Plastic Read online

  You can chart a direct relationship among the rising production of plastics, humans' growing reliance on throwaway products such as disposable lighters, and plastics pollution of the environment. As British biologist David Barnes wrote, "One of the most ubiquitous and long-lasting recent changes to the surface of our planet is the accumulation and fragmentation of plastics." And it's happened in the space of a single generation, really just since the 1960s, when the era of disposability took hold.

  The very qualities that make many plastics such fantastic materials for the human world—lightness, strength, durability—make them a disaster when they get loose in the natural world. The air, the land, the sea all carry the tracks of our dependence on these most persistent of all materials. I see the evidence in my family's backyard compost bin, where every so often a tiny bar-coded plastic label—the sort inevitably affixed to fruits and vegetables today—comes bubbling out of the fresh new soil: Nectarine 3576; Avocado 2342. That many of the labels also read organic seems particularly perverse.

  Plastic bags, packages, cups, and bottles skitter across landscapes around the world, from crowded urban downtowns to remote rural areas, an eyesore for humans as well as a hazard for wildlife. Over the past year, I've found four plastic lighters during my daily walks in Golden Gate Park. Even plastics that are properly thrown away in landfills can cause problems, leaching endocrine-disrupting chemicals such as phthalates, bisphenol A, and alkyphenols that can contaminate the soil, streams, and ground water.

  But most worrisome of all is plastic pollution of the oceans, the terminus of all inland waterways, the bottom of the hill from eve­rywhere that humans live. There, far out of sight, plastics are accumulating at a mind-boggling rate, settling on the ocean floor at all depths and aggregating across vast stretches of open sea, as in the North Pacific area where that castaway lighter was found. No one knows for sure how much plastic is in the world's oceans—I've seen estimates ranging from 13,000 to 3.5 million pieces of plastic per square kilometer. One expert estimated as much as 1.6 billion pounds of plastics ends up in the oceans each year, which is about the same amount of Atlantic cod fished from the seas annually. A key question researchers are now asking is whether that plastic—and the toxins it can carry—is getting into the food chain. Is our plastic trash winding up back on our dinner plates?

  Researchers first began noting the presence of plastic in the ocean in the mid-1960s. The problem has increased exponentially along with rising plastic production, which has grown twenty-five-fold in the last half century. During that time, the volume of plastic fibers in the seawater around the British Isles rose two- to threefold, surveys show. Off the coast of Japan, the amount of plastic particles in the ocean rose even more sharply, by tenfold during the 1970s and 1980s and then tenfold again every two to three years during the 1990s. While in some areas, such as the North Pacific, the problem continues to worsen, studies suggest that in other places it may be leveling off. Archives of trawls taken along the East and West coasts of the United States, for instance, have not found increases in recent years.

  Still, considering the vast quantities of plastic present in the seas, this may be the most intractable and disconcerting form of plastic pollution. As the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico demonstrated all too tragically, damage deep in the ocean is difficult to repair. How do you even begin to clean up an environment covering 70 percent of the earth's surface; a vast, lawless wilderness that belongs to everyone and, hence, to no one? It's a classic tragedy of the commons, and a dire one, since this commons is the "blue heart of the planet," as oceanographer Sylvia Earle called it, the wellspring of most of the oxygen in the atmosphere and home to more species of plants and animals than any other habitat.

  The oceans have absorbed humanity's castoffs for centuries, but "we're reaching a tipping point," warned Richard Thompson, the dean of marine-debris research. "It's going to be difficult to remove the plastic debris that's already in the environment, if not impossible. With the exponential growth we're seeing in plastic production, in ten or twenty years we're going to have a serious problem unless we change our ways."

  The disposable lighter is an icon of the throwaway mentality that began to take shape in the years following World War II, when the technology that helped the Allies win the war took aim at the domestic front. Disposability wasn't an entirely new concept: when paper became cheap, in the nineteenth century, throwaway paper shirt collars came into vogue, and stores began handing out paper shopping bags. Still consumers mostly assumed the things they bought could be used over and over again and if broken could be repaired. The new materials coming out of World War II challenged that assumption by their very nature. Plastics weren't something people could make or fix at home. How could you patch a cracked Tupperware bowl? Was it even worth the bother?

