From the Age of Coal to the Age of Plastic: Two Books and the Struggle to End the Plastic Age

A Review of Robert Gedert, Untangling Plastics: The Missing Link in Mitigating Climate Change (River Grove Books, 2026), and Judith Enck with Adam Mahoney, The Problem With Plastic (The New Press, 2025)

By Neil Seldman

Every age leaves behind a defining environmental legacy. The nineteenth century was the Age of Coal. Its factories transformed economies, lifted millions into industrial society, and darkened the skies over Europe’s manufacturing cities with soot and smoke. The twentieth century became the Age of Oil, whose abundance fueled unprecedented prosperity while setting humanity on a path toward climate change. Today we inhabit a new epoch—the Age of Plastic—whose consequences are only beginning to be understood.

Plastic has become so pervasive that it is no longer simply a material. It is the infrastructure of modern consumer society. It is woven into packaging, clothing, automobiles, electronics, medicine, agriculture, and construction. Yet the same material that has made modern life lighter, cheaper, and more convenient has also become one of the world’s most persistent environmental threats. Micro-plastics and nano-plastics are now found in oceans, rivers, soils, wildlife, and throughout the human body, including blood, lungs, brains, placentas, and unborn children. Plastic pollution is no longer merely a waste-management problem; it has become a public health, climate, and environmental justice crisis.

Two important new books seek to explain how we arrived at this point and, more importantly, how we might change course. Robert Gedert’s Untangling Plastics: The Missing Link in Mitigating Climate Change and Judith Enck and Adam Mahoney’s The Problem With Plastic are written from different professional experiences, but together they offer one of the clearest and most comprehensive examinations yet published of the plastics crisis. They reject the comforting illusion that better recycling alone can solve the problem. Instead, they argue that meaningful progress will require reducing plastic production itself while redesigning the systems through which modern society manufactures, consumes, and discards materials.

The books will become standard texts for current and future concerned citizens and researchers. Neither has an index, which could have helped their efforts.

The historical perspective of both books is one of their greatest strengths. During the early Industrial Revolution, Manchester’s textile mills operated on coal-fired steam engines. Workers labored six days a week beneath the smoke of William Blake’s “dark satanic mills,” while soot settled over streets, buildings, and homes. Those conditions inspired generations of reformers who challenged the environmental and human costs of industrial capitalism. Among them were Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, whose observations of Manchester’s factories and working-class neighborhoods helped shape the nineteenth century’s most influential critique of industrial economies.

The comparison is more than literary. Coal transformed the nineteenth century just as plastics have transformed the twenty-first. Each represented a technological triumph that carried hidden social and environmental costs. Industrial smoke fouled the air; plastic waste now contaminates nearly every corner of the planet. Coal filled miners’ lungs with dust and covered them with paste formed by coal dust mixed with fog and rain; plastic particles now circulate through human organs once thought protected from environmental contamination. Yesterday’s pollution was visible. Today’s is often microscopic, but no less consequential.

Gedert and Enck approach this challenge from complementary directions. Gedert, one of America’s leading advocates of Zero Waste, writes from decades of experience managing solid waste systems and helping communities reduce dependence on landfills and incinerators. His book reflects a lifelong commitment to preserve nature and the conviction that waste is not inevitable but the consequence of poor product design and misguided public policy. He argues that society must place what he calls a “hard stop” on the production of virgin plastics if meaningful progress is to be achieved.

Enck brings a different but equally valuable perspective. As a former Regional Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and founder of Beyond Plastics, she examines the crisis through the lens of environmental health, public policy, and grassroots activism. The 2023 East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment—an event closely linked to the petrochemical industry—reinforced her conviction that plastic production forms part of a broader web of environmental harm extending from oil extraction to manufacturing, transportation, consumption, and disposal. Her account is both deeply reported and accessible to readers unfamiliar with the complexities of plastics policy.

The authors are proven pioneers and leaders in the movements to educate, organize, and mobilize citizens for redemptive actions.

They deserve careful attention not only from environmental professionals but also from policymakers, business leaders, and citizens seeking practical responses to one of the defining challenges of our time.

Both authors ultimately ask readers to confront a difficult truth. The plastics crisis cannot be solved by managing waste more efficiently after it has been created. It requires rethinking the industrial system that produces waste in the first place. That insight provides the foundation upon which both books—and the growing movement for Zero Waste—are built.

