Plastic (21 page)

Now we've begun to acknowledge there is trouble in this relationship, perhaps deep trouble. But we've been together so long it's difficult to imagine a different world, one in which people determined the fate of plastic, rather than the other way around.

And yet a small but determined group have begun to imagine that world. They've realized that the best way to prevent the oceans from choking on plastic debris is to better manage that debris on land, which means, among other things, curbing human reliance on throwaways. As a start, they've trained their sights on the most ubiquitous of all throwaway items: the plastic shopping bag. The bag may not be any more pernicious than foamed polystyrene cups or picnic forks or carryout clamshells, but it's the single-use item that, more than any other, has aroused popular ire. People the world over are calling for the bag's abolition, from community activists who view it as very nearly the spawn of Satan to the somewhat more staid head of the United Nations Environment Program who contends that "there is simply no justification for manufacturing them anymore, anywhere."

In 2007, San Francisco became the first U.S. city to ban plastic grocery bags, joining dozens of other cities and countries on every single continent that have taken moves to rid themselves of the bags. Inspired by San Francisco, local governments across the United States—from Plymouth, Massachusetts, to sunny Maui—announced their own measures to eliminate plastic bags, as did major retailers such as Ikea, Whole Foods, Walmart, and Target. All told, more than two hundred anti-bag measures have been introduced in the United States,
and although the plastics industry has successfully defeated or derailed many of those measures, activists as well as industry insiders predict that eventually the plastic bag as we know it will disappear—at least from grocery stores. (There are countless other types of plastic bags we rely upon.)

It's not hard to see why the bags have become a favorite target. They are virtually without substance—evanescent puffs of polyethylene, transient and yet ubiquitous. They are designed for a brief use but remain with us seemingly forever as a visible and costly source of litter—hanging from trees, plastered against fences, tumbling across beaches—as well as a potential threat to marine life. They do cause real harm, but their symbolic weight is even more significant. They've come to represent the collective sins of the age of plastic—an emblem "of waste and excess and the incremental destruction of nature," as
Time
magazine put it.
The bags signify the overpackaged world we all love to hate; they're the totem of all the ways in which "the plastics industry has helped turn us into a disposable society," as one anti-bag activist complained.

Often when we find ourselves caught in a relationship that makes us feel bad or guilty, we want to be rid of it as quickly as possible. Yet in the rush for a quick divorce, we may just find ourselves falling into a rebound romance that is no healthier than the one we just left.

How did we get hooked on plastic shopping bags?

For a century, imaginative entrepreneurs eyed the protean possibilities of plastic and asked: Which natural substances can these wonder materials replace? It was not a question that went uncontested. As the editor of the trade journal
Modern Plastics
observed in 1956, "Not a single solid market for plastics in existence today was eagerly waiting for these materials." Each new plastic product faced "either fearsome competition from vested materials or inertia and misunderstanding in acceptance, all of which had to be overcome before plastics gained a market."

The fight to conquer the checkout counter was part of plastic's long and steady incursion into the general field of packaging. About half of all goods are now contained, cushioned, shrink-wrapped, blister-packed, clamshelled, or otherwise encased in some kind of plastic.
Indeed, one of every three pounds of all plastic produced is used for packaging, including the now ubiquitous grocery bag that wraps itself around your fingers at every opportunity.
The push into packaging began in the late 1950s, as plastic challenged one after another of paper's strongholds. Soon, sliced bread was being sold in plastic bags, and waxed paper was being replaced by sandwich baggies. Dry cleaners abandoned heavy paper bags in favor of polyethylene sacks.

That last shift, however, sparked a national crisis in 1959, with a flurry of news reports that the new filmy bags could kill: eighty babies and toddlers had been accidentally suffocated, and at least seventeen adults had used them to commit suicide. In the ensuing "bag panic,"
dozens of communities proposed banning the bags, confronting the industry with its first major threat. The manufacturers of film plastics scrambled to save their fledgling industry, spending close to a million dollars on a national education campaign to warn consumers about the dangers of the diaphanous bags while also developing new industry standards to make them thicker and less clingy. Meanwhile, the head of the Society of the Plastics Industry (SPI) pledged to run newspaper and radio ads "until there is not a mother, father, boy or girl in this country who does not know what a plastic bag is for ... and what it is not for."
The combined measures shut down the calls for bans. As Jerome Heckman, the lawyer who for decades represented the SPI through the bag panic and countless later fights, recalled, "Our job was and should always be to open plastics markets and keep them open."

