Their Plastics And Ours PDF

THEIR PLASTICS AND OURS San Francisco, May 25. One surprising similarity between Ecotopia and contemporary America is that they both use huge amounts of plastics. At first I took this as a sign that our ways of life have not diverged so drastically after all. However, closer investigation has reveal...

THEIR PLASTICS AND OURS San Francisco, May 25. One surprising similarity between Ecotopia and contemporary America is that they both use huge amounts of plastics. At first I took this as a sign that our ways of life have not diverged so drastically after all. However, closer investigation has revealed that, despite surface resemblances, the two countries use plastics in totally different ways. Ecotopian plastics are entirely derived from living biological sources (plants) rather than from fossilized ones (petroleum and coal) as most of ours are. Intense research effort went into this area directly after Independence, and it continues. According to my informants, there were two major objectives. One was to produce the plastics, at low cost and in a wide range of types: light, heavy, rigid, flexible, clear, opaque, and so on---and to produce them with a technology that was not itself a pollutant. The other objective was to make them all biodegradable, that is, susceptible to decay. This meant that they could be returned to the fields as fertilizer, which would nourish new crops, which in turn could be made into new plastics---and so on indefinitely, in what the Ecotopians call, with almost religious fervor, a "stable-state system." One interesting strategy for biodegradability involved producing plastics which had a short planned lifetime and would automatically self-destruct after a certain period or under certain conditions. (With typical biology-centered thinking, Ecotopians refer to such plastics as "dying" when they begin to decompose.) Plastics of this type are used to make containers for beer, food of many types, to produce packaging materials that resemble cellophane, and so on. These materials "die" after a month or so, especially when exposed to sunlight's ultraviolet rays. I have noticed that the usually tidy Ecotopians have no hesitation about dropping (and stamping on) an empty beer container; it turns out they know that in a few weeks its remnants will have crumbled and decayed into the soil. Similarly, Ecotopian householders toss wrapping materials onto their compost heaps, knowing they will join there in the general decay into rich garden fertilizer. Another line of plastics development led to a variety of durable materials, which were increasingly needed in place of metals. Metals became deliberately scarce in early Ecotopia, when the little mining and smelting that had taken place were replaced by an entirely scrap-based metals industry. An amusing aspect of this scarcity was the nationwide campaign to recycle junked cars, which had littered the Ecotopian landscape just as they do ours. These formerly worthless heaps of junk skyrocketed in value, and were hauled up from creekbeds, pulled out of vacant lots, unearthed in abandoned barns, and of course salvaged from scrap yards. In a parallel campaign, several billion beer and soda cans were collected and recycled. Ecotopian durable plastics, which are used for minibus bodies, "extruded houses," coins, bottles, and mechanical objects of many kinds, have molecular structures similar to those of our plastics, and are virtually decay-proof under ordinary circumstances---in particular, so long as they are not in contact with the soil. However, by chemical advances that have so far remained secret, Ecotopian scientists have built into these molecules "'keyholes," which can be opened only by soil micro-organisms! Once they are unlocked, the whole structure decomposes rapidly. This weird but ingenious system means that even a large plastic object will, if left in contact with damp earth over a long period of time, eventually decay. Usually, however, when plastic objects are to be recycled they are broken up into easily handled pieces and thrown into "biovats," huge tubs of a special earthen mush that soil micro-organisms find a good habitat. In time the results of this process are dried into sludge and recycled onto the land. (It is in such vats that the contents of the recycle bins marked P are dumped.) Whatever their advantages these plastics do not impress all Ecotopians, especially those who are fond of wood. It is recognized, of course, that since plastics can be molded they are capable of taking shapes that wood is not; and that they can be stronger, more flexible, and often more durable. Extremists, however, still take exception to any use of plastics, believing they are unnatural materials that have no place in an ecologically ideal world. These purists will live only in wood houses, and use only containers such as wooden chests, string bags, woven baskets, and clay pots. The defenders of plastics, on their side, have many effective economic arguments, and they have also produced plastics that have a less "plasticky" feel and look---with some success, it seems to me. Nonetheless, I have the impression that despite the undeniable Ecotopian scientific achievements in plastics, the future may well belong to the purists. For in this as in many areas of life, there is still a strong trend in Ecotopia to abandon the fruits of ail modern technology, however innocuous they may be made, in favor of a poetic but costly return to what the extremists see as "nature."