-Plastic, the miracle stuff that’s become indispensable to modern life, except for what’s not -- the throwaway, single-use trash that overwhelms all efforts to recycle.

Can the genie be put back in the bottle?

We’ll look at a way to stop the deluge and what’s holding that effort back.

♪♪ -Funding for this program was provided by... ♪♪ ♪♪ -If any single human-made substance defines the modern era, it is the miracle product of plastic.

It benefits our lives in so many ways, from cars to computers to phones to a world of durable goods, even the clothes we wear.

Plastic and its various forms is used by nearly every human on the planet.

But one use of this miracle stuff that accounts for nearly half of all plastic being made has come back to bite us.

The disposable, single-use packaging, plastic food containers, and bottles that can persist in the environment for centuries.

The immense volume of debris flowing into the ocean is one problem, but there are signs that the process of making all this plastic is also having a serious impact on our health and the environment.

The question is, how do we keep all the benefits that plastics provide, but protect ourselves and the environment from the negative impacts?

And why does this waste stream continue to grow despite so many efforts to reduce it?

-...Jerry Brown signed a bill yesterday outlawing... -On November 7, 2017, construction began on the Royal Dutch Shell ethane cracker plant in Beaver County, Pennsylvania.

A plant designed to, each year, produce over 1.5 million tons of raw plastic.

-10 years ago, when we started courting Shell in Beaver County, we had four hotels.

Today, we have 31.

Where the steel industry left us 30 years ago and we have been desperate for economic impact.

-All of my great-grandparents and grandparents worked in Braddock, and I spent half of my childhood there.

You know, I remember a time when there were thousands of workers, and the place where the steel industry began has slowly been abandoned.

It’s resulted in lots of displacement of people, families, and it’s heartbreaking.

-Have you gotten to see what’s going on at the Shell petrochemical facility, also known as the cracker plant?

If you have not, will you please take a ride to go see it?

Take -- Right now.

It has, I believe, the third-tallest crane in the country and the fifth-tallest crane in the country.

And my understanding is, is that it is the single largest construction site in the United States, if not the world.

4,500 trade jobs, and it’s going to peak this summer at 6,500.

-The reason why I got into office, why I wanted to do this -- because I have seven kids, and after seeing my siblings leave Western Pennsylvania, I want to see a day when they can stay here.

-As an incentive for Shell to build their ethane cracker in rural Beaver County, the majority of state lawmakers voted for the biggest tax break in Pennsylvania’s history.

The belief was that it would boost the economy by tapping into the natural gas deep within the state’s Marcellus Shale Formation by fracking, the drilling method that injects liquids at high pressure to fracture the rock and release liquid ethane, the main feedstock for making plastic.

But from the very start of the Shell project, Pennsylvanians have been divided about the idea.

-Pennsylvania residents have a constitutional right to clean air.

-The petrochemical manufacturing industry that is waiting to be born will bring economic growth greater than Pennsylvania has already seen from the drilling.

-No person’s job has a right to make me, my family, and my neighbors sick.

-The further use of Pennsylvania natural gas is necessary for greater job creation.

-It’s a mystery to me why we would permit any of it.

-We need this stuff.

We need the polyethylene.

We use it every day.

-Whether or not there’s any shortage of plastic being made is another bone of contention, partly because the sheer volume of gas being extracted has spawned plans for more ethane crackers that would add to what critics say is already a global surplus of plastic, a surplus that has many scientists concerned about what it’s used for.

-Packaging, beverage containers, and that accounts for 40% of all the plastics being made.

That is the major driver of the expansion of plastic production now.

At its current rate of growth, plastics production will quadruple by 2050.

If that happens, then, by 2030, which is when the IPCC tells us we need to cut global emissions nearly in half, plastics alone will be producing as much greenhouse gases as 291 large coal-fired power plants.

-In the end, construction of the giant plant went forward without delay.

But debate over the government’s embrace of the project continues, in part because of the state’s industrial past.

-Why leadership would want to go back down that path again, after living through the displacement and the toxic cleanup and the economic struggles -- we will be subsidizing the wrong thing.

-I am a former commercial lender and was president of an international importing company that supplied the steel industry.

There is so much data about the economics showing the harms and the poor payouts that will come through plastics.

-The capacity to produce ethylene and polyethylene in the United States has increased by more than 50%.

At the same time, China and other Asian countries have also been vastly expanding their ability to produce plastic.

There is way more capacity to produce plastic than there is demand right now.

-And so the long-term prospects of success, financially, of this strategy aren’t good.

-I can’t believe that these people who are our leaders would be entrusted to make these decisions.

On the heels of the '80s and the steel industry and the collapse of it, and here they are making the same choice again.

