Plastic (11 page)

Who knows whether the pellets I saw streaming into the railcars were eventually made into Frisbees. There was something so abstract about the process that it was hard to connect it with any real-life plastic products. I wondered if Johnson felt a sense of ownership in things made of polyethylene, the way a mason might stop and admire a building where he had laid brick. "Absolutely," he said when I asked. "We sell a lot of stuff to'S. C. Johnson to make Ziploc bags."

"So when you look at a Ziploc bag, do you feel proud?"

"Oh yeah, absolutely."

It's a long journey from a pellet to a Ziploc bag or a Frisbee. Along the way, the raw polyethylene passes through many different hands—compounders who mix in the needed additives; processors who make the finished product; brand owners who slap on a label; retailers who sell it. At every stop, the plastic gains in value. It costs Dow less than a penny to manufacture the 140 grams of polyethylene that go into a basic Frisbee. It costs the factory that makes Frisbees about twenty cents to buy that disc's worth of plastic, and it will spend another dollar or so on the costs of manufacturing and packaging the disc. Wham-O sells that disc to toy companies for three or four dollars. By the time that 140-gram Frisbee appears at my local toy store, it will sport a price tag of approximately eight dollars. The value of that hunk of polyethylene has risen by orders of magnitude. Still, as toys go, the Frisbee is a bargain.

Toy makers feel great pressure to keep their prices low, ideally under twenty dollars. Twenty bucks "is considered a magical price point because it is an 'ATM unit.' People think hard about breaking two of them," explained Danny Grossman, president of Wild Planet Toys and former president of the Toy Industry Association.
Price points, of course, change with the times. With the 2008 recession, Grossman added, some stores began to look at fifteen dollars as the new twenty. Whatever the magic number is, the chief way the toy industry stays below it is by moving operations overseas. Welcome to China, where four out of five of the toys in the world are made.

Wham-O was late to join the procession of toy companies decamping from the United States. As long as Rich Knerr and Spud Melin owned the company, they kept it firmly planted in their Southern California home turf. The company had a factory in San Gabriel, and whatever toys weren't made there were farmed out to molders in and around Los Angeles. Indeed, until the 1970s, the whole area was full of plastics processors kept busy by the big toy companies. Every mold maker in Southern California "was doing Barbie legs and heads and parts," recalled one reporter who has long covered the industry. But then toy makers began moving production to Mexico, with Mattel and Kenner leading the way.
(Toys were among the first of the major industries that use plastic to leave the United States. The continuing exodus of valuable end markets is a constant thorn in the side of the plastics industry, and one reason, along with the rising cost of natural gas, that it has been bleeding jobs for the past decade.)

Wham-O stayed put until Melin and Knerr sold the company in 1982. The new owners promptly moved production south of the border, and Frisbees were made by Mexican maquiladoras for the next two decades.
In 2006, a Hong Kong-based toy company bought Wham-O—or what was left of it, for by then the brand was attached to only a handful of toys, including Frisbees, Hacky Sacks, and Hula-Hoops. To no one's surprise, the new Hong Kong owners moved Frisbee production to a vendor in China.

When I first asked if I could visit Wham-O's Chinese factory, the vice president for marketing and licensing turned me down, citing a need for secrecy that I normally associate with nuclear technology or Colonel Sanders's Original Recipe. Making a Frisbee "is not rocket science," he explained. "It's a very simple piece of injection-molded plastic. Any idiot can get a mold and make one. I don't want anyone in there unless he's from a government agency or Walmart or someone who absolutely needs to see it." Eventually, after much pleading on my part, he agreed to let me visit the factory, but with a proviso: I could not identify it or reveal where it was located on pain of a lawsuit. All I am allowed to divulge is that it is in Guangdong Province, in the Pearl River Delta, a place that's been described as the manufacturing center of the world.

