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It's not just bottom dwellers that are ingesting microdebris. In a 2008 return trip to the Pacific gyre, Moore harvested hundreds of lantern fish, small fry that dominate the middle depths of the ocean and rise to the surface at night to feed on plankton and, it now appears, plastic. Moore found that 37 percent of the fish he sampled had plastic in their guts; one had a bellyful of eighty-three plastic bits, a considerable cargo for an animal scarcely two inches long. The fish are a staple in the diet of the tuna, swordfish, and mahi-mahi caught near Hawaii, which in turn are popular in the diet of the next creatures in the food chain: us.
That's particularly disturbing in light of recent findings about what those plastic bits may contain. Japanese researchers have found that pellets and fragments of certain plastics (particularly polyethylene and polypropylene) act as sponges, sopping up toxic chemicals that are widely present in the oceans, including PCB, DDT—two carcinogens long banned in the United States—and endocrine-disrupting substances such as bisphenol A, fire retardants, and phthalates. Geochemist Hideshige Takada has found that pellets collected from the world's beaches can contain concentrations of chemicals 100,000 to 1,000,000 percent higher than the surrounding water or sediment. Ironically, that's no surprise to scientists who study ocean contaminants; they've long used plastic beads for just that purpose, to pull toxins out of seawater samples. Indeed, Takada argues the pellets can be used to monitor the presence of persistent organic pollutants in oceans around the world.
I packed up a hundred and fifty pellets I collected on Kehoe Beach and sent them to Takada for analysis. The report I got back nearly a year later showed that the pellets contained small amounts of pesticides, including DDT, the compound that prompted Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring and that has been outlawed for all but limited uses since 1972. The analysis also showed that the pellets had "moderate concentrations" of PCBs (ninety-six nanograms per gram), which, according to Takada, was a much higher level than pellets found in Central America or tropical Asia but lower than those from urban areas such as Boston Harbor, Seal Beach in Los Angeles, and Ocean Beach in San Francisco.
Thompson and other researchers fear that these microplastics represent tiny time bombs that could be getting into the marine food chain and working their way back up the long ladder to us. Though there are still more questions than there are clear-cut answers, the early evidence is worrisome. More than 180 species have been documented to eat plastic debris, and the small number of studies to date suggests that chemicals absorbed into those plastics can also desorb into the animals' systems and bodies. Thompson placed lugworms in sediment containing contaminated plastics and found that after ten days there was a higher concentration of chemicals in the worms' tissues than in the surrounding mud, suggesting that the chemicals had leached off the microbits and into the worms. Thompson's colleague Emma Teuten fed sea birds pellets laced with notoriously persistent PCBs and later found traces of the chemical in the birds' tissues and preen glands.
The PCB finding is especially disturbing because once PCBs are ingested, the chemicals migrate to fatty tissues, where they remain. The consequences of that persistence have been sadly demonstrated in the Arctic ecosystem, where over the course of several decades the chemicals have risen up through the food chain from small fish to big fish to polar bears, seals, and whales, and finally to the Inuit natives, who, owing to a diet rich in the fatty meat of seals and whales and bears, have been found to harbor some of the world's highest levels of PCBs in their blood and in the women's breast milk.
Still, it's complicated to pin down the role polymers play in passing on these toxins that are already so widely present in the environment. For example, University of Connecticut researcher Hans Laufer found alkyphenols—chemicals used in making plastics and rubber—in the blood, tissues, and shells of lobsters. He suspects the compounds may be responsible for a shell-softening disease that has devastated East Coast lobster populations. But how did the alkyphenols get into the lobsters? As bottom feeders, the lobsters might have ingested contaminated plastic fragments or smaller organisms that had eaten contaminated bits. Or they may have absorbed the alkyphenols directly from seawater. The ocean, the seabed, and the coastlines in many parts of the world are already polluted with chemicals. The question, said Thompson, is "How much worse do plastics make it?"
