Plastic (45 page)

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That finding was surprising
: Author interview with Carol Misseldine, May 2010.

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I met with him
: Author interviews with Roger Bernstein; Keith Christman, senior director of packaging, plastics division, ACC; and Jennifer Killinger, senior director of sustainability and public outreach, ACC, in October 2008.

162
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it took up the fight
: Author interview with Bazbaz. Under the ACC's aegis, the bag makers' group formerly known as the Progressive Bag Alliance got a new name the Progressive Bag Affiliates. Strangely, the SPI has mostly stayed out of the battle.

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Plastics Make It Possible
: Ronald Yocum and Susan Moore, "Challenge 2000: Making Plastic a Preferred Material," in Rosato et al.,
Concise Encyclopedia,
15. The campaign was sponsored by the American Plastics Council, and industry-sponsored polls showed plastics' favorability ratings rose from around 52 percent to the mid-60s range. See also Steve Toloken, "The Plastics Wars,"
Plastics News,
March 8, 1999.

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Aggressive industry lobbying
: For instance, the industry's tough tactics succeeded in preventing Suffolk County, New York, from implementing the nation's first ban on plastic packaging, including plastic bags. After the law was passed in 1988, manufacturers sued, tying it up in litigation for four years. The county won in court, but by then recycling programs had been put in place, the public had lost interest, and the county decided to drop the ban. John McQuiston, "Suffolk Legislators Drop a Ban on Plastic Packaging for Foods,"
New York Times,
March 9, 1994.

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major public relations effort
: Information about the fashion shows and other programs can be found at
http://www.plasticsmakeitpossible.com
. Meanwhile the SPI has pledged to launch a major ten-million-dollar Internet campaign, Imagine the Possibilities with Plastic, that will tout the materials' benefits while also rebutting what the industry considers the huge amount of misinformation about plastics on the Web. Mike Verespej, "Playing Offense,"
Plastics News,
June 29, 2009.

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the group spent $5.7 million
: Lobbying disclosure reports filed with the California secretary of state's office. The 2007–2008 session was also the period during which California's Green Chemistry Initiative was being debated, a measure in which the ACC had a far greater stake. As of the third quarter of 2010, the group reported it had spent nearly $1.2 million on the 2009–2010 legislative session, though not all on bag-related efforts. The same session, the ACC was fighting a proposed ban on bisphenol A. At the federal level, the ACC spent $4.9 million on lobbying in 2008 and more than $8 million in 2009, according to
opensecrets.org
.

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polling conducted by the city
: Author interviews with Keith Christman, American Chemistry Council, December 2009, and Dick Lilly, waste-prevention business-area manager, Seattle Public Utilities, and one of the framers of the fee measure, December 2009. Interestingly, at the same time the city council passed the bag tax, it also enacted a ban on takeout food packages made of expanded polystyrene. The ACC opted not to challenge the polystyrene ban because, as spokesman Keith Christman put it, "It didn't have the same kind of data going into it." Unlike the bag fee, it was popular, so there was no undercurrent of ambivalence to exploit.

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The group spent
: Mike Verespej, "Seattle Voters Reject 20-Cent Fee,"
Plastics News,
August 19, 2009; Marc Ramirez, "Paper or Plastic? Or Neither?"
Seattle Times,
July 21, 2009. Officially there were other partners in the Coalition to Stop the Seattle Bag Tax, including 7-Eleven and the trade group representing independent Washington groceries. But the bulk of the money came from the ACC's deep pockets.

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leaving them outspent
: The Green Bag Coalition spent about $98,000 defending the fees, according to filings with the Seattle Ethics and Election Commission.

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pulled out all stops
: In addition to its expenditures on lobbying and media, the ACC spent at least $15,000 in political donations during the first nine months of 2010. During that same time, Hilex Poly gave $21,700 to various lawmakers and made a $10,000 contribution to the Democratic State Central Committee. Ex­xonMobil gave nearly $45,000 to individual legislators, plus $10,000 to the California Republican Party. A group called the Good Chemistry PAC, affiliated with Dow Chemical, gave $3,000 in donations to one influential state senator. To be fair, during the same period the California Grocers Association, which backed the ban, gave $22,000 to legislators, $10,000 to the state's Democratic Party, and $32,500 to the state's Republican Party.

