Oil-backed trade group is lobbying the Trump administration to push plastics across Africa

A lobby group representing oil and chemical companies, including Shell, Exxon, Total, DuPont and Dow, has been pushing the Trump administration during the pandemic to use a US-Kenya trade deal to expand the plastic and chemical industry across Africa.

Oil Industry’s Shift to Plastics in Question as Report Warns $400 Billion in Stranded Assets Possible

But facts, as the saying goes, are stubborn things. And the world we live in today has already changed significantly from the world that existed in 1989, when messaging around plastics, even if untrue, was enough to affect reality for the oil industry.

Plastic, plastic everywhere

When we discard a plastic bag, an electronic device encased in plastic, a plastic pen emptied of its ink or any of the myriad plastic objects which populate our lives, we usually say we are throwing the object “away.”
I put “away” in quotes because if there were ever any piece of evidence to convince us that there is no “away,” it is the discovery of tiny particles of plastic in the Arctic ice, deep oceans and high mountains.