I have written about plastics several times in recent years, and each time I have expressed my frustration with the intractability of dealing with this ubiquitous material that only humans make. But now, after reading the latest exposé of the plastics industry, I am not just frustrated, I am feeling betrayed and really pissed off. That’s because what the NPR report by Laura Sullivan (“How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled” Sept. 11, 2020) reveals is that the recycling that all of us have long thought was at least mitigating the problem, by turning much of the plastic waste clogging our world into many repurposed plastic products we could use, was an elaborate con. A con that lured many of us, who have dutifully separated our plastic waste for years, looking for the triangle symbol at the bottom, and feeling relieved that it could be recycled rather than thrown away, have gone for hook, line and sinker. I personally have tried to gather my plastic bags into little sacks (I have several in my living room right now) that I can drop off at Safeway’s bins to be turned, I always believed, into plastic benches or something else useful. This so they wouldn’t clog up the oceans or beaches or our landfills—already groaning from the ever-increasing amounts of waste, including plastic, that we bury. This became especially urgent when we learned from reports two years ago that China and India would no longer accept our plastic waste at all. So the nice Recology (even the name is reassuring) trucks that come around weekly to collect my waste sport two separate bins—one for recyclable material, including appropriate plastic—and the other for regular waste destined for the landfill. And that belief that what was able to be recycled was being recycled has eased my earth-respecting conscience some.
Laura Sullivan’s report blows this all out of the water. It turns out that not only is none of this recycling happening where plastic is concerned, that it’s all been a ploy to quiet our minds about all the plastic being consumed, but that the oil companies that produce plastic have known, since at least the 1970s, that recycling plastic simply could not work. Here are the words from the report uncovered by NPR:
We found that the industry sold the public on an idea it knew wouldn't work — that the majority of plastic could be, and would be, recycled — all while making billions of dollars selling the world new plastic (NPR report, Sept. 11, 2020).
That pretty much sums it up; but the details, many of them from industry insiders who were in charge of the deceptive advertising, are staggering. Listen to Larry Thomas, former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, about the logic of the con in which he was involved: “If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment” (ibid). And so the industry set out to fool the public into thinking, through artfully-designed advertising, through secretly financing recycling companies and ‘recycling machines,’ that plastic could be recycled—all so that people would feel better about the cascading mountains of plastic being used for virtually everything in our world. Indeed, the oil industry used a playbook similar to the one used earlier by the cigarette industry, with an identical outcome in mind: ease their minds about plastic, as industry eased their minds about cancer, and sell billions more of our product. And they knew, all along, industry documents show, that it was all a lie, an elaborate con, because of the singular brute fact:
All used plastic can be turned into new things, but picking it up, sorting it out and melting it down is expensive. Plastic also degrades each time it is reused, meaning it can't be reused more than once or twice (ibid).
Since it’s cheaper to produce new plastic from oil than to do all this laborious sorting (which in any case results in ‘recycled’ products that can only be minimally reused), that is precisely what the oil and chemical industry giants like Exxon and Chevron and Dow and Dupont have done: produce ever-increasing amounts of new plastic. And meanwhile, their public relations geniuses have come up with the bullshit about recycling, and codes on the bottom of plastic containers, so people will dutifully check the triangles to see which level of recycling they signify—all of which has done nothing, zero, nada. Because in all the time John Q. Public has been recycling, the truth is that “less than 10 percent of plastic has been recycled” (ibid). Less than 10 %! Into this breach, meanwhile, the oil companies have plunged with always new plastic products and new plants (the latest a $6 billion facility in Sweeney, Texas, by Chevron Philips) still making billions on the manufacture of new plastic:
…The oil industry makes more than $400 billion a year making plastic, and as demand for oil for cars and trucks declines, the industry is telling shareholders that future profits will increasingly come from plastic (ibid).
Your read that right: the oil industry’s future profits will come from plastic. If this doesn’t make you angry, I don’t know what will.
