Union Carbide plant. Photo by Philip Gould /Corbis

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American petro-topia

The genius and hubris of plastic has been absorbed by everyliving thing. Is it a curse or evolution’s next step?

by Rebecca Altman

Rebecca Altman has a PhD in environmentalsociology and serves on the Board of Directors of

Iknew it was late to be calling him. But that night, withthe first warm breezes rustling the curtains, I couldsense the coming spring and realised he would turn 73

soon.

For more than a decade, my father and I had talked aboutreturning to the place where he made plastics before I wasborn. The plant had exerted an inexplicable pull on me forlonger than I can remember, since before I had kids, andeven before I entered graduate school to studyenvironmental legacy – what is passed from onegeneration to the next.

So I dialled. He answered quickly. When I asked whetherhe’d like to go with me, he didn’t hesitate. Within minutes,we had set a date. Two months later, in May 2013, we stoodon the grounds of the former Union Carbide plant inBound Brook, New Jersey, the birthplace of modernplastics.

A century earlier, in 1907, Leo Baekeland invented the firstsynthetic plastic in his laboratory in Yonkers, New York.Though earlier plastics had been made from plants(biomass), Baekeland’s formulation used fossil-fuelderivatives, which is now the standard.

He called his amber-hued invention Bakelite resin. It wasmade by reacting formaldehyde with phenol, producedfrom coal tar traced to fossilized plants. At the time,

the Science and Environmental Health Network.She is writing a book about the legacy of persistentpollutants.

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industrial chemists had just begun to manipulatehydrocarbons extracted from decomposed, ancient life.They would go on to synthesise new molecules bysubjecting hydrocarbons to unearthly temperatures andpressures, and mixing them in concentrations and withother elements in combinations never before seen innature.

After his backyard laboratory caught fire, Baekelandrelocated in 1910 to a factory in Perth Amboy, New Jersey.By the early 1930s, he had built a 125-acre plant along theRaritan River in Bound Brook.

It was the broadcaster Lowell Thomas, the signature voiceof the early 20th century, who helped Bakelite become ahousehold name. The natural world was thought to haveonly three kingdoms – animal, vegetable and mineral – butin a 1937 film on the story of Bakelite, Thomas described afourth kingdom of synthetics, which promised to free usfrom reliance on nature, including timber and plant masssuch as cotton and wool. Baekeland’s company chose theinfinity symbol as its logo and the phrase ad infinitum asits motto.

But Bakelite wasn’t infinite in the way Baekeland hadintended. His synthetic resin inspired other companiesand new plastics, which eventually began to compete formarket share. In 1939, he sold his Bound Brook factory toUnion Carbide.

In 1962, the same year Rachel Carson published SilentSpring, my father started his first job at this factory.He was 22, his black hair buzzed short, accentuating

the characteristic patch of white just above his hairline. Hehad just graduated from the chemical engineeringprogramme at the University of Rhode Island, and washired even though URI did not yet offer classes in plasticsproduction.

Union Carbide assigned him as a process engineer. Withinfour years, at the age of 26, the company promoted him tosupervisor of their polystyrene department, a position heheld for a couple years until taking over the production ofphenol, formaldehyde and hexamethylenetetramine, thechemicals used to make Bakelite. They gave him a goodsalary and a small office with a door. When closed, it coulddampen the din of the incessant machines. But he spentmost days in the plant. His shirt and tie carried home thesaccharine smell of styrene and Acrowax, the powdersifted onto the finished polystyrene pellets to keep themfrom sticking. For a time, he commuted by bicycle past thejunkyards before pedalling down Baekeland Avenue. Whenthe union went on strike, he worked the 12-hour graveyardshift. By the close of 1963, The New York Times Magazinereported, Union Carbide had made 1 billion lbs of plastic ina single year.

My father spent a decade at that job, spanning the period

in which my three older siblings were born. By spring 2013,on the day we visited, only a few buildings remained. Wehappened to meet a uniformed employee who showed us amanhole cover bearing the Bakelite logo, the only knowncompany artifact on-site. He had salvaged it and placed itby the central flagpole, in grass taken over by Canadiangeese. It once marked a portal into the dense network ofunderground wires and pipes that, like roots, conveyedpower and resources to the plant’s many branches. I stoodbetween my father and the geese trying to imbue theround, rusted disc with significance. But all I could seewere goose droppings.

Visiting the old Carbide site made me wonder why we callindustrial factories ‘plants’ in the first place. Most plantsstrike me as an extreme landscape, invasive, grown beyondthe human scale. They look like an impenetrable thicket ofpipes and valves, canopies of stacks and distillationcolumns with an understory of brick and catwalks,scaffolding and tanks.

