Science Snippets: The Disasters of Cooking and Heating with Plastic

Draft script:

The Graduate is a 1967 film starring Dustin Hoffman. Hoffman plays Benjamin Braddock, a talented but aimless recent college graduate. A scene in the film has Braddock interacting with Mr. McGuire, played by Walter Brooke. The scene includes this conversation:

Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.

Benjamin: Yes, sir.

Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?

Benjamin: Yes, I am.

Mr. McGuire: Plastics.

Benjamin: Exactly how do you mean?

Mr. McGuire: There's a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?

The word Plastics is ranked number 42 in the American Film Institute's list of the top 100 movie quotations in American cinema. It is a famous line delivered by Walter Brooke to the rising star Dustin Hoffman. Walter Brooke died from emphysema at the age of 71 years on 20 August 1986.

Plastics have enjoyed a remarkable run from the mid-1900s through the current day. Belgian chemist Leo Baekeland invented the first fully synthetic plastic, Bakelite, in 1907, thus initiating the Polymer Age. Today, plastics are durable, lightweight, and versatile. They dominate our lives, and they have been used for appliances, construction, consumer goods, electronics, furniture, health care, packaging, textiles, transportation, and more.

The word plastic is derived from the Greek work Plastikos, which means “easily molded into shape.” This property has contributed greatly to the widespread use of plastics in our daily lives. As you might imagine, this widespread use of plastics comes with costs.

An article at Phys.Org was published on 18 February 2025. Titled Burning plastic for cooking and heating: An emerging environmental crisis, the article includes a link to a peer-reviewed paper in the renowned Nature series of publications. The opening sentence includes a call “for action to reduce the burning of plastics for heating and cooking, a common yet hazardous practice emerging in millions of households in developing nations due to a lack of traditional energy sources.” It seems the “great future in plastics” mentioned by Mr. McGuire has transitioned into a disaster affecting millions of households.

The lead author of the peer-reviewed paper in Nature Cities is quoted in the Phys.Org article: “Burning plastic releases harmful chemicals such as dioxins, furans and heavy metals into the air, which can have a range of health and welfare impacts such as lung diseases. These risks are particularly pronounced among women and children, as they spend more time at home. But the pollution doesn’t just stay in households who burn it: it spreads across neighborhoods and cities, affecting everyone.”

Based on my time living in Belize, I can relate. The neighbors would routinely burn plastic in their garbage. The stench was horrifying, physically and emotionally.

Another of the 14 scholars who created the peer-reviewed paper in Nature Cities provided a useful summary that forms the final three paragraphs of the article in Phys.Org: “Many governments are not addressing the issue effectively because it’s usually concentrated in areas such as slums, which are often neglected. A ban on plastic burning might not help if people have no other option to keep warm and cook their food. Possible ways to address the problem include subsidies for cleaner fuels to make them affordable for poorer families, better waste management to prevent plastic from piling up in slum areas, education campaigns to inform communities about the dangers of burning plastic and alternative low-cost, innovative cooking solutions tailored to lower-income areas.”

The Abstract of the peer-reviewed paper in Nature Cities provides a compelling overview of the peer-reviewed paper: “Increasing plastic waste pollution has led to a rising prevalence of the open burning of plastic waste, especially in locations lacking formal waste-management systems. Urban slum communities face particularly acute challenges in accessing both organized waste-collection services and low-cost traditional energy sources, and clean cooking-fuel alternatives tend to be unaffordable for their low-income residents. Here we examine the potential risk these unseen communities face and describe the need for a new research agenda to better understand and quantify the scope of the problem. The Global South is urbanizing at a rapid rate. Moreover, in many countries, this urbanization is outpacing the expansion of amenities and economic opportunities. With global plastic use predicted to triple by 2060 and two-thirds of the global population estimated to be living in urban areas by 2050, this Perspective draws attention to the nexus of sanitation and energy poverty, and the potential problems it poses for many low-income urban dwellers. An increasing number of energy-poor households, surrounded by plentiful waste plastic, are believed to be burning waste to both meet their energy needs and manage waste, although the evidence is limited and far from representative. We discuss the factors that may push marginalized households in cities of the Global South to burn waste plastic, and why this possibility is so concerning, before closing with a call for applied research to better understand the scale and scope of the phenomenon and its consequences.”

Never mind the statement “global plastic use predicted to triple by 2060 and two-thirds of the global population estimated to be living in urban areas by 2050.” There are already too many people on a crowded, overheated Earth. As is often the case with contemporary problems, the horrors are already afflicting the Global South. The privileged among us in the Global North continue to transport our waste and other problems elsewhere. As a result, we transport our suffering, too.

In 1967, plastics were the future. It’s pretty obvious at this point that plastics are the source of many contemporary problems. As with many of these issues, there seems to be no easy way out. Will we continue transporting our problems to those with less money and less power? Is there any other way out of this mess?