As oil and gas companies pivot to plastic, California neighborhoods become sacrifice zones again

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

This shift isn’t just a climate concern — it’s a public health crisis. Plastics are fossil fuels in another form. And the communities most exposed to their production bear the highest health burdens.

A new report from the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation on what defines a plastic-burdened community traces how this expanding plastic economy maps directly onto California’s oil and gas footprint. 

Even as California celebrates its climate leadership, our neighborhoods remain entwined with the legacies of fossil fuel infrastructure. More than 2.5 million Californians live within a kilometer of an active or idle oil or gas well.

There are pumpjacks in Inglewood, refineries along the Wilmington corridor and wells beside schools in Kern County.  Refinery infrastructure — much of it feeding plastic precursor production — also is heavily concentrated in Los Angeles County, the most populous region in the state.

Unequal exposure

The science is unequivocal: living near oil and gas development is linked to a wide array of health harms: respiratory disease, cardiovascular illness, adverse birth outcomes and elevated cancer risk. The higher odds for these conditions persist even when controlling for socioeconomic and environmental factors. 

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

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

Neighborhoods closest to wells and refineries have far higher proportions of Latino and Black residents, lower incomes and greater health vulnerabilities. On average, for each refinery within 1.5 miles of a community, the median household income is nearly $11,000 lower, poverty rates are 5.5% higher and emergency-room visits for asthma and heart disease are significantly elevated. 

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

In other words, even as we transition away from burning fossil fuels, we are locking ourselves into new forms of dependence — embedded in the packaging we discard daily.

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

Administered 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 disposability, building on the plastic reduction efforts required of the industry under SB 54.

Plastic pollution is not just about littered beaches or overflowing landfills; it begins long before a product reaches a 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 it must ensure that communities long treated as sacrifice zones become the first to benefit from solutions.