Plastic (26 page)

The PET bottle, more than any other plastic product, has succeeded in covering the three bases necessary to a successful recycling loop. It's widely available, thanks to the billions produced each year. It's easy to reprocess. And it has numerous secondary markets. Manufacturers around the world clamor for bottles to make into T-shirts, carpets, and more new bottles. An empty PET bottle is valued by all players in the global recycling network, from street scavengers to multimillion-dollar businesses.

Even so, most are not recycled.

Nationally, we recycle only about a quarter of all PET bottles,
like the empty twenty-ounce Diet Coke bottle sitting on my desk as I type, a totem of my daily vice. So of the roughly seventy-two billion bottles produced each year, some fifty-five billion end up being landfilled or littered. That's nearly enough polyester to knit three sweaters for every resident of the United States.
It's a collection of energy that could heat and light up 1.2 million households for a year.
By any measure, fifty-five billion dumped bottles is an awful lot of waste.

In yet another of plastic's paradoxes, recycling's greatest success story, the PET bottle, is also the emblem of its greatest challenges.
We recycle less plastic than any other commodity material—scarcely 7 percent overall, compared to 23 percent of glass, 34 percent of metals, and 55 percent of paper.
In short, we're burying the same kinds of energy-dense molecules we spend a fortune to pump from the ground, scrape from mines, and blast mountaintops to reach. How does this make sense? As bag critic Robert Haley pointed out, when we put these precious molecules into products designed for the briefest of uses, we inevitably lose sight of their worth. We forget that an item like a used soda bottle is a resource worth saving, not trash to be thrown away. What will it take to turn that mindset around, to get people to value plastic for more than a one-night stand?

Waste wasn't much of a problem before the twentieth century. Curbside bins and the chasing-arrows symbol may be modern inventions, but people have been recycling and reusing materials throughout history. The preindustrial English were so engaged in recovering and repurposing clothes, metals, stones, and other materials that one historian has called the period "a golden age of recycling." Until the mid-nineteenth century, paper was made entirely of what today we would call "postconsumer content," namely used rags. During the American Civil War, rags and fabric were in such short supply that papermakers imported Egyptian mummies so they could use their linen wrappings—surely one of the longest recycling loops on record.

For much of the United States' history, Americans produced relatively little trash. Packaging, now one of the largest portions of the waste stream, scarcely existed. Most food and goods were sold in bulk. And few people had the resources to be wasteful, as historian Susan Strasser pointed out in her social history of garbage,
Waste and Want.
Reuse was a daily habit. Women cooked food scraps into soup and fed leftovers to the pigs and chickens most households kept. Old clothes were mended, disassembled for rags, or made into new outfits. Broken objects were repaired, dismantled for their parts, or sold to itinerant peddlers, who in turn broke them down and sold the metals, glass, rags, leather, and other materials back to industry.
Children of the poor scoured their environs for useful castoffs that could be sold, much as they do today in developing countries. Things that could not be used in any way were burned; for the poor especially, "trash heated rooms and cooked dinners," Strasser wrote. The continual cycling of used goods not only kept households going but also provided crucial sources of raw materials for early industrialization.

These kinds of informal recycling systems began to fade in the early twentieth century. On the one hand, people were starting to get more one-way products and packages. And on the other, municipal waste-collection systems and landfills were introduced by progressive-era reformers pushing to clean up the epidemic-breeding squalor of crowded, turn-of-the-century cities. From then on, the products and materials entering American lives increasingly had just one final destination: the garbage can. Waste was no longer a source of potential value or opportunity; it was a problem. And it was a problem solved by either digging holes in the ground and burying it or building incinerators and burning it. The worth of waste was measured solely in the tipping fees charged by dumps.