What we really need to do, though, is examine the roots of this plastic menace, because we are all deeply involved, if not complicit. That’s because those roots run deep in the human psyche. What, to begin with, does plastic do for us; e.g., what human need does it satisfy? The answer is pretty simple: our lust for permanence. We want to be invulnerable to decay; we want protection from it and from the elements; we want homes and pipes and car parts and clothes and containers and tools that last; that won’t mix with the always corrosive effects of the natural world. That is what deeply frightens us after all: the habit that organic matter (including our own bodies) has of rotting, spoiling, yielding to the thousands of mites and worms and bacteria and fungi that feed on it. And so we try to insulate it as well as we can (all structures built now are draped in a protective layer of plastic). And for millennia, there was simply no good way to do that, no material that was proof against the natural cycle. But then along came oil, and then along came plastic. Able to be molded into whatever shape and size we wished, plastic was seemingly impervious to decay. Eureka! Our problems solved. Shirts didn’t need to be ironed: dacron and rayon solved all that. Pipes didn’t need to be molded out of iron that sooner or later failed: plastic pipes lasted almost forever. All our containers were easily molded from plastic that didn’t break when dropped. Now we have computerized 3-D printers that can forge any shape simply from a drawing—to make plastic guns and plastic machine parts and plastic animals and plastic little men. Our world has become a world made almost entirely of plastic, or if not made of it, then wrapped in it. Packaged in it.
Only there eventually emerged this little problem. Plastic did, indeed, last almost forever. It was proof against decay, because being unnatural, no natural creature fed on it. I once saw a comparison of electron-microscope images of organic matter, and alongside them, of plastic. The organic matter had structure, logical orderly structure. The plastic was chaotic, a mess of fibers jumbled together. In a word, unnatural. We know this instinctively. We are organic creatures and we respond automatically to others of our kind—organisms. And we know, equally organically, that plastic does not belong in our world. To put the matter in terms we can easily understand, and which important thinkers like Daniel Schmactenberg are now using: organic matter is part of nature’s system—a closed-loop system. That means, simply, that nothing is wasted. Everything in nature goes through its life cycle, and dies, whereupon it is used as food by some other organism in the fully-integrated system. Trees fall and die, are fed on by fungi and insects, which is to say, they rot, and become humus, which in turn feeds other organisms. The same is true of animals when they die, and humans when we die (if we’re not removed from the system by burial in a plastic container). The loop is closed: everything is used by everything else; nothing is wasted. This both pleases us aesthetically—a flower is beautiful to the extent that it dies and we know that the essence of its beauty is its evanescence—and terrifies us existentially. We know we are temporary creatures, like all other organic life, we know we will die, and that knowing leads inevitably to ego-driven fear. But again, that evanescence is also what makes every human life precious.
Plastic, on the other hand, is part of an open-loop system. A human-created system. It does not partake of the organic round. It is not consumed by fungi or bacteria or anything else we know of (though there are some innovations claiming to have developed bacteria or fungi that do consume plastic), at least not for thousands of years. It is what economists call an “externality”—something that the corporate world of capitalism disposes of but takes no responsibility for—like the waste generated by monstrous factory farms that pollute our waterways, or the waste produced by electronics manufacturers, many of whose components, not incidentally, are made of plastic. That means the system is open: outside the closed, recycling, integrated loop of nature. It does not become part of the whole that keeps going forever on its own. Its discard is a full stop. For this reason, our landfills are being overwhelmed with plastic. Our oceans are filled and overflowing with huge gyres of degraded and degrading plastic. The tiny plastic balls that result from this ‘photo degradation’ are mistaken by fish and seabirds for organic morsels that they normally feed upon. And so we have the terrifying spectacle of birds dying with their stomachs full of indigestible plastic bits; of fish dying in the same way; and of humans eating fish that contains some of this indigestible plastic—that has now become part of us. Indeed, a recent report in wired.com presented these alarming facts:
…in 11 national parks and protected areas in the western US, 1,000 metric tons of microfibers and microplastic particles fall from the sky each year, equivalent to over 120 million plastic water bottles—and that’s in just 6 percent of the country’s land area. Last month, another group described how the ocean is burping up microplastics, which then blow onshore via sea breezes. And last year, still more scientists reported that 7 trillion microplastic particles flow into the San Francisco Bay annually (Matt Simon, “Who’s to Blame for Plastic Microfiber Pollution?” wired.com, 6/22/20.)
