‘As Plasticville sprawls farther across the landscape, we become more thoroughly entrenched in the way of life it imposes. It is increasingly difficult to believe that this pace of plasticization is sustainable, that the natural world can long endure our ceaseless “improving on nature”.’
—Susan Freinkel, Plastic: Toxic Love Story
‘Does anyone else have plastic bags full of plastic bags, or is it just me?’
—meme
I haven’t been shopping in ages. Yet as I head down the escalators towards the store I’ve been obsessing over, the shopaholic’s rush of expectation is absent. You see, I don’t want anything in the place. Not a single thing. ‘Sorry we’re open!’ proclaims the sign on the door. A boy in school uniform considers a display of sunglasses: classic aviators, a wrap-around mirrored pair. He reaches for some thick, black 1960s-style frames, very Michael Caine. If only they had two lenses. The kid puts them back. Inside the store are plastic cutlery sets and bumper packs of straws. There’s a plastic drum of Chupa Chups sticks and wrappers, lollies missing in action. ‘How much are these?’ I say.
‘Very funny,’ says the woman behind the counter. She seems a little fractious.
‘Do you not like working here?’
‘Let’s just say, I wish it wasn’t necessary.’
Outside a tourist browses the postcards depicting iconic Australian beach scenes littered with empty cans and takeaway containers. We watch her face as she notices the prices: ‘$2 each, 4 for $10, 6 for $20.’ She spins the display round and round, hoping the views might improve.
I grab a packet of burst balloons marketed as ‘turtle food’ and take it to the counter, pausing by a shelf of chewed gum. ‘Ocean fresh breath!’ They are merchandised with the used plasters, empty soy sauce containers and lone flip-flops.
‘Want those?’ says Marina DeBris.
‘Not much.’
‘Can I interest you in a Santa hat instead?’ she smiles, pointing to a row that she rescued from the shallows on Boxing Day: made in China, bought for a few dollars, worn for a few hours, discarded. The hats are furred with seaweed.
‘Yeah, no.’
We regroup outside next to the retro vending machine. It’s filled with brightly coloured plastic fragments, white polystyrene beanbag balls and cigarette butts.
‘Charming.’
‘I don’t even smoke,’ says DeBris. There’s something especially hideous about raking the sand for fag ends when you’re not a smoker. Butts are the most commonly found type of marine litter, and they contain thousands of tiny plastic (cellulose acetate) particles. In 2015, the annual International Coastal Cleanup collected 2,127,565 cigarette butts. I don’t even like to think about the chemicals they’re steeped in.
‘Inconvenience Store’ has just opened at Taronga Zoo, not far from the elephant enclosure. The installation debuted at Bondi’s Sculpture by the Sea exhibition a few months back, where it won two prizes, beating tasteful bronzes and a giant hamburger. DeBris is best known for her grotesquely beautiful ‘trashion’ gowns, made from beachcombed materials (old coffee cups, chewed dog balls, disintegrating shopping bags), but the Inconvenience Store dispenses with good looks.
‘It’s an ugly issue,’ she says, ‘but the store is quite the humorous, don’t you think? I’ve been having some amusing encounters. In Bondi a woman asked, “Do you have any hair ties?” I said, “Yeah, over there,” and she went and inspected them carefully. I thought, it’s going to click soon, she’s going to understand, but then she takes one off, brings it to the counter: “I’ll have this.” I said, “Are you sure?” She said, “Why not?” I told her they were broken and she left in a huff.’
A man asked if she sold water, and DeBris directed him to a cabinet of wave-bashed PET bottles plastered with fake labels for ‘Damn Water’ and ‘Fizzer’. He asked if she took credit cards.
In case you haven’t guessed, Inconvenience Store is not a real shopfront. DeBris, an American in Sydney, is a former graphic designer who began her artivism in 2009 in Los Angeles, when she fashioned an outfit out of cigarette lighters, bottle tops, straws and single-use cutlery for the ocean-protection group Heal the Bay. Since then she’s made trashion pieces for mock catwalks and provocative plastic frocks to make points. Recently, in collaboration with KeepCup, DeBris made a sculpture of a tornado from 1600 discarded coffee cup lids. Called Disposable Truths, it was displayed in a prominent Sydney retail centre.
‘This is fun,’ says DeBris of her latest work, ‘but it’s really not funny. We’re past the stage of this being something to tiptoe around. Plastic is a plague. It’s truly such a massive problem for wildlife, for the ocean, for our food chain, that we don’t have time to mess about doing teeny fixes to the old system. We need a totally new way of living.’
Dreams × Adventure (related to the power of stories) = Inspiration. ‘Dreams are the breeding grounds for adventures,’ explains David de Rothschild.1 ‘Adventures percolate stories, and stories inspire more dreams. And the entire equation is pushed through by asking questions.’
