By John Mattingly
So much of our world in the U.S. is packaged in plastic.
Much of our food comes wrapped in it. Even the bulk items in a supermarket are put in a plastic bag and in another plastic bag for carryout. As a farmer, I’ve always thought food stamps should be redeemable only for bulk foods, at special distribution centers near the production of actual food.
Movies and music are packaged in a thin skin of plastic with sticky plastic binders for good measure. I think I recall a story about a famous country-western musician who nearly killed himself trying to unwrap a CD of his own music.
Small tools are encased in hard plastic molding. I bought a set of three pliers the other day and had to use a sharp box cutter to free them from a ridiculous plastic sarcophagus. It’s surprising that the packagers – manufacturers and/or retailers – haven’t taken notice of our aging population, some of whom have arthritis.
Electronic devices are almost always encased a bubble of plastic. Many people have suffered injuries trying to cut through the plastic, the hard snap-ties, and the button locks that wrap something as pedestrian as an alarm clock. I know people, including family members, who have destroyed items in the process of attempting to extract them.
Outside the U.S., in the less developed world, packaging is less common. Open air markets dominate food distribution, consumer goods are mostly offered in bulk. It may be that excessive packaging is a feature of an affluent economy that (a) can afford the added expense of the packaging, and (b) claims economic benefit from placing items in plastic either for theft deterrence or perceived hygiene.
Even so, it has often happened to me – and I know I’m not alone here – that I purchase an item with neat plastic sub-containers of, say, nuts and bolts, or similar packets of some critical component, only to find that someone has broken into the packaging and stolen the one small piece needed to assemble the item, or achieve its final function. This level of larceny may be what drives package designers nuts, ultimately leading them to come up with packaging that mimics a Hanayama chain puzzle.
A friend of mine (who concedes he’s turned “funny”) once offered the theory that excessive packaging is related to our fear of The Bomb. Back in the 1960s, we were told to simply dig a hole and cover ourselves with dirt during a nuclear war. “All this stupid packaging,” he told me, “is just a clean substitute for the dirt. Subconsciously we’re still afraid of Armageddon, so we’re covering everything up.”
I’d venture to suggest that excessive packing is related more to our fear of the germs and sticky fingers of our fellow humans than to death and destruction from The Bomb. Still and all, it’s a sad commentary on U.S. culture that we have to go such extreme measures to protect us from ourselves.
The crowning absurdity of packaging is bottled water. Every major retailer in the U.S., including office supply businesses, offer some kind of water in plastic bottles. Plain water, spring water, Artesian water, carbonated water, distilled water, flavored water, and so-called enhanced water appear to dominate market share in the bottled beverage business. This despite numerous investigative reports confirming that bottled water, in a great majority of cases, is in no way superior to common tap water.
The tragic irony is that a lot of these plastic bottles end up in the ocean, contributing to what is now the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, aka the Pacific Trash Vortex (PTV), an area of high concentration of trash, mostly pelagic plastics. Considered estimates by the National Science Foundation put the current size of the PTV at nearly twice the size of Texas. Environmental radicals claim this is purposely under-stated and the size actually approaches that of the continental U.S..
There is also an ATV, an Atlantic Trash Vortex, and reported trash vortexes in all the Earth’s major oceans, the result of ocean currents moving the solids into vortices over time. An estimated eighty percent (80%) of oceanic trash comes from the land, flowing into the oceans from rivers and shores and then carried out and distributed to the various vortices.
Part of the problem in sizing the trash vortices is the varying concentration of the sludge, debris, and degrading polymers, some of which are in suspension, some of which are aggregated. In some places the trash is literally concentrated into walkable islands, and like icebergs, a majority of the trash is below the surface. In other places, the garbage is disbursed such that it can only be detected by filtration.
Of particular concern is the plastic in the vortices. Unlike organic sludge, which breaks down into other organic compounds (vile though they may be), plastic photo-degrades, disintegrating gradually into smaller and smaller pieces of plastic, down to the molecular level, such that marine life then ingests the plastic. Plankton eat it, small fish eat the plankton, and bigger fish eat the smaller fish. One can presume that as humans harvest marine life for our food chain, we then eat the tiny plastic particles. Not to be alarmist, but ingestion of molecular plastic has been linked to infertility, heart disease, and liver dysfunction in rats.
The remarkable thing is that this plastic pollution has occurred in less than a hundred years, and probably in less than fifty. The first plastic was invented by Alexander Parkes of England. A derivative of cellulose nitrate, it was offered, and honored, at the 1862 Great Inventions Exhibition as Parkesine, a product that could be molded into various useful shapes. But Parkes company failed because the product was highly flammable in an era of candles, and generally proved unstable and unsuitable.
It wasn’t until well into the twentieth century with the introduction of Bakelite, which combined cellulose nitrate with alcoholized camphor and formaldehyde, that plastic worked its way into the mainstream of human economy, and it wasn’t until the end of World War II that a mass market, consumer-styled economy emerged in the U.S. that began using plastic on a wholesale basis. Thus, the speed with which the Oceanic Trash Vortices (OTVs) have formed is particularly alarming.
If nothing is done to turn this trend, it isn’t unreasonable to project the odd scenario of humans placing their water, food, and consumer goods in plastic, and then tossing the plastic, which eventually works its way back into the oceans (which are the aboriginal source of all fresh water) clogging up the oceans and destroying those very qualities which make fresh water, and life itself, possible. It’s enough to make you think some of that molecular plastic is somehow migrating to, and replacing, human brain cells.
I mention here parenthetically, and with some cosmological comedy, that when I told my funny friend about OTVs, he made the observation that the existence of these trash vortices is an excellent counter to the proposition of Intelligent Design. Anyone arguing, for example, that the human eye is so remarkable as to require an intelligent designer, should turn that eye on the OTVs and explain how anything but a random universe could create such an ignorant mess.
I’m going to suggest here, in writing, that there really is no active solution to the OTVs. Though the pictures of the floating garbage fields are alarming enough, the fact is that the debris fields, and particularly the plastics, have degraded into tiny particles and basically turned the world’s oceans into irreversible garbage sinks.
If you read the blogs and the What Can We Do About It links, all you see is people expressing alarm, embarrassment, and concern, but never any solutions. Why? Because there are none. Even if we reuse, recycle, reform, and redistribute from now on, which we won’t, and even if we finally agree, as citizens of a planet, to launch a worldwide effort to pull the trash out of the oceans, where will we put it?
And, of course, all the forums of planetary activism regarding OTVs are made possible by computers, parts of which will soon be a component of the contaminated oceanic stew.
Like many big, planetary problems, the only real solution is adapt or perish. Over the coming hundreds of years, humans will likely evolve into part-plastic, part-silicon-based life forms in order to survive. I’ve written about this future in prior articles (A Species Behaving Badly), and a thorough-going analysis of the probabilities of such a future can be found in Ray Kurtzweil’s book, The Singularity Is Near.
Human evolution appears headed toward a radical physiological change from humans continuing as carbon-based life forms to becoming plastic- and silicon-based life forms. It’s an inevitable destiny we’ve created by our own behavior, not only because we are, as a species, slowly replacing the human touch with plastic- and silicon-based devices, but in good part out of a growing fear of our fellow humans, which has caused us to wrap so much of our sustenance in plastic.
The plastic molecules, which are carbon-based but inert, will photo-degrade under the sun, and then find their way back into the human body. Those humans who survive in the future will adapt to the plastic by metabolizing it, and the plastic will be part of the transformation out of the former carbon-based life form into a plastic-silicon-based life form.
It’s only natural.
John Mattingly cultivates prose, among other things, and was most recently seen near Creede.