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the bags could be a breeding ground
: The study, done by reputable scientists Chuck Gerba and David Williams, from the University of Arizona, and Ryan Sinclair, from Loma Linda University, found "large numbers of bacteria" in almost all bags tested, including dangerous
E. coli
bacteria in 12 percent. The solution to the problem was simple regularly wash the bags.

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unlike the earlier generation:
That's according to Green Cities California. See the page on local bag ordinances on its website,
http://greencitiescalifornia.org/node/2755
. The inclusion of paper bags, along with the fact that those city governments are now armed with an environmental impact report, means it will be harder for Steve Joseph to mount successful legal challenges. San Francisco, meanwhile, is considering a measure to broaden its bag ban to include nearly all other types of plastic bags, with the exception of those used for produce and to wrap newspapers. At the same time, several California bag makers are taking steps to create new kinds of plastic carrier bags
: ones that are thicker, and therefore less litterable, and that contain recycled plastic.

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The ACC may have succeeded
: The list of areas with failed ban proposals includes Edmonds, WA; Fairfax, CA; Malibu, CA; Palo Alto, CA; Ft. McMurray, CA; Brownsville, TX; Maui County, HI; Marshall County, IA; and Westport, CT. Los Angeles passed a ban but was sued by Joseph and agreed to delay implementation pending action by the state legislature.

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the District of Columbia
: Nikita Stewart, "Bill to Charge Consumers for Bags Prompts Debate,"
Washington Post,
April 2, 2009; Tim Craig, "D.C. Bag Tax Collects $150,000 in January for River Cleanup,"
Washington Post,
March 30, 2010; Sara Murray and Sudeep Reddy, "Capital Takes Bag Tax in Stride,"
Wall Street Journal,
September 20, 2010. Nor was the ACC able to block Brownsville, TX, in 2010 from requiring grocers to impose the highest fee yet slapped on bags: one dollar.

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a more significant commitment
: Author interview with Steve Russell, managing director, American Chemistry Council, plastics division, December 2009. Also Bruce Horovitz, "Makers of Plastic Bags to Use 40 Percent Recycled Content by 2015,"
USA Today,
April 21, 2009.

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"
It is a little too little
": Murray quoted in "Bag Makers Set Recycling Goal for 2015,"
Plastics News,
April 27, 2009.

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bag recycling above single-digit rates
: There's lots of debate over the numbers. The ACC maintains that bag recycling has grown by leaps and bounds over the past several years and that the various existing programs are now capturing about 13 percent of all bags produced. But convincing analyses by
Plastics News dispute those claims
: they show that bag recycling did jump 24 percent in 2005, the first year the ACC began its push, but since then the rates have scarcely risen at all. According to
Plastic News,
the real rate of bag recycling is only about 8 percent. See "New Data Shows Bag, Film Recycling Stall,"
Plastics News,
March 22, 2010; Mike Verespej, "Film, Bag Collections on the Rise,"
Plastics News,
March 9, 2009.

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Whatever the material
: You can get bogged down in a whole other debate about the environmental impacts of various reusable bags. As the plastics industry pointed out, the polypropylene mesh bags that often appear as replacements to T-shirt bags are mostly made in China, have been found to contain heavy metals, and are not easily recycled. Given the choices available in today's world, we'll find that our best options involve tradeoffs.

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Robert Cialdini
: Author interview with Cialdini, December 2009. See also Robert Cialdini, "Crafting Normative Messages to Protect the Environment,"
Current Directions in Psychological Science
12 (August 2003): 105–9; Noah Goldstein et al., "Room for Improvement: A Social Psychological Approach to Hotel Environmental Conservation Programs,"
Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly
48 (2007): 145–50.

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An independent consultant
: Robert Lilienfeld, "Report on Field Trip to San Francisco to Assess Plastic Bag Ban," September 2008. Accessed at
http://use-less-stuff.com/Field-Report-on-San-Francisco-Plastic-Bag-Ban.pdf
. Also, author interview with Lilienfeld, November 2008.

