected deep into the ground, a practice tied to an increase in the frequency and intensity of earthquakes (Bao and Eaton 2016; Ellsworth 2013; Schultz et al. 2016). Sometimes it is used to irrigate crops (Duke University Nicholas School of the Environment 2017) or sprayed on roadways for de-icing or dust control (Marusic 2018; Veil 2016).

To bring the extraction problem full circle, fracking “sand” itself can be particles of plastic (Parker, Ramurthy, and Sanchez 2012), such as polyacrylamide (Xiong et al. 2018), styrene-divinylbenzene copolymer, or a styrene-ethylvinylbenzene-divinylbenzene terpolymer mixed with a proprietary nanofiller, or real sand coated in a synthetic polymer such as (BPA-based) epoxy resins, furan, polyesters, vinyl esters, and polyurethane (Liang et al. 2016). In other words, in order to produce plastics, we inject microplastics deep underground. Coating raw sand with plastic increases its strength and resistance to being crushed.

Once the natural gas has been extracted, the ethane is separated from the methane. Ethane is taken to a cracker, where a good deal of energy is used to heat it to 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit (816 degrees Celsius).⁵ The heating process breaks some of the carbon-hydrogen bonds and causes a new molecule to form: ethylene. Ethylene is the building block of polyethylene (a plastic used to make shopping bags, milk jugs, and many other familiar items). However, if it is subjected to a complex set of chemical reactions, it can be made into styrene (which in turn can be expanded into Styrofoam™), polyester, synthetic rubber, vinyl acetate (the base of some chewing gums), or vinyl chloride, the building block of PVC (vinyl).

Workers’ health and safety rarely make headlines. A tragic exception occurred in 1984 when a pesticide factory in Bhopal, India, released a cloud of methyl isocyanate gas over the surrounding community where workers and their families lived. Thousands perished. The official version of events, as told by Union Carbide (now Dow), blames the disaster on a worker rather than on any contributing structural factor (Saxon 1986).

Such spectacular instances are hard to ignore, but they are readily dismissed as accidents, as exceptions to an otherwise tolerable safety record. Slow violence done to workers in the plastics industry is much different. In fact, it can be hard to see without specialized training in occupational epidemiology. It is what Nixon (2011a) would call the “attritional lethality” of everyday, cumulative exposures.

Among workers in past generations, exposure to high levels of vinyl chloride monomer (VCM) was linked to an otherwise rare liver cancer called angiosarcoma as well as to acroosteolysis, a painful condition in which the bones in the fingertips and sometimes the toes are resorbed. Permissible exposure limits in the United States for PVC industry workers have been lowered substantially,⁶ but it is unclear whether workers abroad, particularly in China, where nearly 40 percent of the world’s VCM is made, enjoy similar protections (IHS Markit 2017; Kielhorn et al. 2000).

Vinyl chloride is just one of hundreds of dangerous chemicals associated with the production of plastics. Warning signs are emerging about others. Handling BPA is linked to a long list of health problems, among them impaired sperm production (Li, Frey, and Browning 2011). Styrene (the monomer used in the production of polystyrene) can cause, among other maladies, hearing loss (Johnson 2007). Antimony, used as a catalyst in the synthesis of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) (single-use plastic water bottles are frequently made of this material), is linked to cardiac arrhythmia, an altered sense of smell, pneumoconiosis (a lung disease), chronic bronchitis, and skin irritation (Sundar and Chakravarty 2010). One of many problems associated with phthalates (chemicals used as plasticizers to soften PVC and used in many cosmetics and fragranced products) is that they interfere with the body’s ability to regulate testosterone.

There is evidence that this effect, and other toxicants that act on the body’s hormonal systems, do not necessarily follow the usual Paracelsian logic of “the dose makes the poison.” There is not always a safe threshold below which harm is not anticipated. Instead, some toxicants follow decelerating exposure-response curves (Lanphear 2017; Vandenberg et al. 2012) in which smaller doses can be more harmful than larger ones. When zero is the only safe dose, we put those tasked with regulating permissible exposure limits in a predicament. As long as we manufacture these chemicals, there will be some degree of risk to plastics industry workers.

Much is obscured behind the racist caricature of the “ecological Indian” in the iconic 1971 Keep America Beautiful ad campaign. Italian American actor Espera de Corti, himself not Indigenous, is dressed in buckskin and paddles a canoe. Upon viewing the environmental degradation and carelessness of the modern world, he sheds a single tear, silently pleading with Americans not to litter (Gilio-Whitaker 2017). Aside from the evident problems of cultural appropriation and the troubling implication that the presence of the Indian in “modern” society is an anachronism, the ad was part of an “astroturf”⁷ campaign by the beverage industry to deflect criticism of the introduction of disposable packaging for drinks (Dunaway 2017). This set the stage for the popularization of disposable plastics.

The garbage placed “responsibly” in rubbish and recycling bins tends to end up in the bodies of Indigenous people and in other socially vulnerable communities (Cerrell Associates and California Waste Management Board 1984). Landfills, incinerators, and even materials recovery facilities where items are sorted for recycling are disproportionately sited in low-income communities of colour—and not by accident (Jaramillo et al. 2007). They are called LULUs (locally undesired land uses) for a reason.