-There may be 5,000 workers there now, but that only lasts for a couple of years, and then it’s done.

-I will tell you, I think Shell, in and of themselves, were -- They did a great job.

They’re giving reports out.

They’re being very transparent with the public.

-The leadership made a decision to pursue this industry.

That decision was made behind closed doors.

-They’ve engaged with the community to the point where people are very excited about the prospects of this facility opening up and others opening up, as well.

-With the plastic plant still under construction and the dust far from settled over the decision to build it, lawmakers squared off over a second government subsidy bill, House Bill 732, a bill intended to attract more petrochemical plants like Shell’s ethane cracker.

-So, what is going to allow us to grow Pennsylvania all across the 67 counties?

It’s the use of natural gas.

-My legislation seeks to replicate the success of the currently under-construction project of the cracker plant just outside of Pittsburgh.

-There’s projects across this entire commonwealth that could benefit from a project like that.

-It stands to attract petrochemical manufacturers from around the world.

-Giving this generation of Pennsylvania working families a shot at a good-paying job.

-House Bill 732 is the transformative opportunity of a generation.

-The natural-gas industry is a great thing for our environment.

The footprint that a natural-gas pad has, as opposed to a coal mine or strip mine, is dramatic.

-It was an opportunity to not just, you know, create the energy, but manufacture products based on and used with those building blocks, those petrochemical building blocks.

-The people that are living in it, that have the well sites close to their home, they love having it there because it’s bringing more wealth to the area.

-We currently have 32 well pads around our home.

We have compressor stations, pigging stations, residual-waste ponds, residual-waste tanks.

There is no way for us to get away from this.

My two youngest seem to have the most impact, just because they’re younger.

Nosebleeds.

They’ve all had skin issues.

My third son has the worst impacts.

He had raging nosebleeds, and he would have them two and three times a day and he would get pale.

I realized like, "Oh, wait.

I can’t keep the windows open at night."

Because they were all fracking.

-This is, indeed, a handout to the petrochemical industry.

Other industries can help our economy, can help stabilize our state, not an industry that has been harmful, is still harmful.

-Heated debates over subsidies for the gas and petrochemical industry center not just on jobs, but what kind of future and quality of life the development leads to.

-And you know what happens if we don’t do this tax credit?

These jobs aren’t created, these investments aren't made, and the commonwealth gets zero.

When you’re looking for a job to support your family, you don’t care about Republican or Democrat.

You don’t care about a tax incentive or anything.

You care about you have food on the table.

-It’s not just about putting food on the table.

It’s about creating good jobs that don’t make workers in our community sick or unsafe.

It’s not an either/or situation.

And for decades, this state has had to make that decision.

-So I had to leave my ivory tower and drive quite a distance to see really what HB 732 is affirming, which is doubling down on fracked gas.

And what I learned, among many things, was that people of that area in Susquehanna County -- they didn’t drink their own water.

They had bought into fracking when it came to their county.

They believed it would be a boon for their economy.

They believed that it would bring high-paying jobs, family-sustaining jobs.

Several years later, the folks who I spoke to, they got cancer.

Rare cancers.

-Far from the state capital, opinions are just as divided.

-It’s people against people -- people that are making money, peoples not making money.

That’s what the gas industry is about.

They’re not drilling here now, but once they open that cracker plant, they’re going to drill in here again.

-Some people did make money, but to what cost?

It impacts other people that are getting no financial benefit.

They’ve polluted our air.

Our water is toxic.

Every single quarter.

They try to normalize everything so that people think it’s okay, and it isn’t okay.

-The whole reason why fracking is expanding is to supply ethane to make more plastic.

And some of the health impacts we see immediately.

We see upper-respiratory effects, kids with bloody noses.

Also, there is a cancer crisis in Southwestern Pennsylvania.

People who live here -- physicians, parents -- we are all concerned that fracking may be to blame for this spike in rare childhood cancers.

-The gap between how Pennsylvanians view Shell’s ethane cracker and the drilling for gas to supply it often comes down to how close they live to these operations, but not always.

-8,000 construction workers, if not more, on-site.

You can’t have 8,000 people working down the road without it having a positive economic impact.

We have a restaurant in town that has a standing order for 500 sandwiches.

-The arrival of the Shell project really boosted our business.

It allowed us to build our business within the community.

Daily lunches for meetings, and at some points, we were up to 500 lunches at a time.

-The other thing that it really has done is put us on the map.

-A world-class, large project in Beaver County.

It was the best marketing program for Beaver County that we ever could have encountered in our life.

The gas is right here, so you have lower costs of extracting that gas and getting it into a production facility, which can then make the polyethylene.

-When the Shell plant starts up, the local citizens will have a concern.

They don’t know what to expect when it’s in operation.

