Plastic: A Toxic Love Story

Her conclusion: we cannot stay on our plastic-paved path. As journalist Susan Freinkel points out in this engaging and eye-opening book, we’re nearing a crisis point. She combs through scientific studies and economic data, reporting from China and across the United States to assess the real impact of plastic on our lives. Where would we be without bike helmets, baggies, toothbrushes, and pacemakers? But a century into our love affair with plastic, we’re starting to realize it’s not such a healthy relationship. Plastic built the modern world. We’ve produced as much plastic in the past decade as we did in the entire twentieth century. Plastics draw on dwindling fossil fuels, leach harmful chemicals, litter landscapes, and destroy marine life. We’re drowning in the stuff, and we need to start making some hard choices.  Freinkel gives us the tools we need with a blend of lively anecdotes and analysis. She tells her story through eight familiar plastic objects: comb, chair, Frisbee, IV bag, disposable lighter, grocery bag, soda bottle, and credit card. And we don’t have to. Plastic points the way toward a new creative partnership with the material we love to hate but can’t seem to live without.

Some plastics might last less than a year; others can persist for decades or possibly centuries—especially in the ocean. When I started the book in 2008, I took a pair of plastic grocery bags and tacked one onto the fence in my backyard and tied the other to the branch of a nearby tree. I decided to try getting through one whole day without touching anything plastic. Carry a travel mug for your daily caffeine fix. Tell your waiter you don’t need a straw.

2. By day’s end I was staggered to see how thoroughly synthetic materials permeated my life. The absurdity of this experiment became clear ten seconds into the appointed morning when I walked into the bathroom and realized the toilet seat was plastic. We’re trapped in an unhealthy dependence, the hallmark of a toxic relationship.

Q: Does plastic really last forever?

A: The lifespan of a plastic depends on a lot of variables. Learn what you can recycle. Refuse single-use freebies: Bring your own bag when shopping. Even after years of research, I keep discovering plastic in unexpected places. Don’t cook in plastic. Heat can cause hazardous chemicals to leach out of some polymers, so transfer food to glass before microwaving. Something like the fight over the plastic shopping bag might seem trivial, yet when we grapple with the plastic shopping bag, we’re grappling with our whole throwaway culture—and the environmental problems that culture of convenience has created. Because my family loves fizzy water, we bought a seltzer maker that comes with reusable bottles. I gained a better understanding of how plastic transformed fields like medicine, or transportation, or construction, making it possible to replace, say, a failing heart valve or build Boeing’s new super-lightweight Dreamliner plane. I’ve really tried to reduce my dependence on single-use plastics, like bags, and to buy more in bulk when possible to reduce packaging waste. But I also think how we use plastic is symptom and symbol of significant issues, like our dependence on finite fossil fuels, or our daily exposure to hazardous chemicals. Today, there are thousands of different types of plastic and the average person is never more than three feet from something plastic. People initially were infatuated with these new materials, eager to use them in every possible way. You can stay just as hydrated with a reusable bottle made of stainless steel, aluminum, or BPA-free plastic.

4. Q: What did you learn about plastic that most surprised you?

A: I was shocked to realize how fast our world became plasticized. Two years into my research, I was making tea one day when I suddenly realized my electric teakettle was made of plastic. Talking about plastics is really a conversation about just how deeply we want to transform the natural world, what kind of legacy we want to leave to the generations that succeed us.

Q:Have you changed the ways that you use plastic?

A: I am more conscientious about how I use plastic. Today we’re discovering truly serious problems because of our reliance on plastic—health hazards, wasting of resources, pollution. The funny thing is how easy it is to overlook the place of plastic in your life—even when you’re writing a book on it! Like most people, I completely overlooked the extent to which modern life depends on plastic. Explore other recycling resources: UPS stores will take back shipping peanuts; many grocery chains will take used bags and plastic film; many office supply chains will take back used printer cartridges.

5. Reuse where possible: Give that sandwich baggie a week’s workout; use that empty yogurt tub for leftovers.

3. Amazon Exclusive: A Q&A with Author Susan Freinkel

Q: Why did you decide to write a book about plastic?

A: In San Francisco, where I live, there’s been a lot of talk about the problems of plastic for several years. Yet a lot of it is going to trivial one-time uses, which is an incredible waste of a very valuable resource—and one that could be very useful in helping us address the problems posed by climate change. In 1940, few plastics existed and scarcely anything was made of plastic. Three years later, the bag on the fence is still there looking scarcely the worse for wear. So instead, I spent the day writing down everything I touched that was plastic. The bag in the tree is gone—but only because the tree died.

Q:Did working on the book change your feelings about plastic?

A: I became both more appreciative and more worried about plastic than I’d been before. Or here’s one for the yuck files: It’s also an ingredient of chewing gum.

Q: Why is the book subtitled "A Toxic Love Story"?

A: In researching the history of plastic, I was struck by how our relationship with it resembled a love affair gone bad. Find out what plastics your community recycler accepts. In the ‘40s, pollsters found that "cellophane" was considered one of the most beautiful words in the English language, after "mother" and "memory." By the 1970s, when I was a teenager, plastic had acquired a much worse reputation; it was the stuff of pink flamingos, shiny suits, tacky furniture. And yet every year, the amount of plastic produced and consumed goes up. Early in my research I attended a convention on eco-friendly construction and discovered that "green" builders love Styrofoam because it’s a great insulator and is long-lasting. Given what I had learned about the ways heat can accelerate the breakdown of polymer bonds, which allows chemicals to leach out, I decided to swap it out for a metal teakettle.

Q: What are the five things people can do to improve their relationship with plastic?

A: Unlike many troubled marriages, this is one relationship that can be bettered without a lot of pain:

1. Quit the bottled water habit. It was synonymous with shoddy and fake. For instance, the tiny beads in face scrubs are often made of plastic. But many of the pluses plastic provides come with minuses. For instance, the qualities that make Styrofoam a friend of the environment in construction make it a disaster for the environment when it’s used to make disposable cups.

Q:With huge environmental issues like climate change or loss of biodiversity facing us, why should we care about plastic?

A: For one thing, we’ve produced more plastic in the last decade than the entire previous century.