Plastic (25 page)

Obviously, it's better for bags to be recycled than thrown away. But the practicalities of bag recycling are largely beside the point. The ACC needs recycling programs to assuage people's guilt about using plastic bags. If we can be persuaded that plastics have a lifetime beyond a one-time shopping trip, then maybe we won't bother to think about the wasted resources the bag literally and figuratively embodies. Thus the new message ACC spokespeople now repeat endlessly whenever called upon to defend plastic bags (or any other single-use plastic product): "Plastic is a valuable resource. Too valuable to waste."

Surely it's no coincidence that this is just the sort of phrase zero-waste advocates use when explaining why they are attacking the plastic bag. To San Francisco's Robert Haley, the bag is the ultimate example of waste, a diversion of valuable nonrenewable resources into an ephemeral product of marginal value. "Plastic should be a high value material," Haley said. "It should be in products that last a long time, and at the end of the life, you recycle it. To take oil or natural gas that took millions of years to produce and then to make a disposable product that lasts minutes or seconds, and then to just discard it—I think that's not a good way of using this resource."

The absurdity of the plastic-bag controversy becomes clear when you consider that people carried things for millennia without the aid of plastic or paper bags. (Be grateful we've passed the era when a bull's scrotum was the bag of choice.) Happily, we don't have to reach that far back to find the bag of the future. A reusable shopping bag can be made of any material—cotton, jute, polyester, nylon, polypropylene mesh, recycled soda bottles, or even thick durable polyethylene. Whatever the material, it will be an improvement over today's giveaways, provided it is frequently reused.

Not all single-use products are so easily replaced. But the fact that the plastic bag can be readily swapped for a sustainable alternative is one reason activists like Murray have put so much effort into the bag wars. That choice at the checkout stand marks an important first step in getting people to think about the environmental consequences of their actions, Murray said. "If you can get people to take this action of bringing their own bags to the store, that's an environmental statement that they're making in their lives," he said. "It's a gateway to environmental activity that I think will spread to other things that they might be willing to do."

As anyone who has tried to quit smoking or follow a diet or commit to a workout routine can attest, it's not easy to change our patterns of behavior, to do things we know, in the abstract, are good for us. So how
do
you encourage people to change their ways, to cultivate habits that are healthier for the environment? Arizona State University psychologist Robert Cialdini has done research for many years on the most effective ways to nudge people toward more environmentally responsible behavior. Surprisingly, the best method isn't to ask people to look inside themselves; rather, ask them to look
outward,
to their peers.
"You simply inform them of what the social norm is," said Cialdini. It's not that people don't know littering is wrong or that one should turn off lights when leaving a room. But people forget, grow careless, and need to be reminded, said Cialdini. In one study, he found that the best way to encourage hotel guests to reuse their towels was to leave a card in the room telling them that's what other guests did. That statement had more impact than did cards that told guests they should reuse their towels because it would help the environment, or save energy, or allow the hotel to save money and therefore charge less for its rooms. Another example: Cialdini helped craft a public service announcement designed to encourage Arizona residents to recycle. The PSA said, in essence, Arizonans approve of people who recycle and disapprove of those who don't. It declared recycling was the social norm. Most PSAs move only 1 to 2 percent of listeners to action, according to Cialdini. "Those public service announcements produced a hundred and twenty-five percent increase in recycling tonnage. That's unheard-of."

The frustrating thing about watching the bag wars over the past three years has been seeing how politics reaches for the easy answers, using policies that aren't very effective in making people change the way they think. Fees and public education campaigns help nurture a shared social value of reuse. By contrast, bans may capitalize on and reinforce people's reflexive distaste for plastics without encouraging them to question their reliance on single-use bags of any sort. At least that seems to be the experience in my hometown of San Francisco.

An independent consultant who visited all fifty-four of the city's major grocery stores in 2008 found they all were dispensing paper bags, and in many instances double-bagging whether or not it was needed.
True, paper bags may be easily recycled or composted, but San Franciscans are still consuming tens of millions
of shopping bags designed for a single trip home from the grocery store. And despite the ban, the city is still awash in plastic bags,
since the ban applied only to big groceries and drugstores. Mom-and-pop stores still hand out T-shirt bags, as do produce markets, takeout restaurants, clothing stores, hardware stores, and a host of other retailers. And every morning, rain or shine, my newspapers still arrive in tubular plastic sacks, often double-bagged. I've taken home relatively few plastic bags in over three years, and yet those two bag holders in my broom closet are always overflowing.

