I just finished reading Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, and I recommend it highly. The book imagines that all humans vanish from this planet overnight (aliens, killer virus, the rapture, etc) and then investigates what would happen to the planet after we’ve gone. It makes for a good framework within which examine all the terrible things we’re doing to our little blue marble home and what it would take to clean up our mess.

To me, the scariest chapter is the one called “Polymers are Forever.”

“Except for a small amount that’s been incinerated,” says [research scientist] Tony Andrady […], “every bit of plastic manufactured in the world for the last 50 years or still remains. It’s somewhere in the environment.”

Most of it is in the ocean. The large pieces are clumped up in what is called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area of the middle of the Pacific Ocean absolutely covered in garbage. Which is bad enough, but that’s only the big pieces. The really terrifying part is what happens to the small pieces. Plastic pieces don’t biodegrade, they just break down into smaller pieces of plastic.

The book quotes marine biologist Richard Thompson, who studies the accumulation of plastic in the world’s oceans. Thompson has discovered that most sea creatures happily eat “bite-sized” pieces of plastic, and then die if the pieces are too big to pass through their digestive systems. As the plastic bits get smaller, smaller animals start eating them and dying.

At what point would [plastic debris in the ocean] star to naturally break down—and when they did, would they release some fearful chemicals that would endanger organisms sometime far in the future?

Richard Thompson didn’t know. Nobody did, because plastics haven’t been around long enough for us to know how long they’ll last or what happens to them. His team had identified nine different kinds in the sea so far, varieties of acrylic, nylon, polyester, polyethylene, and polyvinyl chloride. All he knew was that soon everything alive would be eating them.

“When they get as small as powder, even the zooplankton will swallow them.”

We’re wildly irresponsible in our use of plastic. It’s one of the most indestructible materials we’ve invented, and we use it primarily to make disposable goods like packaging and grocery bags. It’s insane. As a species, we’re terrible at long-term thinking. We’re merrily destroying our home and poisoning ourselves, but it’s happening slowly enough that we can turn a blind eye to it in the name of short-term profit.

We ought to factor the costs of safe disposal (and by disposal I mean breaking down to base elements) of our materials into their cost. It’d drive the price of plastic through the roof and probably ruin the holy economy in the short term, but it might keep the plastic wrapper containing today’s breakfast from being part of breakfast tomorrow.

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