Copyright © 2025 by Beyond Plastics. This excerpt originally appeared in The Problem with Plastic: How We Can Save Ourselves and Our Planet Before It’s Too Late, published by The New Press. Reprinted here with permission.
Debra Ramirez lives at a place where survival and sacrifice meet. She knows the winding back roads that crisscross Lake Charles and the city of Sulphur, Louisiana, like the back of her hand. And like her hands — roughened by the work of cleaning up her community after oscillating natural disasters, hurricanes, and tornadoes — the roads connect something as simple as our soap dispensers to the severe weather that kills more than 40,000 people across the globe every year.
There are dozens of oil refineries and methanol and chemical plants dotting the roads that Ramirez regularly frequents. They light up the sky with orange hues and paint her drinking water brown, green, and pink with their chemicals, which are constantly dumped into water sources. It is clear to her, not by choice, how plastics and climate change relate. How her forced dependence on bottled water, plastic roofing, window tarps, and cheap, preserved foods during times of disaster relates to the chemical plants producing plastic polymers down the road. Why her home in Mossville, Louisiana, paved over in favor of a chemical facility, is always flooding, the permeating soil tilled by her ancestors turned to concrete and smokestacks.
Today, the total climate change–driving emissions of plastics, from production to disposal, are estimated to be four times those of the global aviation industry. Plastics are on track to surpass coal emissions in the United States. Yet despite the fact that plastics are made from fossil fuels and inundate our lives, the connection between plastics and climate is not yet well socialized within the general public — unless you’re someone like Ramirez who lives it every day.
Plastics are made from fossil fuels and chemicals. The world’s biggest oil and gas companies are also the biggest plastic producers. According to the International Energy Agency, petrochemicals will account for more than a third of the growth in world oil demand by 2030 and nearly half of the growth by 2050. That means that even as the country strives to lower emissions by 50% by 2050, and lower its use of oil and gas as an energy source, we’ll still be gulping down those fossil fuels via coffee cups and takeout containers. All the while, communities like Ramirez’s may cease to exist.
Already, the fossil-fueled climate disasters that have plagued her town in recent years have made Lake Charles the fastest-shrinking town in America. Between 2019 and 2024, the community lost nearly 10% of its residents, a higher share of its population than any other city has lost. It feels deliberate, she says, and points to the larger motivations behind the plastics and fossil fuel industries. “You can’t survive without water, you can’t survive without air, and you can’t survive without land,” she says, and the governments and industries driving this destruction are aware of this. “They don’t want us to survive.”
The same fossil fuel companies contributing to climate change are also fueling the plastics boom, profiting from both ends of an environmental crisis. Plastic is serving as a golden goose to continue extraction as usual, even when the transportation sector is electrified and the grid is powered by renewable energy. “The good old boys smile,” Ramirez says, “while we’re left with nothing.”
The Chain of Contamination
Plastic’s relationship to climate change begins with its impacts on land. The molecules that make up a plastic water bottle, which might have a useful life of about ten minutes, make a journey that is hidden from consumers through oil and gas wells, pipelines, injection wells, compressor stations, petrochemical facilities like ethane crackers, secondary manufacturing facilities, trains, barges, and incinerators. The infrastructure needed to extract fossil fuels, transform them into plastics, and deal with waste has a massive footprint. Each step of the plastic production cycle increases our collective carbon footprint, impacting communities like Ramirez’s that are already vulnerable to the effects of climate change.
Where Ramirez lives in Lake Charles and across the neighboring city of Sulphur, it’s hard to miss the markers of an industry that has reshaped her community and countless others. Bright yellow and orange pipeline markers rise from the ground like warnings, telling you that beneath your feet is a network of pipelines, quietly transporting fossil fuels across the landscape. These markers are more than just safety alerts; they’re symbols of an industry whose reach extends far beyond the oil rigs and refineries.
In 2022, there were 400 petrochemical facilities devoted to plastic resins and synthetic rubbers in the United States, producing more than 30 million metric tons of plastic each year. The industry only grows. According to Oil and Gas Watch, at the beginning of 2025, there were at least 71 more proposed projects, including 33 new ethylene crackers — plants designed to break down fossil fuels into the building blocks of plastic. These don’t include all the oil and gas wells that feed these facilities, or the secondary manufacturing plants that turn resins into plastic products — of which there were 955 facilities in 2021 — nor the waste disposal infrastructure that takes the plastic after it has been used. It’s a sprawling network with no clear end, consuming resources and land at an astonishing rate.
All this infrastructure takes up a lot of land. In Cancer Alley — an 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where residents have some of the highest cancer rates in the country — a single petrochemical complex can consume more than 1,500 football fields of land. Despite Ramirez’s Louisiana community having a cancer risk from air pollution that is eight times the federal limit, it is not included in the Cancer Alley designation.
