- Home
- Susan Freinkel
Plastic Page 8
Plastic Read online
Page 8
Dow remains the biggest employer in the area and calculates that for every job the company directly provides, another seven are indirectly created. It pays more than $125 million in state and local taxes and donates more than $1.6 million each year to community projects large and small, from a maternity ward at the local hospital to new police radios. For more than fifty years, it's been the place where the county's blue-collar kids work when they graduate from high school, and where the white-collar sons and daughters hire on after getting their college degrees. Everyone knows someone who works at Dow. "If this place went away, the community would fold," said Tracie Copeland, the cheery public affairs representative who agreed to show me Plant B, one of the three production complexes that make up Dow's Freeport operations.
Plant B is a grid of fifty different plants, each one a mini-village devoted to the making of a particular plastic resin or chemical building block. We drove past facilities that make polypropylene, polystyrene, polycarbonate, and various epoxies, as well as the monomers—the starting chemicals—for polystyrene and polyurethane. Many encompass entire blocks. The streets have names out of the periodic table, such as Chlorine and Tin. Fat white pipes run along the ground or stretch overhead—the vital arteries of the complex, connecting it all. We passed a lone worker on an adult-sized trike, and I suddenly realized he was the only person I'd seen outdoors. More than five thousand people work at the plant, but as Copeland explained, this massive maze works is run from computerized control rooms; that's where all the people are.
The people may be scarce in this Twilight Zone-like ecosystem, but the wildlife isn't. Plant B is home to a large colony of migratory sea birds known as skimmers. A herd of longhorn cattle graze in one of its greenbelts, and big schools of tarpon and redfish live in the saltwater intake ponds, Copeland noted as she pulled over next to a long, slightly brackish rectangle of deep water. "You wouldn't think to look at it, but it's a great fishing hole," she said. Former Texas governor Ann Richards once stopped by here, she said, and "caught just a ton."
At the corner of Nickel and Glycol streets, we stopped to see where the production of polyethylene starts: the industrial glimmer-in-the-eye of what will eventually become a Frisbee. In front of us was one of Dow's two crackers, a block-long bank of gigantic furnaces that break down the hydrocarbon molecules in crude oil and natural gas. Either substance can serve as the base raw material for plastics. Dow uses natural gas, as have most American resin makers since the price of oil started rising in the 1970s. Today, about 70 percent of plastics made in America are derived from natural gas and 30 percent from oil; the reverse ratio holds true in Europe and Asia, where natural gas prices run higher than oil.
The cracking process uses a spectrum of temperatures and pressures to disassemble and reassemble those hydrocarbons into new arrangements of gases that will serve as the starting ingredients, the monomers, used in making plastics. When the carbon atoms form a ring of six, you get benzene, which is one of the bases for styrene, used to make polystyrene. A carbon quartet can become butadiene, a chemical used in making synthetic rubber and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), the hard, shiny plastic used in Legos, cell phones, and other electronic devices. At another temperature, the carbons triple up, which can form propylene, the molecule used to make polypropylene. And in the highest hottest reaches of the cracker, where the temperature is cranked up past 750 degrees Celsius, two carbons can bond to form the gas ethylene, the starting molecule of polyethylene.
It was a quick drive from the cracker to a low, beige cinder-block building that serves as the nerve center for one of the operations dedicated to making the low-density polyethylene used in basic Frisbees. Our guide to the facility, John Johnson, was a fiftysomething barrel-chested mechanic in a blue jumpsuit who had worked at Dow since he got out of high school and who now oversaw maintenance of the plant. Production runs 24–7 and stops only for scheduled maintenance every eighteen months. "We run until something brings us down," he explained. In 2008, Hurricane Ike forced a closure, and it took two weeks to get the lines back up.