In the years since my grandfather walkedthese paths, all living organisms haveabsorbed the products of 20th centurypetrochemistry

But little else can thrive in their presence. I’m reminded ofthe Locke Breaux Oak that, since the 1600s, had grown inTaft, Louisiana. Union Carbide built a chemical plant

nearby and, beginning in 1966, it likely made the styrenemy father coaxed into polystyrene. When the plant wasbuilt, the oak was 36 ft around its trunk and 75 ft tall, withbranches that spanned 170 ft across. But by 1968, it wasdead. So I’m left wondering: how is it that two seeminglyopposed concepts – factories and flora – came to share thesame word?

The related term, factories, is a shortening ofmanufactories, an example of how places are sometimesnamed according to what actions – manufacturing – areperformed there. Hence smelters smelt. Paper mills millpaper. Ironworks work iron. Refineries refine petroleum.But plants don’t follow the same logic. The corollary wouldbe plantations.

Interestingly, Union Carbide’s Taft plant sits along the 150-mile corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans,which was once lined with antebellum plantations. Thehundred or so petrochemical plants along the Mississippiwere constructed on former cotton, indigo and sugarplantations, and now produce, in addition to chemicalfeedstocks and plastics, synthetic versions of the cropsonce raised by forced labour: rayon, dyes and artificialsweeteners. The descendants of former slaves now share afence line with some of the most polluting industries inthe nation.

However, according to the Oxford English Dictionary,calling factories plants predates the conversion of USplantations into petrochemical production. I put the

T

question to an environmental historian, severalsociologists, a linguist, two science and technologyscholars, and a plastics expert – all of whom uncoveredpieces of its origins, but were otherwise stumped by howfactories became plants. Might it have a Latin root? Does itrefer to how the first factories converted plants (such ascotton) into commodities? Was it a clever metaphor – toplant a business, to sow profit – that spread organically? Didits use emerge in that chasm between technologicalchange and the evolution of adequate terminology todescribe it?

Even the linguist said I’d dug up an etymological mystery,one that hadn’t yet revealed its source. And while my(re)search continues, I wonder how phrases become takenfor granted, adopted without thought, and their originlargely unknown to generations who rarely question theway things have come to be.

he same could be said about plastics.

My mother’s father died young, but the man mygrandmother remarried – and whom I knew as Grandpa –had been among the first chemical engineers trained atthe Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the first USinstitution to grant degrees in the field. He matriculatedin the early 1920s, just as Baekeland’s business took off. Hegraduated with his Bachelor’s degree in 1928, and hisMaster’s a few years after that.

In the fall of 2012, before my father and I went to New

Jersey, I visited the MIT archives. I had arranged for thelibrarians to find my grandfather’s theses. They were well-preserved, their black bindings so taut that they creakedwhen I opened them. As I read his work, I remembered hisbasement laboratory and how, when I was young, he hadmade me a set of test tubes. I’d watched as he blew bulbousends onto slender glass tubing. I don’t remember whatexperiments we ran afterwards, but there were powdersand liquids, scales and bottles, and shifting states andcolours that seemed magical and otherworldly.

Until I read his research, I didn’t know he hadexperimented with corn as a feedstock. This is how Idiscovered that there was a time before oil, and that someindustrialists of the 1930s and ’40s envisioned a radicallydifferent society, with plastics, paints and fuel for carsmade from carbohydrates. But in the US by the close of the1940s, oil had replaced both biomass and coal as thesubstrate for making the stuff of everyday life. UnionCarbide had helped lead the conversion.

In the years since my grandfather walked these paths, allliving organisms have absorbed the products of 20thcentury petrochemistry. We now embody its genius, itsintellectual property, its mistakes, and its hubris. The USCenters for Disease Control and Prevention has confirmedthe presence of at least 200 (from a possible 80,000-100,000) industrial chemicals in Americans. And thoughwe already have clear reason for concern about their rolein human health, development and reproduction, not eventhe scientists know exactly what their combined presence

means for our future.

The volatility inherent to plastics-makingmirrored the social milieu of the decade: theassassinations; the ignition of racism; theVietnam War

A generation after my grandfather studied at MIT, in the1960s, my father oversaw four production lines ofpolystyrene, each capable of making 2,000 lbs an hour.Polystyrene was made in large, thick-walled autoclavesthat could withstand the extremes in pressure andtemperature required to string together molecules ofstyrene and butadiene rubber. The equipment ran roundthe clock, nearly every day of every year he was there. Itwas his job to keep the pressure and temperatures steady,lest they blow the roof. He knew styrene was hazardous,but it would be decades before the government confirmedits potential as a carcinogen.

