It’s not just sea turtles. Plastic is killing people of color too.

When I first met Jessie Parker at her home in Freeport, Texas, she told me how hard she works to recycle her plastic. Her historically Black community has no curbside recycling, so she brought her plastic to church to give to her brother, who lives in a wealthier suburb.

I found it particularly poignant because Miss Jessie lives in the shadow of a massive plastic plant owned by Dow. The chemical giant is the world’s number two company responsible for single-use plastic waste, according to a new report from Australia’s Minderoo Foundation.

The report sheds important light on the companies behind the globe’s plastic pollution crisis. It finds just twenty manufacturers account for more than half of the world’s single-use plastic waste, with U.S.-based ExxonMobil and Dow topping the list. State-owned companies in China, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere in the Middle East also dominate.

The report rightly calls on governments to target policies at these producers in order to reduce the tide of plastic waste choking oceans and wildlife. The study does not focus on the devastation to people who must live with these plants. That is a problem, because some proposed policy solutions—such as requirements to produce plastic from recycled feedstocks—will not necessarily reduce the pollution harming these communities.

Their suffering is “one of the most invisible aspects” of the plastic crisis, says Carroll Muffett of the Center for International Environmental Law.

Take Miss Jessie. In her hometown of Freeport, south of Houston on the Gulf of Mexico, Dow operates the largest chemical complex in the Western hemisphere. Nearly two dozen additional petrochemical plants surround the town. It is majority Black and Latinx, with a median income of $38,000—less than half that of the neighboring, largely white community of Lake Jackson.

Brazoria County, where Freeport sits, violates legal limits for ozone smog pollution, which can trigger asthma, heart attacks and strokes. Miss Jessie developed asthma after moving back to Freeport ten years ago and must use an inhaler daily. Dow is a top emitter of smog pollutants and regularly exceeds permitted levels. It also emits pollutants linked to liver, nose, and lung cancer, which are elevated in Freeport. Miss Jessie’s grandmother, who raised her, died of lung cancer at age fifty.

Freeport is far from unique. Down the coast near Corpus Christi, ExxonMobil and the Saudi-owned SABIC are building one of the world’s largest plastic plants beside the town of Gregory, whose residents are mostly Latinx, and a third are low income. To the east, in St. James Parish, Louisiana, which already has some of the most toxic air in the nation, Sharon LaVigne is leading a struggle against a new plant by the Taiwanese plastics giant, Formosa.

The new plants are part of a $200 billion building boom, concentrated along the Gulf Coast and in Appalachia. Companies are looking to take advantage of cheap fracked natural gas—the raw material of plastic. They are doubling down on plastic as their profit maker, as the world moves away from fossil fuels for cars and power plants.

Global plastic production is expected to double in the next ten years. That is a haunting specter, given that scientific research suggests we all are eating and breathing plastic from an invisible fallout of plastic particles that blankets the globe.

Like Miss Jessie, we can do our part to reduce and recycle our plastic. But we will never stem this tide until we hold producers accountable for the pollution they create—from production to disposal.

A bill in Congress, the Break Free from Plastic Pollution Act, would do that. It was introduced in March by Los Angeles County representative Alan Lowenthal and others over the vociferous objections of industry. The bill would spur a major paradigm shift by making manufacturers pay for waste collection and recycling, instead of relying on tax dollars and charging consumers. It would also ban some single-use plastic products and put a moratorium on new plastic plants until stronger health and environmental protections are in place.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the lobbying muscle of the oil and gas and petrochemical industries, the bill has gone nowhere. A similar bill last year also died.

I feel deep dismay when I see dead whales filled with plastic and a sea turtle with a straw lodged in its nostril—so much dismay I spent 10 years writing a book about it. Along the way, I woke up to the lives of people being harmed by this pollution, and the brutal injustices of our consume-and-dispose economy.

Industry benefits from the status quo. It will take a broad movement to change it. People with privilege, like me, need to add our voices. Ultimately, it is all our lives at stake.   

Allison Cobb is a writer and environmental advocate, and author of the book Plastic: an Autobiography.