I think they have every right to be concerned.

It’s their neighborhood.

It’s their neighbors.

-It’d be great if we could all be sitting in Starbucks on our laptops, making a living trading Bitcoins while people serve us coffee, but that’s not the way the world works.

You have to make things.

-All of our towns here basically had a steel mill in them.

I swam in orange water from acid-mine drainage.

We have been around resource extraction our entire life.

All we ask is that if you’re going to do it, you do it environmentally sensitive as you can and that the value add is here.

-As to how much value added the natural-gas industry has brought to the local economy, recent data from the federal government has only intensified the debate.

The counties in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia that are the sources of more than 90% of all the natural gas produced in Appalachia, did not see significant growth in jobs and income and actually lost population.

These are not labor-intensive industries.

They are capital-intensive.

They just don’t hire that many workers to begin with.

-The basic fundamentals of the market are leading people away from investing in this, and that’s why they keep appealing to subsidies.

-With construction of the cracker soon to be finished and more wells being drilled to feed it, concerns about the exposure of work crews to radioactivity has added to the controversy.

-A new study by Harvard researchers shows radiation.

levels up to 12 miles downwind of drilling sites can be significantly higher than... -The American dream is to get a good-paying job, be able to provide for your family, do it safely, come home.

This industry does not provide that -- period.

-I’ve worked in that industry 40 years, and no one can deny that I don’t know how it works.

Drilling these wells, they’re bringing up chunks of uranium, and they’re not looking at the high levels of radioactivity.

-Now I’ve been informed, and you’ve been exposing me by proxy to all these hazardous chemicals.

And I’ve been exposing my kids by proxy to all these hazardous chemicals, by just wearing my clothes into work and bringing them home and throwing them in the washer.

That’s not right.

I didn’t sign up for that.

-After six years and more than $6 billion to build, Shell’s ethane cracker plant is finally up and running in Beaver County.

-With the Shell plant built and making plastic, hope remains that it will bring the economic renaissance that politicians promised.

But with thousands of construction workers now laid off and a noticeable dip in local commerce, there is also uncertainty.

-I got to see this thing from start to pretty much finish and I got to see what was here prior to the cracker plant.

It’s kind of like renovating a house, right?

They came in, they took something old, and they made it new.

It’s going to bring a lot of jobs, a lot of money to the area.

The economy is going to be boosted.

So, again, it’s all good.

-When it comes to creating new jobs, which industries to help boost and the real-world impacts they can have much further downstream, policymakers have choices.

-Pennsylvania has been long known as the energy capital of the world, and in renewable energy, altogether, we do have about 10,000 jobs.

And that’s pretty remarkable when you think about only a half a percent of our energy comes from solar in Pennsylvania.

-Think of the money and the billions and trillions of dollars they’re dumping into the oil and gas industry.

Why haven’t we even thought about putting just a little bit of that money towards solar power, towards wind power?

Why haven’t we thought about renewable resources?

I mean, that’s a freaking no-brainer.

-Those technologies have now been proven, and they are some of the fastest-growing technologies in the world.

-The number of potential jobs associated with clean-energy technologies and businesses, like energy efficiency, would dwarf the number of jobs that are currently provided by the natural-gas industry and the petrochemical industry.

-In a rapidly changing world, the type of boom-and-bust economics facing rural Pennsylvanians happen across the nation.

Commercial enterprises die out.

People need new livelihoods.

Industries compete for government support.

And, as in Beaver County, the decision of which to support is subject to political influence, decisions that have long-lasting impact.

-Roughly 150 petrochemical plants line the banks of the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, known as "Cancer Alley."

When we know better, we have a responsibility to do better.

♪♪ ♪♪ -The Mississippi River has long been vital to the American economy.

By 1860, New Orleans had become the nation’s third-largest city and a major port.

The region’s commerce built largely on enslaved workers and the trade of wealthy plantation owners.

But with the end of the Civil War came change.

Today, almost a third of Louisiana citizens are descendants of formerly enslaved Americans.

And in rural communities along the river, many of these residents find themselves surrounded by the petrochemical industry, development that’s had the steady support of the state’s political leadership.

-I’m fifth-generation granddaughter of Harriet Jones, and she purchased this land in 1874.

I’ve seen a lot of changes, a lot of changes.

-We can’t eat the fish in the river anymore.

And my grandfather used to fish in that same river.

Fish and swim -- can’t eat it anymore.

-A lot of people are getting diagnosed with cancer.

When you’re burying young people, when you’re burying middle-aged people, when you’re burying 50-year-old, 60 years old, that’s not their time.

-♪ I got a crown up in that kingdom ♪ ♪ Ain’t a-that good news?