We followed him down a long hall, past a lab where polyethylene samples were tested for quality, to the control room, a space dominated by a long electronic board that looked like a digital subway map. But instead of tracking trains, this map tracked the flow of chemicals through the stations of transformation from various gases to liquid plastic. A man stood intently watching the board. "The board operator basically runs the plant," Johnson explained, then corrected himself. "The mod"—the computer system—"is running the plant, but he's the checks and balances for it. If something's out of line, he'll get the alarm and then come in and make adjustments." As if on cue, a bell sounded, and the man calmly punched a few buttons.
Before we could go outside to see the physical plant represented by the board, we were required to suit up. I pulled a blue mechanic's jumpsuit over my clothes, balanced an oversize hardhat on my head, slipped plastic safety glasses over my own glasses, stuffed earplugs in my ears, and pulled on thick leather gloves. All this to tour a facility in which, Johnson insisted, "you're safer than you are at home." Many of the chemicals used to make plastics, such as propylene, phenol, ethylene, chlorine, and benzene, are highly toxic. Decades ago, hazardous exposures were fairly common for plastics workers, but even critics agree the industry has improved its production processes, reducing the risks for its workers. "Dow has come a long way," Charles Singletary, the head of the local chapter of the operating engineers' union, told me. "We're not exposed like we used to be." Still, accidents happen. In 2006, a worker at the Freeport plant was exposed to chlorine gas during an accidental release. For some reason, his protective mask got pulled off, and the man inhaled some of the deadly gas. According to Singletary, he called in the accident, finished his eleven-hour shift, went home, collapsed, and died.
Outside, Johnson showed us a bank of white pipes that carry the raw ingredients of polyethylene—ethylene, nitrogen, water, methane, and others—into and out of the plant. We followed the pipes, which arced overhead, into an enormous two-story shed filled with hissing and pumping machinery—the brute mechanics required to chemically crochet a new pattern of carbon and hydrogen atoms. Here, Johnson walked us past a series of tanks, compressors, and exchangers, explaining in great detail how the ethylene gas is repeatedly heated up and cooled down, squeezed under thousands of pounds per square inch of pressure, and then depressurized. After several cycles, more chemicals are piped into the mix: butane, isobutene, and propylene—the stuff that "makes the poly," Johnson shouted over the thundering sounds of production.
At the back of the second floor, he pulled open a door, then grabbed my arm as I instinctively started to walk through it. "You can't go in there. That's the reactor." This room represented the heart of the operation, the place where catalysts were added to the mix of chemicals to set off the big bang of the process: polymerization. Here was where the smaller individual molecules hooked themselves together into one magnificently giant molecule. I peeked through the door. I don't know what I was expecting to see—bubbling vats, steam-filled flasks. Instead, it was just a huge space filled with fat pipes looping up and down from floor to ceiling, like a gigantic intestine. I tried to imagine the molecules roller-coastering through the three-quarter-mile-long circuit of pipe, pulling closer and closer together, lining up, forming new bonds, gaining weight and mass until they dropped out of their airy gaseous state and pooled into a liquid resin.
I couldn't see any of that amazing transformation, of course. But as we returned to the ground floor and walked along the outer wall of the reactor chamber, I suddenly became aware that the atmosphere around us was subtly changed. The air had turned moist from all the hot water being fed into the reactor. The background noise shifted from a dull roar to a loud buzz, like a million lawn mowers. All at once I smelled plastic. My nostrils filled with that flat, featureless aroma you catch a whiff of when you chug the last drop from a plastic milk bottle or sniff a brand-new
Frisbee.
The pipes around us were now flowing with liquid polyethylene. We followed them to another group of machines, where the liquid resin is cooled and molded into long spaghetti strands that are chopped into glossy rice-sized pellets, which are then spun dry. These pellets, also known as nurdles, are the coin of the realm in Plasticville, the form in which most plastics are traded and transported around the globe.
We watched a small hopper fill with fresh-baked white grains of polyethylene. I stuck my hand in; the pellets were still warm and so pleasing to the touch that I didn't want to pull my hand out. Johnson said the plant can make twenty-seven thousand to twenty-nine thousand pounds of pellets an hour, meaning that during the minute we stood watching, some four hundred to five hundred pounds of pellets tumbled by—roughly the combined weight of Johnson, Copeland, and me. It had taken scarcely sixty seconds to replicate our mass in plastic.
