Plastic Page 9

  Thirty years ago, Shenzhen was a sleepy fishing town of about seventy thousand people. Now it has a population of about eight million. "It changes every day," my translator Matthew Wang later told me. He spent a few years working in factories there. For him, it was a lonely time. "In this city, you need to keep moving, moving. Nothing is stable. Accommodations, jobs, friends, everything. That's why economically it's good, but it's not a good place to live. My wife says I would have gone crazy if I'd stayed here."

  Matthew, nearing forty at that time, embodied this feverish pace of change. He was the son of peasants. His father was briefly jailed during the Cultural Revolution. Matthew was raised in a farming village, drank water hauled in a wooden bucket from a well, and did his schoolwork by the light of kerosene lamps. But he did well in school and mastered English, and now he was a player, albeit a small one, in the global economy. He followed international affairs on the Internet (to the extent Chinese censors allowed) and made his living as a translator and fixer for foreigners with business in Guangdong, like me. One day as we were driving to an interview, his ever-present cell phone rang with a call from an Australian client who wanted him to make arrangements for a shipment of shoes to Sydney.

  This steroidal push into the twenty-first century was all the more surreal for the contrary images that kept popping up, the reminders that this sheen of development and prosperity reached only so deep. Bicyclists pedaled along the sides of traffic-choked six-lane highways. Peasants in straw hats hand-hoed little pockets of farmland on the outskirts of cities. Towers under construction were framed by bamboo scaffolding. Drying laundry hung from the balconies and windows of every high-rise building.

  Though Guangdong has been a locus for international trade on and off since 200 B.C., this current gold rush of foreign investment began in 1979 when Premier Deng Zhou Peng announced his open-door policy. Under a series of economic reforms, the government established "special economic zones" in the cities of Dongguan, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Foshan. Each was granted special tax benefits that made it attractive to foreign investors, especially those based in nearby Hong Kong, which was still a British colony.

  By then Hong Kong had a strong plastics-processing industry, geared heavily toward export. As in the United States, Hong Kong plastics manufacturers had started in the 1940s with simple objects like combs, then moved on to toys, and by the 1980s they were producing for the more lucrative end markets, such as computers, cars, and medical devices. But toys remained a mainstay export. Enticed through Deng's open door, plastics processors and toy makers began migrating to mainland China, where the rents were cheaper and the labor far more abundant. To this day, most of the toy factories in Guangdong Province have Hong Kong or Taiwanese owners.

  The path that brought the owner of the Frisbee factory, Dennis Wong, to the region is typical. Born and raised in Hong Kong, he studied polymer engineering at Hong Kong Polytechnic and cut his teeth in the industry working for Union Carbide's Hong Kong outpost. Hong Kong's homegrown plastic industry was still young, he recalled. "All the information was from America. All the plastic molding technology, all the equipment and how to mold it, how to machine it, how to make good plastic products was introduced from America." When he and his wife started their company, in 1983, they began by making simple, practical items, such as flashlights and refrigerator magnets. The company developed a reputation for doing good work. One day a toy company asked Dennis if he could manufacture its novelty pens. Soon Dennis was in the toy-manufacturing business.

  In 1987, he built a factory in Guangdong Province, in what was then a remote spot in the countryside surrounded by rice paddies. It took a taxi two hours to reach the factory from the local train station, and invariably the driver would get lost. Now a busy thoroughfare runs past the front gate, and it's surrounded by a bustling neighborhood of shops, hotels, apartment buildings, and other factories. Though Dennis comes to the factory nearly every day, he and his family continue to live in Hong Kong, a ninety-minute drive away. They all work in the business. The company employs about a thousand people, which is small by Guangdong standards. Still, it enjoys a strong reputation.