For the past thirty years, this region just north of Hong Kong has been "the heart pumping China's emergence as a global economic power."
As many as fifty thousand factories
stud an area roughly the size of Missouri, turning out electronics, housewares, shoes, textiles, clocks, clothes, handbags, and countless other items, including 80 percent of the world's toys. To a large extent, what makes this beehive of productivity possible is plastic, the material used most often by all those industries. This is the most concentrated center for making plastic goods in China, if not the world, with some eighteen hundred factories and half a dozen huge wholesale resin markets where brokers peddle raw plastic pellets from around the globe. There are twice as many people working in plastics in that single province than in the entire U.S. plastics industry.

Before the economic crash of 2008, Guangdong's boomtowns drew tens of millions of migrant workers from the rural countryside and pulled in foreign investment at the incredible rate of nearly two billion dollars a month.
Shipping containers left the region's busy harbors at the rate of one per second, around the clock, all year round, journalist James Fallows calculated.
If the region were a country, at that time it would have boasted the world's eleventh-largest economy.

It's also one of the most densely populated places on earth, with an estimated population of forty-five to sixty million. (No one is quite sure, because of all the migrant workers.) It was hard for me to appreciate the implication of such numbers until I got on the train from Hong Kong and reached the district's first major city, Shenzhen. All I could see were complexes of skyscrapers stretching out in every direction. It looked as if multiple copies of midtown Manhattan had been cut and pasted under the dull gray skies. (The smog overlying the province is so thick and persistent that it killed off the region's centuries-old silk industry. By the 1990s, the silkworms just couldn't be kept alive.)
The only breaks in the skyscraping came when I passed the big block-shaped factories, which for some reason are almost invariably five stories high.

Thirty years ago, Shenzhen was a sleepy fishing town of about seventy thousand people. Now it has a population of about eight million. "It changes every day," my translator Matthew Wang later told me. He spent a few years working in factories there. For him, it was a lonely time. "In this city, you need to keep moving, moving. Nothing is stable. Accommodations, jobs, friends, everything. That's why economically it's good, but it's not a good place to live. My wife says I would have gone crazy if I'd stayed here."

Matthew, nearing forty at that time, embodied this feverish pace of change. He was the son of peasants. His father was briefly jailed during the Cultural Revolution. Matthew was raised in a farming village, drank water hauled in a wooden bucket from a well, and did his schoolwork by the light of kerosene lamps. But he did well in school and mastered English, and now he was a player, albeit a small one, in the global economy. He followed international affairs on the Internet (to the extent Chinese censors allowed) and made his living as a translator and fixer for foreigners with business in Guangdong, like me. One day as we were driving to an interview, his ever-present cell phone rang with a call from an Australian client who wanted him to make arrangements for a shipment of shoes to Sydney.

This steroidal push into the twenty-first century was all the more surreal for the contrary images that kept popping up, the reminders that this sheen of development and prosperity reached only so deep. Bicyclists pedaled along the sides of traffic-choked six-lane highways. Peasants in straw hats hand-hoed little pockets of farmland on the outskirts of cities. Towers under construction were framed by bamboo scaffolding. Drying laundry hung from the balconies and windows of every high-rise building.

Though Guangdong has been a locus for international trade on and off since 200
B.C.,
this current gold rush of foreign investment began in 1979 when Premier Deng Zhou Peng announced his open-door policy. Under a series of economic reforms, the government established "special economic zones" in the cities of Dongguan, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Foshan. Each was granted special tax benefits that made it attractive to foreign investors, especially those based in nearby Hong Kong, which was still a British colony.

By then Hong Kong had a strong plastics-processing industry, geared heavily toward export.
As in the United States, Hong Kong plastics manufacturers had started in the 1940s with simple objects like combs, then moved on to toys, and by the 1980s they were producing for the more lucrative end markets, such as computers, cars, and medical devices. But toys remained a mainstay export. Enticed through Deng's open door, plastics processors and toy makers began migrating to mainland China,
where the rents were cheaper and the labor far more abundant. To this day, most of the toy factories in Guangdong Province have Hong Kong or Taiwanese owners.

