Plastic (10 page)

How tight became clear as I approached Freeport. For someone used to the strict zoning of San Francisco—where even a permit application to build a Burger King sets off a political brawl—I found the area that came into view a shock. One minute I was driving past low-rise apartment complexes, tree-shaded housing developments, restaurants, and shops, and then all of a sudden I was passing a vast industrial complex that stretched west as far as I could see, a dystopic skyline of otherworldly shapes, dun-colored towers, gigantic tanks, spires and silos and mazes of pipes. My hotel, advertised on the Internet as a local favorite spot for wedding parties, was right across the street.

Looking at a map later on, I saw that the town of 14,300 citizens was all but surrounded by petrochemistry. Dow operations cover five thousand acres in wide swaths to the northwest and east; a huge liquefied natural gas plant lies to the east also, bordering the beach; the salt-dome wells of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve sit on its southern edge. Scattered in between and around are the operations of other companies, including BASF, Conoco Phillips, and Rhodia. The only area without industry is to the west, where the municipal golf course is located. (It's also where, in 1994, chemicals leaching from a huge waste dump located on Dow property were found to be contaminating the ground water. A whole neighborhood had to be permanently evacuated.)

Dow's influence extends across the southern part of Brazoria County, named for the slow, muddy Brazos River that winds through it before emptying into the Gulf. Lake Jackson, the town north of Freeport, was literally built by Dow for the managers and engineers recruited to work at the new plant. Herbert Dow's grandson Alden, an architectural disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright, laid it out in the early 1940s. He designed much of the early housing and was responsible for the town's eccentric plan. Believing that it was nice not to know what lay ahead, he created an arrangement of insistently winding roads, all of them bearing names like Circle Way, This Way, That Way, and even Wrong Way.

Dow remains the biggest employer in the area and calculates that for every job the company directly provides, another seven are indirectly created. It pays more than $125 million in state and local taxes and donates more than $1.6 million each year to community projects large and small, from a maternity ward at the local hospital to new police radios.
For more than fifty years, it's been the place where the county's blue-collar kids work when they graduate from high school, and where the white-collar sons and daughters hire on after getting their college degrees. Everyone knows someone who works at Dow. "If this place went away, the community would fold," said Tracie Copeland, the cheery public affairs representative who agreed to show me Plant B, one of the three production complexes that make up Dow's Freeport operations.

Plant B is a grid of fifty different plants, each one a mini-village devoted to the making of a particular plastic resin or chemical building block. We drove past facilities that make polypropylene, polystyrene, polycarbonate, and various epoxies, as well as the monomers—the starting chemicals—for polystyrene and polyurethane. Many encompass entire blocks. The streets have names out of the periodic table, such as Chlorine and Tin. Fat white pipes run along the ground or stretch overhead—the vital arteries of the complex, connecting it all. We passed a lone worker on an adult-sized trike, and I suddenly realized he was the only person I'd seen outdoors. More than five thousand people work at the plant, but as Copeland explained, this massive maze works is run from computerized control rooms; that's where all the people are.

The people may be scarce in this Twilight Zone-like ecosystem, but the wildlife isn't. Plant B is home to a large colony of migratory sea birds known as skimmers. A herd of longhorn cattle graze in one of its greenbelts, and big schools of tarpon and redfish live in the saltwater intake ponds, Copeland noted as she pulled over next to a long, slightly brackish rectangle of deep water. "You wouldn't think to look at it, but it's a great fishing hole," she said. Former Texas governor Ann Richards once stopped by here, she said, and "caught just a ton."

At the corner of Nickel and Glycol streets, we stopped to see where the production of polyethylene starts: the industrial glimmer-in-the-eye of what will eventually become a Frisbee. In front of us was one of Dow's two crackers, a block-long bank of gigantic furnaces that break down the hydrocarbon molecules in crude oil and natural gas. Either substance can serve as the base raw material for plastics. Dow uses natural gas, as have most American resin makers since the price of oil started rising in the 1970s. Today, about 70 percent of plastics made in America are derived from natural gas and 30 percent from oil; the reverse ratio holds true in Europe and Asia, where natural gas prices run higher than oil.

