Do you remember the 1967 movie “The Graduate” and the iconic line “There’s a great future in plastics”? As a piece of investment advice, that guy must have made millions, and if he was any sort of smart, he’d be worth billions today.
Because plastic sure became the thing. And the world was good. And cheap. And then plastics were everywhere. And really cheap. After a generation, there was so much plastic, it started to become a problem. Uh oh. Plastic washing up on shores, birds strangling themselves in those plastic six-pack rings, plastic filling up landfills. Plastics, indestructible, and here to stay.
And instead of saying maybe we should stop with the plastic already, they invented recycling, which sounds good, getting to be responsible, saving the world one plastic bottle at a time. Except, of course, that recycling is an energy hog, which means burning more fossil fuels, which means making more plastic. Yikes. In terms of fixing problems, recycling has only made it worse. It encourages people to use ever more plastic because, hey, they are doing the planet a solid by recycling even more.
Nowadays, the big thing in plastics is microplastics. The scarier the headline, the more likely I am to read the story, and the gist of this one is that we all consume a credit card’s worth of microplastics (miniscule particles of plastic) each week. There’s one set of scientists saying that. The really good news is that there is another set who say the data from the first set is bad and we’re consuming more like a grain of salt’s worth.
That’s a load off my mind. For a minute there, I started to imagine 8.2 billion people pooping credit cards on a weekly basis, and soon enough the world is covered a mile deep in plastic and everyone’s dead. A million years later, the plastic will have biodegraded into fossil fuel, and in that world of bountiful energy, little children will be fascinated by humans, little plastic human figurines, some of them carnivores, some of them herbivores, and parents will have to remind their children that humans don’t live anymore — plastic killed them.
Thankfully, if it’s only one grain of plastic we’re inhaling per week, we’re likely a few years off from the apocalypse. Still, while I am comforted by how little plastic I’m consuming, I can’t say the same for Walter, the dog. Walter, who eats the grandkids’ plastic toys and who has a penchant for dinosaur figures. The number of dino legs and tails and heads that Walter eats is a credit card’s worth right there, and then there are the plastic balls and blocks and animals he regularly chomps on. Talk about recycling.
Today, groovin’ to Marvin Gaye …
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