by Edward Humes
As it did with other industries, World War II mobilization ramped up the plastics business tremendously. The First World War knew only wood, metal, wool, cotton and leather. A quarter century later, everything from combat helmet liners to parachutes, gun sights to cockpit windscreens was made from plastic, a quick and ready stand-in for scarce raw materials. The first iteration of Dow Chemical’s Saran Wrap—which was a transparent green film with a putrid chemical smell—was used to wrap not sandwiches, but whole planes and artillery pieces to protect them from water and sea salt during transoceanic voyages.
When the war was over, plastic manufacturers had considerable excess capacity—and so new generations of products made of plastic were conceived, made and marketed whether they represented improvements over old materials or not. The disposable cups, spoons, forks, knives and plates that followed—an entire disposable economy—were born out of a kind of industrial hangover from the war effort, combined with cheap oil (plastic’s essential ingredient) and America’s then-ironclad control of the global oil supply. Now, though, plastic was pitched not as a substitute for the “real” thing, but as an improvement, a convenience, a freedom. Dow figured out how to make Saran Wrap clear and with no smell, and suddenly everything was being hermetically sealed. Plastic chairs, tables, counters, curtains and Tupperware invaded the American home (and, a short time later, the American landfill), supplanting wood, cloth, tile, metal and glass.
In the 1960s, plastic surpassed aluminum in volume as a raw material, and in the 1970s, it surpassed steel. It has continued to grow, reaching 51.5 million tons of plastic manufactured in 2010. That one year’s worth of plastic outweighs the entire U.S. Navy’s 286 active ships (which itself is so huge that the U.S. fleet represents more tonnage than the next thirteen largest navies of the world combined). Indeed, a year’s worth of plastics would outweigh a navy of more than five hundred Nimitz-class aircraft carriers, the largest ship ever built, each one capable of carrying ninety aircraft plus more than five thousand crew and troops. Of course, there are only ten of these huge ships in existence. Plastic, when you hold it in your hand, seems so light as to be inconsequential, yet collectively it is that unimaginably huge.
This deceptive, alluring quality, plastic’s horrifying convenience, helps explain why, for more than a half century, this miracle material, this great innovation that set us free, was only half baked, for no one thought through its life cycle, its afterlife. It takes 8 grams of oil to make a single plastic ketchup bottle, which will not be recycled because the ketchup residue inside is “contamination” and recyclers want clean plastic. Dirty plastic is just too hard to recycle, too costly. Failing at the birth of the age of plastic to think this through, to consider the life cycle of substances that do not occur in nature and that are, for all intents and purposes, immortal, is like failing to think through what to do with nuclear waste at the birth of nuclear power … which is exactly what we did.
Every year, a significant portion of this manufactured plastic remains unaccounted for. The American Chemistry Council trade organization, reports that 34 percent of the annual plastic business, 17.5 million tons of it, is used for packaging—plastics that get thrown away very quickly. The EPA, meanwhile, has tracked 13 million tons of plastic packaging as waste, which means more than 4 million tons a year (the equivalent of forty of those super aircraft carriers) remain unaccounted for. Many ocean pollution researchers believe a substantial portion of this “ghost plastic”—these forty missing aircraft carriers we somehow misplace every year—finds its way into the ocean.
Which is how an oceanic garbage patch is born.
The most common types of plastic found there—primarily at the surface but also found as deep as one hundred meters—are low-density polyethylene (plastic grocery bags), expanded styrene (Styrofoam), polypropylene (rope, nets, carpet, prescription bottles) and PET (notwithstanding its propensity to sink once broken up).
Whatever the type, pretty much every piece of plastic that ever entered the clutches of a gyre is still in there, ocean scientists say, except for what washes up on the beaches of Hawaii, which lie within the gyre’s convergence zone and are inundated daily with plastic debris. They’re still trying to come up with a number to describe the measurable and identifiable quantity of plastic in the garbage patches. Not supposition, not guesses, not extrapolations, but a real number.
So far, the scientific term most often used to describe how much debris is out there is: a lot. Some scientists, such as Miriam Goldstein, prefer a slightly more exact term:
“A whole lot.”
SO HERE’S the big question, the one that eats at Mary Crowley and Miriam Goldstein and the crews who wander and plumb the five gyres: What sort of economy, what sort of society, could lose track of a fleet of forty aircraft super carriers of plastic year after year, without blink or blame?
And what, besides building oceans of plastic and mountains of garbage, can be done about it?
PART
2
THE TRASH DETECTIVES
An ocean of urban trash flows daily to my windy corner of San Francisco. Revelation blows in the wind: about the waste society, the careless or alienated urban dweller, environmentally thoughtless packaging and advertising, industry devoted to consuming without need.
—JO HANSON
Here’s the main lesson of garbology: People forget, they cover, they kid themselves, they lie. But their trash always tells the truth.
—WILLIAM RATHJE
7
THE TRASH TRACKERS
WHAT IF YOUR TRASH COULD TALK?