Where do these microfibers come from? Why, mainly from those wonderful no-iron clothes we all wear and love. So convenient. But there is a price we pay for convenience, and we had all better heed it because, as Matt Simon puts it, it‘s those
cheap synthetic clothes that during each wash shed perhaps 100,000 microfibers, which then flow out to rivers and oceans through wastewater. (Consider that 70 years ago, the textile and clothing industries used 2 million tons of synthetic materials; that figure had skyrocketed to almost 50 million tons by 2010.) Everywhere scientists look, these microfibers turn up; they’re blowing into the Arctic and to the tops of (formerly) pristine mountaintops (ibid).
So yes: we have the convenience of synthetic clothes to wear; but we also have these microfibers that research is beginning to show have become parts of the very cells of fish, and have affected their reproductive capacity (“From Fish to humans, a Microplastic Invasion May Be Taking a Toll,” Andrea Thompson, 9/4/2018, scientificamerican.com). One study with hamsters injected with microfibers shows that they can lead to blood clots. So are we all now contaminated with plastic—from the fibers in the air we breathe, from the soil in which we grow our crops (and many of which are fertilized with sewage sludge laced with microfibers)? It is beginning to seem likely. And while no direct studies, for ethical reasons, can be done on humans, the prospects do not look good for us, if the ubiquity of plastic is not cut off.
The deeper problem, as always, is the system in which the manufacture of plastics, and the economics of that manufacture, are embedded. That system is corporate capitalism. The essence of the system, as most people now know, is profit; and not simply profit, but the elevation of profit over every other consideration. Profit over people more or less sums it up. This is what drives oil companies to not simply produce oil for cars and electricity generation and factory production, but to counteract the growing movement to shift from fossil fuels to more sustainable forms of power by a consistent program of deception—muddying the science with countervailing views about global warming so that average people will remain baffled and unconvinced of the urgency of change. And the fossil fuel giants do this knowing that the fate of all life hangs in the balance. How is this possible? First by treating carbon pollution—directly caused by their product—as an externality. ‘We are not responsible for what happens after the product leaves our facility.’ And second, by appealing to the needs of stockholders (mainly themselves) that profit must reign supreme. Even at the cost of all life on the planet? Even so. Profit is the irreducible minimum of every capitalist enterprise; and it has been made into an idol, unassailable, permanent, and given the unimpeachable attribute of being an integral part of human nature. Which of course it is not. Humans existed for millennia without it. But our current economics casts it in this light. And the advertising which is meant to convince us of this—using specious and false logic—drums this profit mantra into the mind of every human on the planet. And so far, it has worked. Why else would Americans be satisfied with the obscene spectacle of the wealthy few possessing more wealth than the rest of the population combined, able to conspicuously consume and waste while the majority can barely eke out of living? Simple: because they have convinced most of us that this is the natural way of things. Inevitable, perfect, what god or nature has intended.
Now, though, there is plastic—infiltrating our very cells. Now there is global warming, caused, without doubt, by humans and their industrial civilization. Now there is the real threat that humans, homo sapiens the species, will indeed become what Daniel Schmactenberg fittingly calls a “self-terminating species.” It is a forbidding term; a frightening term; but one that is stunningly apt at this time. It suggests, that is, that unless we change our systems to model them on nature’s closed loop system, change our very ways of thinking to restore organic life to the top of our pyramid of concern, we shall end ourselves, not as individuals, but as a species. That is what is at stake: not the existence of the planet as is commonly stated (the planet will survive without us as it did for millions of years), but our very survival as a species. Homo sapiens sapiens. Wise humans. Which often seems like a joke. For would a wise species come up with plastic? With a power source whose externality threatens all life?
But perhaps we should say that the term really points to an ideal yet to be achieved.
That some day—and it had better be soon—homo sapiens will be wise enough to no longer put all our energy into trying to make what is ineluctably temporary, permanent. No longer be fooled by the promise of plastic. No longer be fooled by viciously deceptive advertising that gulls us into believing that we can invent a material that can be of the natural system, but outside its natural cycle. Wise enough perhaps to know that it cannot be done—not without severe consequences, that is. Perhaps we will get there. For now, though, it might have to be enough to condemn, with all our being, these evil hucksters that have sold us on plastic and recycling. Condemn them and throw their evil product back in their well-pampered faces, and tell them in no uncertain terms that their nasty little game is over, their reign is over, and they had better revise their ethics and their thinking very very fast. Or there may not be the opportunity for revision or remorse or repentance or atonement ever again.
Lawrence DiStasi
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