Plastic (30 page)

The company recently adopted the goal of recovering or collecting 100 percent of all the bottles and cans it sells in the United States. That means continuing to develop new uses for used bottles, such as the T-shirts and chairs it now makes from old Coke containers. But more important, it means expanding its investment in the recycling infrastructure, most significantly by plunking down forty-five million dollars in 2007 to build the world's biggest bottle-to-bottle recycling plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina. (The company already operates similar closed-loop recycling plants in Austria, Mexico, Switzerland, and the Philippines.) The South Carolina factory has the capacity to recycle a hundred million pounds of PET a year—the equivalent of two billion twenty-ounce Coca-Cola bottles.
Once the plant is fully online, Coke hopes to put 25 percent recycled content into the bottles sold in the United States. (Coke could raise the recycled content even higher, but not to much more than 50 percent; experts say that beyond that level, the resin starts to degrade and darken.
)

So is this the real thing? Some skeptics question Coke's commitment, since for years it has bitterly fought the one type of producer-responsibility measure that's been shown to increase recycling and reduce plastic waste: bottle bills. The deep pockets of Coca-Cola and other major beverage makers is the main reason we have so few deposit laws. Vitters insisted the company wasn't opposed to EPR legislation, just to laws that focus only on bottles and cans. "We need to focus on all packaging and printed materials. And then you hold industry accountable for the costs of recycling," he said, mentioning with approval the European EPR systems for packaging. Vitters makes a reasonable point. Yet if that's really the company's position, why hasn't it worked proactively with EPR advocates to develop legislation instead of fighting to crush every proposed bottle bill?

In early 2010 the company unveiled its latest step toward sustainability: the PlantBottle. It's a PET bottle, but the feedstock for part of the plastic comes from plants rather than oil or natural gas. One component of the PET, monoethylene glycol, is derived from Brazilian sugar cane, while another, terephthalic acid, is still processed from fossil fuels. "About a third of the bottle is now plant-based, but we're working hard to get it up to a hundred percent," said Vitters. But even though the PlantBottle comes from new types of feedstock, it fits right into the existing PET recycling stream. To Vitters, this bottle is the ultimate expression of cradle-to-cradle thinking, the embodiment of the company's commitment to zero waste. As he put it, "The PlantBottle ties this all up."

Can plant-based plastics like the new Coke bottle really help deliver a cradle-to-cradle future, a future where empty bottles, like scattered cherry blossoms, are a valued nutrient of production rather than a devalued waste? It's a comforting vision, and in our long, turbulent relationship with plastics, we might be forgiven for seeking comfort where we can find it. Clearly, bioplastics is where the industry as a whole is headed. But as anyone who has ever been in couples' counseling knows, envisioning a healthier future is one thing. Putting new insights into practice is where the heavy lifting begins.

8. The Meaning of Green

O
NE EVENING IN
1951, so the story goes, a New York businessman named Frank McNamara was out dining with friends. The check arrived, and McNamara was chagrined to realize that he had left his wallet at home. That chastening experience led him to invent the Diners Club card, which allowed members to charge meals at participating restaurants and pay their tabs at the end of the month. Apparently he wasn't the only one who'd suffered the embarrassment of finding himself cashless: within a year, twenty thousand people had signed up for Diners Club cards. The card itself was nothing remarkable, just a wallet-sized square of cardboard, but "the idea behind it—a third party facilitating a 'buy-now, pay-later' process—was revolutionary," as one history of credit cards noted.
The concept of money had become attenuated, the line between cash and credit blurred. Money's new identity was lodged in a symbolic card that allowed you to pay even when you couldn't flash the legal tender. Money had taken on a new kind of plasticity.

