Beyond Plastics: The Charity Opposed to Everything

“It would be better to dump the whole stinking system and take the consequences.”

—Ted Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future (“The Unabomber Manifesto”)

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Innumerable modern miracles have come from plastic solutions to challenges large and small. For example, children are particularly vulnerable to lead poisoning when old water mains made of lead corrode. Fortunately, federal regulators, the American Water Works Association, and the National Science Foundation have all concluded that polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastic water pipes are a safe, durable, and cost-friendly replacement option.

Because of PVC, Americans are getting healthy, lead-free drinking water much sooner than they otherwise might. But there’s an anti-plastics movement that isn’t happy. Beyond Plastics is a standout in this very performative group, and they’re opposed to almost everything.

In 2023 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a rule requiring replacement of lead water mains within 10 years. Responding in a news release, Beyond Plastics complained that “PVC plastic contains chemical additives, some of which are known to be toxic to humans and many of which have yet to be tested for safety.” Judith Enck, the founder and president of Beyond Plastics, called on the EPA to “advise local governments not to replace lead service lines with PVC.”

This fearmongering is dangerous to public health. The precursor needed to create PVC is vinyl chloride. While vinyl chloride is toxic, almost none of it survives to the finished PVC product. One critical feature of PVC is that it is chemically inert and nonreactive with how we use it, such as in water pipes, medical equipment, and food packaging.

The National Cancer Institute reports “PVC is not a known or suspected carcinogen.” While eating PVC certainly isn’t recommended, Poison Control advises that even ingested plastic is “not toxic” and (assuming you don’t choke on it) “should pass through your digestive system without causing harm.”

Eating processed uranium is definitely bad for you. But in a nuclear power station it becomes the safest and cleanest energy option we have, endorsed by The Nature Conservancy and the U.S. Department of Energy.

From the first harnessing fire to splitting the atom and beyond, our industrial civilization is possible only because we have safely tamed these dangerous, but enormously useful things.

Who could object to that?

You have one guess.

Objecting to Everything

In August 2024, Judith Enck criticized Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul for merely considering using more nuclear power. Enck is a former president of the anti-nuclear Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, and her Beyond Plastics advisory board members include founders and former leaders of anti-nuclear nonprofits such as the Sierra Club and 350.org.

This lineup is a hint that the attack on plastic is arguably just a tactic in the war against all the energy that works. Plastic miracles are a subset of the benefits of the oil and gas industry, so it’s redundant to point out that Beyond Plastics also hates all the hydrocarbon fuels.

The stated mission of Beyond Plastics is to wipe out plastic pollution, and we have multiple clever and even profitable ways to get there. But Beyond Plastics opposes all of them, starting with environmentally engineered American landfills.

In 2019, despite the far larger population, wealth, and plastic use of the United States, Honduras dumped almost three times as much plastic into the ocean, and Vietnam 11 times as much. Modern landfills are a huge component of our success in keeping our plastic out of the oceans and environment. And when we fill them up, we often reclaim the environment by turning old landfills into brand new public parks.

A not clever alternative to using landfills, but one that has been politically popular, is conventional, curbside recycling. Beyond Plastics is also opposed to this, but in this case they’re not wrong. Our World in Data reported in September 2018 that plastics “typically degrade in quality during the recycling process” and most are “typically only suitable for recycling once” and that this just “delays rather than prevents plastic disposal to landfill or incineration.”

There is a false perception that plastic lives forever in our landfills, but this isn’t true. Plastics decompose and some—such as polystyrene—do so very quickly. A report from Our World in Data claimed a 50-year decomposition rate for foam cups and just 20 years for plastic bags.

So, of course, Beyond Plastics has proposed laws to abolish plastic bags and polystyrene. They even supported a New Jersey law that did all this and “phases out paper bags at large grocery stores.”

“Waste-to-energy” is another clever plastic disposal option. This involves burning discarded plastic and using the resulting heat to spin an electric turbine. Even though this reduces the use of coal and natural gas, Beyond Plastics is predictably unimpressed, complaining that it “is more expensive than landfilling.”

If so, that’s because it is creating a valuable output—electricity. Reading news releases from Beyond Plastics leads to the conclusion that the people at Beyond Plastics either do not understand or just oppose wealth creation. (It could be both.)

A new and very clever option to landfilling plastic is chemical recycling, or pyrolysis. This is the superheating of plastic to break down its components and form profitable new products, such as diesel fuel. In October 2023, Beyond Plastics co-produced Chemical Recycling: A Dangerous Deception, a report that argued chemical recycling was a “false solution to plastic pollution.”

