Plastic (34 page)

Over the course of her deplasticization, she's had to abandon purchases ever more frequently. As Terry recalled, at first she simply wanted to replace plastic stuff with things made of glass or wood or paper or other natural materials. She bought sauces in glass jars, scoured the grocery stores for frozen dinners that came in nonplastic trays, tried soy milk powder to make soy milk (pronouncing it "feh!"), and gave up disposable razors in favor of an old-fashioned safety razor she found at a local antique store.

"I thought I could find an alternative for everything in my house," she said. But over time, she found that "there were fewer and fewer things I could buy." When her hair dryer broke, she had to go without or figure out a way to repair it, which she did. Instead of buying almond milk and yogurt and cough syrup, she taught herself how to make them. Rather than purchase new tools, she borrowed them from friends or a local tool-lending program.

"Giving up plastic," Terry said she realized, "meant I was kind of forced to consume less." She may not have environmental quibbles with her plastic credit cards, but the fact is, a life without plastic means she has fewer and fewer occasions to use them.

Plastic is so deeply embedded in our consumer culture it is almost synonymous with it. Look at the bright, shiny hygienic surface of Plasticville and you'll see a wealth of products that make life easier, more convenient. But start scratching that surface and you'll begin to see that minor, even trivial, conveniences can have profound consequences—whether that's reflected in disposables that will outlive us, chemicals that can undermine the health and fertility of future generations, or albatrosses choking on things we've discarded because they can't be reused or recycled.

Does this mean we must follow Terry down that road out of Plasticville? Must we choose between our plastic and our planet? If those were the only options on offer, I'm not sure I could trust myself or my fellow citizens to make a good decision. Fortunately, building a sustainable future doesn't require such a stark and dramatic choice. In fact, an overly simplistic pursuit of perfection can get in the way of a mostly green good.

Consider local dairies trying valiantly to improve on the way milk is produced and sold. One in my area sells organic milk in returnable glass bottles. But the cap is still plastic, and for Terry that's a deal breaker. It's a question of priorities, she said. "You have to prioritize what's important in your life. I don't need to drink milk." That may be a reasonable choice for Terry, but if enough people followed her example, that organic dairy with its returnable glass bottles would go out of business. If we want to bring about a greener world, personal virtue must take into account the larger political and social contexts of individual actions. Still, Terry's uncompromising example provides a reminder of the tradeoffs we casually make every day, as I realized when I finally decided to take up her plastics challenge and track my plastics consumption for a week.

I'd been putting it off. I'm not sure why, except the whole idea made me feel vaguely uncomfortable. I knew there was no way I was going to scale back plastics to the degree Terry had. I have three kids, full-time work, and a far less obsessive temperament; I've never felt compelled to run a marathon. I wasn't convinced that collecting my plastic trash for a week would tell me anything I didn't already know. Or, if I'm honest, anything I wanted to know.

To my surprise, it turned out to be a very useful exercise, like my earlier experiment in writing down everything I touched that was plastic. It reminded me once again of plastic's ubiquity and how easy it is to stop noticing that fact. Knowing that I would have to keep and consider every plastic item I used transformed each use—even the most trivial—into a conscious decision. At the gym, I could get myself a drink of water from one of the plastic cups by the cooler—and add that cup to my collection. Or I could walk downstairs and sip from the water fountain.

Looking at the pile of trash I accumulated in a week—123 items, which was probably more than Terry generated in a year—a few things became clear. One was how often my purchases are made on the basis of convenience. Do I really need to buy zucchini from Trader Joe's, where it comes nestled on a plastic tray, covered in plastic wrap, with little plastic stickers adorning each individual squash? Sometimes. But most weeks I can make the time to stop by the farmers' market or the neighborhood produce stand, where all the fruits and vegetables come unencumbered by synthetic skin.