The pendulum began to swing back in the late 1960s, pulled by the emerging environmental movement. Activists were worried about chemicals leaching from unregulated landfills, distressed by growing amounts of litter, and convinced that we were draining the earth's resources at an alarming, unsustainable rate. Invoking that earlier ethos of reuse, thousands of voluntary grassroots recycling programs sprang up in the months surrounding the first Earth Day, in 1970.
But the movement didn't really gain steam until the late 1980s, after the New York garbage barge the
Mobro 4000
spent several weeks in 1987 cruising the Eastern Seaboard seeking a place to offload its cargo, and the country became seized by the conviction that it was facing a critical landfill shortage. As it turned out, the
Mobro
's plight had more to do with its owner's financial troubles than a lack of landfill space.
No matter. In the wake of the barge's epic wanderings, modern recycling took off. By the mid-1990s, most states had adopted comprehensive recycling laws and announced recycling targets and goals for reducing the waste headed for landfill. Communities began to incorporate curbside recycling and drop-off centers in their municipal solid-waste programs. Waste haulers built hundreds of materials-recovery facilities, known as MRFs (pronounced
murf
s), to sort the recyclable goods that were collected. New businesses sprouted up that were devoted to reclaiming used materials.

Meanwhile, in 1988 the Society for the Plastics Industry introduced a coding system to help manufacturers and recyclers identify the type of plastic packaging they were dealing with. Hence the tiny numbers you find today on the bottoms of bottles, jars, and other packages. The code was never intended as a promise that the item would be recycled, yet consumers have generally read it that way because the numbers are typically surrounded by a triangle of chasing arrows—the universal symbol of recycling. Given how little plastic is actually recycled, the misconception drives recycling experts nuts.

The resin code covers the six main plastics used in packaging: #1 refers to PET; #2 indicates high-density polyethylene (HDPE), the plastic used in milk and juice containers and T-shirt bags; #3 is polyvinyl chloride (PVC), which in packaging gets deployed in juice bottles, blister packs for electronics, and some cling wraps; #4 is low-density polyethylene, used for frozen-food bags, squeezable bottles, and sometimes cling films and the flexible lids of containers; #5 is polypropylene, the plastic of yogurt containers, margarine tubs, bottle caps, and microwavable ware. The #6 refers to polystyrene, either in a foamed version that's used in egg cartons and takeout containers or in a hard, clear incarnation, which is increasingly being used in clamshell containers for produce, consumer goods, and takeout foods. The last category, #7, was intended as a catchall for any other plastic. In recent years, its association with bisphenol A-containing polycarbonate, found in those hard water bottles, has made consumers leery, tainting the designation for the makers of other plastics. No manufacturer wants a #7 on its product anymore.

The code is such a poor guide to the multiplicity of polymers used in packaging today—which tend to get pigeonholed as #7s—that efforts are under way to revise and expand the number of categories.
But back in the 1980s and '90s, the code provided a valuable lingua franca for the recycling infrastructure that was rapidly taking shape. That system itself is now as unreliable as the recycling code, resting as it does on the shaky commitment of municipal governments and people's fuzzily green hopes that by depositing discards in recycling bins rather than the trash, they will reduce their waste.

Most Americans now have access to recycling (though not necessarily through a curbside program).
It's the most popular environmental activity we engage in. But does it do any good? Even though I diligently dropped my empty Coke bottles in my blue bin every week, I really had no idea what happened to them after that. As I'd learn, my bottle embarked on an epic journey, and following that bottle would take me to parts of my hometown I'd never before visited, across the globe, and into an economy that is at once both ancient and postmodern.

It was Tuesday morning at 8:20 and I could hear the hydraulic hiss and grind of the recycling truck at the other end of the block. I hurried outside to meet the driver, Bill Bongi, who had agreed to let me follow him on his route.