The Scale of the Crisis

If the Industrial Revolution transformed the relationship between humanity and energy, the plastics revolution transformed the relationship between humanity and materials. In little more than a century, plastics evolved from scientific curiosities into the indispensable fabric of modern life. Their extraordinary versatility—lightweight, durable, inexpensive, and adaptable—made them ideal substitutes for wood, metal, glass, paper, and natural fibers. Entire industries were redesigned around them. Yet the very qualities that made plastics economically attractive have also made them one of the planet’s most persistent pollutants.

Gedert and Enck carefully explain that plastic pollution cannot be understood simply as an accumulation of discarded bottles, bags, and packaging. Plastic is best viewed as a continuum that begins with the extraction of fossil fuels and extends through refining, petrochemical production, manufacturing, transportation, consumption, and disposal. At every stage, environmental and public health costs accumulate. Carbon emissions, toxic chemical releases, industrial accidents, and waste generation are not separate problems but interconnected consequences of a single industrial system.

This broader perspective is one of the principal contributions of both books. Public debate often treats plastics primarily as a recycling issue, encouraging consumers to believe that conscientious disposal can solve the problem. Gedert and Enck argue that this assumption is fundamentally misleading. Recycling addresses materials only after they have entered the waste stream, leaving untouched the economic forces that continually increase the production of virgin plastics. As long as production expands faster than waste can be recovered, the crisis inevitably deepens.

The statistics illustrate the magnitude of the challenge. Global plastic production reached approximately 450 million metric tons in 2025, with industry projections anticipating a two- to threefold increase during the coming decades. Such growth would dramatically expand the demand for fossil fuels while increasing the burden placed upon landfills, incinerators, waterways, and the communities that already bear the greatest environmental risks.

Those burdens are not distributed equally. Petrochemical facilities, refineries, plastic manufacturing plants, and waste disposal sites are disproportionately located in low-income communities and communities of color. Residents of these “fence line communities” experience higher exposures to air pollution, contaminated water, hazardous chemicals, and industrial accidents while receiving few of the economic benefits promised by new development. Both authors rightly place environmental justice at the center of the plastics debate rather than treating it as a secondary concern.

Perhaps the most disturbing evidence assembled by Gedert and Enck concerns the emerging science of micro-plastics and nano-plastics. Plastics do not disappear when discarded. Instead, sunlight, abrasion, and weather gradually fragment them into ever-smaller particles that disperse through the atmosphere, waterways, agricultural soils, and marine ecosystems. These particles have now been detected throughout the human body, prompting an expanding body of research into their possible effects on human health.

Although scientists continue to investigate the full biological consequences of chronic exposure, the evidence already raises profound concerns. Plastic products contain thousands of chemical additives, many of which have received only limited toxicological evaluation. Increasingly, researchers associate plastic-related chemicals and microscopic plastic particles with endocrine disruption, reproductive disorders, cardiovascular disease, respiratory illness, neurological impairment, and certain forms of cancer. What once appeared to be a convenient consumer material is emerging as a complex public health issue whose implications may not be fully understood for decades.

Gedert provides a particularly useful historical account of how society arrived at this point. He traces the evolution of plastics from early materials such as celluloid through the rapid technological advances of the Second World War and into the postwar consumer economy. The decades following 1945 witnessed a profound transformation in manufacturing philosophy. Products once designed for durability, repair, and repeated use increasingly gave way to disposable packaging and single-use consumer goods. Convenience became an organizing principle of modern commerce.

Enck complements this history by examining the political and economic decisions that encouraged this transformation. Organized decade by decade, her account demonstrates how industry successfully promoted expanding plastic consumption while resisting regulation and minimizing growing scientific concerns. Together, the two books reveal that today’s plastics crisis was not an unintended accident of technological progress. It resulted from a series of policy choices, corporate strategies, and consumer habits that favored short-term convenience over long-term sustainability.

One of the strengths of reading these books together is that each fills gaps left by the other. Gedert excels at explaining the evolution of waste management and the principles underlying Zero Waste systems. Enck is especially effective in describing the political institutions, regulatory failures, and citizen movements that have shaped the modern plastics debate. Their perspectives differ, but they reinforce a common conclusion: the plastics crisis cannot be understood solely through chemistry, engineering, or economics. It is equally a story about political power, corporate accountability, and democratic choice.