  Most of the company's work is dedicated to manufacturing other companies' branded products, such as the Frisbee, as well as anonymous tchotchkes such as key chains, light-up pens, and pedometers. But like many Chinese processors today, Dennis's daughter Ada has higher ambitions. She is hoping the company can eventually start producing its own brand of toys; that's where the future is. To that end, her business card reads Product Innovation Manager. She's a friendly, slender woman in her early thirties with chin-length hair and delicate features. She speaks impeccable English. She drove up from Hong Kong to guide me through the factory on a broiling-hot March day.

  Ada had promised to show me the production process from start to finish. Accordingly, our first stop was a small room off the main production area, where the raw resins are mixed into the custom blends that Wham-O requires for its Frisbees. Bags of clean white pellets were stacked against the wall, and I spotted the label of ExxonMobil among them. (The factory almost exclusively uses resins from overseas—the United States, Taiwan, Mexico, the Middle East—because, Dennis later explained, Chinese resins are not reliable; the quality can vary from batch to batch, which can affect processing. Despite China's powerhouse status as a producer of plastic products, it still imports most of the resins it uses, though construction of new resin plants will start changing that equation.) Those pellets—a mix of high-density and low-density polyethylene—are blended in a barrel with grains of pigment and softening agents in proportions that Wham-O has prescribed. The raw materials are then ready to be made into Frisbees.

  Out in the clanging, whirring din of the main factory floor were six injection-molding machines—each about the length of a limousine—devoted to molding Frisbees. (More were going full-bore in another building.) I stopped by one and watched the process. It reminded me of a giant Play-Doh Fun Factory. A funnel-shaped hopper sitting on top of the machine was filled with a blend of pellets and white pigment. Every so often, the hopper released a batch into a long horizontal barrel, where they were immediately heated to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. As the plastic melted, a long screw pushed it through the barrel into a Frisbee-shaped cavity formed by molds that clamped together with a pressure of more than two hundred tons per square inch. The mold was chilled so the plastic started hardening as soon as it reached the cavity. All this took fifty-five seconds. At that point, the front of the mold pulled away from the back, and a woman sitting next to the machine opened a small glass door and plucked out a shiny white 140-gram Frisbee. She carefully inspected it for flaws and snipped off any trailing filaments of plastic as well as the sprue, the little tab indicating where the liquid plastic ran into the mold. By then, another fresh Frisbee was ready to be pulled from the mold. Once the Frisbee cooled down, it was placed onto a rack with hundreds of other blank discs awaiting decoration. One disc she pulled out had a little smudge of red on top, residue from a previous production run. She razored out the offending spot to avoid further contamination and threw the disc onto a pile of rejects that would be remelted and remolded into new Frisbees.

  This may not be rocket science, but it's more complicated than it looks. It's taken the company much trial and error to ensure the discs contain just the right blend of materials, that they come out at the proper weight, and that they don't deform while cooling, said Ada. Indeed, the company spent a considerable amount of money upgrading its machines, buying new equipment, and machining new molds in order to make Frisbees. What has made it worthwhile? I asked. "Quantity," Ada answered, without hesitation. The company was producing over one million discs a year.

  Actually, it was making one million discs in the space of about four months. Because the peak season for Frisbees is the summer, the factory hums with disc-making from January to April only. After that, the machinery is refitted with different molds to produce other toys for the U.S. Christmas rush. The
seasonality of toy making means many Guangdong toy factories fall idle and lay off workers for several months of the year. Dennis has been both savvy enough and lucky enough to keep his company going full-speed year-round.

  Ada took me upstairs to the area where the discs are decorated. A pair of women were sitting in front of hot-stamping machines, bought specifically for Frisbee production. One fit a faceless disc into the machine and—whoosh—the top was stamped in black with the image of what looked like an octopus surrounded by a ring with the words All Sport and 140 gram. She passed the Frisbee to her partner, who fit it precisely into place on her machine, which then embossed in silver a swooshing pattern of circles and the logo FRISBEE DISC. Nearby were dozens of racks filled with bright blue, yellow, orange, and white hot-off-the-presses Frisbees.