From here, the pellets are piped to nearby silos sitting alongside a pair of railroad lines. We climbed a flight of stairs into a shed that straddles the railroad tracks. From a catwalk we could look down. There were eight railcars lined up below us, each positioned precisely under a silo. Pellets poured like salt from a box of Morton's into a round opening at the top of the car. Each car holds 192,000 pounds of pellets, so the eight cars sitting below us would be carrying 1.5 million pounds of polyethylene. Some days just a single trainload is shipped out, and some days there are double shipments: sixteen cars—three million pounds of raw polyethylene—rolling out at five in the morning and five at night to factories around the United States and the world. Many will be loaded onto container vessels bound for China, where the pellets will be processed into products that we will then import. Dow, like other U.S. resin makers, has long supplied the plastics industries of the world.
That lopsided trade balance is changing, however. Historically, American and Western European companies have dominated the global industry, with the West supplying most of the nearly six hundred billion pounds of plastics now produced annually. But a seismic change is under way: the industry's center of gravity is shifting from the developed to the developing world, where production costs are lower, and demand and consumption are growing faster. China, India, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East have all been gearing up to produce their own raw plastic resins.
For oil-rich countries such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates, plastics are a natural next stop. Each has built new manufacturing complexes, and to jump-start those efforts, they've tried to ally with American petrochemical producers—always eager to get closer to their feedstock sources—to make various commodity plastics. The Saudi company SABIC, for example, purchased General Electric's storied plastics division in 2007. Thanks to such ventures, the Middle East's share of worldwide raw plastic production has increased fivefold since 1990, to 15 percent. Like the Chinese before them, the Saudis are trying to break into the value-added business of making finished plastic products. Those Made in China labels we're so used to seeing may be joined before long by products stamped Made in Saudi Arabia.
But those products may not necessarily be coming back to the United States or other developed economies. The United States, Europe, and Japan have long consumed the lion's share of the world's plastics, but as the romance with plastic goes global, experts believe the rest of the world is poised to quickly catch up. Per capita consumption of plastics in places like Africa, China, and India has shot up in recent years. A wide gap still exists—the world's average per capita consumption is still less than a third of the United States'. But that gap also suggests "a long trajectory of sustained growth of polymer production and demand in the developing world," as one recent forecast put it. Assuming the developing world falls for plastic as hard as Americans have, the rising demand, coupled with the growing population, will require plastics production to swell nearly fourfold by 2050, to almost two trillion pounds.
Who knows whether the pellets I saw streaming into the railcars were eventually made into Frisbees. There was something so abstract about the process that it was hard to connect it with any real-life plastic products. I wondered if Johnson felt a sense of ownership in things made of polyethylene, the way a mason might stop and admire a building where he had laid brick. "Absolutely," he said when I asked. "We sell a lot of stuff to'S. C. Johnson to make Ziploc bags."
"So when you look at a Ziploc bag, do you feel proud?"
"Oh yeah, absolutely."
It's a long journey from a pellet to a Ziploc bag or a Frisbee. Along the way, the raw polyethylene passes through many different hands—compounders who mix in the needed additives; processors who make the finished product; brand owners who slap on a label; retailers who sell it. At every stop, the plastic gains in value. It costs Dow less than a penny to manufacture the 140 grams of polyethylene that go into a basic Frisbee. It costs the factory that makes Frisbees about twenty cents to buy that disc's worth of plastic, and it will spend another dollar or so on the costs of manufacturing and packaging the disc. Wham-O sells that disc to toy companies for three or four dollars. By the time that 140-gram Frisbee appears at my local toy store, it will sport a price tag of approximately eight dollars. The value of that hunk of polyethylene has risen by orders of magnitude. Still, as toys go, the Frisbee is a bargain.
