All the Recycling in the World Won’t Save Us From the Greed of Big Plastic

In 2017, Saudi Aramco, in partnership with Dow Chemical, finished work on a $20 billion, twenty-​­six-​­plant petrochemical complex called Sadara. The largest such facility ever built in a single phase, it sits on two square miles beside the blue-​­green Persian Gulf, made from a million cubic feet of concrete, as much steel as two Golden Gate Bridges, and 1,500 miles of pipes. Capable of producing more than three million tons of plastics and other chemicals annually, the complex is “one for the record books,” Saudi Aramco boasts, yet another demonstration of its ability to execute “extreme engineering projects.”

It wasn’t the company’s first step into plastics—it o​­perates other plants, at home and abroad, with partners such as ExxonMobil, France’s Total, and China’s Sinopec. But Sadara “is not just another project,” Saudi Aramco explains on its website. Instead, it is “the cornerstone” of plans to transform itself from an oil company into an “integrated energy and chemicals enterprise” that will be “the global leader in petrochemicals production.”

Doing so, said CEO Amin Nasser, would enable it to “derive the maximum value from every hydrocarbon molecule.” Or, in plainer English, to wring as much cash as possible from the kingdom’s buried riches. Saudi Aramco envisioned another complex nearby—​­PlasChem Park, where manufacturers could process the ingredients Sadara and other petrochemical complexes produced into finished products, from tires and auto interiors to diapers, flooring, packaging, and appliances.

In 2020, three years after Sadara’s completion, the oil giant committed even more definitively to plastic.

It was, the Financial Times observed, “a powerful statement of intent.” The company was heeding the crown prince’s words. Plastic and other petrochemicals would strengthen the nation’s economy by diversifying it, guaranteeing a healthy new stream of revenue, creating jobs in the plants themselves and hopefully attracting more in factories like PlasChem Park’s.

Leaning into plastic would not only prepare one of the world’s top oil powers for life after oil but also enable it to add value to its own crude, rather than leaving the job to others. In that way, this new push was really just another step in Saudi Arabia’s decades-​­long project of claiming control of its own resources.

There was only one problem. This effort to move away from oil was built on oil—“attached by an umbilical cord” to Saudi reserves, as the Financial Times put it. Turning oil into chemicals may avoid the carbon impact of burning it as fuel, but pumping out ever more plastic creates a whole new set of harms, including to the climate. That didn’t seem to bother Saudi Aramco. “We see the world changing,” one executive explained, and the company was adapting “in a way that we keep our market share.”

For Saudi Arabia, “the big picture imperative is to avoid being forced to leave barrels in the ground,” one analyst wrote. “Better to turn these barrels into petrochemicals” than “to leave reserves stranded.” If the fuel market was weakening and plastic sales showed promise, Saudi Aramco would follow the money.

In 2020, three years after Sadara’s completion, the oil giant committed even more definitively to plastic. Saudi Aramco bought a 70 percent stake in the Saudi Basic Industries Corp., or SABIC, a state-​­owned petrochemical conglomerate established by royal decree in 1976. SABIC had since grown into the world’s fourth-​­biggest chemical company, with annual sales close to $35 billion—“one of Saudi Arabia’s crown jewels,” a regional news site wrote. Much of that growth came through gobbling up pieces of other companies, most notably GE Plastics, a General Electric division making plastics used in packaging, cars, consumer goods, and medical offices, for which SABIC paid $11.6 billion in 2007.

Today, SABIC operates dozens of plants around the world, including a giant ethane cracker and polyethylene complex it built with ExxonMobil near Corpus Christi, Texas. Indeed, the company has more than a dozen manufacturing sites in the United States.

Saudi Aramco’s $69 billion acquisition of a controlling stake in SABIC was, in a sense, just one arm of the state buying from another, since both companies were almost entirely government-​­owned. Still, it was a watershed moment. SABIC’s petrochemical output was more than three times Saudi Aramco’s, so the merger was a clear recommitment to the oil giant’s all‑in bet on plastic.

Not long before, Saudi Aramco had announced plans to pour $100 billion—not counting SABIC’s price tag—into expanding plastic and petrochemical production. Nasser, the CEO, said he saw “great potential in non-​­metallic materials as a substitute for natural materials” in “high-​growth industries” including packaging, automotive, and construction. The world’s all-​­but-​­insatiable hunger for such items was why petrochemicals would account by midcentury for nearly half the growth in global oil demand—and therefore, “provide a reliable destination for Saudi Aramco’s future oil production,” he explained. It was simple, another company executive said: “As populations grow they need more plastic.” That dynamic, in Nasser’s view, provided “a fantastic window of opportunity.”