♪ -1,000 miles downstream from Pennsylvania, where the Mississippi meets the Louisiana bayous, the plastic industry, again invited by elected officeholders, has been welcomed by some, but not all.

And as in rural Pennsylvania, the issue is over the choice of which industry was brought in.

-Formosa is proposing to invest $9.4 billion in Louisiana to construct and operate what will be one of the most innovative single-site ethylene and propylene production facilities in the world.

-Whether building another petrochemical plant, this one to make plastic, would be an economic boon or only add to the region’s troubles depends on who’s talking.

-The opportunity that this affords Louisiana is unmeasurable.

The clothes we have on are made of chemicals.

The shoes that I have on are made from chemicals.

So we’re all part of this industry.

-This project is going to bring in 8,000 construction jobs at its peak.

-Petrochemical industry has allowed me to raise my two kids, have them go to very good schools in Baton Rouge, and graduate from college.

-Formosa has funded many, many programs for the students of our parish.

They committed to forming the FG Workforce Academy to train our residents to work at their facility.

-Would you want a plant like this to locate less than a mile from your house and your side door?

I have Nucor at my front door, Occidental at my back door.

-And they got me in the middle of it.

I can’t even go get some fresh air.

You know, most people say, "I think I’ll go outside and sit on the porch and get some fresh air."

You come outside now, you might get a disease.

-They’re saying that they’re going to get rid of plastic.

You know, they’re trying to get rid of plastic straws and all these other stuff.

But the plants are still coming in.

Nobody came to the people in the community and said, "How do you feel about this?"

We were never asked.

The deals are already made, and we hear about it, it’s on TV.

-And all the plastic that’s in the river.

It’s too much plastic.

We don’t have to drink our water out of a plastic jug.

We can always do something else besides all of this plastic.

There’s too much.

-Pollution from the many petrochemical plants along a stretch of the Mississippi River known as Cancer Alley is not the only issue at play.

Many of the plants exist on former sugarcane plantations, including those surrounding St. James, a community originally founded as Freetown by African-Americans emancipated from slavery.

-When you say no, they want to know why you say no.

-The local citizens became further incensed after learning that Formosa would build on top of sites where enslaved plantation workers were buried, likely their own ancestors.

But it’s the growing loss now of family members and neighbors and fears for the health of their children that has them filling meeting halls at public hearings to stop the Formosa plant from being built.

-I wish they had one of you women up there, and I think we would stand a fair chance, because women, they think about their children and their grandchildren and what do they really want?

-I sat down the other day and I took out a page and numbered it from 1 to 50.

I got to 35, and that’s 35 people that I know personally who have died from cancer just in this area.

-The plant Formosa that’s coming in the Fifth District is less than 2 miles from the nearest St. Louis Academy, where these are children from Head Start to third grade, that when they have recess, they go outside, so they’re breathing in your chemicals that you’re letting out into the air.

-In a very different environment, their state capitol in Baton Rouge, the project has had steady support.

-I see a lot of plants coming in Louisiana in the last, you know, 15 years, and the one common denominator is the natural gas.

So I think this would be a big, big help to St. James Parish and its economy and its residents.

-Formosa, a chemical company based in Taiwan, wants to build their complex in Louisiana not only for the cheap gas, but because of generous tax breaks they’ve been offered and their success in getting the approval of state agencies.

-...and respectfully request the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality approve our air permits.

-Dueling testimonies have become routine at public hearings on such permits, especially around emissions data provided by companies seeking the permit.

-The project will be designed and engineered to minimize emissions and meet all applicable ambient air standards.

-So, with respect to Formosa specifically, there will be 95 tons per year of cancer-causing substances released into the environment.

The complex that Formosa wants to build would be massive -- 14 different units on a 2,000-acre site that, collectively, would emit more than 800 tons per year of toxic air pollution.

-The air pollutants that Formosa Plastics would be allowed to emit would add to what prevailing winds already carry from the other petrochemical plants surrounding St. James.

-Benzene, formaldehyde, and ethylene oxide.

And Formosa is permitted to emit large quantities of all three of those pollutants, which are all known to be carcinogens.

-DEQ failed to evaluate the cumulative impacts of toxic air emissions from the proposed... -Wilma Subra is a chemist and a recipient of a MacArthur Genius Award, whose expert testimony is sought worldwide on the health effects of chemical emissions.

-Frequently, I’m fighting a lot of the industry people, and frequently, the local people in the area work for those industries.

I’ll get a phone call, and they’ll say, "You know, I always opposed what you were saying, but my wife or my child or my mother just came down with cancer or leukemia."

-I didn’t even know these chemical plants did these things.

The years we cooked and my mom and my daddy cooked with that water and drank the water.

Who knows if that water had stuff in it that made us sick?

