Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (26 page)

“When I first got to Madras, I went around to all the ragpickers, because they know everything,” said Leonard, who speaks in rapid-fire bursts. “They’re very organized and hierarchical. Each family does a different resin: one does only PET; another does only HDPE. The ragpickers were mad because they couldn’t compete with all the plastics coming in from overseas. They were losing their livelihood.” The ragpickers gleaned plastic from roadsides and trash cans, selling it to small factories that made low-quality plastics for sandals and kitchen goods. “You know,” said Leonard, “all that stuff you see in Third World countries that breaks. Cups and bowls.”

“And toys?” I asked.

“Yes!” Leonard yelped. We both had young children, and every time they went to birthday parties—her son on the West Coast and my daughter on the East—they came home flush with candy and cheap plastic toys made in Asia. “And they always end up in the trash,” Leonard said, sighing. Full circle.

I’d never talked to anyone so vehement about plastics. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Leonard had always thought she’d work as a forest activist. Then she went to school in New York and was bowled over by the amount of cardboard piled on sidewalks for collection. “That’s where all our forests are going,” she said to herself. Almost overnight, she dedicated herself to waste activism instead.

Riding around Madras in a rickshaw, Leonard ordered her driver to a halt every time she spotted a plastic bottle in a ditch. Over and over again, she saw bottles stamped “California Redemption Value”—bottle-bill bottles! “Finally, we came over a rise in the road and saw this enormous pile of compressed and baled bottles. The factory, owned by Futura Industries, washed, chipped, and melted the plastic, which it added to virgin plastic to spin polyester fabric. Out back there was a pile of waste—the hard bottoms of PET bottles, their lids and labels.” According to the plant manager, Futura processed only between 60 and 70 percent of the bottles it received (not unlike Allied, back in Brooklyn). The rest were either too contaminated with residual material, with other garbage that arrived mixed in with the shipment, or with substances impossible to recycle. This last category was growing by leaps and bounds as bottlers introduced weird hybrids into the marketplace: plastic bottles with aluminum tops, tinted or painted plastic, and bottles made of multiple layers.

According to Greenpeace, 50 percent of the discards shipped overseas were contaminated. Importers were left with mounds of plastic that they either dumped on the ground—often in unlined, unmanaged sites where they leached toxins into the soil and water—or burned. Greenpeace reported that none of the recycling workers employed by Futura—30 percent were women earning less than thirty cents a day, 60 percent were children, and the remaining 10 percent were old and disabled men—wore a mask or other clothing that would protect them from noxious fumes released by burning plastic, a combination of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and sulfur dioxide, and, in the case of PVC, dioxin. Dioxin migrates on the wind, settling on grasslands and in the water, where grazing animals and fish consume it. Like DDT, dioxin doesn’t readily break down in fatty tissues: it accumulates. According to medical researchers, traces of dioxin can be found in every person on earth.

In response to Greenpeace’s report on the dumping situation, Pepsi claimed that workers were not endangered, that Coke was doing the same thing, and that this was what bottle recycling looked like. “But it’s not recycling at all,” said Leonard. “True closed-loop recycling has no new resource input and no waste output. And that’s virtually impossible with plastic waste because its chemical structure changes when it’s heated and the quality degrades. We’re just delaying its eventual dumping.”

I hung up the phone and stared out the window for a minute. If Leonard was right, then it didn’t matter whether I redeemed my plastic bottles at the store, the first step on a journey to Asia, or gave them to American Ecoboard, via my food co-op. “Recycling” plastic, because it created new toxins and left old ones behind, might be more harmful than landfilling.

Leonard had suggested I call Berkeley’s Ecology Center, which developed the East Bay’s highly successful curbside recycling program, fueled its collection trucks with biodiesel, and ran a storefront that sold environmentally friendly carpet shampoo, compost bioactivator, whale magnets, and relaxation tapes. But for all its orthodoxy, the center for many years refused to collect plastic, which its founder, operating on the same wavelength as Ann Leonard, preferred to call “Satan’s resin.” Why such opposition? Because picking up plastic at the curb, said the Ecology Center, would legitimize the production and marketing of packaging made from virgin plastic, imply that it was ecologically friendly, and encourage residents to buy more of it. Alas, all this abandoned Berkeley plastic would only end up in the landfill. (In 2001, the city began to collect number one and number two containers, but only if they had necks narrower than their bases.)