But “such windows by their very nature offer maximum benefit only to those who act quickly.” That’s exactly what he planned to do: By the early 2030s, Saudi Aramco aims to turn more than a third of its crude into chemicals—a near-​tripling in fifteen years.

“What if the yield could be increased even more?” its website asks.

Rolling out that $100 billion spend would now be SABIC’s work too. It depends, in large part, on a new set of technologies with the potential to transform the way plastic is made. “Crude oil–​­to‑chemicals” promises—or threatens, depending on your perspective—to supercharge production. “A game changer,” one industry publication pronounced. “Because of its sheer scale and the volume of products that can potentially be produced,” crude‑to‑chemicals “could be one of the most important trends ever to impact” the industry.

We’ve seen how by‑products of gas—particularly ethane and propane—are “cracked” into ingredients for plastic. When the process begins with oil rather than gas, it works differently. Traditionally, refineries separate crude into its component parts, or “fractions.” Some—li​­ke gasoline, diesel, and kerosene—ar​­e fuels. Others, particularly the fraction known as naphtha, become ingredients, or “feedstocks,” in the industry’s lingo, for petrochemical plants that turn them—through a series of steps—into plastic and other products.

Each step is expensive. And refineries’ output is heavily skewed toward fuel, traditionally processing just a tenth of oil into chemical feedstocks. Many have begun tweaking their operations to nudge that proportion higher. Given its new priorities, Saudi Aramco wants to rewrite the equation more definitively. Already, working with Chevron and a Houston-​­based company called Lummus Technology, it has developed a heat-​­based technology soon to come into use at a complex under construction in Ulsan, South Korea, that’s expected to turn 25 percent of the oil it takes in into chemicals. “Definitely a breakthrough,” one expert opined.

Saudi Aramco’s not satisfied. “What if the yield could be increased even more?” its website asks. Inside a curving, glass-​­walled research building at company headquarters in Dharan, scientists are working on ways to push chemical output to 80 percent of every barrel. “This is truly pioneering research,” the lab’s development manager said in an article featured on the corporate site. Teams are searching for a catalyst—“the elixir,” the company calls it, that, when mixed with crude, would trigger reactions yielding streams of useful feedstocks.

Among other work, the article describes lab experiments focused on maximizing output of ethylene and propylene—the building blocks of polyethylene and polypropylene plastics. “Imagine you are making food and the recipe has many ingredients,” one scientist says. You keep adjusting the proportions “to get the desired flavor and texture.”

At another Aramco lab, teams work toward what the company calls the holy grail: crunching the crude‑to‑chemicals process down to one step, which would slash costs. It “seems like science fiction,” but is getting closer to reality, one scientist said. The company’s sharp minds and disciplined execution, said another, boost its odds of “hitting the jackpot.” It’s hard to overstate the impact such research could have. Refineries are gigantic, so shifting them away from fuel production could “easily” push chemical output ten times higher than a typical petrochemical plant’s, one expert said. “It will only take a few of these projects to significantly affect global supply and demand.”

To flood the world, in other words, with vastly more plastic. If Saudi Aramco reaches its 80 percent target, one crude‑to‑chemicals complex could produce more ethylene than the eight crackers built in the first wave of fracking-​­driven US plant construction do collectively, Standard & Poor’s analysts estimated. Even less optimized projects already in the works are likely to “reshape the global petrochemical industry,” they wrote.

Saudi Aramco is moving ahead with plans for a big crude‑tochemicals facility beside the Persian Gulf and possibly another on the Red Sea. Such complexes could double the money a typical refinery-​ plus-​­petrochemical-​­plant setup makes per barrel.

I’m taken aback by the idea of vacationing in a country I’ve associated more with the brutal oppression of women and exploitation of migrant workers than sightseeing potential.

They also lock in demand for oil. Which is a big part of why Saudi Aramco, collaborating with Chinese companies, is now building, or buying into, major crude‑to‑chemicals complexes in that country. Among other ventures, it paid $3.4 billion in 2023 for a 10 percent stake in the corporate parent of Zhejiang Petroleum and Chemical, which operates a vast refinery whose output is about 40 percent chemicals—including more than four million tons of ethylene a year.