Certainly plastics enable the mentality that makes it all too easy for a person to simply discard an object when it is used up with little thought about the consequences. The era of disposability has fundamentally changed our relationship to the things surrounding us—whether of our own manufacture or nature's. Consider, for instance, the mental and cultural shift involved in adopting something like the disposable lighter.
Disposable lighters were not replacing disposable paper matches only. The tool they were really stepping in for was the refillable pocket lighter—most famously represented by the Zippo, the inexpensive lighter made of chrome and steel that gained an enduring place in America's heart during World War II, when they were standard issue for every GI. From their debut in 1932 to this day, Zippos come with a lifetime guarantee: "It works or we fix it for free." Over the decades, the Bradford, Pennsylvania, company has repaired nearly eight million.
Although Zippos, like Bics, are mass-produced and made from humble materials, there is a thriving collectibles trade in them; not the case for Bics or other disposables. Collectors like the advertising logos and themed images Zippo has always printed on the sides of its lighters. Bic has done the same; it offers limited-edition lighters each year, which are decorated with NASCAR heroes or sports-team logos or nature-themed pictures of wildlife and trees. Still, collectors have little interest. "We don't really consider they are lighters," said Judith Sanders, a member of a collectors club called On the Lighter Side. Ted Ballard, an Oklahoma lighter lover who used his collection of forty thousand lighters to create the National Lighter Museum, sniffed at the idea of collecting Bics. "It came to a pretty sad world when people would accept a plastic lighter as a thing they'd carry in their pocket," he told me. "There's no esteem to it."
Why do people "esteem" their durable lighters but not the throwaways? Technically speaking, there's not a huge difference between a Bic and a Zippo. Both rely on essentially the same mechanism to make fire: fuel released through a valve and sparked by the turning of a flint wheel. But the fact that a Zippo can be refilled and a Bic cannot bespeaks a world of difference. If you can't reuse or repair an item, do you ever really own it? Do you ever develop the sense of pride and proprietorship that comes from maintaining an object in fine working order?
We invest something of ourselves in our material world, which in turn reflects who we are. In the era of disposability that plastic has helped foster, we have increasingly invested ourselves in objects that have no real meaning in our lives. We think of disposable lighters as conveniences—which they indisputably are; ask any smoker or backyard-barbecue chef—and yet we don't think much about the tradeoffs that that convenience entails.
The convenient disposables that Life magazine celebrated in 1955 appeared in the picture to be magically suspended midair; readers didn't see the next frame in the photo shoot, the one that would have shown them piled up on the ground. For decades, humans have accepted the illusion of that first photograph—that convenience comes with no cost or consequence. But now we're recognizing that our plastic throwaways do not simply go away. They go somewhere, and, in the worst case, they become matter out of place.
6. Battle of the Bag
IT'S NOT ALWAYS easy to see when a relationship is in trouble. People have been known to cut down their forests, exhaust their local water supplies, and deplete their soil, failing to recognize or understand the natural foundation for human existence. Plastics seemed to promise a new foundation for human life: food comes sliced and diced and packaged in plastic; sports are played on grass made of plastic; homes are wrapped in plastic; and every year brings new time-saving devices and electronic miracles encased in
plastic.
Now we've begun to acknowledge there is trouble in this relationship, perhaps deep trouble. But we've been together so long it's difficult to imagine a different world, one in which people determined the fate of plastic, rather than the other way around.
And yet a small but determined group have begun to imagine that world. They've realized that the best way to prevent the oceans from choking on plastic debris is to better manage that debris on land, which means, among other things, curbing human reliance on throwaways. As a start, they've trained their sights on the most ubiquitous of all throwaway items: the plastic shopping bag. The bag may not be any more pernicious than foamed polystyrene cups or picnic forks or carryout clamshells, but it's the single-use item that, more than any other, has aroused popular ire. People the world over are calling for the bag's abolition, from community activists who view it as very nearly the spawn of Satan to the somewhat more staid head of the United Nations Environment Program who contends that "there is simply no justification for manufacturing them anymore, anywhere."