Money would be truly yoked with plastic a few years later, in 1958, when American Express introduced the first plastic credit card—yet another in the tide of transformative plastic goods that Americans began to embrace in the mid-twentieth century. AmEx promoted the plastic card as a step up from the flimsy paper ones then in use, promising it would "better withstand day-to-day use."
Implicit here was the notion that this card wasn't a convenience for the occasional dinner out but a tool for daily life. We would no longer be bound by bank hours or the approval of a loan officer. We could buy what we wanted—any time, any day—and pay later. Unlike the prior card issuers, American Express, MasterCard, and others started to provide revolving lines of credit in the mid-1960s, which allowed customers to carry balances from month to month. Credit wasn't a new concept, of course, but its instant availability was radical. Now we were fully released from the constraints of tangible money, our purchasing habits no longer limited by "cash on hand." We were free to consume, whether we could afford it or not.

It's no wonder that within another decade or so, credit cards were so commonplace the very word
plastic
became synonymous with money, edging out phrases that evoked the texture of tangible cash, the metallic clinking of
two bits,
the sandpapery feel of
sawbucks.
Any reader knew just what novelist Dan Jenkins meant when he wrote, "She had a whole purse full of plastic," in his 1975 novel
Dead Solid Perfect,
the first recorded use.

Today, those plastic cards are the chief currency of commerce. Or as the website of one card manufacturer stated grandiosely, "A plastic card is a physical device that links people to civilization."
Three-fourths of American adults have at least one credit card; most have three or more. But the credit card isn't the only plastic taking the place of cash in the average wallet. Four out of five Americans own debit cards, and one in six has a prepaid card to buy gas, make phone calls, or use for general purchases.
Plastic cards are also increasingly the stand-ins for gifts, especially for giftees one doesn't know well—the doorman, a coworker, a distant relative. Miss Manners may complain that the impersonality of gift cards has "taken the heart and soul" out of giving,
yet they offer such a convenient and stress-free mode of appreciation that ten billion are now created annually.
Who knew we were so altruistic?

Over the course of their evolution, these small vinyl rectangles have become a canvas of marketing goals and cultural preoccupations. Card issuers have played on status consciousness with color-coded luxury cards, from American Express's first gold card to Visa's popular Austin Powers titanium card, which was promoted with the slogan It's Titanium, Baby! In the 2009 movie
Up in the Air,
the object of desire for the protagonist played by George Clooney was the elusive carbon-black million-mile frequent-flier card.
Banks have appealed to emotional connections with affinity cards, first popularized by Visa in 1989, when it cobranded a card with the National Football League. Today, chances are good that I can find an affinity card for whatever cause I care about, from the National Rifle Association to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Or at the very least I can choose an image for the front of the card that conveys what's dear to my heart, whether it's puppies, my alma mater, my favorite band, or my family.

It's not only the terms of the card or the adorning imagery that offer a key to the Zeitgeist. It's the material of the card itself—that five-gram sheet of plastic. At a time of growing concern about plastic's toll on the environment, cards are undergoing a total transformation. These facilitators of consumption are going green.

I'm holding in my hand my new Discover card. It looks like any regular plastic credit card, yet it's made out of a kind of polyvinyl chloride that I'm told will harmlessly biodegrade when I throw it away. The back of the card is colored an earthy brown and bears the word
biodegradable.
When I ordered the card over the phone, I was told I could pick from several options for the front: plain gray, an American flag, a polar bear, a panda bear, mountain scenery, a beach. None seemed especially relevant to the problems of plastic pollution, but with thoughts of the Pacific vortex in mind, I chose the beach, not realizing the image I'd wind up with would have the supersaturated colors and unreal look of a Club Med brochure. "Well, it is a
Discover
card," my husband said when I showed it to him. "They want you to spend money to discover the world."

Discover introduced these new "environmentally friendly" cards in late 2008, just in time for the Christmas season. "We hope this will appeal to those interested in living a greener life," a company spokeswoman said at the time. The company won't say how many green-living customers have taken them up on the option, only that "We are encouraged by the results thus far which have exceeded expectations."

PVC, you'll recall, is the plastic environmentalists hate more than any other, the one known in Greenpeace circles as "the poison plastic." Nearly all credit cards, as well as gift cards and debit cards, are made of PVC and have been since the American Express debut. Card manufacturers like PVC because it's easily processed, offers the right blend of rigidity and flexibility, and is durable enough to last the standard three-to-five-year term of a credit card.