-We call and tell them we smelled something, and they maybe come two weeks later.

And when they come, they say, "We don’t smell nothing."

I guess you don’t.

You’re two weeks late.

-In 2019, in addition to a $1.5 billion tax break being offered to Formosa Plastics, further support for the petrochemical industry came in the form of House Bill 510.

-House Bill 510 authorizes facilities regulated by DEQ to conduct voluntary health, safety, and environmental audits.

-The bill would allow petrochemical facilities, including the proposed Formosa Plastics complex, to voluntarily self-audit certain pollution events, keeping them confidential, and face reduced penalties from the state’s Department of Environmental Quality, the DEQ.

-This opens the door for abuse more than opening things up, because what is being done in these facilities that affect the people that live around them, they need to know what’s going on.

-In Oklahoma, not only did they call it the Pollution Secrecy Act, but they call it the Right to Know Nothing Bill.

And the citizens are not going to have this information available to them.

-It opens up so many avenues for abuse.

It ties the hands of DEQ.

-DEQ still can go in and do their job whether there’s a voluntary audit or not.

They can still send in enforcement.

-This says they can’t even request it.

-I’m sorry?

-This says they can’t even request it.

That’s kind of broad, would you think?

-Yes, sir.

-It was a cover-up.

The concern for me was, how do you know these plants are going to do the right thing?

They are a powerful group.

I mean, they have a lot of money, and there’s a lot of the representatives are from that industry, and they have a natural instinct to protect their bread and butter.

-You know that my overall concern is for the safety and the health of our residents, and anything that compromises that is a problem for me.

-And I understand that.

You and I have had conversations at length in committee.

-We’ve had lengthy conversations about water and air, right?

-And I agree with you on your water.

-You agreed with me the other day, and so you want me to agree with you now?

Is that what you’re saying?

-Well, that would be nice if you were to reciprocate that.

-I don’t know about that, McFarland.

-Self-reporting -- I mean, how frequently does that really work?

If it’s a matter of lives over dollars, I’ll take the lives every time.

-My name is Tyler Gray, and I’m the president of the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association.

-Tyler Gray is among the many lobbyists and legislators who attend the industry’s annual Oil and Gas Day event, right outside the Louisiana State Legislature.

Families are invited.

Speeches are given by politicians vying for the industry’s support.

But it’s inside the Capitol where the real work gets done.

-...legality was overly broad... -Seated beside Representative Stuart Bishop, who introduced House Bill 510, is Tyler Gray, and the oil-and-gas industry he represents is a top contributor of election campaign money to Representative Bishop and to many other of the state’s legislators.

-Most of the attention on corporate donations in the political process focus on corporate donations at the federal level, in part because those are much easier to track.

But, in fact, when you look below the surface, at state and community levels, those corporate donations don’t go away.

They just get more and more focused and they have a bigger and bigger impact.

-Then, in August of 2021, residents of St. James Parish celebrated news that Formosa’s permit to build was being suspended, a ruling considered temporary by Formosa and the policymakers who championed the project.

-Yeah, I mean, obviously, there’s some challenges.

They’ve reopened the permitting process with the Corps of Engineers.

And, certainly, that’s going to delay.

-A year later, the delay was further extended when a district judge revoked Formosa’s air permits on grounds of environmental justice, a decision that was later overturned in favor of Formosa, adding more uncertainty as to when and where the plant might get built.

-We keep buying plastic, using plastic, so the question is, are they going to make it here or elsewhere?

-There’s no question that plastic is crucial for many things we need and that the industry can provide jobs for some.

But given there’s a global oversupply of it being made, with serious pollution involved, St. James residents wonder what’s going on in their government.

-Our officials have voted not just this plant, but have voted three more plants in already.

And I feel that enough is enough.

-Article 9 of the Louisiana constitution states that the Louisiana government and everybody that worked for it number-one priority is to protect the people.

-That’s right.

-As the former commander of Joint Task Force Katrina and the commanding general of the U.S. 2nd Infantry Division, Russel Honoré is known to the people of Louisiana.

-I spent 37 years in the Army, helped to defend this country, and came back to Louisiana and found out our democracy had been hijacked by a bunch of plants.

Where are the state representatives?

We’ll find out who give money to them.

♪♪ -♪ Look what the Lord has done ♪ ♪ Look what the Lord has done ♪ -I’m not going to be silent anymore.

I’m not going to watch my community just be annihilated.

And people are saying, "Oh, there’s jobs, there’s people's livelihoods."

We don’t have to have that industry to have a livelihood.

-I think it’s all about money.

I think money plays a big part in them letting these industry come in here.

-Me, personally, I’m going to get around here and I'm gonna try to change some things with our elections, because we need people in office that are going to love people and not money.

