July 18, 2022

we are all material gworls (the material is plastic)

Dear friend—

I think I am constantly thinking about plastic.

When I was a kid, my mother taught me to recycle dutifully, borderline obsessively. On days out, she holds on to her daily bottle of Diet Coke until we find a recycling bin—more often than not, she has to wait until we return home to toss it in our own recycling bin. I’ve inherited this habit from her.

Cardboard, plastic, glass, aluminum … my family always rinsed all that needed rinsed, even the most stubborn peanut butter jar, and stacked the containers in a pile beside the sink. After dinner, I would take the pile and run through our garage, the concrete freezing and gritty against the soles of my feet, to drop the pile into our yellow recycling bin. Clank-clickity-clack-clink!

For years, I thought recycling absolved me of some crime, though I don’t think I really understood the crime. And once the bottles were in the bin, I no longer thought about them. They became someone else’s responsibility, someone who would sort and process and magic them into something new.

Since then, I have learned a lot about plastic. I learned that plastic essentially lives forever—even the silly little scraps wrapped around our silly little forks and knives and even those silly little forks and knives, which are not recyclable and so go to landfill.

Wishful recycling of non-recyclable plastics, I learned, is perhaps worse than chucking them right in the trash. It takes extra time and energy to sort them out, which makes the recycling process for everything more time- and resource-intensive. When in doubt, throw it out … where it will sit in landfill and turn into tiny plastic particles that will seep into our soil and our water and our air and our bodies.

I learned that almost all plastics are made from fossil fuels, and our current plastic-drenched world is a byproduct of the same billion-dollar industries pumping climate emissions into our increasingly warming planet. And most recently, I learned that no matter how careful I am about chucking things in the blue bin, there is only a 1 out of 20 chance that it actually gets recycled.

This is not a bug, but a feature. The industry has always known that recycling was DOA, even as they pushed it as the solution to plastic pollution. Before that, despite plastic’s sticky forever-ness, the petrochemical companies created the market for disposable plastics out of thin air. Not because anyone was calling for it, but because companies had too much plastic.

Plastic use boomed in World War II, in weapons and planes and other equipment. When peace came, petrochemical companies wanted to keep the money coming in. The solution—pushing plastic, as environmental sociologist Rebecca Altman writes, “not into homes but through them.” (Emphasis my own.) The industry had to teach folks through advertising that throwing away plastic was “okay,” that they didn’t need to reuse or repurpose it.1 This brought us to our current disposable world, where everything is made of plastic or wrapped in plastic and almost certainly destined for landfill.

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When I first became hip to the perils of plastic, I was an undergraduate student living in a dorm. I went through a zero-waste phase. I tried to eliminate as much trash, especially plastic, as possible from my life. My zero-waste purity ended due to a confluence of factors, which I still stand by today, but my fear of and resentment toward plastic has continually ebbed and flowed.

There are the individual choices we make—and then there are the systemic ones that we swim in, either with or against, but always among.

Going zero-waste was hard, even for me, the upper-middle class college student at a public university. It is so hard to find produce not wrapped in plastic. It is almost always more expensive to buy toiletries in plastic-free packaging. The pills I take every day come in plastic bottles that won’t be recycled. My clothes and my furniture and my air conditioner and my computer—plastic, plastic, plastic.

It is easy for me to rail against plastic. Much harder to actually cut it out of my life. And much harder still for those not in the life circumstances to give plastic a yeet.

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Rebecca Altman has perhaps a deeper relationship to plastic than most. I came across her work a few weeks ago. Altman’s father worked for years at Union Carbide, a legacy petrochemical company, at a plant in New Jersey that became “the birthplace of modern plastics.” In one ruminative, haunting essay, she reflects on her family’s and the world’s relationship with the stuff.2

Most of the time, I see plastic as emblematic and symptomatic of modern life’s greatest ills. In much of the way that it’s used, it trades small victories—lightweight products, snack food conveniences—for incredible human and planetary tolls.

Before plastic even becomes a product, it does harm. Petrochemicals release toxic substances that flood nearby neighborhoods. Plenty of plants have wantonly dumped their waste into nearby rivers and empty land. Overwhelmingly, these plants are cited alongside poor communities and communities of color.

As Altman points out in her essay, the petrochemical plants that dot the banks of the Mississippi River sit on what were once cotton, indigo, and sugar plantations. “The descendants of enslaved people now share a fence line with some of the most polluting industries in the nation,” she writes. Industries like plastics and fossil fuels are just another—tool? symptom? face?—of white supremacy, of Astronomical Money laying waste to Black and Brown bodies.

At the same time, plastic makes the world better and safer in many ways. For instance, it’s used in a variety of medical equipment that saves lives. Plastics are key ingredients in personal protective equipment, such as masks and goggles and gowns and gloves. And the fact that we throw away all this gear means less contamination, less illness, less death.

Altman reflects on an essay by Jody Roberts, a plastics scholar who found his family reliant on the stuff when his daughter was born with cerebral palsy and needed plastic tubes to eat and breathe.

“His essay,” she writes, “forced me to reconcile plastics as both life-altering and life-giving—practically inseparable from the practice of modern healthcare. We are past the point of simple dichotomies such as good/bad, nature/plastic, innocent/complicit.” (Emphasis my own.)

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While self-flagellation is one of my favorite pastimes, I’m trying to convince myself that using plastic does not make me a bad person. And swearing off plastic is meaningless to the neighbor who has no choice but to buy plastic because it’s the cheapest or safest or most reliable option. It won’t change the social and environmental ills, or moral quandaries, of plastic’s alternatives. “Vegan leather” is made of plastic, but far be it from me to tell the vegan they should purchase the animal version instead.

There are the individual choices we make—and then there are the systemic ones that we swim in, either with or against, but always among.

Of course, creating a post-plastic-waste world requires cultural and political changes. It requires a world that no longer sees some as dispensable or more easily poisoned. A world that puts health and safety over money and power, care over convenience. That sees every material and every person’s inherent value and potential. In short, I think it requires the same world that we need to fight every threat to humanity, from racism and imperialism, to environmental degradation and climate change.

Easy peasy lemon squeezy, I know.

mia xx