As part of the deal, the parent company agreed to buy nearly five hundred thousand barrels of Aramco oil a day. Now Aramco is pursuing similar stakes in Jiangsu Shenghong Petrochemicals and Hengli Petrochemical, which run massive refinery and chemicals complexes, and Shandong Yulong Petrochemical, which is building one. If those deals are finalized, they’ll likely include oil supply commitments too. Meanwhile, SABIC is building a $6.4 billion ethylene, polyethylene, and polypropylene plant in Fujian province.

Of course, Saudi Aramco isn’t the only one tempted by the returns crude‑to‑chemicals promises. Across the industry, expected declines in demand for oil-​­derived fuels threaten to leave refineries running below capacity, McKinsey consultants explain. Operators, they advise, “must fundamentally rethink” their setups and move toward petrochemicals, either by adjusting existing processes or installing crude‑to‑chemicals technologies. Many are already doing so, said a contractor working with such facilities. “Any time we look at new refineries” or upgrade existing ones, “we almost always find that a major goal is petrochemical production,” he said. Facilities are introducing it “at a scale that we really haven’t seen before.”

Dragging my wheelie bag through Dubai’s glitzy, glimmering airport, I look up to see a huge ad promoting Saudi Arabia—its stunning landscapes and millennia of history—as a tourist destination. I’m taken aback by the idea of vacationing in a country I’ve associated more with the brutal oppression of women and exploitation of migrant workers than sightseeing potential. But given the reason for my trip to Dubai, the biggest city in Saudi Arabia’s next-​­door neighbor the United Arab Emirates, the pitch makes sense. Attracting visitors beyond the millions making the annual hajj pilgrimage is part of Saudi Arabia’s effort to develop new sources of income.

The same forces behind its push to make more plastic are driving the development of luxury resorts on the Red Sea. Plastic producers have frequently replied to my requests to interview their representatives with, at best, written statements, and more often refusals to comment, or just silence. (Neither Saudi Aramco nor SABIC responded to my messages.) So I was pleasantly surprised when organizers of the Gulf Petrochemicals and Chemicals Association’s annual plastics conference said I was welcome to attend. SABIC was the main sponsor of the conference, whose other participants would include representatives of both global and regional petrochemical companies, so the gathering seemed like a good place to get a glimpse of Saudi, and Gulf, plastic plans.

Dubai feels astonishing from the moment I step into the enormous airport, with its mirrored columns, shiny marble floors, and walkways lined with tall palm trees. The diversity visible on the city’s streets—and reflected in the restaurants I hungrily explore—is e​­vidence of the economic draw it offers to workers from across South Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. The preserved, refurbished old quarter retains hints of Dubai’s past as a small-​­scale hub for fishermen, traders, and pearl merchants. But in much of the rest of the city, the UAE’s wealth is on flashy, over-​­the-​­top display. In some neighborhoods, nearly every building is an architectural extravaganza—one neck-​­craning luxury tower after the next gleaming in the broiling desert sun, some garish, others elegantly avant-​garde.

As my Uber approaches the conference hotel, I can see it is another such marvel. Two, in fact—side‑by‑side oval-​­shaped buildings, connected fifty stories up by a walkway jutting out on one side into a cantilevered observatory with see-​­through floors. Visitors, I’d later learn, could zoom down a slide—ou​­tside the building, although enclosed in glass—fr​­om level fifty-​­three to fifty-​­two, or, even more harrowing, walk on an outdoor ledge, and climb the side of the tower, protected only by a harness.

Despite the buildings’ lavishness, the plastics meeting is in a downstairs space that’s less Dubai bling than basic corporate nice. The heavy Saudi presence is easy to see as I enter the refreshment area, where men in the country’s traditional dress—​­long white robe, red-​­and-​­white-​ checked headdress secured with a dark band—chat over coffee and pastries with attendees in suits. At a SABIC information stall, several bearded young Saudis peer at a laptop, beside a tray piled with chocolates wrapped in gold and silver paper. They smile as I pocket a couple and walk into the conference hall.