-If there’s some way you could separate and have someone run for office that doesn’t depend on contributions for industry.

-In this part of the world, we call that shenanigans.

It’s definitely going on.

-Where officeholders get their election campaign money is, to a degree, public information, and, not surprisingly, those who routinely support bills to benefit a particular industry receive generous contributions from that industry, money they might need to get elected.

Over his career in office, Mike Turzai received several hundred thousand dollars from the oil, gas, and petrochemical industries, and after resigning as speaker of the House, he started a new job as general counsel for one of the largest providers of natural gas.

Senator Jake Corman -- in 2019, he successfully halted a ban on single-use plastic bags.

He, too, has received large campaign donations from the industries involved.

Overall, since 2008, candidates and officeholders in Pennsylvania and Louisiana have received tens of millions of campaign dollars from these same industries.

-If someone gives you a very large check and they want you to return their phone call, you will.

I know this, because my mother expects that.

-There’s a lot of good people in both the House and the Senate who want to do well.

It’s just you got these outside forces, you know, they have an agenda.

And if you go against these businesses, they will put somebody in your race and raise a lot of money to run against you.

-They can dump a lot of money, big-time money, into people, and that’s how many of my colleagues have won before.

-When you talk to people one-on-one, many of my colleagues -- they believe in whatever the bill is that you’re presenting, but they are scared of not being re-elected.

-This has gone on for decades.

It’s not Republican or Democrat.

We’ve had both Republican and Democrat governors that have sold their soul.

-Campaign money may or may not buy a person’s soul, but its influence is not limited just to legislators.

Former governors Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania each pushed hard to lure the giant ethane crackers to their state and both were on the receiving end of big campaign money from the industries involved.

-That type of influence, I believe, corrupts the legislative process and makes it hard for folks to vote how they truly would want to.

-Most Americans know by now that the way our country runs our elections forces officeholders and candidates to raise very large amounts of money, money that most citizens don’t have, which is why many politicians turn to big industries, special interests, and wealthy donors.

It’s a gold mine for media outlets, network, cable television, and social media.

Our electoral system is also very lucrative for the lobbyists, who help funnel the money from deep-pocket donors.

-I am not shy about talking about the benefits of this industry -- not for the industry, but for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and for its citizens.

So I am more than happy to go across the street and talk to legislators and regulators and others.

-As president and C.E.O., I mean, my primary responsibility is to be the voice of our members.

And one of the most important places to be a voice is not just on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., but also in state capitals around the country.

-We have a thing called the First Amendment that allows people like myself and other people you have spoken to petition their government and talk about issues that are important to their industry.

In fact, what we do here at the American Chemistry Council is carry out that First Amendment right.

-There are more lobbyists for fracked gas than there are state legislators, and we are the largest state legislature in the country, full time.

-Lobby has a lot of influence.

They do have fundraisers for you -- not for me, but for those who understand their agenda and want to promote their agenda.

-I might have to have, you know, 100 people give me money.

They may raise -- They may have a little, small, multiple small gatherings of fundraisers.

And, you know, it’s nothing for those representatives or senators to have $150,000 just sitting there.

-Like in Louisiana, there are Pennsylvanians frustrated with the way things work in their government.

A nonpartisan movement called March on Harrisburg has drawn people from across the state, a campaign organized by Michael Pollack.

-What we were doing was throwing $500 down from the House gallery onto the House floor and letting them know that they need to serve people and not money.

Any given day in Harrisburg, there’s five to 10 fundraisers that are happening.

Most of those are being organized by lobbyists who work for the fossil-fuel industry.

If you go to the state capitol, you’ll see the reserved parking spot in the best parking garage near the building because they run the place.

-We educate lawmakers.

Most people probably take petitioning their government for granted, and we don’t.

-The bills start out in the lobbyists' office, being written by them.

They then bring them into the legislators' office and they grease the wheel at that point, with so many things.

There’s "Oh, let’s throw you a fundraiser and bring $50,000 into your campaign."

-They spend a lot of money on these campaigns, and pretty much, they kind of run a lot of these committees.

-Bags -- I tried to ban plastic bags in Louisiana.

That went over like a lead balloon, but it got killed in committee.

I couldn’t get it out onto the Senate floor.

-Who calls the bills up for the votes is the problem.

The committee chairs, the majority leaders, the speaker of the House, and the Senate president.

If you’re not one of those six people for any one bill, it’s dead.

-I can’t call a hearing.

I can’t put a bill on the calendar to run out of committee.

We can’t even bring a bill up for a vote.

-The dollars speak.

-For me, it’s just like government has lost its purpose.

It's supposed to be here for people, not bottom lines and Wall Street and special interests.

-U.S.