De Rothschild is a British explorer who in 2006 crossed the Arctic from Russia to Canada to raise awareness about climate change. As he packed up his tent each morning, he noticed that the process involved tidying away a plastic bag of plastic waste. In the great garbage-free white it was matter out of place.
Back home de Rothschild began reading up on the plastic problem and discovered that this seemingly mundane, trifling thing that he’d barely given a thought to before was messing with the environment on an epic scale. He read an article by Charles Moore, the oceanographer and racing boat captain credited with discovering the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the late 1990s. Moore and his crew had finished a race in Hawaii and were on their way home to California when they discovered it: the famous plastic soup, our consumer conscience, lurking in the middle of goddamn nowhere. Since they ‘were feeling mellow and unhurried’, they’d decided to take an unusual route through the North Pacific Gyre. ‘Fishermen shun it because its waters lack the nutrients to support an abundant catch. Sailors dodge it because it lacks the wind to propel their sailboats,’ writes Moore.2 ‘Day after day, [his boat] the Alguita was the only vehicle on a highway without landmarks, stretching from horizon to horizon. Yet as I gazed from the deck at the surface of what ought to have been pristine ocean, I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic.’ Moore returned to conduct several studies into plastic in the gyre, revealing mind-blowing numbers.
De Rothschild asked himself, How is it possible that there could be 46,000 bits of plastic in every square mile of the sea? That the mass of plastic in the gyre is six times that of plankton?3 And what on Earth could he do about it? ‘Rather than lecture people, or tell them off, or make them depressed,’ he called on his skills as an epic yarn-teller and decided ‘to use the power of a great adventure story to get people thinking about plastics in a new way.’4 He would build a marvellous boat from trash, and sail it on a fantastic adventure.
The Plastiki set sail from San Francisco for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in March 2010. It was built from 12,500 reclaimed 2-litre plastic soft-drink bottles with sails made from recycled PET fabric, and secured with glue derived from cashew nuts and sugar. Sensible people thought de Rothschild’s bizarre 60-foot catamaran wouldn’t make it the 8000 nautical miles to Sydney. There were times when de Rothschild felt the same way; when he wasn’t skyping journalists about his mission, he spent much of the journey feeling anxious.
After four months at sea, the Plastiki made it, and in the process made the ocean plastic problem big news. Said de Rothschild, ‘I like to think of Plastiki as a metaphor for action. We built a boat out of plastic bottles and sailed it across the Pacific. Let’s apply the same ingenuity and hard work to the ocean’s problems. I hope, most of all, people buy into the audaciousness of the whole thing.’5
Later he told a British newspaper it hadn’t been enough. ‘I guess I was hoping it would achieve more,’ he said. ‘We got massive amounts of publicity. We raised the bar on the plastic issue. We caused a conversation, but we didn’t solve the problem. The oceans are still drowning in plastic.’6
De Rothschild, in his darker moments, might question whether his voyage succeeded, but he underestimates its power. Imagine how many kids unknowingly applied his equation of curiosity to dream of building boats of their own. Big kids too. Take 3’s Tim Silverwood was inspired by the Plastiki, as well as by Charles Moore’s expeditions and Curtis Ebbesmeyer’s writings.
You might have heard of Ebbesmeyer: another American oceanographer, he’s the rubber duck guy. In 1992, when a Greek-owned, Taiwanese-operated cargo ship lost some containers in rough weather, 28,800 Chinese-made plastic toys were released into open ocean. They included 7200 yellow ducks. Ebbesmeyer, the author of a book called Flotsametrics about how gyres work, was not the only beachcomber tracking their progress, but he is the most famous.
I’m at the beach now reading the news as I wait for Tim Silverwood. The Guardian is reporting that plastic production is set to increase dramatically on the back of the shale gas boom: by 40 per cent over the next decade.7 The American Chemistry Council confirms 318 new plastic plants have been built or planned since 2010. As part of a US$20-billion investment, ExxonMobil has expanded its facility near Houston, Mont Belvieu. ‘The plant capacity will total more than 2.5 million tons per year, making it one of the largest polyethylene plants in the world,’ trumpets the press release,8 like that’s a good thing. One of the primary uses for polyethylene is packaging. Not content with mining the fossil fuels that drive global warming, the big oil companies also own the big plastics companies. It is not in their interests to promote recycling. According to the World Economic forum, 90 per cent of all the plastics produced are derived from virgin fossil feedstocks, and ‘if the current strong growth of plastics usage continues as expected, the plastics sector will account for 20 per cent of total oil consumption’ by 2050.9
Silverwood waves and makes his way slowly towards me, stopping every couple of metres to pick something up from the sand. ‘That’s more than three,’ I say, and he laughs. My own pockets also contain more than three pieces of plastic beach litter. I found a fork, a child’s neon orange spade, two bottle caps, a coffee cup lid and a chocolate wrapper. Silverwood knows that however many people get on board with Take 3, we’ll never clean all the junk from our beaches, oceans and waterways by hand. ‘We have to concentrate on not putting any more in there,’ he says.10 The plan is to get people noticing the problem and thinking of new approaches to consumption and waste. ‘Education inspires participation.’