It always struck me how the volatility my father describedas inherent to plastics-making mirrored the social milieuof the decade in which he made it: the assassinations; theignition of racism and racial inequalities in Plainfield,where he lived; and the Vietnam War – a war in which hewas prepared to serve, but for a variety of reasons (hiseyesight and a critical-skills deferment) didn’t. Instead, onthe nightly news he watched the horrors of napalm (whichDow made from roughly 46 per cent polystyrene). While at

work, he witnessed unmarked trucks cart away drums ofun-reacted styrene, only to return them empty forrefilling. This was before Ohio’s Cuyahoga River ignitedagain in 1969, before the US Environmental ProtectionAgency was founded in 1970, before the public health crisisat Love Canal, New York, erupted in the late 1970s, andbefore federal laws tried to curb hazardous waste and itsburial. He knew enough to wonder where the drums – andtheir contents – were going, but not enough about his ownagency at a time when there weren’t clear channels forquestioning such things.

As my father’s discontent grew, he marched for civilrights, marched on Washington to end the war, attendedthe first Earth Day, and eventually, quit plastics altogether.Soon thereafter, his wife left, too, taking their kids.

By the late 1970s, US plants were making more plastic thansteel. By the 1980s, Union Carbide was on its way to infamyafter the lethal explosion in Bhopal, India. Meanwhile,thousands of drums containing waste from the BoundBrook plant had already been found at a farm in TomsRiver, an hour south. The farm was added to the federalSuperfund list in 1983, the year before Bhopal. Stateofficials later began researching whether the chemicalsthat had leached into the water supply from the illegaldump had contributed to elevated rates of childhoodcancers.

Dow announced its intention to buy Union Carbide in1999, even as the Toms River inquiry continued. A century

P

after Baekeland’s invention, Dow too ceasedmanufacturing at the site.

When I asked my father why he left Carbide, a place manystayed for life, he said: There had to be a higher calling.

lastic is a term that predates the material. In the1600s, it referred to any substance that was readilymoldable and easily shaped. In step with growth in

plastics production, plastic acquired a figurative meaningand is now used to indicate when something seemsartificial or contrived.

The landscape architect Kate Orff has written about ourinsatiable appetite for plastics, calling US culture a petro-topia – an idealised landscape designed for theconsumption of petroleum-derived plastics, manydisposable, bought on credit, which we also call plastic. Itis a place distanced from the plants that make what we buyand from the communities living in the shadow ofproduction. It is a culture built with and aroundhydrocarbons.

The petro-topia I’ve come to know is eerily over-populatedby plants of another species: tables set with inedible fruit,backyards where grass stains have been traded for turfburns and gardens landscaped with polyethylene boulders.Where I live in Massachusetts, an artificial tree sproutsfrom the floor of the Whole Foods Market. It stands in thebulk-foods aisle, the freeze-dried fruit and plastic-sealedkale chips shaded from the fluorescent lights by its eternal

foliage.

In one of the most telling essays on plastics, ‘Reflections ofan Unrepentant Plastiphobe’ (2010), the plastics scholarJody Roberts describes how his research made himhypervigilant about his families’ home and diet. But whenhis daughter was born with cerebral palsy, she wasdependent on plastics for her survival. Plastic tubingconveyed breath and nourishment, even as it deliveredplasticisers and other plastic additives known to interferewith vital physiological functions. His essay forced me toreconcile plastics as both life-altering and life-giving –practically inseparable from the practice of modernhealthcare. We are past the point of simple dichotomiessuch as good/bad, nature/plastic, innocent/complicit.

Plastics swirl in the oceans’ major gyres. Inplaces, microplastics outnumber plankton

It’s the same lesson taught by the new kind of rock, foundrecently in Hawaii. Neither plastic nor stone,plastiglomerates are a composite of melted plastics, marinedebris and volcanic rock. Its discovery confirms humancapacity to change the geological record for the era inwhich we live. According to the Worldwatch Institute,global plastics production continues to rise. Some299 million tons of plastics were manufactured in 2013alone, a four per cent increase over the previous year.

I’ve come to believe Baekeland chose an apt symbol for

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plastics. Purportedly, the infinity symbol has roots inmystical traditions. It depicts a snake eating its own tail.

Over the past 10 years, we’ve learned how sunlight andwaves break down plastics into microscopically smallparts. They swirl in all the oceans’ major gyres, of whichthere are five. In places, microplastics outnumberplankton.

