I Have One Word For You

Benjamin Braddock is politely chatting with his parent’s friends at the high school graduation party they have hosted in his honor. He is taken aside by Mr. McGuire. Their conversation goes something like this:

     “Ben…”

     “Mr. McGuire?”

     “I just want to say one word to you. Are you listening Ben?”

     “Yes.”

     “Plastics.”

In 1967 (two years before my own graduation), I went to see “The Graduate” with my parents. I was as confused about my own future as Benjamin Braddock. I was also struck by the similarities of Benjamin’s parents’ culture and behavior to those of my own folks’. My mother said, “That poor kid,” referring to how the Braddock’s cluelessness mortified their son to such an extent that he took refuge underwater, in the family pool, breathing through a snorkel.

This movie comes to mind several times every day as I rinse out yet another plastic container and then try to fit it into my recycling bin. I often take stuff out and attempt to stack the containers within each other to take up less room. Just when I think I have compacted everything, they spring apart, sometimes flying out onto the kitchen floor. I empty the bin two or three times a day. I find this outrageous.

I can’t remember how we brought food home prior to the late ’60’s; before the petrochemical industry hired all the Benjamins and created an economy ever-more dependent upon fossil fuels. There were no rolls of plastic bags for produce, but then there weren’t that many choices of fruit or vegetables in supermarkets. If you wanted to buy four or five apples or several tomatoes, you put them in a small paper bag. 

We didn’t order many things through the mail, except at Christmas; if you needed something, you went to a store. People didn’t know they needed things because ads were only in magazines or newspapers or in TV commercials (and most of them were aimed at children and had to do with cereal or snacks). Direct mailing was just beginning and the Internet age hadn’t begun. 

When you ordered something, it came in a brown cardboard box stuffed with newspaper. Tiny items were mailed in small mailer envelopes. Today, a package of guitar strings requires a box the size of a loaf of bread stuffed with plastic bubble wrap. Drugstore items, like a bottle of eyewash or nasal spray are embedded in an envelope of clear plastic which requires a boxcutter fitted out with a razor blade to open. Even clothing ordered online comes enshrouded in a plastic bag.

Since none of these plastics are biodegradable and just a small fraction of them are re-used, we are drowning in our own detritus; plastic is the new nuclear waste.

It’s not just the landfills; our oceans are strangling in plastic waste. I think we humans view the ocean as a vast sewer; a black hole that swallows everything thrown into it. Yet plastic is more insidious than we ever imagined. Some plastics float, but others break down into micro fibers and microplastic particles. As our demand for fish increases, the plastic thoughtlessly tossed into our seas returns on our plates in the bodies of both fresh and saltwater fish. Seafood haters…don’t be too smug. We also consume microplastics when we drink bottled water, use toothpaste out of plastic tubes, or eat that shrink-wrapped lunch meat. We even absorb microplastics from the air we breathe.

Humans, especially Americans, create products and release them without much forethought about their future impact. So much of our economy depends upon products involving plastics that it is unlikely anyone will attempt to slow or halt plastic production, regardless of the health risks. Look how long it took to get any type of regulation in the tobacco industry!

The only possible thing that could put a halt to the environmental damage caused by plastics, is a less expensive, biodegradable type of plastic. I read an article in the NY Times about such a discovery. The RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science and the University of Tokyo have developed a biodegradable plastic which dissolves in seawater within hours and also enhances soil health. Since traditional plastics take hundreds of years to break down and even then, form micro plastics, this could prove a solution for the plastic problem.

As our garbage grows and overflows, it is high time we demand regulation of the plastic industry. We need to switch NOW to plastics that are biodegradable. We also need to contact the companies we support and tell them to go back to the metal toothpaste tubes, the glass bottles of eyewash and nose sprays. We should refuse to buy tiny products encased in huge, unneeded hard plastic containers. There are plenty of alternatives to plastic clothes, plastic furniture and plastic dinnerware and drinking cups. 

Once our scientific research catches up to our obsession with plastic consumption and begins to warn us of all the cancers and what-nots we have brought upon ourselves using non- biodegradable plastic for many decades, we may or may not choose to change. It seems to me everything depends upon whose pocketbook is most affected.

These days, I often feel as though I would like to sit at the bottom of a swimming pool, breathing through a snorkel to escape the world. It wouldn’t help. I would still be absorbing micro-plastics.