Plastic Read online

  Bernstein learned the methods of guilt assuagement in the late 1980s during an earlier public outcry over plastics packaging. Fears about shrinking landfill space touched off a wave of calls for bans on Styrofoam takeout containers and other visible forms of plastic trash.

  In response, seven of the major resin makers, including DuPont, Dow, Exxon, and Mobil, launched a special initiative—a short-term "strike force," as Bernstein described it—to ramp up plastics recycling, at that time virtually nonexistent. The group spent some forty million dollars developing plastics-recycling technology and providing technical help and equipment to communities that wanted to start recycling programs. It was a great boon to recycling, but the commitment was shallow—the support evaporated once the political furor died down.

  The heftier and lengthier investment was a $250 million, decade-long campaign of print and TV ads spotlighting how plastics enhanced people's health and safety, with heavy emphasis on products such as bike helmets and tamper-proof packaging. The Plastics Make It Possible campaign succeeded in lifting plastics' favorability ratings, polls showed. People still thought plastics posed serious disposal problems, but they weren't clamoring for bans anymore.

  That was also due to the heavy stick the industry wielded, alongside the proplastics carrots. Aggressive industry lobbying succeeded in defeating or gutting hundreds of restrictive bills. "There were no bans, essentially, in all that time," Bernstein recalled proudly. Between recycling, PR, and hardball lobbying, "There were no products that were put out of the marketplace."

  The ACC is using that same playbook again. It's launched a major public relations effort, reaching out especially to the millennium generation with a Facebook page, Mylecule (which as of August 2010 had only seven monthly users), a YouTube channel, a Twitter handle, blogs, and sponsorship of art exhibits and fashion shows where the message is "plastic is the new black."

  Meanwhile, Bernstein is directing the political combat. He's choosing his battles carefully, focusing on high-profile cities and states to get the most bang for the buck. For instance, the group spent $5.7 million in California during the 2007 to 2008 legislative sessions, when some of the most intense bag debates were taking place, and nearly one million dollars during the months in 2010 when the legislature was considering a proposed statewide ban. By highlighting the environmental problems of paper bags, the ACC succeeded in steering initiatives aimed at banning plastic bags to either voluntary or mandatory store-based recycling programs in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Annapolis, and the state of Rhode Island, among other places.

  But more recent fights have required the ACC to address the issue of reusability directly—a point where the industry can play to people's mixed feelings about single-use products. In Seattle, for instance, the group waged an aggressive campaign against a 2008 law passed by the city council requiring grocers to charge twenty cents each for either plastic or paper bags—the same approach San Francisco originally wanted to take. Left standing, the law would have marked the biggest victory to date for advocates of reusability. You'd think an ecotopia like Seattle—where the public utilities use goats instead of pesticides to keep down weeds—would be an unlikely place for a plastics showdown. Yet Bernstein and his colleagues realized they had a shot at winning when they got a look at polling conducted by the city. The polls showed that most Seattleites were willing to accept a ban on plastic bags. At the same time, they were unwilling to pay a fee for them at the grocery store. They could live without plastic bags, but not without the convenience of a free one-time-use tote for their groceries. That ambivalence—certainly not limited to Seattleites—offered the ACC an opening.

  The group spent more than $180,000 on a successful drive to gather signatures for a ballot initiative to overturn the fee, and then another $1.4 million on the election—the most spent in the city on any election in at least fifteen years. Using the same PR firm that crafted the famous Harry and Louise ads that defeated the Clinton-era health-care reform initiative, the group developed an ad campaign that recast the fee (which citizens could avoid by not buying bags) as a regressive mandatory tax, as in the following radio ad:

  Man: You heard there might be a tax on grocery bags, on paper and plastic bags, right?

  Woman: Another tax in this economy? ... But most of us already reuse or recycle these bags.