In 2007, San Francisco became the first U.S. city to ban plastic grocery bags, joining dozens of other cities and countries on every single continent that have taken moves to rid themselves of the bags. Inspired by San Francisco, local governments across the United States—from Plymouth, Massachusetts, to sunny Maui—announced their own measures to eliminate plastic bags, as did major retailers such as Ikea, Whole Foods, Walmart, and Target. All told, more than two hundred anti-bag measures have been introduced in the United States, and although the plastics industry has successfully defeated or derailed many of those measures, activists as well as industry insiders predict that eventually the plastic bag as we know it will disappear—at least from grocery stores. (There are countless other types of plastic bags we rely upon.)
It's not hard to see why the bags have become a favorite target. They are virtually without substance—evanescent puffs of polyethylene, transient and yet ubiquitous. They are designed for a brief use but remain with us seemingly forever as a visible and costly source of litter—hanging from trees, plastered against fences, tumbling across beaches—as well as a potential threat to marine life. They do cause real harm, but their symbolic weight is even more significant. They've come to represent the collective sins of the age of plastic—an emblem "of waste and excess and the incremental destruction of nature," as Time magazine put it. The bags signify the overpackaged world we all love to hate; they're the totem of all the ways in which "the plastics industry has helped turn us into a disposable society," as one anti-bag activist complained.
Often when we find ourselves caught in a relationship that makes us feel bad or guilty, we want to be rid of it as quickly as possible. Yet in the rush for a quick divorce, we may just find ourselves falling into a rebound romance that is no healthier than the one we just left.
How did we get hooked on plastic shopping bags?
For a century, imaginative entrepreneurs eyed the protean possibilities of plastic and asked: Which natural substances can these wonder materials replace? It was not a question that went uncontested. As the editor of the trade journal Modern Plastics observed in 1956, "Not a single solid market for plastics in existence today was eagerly waiting for these materials." Each new plastic product faced "either fearsome competition from vested materials or inertia and misunderstanding in acceptance, all of which had to be overcome before plastics gained a market."
The fight to conquer the checkout counter was part of plastic's long and steady incursion into the general field of packaging. About half of all goods are now contained, cushioned, shrink-wrapped, blister-packed, clamshelled, or otherwise encased in some kind of plastic. Indeed, one of every three pounds of all plastic produced is used for packaging, including the now ubiquitous grocery bag that wraps itself around your fingers at every opportunity. The push into packaging began in the late 1950s, as plastic challenged one after another of paper's strongholds. Soon, sliced bread was being sold in plastic bags, and waxed paper was being replaced by sandwich baggies. Dry cleaners abandoned heavy paper bags in favor of polyethylene sacks.
That last shift, however, sparked a national crisis in 1959, with a flurry of news reports that the new filmy bags could kill: eighty babies and toddlers had been accidentally suffocated, and at least seventeen adults had used them to commit suicide. In the ensuing "bag panic," dozens of communities proposed banning the bags, confronting the industry with its first major threat. The manufacturers of film plastics scrambled to save their fledgling industry, spending close to a million dollars on a national education campaign to warn consumers about the dangers of the diaphanous bags while also developing new industry standards to make them thicker and less clingy. Meanwhile, the head of the Society of the Plastics Industry (SPI) pledged to run newspaper and radio ads "until there is not a mother, father, boy or girl in this country who does not know what a plastic bag is for ... and what it is not for." The combined measures shut down the calls for bans. As Jerome Heckman, the lawyer who for decades represented the SPI through the bag panic and countless later fights, recalled, "Our job was and should always be to open plastics markets and keep them open."