San Francisco, where I live, probably boasts the strongest municipal recycling program in the country. In its drive to divert as much waste as possible from the city's landfill, San Francisco has made recycling mandatory. Residents are also required to compost food and yard waste. City officials admit they don't really have the resources to enforce this law. Still, because of that larger goal, residents are encouraged to put pretty much any kind of plastics in their recycling bins—the full gamut of #1s through #7s. That means not just the beverage bottles and milk jugs that most recycling programs collect but also yogurt tubs, old toys, flowerpots, toothbrushes, CD cases, disposable cups, and other non-packaging-related plastics less commonly accepted by community programs. There are only a few types of plastics I can't put in my bin: plastic bags, wraps, and film, because they get tangled in the equipment at the recycling plant; Styrofoam, because there are few secondary markets for it; and biodegradable and compostable plastics, because they're designed for composting rather than recycling.

Bongi, who's in his fifties, has worked for Recology, the company that hauls San Francisco's waste, since he graduated high school. Like several other employees of the company, he comes from a family of garbage men. He followed both his father and his grandfather into the business. When I asked if his kids would follow him, he said emphatically, "No, no, no. They're in college." I walked along the sidewalk as he drove slowly up the block, stopping between every two houses to hop out and grab the bins. (He misses the days when the trucks were manned by crews; now the only chance for conversation is if a resident comes out to greet him or ask a question.) There were the blue bins for recycling; green ones for yard trimmings, food scraps, and paper food packaging like pizza boxes that are trucked to the city's industrial-scale composting facility; and black bins, for whatever doesn't belong in the other two. This three-bin system is a key part of the city's ambitious zero-waste policy. Making residents separate their discards into the bins forces them to consider what parts of waste may in fact be fit for useful afterlives. The more city residents put in the green and blue bins, the lower their garbage bills, a "pay-as-you-throw" approach that experts say helps boost recycling rates.

Yet, as in any curbside program, there are intrinsic limitations to how much refuse can be rescued. There tends to be less compliance in apartment buildings, where most San Franciscans live and where responsibility for discards is more diffuse than in a single-family home. It's tough for landlords to check, much less ensure, that all their tenants are putting their recyclables in the blue bin. And curbside programs are, by definition, aimed at collecting things consumed in one place. Which means they don't catch the ever-increasing numbers of beverage bottles that are consumed on the go. Take a look in the trash cans at gas stations, one plastics recycler told me: they're always filled with empty bottles.

I'd made sure to put my week's worth of Diet Coke bottles in my blue bin that morning. But there were surprisingly few plastic bottles in the other bins Bongi emptied. Instead, the contents were mainly newspaper, cardboard, and glass jars. That's because of California's bottle bill: beverage bottles and cans in California can be redeemed for money, and so they are routinely swiped from the curbside bins, Bongi said. "The homeless steal all the bottles and cans." They'll still be recycled, but through the state's redemption program, not the city's recycling system.

I shouldn't have been surprised by the absence of bottles and cans. Months earlier, I had spent a morning with a homeless man named Sean, one of the bit players in San Francisco's unofficial recycling economy. Every day he walks a forty-block route through my neighborhood checking the blue bins for bottles and cans that he can sell to one of the city's eighteen neighborhood redemption centers. Those centers pay for beverage containers by the pound at prices set by the state, which fluctuate depending on the global scrap markets. On the day I spent with Sean, a pound of PET bottles was worth ninety-six cents, a good bit less than aluminum, slightly under glass, but still higher than any other kind of plastic.

Sean was in his late sixties. He was a friendly guy, with a white beard, clear blue eyes, few teeth, a weakness for beer, and a karmic take on his life of homelessness. He was well educated and seemed lucid except when he described the extraterrestrials who were remaking his body to make him stronger and better equipped for life on the street. Still, I believed him when he said that it had been his choice to live outdoors for the past twenty-three years. To his mind, it was all preparation for what would happen when he too was recycled.

"Do you ever want a home?" I asked.

"No," he said, "because the Buddhist teaching is the more you surrender, when you come back [in the next life] you come back big-time." He had found that whatever he needed tended to come his way, whether that was a shopping cart, a half-eaten sandwich, or a new pair of pants. "I find them on the street. See, there's a whole pile of shoes," he said, pointing to a bag by someone's trash bin. "I just keep my clothes for a day. When I'm finished with them I put them in places where people can recycle them if they want."