For all the shortcomings of bans, they have sustained a public discourse about our single-use habits. And there are hopeful signs that the throwaway mindset is changing. Makers of reusable bags report huge increases in sales; one Phoenix company that makes polypropylene mesh bags saw sales jump 1,000 percent in 2008. ChicoBag, a California company, saw sales of its five-dollar polyester bag triple that year and they have continued to grow.
Meanwhile, some makers of plastic bags see a new market opportunity and are retooling to produce heavier-gauge polyethylene bags that are truly reusable.

Recently, I spent one day doing an admittedly unscientific survey at three different grocery stores in San Francisco. While most shoppers were wheeling out carts stacked with paper bags, a small number, maybe two in ten, had their groceries packed in reusable bags—battered canvas bags, heavy plastic totes, or the mesh polypropylene bags that all the major stores in town are now selling for a dollar. Nearly every person in this robust minority said he or she had switched over to reusable bags in the past year or so. I stopped one young woman with five bags in her cart. She said she began bringing her own bags about a year before "just to be environmentally friendly." The reusable bags in her cart looked so new and pristine I asked whether she owned a lot of them. "No," she answered. "I have, like, five, and I always keep them in my trunk. I try not to waste them either."

7. Closing the Loop

N
ATHANIEL WYETH OFTEN
called himself "the other Wyeth" in deference to his famous artist family: his father, N. C. Wyeth, and siblings Andrew and Henriette. It was clear from an early age that he wouldn't be joining that artistic dynasty. Instead of inks and paints, he was fascinated by gears and gadgets—so much so that when he was ten, his father changed the boy's first name from Newell (his own given name) to Nathaniel, after an uncle who was an engineer.
Sure enough, Wyeth went on to train as a mechanical engineer and in 1936 joined DuPont, where he remained for nearly forty years, inventing up a storm in plastics as well as in other materials. It irritated him that chemistry didn't get the same creative kudos as art. A painter need only imagine a picture and then put it to canvas, he pointed out, while a polymer engineer had to conjure entirely new molecules, give them substance, and make them work.
As he once told an interviewer, "I'm in the same field as the artists—creativity—but theirs is a glamour one."

The act of imagination that won him a spot in the Plastics Hall of Fame began one day in 1967 with a question: Why does soda come only in glass bottles? Coworkers explained that plastic bottles explode under the pressure of carbonation. Wyeth was skeptical. He bought a plastic bottle of detergent, emptied out the soap, filled it with ginger ale, and stuck it in the refrigerator. When he opened the fridge the next morning, the bottle had swelled so much, he could hardly pull it from between the shelves. Wyeth was certain there was a way to solve what he called "the pop bottle problem." It only took ten thousand tries to find the solution.

Wyeth knew that some polymers gained tensile strength when stretched lengthwise; a polymer used to make a soda bottle needed to get stronger when stretched both lengthwise
and
widthwise. That challenge demanded both a special polymer and a new system for making bottles.
Wyeth found both. He used polyethylene terephthalate
—a type of polyester—and molded it first into a small test-tube shape that was then inflated into a full-sized bottle; this method caused the molecules to realign and provide a whole new level of structural strength. Here was a plastic bottle that was tough enough to withstand all that pressurized fizz but also safe enough to win approval from the FDA.
It was as clear as glass but shatterproof and just a fraction of its weight. Its thin walls kept out oxygen that could spoil food contents while holding in that explosive carbon dioxide. The PET bottle was yet another of those pedestrian plastic products that humbly fulfilled a Herculean set of demands.

Wyeth filed his patent in 1973. Coca-Cola and Pepsi quickly glommed onto the PET bottle, and—as so many plastic stories go—soon there were bazillions. About a third of the 224 billion beverage containers sold in the United States are now made of PET,
the polymer also known as #1 plastic, after the resin-code designation introduced by the industry in 1988.