As Leonard said, plastic isn’t truly recyclable in the way that glass, metals, and fibers are. Streams of mixed plastic can be turned into only one other product (plastic wood, garden pavers, or toothbrush handles, for example). When their useful life is over, these products cannot be “recycled” again. They have to be burned or buried. Either way, they add toxins to the environment. Unmixed streams are another matter: they actually can be refashioned into bottles and containers. But there isn’t much demand from their makers for recycled plastic. Virgin is so much cheaper.

And even if plastic manufacturers magically got it together and began using recycled content, the Ecology Center would still take issue. The raw material for the plastic used in packaging is ethylene, a gas derived from natural gas or from a fraction of crude oil that has a composition similar to natural gas. “Both natural gas and crude oil are products of fossils and are therefore not renewable,” says the Berkeley Plastics Task Force report.

Producing and refining ethylene is a multistep process, one that employs small armies of those white-coated chemists I mistakenly conjured at American Ecoboard. First, the gas has to be heated, then refrigerated, then combined with solvents, comonomers, additives, and other chemicals. The mixture is then “polymerized” to create long-chain molecules. The new polymer is extruded, pelletized, or flaked: the finished product is called a resin. The resin is sold, reextruded, and made into containers, films, and other products.

If it sounds energy intensive, it is. But even worse, plastic is toxic both to make and to dispose of. On the front end, said the EPA, the production of plastic emits the toxins trichloroethane, acetone, methylene chloride, methyl ethyl ketone, styrene, toluene, and 1, 1, 1 trichloroethane, as well as sulfur oxides, nitrous oxides, methanol, ethylene oxide, and volatile organic compounds. Plastic manufacturers use copious quantities of benzene and vinyl chloride, which are known to cause cancer in humans. Ingesting other ingredients of plastic production can lead to birth defects and damage the nervous system, blood, kidneys, and immune system. Many of these chemicals are gases and liquid hydrocarbons that readily vaporize and pollute the air; many are flammable and explosive, and many can cause serious damage to ecosystems. In an EPA ranking of the twenty chemicals whose production generates the most total hazardous waste, five of the top six are chemicals commonly used by the plastics industry. Not surprisingly, plastic resin factories tend to be clustered in low-income communities of color (mostly in the Gulf States, which have easier access to gas lines). OSHA health studies have shown that people who work in and live near plants that manufacture plastics and the chemicals used to make them experience higher incidences of some kinds of cancer than other populations.

At the end of their useful lives, plastic products that lie by the roadside or get buried in landfills can leach phthalates—which give plastic its softness and flexibility but have been linked with endocrine disruption—into groundwater. Burned in an incinerator, shampoo bottles, take-out containers, and bathtub mats release other toxins that escape smokestacks or are concentrated in bottom ash, which is eventually buried in landfills (unless it is combined with other materials and used in construction).

Of all the materials we throw out, plastic is among the hardest to kill. It doesn’t biodegrade in any conventional sense; sunlight causes it to photodegrade into ever-smaller pieces of polymers. These are easily consumed by some organisms, but they’re still too large and too tough to be digested by microorganisms. In a landfill, where the sun never shines, plastic doesn’t get even this far. (“Earth friendly” biodegradable plastics, made of potato- and cornstarch, need moisture to break down; this, too, is in short supply within most landfills.) But washed into the ocean from rivers and streams, dropped overboard from boats, or abandoned as fishing nets, plastic degrades into pieces that choke turtles, entangle jellyfish, and fill the stomachs of seabirds from the tropics to the antipodes, which then starve to death because they always feel full. Besides the usual bits of balloons and bags, Laysan albatross chicks have ingested a cigarette lighter, a toothbrush, a tampon applicator, a toy robot, a golf ball, and lids from a car battery and a shampoo bottle. In 1999, marine researcher Charles Moore surveyed five hundred square miles of the North Pacific subtropical gyre and found six pounds of floating plastic for every pound of naturally occurring zooplankton. He repeated his study in 2002 and found ten pounds of plastic for each pound of zooplankton. A 2004 study conducted by marine ecologists around the British Isles showed accumulations of microscopic fibers and bits of synthetic polymers in beach and seabed sediments, as well as a big jump, in the last two decades, in the concentration of plastic particles amid plankton.