  In the immediate postwar years, plastics began replacing traditional materials in durable goods. But it was clear that consumers would buy only so many cars and refrigerators and radios. The industry recognized that its future depended on developing new kinds of markets, and the steady innovations in polymer science were paving the way. The market for short-lived applications was "rosily astronomical," as the trade journal Modern Plastics crowed. Or as a speaker at a 1956 conference bluntly told an audience of plastics manufacturers: "Your future is in the garbage wagon."

  Pretty soon all those durable long-lasting materials developed for the hardships of war were being turned to ephemeral conveniences of peace. The wonderfully buoyant and insulating Styrofoam that the U.S. Coast Guard had used for life rafts found new life in picnic cups and coolers; the vinyl-based compound Saran, which had proved so useful in protecting military cargo, was redeployed to the short-term protection of leftovers; and polyethylene's extraordinary capacity to insulate at high frequencies was sidelined for a new career bagging sandwiches and dry cleaning.

  Initially, such products were a tough sell—at least to the generation that had come through the Depression and wartime scrap drives with the mantra "use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without." The ethos of reuse was so deeply ingrained that in the mid-1950s when vending machines began dispensing coffee in plastic cups, people saved and reused them. They had to learn—and be taught—to throw away.

  The lesson was quickly absorbed, driven home by an ever-expanding array of new disposable products from lobster bibs to diapers (which some pundits suggested were responsible for the postwar rise in birth rates). Life magazine celebrated what it dubbed "Throwaway Living" with a photo that showed a young couple and child with their arms raised in exultation amid a downpour of disposable items—plates, cutlery, bags, ashtrays, dog dishes, pails, barbecue grills, and more. Cleaning the nondisposable versions would have taken forty hours, Life calculated, but now "no housewife need bother." No wonder the young mom looked so happy! We learned to throw away so well that today half of all plastics produced go into single-use applications.

  The disposable lighter arrived in this tsunami of disposables washing over the marketplace, an emblem of the changing mindset. Procuring a match or refilling a butane lighter was hardly an onerous task. Still, even such slight burdens could be lightened through disposability.

  Disposable lighters began to be popular in the United States in the early 1970s, about the same time the first plastic soda bottles debuted and a few years ahead of the plastic shopping bag. The lighter was the brainchild of Bernard DuPont, a member of a venerable French family that had been making and selling luxury leather and metal goods for nearly a century, since the Franco-Prussian War. His company made high-end lighters that used replaceable fuel cartridges. DuPont was holding one of those cartridges one day in the early 1960s when it suddenly hit him: why not just outfit the cartridge with a simple striking mechanism, encase it in plastic, and market the result as a low-cost lighter that could be tossed once the fuel ran out? DuPont introduced the product in France in 1961 and in the United States a few years later, calling it the Cricket.

  Whe
ther they were puffing away on Gauloises or Marlboros, smokers loved "the attractive toss-away," as the New York Times called it. The Cricket was, said the Times, "as much a symbol of contemporary America as the durable Zippo had been for the sturdy era of World War II." That caught the attention of two other companies already well versed in marketing throwaway goods: Bic, which brought the world the disposable ballpoint pen starting in 1952, and Gillette, maker of the first disposable razorblade. Each saw in the lighter another product that, like the pen and the razor, could be produced inexpensively and sold through the convenience marts, self-serve groceries, and drugstores that had sprouted across the postwar landscape. Gillette bought Cricket and expanded its production, while Bic introduced its own lighter. Throughout the 1970s the two companies duked it out in a famously brutal marketing fight. But Gillette's chirpy bug logo wasn't much of a match for Bic's suggestive "Flick my Bic" campaign, and in the early '80s Gillette threw in the towel, ceding the market to Bic. By then, worldwide annual sales of disposable lighters had risen sixfold, to more than 350 million lighters. Smokers—and even nonsmokers—were hooked on the convenience offered by disposables. In hindsight, it's amazing how quickly consumers were willing to transfer affection from matches, which were often free, to these smart-looking fire makers, which people had to pay for.

