Oct 30, 2009
More than a decade and a half before Mr. McGuire uttered the word plastics to the directionless Ben Braddock in The Graduate, my dad was getting his PhD in polymer science. He followed that with thirty plus years perfecting plastic for Du Pont—a successful career that paid for all eight of his children's educations. I even joined him for a summer at the plant, as a recipe mixer for test batches of new compounds. In the style of full disclosure, I have to admit I am from a plastics family. Since my teen years, I have refused to wear Dacron/cotton blends, but I was and still am a user.
However, today it is getting harder and harder to stay on the fix. There is no doubt that plastics have made our lives better, even saved it in some cases. One of the plastics my dad helped develop is the inner-layer in the windshield that holds a shattered pieces of glass together during an accident. This innovation has lessened frontal impact fatalities for decades. There are also important surgical procedures that require plastic parts and other every day applications, like PVC piping, that have contributed positively to our lives. However, the sea of waste created by the overuse and improper disposal of plastics is enough to make a person want to quit cold turkey
Since plastic doesn't sink, the phrase “sea of waste” is more than a metaphor. Carelessly discarded plastics travel down streams into rivers and out to sea constantly. There they congregate in massive groups in the slow moving currents of the Pacific. Reports claim that one of these massive floating plastic dumps covers an area twice the size of the United States. Roadside litter is heart-wrenching enough. Imagine what a hellish sight a floating continent of plastic waste would be.
In the United States, we use about 50 million tons of plastics a year. Although recycling has increased over the past two decades, still less than ten percent of shopping bags and only about twenty-five percent of beverage bottles are recycled. We may feel cleansed of our sins when we take our trash to the waste station and separate it into the coded bins, but this makes restitution for a minute number of our consumption sins. Most of our plastics (and consumption sins) are still being covered over in landfills.
While plastic consumption is controversial mainly due to its environmental impact, there are many global economic issues we ought to consider as well every time we hoist a bottle of water to our lips. About eight percent of world-wide petroleum production is used to make plastics. Derivatives from natural gas are also used in the production of plastic. Plastic water bottle production in the US alone requires 1.5 million barrels of oil annually. We may very well be quenching one thirst while contributing to another.
I cannot remember being overly thirsty as a child, yet I am sure that in those days the only water available in a bottle was Perrier. I don’t remember our moms chasing after us with little green bottles to keep us hydrated at the playground either. As a young adult, I do remember when Evian was introduced along with spandex at the gym. Unfortunately, both caught on. [By the way, Evian still spells naïve backwards and a little bag in the pants can hide a lot.]
Today, we are consuming bottled water like its, well, water. However, in terms of environmental and economic costs, a bottle of water is not just water—it is bottled water. We have shunned tap water at a fraction of a penny a gallon to pay 99 cents for sixteen ounces of water that nevertheless came out of some kind of tap. How else could they have gotten it from the spring into the bottle? Even with that ironic image and all the campaigns against it, bottled water consumption has quadrupled over the past twenty years.
Obviously, the aspects of plastic consumption we have the most influence over as individuals are beverage bottles and shopping bags. It is time to step up our self-discipline. We can tote water to fields in five gallon Igloo jugs. What fun is it to dump a bottle of water on the coach anyway? We can take a cloth shopping bag to the grocery store. And when we forget our eco-friendly bag, we can juggle our seven items all the way to the car as true penance for all the plastics we continue to consume. The new word, Ben, is avoidance.