The more I learned about plastic, the worse I felt about the way I transported short-grain brown rice from the food co-op to my home (in a number 4 LDPE bag that I reused) and stored my leftovers in the fridge (in number 5 polypropylene containers). Not only was plastic bad news, both coming and going, but trying to recycle it possibly made the situation even worse. “It’s just a diversion from more important issues, like sending putrescibles—very valuable stuff—to the landfill,” Dan Knapp told me. Knapp was part of the Berkeley Plastics Task Force, and he ran that city’s Urban Ore, a reuse and recycling center that kept five thousand tons of “waste,” in hundreds of different categories, in circulation and out of the landfill. “We should just ban plastics. They’re not worth it.”

After talking to Knapp I reviewed my own garbage data. It’s estimated that Americans go through about a hundred billion polyethylene bags—the ubiquitous eighteen-microns-thick grocery sacks that snag on branches, skip along on the breeze, clog sewers and storm drains, and burrow into ditches and dunes—a year. Although plastic bags don’t take up a lot of landfill space, they persist in the environment for decades, if not centuries. Like other forms of plastic, they have high social and environmental costs—called “externalities”—that are borne by the public and by government, not by the producers of the plastics or their intended users. Recognizing these externalities, South Africa has prohibited the sale of plastic bags under 80 microns thick, and Taiwan and Bangladesh, where plastic trash clogged street drains that carried human waste, have banned free distribution of the bags in stores. Ireland reduced bag use by 90 percent by instituting a fifteen-cent charge for each sack.

Because they were so light, plastics left barely a mark in my trash logs, though I was going through an average of 5.2 Ziplocs and thin vegetable bags a week. When I began separating the bags from my kitchen trash, the total number of items in the can fell by nearly half. I ignored the slimiest bags, but the torn veggie bags, the worn-out Ziplocs, excess shopping sacks, pretzel and spinach and cheese bags, scraps of Saran Wrap, bread bags, and their ridiculous inner plastic liners now collected in yet another bin in my personal materials recovery facility (my kitchen). After one month, I had an entire pound of them.

Until producers took back the resins they sent out—I figured this would take a legislative act—I was going to have to change my habits. Instead of carrying my brown rice home in a plastic bag, I could buy it in a recyclable box. That sounded good until I considered its product-to-package ratio. According to California’s Integrated Waste Management Board, a delivery of one thousand pounds of rice in plastic bags generated 3.9 pounds of waste, while the same amount of rice delivered in paperboard generated 78.1 pounds of waste. Which was preferable? The choices, like so many at the intersection of consumerism and environmental concern, were agonizing.

Switching from bottles of liquid dish soap to cakes of hard yellow soap, which worked great and came with zero packaging, was a no-brainer. I was already reusing my Ziplocs, but I resolved to always use containers, rather than Saran Wrap, to hold leftovers. I checked my data sheets again: the only other plastics that occurred in my trash were bottles of shampoo, conditioner, olive oil, ketchup, mouthwash, medicine, and, twice, children’s bubbles. A year’s data included three half-liter water bottles, but on that matter my conscience was clear: they were outliers, introduced by guests unaware of my single-use phobia. I was devoted to my widemouthed Nalgene bottle—refillable, hardy at all temperatures, a cinch to clean. Then I read about a study conducted at Case Western Reserve University and learned it was made of a polycarbonate called Lexan that’s been linked in mice to an endocrine disruptor called bisphenol-A, which has in turn been linked to chromosome abnormalities and the runaway development of fat cells. The only healthy alternatives for toting around liquids, it seemed, were the leather bota bag, popularized by Chianti-drinking campers in the seventies, and the bladders of large ungulates, like buffalo or elk, popularized by hard-core survivalists.

But what about the plastic bottles I used at home? I decided to buy ketchup only in glass. I would buy olive oil in cans, then give them to Wendy Neu. I could buy shampoo and conditioner in the largest-size plastic bottle I could find. It was either that or go for those antiquey-looking products, usually “botanical,” that came in blue glass. But they were expensive, and heavy, and slippery when wet, and impossible to squeeze the last and even second-to-last drops from.