This fall, 54 million K-12 students are headed back to the classroom for another year of lessons in all the classic subjects: math, English, history, biology. But there’s another subject that’s been sneaking into school curricula: plastics.
A new report from the nonprofit Plastic Pollution Coalition documents the many ways the plastics industry has been inserting its agenda into classrooms across the U.S. — including through lesson plans and worksheets, hands-on science experiments, and a program called “PlastiVan” that travels from city to city teaching students about “the contribution plastics make to modern life.”
Industry interests offer these resources to teachers for free or for cheap, according to the report. The materials tend to highlight the necessity of plastics while downplaying their significant downsides to human health and the environment.
“When that information is provided to kids, it obfuscates the true impacts of plastic pollution,” said Madison Dennis, senior policy and advocacy manager for Plastic Pollution Coalition and one of the report’s main authors. Besides harming marine life, plastics can expose people to hazardous chemicals, clog storm drains and contribute to flooding, and release planet-warming greenhouse gases. Dennis’ organization is calling for stricter school policies against the use of industry-sponsored learning materials.
The report lays out four case studies of plastics industry “propaganda” for schoolkids. One involves the Society of Plastics Engineers, or SPE, a trade group that recently became a division of the Plastics Industry Association. SPE’s lesson plans include activities like a “plastic scavenger hunt,” which aims for students to “understand that plastics are ubiquitous and their importance to society and their personal life.” A video titled “Your Bottle Means Jobs” explains how plastics recycling supports local employment.
Another case study highlights the American Association of Chemistry Teachers, an initiative of the Dow Chemical Company. One of the association’s lesson plans teaches elementary and middle school students how to compare the strength of various types of plastic bags that can be found in a grocery store. After a brief experiment, the lesson invites them to “pretend [they] are an employee for Dow Chemical Company” and are designing a plastic bag for a customer.
Nic Antaya / The Washington Post via Getty Images
While many of the materials claim to support STEM learning objectives, they do so while promoting familiar industry talking points, emphasizing the affordability and safety of plastics. Some acknowledge plastic pollution as a serious problem, but they blame irresponsible consumer behaviors and, instead of recommending less plastic be produced, propose more recycling as the primary way to address it.
In reality, only 9 percent of all plastics are recycled worldwide, and scientists have repeatedly warned that recycling will be unable to keep up with projected growth in plastic production. Investigative reporting has shown that industry groups knew this decades ago, but promoted recycling anyway in order to defuse growing concern over plastic pollution.
Wendy Johnson, a science education specialist at the National Center for Science Education, said the industry’s lesson plans and worksheets don’t reflect good pedagogy. Materials claiming to be aligned with state-level STEM standards don’t say which standards they support, or how they’re aligned. Lesson plans instruct students to read teachers’ notes, or list industry-specific vocab terms like “stretch blow molding” or “thermosetting.”
“By using all of these technical terms, it’s tricking people into thinking … that they’re doing science,” Johnson told Grist. What the materials really teach, she said, is “ideological perspectives about the economy,” like the desirability of cheap consumer goods.
“It’s so clear that the purpose isn’t to make really clear, easy-to-use materials,” Johnson added. “The idea isn’t to teach,” but to get industry talking points into classrooms. The report documents plastics propaganda finding its way into schools since at least the 2000s. Between 2009 and 2011, for example, a plastics trade group lobbied the California Department of Education to add a section on “The Advantages of Shopping Bags” to the state’s high school textbooks. The PlastiVan initiative has been ongoing since 2011, and SPE claims it’s reached over 132,000 students in total.
Plastic Pollution Coalition suggests that the problem is particularly significant in schools located near petrochemical facilities. In Beaver County, Pennsylvania, for example, Shell operates a 386-acre plastics production complex and has invested millions of dollars in the development of plastics-related curricula and recycling programs, both for grade schoolers and for community college students. It has also donated hundreds of backpacks filled with school supplies, and bought one school a basketball court — seemingly in exchange for incorporating plastics recycling into the curriculum.
Shell didn’t respond to Grist’s request for comment. Neither did SPE, the American Association of Chemistry Teachers, nor the school district in Beaver County.
The report hints at a broader problem with STEM education in U.S. public schools. Teachers often lack the time and money needed to design their own curricula, or to buy high-quality materials and lesson plans needed for in-class labs or science projects. When vested interests come along offering support — whether it’s the tobacco industry, the junk food industry, the pesticide industry, or the fossil fuel industry — it can be hard to say no.
“As a teacher, I’m always looking for free stuff,” said Suzie Hicks, a K-8 environmental educator in California who consulted on the Plastic Pollution Coalition report. Hicks said their education and background make them comfortable vetting materials for greenwashing — but that’s likely not the case with most teachers.
Dennis recommended that school boards adopt policies banning educational materials sponsored by the chemical, fossil fuel, and plastics industries. She also emphasized the need for better school funding more generally, so that teachers and districts aren’t so desperate for ready-made learning materials.
One way to achieve this would be to eliminate tax breaks for petrochemical processing and plastics production facilities, which deprive communities of much-needed cash.
Katie Allen, executive director of Algalita, a California-based environmental nonprofit that develops educational materials on plastic pollution, pushed back against the idea that schools should ban all industry-sponsored content.
“Once you start banning one thing, where does it end? What I want to do is give educators the benefit of the doubt and allow them to make their own decisions,” she told Grist. She argued that teachers should be trusted to properly contextualize industry materials — and that they could even use them to teach critical-thinking skills.
That said, there are plenty of educational materials on plastics that are developed by non-industry sources. Algalita, for instance, offers free lesson plans on topics like plastic garbage patches in the oceans and biomagnification — the phenomenon where plastics build up inside sea creatures as you move up the food chain. The Story of Stuff, another nonprofit, offers a broader high school curriculum focused on the costs and consequences of producing consumer goods — including those made from plastics.
Those learning materials still come from organizations with an agenda. But Hicks argued they’re more trustworthy, since nonprofits usually aren’t trying to sell something.
Another option is for teachers to simply design their own curricula. That’s what Jacqueline Omania, a recently retired elementary school teacher in Berkeley, California, did in 2015. She turned her classroom into a zero-waste laboratory, and each year for 11 years, Omania and her students developed a set of zero-waste classroom agreements, vowing to minimize their plastics use — by swapping individual glue sticks for a communal tub of glue, for example — while also advocating for more systemic change, like by campaigning for a policy requiring Berkeley restaurants to stop giving out single-use plastic foodware.
“There are so many challenges in the world, but plastic is something tangible,” Omania said. “It’s right there in front of them, and they can see the difference that they’re actually making through their actions.”
