Getting rid of plastic not as easy as it sounds
It finally happened. We will no longer have to stand agog at the grocery checkout watching a river of plastic coming down the conveyor belt for plastic-bagging.
By the end of 2021, we will see a Canada-wide ban on some single-use plastics, including grocery bags, straws, cutlery stir sticks, six-pack rings and some food containers.
The ban is decades late and doesn’t go nearly far enough. Retail rules need to be changed, too: why should mixed greens come in clear plastic containers; why not put fruits and vegetables into small paper bags; why styrofoam when light waxed cardboard would do? Why sell detergent in heavy plastic containers that will outlive mankind? At best, they become microplastics and poison land and water.
So many objects are made of plastic now: staplers, eyeglass frames, styrene lampshade liners, dishes, car interiors, desktop computers, laptops, Crocs, faux fur, Kindles, office chairs, laminate kitchen cupboards, bathtubs, carpeting, resin Muskoka chairs, patio umbrellas, store displays, bike helmets, polyester-central Zara, upholstery, and faux-wood laminate bar furnishings.
It would be simpler to list goods made of nonplastic: wool, silk, cotton, rock, wood, paper, leather, glass, metal and well, you know it when you see it, touch it and drink from it and try to break it. If it’s the real thing, it’s more likely to last, which is why it’s often more carefully made.
In my neighbourhood, people are passionate upcyclers, offering used birthing pools, cats, dogs, tarp, bald tires and old buckets. What they have in common, pets aside, is that they’re plastic, so cheap and badly made that it’s more work to keep them than give them away.
I was quite ecstatic to buy an $80 Ikea Linnmon desk on Kijiji last year, less happy to discover that you can’t screw a computer tray underneath it because its top is made of mashed sworls of cardboard. It would require a Gerton slab of solid beech as a base layer beneath this thick papery mess. Wooden furniture, imagine that.
Now Ikea is doing its Earth-friendly best here but if you can’t sit on cardboard furniture without a sense of pending doom — Ikea’s idea of a trust exercise — then it isn’t really furniture, is it?
We are surrounded by plastic. Sales receipts are slippery because of bisphenol A, a plastics chemical that became ubiquitous, then infamous in baby bottles and food can linings. Why is this thermal paper better than genuine paper? Why plasticize the world?
Getting rid of plastic will be much harder than we imagine. Cheap plastic goods do serve the purpose of concealing from us how underpaid we are. If manufacturing were made to turn away from plastic back to more primal basic materials, many people would not be able to afford household goods, the things people actually notice in daily life.
It’s something of an economic house of cards. To be kinder to the planet, people need more money. If there were a universal basic income, would people buy more things, or fewer better-made things? If, say, the government were to ban polyester clothing — its lint ends up in lakes and oceans — what would we make of that?
I think of the transparent resin panels that protected Sen. Kamala Harris while a pink-eyed, fly-attracting Vice President Michael Pence possibly shed coronavirus during last week’s vicepresidential debate. The bendy seethroughs were so short and shabby with their little floor supports, like an end-of-aisle discontinued bras display at Kmart.
I’m embarrassed for you, Plexiglas, with your glorious history. Invented in Germany in 1904, it was put to dire Nazi (as well as Allied) uses but what was not in those years? Its finest hour was its use in fighter-bombers, easily installed and difficult to shatter, giving pilots and gunners a great panoramic view.
Even more excitingly, the chemistry behind it was said to have helped win the Battle of Stalingrad, thawing out Russian equipment while Nazi tanks froze in place.
All good things come to an end. Plastic became a poison, making our daily lives disposable, poisoning our oceans beyond repair. Remember that as you wearily pack your comestibles in burlap sacks in 2022.