Opinion | – CalMatters

By Veronica Herrera and Daniel Coffey, especially for CalMatters

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The fossil fuel industry is reeling. As demand for gasoline declines, oil and gas companies are betting their future on plastic. What once fueled our cars is now being refined, cracked and polymerized into bottles, packaging and disposables that will outlive us all.

This change isn’t just a climate problem—it’s a public health crisis. Plastics are fossil fuels in another form. And the communities most exposed to their production bear the greatest health burden.

A new report from UCLA’s Luskin Center for Innovation what defines a plastic-burdened community tracks how this expanding plastic economy is feeding directly into California’s oil and gas footprint.

Even as California celebrates its climate leadership, our neighborhoods remain bound by the legacy of fossil fuel infrastructure. More than 2.5 million Californians live within a mile of an active or inactive oil or gas well.

There are pumpjacks in Inglewood, refineries along the Wilmington corridor and wells next to schools in Kern County. Refinery infrastructure—much of which feeds the production of plastic precursors—is also heavily concentrated in Los Angeles County, the state’s most populous region.

Uneven exposure

The science is unequivocal: living near oil and gas developments is associated with a wide range of health impairments: respiratory disease, cardiovascular disease, adverse birth outcomes and increased risk of cancer. Higher odds of these conditions persist even when socioeconomic and environmental factors are controlled.

In California and beyond, research shows that pollutants from drilling and refining — such as volatile organic compounds, nitrogen oxides, particulate matter and formaldehyde — worsen air quality and increase asthma, heart attacks and rates of low birth weight.

The severity of these exposures falls unevenly, our analysis shows.

Neighborhoods closest to wells and refineries have much higher proportions of Hispanic and black residents, lower incomes, and greater health vulnerability. On average, for each refinery within 2.5 miles of a community, median household income was nearly $11,000 lower, poverty rates were 5.5% higher, and emergency room visits for asthma and heart disease were significantly increased.

The environmental injustices of the oil era are being repackaged in the plastic economy. Globally, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development projects plastic production to triple by 2060. Petrochemicals already account for approximately 14% of oil use and may drive nearly half of global oil demand by mid-century.

In other words, even as we move away from burning fossil fuels, we’re locking ourselves into new forms of dependency—embedded in the packaging we throw away every day.

Recognizing this relationship is critical as California prepares to implement Plastic Pollution Mitigation Fund under Senate Bill 54, a plastic recycling and pollution prevention law signed in 2022. The fund will direct hundreds of millions of dollars from the plastics industry to communities damaged by pollution.

Managed wisely, the fund could be a catalyst for mitigating the adverse health impacts of plastics and could create a transformative shift away from plastic production, use and disposal, building on the plastic reduction efforts required by industry under SB 54.

Plastic pollution isn’t just about littered beaches or overflowing landfills; it starts long before a product hits the store shelf. If California truly intends to lead on climate and environmental justice, it must see plastic for what it is—the fossil fuel industry’s new frontier—and must ensure that communities long treated as victim zones become the first to benefit from solutions.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.