  A lighter might seem an anachronism at a time when smoking has gone the way of the three-martini lunch. Yet while smoking rates in the United States and Western Europe are dropping, in many areas of the world, particularly Asia, the former Soviet Union, and parts of Africa and Latin America, cigarette smoking is on the rise. "The global tobacco epidemic is worse today that it was fifty years ago," the World Health Organization lamented in a recent report predicting that at current rates, the number of smokers worldwide would rise nearly 60 percent by 2050.

  For those in the lighter business, that's good news. Bic now has markets in 160 different countries and sells five million disposable lighters a day. And that's just Bic—that's not counting sales of unbranded disposable lighters, many of which are manufactured in China. In exports alone, China sold more than $700 million worth of lighters in 2008.

  Such volumes help explain why disposable lighters are still a common form of debris. Indeed, the disposable lighter is an even more insistently throwaway product than many single-use items that can be reused or recycled. A disposable lighter exists for the sole purpose of igniting a few thousand flames. Once the fuel cartridge is depleted, the lighter's useful life is over. It cannot be used for anything else; it cannot be recycled, because of the fuel. It can only be thrown away.

  The plastic that encases a Bic disposable lighter is a tough cousin of acrylic that was developed in the 1950s and is sold by DuPont under the trademark Delrin. It's a plastic known for its strength, hardness, friction resistance, and imperviousness to solvents and fuel, qualities that make it, DuPont boasted, "a bridge between metal and ordinary plastics." That metal-like ability to contain fuel is why Bic chose it for its lighters. It's a plastic built to endure the toughest abuse.

  So what happens when one of these used-up Delrin cartridges is carelessly tossed onto the ground or swept out to sea? For help with this question I turned to Anthony Andrady, perhaps the world's leading expert on how plastics behave in the environment. He literally wrote the book on the subject: Plastics and the Environment, a 762-page tome respected by industry and environmentalists alike. Trained as a polymer chemist, Andrady became interested in what he called "the plastics disposal problem" in 1980 when he was visiting his homeland, Sri Lanka. He went walking along beaches where he had played as a child and was dismayed to find them littered with plastic bags and wrappers and other debris. He recognized there was a problem in the industry's paradoxical goal of making materials that were both durable and disposable.

  Natural materials such as wood or paper melt away through biodegradation, a process that requires the involvement of microorganisms that can disassemble the molecules and cycle their parts back into carbon and water. But as Andrady noted, it took millions of years to evolve the microbial chop shops that can dispatch a tree or a puddle of crude oil. Plastics have been around scarcely seventy years—nowhere near long enough for the evolution of microbes capable of dismantling these huge and complex long-chain molecules.* Instead of biodegrading, most plastics photodegrade, meaning they are broken apart by the ultraviolet radiation in sunlight. As Andrady explained, UV rays fray and fracture molecular bonds, breaking the long polymer chains into smaller sections; the plastic loses flexibility and tensile strength and begins to break apart. Plastics manufacturers routinely add antioxidants and UV-resistant chemicals to slow the process down, one reason why the breakdown rate can vary from product to product.

  In any event, the process is not quick. On terra firma, the plastic case of my lighter would slowly photodegrade: within about ten years the shiny coat would dull, and the case would get brittle and crack, fragmenting into smaller and smaller pieces until it became a fine powder of Delrin molecules. Eventually, the long molecules would fracture into small enough sections that microbes could biodegrade them. How long would that take? Decades? Centuries? Millennia? Andrady can't say. All he knows for sure is it's an incredibly slow process, so slow that he called it "of little practical consequence."

  In the ocean, that process slows to a standstill. Andrady has submerged hundreds of samples of different plastic materials in seawater for long periods and has found that none easily decompose. His research suggests that in a marine environment, polymer molecules are virtually immortal. Which means that unless it's been beached or removed, every piece of plastic that has entered the ocean in the past century remains there in some form or another—an everlasting synthetic intrusion in the natural marine ecology.