What would happen if all the stuff we buy, use and ultimately throw away—a carton of milk, a computer keyboard, a case of beer, a color TV—could be aware of its surroundings and stream that information to us, forming a vast network of objects, a kind of Internet of stuff. Manufactured objects would become “blogjects,” or “spimes,” as science fiction novelist and futurist Bruce Sterling has dubbed them, so named because they would be aware of themselves in space and time, recording their own histories and travels, then passing on that information as it unfolds. Put aside for a moment the scary, Orwellian, National Security Agency overlord fears such a capability might represent, and consider just its implications for waste and wastefulness. Innate intelligence would, in Sterling’s vision, allow us to direct all objects—specifically the objects we throw away—to the best and most efficient path for reuse, repurposing or recycling.
A world of “smart trash” would be a world in which zero waste stopped being a distant dream and started being an achievable goal.
Of course, our trash isn’t smart, and what we know about its travels is shockingly thin at best, which is one reason the oceans are slowly plasticizing. Retailers and manufacturers impose deep scrutiny on the front end of the consumer economy, in which the travels of goods on the way to market are compulsively micromanaged, dated, accounted for and tracked with optical scans and RF transmitters. That part of our consumer culture—the supply chain—is brightly lit. But the removal chain, that’s another story, a veritable black hole. Not even the king of trash, the CEO of Waste Management, Inc., has a clear view of that dirty end of things. Which is why the scientists and artists of the SENSEable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, inspired by Sterling’s vision of an Internet of things (with a generous dollop of funds from Waste Management), decided to create smart trash. They gave select pieces of trash their very own brains (i.e., the guts of a smart phone), slipped them into the daily trash flow with the help of an army of volunteers and a clever adaptation of global-positioning software, then turned it all loose to see what would happen.
They are the nation’s first true trash trackers. They followed the meanderings of electronic waste to distant shores, of ratty old sneakers that ran the equivalent of a dozen marathons aboard a circuitous trash trail, and of printer ink cartridges that traversed the continent not once but twice on the road to recycling—expending far more energy and reso
urces in transport than could ever be recouped through recycling. Some materials intended for recycling simply never made it there.
Most studies of garbage are concerned with what’s in our trash, and what happens to it once it gets where it’s going. But the creators of smart trash wanted to expose how waste gets where it’s going—the meandering, mysterious and, it turns out, occasionally disturbing path it takes after it is thrown away.
“Even the people working in waste removal don’t really have a clear knowledge or picture of where the stuff goes,” says one of the lead trash trackers, Dietmar Offenhuber. “We were fascinated to see an invisible infrastructure unfolding.”
And seeing it, he says, is the first step in changing it.
SEATTLE RESIDENT Tim Pritchard learned about Trash Track in 2009 when he stumbled on a blurb on the Seattle Public Library website that said MIT scientists were looking for volunteers to participate in a novel experiment to “bug” trash with electronic trackers in order to better understand our waste. Intrigued, Pritchard immediately hit the e-mail link. This led to a correspondence with Offenhuber, and Pritchard soon was on board, becoming one of the more deeply involved of the several hundred volunteers who eventually participated.
At fifty years old, Pritchard was a natural for Trash Track. He’d been working to green himself for years, knocking his personal trash footprint way below the 102-ton legacy. He pegs his trash output at a single paper grocery bagful a month, recyclables included, though he qualifies this achievement by saying he’s single and travels often for work, which cuts down his trips to the home trash can and recycling bin. He spent much of his professional career engineering audio for Broadway musicals—he toured with Phantom of the Opera for years—but more recently switched to corporate gigs, engineering the audio for conferences and major meetings, which are a form of theater unto themselves. He was fascinated by the opportunity to dig into the fate of trash, something he realized he knew next to nothing about, despite his personal dedication to sustainability.
Seattle was a good choice for the project’s main push, too. Trash Track had launched smaller-scale efforts in London and New York, but those were primarily to create public exhibitions and museum displays featuring local “trash trajectories.” The idea originated not as a research project but as a proposal for an exhibition sponsored by the New York Architectural League entitled “Toward the Sentient City.” Cambridge University professor Rex Britter, a visiting fellow at the SENSEable City Lab, suggested that electronically tracking garbage in the city could produce some interesting revelations about waste for the exhibition. It soon became apparent that, in addition to the public education aspect that exhibitions provide, some real and original science could be accomplished, and the MIT group planned a larger-scale effort. And for that, Seattle was chosen, in part for its diverse transportation infrastructure. The city is a major port and interstate hub and a convergence for major rail lines, all of which figure in the waste “removal chain,” including the daily, mile-long garbage train that hauls Seattle’s trash to a landfill in eastern Oregon. The researchers also chose Seattle for its reputation as a green community that invests in sustainability. While the average U.S. city recycles about 30 percent of its waste, Seattle topped 50 percent the year Trash Track came to town. Seattle residents have also accepted a trash system that charges them by the amount of trash they produce rather than a straight monthly fee—a firm fiscal incentive to waste less. Offenhuber figured they’d have so many volunteers they’d have to turn some away, which they did.