Today in the Gulf South, the coastal prairie and wetlands critical to migratory birds are being eaten up by vast gravel yards of pipelines, flares, and smokestacks. They also tell the story of a deeply insidious economic shift that has been kept afloat by state governments and everyday citizens’ pocketbooks. The booming petrochemical buildout along the Gulf of Mexico has been supported by billions of dollars in public subsidies from state tax abatement programs despite facilities’ regular violations of pollution permits and their contributions to the climate threats that are making life untenable.
Before the petrochemical plants were built, much of these lands were plantations: massive farms worked by people who were stolen from another continent and then enslaved to grow cash crops like corn, sugarcane, cotton, rice, and tobacco for white businessmen. After the Civil War, many of these places became free towns—areas that were settled by people who had been enslaved. But after a few decades of agricultural decline, people from all over the country and even the world turned their attention to Louisiana for a new business: petrochemicals. The foundation for extraction was already there, the land cleared, cheap, and primed for development. The plots were also in ripe locales near essential natural resources, such as rivers and coastlines, providing easy access to water and transportation routes for shipping raw materials and finished products. In 1914, the Mexican Petroleum corporation purchased land on the Destrehan plantation in Louisiana to build a large oil refinery—and the rest, as they say, is history.
These historically Black communities continue to exist on the land to this day. Many of their ancestors are buried there. The Shell Norco oil refinery in Louisiana, for example, sits on the site of a former plantation where the largest slave revolt (and one of the largest slave massacres) took place. For these communities today, the land holds memories of both resilience and relentless exploitation, as the cycle of extraction continues to take its toll. These neighborhoods aren’t just dots on a map; they’re living, breathing testaments to the families who have called them home for generations, carrying on traditions, raising kids, and gathering on porches, rain or shine.
The Shell Norco oil refinery in Louisiana, sits on the site of a former plantation where the largest slave revolt took place. (Adam Mahoney/Capital B) 
A Black Masking Indian tribe — a subculture of Black Louisianans that emerged during slavery combining West African, Afro-Caribbean, and Native American cultural practices — honors the legacy of America’s largest slave revolt. (Adam Mahoney/Capital B)
Rising Up Against a Life Tainted by Plastics
Ramirez regularly visits her eighty-nine-year-old cousin Herbert Rigmaiden, one of the few remaining residents in her hometown of Mossville, Louisiana. Founded in 1790 by people who were previously enslaved, Mossville used to be defined by the massive oak trees that shot out of the ground, not smokestacks. Once home to more than ten thousand residents, now fewer than eight hundred people live there, including the Rigmaidens. These days, Herbert takes care of his eighty-six-year-old brother, Raymond, who has Parkinson’s disease — a disease that studies show is connected to trichloroethylene, a chemical commonly used to make materials such as PVC plastic. A few miles beyond the grassy plot of land where they live there is an oil refinery, several petrochemical plants, and the country’s second-largest concentration of vinyl chloride manufacturers. The pollution’s impact is palpable: A 1998 study found that Mossville residents had three times more cancer-causing chemicals in their blood than the average American.
The destruction of Ramirez’s and the Rigmaidens’ homes has happened in more than just one way. Many residents died as a direct result of these health problems, as evidenced by the billboards lining the streets detailing class-action lawsuits for industrial pollution–caused cancer clusters. But they also died from the stress of housing insecurity, as Ramirez suspects. Studies support her assertion: A wide-ranging 2021 study found that housing insecurity contributes statistically to worsening cancer outcomes. Guiding a tour through what’s left of Mossville, she is one of the last holders of these lives and stories. Pointing to crumbling homes and signs signaling various chemical companies’ ownership of the now desolate community, she gave eulogies for those lost.
Between 2013 and 2020, Sasol — the latest chemical company to buy out homes around Mossville — purchased 584 plots in the community, including land in a majority-white area next to Mossville. A 2021 report showed that the predominantly white areas received payouts from the company that were 82% higher than those in Mossville, totaling $8.5 billion. Because of this disparity, about one hundred households in Mossville stayed put, experiencing the slow death of environmental racism. In a conversation with Herbert in his yard in 2023, he explained that we all need to do our best to protect our families from these diseases. But also: Your birthplace can sometimes determine your life expectancy.
This is why Ramirez fights. You’ll see her in her cheetah-print outfits at protests across the Gulf Coast, zooming down her street to organize neighbors in her electric scooter, and holding signs condemning chemical polluters in the nation’s capital. “It’s easier for some people to push past this, to act like it doesn’t exist,” she says. “But for me and the people I love, there is no way I could normalize it.”