The cracking process uses a spectrum of temperatures and pressures to disassemble and reassemble those hydrocarbons into new arrangements of gases that will serve as the starting ingredients, the monomers, used in making plastics. When the carbon atoms form a ring of six, you get benzene, which is one of the bases for styrene, used to make polystyrene. A carbon quartet can become butadiene, a chemical used in making synthetic rubber and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), the hard, shiny plastic used in Legos, cell phones, and other electronic devices. At another temperature, the carbons triple up, which can form propylene, the molecule used to make polypropylene. And in the highest hottest reaches of the cracker, where the temperature is cranked up past 750 degrees Celsius, two carbons can bond to form the gas ethylene, the starting molecule of polyethylene.

It was a quick drive from the cracker to a low, beige cinder-block building that serves as the nerve center for one of the operations dedicated to making the low-density polyethylene used in basic Frisbees. Our guide to the facility, John Johnson, was a fiftysomething barrel-chested mechanic in a blue jumpsuit who had worked at Dow since he got out of high school and who now oversaw maintenance of the plant. Production runs 24–7 and stops only for scheduled maintenance every eighteen months. "We run until something brings us down," he explained. In 2008, Hurricane Ike forced a closure, and it took two weeks to get the lines back up.

We followed him down a long hall, past a lab where polyethylene samples were tested for quality, to the control room, a space dominated by a long electronic board that looked like a digital subway map. But instead of tracking trains, this map tracked the flow of chemicals through the stations of transformation from various gases to liquid plastic. A man stood intently watching the board. "The board operator basically runs the plant," Johnson explained, then corrected himself. "The mod"—the computer system—"is running the plant, but he's the checks and balances for it. If something's out of line, he'll get the alarm and then come in and make adjustments." As if on cue, a bell sounded, and the man calmly punched a few buttons.

Before we could go outside to see the physical plant represented by the board, we were required to suit up. I pulled a blue mechanic's jumpsuit over my clothes, balanced an oversize hardhat on my head, slipped plastic safety glasses over my own glasses, stuffed earplugs in my ears, and pulled on thick leather gloves. All this to tour a facility in which, Johnson insisted, "you're safer than you are at home." Many of the chemicals used to make plastics, such as propylene, phenol, ethylene, chlorine, and benzene, are highly toxic. Decades ago, hazardous exposures were fairly common for plastics workers, but even critics agree the industry has improved its production processes, reducing the risks for its workers. "Dow has come a long way," Charles Singletary, the head of the local chapter of the operating engineers' union, told me. "We're not exposed like we used to be."
Still, accidents happen. In 2006, a worker at the Freeport plant was exposed to chlorine gas during an accidental release. For some reason, his protective mask got pulled off, and the man inhaled some of the deadly gas. According to Singletary, he called in the accident, finished his eleven-hour shift, went home, collapsed, and died.

Outside, Johnson showed us a bank of white pipes that carry the raw ingredients of polyethylene—ethylene, nitrogen, water, methane, and others—into and out of the plant. We followed the pipes, which arced overhead, into an enormous two-story shed filled with hissing and pumping machinery—the brute mechanics required to chemically crochet a new pattern of carbon and hydrogen atoms. Here, Johnson walked us past a series of tanks, compressors, and exchangers, explaining in great detail how the ethylene gas is repeatedly heated up and cooled down, squeezed under thousands of pounds per square inch of pressure, and then depressurized. After several cycles, more chemicals are piped into the mix: butane, isobutene, and propylene—the stuff that "makes the poly," Johnson shouted over the thundering sounds of production.

At the back of the second floor, he pulled open a door, then grabbed my arm as I instinctively started to walk through it. "You can't go in there. That's the reactor." This room represented the heart of the operation, the place where catalysts were added to the mix of chemicals to set off the big bang of the process: polymerization. Here was where the smaller individual molecules hooked themselves together into one magnificently giant molecule. I peeked through the door. I don't know what I was expecting to see—bubbling vats, steam-filled flasks. Instead, it was just a huge space filled with fat pipes looping up and down from floor to ceiling, like a gigantic intestine. I tried to imagine the molecules roller-coastering through the three-quarter-mile-long circuit of pipe, pulling closer and closer together, lining up, forming new bonds, gaining weight and mass until they dropped out of their airy gaseous state and pooled into a liquid resin.