On the screen up front, a video touts plastic’s many benefits, notes its production has doubled since the century’s start, and offers the idea of a “circular economy”—a wo​­rld in which discarded material is endlessly recaptured and recycled—​­as the answer to any problems such growth might pose. “The time is now to harvest the power of innovation and build a new future for plastics,” the narrator says. It’s the first of many such exhortations that will soon pour forth in a blur of PowerPoint presentations and panel discussions.

They are, though, offering a master class in industry’s long-​standing skill at co‑opting the language of environmentalism. Indeed, when I listen more closely, there is a lot more going on amid all that green talk.

Over a day and a half, representatives of Saudi corporate and government entities—including SABIC itself, a company-​­backed economic development initiative, and a Ministry of Energy official—take the stage, along with other petrochemical executives, representatives of big plastic users like Pepsi and Unilever, and trade groups including the US‑based Plastics Industry Association. As the upbeat corporate-​­speak washes over me, I begin to imagine playing bingo with the most frequently repeated greenwash buzzwords—in​­novation, collaboration, opportunity, challenge, sustainability, circularity.

Procter & Gamble, found in one waste audit to be the world’s seventh-​­biggest corporate plastic polluter, is committed to “creating products that make responsible consumption irresistible to our consumers,” one of its executives says—tw​­ice. “I’m optimistic because we have all of you,” he adds. “The journey is probably still at the start,” but it’s time to “join hands together to achieve this.” A packaging manager from Dow Chemical talks about its goals: “to protect the climate, stop the waste, and of course to close the loop.”

Despite the sometimes anodyne language, there are moments when it seems impressive, and unexpected, to hear big corporate interests recognize the urgency of our planetary crises and the need to change. Packaging “is very, very important for us,” a Unilever executive says. “But we know there is a problem.” Then, unwrapping one of the SABIC chocolates, I remind myself who is paying for this event: the huge chemical conglomerate through which the Saudi state plans to monetize its oil reserves far into the future. Neither SABIC nor its partner, Saudi Aramco, currently pouring $100 billion into their petrochemical dreams, is interested in making less plastic.

They are, though, offering a master class in industry’s long-​standing skill at co‑opting the language of environmentalism. Indeed, when I listen more closely, there is a lot more going on amid all that green talk. A “leadership dialogue” with three Gulf-​­based petrochemical executives hits many of the industry’s favorite points. As the panelists settle into armchairs onstage, a moderator says there is a “difference between plastic pollution and plastic production. Plastic is good, pollution is bad.” Turning to climate change, he shows a graph of rising emissions “the world cannot afford to ignore.” As a component of wind turbines, solar panels, and electric vehicles, he argues, plastic will be key to shifting toward clean energy.

Fayez Al Sharef, CEO of Sadara, the massive Aramco-​­Dow petrochemical project, picks up the theme. “We’re all citizens of this world, and we’re affected,” he says, his demeanor assured and thoughtful, black-​ framed glasses and close-​­trimmed beard beneath his checked headscarf. “We have to be part of the solution.”

But his industry is up against a troubling obstacle, he explains. People get “too emotional” about plastic. “We have this tendency to go between extremes. We want plastic, and then someone shows us a video about the waste, and the next day we say we don’t like plastic.” He takes a similar tone on climate. Shifting toward clean energy “has to happen. But not at the pace people are talking about, and not in the exclusion” some suggest, he says. “We need all forms of energy and we need to be patient.”

Hinting at qualms that buck this event’s green hue—“I have to be careful”—he notes that fossil fuels provide plastic’s raw materials. “I’m just wondering, with all these aggressive policies” on climate, could problems with availability of needed ingredients result? Some components of an oil barrel become fuel while some go into chemicals, “so if you disturb part of it without paying attention,” you risk a domino effect of disruption. Crude oil–to‑chemicals, he suggests, could help solve that problem.

Excellent projects, no doubt. But the idea that throwing a little money at them might begin to erase the environmental harm wrought by two vast global conglomerates is beyond absurd.

Such messaging needs unpicking. The moderator’s argument that plastic is a problem only if it ends up in the wrong place is a long-​ standing industry framing—the same message Keep America Beautiful has espoused—that cleverly accepts public concern while narrowing its target. As long as bags, bottles, and such are properly disposed of, the thinking goes, production can keep climbing. Talk of plastic’s role in reducing emissions is common too. It’s not wrong—​­the material does make vehicles lighter and less fuel-​­hungry, and it’s needed in many clean technologies.

