Plastic (12 page)

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"

B
ABY 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, and 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.

Sizewise, medicine is a small end market, consuming less than 10 percent of all polymers produced in the United States
—peanuts compared to packaging (33 percent), consumer products (20 percent), and building and construction (17 percent). But it's a strong, recession-proof market
and one that has provided the industry enormous PR value. Medicine has long been plastic's indisputable good-news story, the showcase of polymers' benefits.
For one recent public relations campaign, the American Chemistry Council featured a photo of a newborn in a plastic incubator.

Plastics are indispensable in neonatology, agreed Dr. Billie Short as we toured the fifty-four-bed NICU at Children's National, where preemies like Amy may spend the first several weeks or even months of their lives. Short is chief of neonatology at George Washington University, and as we stood by Amy's bedside, she described how plastics enable the care of infants this fragile. Reaching her hands through the pair of portholes in the sides of Amy's incubator, she pointed out the quartet of clear, exquisitely thin tubes that were delivering nourishment and medicines to Amy from the several plastic bags hanging on a nearby rig. One was inserted into a vein in her head to provide fluids; another, delivering antibiotics, tapped into a vein in her arm, which itself was scarcely wider than the pen I was using to take notes. Two catheters ran into the stump of her umbilical cord, one to feed nutrients into a vein and another connected to an artery so that the nurses could monitor Amy's fluctuating blood pressure and the levels of oxygen in her blood. A respiratory tube threaded down her throat was attached to a plastic-encased machine that helped her breathe. All the tubing was soft and supple enough to slide through her delicate body without tearing anything. Meanwhile, that enclosed plastic incubator maintained a carefully calibrated humidity and warmth (preemies like Amy don't have the layers of skin and fat needed to sustain body temperature). This kind of equipment is one of several factors that have helped raise the survival rates of premature babies over the past forty years.

I watched her chest rise and fall as rapidly as a sparrow's. Every so often, an involuntary tremor would ripple across her tiny body, as if she were shuddering over whatever rude force in the universe had pulled her from the dark coziness of her mother's womb into this synthetic approximation.

How long will she be hooked up to all this? I asked Short, indicating the intravenous tubing.

"Oh, for weeks," said Short. After that, once she became stable enough, Amy would receive her nourishment through feeding tubes.

Neonatology is a relatively new medical specialty. The first NICU was set up in 1965. That the field has blossomed in the age of polymers is probably not a coincidence, given the challenges of treating babies with hair-thin veins and tissue-paper skin. Still, until the 1980s, most of the intravenous fluids used in NICUs came in glass bottles. Short remembers the worry and inconvenience of those bottles falling and breaking. At first, said Short, the move to plastic seemed a tremendous advance. "We all thought plastics were inert, safe. We didn't have to worry about it. Then as the research came out, it became more and more evident we needed to pay attention."

And here, Short hit on the central paradox of plastic in medicine: in the act of healing, it may also do harm. Research now suggests that the same bags and tubes that deliver medicines and nourishment to these most vulnerable children also deliver chemicals that could damage their health years from now. The vinyl plastic typically used in IV bags and tubing contains a softening chemical that can block production of testosterone and other hormones. This chemical, called a phthalate (pronounced
tha-late
), doesn't act the way familiar environmental villains such as mercury and asbestos do; for those substances, there's a direct connection between exposure and easily recognizable subsequent harm, such as cancer or a birth defect or death. Phthalates leave tracks along more complex, convoluted routes. That's because they play havoc with the body's endocrine system—the intricate, self-regulating choreography of hormones that dictate how an individual develops, reproduces, ages, fights disease, and even behaves.
Phthalates are not the only chemicals used in common plastics that have disruptive effects. By mimicking or blocking or suppressing production of hormones such as testosterone and estrogen, these various chemicals may produce subtle, long-term effects that don't show up for years or appear only in our offspring. They may make us more vulnerable to asthma, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, infertility, and attention deficit disorder, to name just a few of the health problems that have been linked to various of these chemicals in animal studies and epidemiological surveys. And some of these substances may do their damage even at minute concentrations we never considered worrisome.