School campuses are a new battleground in an increasingly bitter brawl over plastics, as groups like Vitale’s seek to improve the reputation of a material that has become infamous as an environmental menace. The efforts are partially funded by companies involved in or dependent on fossil fuel production, through donations and conference sponsorships. Plastics manufacturing involves large amounts of oil and natural gas. Some of these companies see plastics as an opportunity to continue growing as demand for gasoline and diesel dissipates amid the rise of electric vehicles.
Vitale’s group dispatches its “PlastiVan” program throughout the academic year, with its team of plastic evangelists talking up the wonders of polymers to young audiences. Once housed out of an actual van, the program has since grown into a sophisticated messaging and recruitment operation, visiting as many as 175 schools annually. In Northeast Texas, hundreds of Girl Scouts have been awarded a PlastiVan-sponsored merit badge.
Another industry ally working separate from PlastiVan, conservative advocacy group PragerU, provides public school teachers in at least five states a classroom video that assures students they should not feel guilty about using so much plastic because plastics actually help the environment — an assertion many environmental scientists would find absurd.
Yet industry plans for the future are confronting a hostile regulatory landscape. Even in the classroom, the industry is finding itself up against tough adversaries. Anti-plastics groups are promoting their own lesson plans, which push a very different perspective, one that focuses on industry culpability and guides students to organize against single-use plastics.
“This is a huge fight for the future of our kids,” said Margaret Galbraith, who coordinates a program in Port Washington, N.Y., with students working to ban single-use plastics from school cafeterias and older kids visiting elementary school classrooms to teach about the ills of plastic use. “The industry wants to lay the pollution problem on individual consumers; meanwhile, it is impossible for individuals to fix this. Plastic pollution is everywhere because of these companies. Recycling as a solution is a myth. It’s crazy to me that schools would let them come in to promote this false solution.”
“Overuse” of plastics, particularly single-use plastics like water bottles, has created an “environmental catastrophe,” according to the United Nations, with roughly 12 million tons of plastic swept into the oceans each year. Microplastics permeate the food chain, showing up in 83 percent of our tap water and have even been discovered in human placentas. Recycling has been a grossly inadequate fix: Only 9 percent of plastics is successfully recycled, and 40 percent of material collected in recycling bins ends up in the trash, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Over the last 20 years, with recycling programs in full swing, global plastic waste doubled.
But public school students are encouraged not to worry about it in the pro-industry teachings recently approved for classroom use in Florida, Oklahoma, Arizona and Montana, as well as some Texas school districts. In those places, state officials greenlit PragerU videos and lesson plans aimed at providing students an “alternative to the dominant left-wing ideology in culture, media, and education.”
Much of the organization’s seed money came from Dan and Farris Wilks, billionaire brothers from Texas who made their fortune from fracking and run a church called the Assembly of Yahweh, where they have preached that climate change is God’s will. Among the PragerU videos targeted at public school students is a 10-minute cartoon about plastics.
In it, a child comes home from school stressed out because his math teacher is trying to enlist students in her crusade to get rid of all plastic on campus. “She really scared me,” the boy says. “If it’s so bad for the environment, why is it in almost everything?”
The boy and his sister travel back in time to meet Belgian chemist Leo Baekeland, who developed the first synthetic plastics. Baekeland persuades them that plastics are good for the environment, eliminating the need to kill endangered animals and deplete forests to get resources previously used to make everyday products.
The chemist is shocked to learn that people of the future are concerned about the amount of fossil fuels used in plastic production. “Fossil fuels are cheap and plentiful, thank goodness,” the scientist says. “So we don’t need to use living animals, and we can create items that improve the lives of everyone.”
The lessons taught by PlastiVan are more nuanced, acknowledging the scourge of plastic pollution but sharply diverging with environmental groups and many political leaders on how to address it. PlastiVan officials say they are the ones promoting realistic solutions.
“Science-based information which contradicts anti-plastics positions deserves inclusion and equal weight in these discussions,” Vitale said in an email. “We certainly want to empower students to look at all data and decide for themselves whether the fallacy of ‘we should ban ALL plastics’ is something that is truly possible.”
Environmental groups counter that banning all plastics has never been the goal. They accuse the industry of deliberately confusing consumers and students.
