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October 5, 2023
Plastic is everywhere. If the plastic industry was a country, it would be the world’s fifth-largest greenhouse gas emitter. The average American consumes and discards about 110 pounds of single-use plastic each year. Globally, plastic waste in waterways is projected to triple by 2060. Because of this, Alejandra Warren and Dr. Matt Warren created Plastic Free Future (PFF), a California-based nonprofit committed to the reduction and elimination of plastic pollution through promoting reusable alternatives, with a focus on outreach to underserved and systemically-harmed communities.
Alejandra described growing up in Colombia in an interview with EESI, saying she fostered a lifetime connection with nature as her grandmothers taught her how to care for and respect the environment, especially emphasizing the importance of waste reduction. After moving to the United States and seeing all the waste people accumulate, Alejandra grew more concerned about the issue of plastic pollution. She began to think back to Colombia, other parts of Latin America, Africa, and Asia, where communities already have ideas about sustainable ways of living but often get sidelined.
“We [at PFF] decided to focus on communities that have so much knowledge, but they're usually not part of the mainstream solution,” explained Alejandra. “Our communities already have the solutions but are not highly visible or marketed as those offered by industry or so-called green capitalism. That’s why we want to highlight, celebrate, and recognize them as valid.”
Matt draws from his background as a tropical forest ecologist in his role as PFF’s science advisor. He helps track and critically review scholarly articles on plastic pollution, which PFF then shares on its social media platforms or uses to develop presentations to reach broader audiences, communities, and stakeholders that might not otherwise hear about that research.
“We're finally starting to see that the research is catching up with this sort of community knowledge. Now, we’re seeing that the science is actually supporting what we already knew all along—that we're seeing major, major disproportionate impacts on [overburdened] communities,” said Matt. “And that's something that we're trying to address and we're trying to highlight, you know, both from the research side and the traditional knowledge side.”
Communities of color are disproportionately affected by the harms of plastic pollution at all stages from production to disposal. A 2018 report by the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Center for Environmental Assessment analyzed the demographics of communities located near particulate matter (PM)-emitting facilities, including plastic production facilities. Researchers found that these areas were predominantly non-white. Compared to white populations, Black people were exposed to 1.5 times more PM, which is linked to lung cancer among other health problems. Additionally, Hispanics were exposed to 1.2 times more PM than non-Hispanic whites.
Despite bearing the brunt of the consequences of plastic pollution, these overburdened communities are often left out of the environmental movement and not considered when crafting environmental policies. A 2018 survey from the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability examined the demographics of 2,057 environmental nonprofits and found that white people comprise 85 percent of the staff and 80 percent of the boards of these organizations. According to a 2022 report from Green 2.0, the number of people of color in environmental nonprofits has been steadily increasing since 2017—at least with the 88 organizations in their study—but white staff and board members are still disproportionately in the majority.
To address these inequalities, PFF highlights the importance of considering these communities when creating solutions. “You can benefit the environment, you can benefit human health, and you can benefit business owners, when you think in a more intersectional way,” said Alejandra.
To achieve their environmental justice mission, PFF facilitates bilingual outreach programs. Alejandra leads PFF’s bilingual business outreach to help Hispanic restaurants transition to more sustainable foodware options because of linguistic and financial barriers some businesses face when implementing new environmental practices. PFF helps translate and explain new policies to Spanish-speaking restaurants, emphasizing how reusable foodware can benefit the environment while avoiding the higher costs associated with compostable foodware.
“When you push restaurants into switching to the compostable [foodware], you are not thinking that they're spending three, four, or even five times more per item…When you go to the small restaurants, mostly owned by immigrants, there you see the real impact,” said Alejandra. “[You think about] what's better for the environment, without thinking about if this community is ready to take the cost of additional materials like compostable fiber, PFAS-free, and all of these requirements. And when you see that most businesses that are already struggling to survive or can go out of business with these changes, then you think, actually, if we switch to reusable, they can save money. So that's a truly circular solution that people don't think about, because that's not the go-to solution.”
PFF also encourages reusable goods through their incentives program at local farmers’ markets in northern California. For this program, PFF gives points to people who bring their reusable bags to the market. These points can be exchanged for reusable prizes like bags and jars to encourage people to reduce their plastic use and carbon footprint. At just one of these markets, Alejandra noted how they helped to save over 5,000 plastic bags from entering their community in one year.
“The best solution to plastic waste is to not produce it in the first place.” -Matt Warren
“The best solution to plastic waste is to not produce it in the first place.”
-Matt Warren
PFF emphasizes reusing materials as a more sustainable solution than recycling, which still introduces waste into communities. Only nine percent of plastic waste is actually recycled globally, and 22 percent is mismanaged, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. These statistics are even worse in the United States, where only five to six percent of plastic is recycled.
“The focus on this kind of failed recycling system has really distracted us away from the real solutions, which are reuse and refill systems and community-based solutions that could really work,” said Matt.
While PFF’s community outreach programs emphasize reusing as a sustainable solution at a local level, the organization’s federal and global work focuses on addressing upstream plastic operations. Alejandra was recently involved in the first and second sessions of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution, part of the UN Environment Programme’s process to establish a global plastics treaty, where she emphasized the importance of recognizing the harms of plastic production to low-income communities and communities of color, and implementing bottom-up, community-based solutions to curb plastic pollution.
At the federal level, PFF is currently focused on the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act, which is expected to be reintroduced before the end of 2023. The bill, previously introduced in 2021, aims to curb plastic pollution through “practical plastic reduction strategies.” While the bill lists numerous policy solutions, some of the initiatives include restricting certain single-use, nonrecyclable plastics like carryout bags, requiring the Environmental Protection Agency to conduct more studies on the environmental and public health impacts of plastic facilities, and including more language services to reach non-English speaking communities.
PFF emphasizes the importance of legislation that prevents more waste from entering and harming communities. “We feel very strongly about putting limits on new plastic production, and especially subsidizing plastic industrial facilities because a lot of times these petrochemical facilities that manufacture plastics are subsidized by the taxpayer,” said Matt. “And we don't want to see our tax dollars subsidizing something that's actually killing people and polluting our planet.”
In the near future, PFF is hoping to expand their work amplifying the voices and solutions of systemically-harmed communities.
“We are trying to bring the solutions to other platforms that are not only the plastic platform, but also the biodiversity platform, and the climate platform. I see ourselves just going into those spaces a little bit more,” said Alejandra. “It's really exciting and beautiful work.”
Author: Laura Gries
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