WORT 89.9FM Madison · Plastic has Always Been Supply Pushed, Not Demand Pulled When you go to the store to buy bananas and there is plastic wrapped around them, you are demanding the bananas, not the plastic. The discussion of the plastic industry always centers around how to individually reduce plastic waste as consumers, and where plastic ends up when we are done with it. There is little discussion about how and why these plastics were originally created. That is the topic of author Beth Gardiner’s book Plastic Inc. Plastics have always been a byproduct of fossil fuels. Some of these molecules, called naphtha, are heated to very high temperatures until they “crack,” which allows them to be recombined into different lengths and configurations forming different types of plastics. When fracking became popular in the US, digging deep into the earth in search for methane also led you to get ethane in the process. In the early days of fracking, ethane was just burned off because of its apparent uselessness. However, they soon learned that ethane could be used to make polyethylene, which is now the most common plastic in the world. They started using ethane for a multitude of products during World War II, but when the war ended, they needed to find a new source of revenue for these byproducts. This is when plastic packaging, hula hoops, frisbees, and silly putty entered the market. Even now, new forms of plastic packaging continue to be made, such as body wash bottles where there were previously bars of soap. By the 1970s, the public started questioning the amount of plastic production, and plastic anxiety rose among consumers. The industry recognized the discomfort was a threat to their industry. To counter this, they launched an ad called “Keep America Beautiful,” which was backed by Coke and the Tobacco industry. They created a popular commercial featuring a Native American who finds plastic litter and sheds a tear, ending with the tagline, “keeping America Beautiful is your job.” This completely shifted the blame and responsibility to the consumers, rather than the producers. Their PR campaign redefined the problem as a waste management problem, not an overproduction problem. As a result, people began aspirational recycling, which persists today. People could feel better about buying plastic products – as long as they are properly recycled. However, the only type of plastic that can really be recycled is PET, made from plastic bottles; and even then, new plastic is always better quality and cheaper to make. Recycling was only used to diffuse public concern and remove the guilt from buying plastic products. Gardiner notes that the conflict in the Middle East is driving higher prices in plastic made overseas. Although this could be an opportunity to use less of it, our involuntary reliance on plastic in our society means it’s probably not going away anytime soon. Beth Gardiner is an American journalist based in London. She’s a former longtime Associated Press reporter, and her work has been published in outlets including the New York Times, the Atlantic, National Geographic and the Guardian. Plastic Inc. is her second book. It was named a New York Times Staff Pick/Editors’ Choice and has been long-listed for the Wainwright Prize for conservation writing. Beth has discussed her work on NPR’s Fresh Air, All Things Considered and Here & Now. She’s a three-time grantee of the Pulitzer Center and a recipient of the City University of New York journalism school’s McGraw Fellowship for Business Journalism. Did you enjoy this story? Your funding makes great, local journalism like this possible. Donate here The post Plastic has Always Been Supply Pushed, Not Demand Pulled appeared first on WORT-FM 89.9.