One of the companies with a huge vested interest in opening new markets was Mobil Oil, then the leading producer of polyethylene film. By the time a young college graduate named Bill Seanor joined Mobil in 1966, the company had already developed an extensive line of substitutes for paper packaging. Its bag-on-a-roll had replaced paper sacks in grocers' produce sections, and its Hefty trash bags had helped alter people's longtime habit of lining their garbage pails with newspaper. Restless for new possibilities for polyethylene film, in the early 1970s Mobil began eyeing one of the most lucrative paper products of all—the retail shopping bag.
In fact, said Seanor, the company had already spent years and millions of dollars trying to develop a square-bottomed, stand-up plastic version of the classic brown paper bag.
"The conventional wisdom was that you had to have the same thing." But because the copycat bag priced out higher than paper, "it never got off the ground."

Then Mobil officials caught wind of a grocery bag that a Swedish company was distributing in small numbers, mainly in Europe.
Its inventor, Sten Thulin, had come up with a design unlike any traditional paper bag. Solving technical problems that had stymied other inventors before him, Thulin devised an ingenious system of folds and welds that made it possible to transform a flimsy tube of polyethylene film into a strong, sturdy bag.
In its 1962 patent drawings, the bag looked like a sleeveless scoop-neck T-shirt, hence the name now widely used by the industry: the T-shirt bag.

According to Seanor, who oversaw the company's early foray into the production of T-shirt bags, Mobil executives immediately recognized it was the bag for them.
They could see that, unlike Mobil's initial design, this bag had the punch to knock paper from its perch at the checkout stand. Indeed, the bag ultimately proved so popular with retailers precisely because it wasn't like the traditional flat-bottomed paper sack. Thulin drew on the distinctive virtues of polyethylene to create a wholly new kind of bag. Today the bag is so maligned that we forget what an engineering marvel it is: a waterproof, durable, featherweight packet capable of holding more than a thousand times its weight.

Seanor and his colleagues may have been excited about the bag they introduced to the United States in 1976 (the inaugural versions were decorated in red, white, and blue in honor of the U.S. Bicentennial), but shoppers were underwhelmed. They didn't like the way a checkout clerk often licked his fingers to pull a plastic bag free from the rack, or the fact that the bags wouldn't stand up, Seanor remembered. "People would get their groceries, take them out to the car, and they'd fall over, and consumers would be madder than hell."
And when shoppers were unhappy, it was grocers who caught the flak.

It was clear to the budding bag industry that to win over consumers, it would have to win over grocery stores first. One trade group, the Flexible Packaging Association, launched a public relations campaign that urged grocers: "Check Out the Sack. It's Coming on Strong."
Meanwhile, the bag companies reached out directly to stores with educational programs to help grocers overcome shoppers' distaste for the bags. "We put together training programs that told the store how to actually pack plastic sacks," said Seanor, who eventually left Mobil with a few colleagues to start their own plastic-bag company, Vanguard Plastics.

But the most persuasive factor in the new bags' favor was basic economics: plastic bags cost a penny or two, paper bags cost three to four times as much, and because they were heavier and bulkier, they were more expensive to transport and store.
Two of the country's biggest grocery chains, Safeway and Kroger, made the switch to plastic bags in 1982, and most of the other major chains soon followed suit. "Once we started getting the Krogers of the world to change, it was pretty much over," recalled Peter Grande, a veteran of the business and now head of a Los Angeles bag company, Command Packaging.
There were still occasional skirmishes with paper-bag makers over regional markets, he said. "But the feeling within the plastics industry was 'this is the future—plastic is going to dominate the landscape.'"