Pritchard assumed the role of trail guide for the Massachusetts-based researchers. He showed them around town, identifying a diverse set of neighborhoods to assure the broadest possible spectrum of trash, income levels and lifestyles. And he chauffeured the Trash Track crew to volunteers’ homes where they could root through trash and find the selection of items they wanted to track. Then he helped attach electronic tracking devices to the waste—making the trash smart. It was, Pritchard recalls, a blast.
The tracking technology boiled down to three parts: high-tech, low-tech and subterfuge.
The high-tech part required some compromises. Offenhuber and his crew wanted to deploy more than three thousand pieces of smart trash in order to have a sufficient sample size, so the devices had to be relatively inexpensive. They were going on a one-way trip, with no chance for retrieval. The smart trash trackers would meet one of three fates: they’d run out of power partway through their disposal journey; they’d be destroyed once they reached their final destination at a recycling center, landfill or hazardous-waste site; or they would simply disappear from view—out of range or out of luck.
The MIT scientists, after rejecting a variety of other gadgets and technologies as either unsuitable or too expensive, came up with a device that amounted to cannibalizing the innards of cellular phones and combining them with a custom circuit board and set of software instructions that turned phones into trash-tracking marvels. Once a trash tracker was placed in the waste stream (a public trash can, a recycling drop, a curbside bin), a motion sensor woke up each device whenever it moved, at which time the software commanded it to scan all channels and bands, locate the strongest dozen cell towers nearby, and store their identities with a time and date stamp. This information, which would allow the researchers to triangulate the smart trash’s location at the time of the scan, was then compressed and sent as a simple text message to a server at MIT. The length of time the smart trash “phoned home” in this way was kept to an absolute minimum in order to preserve battery life. The devices went to sleep whenever they stopped moving as a further energy saver. Smart trash had enough battery life to last up to thirty hours of constant motion; standing still, it could last through three to six months of hibernation. This was important, because nobody knew at the outset just how long a piece of trash might travel or sit untouched before reaching its final destination.
The low-tech part of the tracking project was how to attach these transmitters to real pieces of trash. A variety of tapes, glues and other techniques, including latex rubber and carbon fiber, were tried and rejected either because they were too cumbersome or ineffective, or could not be applied quickly in the field by volunteers without advanced engineering degrees. They finally hit on inexpensive spray cans of epoxy foam used to patch holes in boat hulls. It could be quickly applied to just about any kind of trash, plastic, paper, metal or cloth, and dried fast and hard.
The subterfuge part involved hiding the tracking tags out of sight and out of harm’s way—inside sneakers, nested in computer cases, wrapped inside old socks, tucked into café latte cups. This would protect the devices from being knocked loose by accident, or pulled out of place on purpose. Then the tagged items, the smart trash, had to be slipped inside the larger waste stream.
The smart trash was released into the wild in stages during the summer and fall of 2009. For stage one, a field test of the devices, Pritchard and the researchers drove around the city looking for abandoned trash and impromptu disposal locations. Along the way, they’d stumble on all sorts of trash just lying in the street or on sidewalks: old newspapers, soda bottles, paper cups—typical litter—and also discarded cell phones, dead or leaking batteries, abandoned washers, dryers and refrigerators, discarded computers, old furniture and car parts. A typical array of urban junk and flotsam was before them, stuff they’d normally drive by and barely notice, like weeds on an empty lot, except now, to the Trash Track team, these were golden opportunities. These random pieces of trash were tagged, then dropped into public waste cans, taken to recycling stations, slipped into homeowners’ trash bins or just left on the street to see what would happen. This release validated the technology in the field and also let them perfect their curbside conversion of regular trash into smart trash.
In August 2009, stage two—the release of six hundred pieces of smart trash—began with a public event at the main branch of the Seattle Public Library, which served as Trash Track’s home away from
home. Volunteers were asked to come to the library with a piece of trash to be tagged and to sit for an interview. Then they were supposed to take their newly upgraded location-aware trash at least ten blocks away and dispose of it properly. Everything from old sneakers and T-shirts to broken electronics to milk cartons were brought in and tagged. Pritchard ended up tagging twenty items that he had been collecting—an old cell phone, a dish towel with a big hole in it, a junk drawer full of stuff he hadn’t known what to do with. Sometimes the Trash Track team went to the volunteers’ houses and tagged an array of household trash on the spot, then asked the volunteers to dispose of the items curbside as they normally would.
A month later, building on the experiences of the smaller tracker releases, Trash Track set loose a much more systematic and specific swarm of smart trash—2,200 pieces in all. One hundred homes were selected across the city, along with numerous elementary and high schools. This time, instead of relying on volunteers to choose the items of trash, the researchers had a wish list of items drawn from the EPA’s trash categories, so that trackers could be attached to every type of waste imaginable: paper, cardboard, organics, leather, rubber, plastic, glass, metal, textiles and e-waste. The team particularly emphasized tagging “emerging” types of trash such as cell phones, fluorescent bulbs and other household hazardous trash that represent a relatively new and growing part of the daily American waste stream.