The transnational movement of trash also flows from the over-resourced to the under-resourced. Now that China is refusing shipments of waste plastics for recycling, evidence suggests that some of this “recyclable” plastic is finding its way to Malaysia, Vietnam, and Thailand, where there is no trash management infrastructure to receive it. Western waste can be found littering waterways or piled in open fields. When everything of market value has been reclaimed, the rest is burned, sending plumes of noxious smoke over the workers and the surrounding residential areas (Greenpeace International 2018). Meanwhile, American consumers who put their waste plastic in the blue bins provided are encouraged to feel pride in having “recycled.”

Even under the best circumstances, trash and recycling collection/sorting is a risky business. It ranks as one of the five most dangerous professions in the United States, with 34.1 fatalities per 100,000 workers (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2017). Workers face accidents with machinery, exposure to chemical and biological hazards (including blood-borne pathogens), repetitive stress injuries, and noise. In a survey of unionized materials recovery facility (MRF) workers in the Bay Area of California, most workers self-reported eye irritations (68 percent of respondents) and coughs (57 percent), which they attributed to excessive dust. One worker remarked that, “whether I wore my mask or not, when I blow my nose at the end of the day, black stuff comes out” (Jamison 2013, 10). Informal sector waste pickers and incarcerated workers face much more serious risks (Jackson, Shuman, and Dayaneni 2006; Mothiba, Moja, and Loans 2017).

Even incineration and its cousins, pyrolysis and “waste-to-energy,” do not make plastics go away. The by-products of both of these processes are a toxic ash (which then must be disposed of) and air pollution. Which by-products of combustion are created depends on the particular mix of materials in each load, on the level of oxygen present, and on the temperature of the burn. Burning polyvinyl chloride at certain temperature ranges, for example, in the presence of oxygen and organic material such as paper, can produce dioxins, some of the deadliest and most persistent synthetic compounds known to science. Some plastics release hydrogen cyanide when burned, a fact that firefighters know all too well (Burke 2006). Although some of that pollution can be trapped by filters, the filters themselves then become a toxic solid waste problem and are typically moved to a landfill. Consequently, there is growing organized resistance to burning plastics (GAIA 2019).

Yet greenwashing paints burning trash as a sustainable solution, again deflecting attention from the inherent unsustainability of a disposable culture. The Cerrell Report suggests that, to disarm environmentalists, “the concept of a Waste-to-Energy project should be introduced to the public at the onset as part of a recycling program” (Cerrell Associates and California Waste Management Board 1984, 31). Japan has endorsed this strategy wholeheartedly. There the national recycling tally includes the tonnes of trash burned in sāmaru risairingu (“thermal recycling”) facilities (Yolin 2015).

Privileged consumers do not see the communities poisoned by the extraction and refining of the oil and gas that become their straws and shopping bags and water bottles. They send their plastic waste overseas so that they do not have to see the mountains of it piling up or breathe the acrid smoke as it burns. The false morality of recycling shields wilful ignorance behind a smokescreen of pro-environmental virtue.

1. 1. Curiously, the levels of persistent and bioaccumulative compounds such as PCBs and mercury appear to vary by sex in fish (Madenjian et al. 2016). The authors speculate that testosterone levels can affect mercury toxicokinetics in fish and possibly in humans.
2. 2. Nurdles, sometimes called “mermaids’ tears,” are prefabrication resin pellets. They are transported to factories that melt them and mould them into everyday objects. Because they are lightweight, spills are common. That they are inexpensive disincentivizes investing in measures to contain them.
3. 3. Readers unfamiliar with hydrofracking can refer to a BBC explainer (“What Is Fracking?” 2018) that reads in part “fracking is the process of drilling down into the earth before a high-pressure water mixture is directed at the rock to release the gas inside. Water, sand and chemicals are injected into the rock at high pressure which allows the gas to flow out to the head of the well. The process can be carried out vertically or, more commonly, by drilling horizontally to the rock layer and can create new pathways to release gas or can be used to extend existing channels. The term fracking refers to how the rock is fractured apart by the high-pressure mixture.”
4. 4. The Endocrine Disruption Exchange maintains a set of spreadsheets online representing the results of its ongoing effort to catalogue the constituents of fracking operations and to identify their potential health impacts. See https://endocrinedisruption.org/audio-and-video/chemical-health-effects-spreadsheets.
5. 5. For an excellent treatment of environmental racism in the siting of ethane crackers, see Lerner and Bullard (2005).
6. 6. In 1975, based on numerous reports of angiosarcoma of the liver in vinyl chloride workers, the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration dropped the time-weighted average permissible exposure limit from 500 parts per million to 1 part per million. Toxicologists at Dow and B.F. Goodrich had been aware since the 1950s, however, that exposures as low as 200 parts per million led to liver cancer. They colluded to keep this information hidden from government regulators (Sass, Castleman, and Wallinga 2005).
7. 7. “Astroturf refers to apparently grassroots-based citizen groups or coalitions that are primarily conceived, created and/or funded by corporations, industry trade associations, political interests or public relations firms” (“Astroturf” n.d.).

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