The accuracy of that prediction would come back to bite the industry. Plastic bags were so cheap to produce and distribute that, in the inexorable logic of a free market, they were bound to proliferate. Producers would, of course, make as many as they could sell, and grocers had no incentive to ration them. Purchase a few items at the grocery store, and between double bagging and sloppy packing, you might walk out with a dozen bags. (Which in turn gave rise to a whole new market niche: plastic products to hold used plastic bags. I've got two bag organizers in my broom closet.) By the new millennium, the T-shirt bag had become perhaps the most common consumer item on the planet. Worldwide, people used somewhere between five hundred billion and one trillion bags a year—more than a million a minute.
The average American was taking home about three hundred a year.
And yet like so much plastic packaging, the vast majority of these bags wound up in the trash—or worse.

When plastic first began to penetrate the packaging market, it was promoted for its durability, not its disposability. The reason babies in the 1950s could suffocate on dry-cleaning bags was that people were holding on to them for other uses—as DuPont had encouraged when it first introduced the bags.
What's more, those early bags were pricey. "Keep [your] clear plastic bags ... Clean inside and out with a few dabs of a sudsy sponge," an outfit called the Cleanliness Bureau advised readers of the
New York Times
in 1956. "Dry the bag promptly and it will stay lovely for many seasons to come."

But it didn't take long for the industry to recognize that disposables were the route to growth, and for a prosperous public to get comfortable with the idea of throwing plastic packaging away. Especially as that packaging multiplied. Today, the average American throws out at least three hundred pounds of packaging a year; Americans' combined mountain of stripped wrappings and emptied containers accounts for a third of the total municipal waste stream.

Plastic grocery bags would become that stream's most potent symbol.

Mark Murray had plastic bags in his cross hairs long before the current wave of anti-bag warriors did.

Murray is executive director of Californians Against Waste, a statewide group that was formed in 1977 to push for the passage of a bottle bill in California. Its mission has since broadened to encompass a range of waste-related issues, from electronics recycling to dairy-farm refuse. One reason California has long been on the leading edge of solid waste legislation is CAW and, by extension, Murray. He's spent his entire career with the group, having joined as an intern in 1987—a fresh college graduate and political junkie who arrived in Sacramento in search of a job. He had no great interest in recycling, but for someone with an intensely competitive nature, the issue turned out to be ideal. As a reporter profiling Murray once observed: "It provided battles that were winnable—not like saving the whales or shutting down nuclear power."
He may have just stumbled across the issue, but recycling—really, the whole megillah of waste reduction—quickly became an obsession. At the same time, he became well practiced at balancing his idealistic goals with the demands of realpolitik. He's a pragmatist who's open to compromise, at times too much so, according to critics to his left.

Now in his forties, Murray has close-cropped hair with a sharply receding hairline and the zero-body-fat frame of a long-distance runner. Indeed, he's a competitive marathoner, and such endurance is a useful quality when one is a lobbyist for a nonprofit with long-range goals. Murray knows what it is to keep pushing ahead with his sights fixed on a distant finish line. He's been hoping to get rid of plastic shopping bags for more than twenty years.

According to Murray, some waste questions are complicated, but not the ones surrounding plastic bags.
"The plastic bag is a problem product," he said flatly when we met for lunch one fall day when the legislature was out of session. "I'm not out there suggesting that we should ban every plastic product. But there are some whose environmental costs exceed their utility, and the bag is one of them."

Murray's chief gripe about the bag is not the oft-cited one: that they clog up valuable landfill space. In fact, studies have shown that plastic bags and other plastic trash take up much less space in landfills than paper waste or other materials, in part because plastic can be more tightly compressed.
Nor is Murray concerned that plastic bags can "last hundreds of years in a landfill," which was one of the stated reasons for a bag ban proposed in Fairfield, Connecticut.
Nearly all trash—no matter the material—can endure in a landfill. Archaeologist William Rathje—self-proclaimed "garbologist" for his studies of landfills—has unearthed newspapers from the 1930s that were as clear as yesterday's edition, and decades-old sandwiches that looked fresh enough to eat.