The path that brought the owner of the Frisbee factory, Dennis Wong, to the region is typical. Born and raised in Hong Kong, he studied polymer engineering at Hong Kong Polytechnic and cut his teeth in the industry working for Union Carbide's Hong Kong outpost. Hong Kong's homegrown plastic industry was still young, he recalled. "All the information was from America. All the plastic molding technology, all the equipment and how to mold it, how to machine it, how to make good plastic products was introduced from America." When he and his wife started their company, in 1983, they began by making simple, practical items, such as flashlights and refrigerator magnets. The company developed a reputation for doing good work. One day a toy company asked Dennis if he could manufacture its novelty pens. Soon Dennis was in the toy-manufacturing business.

In 1987, he built a factory in Guangdong Province, in what was then a remote spot in the countryside surrounded by rice paddies. It took a taxi two hours to reach the factory from the local train station, and invariably the driver would get lost. Now a busy thoroughfare runs past the front gate, and it's surrounded by a bustling neighborhood of shops, hotels, apartment buildings, and other factories. Though Dennis comes to the factory nearly every day, he and his family continue to live in Hong Kong, a ninety-minute drive away. They all work in the business. The company employs about a thousand people, which is small by Guangdong standards. Still, it enjoys a strong reputation.

Most of the company's work is dedicated to manufacturing other companies' branded products, such as the Frisbee, as well as anonymous tchotchkes such as key chains, light-up pens, and pedometers. But like many Chinese processors today, Dennis's daughter Ada has higher ambitions. She is hoping the company can eventually start producing its own brand of toys; that's where the future is. To that end, her business card reads
Product Innovation Manager.
She's a friendly, slender woman in her early thirties with chin-length hair and delicate features. She speaks impeccable English. She drove up from Hong Kong to guide me through the factory on a broiling-hot March day.

Ada had promised to show me the production process from start to finish. Accordingly, our first stop was a small room off the main production area, where the raw resins are mixed into the custom blends that Wham-O requires for its Frisbees. Bags of clean white pellets were stacked against the wall, and I spotted the label of ExxonMobil among them. (The factory almost exclusively uses resins from overseas—the United States, Taiwan, Mexico, the Middle East—because, Dennis later explained, Chinese resins are not reliable; the quality can vary from batch to batch, which can affect processing. Despite China's powerhouse status as a producer of plastic products, it still imports most of the resins it uses, though construction of new resin plants will start changing that equation.) Those pellets—a mix of high-density and low-density polyethylene—are blended in a barrel with grains of pigment and softening agents in proportions that Wham-O has prescribed. The raw materials are then ready to be made into Frisbees.

Out in the clanging, whirring din of the main factory floor were six injection-molding machines—each about the length of a limousine—devoted to molding Frisbees. (More were going full-bore in another building.) I stopped by one and watched the process. It reminded me of a giant Play-Doh Fun Factory. A funnel-shaped hopper sitting on top of the machine was filled with a blend of pellets and white pigment. Every so often, the hopper released a batch into a long horizontal barrel, where they were immediately heated to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. As the plastic melted, a long screw pushed it through the barrel into a Frisbee-shaped cavity formed by molds that clamped together with a pressure of more than two hundred tons per square inch. The mold was chilled so the plastic started hardening as soon as it reached the cavity. All this took fifty-five seconds. At that point, the front of the mold pulled away from the back, and a woman sitting next to the machine opened a small glass door and plucked out a shiny white 140-gram Frisbee. She carefully inspected it for flaws and snipped off any trailing filaments of plastic as well as the sprue, the little tab indicating where the liquid plastic ran into the mold. By then, another fresh Frisbee was ready to be pulled from the mold. Once the Frisbee cooled down, it was placed onto a rack with hundreds of other blank discs awaiting decoration. One disc she pulled out had a little smudge of red on top, residue from a previous production run. She razored out the offending spot to avoid further contamination and threw the disc onto a pile of rejects that would be remelted and remolded into new Frisbees.

This may not be rocket science, but it's more complicated than it looks. It's taken the company much trial and error to ensure the discs contain just the right blend of materials, that they come out at the proper weight, and that they don't deform while cooling, said Ada. Indeed, the company spent a considerable amount of money upgrading its machines, buying new equipment, and machining new molds in order to make Frisbees. What has made it worthwhile? I asked. "Quantity," Ada answered, without hesitation. The company was producing over one million discs a year.