Recognizing that broader context changes the nature of the discussion. Plastic pollution is not merely the unintended by-product of an otherwise successful industrial economy. It is evidence that the prevailing system of material production has failed to account for its environmental and human consequences. Like the smoke that once hung over Manchester’s textile mills, plastic pollution represents a cost that has been shifted from producers to society at large. The challenge now is not simply to manage that pollution more efficiently but to redesign the economic system that continues to create it.

The Illusion of Recycling

If Gedert and Enck agree on one central proposition, it is this: recycling our way out of it cannot solve the plastics crisis. That conclusion runs directly against decades of public messaging that has encouraged consumers to believe that discarded plastic is simply another recyclable commodity waiting to be collected, processed, and transformed into new products. Both authors demonstrate that this comforting narrative bears little resemblance to reality.

For more than half a century, Americans have been taught that recycling represents the principal solution to solid waste. The familiar triangular chasing-arrows symbol embossed on plastic containers has reinforced the impression that nearly every plastic product enjoys a second life after disposal. Yet, as Gedert and Enck carefully explain, many plastic products are neither technically nor economically recyclable. Different polymer types cannot easily be mixed, additives complicate processing, contamination reduces material quality, and the market value of recovered plastics frequently remains below the cost of collecting and reprocessing them. As a result, enormous quantities of plastic continue to be landfilled, burned, exported, or released into the environment despite decades of recycling campaigns.

Neither author dismisses recycling itself. On the contrary, both recognize that recycling remains an important component of responsible materials management. What they reject is the notion that recycling alone can compensate for ever-expanding plastic production. When virgin plastic manufactured from fossil fuels remains inexpensive and abundant, recycled materials struggle to compete economically. The consequence is a system in which production continues to accelerate while recovery lags ever farther behind.

As someone who has spent decades working within the Zero Waste movement, I find this distinction especially important. Recycling should never have been regarded as the destination of environmental policy. At its best, it is one step within a broader hierarchy that begins with reducing consumption, redesigning products, encouraging reuse and repair, composting organic materials, and only then recycling what cannot otherwise be avoided. When recycling becomes the primary objective rather than the final option, the larger purpose of resource conservation is lost.

Gedert is particularly persuasive in arguing that the real problem lies upstream, long before products reach the waste stream. Materials that are difficult to recycle, contain hazardous additives, or have no viable end markets should not be manufactured in the first place. Society has devoted extraordinary ingenuity to managing waste after it has been created while investing comparatively little effort in preventing waste from being generated. The Zero Waste philosophy reverses that logic. It begins not at the landfill but at the drawing board, where products, packaging, and industrial processes are first designed.

Both books are equally effective in documenting the sophisticated public relations campaigns through which the plastics industry has delayed meaningful reform. For decades, manufacturers promoted recycling as evidence of corporate environmental responsibility while simultaneously increasing production of disposable plastics. The result was a subtle transfer of responsibility. Consumers were encouraged to believe that pollution resulted primarily from individual behavior rather than from product design or industrial policy. Citizens who faithfully sorted their household waste often assumed they had solved the problem, even as plastic production continued its relentless expansion.

The industry’s newest promise is so-called “advanced” or “chemical” recycling, technologies that include pyrolysis and gasification. Their advocates present them as scientific breakthroughs capable of transforming mixed plastic waste into valuable new materials. Gedert and Enck examine these claims with understandable skepticism. After reviewing the evidence, they conclude that many of these facilities have experienced repeated technical failures, economic instability, and disappointing recovery rates while generating additional emissions and hazardous by-products. Rather than reducing dependence on virgin plastics, these technologies often serve to justify continued production.

The same criticism applies to waste incineration. Burning plastics undoubtedly reduces their volume, but it does not eliminate pollution. Instead, it converts a solid waste problem into atmospheric emissions while releasing greenhouse gases and creating toxic ash requiring disposal. Incineration treats the symptoms of the plastics crisis without addressing its underlying causes. It is, in effect, another downstream solution to an upstream problem.

Both authors therefore return repeatedly to the same conclusion: meaningful reform begins by reducing the production of virgin plastics. That proposition may appear politically ambitious, but history suggests otherwise. Environmental progress has repeatedly required industries to redesign products once regarded as indispensable. Leaded gasoline, ozone-depleting chemicals, and highly toxic pesticides were all defended as essential to modern life until scientific evidence and public pressure demonstrated otherwise. Plastics may represent the next chapter in that history.