I was embarrassed to realize how many of the packages I'd collected that week contained food that had gone bad because we hadn't finished it. There were five bread bags, each of which held a few moldy slices—the dreaded heels of the loaf that my kids refused to eat. Those bags were evidence that I was doing far too much of my grocery shopping on autopilot, without thinking carefully about what we really need. But it also reminded me of something Robert Lilienfeld, the coauthor of
Use Less Stuff,
told me when I spoke with him about the debate over plastic shopping bags.
He pointed out that for all the environmental troubles single-use shopping bags cause, the much greater impacts are in what they contain. Reducing the human footprint means addressing fundamentally unsustainable habits of food consumption, such as expecting strawberries in the depths of winter or buying varieties of seafood that are being fished to the brink of extinction.

Beth Terry's challenge pinched awake my sense of mindfulness about my grocery shopping, reminding me to ask myself as I wheeled my cart through the store: Is this something we really need? I'm going to answer that question "yes" more often than Terry. But it's never a bad question to ask oneself, especially in a consumer culture that encourages people to swipe their credit cards regularly but not necessarily thoughtfully.

Those credit cards provide a powerful way to help shape the choices consumers are offered. We can use them to vote for healthier, safer products and to support the development of plastics that are genuinely green. We can also vote by keeping them firmly tucked inside our wallets and rejecting overpackaged goods and products that can't be reused or recycled. The power of the purse has helped make sustainability a viable niche in the market, fueling sales in durable water bottles, travel mugs, and the like. It's why Walmart now sells organic produce and why Clorox introduced a toxin-free line of cleaning products and why the makers of baby bottles and sports water bottles voluntarily switched to bisphenol A-free alternatives. We can move markets, as Terry demonstrated in 2008 when she organized a successful campaign to get Clorox to recycle the carbon cartridges used in its Brita water filters—something the European maker of Brita had begun doing years before, thanks to the requirements of extended-producer-responsibility laws.

But individual actions alone are unlikely to bring about change on the scale that is now required—whether the task is stopping the plasticization of our oceans, protecting our children from endocrine disrupters, or curbing the carbon emissions that fuel global warming. The forces that shaped our marriage with plastics—a powerful petrochemical industry, a culture of acquisition, an erosion of community-mindedness in the suburban diaspora—evolved in a political culture that assumed a world without biological limits. That genie can't be put back in the bottle, but we can remold our political culture to make the genie a better citizen.

Government at all levels—from city councils to Congress—has a role to play in reinventing our communities as places where it is easy, convenient, and cost-effective for people to use less, reuse more, recycle, and compost; where businesses that serve those ends can thrive; where all producers take cradle-to-cradle responsibility for the things they create; and where the ocean is valued for the vast resource it is rather than being the final dumping ground of our plastic folly.

It's a huge project, remaking our relationship with this family of materials.

We've produced nearly as much plastic in the last ten years as we have in all previous decades put together. We've become used to our polymer partners, for better and worse. Today's college graduates may not want a career in "Plastics!" any more than Dustin Hoffman did, but their lives are going to be defined by the presence of plastics to a greater degree than the lives of any previous generation. Plastic production is accelerating, plastic goods are spilling out across the landscape, a culture of use-and-dispose is being exported to a developing world whose consumption of plastic could, by some estimates, catch up to U.S. and European levels in the next forty years. Our annual global plastics production, if present trends hold, could reach nearly two trillion pounds by 2050.
If it feels like we're choking on plastic now, what will it feel like then, when we're consuming nearly four times as much?

We have come a long way from the early promise of plastics, a substance we hoped could free us from the limits of the natural world, democratize wealth, inspire the arts, enable us to make of ourselves virtually anything we wanted to be. But for all the wrong turns we've taken, plastic still holds out that same promise. Especially in a world of seven billion souls—and counting—we need plastics more than ever. We have to remind ourselves that our power to create a sublime world resides not in the materials we deploy but in our gift for imagination, our capacity to create community, our ability to recognize danger and to seek a better way.