I couldn't see any of that amazing transformation, of course. But as we returned to the ground floor and walked along the outer wall of the reactor chamber, I suddenly became aware that the atmosphere around us was subtly changed. The air had turned moist from all the hot water being fed into the reactor. The background noise shifted from a dull roar to a loud buzz, like a million lawn mowers. All at once I smelled plastic. My nostrils filled with that flat, featureless aroma you catch a whiff of when you chug the last drop from a plastic milk bottle or sniff a brand-new Frisbee.

The pipes around us were now flowing with liquid polyethylene. We followed them to another group of machines, where the liquid resin is cooled and molded into long spaghetti strands that are chopped into glossy rice-sized pellets, which are then spun dry. These pellets, also known as nurdles, are the coin of the realm in Plasticville, the form in which most plastics are traded and transported around the globe.

We watched a small hopper fill with fresh-baked white grains of polyethylene. I stuck my hand in; the pellets were still warm and so pleasing to the touch that I didn't want to pull my hand out. Johnson said the plant can make twenty-seven thousand to twenty-nine thousand pounds of pellets an hour, meaning that during the minute we stood watching, some four hundred to five hundred pounds of pellets tumbled by—roughly the combined weight of Johnson, Copeland, and me. It had taken scarcely sixty seconds to replicate our mass in plastic.

From here, the pellets are piped to nearby silos sitting alongside a pair of railroad lines. We climbed a flight of stairs into a shed that straddles the railroad tracks. From a catwalk we could look down. There were eight railcars lined up below us, each positioned precisely under a silo. Pellets poured like salt from a box of Morton's into a round opening at the top of the car. Each car holds 192,000 pounds of pellets, so the eight cars sitting below us would be carrying 1.5 million pounds of polyethylene. Some days just a single trainload is shipped out, and some days there are double shipments: sixteen cars—three million pounds of raw polyethylene—rolling out at five in the morning and five at night to factories around the United States and the world. Many will be loaded onto container vessels bound for China, where the pellets will be processed into products that we will then import. Dow, like other U.S. resin makers, has long supplied the plastics industries of the world.

That lopsided trade balance is changing, however. Historically, American and Western European companies have dominated the global industry, with the West supplying most of the nearly six hundred billion pounds of plastics now produced annually. But a seismic change is under way: the industry's center of gravity is shifting from the developed to the developing world, where production costs are lower, and demand and consumption are growing faster.
China, India, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East have all been gearing up to produce their own raw plastic resins.

For oil-rich countries such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates, plastics are a natural next stop. Each has built new manufacturing complexes, and to jump-start those efforts, they've tried to ally with American petrochemical producers—always eager to get closer to their feedstock sources—to make various commodity plastics. The Saudi company SABIC, for example, purchased General Electric's storied plastics division in 2007. Thanks to such ventures, the Middle East's share of worldwide raw plastic production has increased fivefold since 1990, to 15 percent.
Like the Chinese before them, the Saudis are trying to break into the value-added business of making finished plastic products.
Those
Made in China
labels we're so used to seeing may be joined before long by products stamped
Made in Saudi Arabia.

But those products may not necessarily be coming back to the United States or other developed economies. The United States, Europe, and Japan have long consumed the lion's share of the world's plastics, but as the romance with plastic goes global, experts believe the rest of the world is poised to quickly catch up. Per capita consumption of plastics in places like Africa, China, and India has shot up in recent years. A wide gap still exists—the world's average per capita consumption is still less than a third of the United States'. But that gap also suggests "a long trajectory of sustained growth of polymer production and demand in the developing world," as one recent forecast put it.
Assuming the developing world falls for plastic as hard as Americans have, the rising demand, coupled with the growing population, will require plastics production to swell nearly fourfold by 2050, to almost two trillion pounds.