The central question, then, is not whether society possesses the technical capacity to reduce plastic pollution. The evidence assembled by Gedert and Enck strongly suggests that it does. The more difficult question is whether democratic institutions can overcome the political and economic interests that continue to favor expanding plastic production. That question lies at the heart of both books—and increasingly at the center of environmental policy itself.

A Levée en Masse Against Plastic

The central question raised by both books is no longer whether plastics pose a serious threat. The evidence is overwhelming. The question is whether democratic societies can mobilize sufficiently to confront an industry with enormous financial resources, political influence, and a global infrastructure extending from fossil-fuel extraction through petrochemical production, manufacturing, marketing, and waste disposal.

Here the two books converge most strongly. Gedert provides the systems analysis; Enck provides the organizing strategy. Both believe that the plastic crisis can be reversed, but neither believes that individual consumers, acting alone, can accomplish it.

Gedert’s contribution is to insist that the problem must be addressed at its source. Recycling, better waste management, and consumer education are useful, but they cannot compensate for the continued production of hundreds of millions of tons of new plastic every year. His argument for a “hard stop” on virgin plastic production therefore represents a fundamental challenge to the prevailing waste-management paradigm. Rather than asking how society can dispose of ever-increasing quantities of plastic, Gedert asks the more important question: Why are we producing so much plastic in the first place?

Enck approaches the same problem from the perspective of political action. Her experience as an environmental regulator and organizer leads her to emphasize legislation, public education, litigation, local organizing, and the development of a national movement capable of confronting the plastics industry. Her work with Beyond Plastics demonstrates her belief that organized citizens can influence public policy when they understand the sources of pollution and have the tools to act.

This difference in emphasis makes the books particularly valuable when read together. Gedert’s question is essentially, What must change? Enck’s is, How do we make that change happen?

Beyond Individual Responsibility

Both books reject the industry’s long-standing effort to shift responsibility for plastic pollution onto consumers. The famous “Crying Indian” advertising campaign, for example, encouraged Americans to think of litter as an individual moral failure rather than as the consequence of an economic system designed to produce and sell enormous quantities of disposable products.

The distinction is crucial. Individuals can refuse plastic bags, carry reusable bottles, purchase products with less packaging, and conduct household plastic audits. Such actions can demonstrate demand for alternatives and help build political consciousness. But consumers did not design the disposable economy, and consumers cannot dismantle it one shopping trip at a time.

The necessary changes are structural: restrictions on virgin plastic production, elimination of unnecessary single-use products, refillable containers, improved recycling systems, composting, producer responsibility, and policies that make virgin materials more expensive while rewarding the use of recovered materials.

This is where the Zero Waste movement becomes important. Zero Waste is not simply a better method of collecting garbage. It is an economic strategy for redesigning production so that materials remain productive resources rather than becoming waste.

The most promising examples are emerging at the local level. Cities and counties such as Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Alameda County, San Jose, San Diego, Alachua County, Bethlehem, and Fort Collins have demonstrated that substantial reductions in waste are possible when local government, community organizations, and private enterprises work together.

The lesson is significant: the American recycling and Zero Waste movements were created largely from the bottom up. Grassroots activists and local governments transformed recycling from a voluntary drop-off activity into municipal collection systems. Yet national recycling rates have stagnated for decades. The challenge now is to recover the spirit of that earlier movement and apply it to the much larger problem of plastic production.

The Promise and Limits of Extended Producer Responsibility

Gedert and Enck both support Extended Producer Responsibility, or EPR, as an important mechanism for making producers pay for the consequences of the products and packaging they place on the market. The principle is straightforward: those who create waste should bear responsibility for managing it.

But EPR is not automatically equivalent to Zero Waste.

The structure of the program matters enormously. If the very corporations whose products generate the waste dominate Producer Responsibility Organizations, producers may acquire substantial control over the system that is supposed to regulate them. Decisions concerning fees, definitions, recycling targets, and the distribution of funds can then become matters of corporate rather than public policy.

Maine offers an important alternative because its EPR system is administered through a public agency rather than being controlled primarily by industry. The distinction illustrates a larger principle: producer responsibility must also be accompanied by public responsibility and democratic accountability.

