Plastic Page 26

  Leaving aside the question of whether that goal is even feasible, what does it say about our culture? Is a biodegradable couch a sign of a more sustainable mentality? Or is it just a greened-up version of the same old shop-and-toss habits? Traditionally, durability and longevity have bestowed additional value—a great-grandparent's walnut dresser isn't merely a place to store clothes; with time it becomes an heirloom, a connection to a past that has been conserved. Buying a two-thousand-dollar sofa designed for guilt-free disposal bears an uncomfortable resemblance to buying a ninety-nine-cent lighter also designed to be tossed. Wouldn't the lowest-impact sofa be one designed for and purchased with the expectation that it would be safely in use for decades?

  Technology has come to define modern life, and we love the idea of gee-whiz technological fixes, even for the problems technology itself has created. Outrage at the Gulf oil spill is blunted by a fascination with high-tech blowout preventers and other technological marvels that promise to rescue us from our own complex creations. But the greening of Plasticville will require more than just technological fixes. It also requires us to address the careless, and sometimes ravenous, habits of consumption that were enabled by the arrival of plastic and plastic money—a condition for which there is surely no better symbol than the maxed-out credit card. It means grappling with what historian Jeffrey Meikle called our "inflationary culture," one in which we invest ever more of our psychological well-being in acquiring things while also considering them of such low value "as to encourage their displacement, their disposal, their quick and total consumption."

  What would it be like to turn your back on that culture—or at least the part of it involving plastic? I suppose I could have traveled to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and spent time with an Amish family to find out. But instead I just picked up the phone and called Beth Terry, a fortysomething part-time accountant in Oakland, California, who in 2007 decided to start purging plastic from her life and is writing about her experiences on a blog she calls My Plastic-Free Life.

  As Terry tells the story, she was home recuperating from a hysterectomy when she heard a radio report about Colin Beavan, a.k.a. No Impact Man, a New York resident who had pledged to live as lightly as helium for a year. Terry was moved by his story and decided to check out his blog. There she grabbed hold of an electronic chain that took her first to the (now-defunct) blog of Envirowoman, a Canadian woman who spent a year eliminating plastic from her life, and then to accounts of the plastic vortex, and then to the picture that she said changed her life: a photograph of a Laysan albatross carcass stuffed with plastic trash. The image tattooed itself onto her brain, forever altering her perspective on the world. "That bird was full of things that I use: it was bottle caps and toothbrushes and all the little pieces of plastic," she said. Looking at the photo, she was struck by how little control she had over things once they left her hands. Maybe, she said in hindsight, it was recovering from the hysterectomy, realizing she would never have children and being open to the idea of taking care of something else, like ... the planet. Whatever the reason, she felt an urgent need to convert her horror into action.

  She told me this story over lunch at an Oakland restaurant where we had arranged to meet. I had a feeling it was her when I saw the sensibly dressed woman with dark curls and wireless glasses push through the front door holding a cloth bag with the slogan Canvas Because Plastics Is So Last Year. The bag contained some of the accessories she carries with her to minimize her plastic intake, including cloth bags for the grains and produce she buys in bulk, as well as her kit for eating out: a wooden fork, spoon, and knife, in case she's presented with plastic cutlery; a pair of glass straws; and a cloth napkin. That day she was also toting a stainless steel pot, which she brought out when we later went to the butcher across the street to buy ground turkey for her cat (she is a vegetarian). In order to avoid the plastic film or plastic-coated paper used to wrap meat, she asked the butcher to put the ground turkey into the pot. I noticed she paid for it with a credit card. She says she doesn't have a problem using credit cards—the plastic lasts a long time—but she does worry a bit about the receipts because of the waste of paper and the fact that they are coated with bisphenol A. (Yet another of the ubiquitous chemical's uses: it bonds with the invisible ink used in carbonless copy paper to make an image appear when pressure, such as when one writes one's signature, is applied.)

  As if I hadn't guessed it already, Terry explained she's not the sort of person who does things in half measures. When she took up running, she had to run a marathon; when she began knitting, she made scarves and hats for everyone she knew. So her goal of reducing plastic quickly went far beyond prosaic measures like using reusable bags and travel coffee cups. She began tracking the tiniest scraps of plastic that crossed her threshold—pieces of tape on packages received, the plastic windows in envelopes, the bits of film wrapped around the ends of organic bananas (a measure to prevent mold). She goes out of her way to rid herself of unwanted plastic: she's sent Tyvek mailers back to DuPont for recycling, returned the unneeded CDs that automatically were sent to her when she updated her version of TurboTax, and biked across town (she doesn't own a car) to take back Styrofoam peanuts to the shipper who had delivered a package from her dad. In all of 2009, she accumulated only 3.7 pounds of plastic—just 4 percent of the American average, she proudly noted on her blog. She cheerfully admits she's extreme but sees herself blazing a path that others can follow as far as they want to.

  It's surprising how many people are game to try (though not her husband; he supports her efforts but hasn't joined her plastic-free crusade). Dozens of her readers have taken her up on her challenge to collect their plastic trash for a week or longer and then send in photos. In fact, the blogosphere is filled with plastic purgers and zero-waste zealots determined to reduce their footprints to the slightest tiptoe. They share recipes for homemade condiments and deodorant, fret over the frustrations of trying to find synthetic-free running clothes and sunscreen in nonplastic bottles, and swap tips for recycling unwanted plastic things such as gift cards. "Use them to scrape dried soy candle wax from tabletops, fabric, flat candleholders," one of Terry's readers suggested. "Use them to crease folds in papercrafting ... [C]ut them into squares, glue them onto cork, and make coaster mosaics." They confess their consumption sins online—"Out of laziness, I broke down and bought tortillas in plastic," one reader wrote Terry.

  Even among this hard-core crowd, there are levels of extreme. A fellow green blogger accused Terry of "hair shirt environmentalism" for using baking soda and vinegar to wash her hair. This, noted Terry, from a woman who advocated using cloth wipes in place of toilet paper, "which I think is really extreme." But to Terry, it didn't feel like any great sacrifice to give up bottled shampoo in favor of baking soda and vinegar. It's cheaper, which appeals to her frugal nature. Besides, she added, "I'm not very girly and never have been." (Envirowoman, one of the first blogging plastiphobes, complained regularly about the difficulty of finding plastic-free cosmetics.)

  "Is there anything you've done that does feel like hair-shirt environmentalism?" I asked.

  "I miss cheese." She laughed wistfully. The sharp cheddar she likes almost invariably comes wrapped in plastic. Eventually she managed to find a cheese—not cheddar, alas—wrapped in natural beeswax. But she had to buy the entire fifteen-pound wheel. Occasionally she tries to give herself a break from herself. "I went to Trader Joe's the other day just to get something quick for lunch. I used to be able to eat at Trader Joe's all the time. I wanted to get a salad." She was fully prepared to confess the transgression in her next blog entry. But then that image of the plastic-stuffed albatross flitted across her mind. "I just couldn't do it. I looked at all the plastic and just walked out."

  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 estimate
s, 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.