A bit like Harriet Spark, Silverwood believes the ocean taught him ‘to be part of something bigger,’ only for him it happened when he was a nipper. ‘You go out there and you have to let go of your fears and your control, and if you can let yourself go and be immersed in that, that’s when it grabs hold of you, isn’t it?’ The ocean gave little Tim Silverwood as a grommet surfer the most fun he had a kid.
Now all he had to do was work out how to pay it back. Silverwood studied sustainable resource management, but found it disillusioning. ‘In terms of the work outcomes, they would steer you towards the mining companies, to help with their rehabilitation programs, or to the environment offices of local councils. Local government, where there’s an intention to do some good but your hands are tied. Or a corporation that wants to do the bare minimum to mitigate negative pushback? Those choices didn’t stack up for me.’
Silverwood went snowboarding instead. His plastic bug bit in India. ‘I was in a mountain village; it was beautiful, but one day I looked over the hill and saw all this dumped rubbish. I investigated, found out the story behind it and realised that it was my rubbish too. I’d put it in the bin, but there was no system to dispose of it properly, so now it was littering the Himalayas. I thought, It’s going to end up in the ocean in however many years it takes to get there.’
His first idea was to try to make a documentary about it—‘I was in my wanting-to-be-a-filmmaker phase’—and although that didn’t work out, he understood the power of visual storytelling. He hadn’t been back in Australia long when Chanel Nine aired a 60 Minutes report called ‘Seas of Shame’, featuring arresting footage of Kamilo Beach on the southeast coast of Hawaii’s Big Island, deep in plastic trash. ‘It was a revolutionary story for most Australians eating dinner in front of the telly on a Sunday night. Not many had heard of marine debris and not many knew of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.’11 Two years after it aired, Silverwood managed to get there to see it for himself. He found Kamilo ‘absolutely covered with all manner of plastic debris from toilet seats, toothbrushes, and tennis balls to mountains of rope, piles of crates, umbrella handles and bottles, bottle caps and bottle necks.’12 The gyre was disturbing in a different way. It’s not choked thick with trash as many of us imagine it must be—the ‘floating island’ isn’t solid. As Charles Moore describes it, ‘Half of it was just little chips that we couldn’t identify.’ Silverwood had joined a research team sailing from Honolulu to Vancouver. Sifting through the debris in the gyre, they wore gloves to protect their skin. The plastic draws in persistent organic pollutants (POPs), acting like a sponge in the water. ‘The plot doesn’t play out very nicely for the species that are nibbling and swallowing this toxic detritus,’ wrote Silverwood of the experience. ‘Wait a minute, don’t we eat fish?’
His journey to that point involved some serendipity and a lot of graft. He was ranting about plastic at a film festival in Avoca on the NSW Central Coast when someone in the audience suggested he meet two women who lived nearby. ‘Amanda Marechal is married to a mad-keen surfer, and she’d been going to Hawaii with him, seeing all the trash that washes up when the trade winds blow,’ says Silverwood. She and a friend, marine ecologist Roberta Dixon Valk, had started a beach clean-up initiative. They chose Take 3 as their name because Marechal, who is a mum, thought three bits of garbage was the max that little fingers could manage—they knew inspiring children was vital.
‘Schools are a core focus,’ says Silverwood, who has delivered hundreds of talks to students since he closed the triangle of Take 3. The organisation offers an early-childhood program to inspire mini marine protectors with storytelling and art projects. They work with primary and secondary schools encouraging the kids to develop their own systems to stop plastic pollution and put them into practice. ‘That’s the way,’ says Silverwood. ‘We need to give people agency.’
Being a bit fabulous and also based in Sydney, Silverwood was the project partner the women had been looking for. Not that he knew it all. They all learned how to be professional change-makers on the job. ‘For the first ten months it was, “What do we do now?”’ admits Silverwood.
Their big, beautiful, ridiculously simple message—‘Take three pieces of rubbish [away] when you leave the beach, waterway or anywhere, and you’ve made a difference’—became their touchstone; they knew it was powerful and that its simplicity was a big selling point. They stepped up the beach cleans, worked on their school program and joined the Boomerang Alliance. Silverwood made a fifteen-minute film about plastic pollution that screened at a surf movie festival. He gave a TED talk. They won a $50,000 grant from Taronga Zoo and built a better website, recruited ambassadors and began working with surf lifesaving clubs. Somehow Silverwood found the time to start a company, ReChusable, which sells metal drinking straws and bamboo cutlery.