The stunning success of the PET bottle wrought a number of changes that Wyeth, who died in 1990, surely couldn't have anticipated. Soda makers could more easily package their drinks in bottles that were positively Goliath compared to the dainty six-and-a-half-ounce glass bottles that launched Coca-Cola into American iceboxes nearly a century ago. Single-serve bottles swelled to hold three or four times that much; family-sized bottles ballooned to hold up to a hundred ounces. Bigger bottles encouraged bigger consumption. By 2000, the average American was guzzling about fifty gallons of soda pop a year, about double the amount in pre-PET days.
And bigger consumption has helped make
us
bigger, say nutrition experts charting worrisome correlations between rising soda consumption and rising rates of obesity and type 2 diabetes.

Wyeth's wonder also enabled the growing habit of consuming on the go. Once upon a time, most beer and soda was consumed in bars and restaurants. Not anymore.
Think about how much real estate your average convenience store or corner deli devotes to chilled single-serving bottles of soda, juice, tea, and water. (Mincing no words, the beverage industry calls such stores "immediate consumption channels."
) Single-serving drinks are now the biggest part of the beverage industry. The fastest-growing segment of that chug-on-the-go market is bottled water—a controversial product that arguably owes its existence to the PET bottle. Would designer water have become the indispensable twenty-first-century accessory if it had to be lugged around in vessels of heavy, breakable glass?

While wrestling with the pop bottle problem, Wyeth probably didn't give much thought to what would happen to the bottle once the pop was gone. End-of-life issues weren't a big consideration for polymer engineers in his time. Wyeth had come of age in an era when bottlers routinely collected glass empties to wash and refill. By the time he perfected the PET bottle, the beverage industry was already well on its way to abandoning that two-way system. It was a change that had its roots in World War II, when Anheuser-Busch and Coca-Cola shipped beer and soda to soldiers overseas in billions of cans and bottles that the companies knew were never coming back. But the soldiers did return—enamored with the convenience of nonreturnables—and created a demand that helped keep the beer can alive. The shift to nonreturnables also got a boost with the creation of the interstate highway system, which made it possible for the beverage industry to ship goods over much longer distances, eliminating the need for local bottling plants. The introduction of light, unrefillable PET bottles helped seal the changeover to what the industry calls "one-ways."

Plastic bottles intensified the consequences of the shift to one-ways, adding a nondegradable variety of trash to the growing amount of litter carelessly discarded along roadways, beaches, and parks and to the swelling volumes of products and packaging we discarded in our weekly trash. The abandoned soda bottle was an unsightly corollary to the new ethos of convenience, the sort of sour note that might cause you to question a relationship that otherwise seemed like so much fun.

The growing blight of plastic bottles helped shape the sensibility of the nascent recycling movement. More than that, the bottles themselves provided the material basis for that movement to grow. We now have a whole infrastructure of public and private enterprises dedicated to lessening the environmental burden of our expanding waste stream by cycling those one-ways back into use for new raw materials and products. If recycling has an iconic object, it's the PET bottle.

This was partly due to the agility of the PET molecule; it's a polymer that can be easily adapted for a range of after-uses. No sooner did Coke and Pepsi start bottling their sodas in PET than the first PET bottles were recycled into pallet strapping and paintbrush bristles.
But Wellman Industries, a longtime textile manufacturer, discovered an even more significant second use for the bottles: the base for polyester fiber. Wellman had been using off-spec industrial scrap to make polyester for years—a strategy that amounted to the company's telling its suppliers: We loved that mistake you made. Can you do it again?
The arrival of the PET bottle was a massive windfall, synthetic manna from heaven. Suddenly the company had a source of millions of pounds of inexpensive raw material for clothing, sleeping-bag fill, and furniture. In the 1990s, it teamed up with an old New England wool mill and the outdoor gear manufacturer Patagonia to start turning those used PET bottles into synthetic fleece, launching a whole new category of ecofashion that continues to thrive. Many of the teams at the 2010 World Cup—at least those sponsored by Nike—were wearing uniforms made of recycled PET bottles.