A representative from Braskem, a Brazilian petrochemical company — which has its logo emblazoned on Vitale’s lab coat — that provides major funding for the PlastiVan program, said in an email that the company’s interest is inspiring “the next generation of STEM leaders.” The company said providing an alternative to the anti-plastics messaging of environmental groups is not its motivation. Another sponsor, Husky, which makes injection molding systems for the plastics industry, said in a statement that “introducing young minds to the world of plastics education encourages them to think about how we can each take actions to move towards a circular economy.”
Other backers of the program include Chevron, DuPont and the Plastics Industry Association. Proceeds from industry conferences also help fund it, along with dues paid by individuals to the Society of Plastics Engineers.
The chemistry students who took part in a PlastiVan lesson Vitale taught recently at Warren Mott High School in the Detroit area took to Vitale’s narrative.
“It widens your perspective on plastics,” said Fateha Qureshi, a junior. “You’re told by the media a lot that plastics is a bad thing and how we should stop using it. She was talking about how it can be a good thing. When you learn more, you learn better things, too.”
The perspective was shared by fellow junior Syed Jamal. “I feel like these problems could be fixed if we made better use of the polluted plastic,” he said after the class.
At a Plastics Industry Association conference in the spring, Vitale highlighted how the PlastiVan program is able to collect up to 25,000 “data points” from students each year, which inform student perceptions of the industry and can be used to guide lesson plans. The program, she said at the Minneapolis event, enables tracking of where in the country anxiety about plastic pollution is highest.
“The anti-plastics people make people feel guilty,” Vitale said at the event, a recording of which was shared with The Washington Post by an attendee. “People don’t want to feel guilty, so they push it off on us. We have to fight back with stories of our own.”
Sometimes students are even recruited to help write those stories, like the recent graduate of a Milwaukee-area high school who in the spring penned an essay from the perspective of plastic trash.
“I’m not the bad guy here,” said the piece, which earned a cash prize from a local chapter of the Society of Plastics Engineers. “Have you seen what is happening to the trees, how about the earth’s crust from all that mining? I’m not the problem, the problem is humans. I’m important in all parts of their lives and people still throw me into rivers and lakes.”
The PlastiVan program is focused on the classroom, but its motto — “changing the perception of plastics, one classroom at a time” — makes clear the industry’s hope that the persuasion effort will resonate far beyond it at a time plastic companies are under siege.
The United Nations is pursuing a legally binding international treaty to end plastic pollution, with many nations pushing for limits on plastic production that are fiercely opposed by industry. In Congress, more than 140 lawmakers have sponsored legislation in recent years that would ban certain single-use plastics and place a moratorium on new factories.
It all has put an industry not accustomed to losing control of the narrative in a bind, said Judith Enck, a former regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency who is now the president of the advocacy group Beyond Plastics.
“This is an industry that has successfully confused people by putting a recycling logo on many plastic items that are not even recyclable,” she said. As the industry now promotes what it calls more advanced recycling technologies, such as chemical processes that melt down the materials and repurpose them into other products, it is facing unprecedented scrutiny from activists and regulators who are challenging its claims about sustainability and pointing out the industry’s history of overpromising and underdelivering on pollution mitigation.
“If [PlastiVan] really were an educational presentation, they would be talking about why it is impossible to achieve higher recycling rates because of the thousands of different chemicals used to make plastics and the many different colors and different polymers,” Enck said. “A teacher could be explaining to these students why so much of plastic is fundamentally not recyclable. Telling high school kids these problems can be solved by recycling more is disingenuous.”
Promoters of the industry-aligned education programs say they are providing a public service, often going into schools that are located in areas where the industry has a major presence — such as Detroit, where plastics have a big role in auto production — and inspiring local students to pursue the meaningful careers it offers.
Not everyone in these communities, though, is impressed. As Beyond Plastics recently prepared to lead journalists on a “toxic tour” of Port Arthur, Tex., a city dominated by petrochemical factories, some of the educators and activists who came along suggested a more balanced public school program would include bringing students on such a tour.
“What the plastics industry is doing here is not that different than what the tobacco industry used to do in schools,” said Robert Bullard, a professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University who is known as the father of the modern environmental justice movement. “They are exploiting an educational system that oftentimes embraces free materials and something that may have the appearance of rigor, but is really about industry peddling a message that their harmful product is good.”
