Psychedelics of Plastics: Hallucination
On the first of August 1955, history takes a turn. There are no trumpets, no solemn broadcast to announce it, but there it is, a quiet, almost imperceptible change. To get a glimpse of it, pick up the latest issue of Life magazine. It's not about the 4 men on the cover, even though they are about to usher in the space age. Oh, it is much less and much more than that. There, a few pages later, is an article so short it could pass for an advertisement. Yet in less than 200 words it has wiped out an entire way of life. The throwaway living. "These objects [...] would take 40 hours to clean... except that no housewife needs to bother," the editorial claims. Modern living already shifts perspectives, the family in the picture has become a distant entity, the bin is the centrepiece, and the ambiguities start arising. Are they the ones throwing it, or are the objects falling from the sky in a manna sent by modern gods? Who will take the rubbish out? Where is the out? And why are there ducks?
Meanwhile, the Earth dances in circles around the sun. Laika and Gagarin take humanity for a spin. Later, Armstrong and Aldrin fly it to the moon. The little girl from the magazine has grown up, up and up. She flies above the clouds. As the smoke from the rocket launches clears, she will make a discovery along with the rest of the world. While the eyes were fixed on the stars, the kingdom of plastics had settled on Earth. And they have come to stay.
Soon, a new TV spot launches, squeezed between ads for scrubbing paste and news. It follows an old Native chief, Iron Eyes Cody, paddling up a stream. Progressively, garbage fills the screen, until he ends up on a busy highway surrounded by dumped trash. He must face helplessly the degradation of nature. Espera Oscar de Corti –that’s his real name, sheds a single tear while a solemn voice goes on: “people start pollution, people can stop it”. The Crying Indian public service announcement is a terrible awakening and a call for self-responsibility. The Throwaway Living has come of age, and it smells incredibly strong. It’s time to take out the bins! The Indian has cried enough to dig a lake but the landfills pile up. Too late, the magician’s hat has run out of tricks and the rabbits have no intention to re-enter it.
Panem et circenses
The pressure is rising on plastics, answers are demanded by a public increasingly literate in environmentalism. The world is once again in dire need for an idea. The curtain rises for Act II of the Plastic Tragedy, enters the bright idea. Call it circularity or industrial efficiency, the story of recycling hits the spot. We are already deep in the eighties when a small triangle appears on the back of all plastic goods. It’s the Resin Identification Code: three chasing arrows framing letters and a number. It comes with a tacite promise: “if you sort your plastics, we’ll recycle them to end the pollution, and nothing will have to change.”
Cui Bono? Nemo, vere
(–To whom does it benefit? No body, really)
So we have heard for over 3 decades, and indeed nothing has changed. We have followed the rules, we have learned to sort the thrash out and we have taught our children too. Yet, each year passes under the sign of plastic. Cargos come ashore full of our plastic waste, returned to the senders by people tired of dealing with problems they didn’t create. The more we dig, the more we find out. Tell us, how’s recycling?
Turns out the triangle was never meant to work, only to conceal the truth deep into the abyss. We have been lied. Plastic recycling was not meant to protect us but to protect from us. To deflect the attempts at imposing bans or regulating production. The plastic manufacturers, quick to realise the threat, had put together their means and influence to form a powerful coalition. If you dare scratching the mud, you will soon find out that the Crying Indian was a plastic production, a guilt generator to divert the attention from their central role in the pollution. And when it became obsolete, the recycling story, carefully crafted during decades, was ready to take over.
Meanwhile a darker threat has been brewing under the surface. Time and solar radiations initiated a work of doom, splitting plastics into smaller and smaller units. A generous downpour, or a windgust would suffice to propagate them until no corner of the Earth would remain free of them. Microplastics and nanoplastics are the uninvited guests of the planet and we have to accommodate them, from within. They have found their way inside, through food, water and air. Alas, misfortunes never come alone, and along with this invasion comes the looming danger of chemicals. The plastic industry has played enough the sorcerer's apprentice, summoning plastics upon plastics, bending their abilities and shapes to our hearts wildest wishes. We must pay the price for hubris and it is one of flesh. The thousands of additives, the bisphenols, the phtalates, the PFAs and flame retardants used to stimulate our modern cornucopia are now freely roaming. They are attracting other chemical compounds and pollutants to form unheard-of substances. Like radiations and other human-made toxins, they have the potential to modify our very essence, starting within our hormonal systems, and reproductive organs. They can do that, just as they could do anything else. We have set in action forces beyond our understanding and scientists are yet to discover the extent of the damages.
NB: the fish could be a red herring
It must be ignorance then, that fuels the implacable resistance of the plastic coalitions. Or did they put on blindfolds, confident that solutions would eventually come? One thing is clear now about the plastic recycling trope. The global discourse praises an answer that is exposing us to a greater danger, a far more serious but conveniently less tangible one[1].
And while we are sold a redemption through recycled polyester, we are simultaneously closing the door to the simplest, truest form of solution. Putting a stop to producing more. We are facing a morale threat, as plastic recycling has become a guilt cleanser to perpetuate life-as-usual. While this treacherous triangle will mislead us into thinking we do good, the production of virgin plastics will keep rising, well hidden behind the smoke screen of recycling. Disposability will remain the design paradigm. Legal and illegal landfills will fill up, fishes (real ones) will keep on eating plastics and plants on absorbing microplastics, and the intoxication will keep on.
We are 25 years into the 21st century. Flying cars were supposed to be a thing by the time we write these lines. But dreams can be deceiving. Plastic, for most of it, is a dream turned into a design failure, the growth serum of a predatorial economy that feeds on the living, all of them. Humanity is young, we are bound to make mistakes, and colossal ones for sure. What we can do, must do, is learn from them, and move on.