Senator Tom Udall is leading the push to phase out single-use plastics nationwide.

One of four Congress members backing the Break Free from Plastic Pollution Act.

-As Americans continue to use more single-use plastic per person than any other nation, a trend that also drives the pollution involved with making it, the question becomes, can the political will be found to solve this ever-growing problem?

Over 380 million tons of new plastic is being made each year, and in the U.S., where much of it is produced, only a small fraction of the waste is being recycled.

We’re also exporting our single-use debris to other countries, some with poor waste management, where it can end up where it doesn’t belong.

Proponents of a federal bill called the Break Free from Plastic Pollution Act hope Congress can agree on a solution.

-It’s practical and it’s pragmatic.

It’s actually built on local and state ordinances that have actually worked, and we’re dealing with it from extraction to waste.

-It will phase out unnecessary plastic products.

It limits exports of plastic waste to other countries.

It makes producers responsible for their plastic waste.

It puts a moratorium, or a pause, on new and expanded plastic-production facilities.

-We want to have a temporary halt on that with this bill to be able to even do an environmental assessment.

-A bill that would phase out single-use plastics and thus reduce the need for more industrial production to make it has not been popular with the industry.

-It will risk nearly 900,000 jobs and put nearly $400 billion of economic activity at risk.

-What you see in this bill is it’s really -- it's more of a punishment tool on businesses, on consumers.

It is trying to change behavior through punishment.

-Rather than pass laws to regulate plastic production or phase out single-use products, the industry points to a technology they call advanced recycling.

-Take used plastic that has been discarded and really break it down to raw material that can be used again to make new plastics.

-It's heat.

It's chemical recycling.

So what you’re doing is essentially reversing the process.

-Not all scientists believe that chemical recycling is the answer.

-What they do is they take the plastics and they cook them up, and the gases come out.

The problem is that these approaches can also make contaminants, and some of those contaminants are toxic, particularly when you have a chlorine-containing plastic in the feed, where it’s almost impossible to keep it out.

-Chemical recycling is part of the growing debate over this bill that would phase out single-use plastic.

-Currently, only 0.26% of the plastic waste is handled by this technology, and the plastics industry has suggested they want to have 150 plants in the U.S. That would only handle 5%.

-Mr. Hartz, what do you say to that?

-Without being flip, any innovation has to start somewhere.

Low-flow toilets, when they started, had to be produced at small volumes to get to larger ones.

-If you look at the whole world, we’re making on order half-a-billion tons of plastic.

And so the number of these facilities you’d have to have, you’d have to have one on every block.

We have to stop making plastics that we don’t need and inventing uses that we don’t need for these plastics.

-There’s a lot that we don’t know about plastics and health.

But, you know, there’s a lot that we do know, particularly about the chemicals that are in plastics.

And that’s what I’m going to be talking about.

-Pete Myers is a world-renowned expert on the health effects of chemicals that cause endocrine disruption, chemicals that can enter our bodies from a number of sources, including plastic.

-Plastic is something of a paradoxical material, because it allows modern civilization.

We get wonderful services from plastic, but more and more, we realize that there are chemicals essential to most plastics that are made today that leach out and cause human health problems.

Endocrine-disrupting chemicals -- they hack hormones, and when something disrupts that process, it sets in motion a series of problems that can play out over the lifetime of a fetus, if they’re exposed in the womb, or they can also affect adults, depending upon where they are in their life stage.

So, this is a list of today’s hormonally related diseases.

-Part of the Break Free Bill would mandate that packaging be redesigned to reduce the need for plastic and that toxic additives be eliminated where plastic is needed and that the plastic used truly be recyclable.

-It’s estimated that each of us consumes, in our food and in the air we breathe, the water we drink, the equivalent of a credit card worth of plastic every single week.

And so think about that of your children consuming those, if you will, 52 credit cards a year and all the chemicals that are embedded in that plastic.

-The bill, after gaining support in the House of Representatives, became slow to draw attention in the Senate, which proponents say is due to the steady stream of industry lobbyists who visit the lawmakers.

-What it’s missing is a recognition of how vital plastic is for society.

-I would even argue that the lawmakers who support that legislation are probably a little tone-deaf today.

-One of the lawmakers who supports the legislation is Jeff Merkley.

-You know, we all have -- Around the Capitol, we have these blue baskets, like this one.

And it says "We recycle."

And you throw your plastic in there and you think you’re recycling, but it’s not being recycled.

So in the bill, we’re producing incentives.

If you’re going to choose to use plastics in your packaging or plastics in your product, you have to take responsibility for making that be recycled.

-We’re seeing an increased threat to the industry based on regulation and legislation that is now, you know, moved from, "Oh, we’re just going to ban these, you know, silly products" to "Oh, no, we’re going to actually try to stop the manufacture of plastic as a material."