  The campaign maintained that the fee would cost each consumer three hundred dollars a year, which assumed each consumer was buying fifteen hundred bags a year—or twenty-eight bags a week. Whether or not an individual really would purchase so many bags, it was a powerful argument in the midst of the Great Recession, and one that was difficult to counter. There's no easy catch phrase to articulate the logic of making hidden environmental costs visible. What's more, advocates of the fees—groups such as the Sierra Club and the People for Puget Sound—raised just a fraction of the ACC's war chest, leaving them outspent by a margin of fourteen to one. By the time the election took place, no one was surprised when voters rejected the fee.

  The ACC followed a similar strategy the next year in California when state lawmakers proposed restricting all single-use grocery bags. The measure was designed to steer Californians toward reusables by banning plastic bags and requiring grocers to charge at least a nickel for paper bags. Given California's political influence, the ACC, and member companies ExxonMobil and Hilex Poly, pulled out all stops to defeat the measure, together spending more than two million dollars on efforts that included peppering the statehouse with donations to key legislators and blitzing Sacramento (where lawmakers lived) with newspaper and radio ads decrying the fee as a regressive tax that would cost Californians more than a billion dollars a year. (The ACC even attacked reusable bags by funding and publicizing research that showed the bags could be a breeding ground for food-borne bacteria.) "Instead of wasting time and telling us how to bag our groceries, lawmakers should be working on our real problems, including a huge budget deficit, home foreclosures, and millions of workers without jobs," the ACC argued on a website that called for voters to "Stop the Bag Police." The arguments may have been beside the point, but even proponents of the ban admired how shrewdly they played to the state's political climate. They made the concern with bags seem silly, as if it were "one of those nanny-government type issues," said Murray. At a time when California was $19 billion in the red and the fractious state legislature was months late in approving a budget, no lawmaker wanted to be seen as a person who banned bags but couldn't manage to organize the state's finances. In the end, the state senate killed the bill, twenty-one to fourteen.

  Still, the unprecedented breadth of the coalition that supported the proposed ban—environmental groups, recycling groups, unions, the state's grocers and retailers, and even Schwarzenegger—suggests that the bag's days in California are numbered. Indeed, Murray and other strategists simply shifted their focus, taking the issue, as he said, "back to the locals." In the following months, a number of cities, including San Jose, Los Angeles, and Santa Monica, began moving ahead with plans to restrict T-shirt bags. And unlike the earlier generation of anti-bag measures, these aim to restrict paper bags as well.

  California has long been a bellwether state—pioneering the trends that the rest of the country later follows. It's hard to know if that will prove the case with plastic bags, whether the marine debris and waste issues that resonate so strongly in California politics will have the same effect elsewhere in the country. The ACC may have succeeded in squelching most the proposals for bans, but its intense lobbying failed to stop the District of Columbia city council from passing a five-cent charge on plastic bags, the proceeds of which will be used to fund a cleanup of the district's litter-choked Anacostia River. The 2009 measure was promoted with slogans like "Skip the Bag, Save the River." Residents grumbled about it at first, but after nearly a year, according to city officials, consumers and shop owners have come to accept it and are using notably fewer plastic bags. The D.C. experience suggests that people are willing
to pay the price of convenience when its true costs are made clear.

  Along with the political combat, the ACC continues to push that time-tested guilt eraser—recycling. It has spearheaded a variety of initiatives to spur recycling of plastic bags, from purchasing hundreds of recycling bins to place on California beaches to backing store-based programs. On Earth Day 2009, the ACC announced a more significant commitment: an initiative to manufacture plastic bags with the same proportion of recycled content that paper bags have long contained. Until now, that kind of bag-to-bag recycling has not been widely pursued, since new bags are so cheap to make. The small percentage of bags that are recycled generally go into producing plastic lumber, often used in decking and fences. But the ACC promised that through this new program, bag makers would spend millions to retool their equipment; by 2015, 40 percent of the plastic in T-shirt bags would come from recycled bags. The program would recycle upward of 470 million pounds of plastic, the ACC estimated.