  At first the castaway lighter would bob about on the waves—like about half of all plastics, Delrin floats. (So do the common plastics polyethylene, polystyrene, polypropylene, and nylon. PET, the plastic used in soda bottles, sinks like a stone, as do vinyl and polycarbonate.) UV radiation would take its toll, but less powerfully than on land; the cooler temperatures of seawater slow down photodegradation, and the lighter would quickly be coated with algae and other "fouling organisms" that block UV rays.

  Whether the lighter stayed close to shore or drifted far out to sea, it would be buffeted by waves, and this also breaks plastic objects into pieces. Eventually the lighter, or its fragments, would become so weighted with algae, barnacles, or other foulants that it would sink, joining all those other plastic things that were denser than water. In the icy, pitch-black, nearly oxygenless pit of the ocean, there is absolutely no way for nature to break down polymers. Instead, on "the sea floor, particularly in deeper and still waters, they are doomed to a slow and yet permanent entombment," wrote Murray Gregory, a New Zealand geologist who has been tracking the issue for thirty years. One researcher reported diving down more than two thousand meters near Japan and encountering plastic shopping bags drifting "like an assembly of ghosts."

  The impact of these submerged plastics is still unknown. Experts fear a seabed covered in plastic (and all the other trash that's come to rest at the bottom of the ocean) could reduce oxygen levels in the ocean depths, choke organisms that live in sediment, and even upset the exchange of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and other gases between water levels that is fundamental to the ocean's chemistry. Yet no one knows just how much plastic is on the ocean floor. The best we can do is extrapolate from what we see on the shore.

  Kehoe Beach is a fairly remote place by urban standards: about two hours north of San Francisco, near the end of the long peninsular finger that forms Point Reyes and then a mile-long hike through a cattail marsh and down an old creek bed to the ocean. It's a place of wild natural beauty, but I was heading there for the unnatural stuff that routinely washes up on the beach. Its location, near where the Bay empties out into the open sea, makes Kehoe a magnet for ocean-borne plastic debris, what the Bureau of Land Management calls with bureaucrat
ic understatement "matter out of place."

  Most of that out-of-place matter was originally discarded on land. Only about 20 percent comes from ships, and that amount has probably decreased since 1983, when an international treaty banning ocean dumping went into force. At Kehoe, plastic debris starts washing up after heavy winter storms have flushed out to sea all the tossed and lost detritus that's been flitting down streets, blowing across fields, gathering in storm drains, and accumulating in inland waterways across the Bay Area.

  I'd been told about the beach by Judith Selby Lang and Richard Lang, a husband-and-wife team of beachcombing artists who have been collecting plastic debris from Kehoe for more than a decade. Their first date was a hike along the beach, where they discovered they shared a love of making art from plastic trash. For their 2004 wedding—at Burning Man, where else?—Selby Lang fashioned her dress from white plastic bags and decorated it with bits of white plastic culled from the beach.

  The couple estimates they've pulled more than two tons of stuff from the mile-long stretch. This is actually not that much compared to famed junk beaches like Kamilo Beach, on the southern tip of Hawaii's Big Island. There, converging currents throw up so much debris that cleanup crews have hauled out fifty to sixty tons at a time—much of it derelict fishing nets and lines. Such gear is a serious threat to marine animals, and the problem has escalated since the 1950s, when fishing fleets began switching from degradable natural materials to long-lasting nylon.

  The couple aren't trying to preserve their beloved beach. "We can't possibly clean it," said Selby Lang. "We say we're curating it." They're using their beach finds to create art that sounds the alarm about all that matter out of place. They scour the beach for, as Selby Lang put it, "things that show by their numbers and commonness what is happening in oceans around the world." They then assemble them into sculptures, jewelry, or photo tableaux: a wreath of children's barrettes, or a display of deodorant roller balls—known as Ban beans in beachcombing circles—or a grid of dozens of lighters in different sizes, shapes, and colors arrayed in orderly rows. The pieces are arresting. They have an abstract beauty that draws the eye, and an emotional impact that hits as you recognize objects that once passed through your hands, such as the red sticks in one flag-like design that I realized on closer inspection were the spreaders from the cracker-and-cheese snacks I used to buy for my kids' lunches.