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San Franciscans are still consuming
: The city used as many as eighty-four million paper bags in 2009, according to calculations by writer Joe Eskenazi. To that end, the city's bag warriors are still hoping to break the paper-bag habit; in 2010 Mirkarimi proposed a law requiring grocers to charge ten cents for every paper or compostable bag.

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still awash in plastic bags
: The city's own 2008 litter survey found the ban had made no dent in the number of plastic bags tumbling along the city streets; if anything, the number of bags at large was slightly up.

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Makers of reusable bags
: Ellen Gamerman, "An Inconvenient Bag," September 26, 2008.

7. Closing the Loop

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Nathaniel Wyeth often called himself
: Glenn Fowler, "N. C. Wyeth, Inventor, Dies at 78; Developed the Plastic Soda Bottle,"
New York Times,
July 7, 1990.

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A painter need only
: Fenichell,
Plastic,
316.

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"
I'm in the same field
": Fowler, "N. C. Wyeth."

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It only took ten thousand tries
: Jack Challoner, ed.,
1001 Inventions That Changed the World
London: Quintessence, 2009), 835.

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Wyeth knew that some polymers
: The story of his invention is told in Fenichell,
Plastic,
315–16. Also see a profile of Wyeth written when he was awarded the prestigious Lemelson Award for innovation, "Nathaniel Wyeth," MIT Inventor of the Week archive, August 1998. Accessed at
http://web.mit.edu/invent/iow/wyeth.html
. The polymer Wyeth opted to use, PET, is made from the combination of an alcohol, ethylene glycol (antifreeze), and an acid, dimethyl terephthalate, and was discovered in 1941 by British chemists Rex Whinfield and James Dickson. They found the molecule made a good textile, and after the war ended, they launched it under the name terylene. Later manufacturers found other ways to play with the fiber to create different varieties of the wrinkle-proof wash-and-wear fabrics that liberated us from the dismal task of ironing. Emsley,
Molecules at an Exhibition,
134–35.

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polyethylene terephthalate
: The terephthalate in PET is from a different branch of the phthalate family than the ones used in vinyl that are suspected of causing hormonal disruptions.

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safe enough to win approval
: The FDA had already rejected Monsanto's bid to make a liquor bottle made of PVC after evidence surfaced about the potential leaching of the carcinogenic monomer vinyl chloride. Next Coca-Cola and Monsanto collaborated on a $100 million effort to develop a plastic soda bottle made of acrylonitrile styrene. But the effort was abandoned in 1977 after Monsanto acknowledged small amounts of acrylonitrile could leach into the beverage, and researchers found that rats fed a steady diet of the polymer could develop tumors and birth defects. See Fenichell,
Plastic,
315.

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About a third of the 224 billion
: Container Recycling Institute, "Sales by container type," accessed at
http://www.container-recycling.org/facts/all/data/salesbymat.htm
.

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By 2000, the average American was guzzling
: The exact figures vary from source to source, but data from the USDA's Economic Research Service suggests that in the early 1970s, each American drank about twenty-two to twenty-five gallons of soft drinks a year. In the late 1990s, soda consumption peaked at nearly fifty-two gallons a year. It's since dropped as more people have turned to teas and juices. See Judy Putnam and Shirley Gerrior, "Americans Consuming More Grains and Vegetable, Less Saturated Fat,"
Food Review
(September-December 1997). Accessed at
http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/foodreview/sep1997/sept97a.pdf
.

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Wyeth's wonder also enabled
: About a third of beverages are now consumed on the go, according to the What's a Bottle Bill fact sheet posted at
bottlebill.org
.

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"
immediate consumption channels
": Jon Mooallem, "The Unintended Consequences of Hyperhydration,"
New York Times
Magazine,
May 27, 2007.

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Would designer water
: Water bottles accounted for half, or thirty-six billion, of the PET bottles produced in 2006, according to the Container Recycling Institute. One marketing consultant told the
New York Times
that her research showed the water-bottle habit was less about physical hydration and more about the psychological comfort of carrying around the bottle. "It's like their bangie," she said, meaning a security blanket. Mooallem, "Unintended Consequences."