But talking up those benefits, like reminders of plastic’s role in medicine, is a way of focusing attention on its positive uses while ignoring the many wasteful ones. Arguments for an “all of the above” approach to energy—keep burning fossil fuels while also installing solar panels—and suggestions change will be slow are common industry talking points on climate, combining a reasonable-​­sounding tone with disregard for the urgency the danger demands.

As the day goes on, recycling is a constant theme. “It is crucial that we move from the traditional take-​­make-​­dispose economy to a circular one,” says Jacob Duer, president of the Alliance to End Plastic Waste, an industry group whose members include major chemical and packaging makers. This is another familiar industry go‑to. Recycling, and accompanying notions like circularity and “closing the loop,” are plastic makers’ answer to nearly every concern about their industry, despite the daunting technical, logistical, and economic obstacles, and environmental harms of their own. What’s more, talk of recycling often focuses on “education” and “behavior change”—a ha​­ndy way of shifting responsibility from industry to individuals.

The spin is even more shameless at a conference dinner, where young entrepreneurs competing for funding from the Mega Green Accelerator, a SABIC-­ and PepsiCo-​­backed start‑up support program, present their plans: renting solar panels to small-​­scale farmers (“as of today, we’ve deployed ten units”), solar screens that offer both power and shade, an AI tool for calculating carbon footprints.

Excellent projects, no doubt. But the idea that throwing a little money at them might begin to erase the environmental harm wrought by two vast global conglomerates is beyond absurd. Sometimes the mask of concern slips, revealing flashes of anger. Few things irritate plastic makers more than the suggestion the world needs less plastic, so a briefing on negotiations for a global plastic pollution treaty, where they’ve been trying to bat that idea down, is one of the spiciest sessions. Salman Alajmi, an executive at the Kuwait-​­based petrochemical company Equate, who’s been leading a coalition of plastic-​ producing countries at the UN talks, reports sentiment is “getting very emotional against plastic.”

The treaty, Alajmi explained, was supposed to focus on “mishandling of waste—which is, again, consumer behavior.” Demands for production cuts strayed far beyond those parameters, he complains. Some were even arguing that the calculations of a plastic item’s impact should begin with oil and gas extraction, meaning the harm done by a throwaway fork, for example, would include not just its manufacture and disposal but the drilling and petrochemical processing that created the plastic. Alajmi warns that could pave the way for financial penalties that “will diminish for sure the producer economics.”

If industry did not succeed in reshaping the deal, Alajmi warns, the consequences could be serious. “We have to be more proactive” and “get out of the comfort zone, out of the defensive mode.” Pro-​­industry negotiators need legal experts, and research papers on the benefits of different types of recycling—“why they’re safe and why we consider them solutions.” It all sounds very concerning, says the moderator. “This is an invitation, and a call to action.”

With time to kill between sessions, I follow a glass-​­enclosed footbridge over traffic-​­clogged roads to the Dubai Mall—the world’s largest, with more than 1,200 stores. Wandering its huge, interconnected wings and walkways, I begin worrying I won’t find my way back and decide to head for the indoor waterfall. Instead, I end up outside, by an artificial lake at the foot of the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, whose jagged, asymmetric uppermost segments rise toward a sky-​­piercing needle. On a shaded terrace, I order a lemon-​­and-​­mint drink and am scrolling my phone when loud music begins to play, and dancing jets of water, in shifting patterns, spray up from the lake.

At the world’s largest mall, beneath the world’s highest building, I have stumbled—in t​­he middle of the desert—onto the world’s tallest performing water fountain. Trudging back through the mall, I stop to look down from its fourth floor at the multitude of stores below. It is dizzying.

Dubai reminds me, I decide, of Las Vegas—minus the gambling, which is forbidden by Islam. Las Vegas on steroids. Or rather, on oil money. While the UAE’s economy is far more diverse than Saudi Arabia’s, oil is nonetheless the foundational source of its wealth. Like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, too, is pushing into plastic. To be in a place built—so very expensively—on fossil fuels, listening to endless green talk from an industry profiting off planetary destruction, is far more discombobulating than the astonishing shopping options. More head-​­spinning, even, than I imagine climbing the outside of the conference hotel would have been, had I been bold enough to try it.

__________________________________

From Plastic Inc.: The Secret History and Shocking Future of Big Oil’s Biggest Bet. Used with the permission of the publisher, Avery, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Copyright © 2026 by Beth Gardiner.