Toy makers feel great pressure to keep their prices low, ideally under twenty dollars. Twenty bucks "is considered a magical price point because it is an 'ATM unit.' People think hard about breaking two of them," explained Danny Grossman, president of Wild Planet Toys and former president of the Toy Industry Association. Price points, of course, change with the times. With the 2008 recession, Grossman added, some stores began to look at fifteen dollars as the new twenty. Whatever the magic number is, the chief way the toy industry stays below it is by moving operations overseas. Welcome to China, where four out of five of the toys in the world are made.
Wham-O was late to join the procession of toy companies decamping from the United States. As long as Rich Knerr and Spud Melin owned the company, they kept it firmly planted in their Southern California home turf. The company had a factory in San Gabriel, and whatever toys weren't made there were farmed out to molders in and around Los Angeles. Indeed, until the 1970s, the whole area was full of plastics processors kept busy by the big toy companies. Every mold maker in Southern California "was doing Barbie legs and heads and parts," recalled one reporter who has long covered the industry. But then toy makers began moving production to Mexico, with Mattel and Kenner leading the way. (Toys were among the first of the major industries that use plastic to leave the United States. The continuing exodus of valuable end markets is a constant thorn in the side of the plastics industry, and one reason, along with the rising cost of natural gas, that it has been bleeding jobs for the past decade.)
Wham-O stayed put until Melin and Knerr sold the company in 1982. The new owners promptly moved production south of the border, and Frisbees were made by Mexican maquiladoras for the next two decades. In 2006, a Hong Kong-based toy company bought Wham-O—or what was left of it, for by then the brand was attached to only a handful of toys, including Frisbees, Hacky Sacks, and Hula-Hoops. To no one's surprise, the new Hong Kong owners moved Frisbee production to a vendor in China.
When I first asked if I could visit Wham-O's Chinese factory, the vice president for marketing and licensing turned me down, citing a need for secrecy that I normally associate with nuclear technology or Colonel Sanders's Original Recipe. Making a Frisbee "is not rocket science," he explained. "It's a very simple piece of injection-molded plastic. Any idiot can get a mold and make one. I don't want anyone in there unless he's from a government agency or Walmart or someone who absolutely needs to see it." Eventually, after much pleading on my part, he agreed to let me visit the factory, but with a proviso: I could not identify it or reveal where it was located on pain of a lawsuit. All I am allowed to divulge is that it is in Guangdong Province, in the Pearl River Delta, a place that's been described as the
manufacturing center of the world.
For the past thirty years, this region just north of Hong Kong has been "the heart pumping China's emergence as a global economic power." As many as fifty thousand factories stud an area roughly the size of Missouri, turning out electronics, housewares, shoes, textiles, clocks, clothes, handbags, and countless other items, including 80 percent of the world's toys. To a large extent, what makes this beehive of productivity possible is plastic, the material used most often by all those industries. This is the most concentrated center for making plastic goods in China, if not the world, with some eighteen hundred factories and half a dozen huge wholesale resin markets where brokers peddle raw plastic pellets from around the globe. There are twice as many people working in plastics in that single province than in the entire U.S. plastics industry.
Before the economic crash of 2008, Guangdong's boomtowns drew tens of millions of migrant workers from the rural countryside and pulled in foreign investment at the incredible rate of nearly two billion dollars a month. Shipping containers left the region's busy harbors at the rate of one per second, around the clock, all year round, journalist James Fallows calculated. If the region were a country, at that time it would have boasted the world's eleventh-largest economy.
It's also one of the most densely populated places on earth, with an estimated population of forty-five to sixty million. (No one is quite sure, because of all the migrant workers.) It was hard for me to appreciate the implication of such numbers until I got on the train from Hong Kong and reached the district's first major city, Shenzhen. All I could see were complexes of skyscrapers stretching out in every direction. It looked as if multiple copies of midtown Manhattan had been cut and pasted under the dull gray skies. (The smog overlying the province is so thick and persistent that it killed off the region's centuries-old silk industry. By the 1990s, the silkworms just couldn't be kept alive.) The only breaks in the skyscraping came when I passed the big block-shaped factories, which for some reason are almost invariably five stories high.