-When you build new facilities, site these facilities next to low-income or minority communities, you wouldn’t want to live there.

They put off a lot of fumes.

Look at the cancer rate where these production facilities are.

No, it’s right to call a moratorium until the industry can say, "Well, we can really solve this problem," and we have the science to believe them.

-Since the industrial build-out to make plastic began, industries opposed to regulating its production have spent hundreds of millions of dollars sending lobbyists to Capitol Hill and state capitols across the country.

-There is nothing nefarious about that.

It is an open and transparent process.

It is our ability to provide education, expertise, resources.

-Lobbyists don’t only bring education and expertise about their clients and their issues.

They also organize fundraisers.

-Sheila Krumholz is a research expert with OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan group tracking money and politics, including, in recent elections, expenditures by industries involved with plastic.

-The oil, gas, and chemical industries spent $121 million on contributions to federal candidates and $830 million on lobbying at the federal level.

-I’m Cal Dooley, president and C.E.O... -The American Chemistry Council alone has spent over $50 million over the last three years, and their member organizations have successfully lobbied to keep cities and states from banning plastic bags.

Because of the immense influence of election campaign money on lawmakers, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, and Washington, D.C., proponents of stronger measures to curb plastic pollution believe the problem is likely to grow worse, despite so many localized efforts to reduce it.

But there are other countries taking on this problem.

-[ Speaks French ] -In France, as in other European democracies, elections are run differently, and it may be no coincidence the steps they’ve taken to reduce plastic pollution are making a big difference.

In stores and restaurants throughout the country, there’s a noticeable absence of disposable plastic grocery bags and packaging.

Serving ware and utensils are either reusable or made of materials easily recycled.

How did this come about?

The French parliament has banned many single-use items.

And how is it they’ve been able to do this?

-France prides itself to be the country of enlightenment, the country of the French Revolution, and until today, the attachment of the French people to democracy remains very strong.

-A French citizen and professor at Harvard Business School, Vincent Pons co-authored a broad study to examine the French electoral system.

-All candidates, provided they get more than 5% of the votes, will receive funding and reimbursement from the state for their campaign.

As a result of that, they don’t necessarily need to look elsewhere for money.

What prompted this was the observation that there was more and more money that was entering in politics, and there were a number of scandals.

-So rather than turn to deep-pocket industries for campaign money and the obligation that creates, candidates in France who get more than 5% of the vote can simply get a bank loan, knowing they can repay it after getting reimbursed by the government.

And the amount of money they need to raise is much different than in the U.S., where the main need is for television ads.

-In France, candidates cannot pay for TV ads or for radio ads.

TV and radio channels have to provide equal coverage to all the candidates.

-Another reform that’s changed who’s getting elected to their parliament involves strict laws around campaign contributions.

-Donors cannot spend more than 4,600 euros, and these are just private donors.

Companies cannot donate any euros to a campaign.

-Laws like these that make campaign money from industries like those involved with plastic far less important have long been held back in America by lobbyists and industries that are so used to influencing policy.

It’s a reality that many believe will not change in the U.S. until perhaps, as in France, enough citizens demand it.

-Anyone who’s a U.S. citizen could cut me a check for $1 billion, and it’s okay in Pennsylvania.

-If we can’t change the legislation that says that these large corporations can put this big influx of money into these campaigns, if we can never change that, it’s going to be tough.

-There’s legislation to do that.

We need the political will to make that happen.

-The success France has had with greatly reducing the flow of plastic waste suggests that independent leadership may be better able to take on some big problems and spawn innovation, the kind of innovation that, ironically, also brought about the advent of plastic.

♪♪ -♪ Let’s go upriver to a time before ♪ ♪ Elephants in great number were cut down by the score ♪ ♪ Victorian peoples, in their sporting halls ♪ ♪ Used their ivory tusks for billiard balls ♪ ♪ Along came an inventor who mixed oil and gas ♪ ♪ To save the elephants from their dreadful past ♪ ♪ And plastic was born ♪ ♪ He answered the call ♪ ♪ The future looks bright for us all ♪ ♪ Upon the banks of the river, machines, they crank out ♪ ♪ Plastic doodads and what's-its, both dainty and stout ♪ ♪ So many fine products that make our lives grand ♪ ♪ It’s the single-use stuff that’s got out of hand ♪ ♪ Into the ocean, plastic garbage, it grows ♪ ♪ Majestic sea creatures eat the junk we’ve disposed ♪ ♪ The fishermen at the market sell their catch to us all ♪ ♪ Dinner is served, Plastic Surprise ♪ ♪ Time once again to answer the call ♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -Funding for this program was provided by...