‘When I first started, the enthusiasm I felt around this issue, you couldn’t put a cap on it,’ he says. ‘I was the archetype activist. I was the guy dressing up in plastic bags. I was waving placards in front of parliament, I was sneaking into Coca-Cola’s AGM and getting up to ask [then Coca-Cola-Amatil chairman] David Gonski hard questions, nervous as hell at the time but just compelled to do it.’ A decade on, his approach has changed. ‘I have a more calculated, pulled-back perspective. My approach now is about the slow road. Change is so inherently hard—not to say that you can’t achieve a lot from rapid activist actions—but if we want to change society, to build this into a real movement to ingrain sustainability into our culture, we need the fabric of society to change, and we need behavioural norms to change. That takes patience.’
It started with one woman looking at an empty yoghurt container she was about to toss. ‘I thought, How did I come to have this thing in the first place? What other choices could I have made? I went to work the next day and said, “Right, I’m going to refuse single-use plastics for the whole of next month.’”13
The fact that this woman was Rebecca Prince-Ruiz and she worked in waste education for her local council was good luck for the planet. She’d recently taken a group to visit a materials-recovery facility in Perth, Western Australia, and the scale of it stunned her. ‘The sheer volume, particularly of plastic rubbish. I saw it being sorted and baled up to be shipped to South-East Asia for further processing. It’s so complex and energy-intensive. I thought, We focus on recycling when we should be refusing.’
The first Plastic Free July challenge in 2011 involved about forty colleagues and friends-of-friends committing to ‘choose to refuse single-use plastic’ for a month. It was just a few emails really, sharing tips and encouragement, but the idea was sticky. ‘I think lots of people feel overwhelmed by the amount of plastic packaging in our lives,’ says Prince-Ruiz.
Maybe they also like the feeling of taking their power back. The year 2011 was a rotten one for global stability and natural disasters, with earthquakes in Japan and New Zealand and riots in the UK. Occupy Wall Street stole headlines. The Queensland floods were the worst in memory, while bushfires near Perth destroyed at least fifty houses. Maybe, faced with all that, the idea of being the boss of your own habits was especially appealing that first year.
Prinze-Ruiz thinks the reason people came back to do it again the next year, and the challenge grew wings after that, is that it feels achievable. ‘I mean, you can do most things for four weeks, right? It’s long enough to change habits but short enough to handle.’ Plus it’s not like you’re trying to kick an enjoyable habit—the plastic-free life feels better on many levels, as we shall see. Today, the campaign has global reach.
When I tried the fast in 2017, it definitely recalibrated my thinking, and while I didn’t turn into a full-blown zero-waste warrior, I did give up the big five single-use plastic items (bags, bottles, straws, coffee cups, utensils) for good, and found it deeply satisfying. In terms of difficulty, it was the sneaky little things that got me: the discs of plastic inside metal beer-bottle tops, the plastic labels on glass jars, the bags inside cereal boxes. The fact that I’m lost without yoghurt—Prince-Ruiz makes her own.
‘Some of it is about rediscovering the old ways,’ she says, ‘which people enjoy. With plastic packaging, you can buy food that’s highly processed, imported, not in season, whereas by taking on the challenge, you’re almost forced to buy local produce and support local businesses. You rediscover the farmers’ market, greengrocer, butcher, fishmonger.
‘A couple of generations ago, especially in rural and suburban areas, people used to be responsible for their own waste. You composted what you could or kept chickens to eat scraps, and a little incinerator in your backyard for anything you couldn’t deal with. Your rubbish was processed by you on site, so you cared more. Now we’re disconnected from our waste, just like we’re disconnected from our food production, our environment and where our clothes come from. You need to connect to care.’
Prince-Ruiz says giving up plastic is bigger than a lifestyle trend. ‘I see it as part of a counterculture, anti-consumerist movement, bigger than that even, in that it allows you to take a step out of the rat race and become more mindful.’ And encourages you to question the system. ‘You know the recycling symbol around the number you find on plastic packaging?’
I tell her I do.
‘The number is just a resin identification code that tells you what type of plastic you’re dealing with. Introducing the recycling symbol around it was a genius idea from the American Chemistry Council, but it’s misleading. The question isn’t: is it recyclable? It’s: will it be recycled? Only 9 per cent of the plastic ever made has been recycled,’ she says, and most of that is really ‘down-cycled’ to a lesser grade application. ‘So, PET bottles become synthetic fabric or playground matting; they’re not just these happy drinks bottles that keep being fed into an endless closed loop. I see Plastic Free July as part of a much broader movement that’s seeing large numbers of people question the role of plastics in our lives and its impacts on the environment.’