Plastic (33 page)

PLA is trickier. It will biodegrade, but only under optimal composting conditions, which are challenging to achieve on one's own. Given the so-so state of my backyard compost bin, I suspect that if I deposited the PLA iTunes gift card there, it would remain intact for a good long while. Really mobilizing the microbes that can pry apart PLA's long polymer chains requires a balance of oxygen, moisture, aeration, and steady temperatures between 120 and 140 degrees—in short, the sort of conditions most readily found in an industrial composting facility. Unfortunately, there are only about two hundred to three hundred facilities in the country that process consumer food waste, and far fewer communities that actually collect residential food scraps for composting. Most of those are located in California and Washington.

As with any new technology, it takes time for a supporting infrastructure to develop. NatureWorks hopes that PLA products can eventually be chemically recycled, through a chemical process that breaks them back down to the starting ingredient, lactic acid. But as of 2010, there's only one facility in the world capable of doing that. At the moment, the plastic is creating a mini-crisis in the recycling world, where all is geared to conventional plastics. PLA is increasingly used for food packaging, but many consumers don't realize a PLA bottle can't go into the recycling bin. "We're freaking out about these," said one executive at San Francisco's Recology as he showed me a plastic water bottle made of PLA. The bottle looked exactly like one made of PET, yet it could contaminate a batch of PET being recycled. While some cup makers have started using green or brown logos and labels to indicate the cups are made of PLA, as of yet there's no standard system for differentiating biopolymers.

The allure of biodegradability is understandable. (Though it's ironic to see it assume the kind of marketing cachet for plastics that durability once held. I can't imagine any plastics maker today using this ad that ran in the 1980s: "Plastic is forever ... and a lot cheaper than diamonds.")
Still, the ability to biodegrade is neither a panacea for pollution nor the end-of-life solution to all things plastic.

Consider all the products, like that Discover card, that claim to break down in a landfill. It's a myth and a misplaced hope, said Steve Mojo; he's the director of the Biodegradable Products Institute, a trade group that polices the biopolymers world, certifying products that pass international standards of compostability and biodegradability.
Ideally, nothing should biodegrade in a landfill, he explained. Landfills are engineered to deter that process as much as possible because it generates greenhouse gases. Yucky as it may be to think that our garbage will outlast us as well as our great-great-grandchildren, that's actually preferable to having it break down and give off methane, the most potent climate-change gas. Listening to Mojo describe how landfills work, I thought about the many biodegradable bags that are sold for collecting dog poop and that most people simply throw into the trash. These well-intentioned folks may be hoping that by their using biodegradable bags rather than regular plastic sacks, their pooches' poop will be more likely to decompose. But as with anything deposited in a landfill, "it's going to be preserved," said Mojo. "So when [future] generations go out and excavate the landfill, they will know we had a lot of dogs."

Where biodegradability makes sense is in products that are associated with food or organic waste (the sort that, unlike dog poop, can be safely composted), such as disposable plates and cups and cutlery, snack packages, and fast-food containers. All are single-use items that aren't often recycled today, especially the ones made of film. (Biodegradability would also be useful for the millions of pounds of agricultural film used by farmers every growing season to block weeds from sprouting among crops and that no one has found a way to economically recycle.) Making these kinds of products out of biodegradable bioplastics not only provides a solution for disposing of the package, it helps encourage the composting of food waste—which is a far bigger part of the garbage stream than plastics. Americans throw away more than thirty million tons of food waste each year, and most winds up in landfills.
Zero-waste advocates see compostable plastic packaging as a two-for-one solution.

But is biodegradability the answer to the waste problems posed by quasi-cash plastic cards? Maybe. But what about redesigning them so that it's easier to load on new credit, allowing a card to be reused? That way, fewer new cards would have to be made. As for credit cards, why not reduce the frequency with which new cards are issued for existing accounts? Or expand on the few paltry card-to-card recycling programs that currently exist? Or make the cards out of a less toxic plastic than PVC so they can be more easily recycled? That's the route some European banks have gone and the one chosen by HSBC when it wanted to issue a more earth-friendly credit card for its Hong Kong market. Its green card, unveiled in 2008, is made from the most recycled plastic, PET.
And it's backed by even more tangible ecobenefits: digital billing, which cuts down on paper waste, and the bank's pledge that a portion of all spending will be donated to local environmental projects.

Manufacturers have long chosen the plastics for their products on the basis of price and functionality. But creating a more sustainable relationship with plastics will require a new dexterity on our part. It will require us to think about the entire life cycle of the products we create and use. A green plastic that's suitable for one application may not be suitable for another when all environmental factors are taken into account. Biodegradation may not always be the best answer.

Consider the recent report in the
New York Times
that some designers of furniture and other housewares are taking pains to make sure their products are biodegradable. At one level, that's a laudable application of cradle-to-cradle thinking. Montauk Sofa, for instance, designed a line of couches in which all the components were made of organic, nontoxic materials that could biodegrade. As the chief executive of the company told the
Times,
"At first the whole idea was to have as little impact on the environment as possible. And then I started to think, wouldn't it be great to have no impact? Then it was, hey, what if the sofa just disappears when you're done with it?"

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."