  "It is a little too little, a little too late" was Mark Murray's reaction. For even if the initiative fully succeeded, it would recycle only thirty-six billion bags—a mere third of all the bags Americans currently consume every year. Murray and other critics have long maintained that T-shirt bags simply don't lend themselves to the practical and economic requirements of recycling. They're so nearly weightless that it's difficult to gather enough of a critical mass to make recycling them economically worthwhile. Collecting them through curbside programs is tough because the bags are so flight-prone, and the store-based collection programs pushed by the ACC have scarcely raised bag recycling above single-digit rates.

  Obviously, it's better for bags to be recycled than thrown away. But the practicalities of bag recycling are largely beside the point. The ACC needs recycling programs to assuage people's guilt about using plastic bags. If we can be persuaded that plastics have a lifetime beyond a one-time shopping trip, then maybe we won't bother to think about the wasted resources the bag literally and figuratively embodies. Thus the new message ACC spokespeople now repeat endlessly whenever called upon to defend plastic bags (or any other single-use plastic product): "Plastic is a valuable resource. Too valuable to waste."

  Surely it's no coincidence that this is just the sort of phrase zero-waste advocates use when explaining why they are attacking the plastic bag. To San Francisco's Robert Haley, the bag is the ultimate example of waste, a diversion of valuable nonrenewable resources into an ephemeral product of marginal value. "Plastic should be a high value material," Haley said. "It should be in products that last a long time, and at the end of the life, you recycle it. To take oil or natural gas that took millions of years to produce and then to make a disposable product that lasts minutes or seconds, and then to just discard it—I think that's not a good way of using this resource."

  The absurdity of the plastic-bag controversy becomes clear when you consider that people carried things for millennia without the aid of plastic or paper bags. (Be grateful we've passed the era when a bull's scrotum was the bag of choice.) Happily, we don't have to reach that far back to find the bag of the future. A reusable shopping bag can be made of any material—cotton, jute, polyester, nylon, polypropylene mesh, recycled soda bottles, or even thick durable polyethylene. Whatever the material, it will be an improvement over today's giveaways, provided it is frequently reused.

  Not all single-use products are so easily replaced. But the fact that the plastic bag can be readily swapped for a sustainable alternative is one reason activists like Murray have put so much effort into the bag wars. That choice at the checkout stand marks an important first step in getting people to think about the environmental consequences of their actions, Murray said. "If you can get people to take this action of bringing their own bags to the store, that's an environmental statement that they're making in their lives," he said. "It's a gateway to environmental activity that I think will spread to other things that they might be willing to do."

  As anyone who has tried to quit smoking or follow a diet or commit to a workout routine can attest, it's not easy to change our patterns of behavior, to do things we know, in the abstract, are good for us. So how do you encourage people to change their ways, to cultivate habits that are healthier for the environment? Arizona State University psychologist Robert Cialdini has done research for many years on the most effective ways to nudge people toward more environmentally responsible behavior. Surprisingly, the best method isn't to ask people to look inside themselves; rather, ask them to look outward, to their peers. "You simply inform them of what the social norm is," said Cialdini. It's not that people don't know littering is wrong or that one should turn off lights when leaving a room. But people forget, grow careless, and need to be reminded, said Cialdini. In one study, he found that the best way to encourage hotel guests to reuse their towels was to leave a card in the room telling them that's what other guests did. That statement had more impact than did cards that told guests they should reuse their towels because it would help the environment, or save energy, or allow the hotel to save money and therefore charge less for its rooms. Another example: Cialdini helped craft a public service announcement designed to encourage Arizona residents to recycle. The PSA said, in essence, Arizonans approve of people who recycle and disapprove of those who don't. It declared recycling was the social norm. Most PSAs move only 1 to 2 percent of listeners to action, according to Cialdini. "Those public service announcements produced a hundred and twenty-five percent increase in recycling tonnage. That's unheard-of."