Granted, environmental issues rank well below debt issues when it comes to the hazards usually associated with credit cards. Nor are credit cards the products activists usually point to when warning about the dangers of PVC. Yet in Plasticville, even small objects like credit cards add up. By one estimate, there are more than 1.5 billion credit cards in use in the United States. A stack of them all would reach more than seventy miles into space, the
New York Times
calculated; it would tower nearly as high as thirteen Mount Everests placed one on top of the other.
But the natural laws of erosion and degradation that whittle away mountains would scarcely dent that polymer peak. Even a single PVC card can persist for decades, if not centuries, and each year, we toss away more than seventy-five million.
And that's just credit cards; those tallies don't include the much greater number of gift cards, prepaid cards, hotel keycards, and other varieties of plastic used to transact life these days.

The thought of all those plastic cards accumulating in landfills was what motivated the man who is responsible for the plastic used in Discover's allegedly ecofriendly card.
For twenty years, Nevada businessman Paul Kappus had sold PVC to the makers of credit cards, and he'd often thought there should be a way to make the used cards decompose. He spent several years talking to scientists and chemists, searching for some chemical that might make the PVC mortal. "I tried all sorts of different things, like the enzymes that eat cat urine off the floor. You wouldn't believe what I tried. All of it was a gross failure." Until one day he stumbled across what he says was an obscure technology that turned out to work.

Kappus was vague on the details, saying his formulation, BioPVC, is a trade secret. He'll state only that it involves a special additive blended into the PVC that acts like bait to the microorganisms that are ubiquitous in the environment, including in landfills. The additive doesn't affect the card's durability while it's in use; it'll stand up to years of swiping and stowage in a wallet. But deposit that card in a landfill or compost pile or any similarly "fertile environment," and, according to Kappus, it will draw hordes of microscopic critters that can take it apart. "They actually eat it, believe it or not," he said. Even a card that's litter on the ground will be scavenged, he claimed, without leaving behind any of the polymer's toxic precursor vinyl chloride. He said the card would be fully degraded within ten years, a blink of an eye compared to a regular PVC card.

This all sounded really wonderful—until I started talking to experts on biodegradability.

"That's a load of hooey" was the reaction of Tim Greiner, a Massachusetts sustainability consultant.
Like other experts, he was dubious that PVC could be made to harmlessly melt away. But even if it did work, Greiner questioned the need for it. Biodegradability is a nice solution for litter, perhaps. But credit cards aren't generally littered. So, Greiner asked, "What is the problem this card solves?"

What problem, indeed?

It was a useful question to bear in mind as I started wading into the thicket of "green" plastics. What I found was a broad and sometimes bewildering variety of products made with or packaged in resins that manufacturers claim are safer for the environment and our health, including chip bags, water bottles, cell phones, BB gun pellets, diapers, carpets, cutlery, ballpoint pens, socks, cosmetic cases, plant pots, Easter-basket grass, flip-flops, and trash bags "with a conscience." Some, like the Discover card, involve conventional plastics with a green twist. Others are made from alternative "biobased" polymers: for example, the Apple iTunes gift card my daughter recently got for her birthday is made of a corn-based plastic.

Green plastic
might sound like an oxymoron, but it's one of the industry's fastest-growing fields. Production of biobased polymers has been expanding at the rate of 8 to 10 percent a year and is expected to grow much faster in coming years.
There's so much excitement about bioplastics that it's tempting to describe their rise as a boom. But when I used that term with Ramani Narayan, one of the country's leading biopolymer experts, he reminded me that biobased plastics are still only a drop in the resin bucket, less than 1 percent of global plastics production.
The field is in its infancy, with a steep technological learning curve ahead. Nonetheless, a recent study estimated that bioplastics could one day replace as much as 90 percent of today's plastics.
Said Narayan, "This is the future of plastics."