One of the companies with a huge vested interest in opening new markets was Mobil Oil, then the leading producer of polyethylene film. By the time a young college graduate named Bill Seanor joined Mobil in 1966, the company had already developed an extensive line of substitutes for paper packaging. Its bag-on-a-roll had replaced paper sacks in grocers' produce sections, and its Hefty trash bags had helped alter people's longtime habit of lining their garbage pails with newspaper. Restless for new possibilities for polyethylene film, in the early 1970s Mobil began eyeing one of the most lucrative paper products of all—the retail shopping bag. In fact, said Seanor, the company had already spent years and millions of dollars trying to develop a square-bottomed, stand-up plastic version of the classic brown paper bag. "The conventional wisdom was that you had to have the same thing." But because the copycat bag priced out higher than paper, "it never got off the ground."
Then Mobil officials caught wind of a grocery bag that a Swedish company was distributing in small numbers, mainly in Europe. Its inventor, Sten Thulin, had come up with a design unlike any traditional paper bag. Solving technical problems that had stymied other inventors before him, Thulin devised an ingenious system of folds and welds that made it possible to transform a flimsy tube of polyethylene film into a strong, sturdy bag. In its 1962 patent drawings, the bag looked like a sleeveless scoop-neck T-shirt, hence the name now widely used by the industry: the T-shirt bag.
According to Seanor, who oversaw the company's early foray into the production of T-shirt bags, Mobil executives immediately recognized it was the bag for them. They could see that, unlike Mobil's initial design, this bag had the punch to knock paper from its perch at the checkout stand. Indeed, the bag ultimately proved so popular with retailers precisely because it wasn't like the traditional flat-bottomed paper sack. Thulin drew on the distinctive virtues of polyethylene to create a wholly new kind of bag. Today the bag is so maligned that we forget what an engineering marvel it is: a waterproof, durable, featherweight packet capable of holding more than a thousand times its weight.
Seanor and his colleagues may have been excited about the bag they introduced to the United States in 1976 (the inaugural versions were decorated in red, white, and blue in honor of the U.S. Bicentennial), but shoppers were underwhelmed. They didn't like the way a checkout clerk often licked his fingers to pull a plastic bag free from the rack, or the fact that the bags wouldn't stand up, Seanor remembered. "People would get their groceries, take them out to the car, and they'd fall over, and consumers would be madder than hell." And when shoppers were unhappy, it was grocers who caught the flak.
It was clear to the budding bag industry that to win over consumers, it would have to win over grocery stores first. One trade group, the Flexible Packaging Association, launched a public relations campaign that urged g
rocers: "Check Out the Sack. It's Coming on Strong." Meanwhile, the bag companies reached out directly to stores with educational programs to help grocers overcome shoppers' distaste for the bags. "We put together training programs that told the store how to actually pack plastic sacks," said Seanor, who eventually left Mobil with a few colleagues to start their own plastic-bag company, Vanguard Plastics.
But the most persuasive factor in the new bags' favor was basic economics: plastic bags cost a penny or two, paper bags cost three to four times as much, and because they were heavier and bulkier, they were more expensive to transport and store. Two of the country's biggest grocery chains, Safeway and Kroger, made the switch to plastic bags in 1982, and most of the other major chains soon followed suit. "Once we started getting the Krogers of the world to change, it was pretty much over," recalled Peter Grande, a veteran of the business and now head of a Los Angeles bag company, Command Packaging. There were still occasional skirmishes with paper-bag makers over regional markets, he said. "But the feeling within the plastics industry was 'this is the future—plastic is going to dominate the landscape.'"
The accuracy of that prediction would come back to bite the industry. Plastic bags were so cheap to produce and distribute that, in the inexorable logic of a free market, they were bound to proliferate. Producers would, of course, make as many as they could sell, and grocers had no incentive to ration them. Purchase a few items at the grocery store, and between double bagging and sloppy packing, you might walk out with a dozen bags. (Which in turn gave rise to a whole new market niche: plastic products to hold used plastic bags. I've got two bag organizers in my broom closet.) By the new millennium, the T-shirt bag had become perhaps the most common consumer item on the planet. Worldwide, people used somewhere between five hundred billion and one trillion bags a year—more than a million a minute. The average American was taking home about three hundred a year. And yet like so much plastic packaging, the vast majority of these bags wound up in the trash—or worse.