  Ada had mentioned that she had about a hundred employees working on Frisbees. So far, I had counted a dozen at best. It turned out that the job requiring the most manpower—or, more accurately, womanpower, since almost every worker I saw was young and female—was the packaging of the discs. We walked up a flight of stairs and entered a big open room, where two long production lines were devoted to making the discs retail ready. Young women sat alongside conveyor belts, each bent to the single task that she would repeat hundreds of times a day for the duration of the Frisbee production run, whether it was arranging six discs in display boxes, fitting labels onto the discs' undersides, adding production codes to the labels, sealing clamshell casings, or packing discs in big cardboard boxes stamped Made in China. The only automation was the moving conveyor belts. The space was spacious and well ventilated, but even with all the windows open, it was still brutally hot, and it wasn't even summer yet. There was no air-conditioning.

  The leader of one of the production lines was Huang Min Long, a solidly built woman in a T-shirt and jeans, her hair pulled back under a blue cap. Like most of the workers in the factory—and other factories throughout Guangdong—she was a migrant. She went out, the term commonly used by migrant workers, three years before from Guangxi, a region hundreds of miles to the west, leaving behind two children. She only got to see them once a year, when she went home for the spring-festival holidays. The rest of the year, she lived in the company dormitory, sharing a room with as many as nine other women. The room I saw was a cramped space filled with bunk beds. A single fan hung from the ceiling next to a fluorescent light. One bed was stacked with small lockers where the women could stow their private belongings, another with their suitcases. Each bunk had a sheet hanging across it—the only measure of privacy. Plastic tubs for doing washing were piled out front, and a communal bathroom was down the breezeway, near the canteen where they took all their meals.

  The migrant's life is a difficult one. Ada was not willing to provide details or let Huang talk about how much she and other employees were paid or the hours they worked. But toy-factory workers put in notoriously long hours for desperately low wages. At that time, the average worker at Mattel's plant in Guanyao (also in Guangdong Province) made $175 a month for a sixty-hour workweek. She had to pay for her dormitory housing and meals out of those wages. Recent labor-law reforms may improve migrant workers' lots somewhat. But they will have a long way to go. The watchdog group China Labor Watch reported in 2007 that conditions in many toy factories are "devastatingly brutal," marked by "long hours, unsafe workplaces and restricted freedom of association." In some factories during peak season, workers are forced to put in ten- to fourteen-hour days for weeks, without a single day off. According to the report, factories impose illegal fines and penalties that cut further into the employees' meager pay. The group lays a good share of the blame not on the factory owners but on the multinational toy companies and big-box retailers that insist on being able to sell toys for under twenty dollars each. Cheap toys have their price: "In order to maintain even modest profits, many of these factories have no choice but to accept toy companies' low prices," the group noted. "Sadly, workers' salaries and general treatment are the only flexible factor of production ..."

  This may not be the case with Wham-O or the Frisbee factory. My brief tour wasn't enough to fairly assess conditions there. It looked clean and safe, and though the dormitory and open-air canteen seemed depressing by American standards, my translator assured me that he had seen worse. While migrant workers typically change jobs frequently, Ada told me the workers at her company tended to stay put. "I don't know why," she said, "but our factory people stay for a longer period of time. Some of our workers [have been] working here for twenty years."

  Virtually all of the factory's products are destined to go overseas. That export orientation built China's franchise in Plasticville, but in the absence of strong domestic markets, it leaves China's toy makers vulnerable to world events, such as the epidemic of toy recalls that took place in 2007. The discovery of lead paint and other safety hazards forced American toy companies to recall more than twenty-five million Chinese-made toys that year. Those recalls, coupled with the global recession starting in 2008, knocked the Chinese industry to its knees. By some estimates more than five thousand toy companies—not only in Guangdong—closed between mid-2007 and early 2009. Meanwhile, an unknown number of others have been relocating operations to less expensive parts of China or to cheaper countries such as Vietnam, following the same well-traveled path that initially brought the toy industry to Guangdong. The provincial authorities are apparently happy to see them go, eager to replace the light manufacturing that ignited China's roaring economic engine with higher-value, higher-tech industries. These will also rely heavily on plastics.