The potential of EPR is nevertheless substantial. Properly designed, it can reduce unnecessary packaging, increase recycling, encourage reuse, and shift the economic burden of waste away from taxpayers. But enforceable reduction targets, transparency, public oversight, and—most importantly—requirements for reusable and refillable systems should accompany it.

Refillable containers deserve particular attention. They represent a fundamentally different approach from recycling. A bottle that can be cleaned and used dozens of times eliminates the need to manufacture a new container for every purchase. Refill systems can reduce waste, conserve resources, shorten transportation distances, and create local employment.

A truly comprehensive Zero Waste policy therefore should not merely ask whether a plastic container could be recycled. It should ask a prior question:

Why manufacture a new container at all when an existing container can be reused?

The Political Challenge

The plastic industry presents an extraordinarily formidable political opponent. Oil and petrochemical companies possess enormous capital reserves and extensive lobbying networks. As demand for gasoline and other fossil fuels changes, the industry increasingly views plastics as an important future market for oil and gas.

This makes the plastic crisis inseparable from the climate crisis.

If the world continues to increase plastic production while attempting to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, it will be fighting one environmental crisis while intensifying another. The enormous quantities of fossil fuels required to produce plastics, together with emissions generated throughout the manufacturing and disposal process, make the expansion of plastics fundamentally incompatible with a serious effort to stabilize the climate.

The industry response has been to promote technological fixes—particularly incineration, pyrolysis, gasification, and “advanced” or “chemical” recycling—as ways to accommodate continued production. Gedert and Enck are deeply skeptical of these approaches. Their concern is not simply that the technologies may fail economically. It is that they can become a justification for producing ever greater quantities of virgin plastic.

This is the fundamental distinction between managing the plastic problem and reducing the plastic problem.

The former accepts continued growth in production and searches for ways to dispose of the consequences. The latter begins with production itself.

A Levée en Masse

The title of this concluding section deliberately invokes the French levée en masse—the mass mobilization of ordinary citizens in defense of a democratic revolution. The analogy is useful because the scale of the plastic crisis requires more than technical expertise. It requires political mobilization.

The anti-plastic movement has already begun to demonstrate this capacity. Campaigns for bottle bills, plastic-bag restrictions, refillable containers, recycling, composting, Right to Repair, and producer responsibility have shown that citizens can change public policy when they organize locally and connect their campaigns to broader movements.

Enck’s contribution is to help build that movement. Gedert’s contribution is to give it a broader conceptual framework.

The next stage should connect the anti-plastic movement with movements concerned with environmental justice, workers’ rights, public health, housing, energy, food systems, and economic democracy. Plastic pollution does not exist in isolation. The communities that bear the greatest burden of petrochemical production are frequently communities already suffering from poverty, inadequate housing, health disparities, and political marginalization.

A successful movement against plastic therefore can become part of a larger movement for a healthier and more democratic economy.

This is perhaps the most important lesson to emerge from reading these two books together. The objective should not be a world without plastic. It should be a world in which plastic is used deliberately, safely, sparingly, and only when its benefits justify its environmental and social costs.

Gedert and Enck both believe such a transformation is possible. Their books are ultimately works of warning, but they are also works of hope. They call upon citizens to recognize that the present system is neither inevitable nor permanent.

The Industrial Revolution transformed society by harnessing coal and fossil fuels on an unprecedented scale. The Plastic Age transformed that industrial system once again by creating synthetic materials that could be manufactured cheaply, transported globally, and discarded after brief use.

The next transformation must be different.

It must move from an economy of extraction, disposability, and pollution toward one based on conservation, reuse, repair, recovery, and regeneration.

Two hundred years ago, the smoke from Manchester’s factories darkened the city and coated workers and buildings with the residue of coal combustion. Today, plastic has entered our bodies and ecosystems in ways that may prove even more difficult to reverse.

The question confronting us is whether we will wait for the consequences to become irreversible—or whether citizens, communities, governments, and responsible businesses will act before that point is reached.

Gedert and Enck have given us two important tools for that struggle. Gedert helps us understand why the system must change. Enck shows us how citizens can begin changing it.

Together, their books make a compelling case for a new levée en masse—a mass democratic movement capable of confronting the plastic-industrial complex and opening the way toward a post-plastic era in which materials serve human needs without destroying the natural systems upon which human life depends.

There is no time for delay.