Plastic Makes it (Im)possible

In the 1990s, the American Plastic Council launched a series of advertisements to persuade the American public that, as Mr. McGuire tells Dustin Hoffman in the film “The Graduate,” “There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?” Does Dustin Hoffman think about it?

If, after Dustin Hoffman entices the bride to run away from her wedding, together jumping on a bus to take them away from plastic suburban life, do they eventually buy return bus tickets to regular bourgeois life? Does Dustin begin a career working for the American Plastic Council? Will he go on to design ads that recommend a plastic-filled life to all of America?

In the 1990s, the American Plastic Council made a series of ads to convince Americans that plastic could do no wrong. In one, an image of mother and her daughter shopping at an old timey market, flies buzzing over naked chicken, naked carrots, naked meat. That image gives way to images of a shiny, new mother and daughter at a modern grocery store where her meat, her cereal, even her vegetables are properly dressed in protective films of plastic. The only buzzing comes from fluorescent lights above. One ad where skateboarding kids wear helmets and kneepads to “protect my patella,” as one precocious kid cheerfully points out, loops to another ad that begins with a women careening through barricades as the voice-over dauntingly speaks:

By the end of the week, 7 more lives will be saved (plastic airbags). By the end of the day, 16 people who couldn’t walk, will (plastic prosthetic limbs). By the end of the hour, these special filters will help make 25,000 more gallons of water ready for drinking (cool pipes). And by the end of this message, one more premature baby (heartbeat) will be protected (incubator). All of which is made possible with the help of a material, we call (dom dom) plastic.

*My daughter, born early, was incubated for weeks after she was born. My kids where helmets made out of plastic. My car is 50% plastic. I love my well-piped drinking water and the airbag armedand-ready for whatever barricades my womanly driving ways takes me through. But what Mr. McGuire, the Plastic Ad Council and Mr. Daunting Voice manage to make in their promises is the conflation of types of plastic. Single-use plastic is not the same as durable, long-term use plastic. The plastic in the supermarket is not the same plastic that is in the helmet of the skateboarding boys which is not the same as the plastic in the airbags or the plastic in the baby’s incubator. By eliding the differences between the purposes and types of plastics, the plastic propaganda machine can elicit a kind of “you’re either with us or against us” response. The suggestion: if you don’t use plastic, you might die of flies or car crashes or being born prematurely! It was a threat we took seriously. Wrap us up, American Plastic Council! With petroleum coating we shall bounce!

While I was walking my dogs, I poked my head into someone’s recycling bin looking for something that would substitute for a poop bag because I had run out. In that bin I saw a plethora of recycling that Flagstaff’s recycling stewards have begged and begged people not to include. In Flagstaff, you can only recycle plastic that bears the number one in the middle of that churning triangle. Not all plastic is bad. Not all plastic is recyclable. Even of the plastic that people deliberately put in their recycling bins only 9% is actually turned back into plastic. The vast majority of plastic ends up on slow boats across big oceans where countries whose economic interests (read, not rich) are willing to take our garbage, for a fee. You’ve heard of the giant plastic islands that swirl around the middle of oceans. Scientists predict that by 2030, there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future, reported that high-income countries send twice as much plastic to less-well-off countries than previously thought. We hide our plastic consumption, in the ocean, in other countries, in our landfills, in our recycling bins as if not looking at if actually made it disappear. A toddler’s peek-a-boo kind of system. A petroleum company was recorded saying it doesn’t matter how many electric cars people buy – they’ll make up the market for selling oil to plastic companies. They expect plastic use to double by 2050.

When I drive in my mostly plastic, mostly gas-powered (hybrid) Toyota to work, I pass by the Dutch Bros in Aspen Place. The cars idle, spewing their Co2 into the sky while incredibly happy people with mostly plastic iPads walk up to their windows to take orders from customers who would like a grasshopper double squirt smoothie coffee please.

The grasshopper double squirt smoothie coffee comes in a plastic cup just like the Coke at McDonald’s comes in a plastic cup and the iced Macchiato from Starbucks comes in a plastic cup. Take-out from Someburros and from Pita Jungle comes in plastic (not tin!) tins. The Gatorade comes in plastic. The packaged chicken from Whole Foods comes in plastic. If I were a performance artist, I would wrap the world in Saran Wrap and say, see, this is what the world is now! One planet, secured in plastic. Plastic is the bag in which we wrap our garbage-plastic, plastic planet in.

In the summer, I was complaining to my 13 year-old son that he had to get the Gatorade bottles off the floor. He said, “Mom, what if I just left the bottles there?” Mainly he said this because he didn’t want to clean his room. But maybe he has a point. Isn’t it better to know where your garbage is? Shouldn’t we have to live with the plastic we create? Imagine our roads and forests lined with water bottles, Coke bottles, Gatorade bottles, plastic bags, plastic forks and spoons, yogurt containers, straws, Lean Cuisine containers, raspberry cartons, sriracha bottles, milk gallons and candy wrappers. We could look upon the glory that is all the plastic we ever needed to make this planet as safe as possible.