The report proposes a national prohibition on construction of new chemical recycling facilities. But in a burst of sanctimony and gaslighting, a Beyond Plastics news release claimed chemical recycling processed “just a tiny fraction of the nation’s plastic waste.”

Well, perhaps that’s because the anti-everything movement and its political allies have been trying to shut them down?

In September 2024, Rob Bonta, California’s Democratic attorney general, sued ExxonMobil, alleging the company lied about the efficacy of its chemical recycling program. Beyond Plastics responded with a news release in which Judith Enck praised Bonta for filing “the single most consequential lawsuit filed against the plastics industry.”

In January, ExxonMobil countersued Bonta for defamation and “abuse of the public trust.” While Beyond Plastics is NOT one of the named defendants, the energy giant’s complaint included an apt description of the anti-everything movement:

With apparently no appreciation for the irony of their claim, Mr. Bonta and his cohorts are now engaging in reverse greenwashing; while posing under the banner of environmentalism, they do damage to genuine recycling programs and to meaningful innovation. [emphasis added]

It takes money to deliver that damage.

The Political Agitation Charity

The Beyond Plastics Chemical Recycling report included an acknowledgment that the “Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Beyond Petrochemicals campaign” provided “generous support.”

One year earlier in September 2022, billionaire Michael Bloomberg announced his Bloomberg Philanthropies was dedicating $85 million to block the creation of plastic production and petrochemical facilities. The E&E News account of the so-called Beyond Petrochemicals campaign listed Beyond Plastics as one of the likely beneficiaries and included a quote from Enck praising the effort as “extraordinary.”

In its tax filing for 2022, Bloomberg Philanthropies listed a $300,000 grant to Bennington College, a private liberal arts college in Vermont. The grant description read: “Accelerate transition to clean energy.”

Beyond Plastics is a project hosted by Bennington College’s Center for the Advancement of Public Action, where Judith Enck is an instructor. A former regional EPA administrator during the Obama administration, Enck founded Beyond Plastics in January 2019. The “About” page shows 14 people on staff, including Enck.

The Endeavor Foundation is another generous supporter. In January 2020, Endeavor announced a $290,000 pledge to create “The Endeavor Foundation Environmental Changemaker Fellowship Program” at Bennington College. The news release stipulated that students receiving the fellowships would be mentored by Judith Enck.

How much of this Endeavor funding specifically supported Beyond Plastics is vague and open to interpretation. Endeavor’s 2023 IRS filing listed separate line items for Beyond Plastics ($75,000) and the “Endeavor Foundation Environmental Action Program” ($72,500), and Enck is closely involved in both programs.

An April 2024 post on the Bennington College website reported on the “field work” accomplished by the 2024 recipients of “Endeavor Environmental Action Fellowships.” Many were assigned to other lefty advocacy groups where they participated in what Bennington College referred to as “pulling the levers of power.”

Bennington boasted that an Endeavor intern assigned to Food and Water Watch “played a major role in convincing a long-time holdout on environmental legislation to co-sponsor a bill that would collect billions of dollars from the biggest polluters to repair infrastructure damaged by climate change.”

Another Endeavor intern working with New York Communities for Change engaged in similar behavior:

he and his colleagues followed an influential lawmaker to a speaking engagement and held signs quietly to ensure the audience knew that he was falling short on a promise to divest from a major polluter. “Public disruption is the only way to hold elected officials accountable to their constituents,” he said.

The president of Bennington College was impressed:

President Walker shared her gratitude to the students and their work and to Judith Enck for her leadership. “I can see in this room the people who will create the change we need over the next one, five, or ten years, and I am so moved.”

Political vs. Charitable

Most Americans think of children’s hospitals, food banks, and basic education when they think of the charitable exemption in the federal tax code. They do not think of college interns who engage in “public disruption” of elected officials and “pulling the levers of power.” And since we all pay higher taxes so charitable groups can pay none at all, it’s likely many taxpayers would—and should—not be happy about charities and colleges playing politics.

Whether the behavior of Enck’s interns literally runs afoul of laws separating political and charitable dollars is a concern for the IRS and Federal Election Commission to consider. But the “maybe let’s look into it” argument goes like this: Endeavor is a tax-exempt private charitable foundation, Bennington College is a tax-exempt educational charity, and by extension so are Beyond Plastics and Enck’s interns.

But even if a charity and college proudly engaged in political agitation is not a letter of the law violation, a taxpayer fairness argument still applies. Endeavor’s net asset value exceeds $400 million, and Bloomberg is worth more than $100 billion.

If these one-percenters want to support a political pressure group that prevents PVC water pipes from ending lead poisoning, then perhaps Beyond Plastics should pay taxes on the loot.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/beyond-plastics-the-charity-opposed-to-everything/