  For all his success, Dennis proved to be vulnerable. Six months after I visited his factory, new owners bought Wham-O and decided to cancel his contract, with little regard for the hefty capital investment his company had made in order to produce Frisbees. The new owner, Marvel Manufacturing, has its own manufacturing facilities in China, as well as in Mexico and the United States. It announced it was returning Frisbee production to the United States, though as of mid-2010, the vast majority of discs were still being made at its factory in China.

  Loss of the Frisbee contract was a disappointment, but that's the way business goes, Ada told me when I contacted her after the sale. She said the company had replaced the work for Wham-O by moving into a new market niche: musical greeting cards. It gives the company an entrée into electronics, which is a step up from toys. "Toys are not that stable," she said. The tune-playing cards are "more mass market."

  As it turns out, greeting cards that chirp a toneless "Happy Birthday" are more comprehensible to Ada and her employees than a high-flying platter of polyethylene.

  "Is Frisbee very famous in the U.S.?" Ada had shyly asked me at one point as we walked through the factory.

  "Sure," I told her, "it's very famous. Everyone has had a Frisbee at one time or another."

  To Ada and others in the factory, that popularity was a mystery. "In Hong Kong it is not popular. So we are just thinking, why are so many people ordering Frisbees?"

  "So people don't play it here?" I asked.

  "Oh, no, only once in a while we play it on beaches."

  Huang, the worker I briefly spoke with, was equally baffled by the toy that she spent months packing into boxes bound for overseas destinations. I asked my translator Matthew Wang to ask her what she thought people did with Frisbees.

  "She knows it's used at the beach."

  "Has she ever played with a Frisbee?" I asked.

  "No," Matthew translated. "She's never been to a beach."

  4. "Humans Are Just a Little Plastic Now"

  BABY GIRL AMY* was born in April of 2010, four months early and weighing not much more than two Big Macs. She was whisked straight from the delivery room to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) at Children's National Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

  When I saw her two days later in the NICU, I couldn't help but gasp. She was perfectly formed but still seemed so unfinished, with fingers like tiny spring twigs, an
d skin as translucent as a new leaf. She was in an enclosed clear-plastic incubator, connected to a jumble of tubing. Foam pads covered her delicate eyes to protect them from the special UV lights used to prevent jaundice. Aside from the nest of soft blankets on which she lay, she was entirely surrounded by plastic.

  Neglect and negligence had hurried her into the world. Her mother had had no prenatal care. She had a drug problem. At the time she went into early labor, she was high on angel dust. She'd been carrying two babies, but Amy's twin was stillborn, and Amy's chances were precarious. "We weren't even expecting her to make it this long," said the nurse caring for her. Billie Short, the doctor in charge of the NICU, gave her a 40 percent chance of survival. The fact that Amy had survived her first few days and could even go on to make it was in a sense a victory of polymer technology. Neonatology, like much of modern medicine, owes a huge debt to the advent of plastics, in ways both spectacular and mundane.

  Polymers made possible most of today's medical marvels. Dutch physician Willem Kolff, driven by a conviction that "what God can grow, Man can make," scrounged sheets of cellophane and other materials in Nazi-occupied Holland to perfect his kidney-dialysis machine. Today, plastic pacemakers keep faulty hearts pumping, and synthetic veins and arteries keep blood flowing. We replace our worn-out hips and knees with plastic ones. Plastic scaffolding is used to grow new skin and tissues; plastic implants change our shapes; and plastic surgery is no longer just a metaphor.

  Plastics are in the housing and components of sophisticated imaging devices. They also supply the essential everyday equipment of medicine, from bedpans and bandages to the single-use gloves and syringes that first appeared in the 1950s but became utterly indispensable in the wake of AIDS. With plastics, hospitals could shift from equipment that had to be laboriously sterilized to blister-packed disposables, which improved in-house safety, significantly lowered costs, and made it possible for more patients to be cared for at home.