Just as individual action is no substitute for the exercise of our collective political will, neither can we simply legislate our way to that sustainable, enriching future we know is possible. Remaking Plasticville into a place where our children and their children and their children can safely live will require us to confront assumptions about ourselves and what we need for fulfilling lives and satisfied minds. We don't need to reject material things but to rediscover that their value may reside less in the quantity of things we own and—as with Della's comb—more in the way our material possessions connect us to one another and to the planet that is the true source of all our wealth.

Epilogue: A Bridge

The bridge is unremarkable-looking—just a short, plain span connecting one dirt road to another deep in the heart of the New Jersey Pine Barrens. Pitch pines, scrub oaks, and black gum trees line the road leading up to it. Blueberry and leatherleaf bushes cover the riverbanks on both sides. It's one of dozens of bridges that crisscross the tea-colored waters of the Mullica River as it winds its way through a woods called Wharton State Forest. Unlike the other bridges, however, this one is made entirely of plastic.

You wouldn't necessarily know that unless you stopped to give it a good once-over. All the same, a spokeswoman for the state forest told me, "It doesn't look out of place." In fact, because it's made entirely from recycled plastics, she said, "it promotes our focus of being green."

Nearly one million used milk jugs and a lot of old car bumpers were smooshed and melted and remolded to make the plastic I-beams, pilings, and planks that were used to construct the fifty-six-foot-long bridge.
Rutgers University polymer scientist Thomas Nosker invented the technology to turn plastic throwaways into durable building materials. He then licensed it to a New Jersey company, Axion International, that's taking it commercial. Axion says the plastic it produces from recyclables can be molded to make bridges, railroad ties, decks, pilings, bulkheads, and levees and will stand up to time and the elements far better than wood or concrete or steel. In just two years the company has created worthy new lives for more than two million pounds of plastics that might otherwise have wound up in a landfill. For Axion founder Jim Kerstein, these kinds of products are karmic payment for a career he spent producing and selling hangers made of virgin plastics that he knew would almost invariably be thrown away. "All the negatives about plastic—that it lasts long and doesn't degrade, are being turned into positives," he said. "You're taking a material that doesn't degrade and putting it to use where we want it to last forever."

The Wharton State Forest bridge, constructed in 2002, was one of the company's first. Intrigued by the technology, the U.S. Army hired the company to put up a pair of bridges across small creeks at Fort Bragg. Axion promised that these bridges would support not only trucks but also M1 Abrams tanks, which weigh in at seventy tons each. Army engineers were so dubious that a plastic structure would support a tank that they brought along a crane to the tank's test run across the bridge, convinced they'd need to haul the tank from the creek. The monster tank rumbled across the twenty-foot span, and the bridge scarcely flexed. "Others build strong bridges, but this bridge was built Army-strong," an admiring representative from the U.S. Army's office of acquisition declared at the bridge's dedication in 2009.

The military, he noted, spends $22.5 billion a year on replacing structures lost to corrosion. This bridge cost less to build than those made with other materials and will be corrosion-resistant and practically maintenance-free. After the Fort Bragg bridges were finished, the army ordered two more for its base in Fort Eustis, Virginia. These bridges are slated to carry railroad locomotives weighing 120 tons.

The deteriorating wooden bridge that Axion replaced at Wharton State Forest was at least fifty years old; it had been there when the Wharton family granted the land to the state, in 1954.
The plastic bridge is likely to last much, much longer. Barring an act of war or a natural calamity, it will be there long after the nearby oaks and pines have toppled and new trees have taken their place, ready to be crossed by distant generations awaiting their turn on the planet. So often plastic's obdurate persistence is an insult and injury to the natural world. But this modest crossing in the middle of the forest seems just the right application of a material that doesn't die. Maybe it's not right for a span like the Tappan Zee or the Golden Gate Bridge. But, said Kerstein, most of the six hundred thousand or so bridges in the United States are small spans—shorter than seventy feet—in which traditional materials could easily be replaced by recycled plastic.