  The frustrating thing about watching the bag wars over the past three years has been seeing how politics reaches for the easy answers, using policies that aren't very effective in making people change the way they think. Fees and public education campaigns help nurture a shared social value of reuse. By contrast, bans may capitalize on and reinforce people's reflexive distaste for plastics without encouraging them to question their reliance on single-use bags of any sort. At least that seems to be the experience in my hometown of San Francisco.

  An independent consultant who visited all fifty-four of the city's major grocery stores in 2008 found they all were dispensing paper bags, and in many instances double-bagging whether or not it was needed. True, paper bags may be easily recycled or composted, but San Franciscans are still consuming tens of millions of shopping bags designed for a single trip home from the grocery store. And despite the ban, the city is still awash in plastic bags, since the ban applied only to big groceries and drugstores. Mom-and-pop stores still hand out T-shirt bags, as do produce markets, takeout restaurants, clothing stores, hardware stores, and a host of other retailers. And every morning, rain or shine, my newspapers still arrive in tubular plastic sacks, often double-bagged. I've taken home relatively few plastic bags in over three years, and yet those two bag holders in my broom closet are always overflowing.

  For all the shortcomings of bans, they have sustained a public discourse about our single-use habits. And there are hopeful signs that the throwaway mindset is changing. Makers of reusable bags report huge increases in sales; one Phoenix company that makes polypropylene mesh bags saw sales jump 1,000 percent in 2008. ChicoBag, a California company, saw sales of its five-dollar polyester bag triple that year and they have continued to grow. Meanwhile, some makers of plastic bags see a new market opportunity and are retooling to produce heavier-gauge polyethylene bags that are truly reusable.

  Recently, I spent one day doing an admittedly unscientific survey at three different grocery stores in San Francisco. While most shoppers were wheeling out carts stacked with paper bags, a small number, maybe two in ten, had their groceries packed in reusable bags—battered canvas bags, heavy plastic totes, or the mesh polypropylene bags that all the major stores in town are now selling for a dollar. Nearly every person in this robust minority said he or she had switched over to reusable bags in the past year or so. I stopped one young woman with five bags in her cart. She said she began bringing her own bags about a year before "just to be en
vironmentally friendly." The reusable bags in her cart looked so new and pristine I asked whether she owned a lot of them. "No," she answered. "I have, like, five, and I always keep them in my trunk. I try not to waste them either."

  7. Closing the Loop

  NATHANIEL WYETH OFTEN called himself "the other Wyeth" in deference to his famous artist family: his father, N. C. Wyeth, and siblings Andrew and Henriette. It was clear from an early age that he wouldn't be joining that artistic dynasty. Instead of inks and paints, he was fascinated by gears and gadgets—so much so that when he was ten, his father changed the boy's first name from Newell (his own given name) to Nathaniel, after an uncle who was an engineer. Sure enough, Wyeth went on to train as a mechanical engineer and in 1936 joined DuPont, where he remained for nearly forty years, inventing up a storm in plastics as well as in other materials. It irritated him that chemistry didn't get the same creative kudos as art. A painter need only imagine a picture and then put it to canvas, he pointed out, while a polymer engineer had to conjure entirely new molecules, give them substance, and make them work. As he once told an interviewer, "I'm in the same field as the artists—creativity—but theirs is a glamour one."

  The act of imagination that won him a spot in the Plastics Hall of Fame began one day in 1967 with a question: Why does soda come only in glass bottles? Coworkers explained that plastic bottles explode under the pressure of carbonation. Wyeth was skeptical. He bought a plastic bottle of detergent, emptied out the soap, filled it with ginger ale, and stuck it in the refrigerator. When he opened the fridge the next morning, the bottle had swelled so much, he could hardly pull it from between the shelves. Wyeth was certain there was a way to solve what he called "the pop bottle problem." It only took ten thousand tries to find the solution.