Fish confuse plastics for plankton, and so plastics haveentered the food chain. I’m reminded of the phrase: youare what you eat, and what you eat eats, of the snakeconsuming its tail, and also of the poet Adam Dickinson,who has called us a people of the resin. I suspect he isreferring to how some plastic additives have come to livein us – in our bloodstreams, and even in our mother’s milk.Plastic is part of our inheritance.

This is a topic my father would rather avoid, preferringinstead to talk about recycling. He tells me thermoplastics,like polystyrene, can be melted, remolded and reused. Heplaces great faith in the possibility that some plasticscould be redeemed, though in the US only about seven percent of post-consumer plastics actually get recycled.

By the mid-1970s, my father had remarried and, aroundthe time I was born, began a new career in publicadministration, where he developed a record-settingcurbside recycling programme. One of the most enduringimages of my childhood involves riding in his car, wherehe would throw litter collected from gutters and roadsides

A

to be brought to the recycling yard. In the US, such placesare called redemption centres. Recycling might be animperfect solution to the problem of everlasting waste, butwe name the place where plastic is recycled in hope of oursalvation.

t its peak, Union Carbide’s Bound Brook plantemployed several thousand people. On the day myfather and I peered through the chain-link that

now surrounds the property, there were fewer than adozen employees left. It was spring and, in the absence ofan industrial thrum, I heard birdsong.

My father’s voice cracked when we pulled down BaekelandAvenue, and he gaped in disbelief at the ghost of his oldfactory. We drove the perimeter, past the lot where he’donce parked. Indifferent weeds pushed through cracks inthe asphalt. An old emergency vehicle still bearing theUnion Carbide logo slumped in the grass. At the rearentrance, we parked where the rusted rail lines slippedunder the padlocked gates, its branches warped. I tried topicture the tankers of styrene entering on one branch, thefreight cars filled with polystyrene pellets exiting fromanother, and the trucks rumbling over the tracks withtheir payload of 55-gallon drums carrying away everythingelse. My father would never know the fate of the drums hesaw leaving the plant, their whereabouts likely stillunknown.

But from the papers and from Dan Fagin’s Pulitzer prize-winning book, Toms River (2013), my father eventually

learned what happened to other drums that had beenstockpiled at the Bound Brook plant. In 1971, in the span ofjust five months, a third-party waste hauler stashed atleast 5,000 barrels at a farm in Toms River, the one thatwould become a Superfund site. The farmers, Sam andBertha Reich, had leased their back two acres withoutrealising the purposes to which the land would be put.They were just trying to keep the farm solvent.

Drums labeled ‘styrene’, ‘polymer solution’ and ‘chemicalwaste,’ as Fagin reported, were eventually found empty,others damaged and leaking. All told, an unknowablemixture of chemicals had seeped into the soil and spreadto the well and fields supplying Toms River. One never-before-seen chemical was determined to be a wasteproduct called SAN trimer, leftover from the production ofacrylonitrile butadiene styrene, or ABS, a next-generationplastic that, in the late 1960s, my father remembers UnionCarbide was just beginning to develop. In fact, he hadwitnessed its first experimental production run.

To parse what chemicals from which plantcaused which cancers turned out to be aquestion beyond the capacity of science

By the 1990s, the public outcry over the pollution andchildhood cancers in Toms River reached its pinnacle.Cancer was already spreading in my father’s body, too. Itwould be another decade before it was detected. He wouldsurvive. At least 50 Toms River children, possibly more,

would succumb.

The cause of any one person’s cancer is mostlyunknowable, Fagin writes. And in the case of a community,it is very difficult to prove.

What happened in Toms River is a complex story. Fagin’saccount, published the month before our trip, portrayedthe community’s tireless but ultimately inconclusive effortto understand why so many local children had cancer.Compounding the situation was the fact that the town hadalso been home to Ciba-Geigy, a dye factory nestled in apine forest along the river. For decades, it had used thisriver to unload its prodigious waste. The rest had beenburied on site. And so, the Toms River wells, and thosedrinking from them, absorbed these chemicals, too. Toparse what chemicals from which plant caused whichcancers turned out to be a question beyond the capacity ofscience to answer definitely, though millions of dollarshave been spent trying.

Had we not read Fagin’s book before our trip, neither myfather nor I would have realised that the chemicalfingerprints found at Reich Farm implicated thepolystyrene department that he ran, specifically. Eventhough he never managed the waste, my father came towonder whether he had unwittingly played some part inthe manufacturing of what wound up in Toms River.

On the day we visited the factory, Building #91, the bulkpolystyrene department, was a rectangle of barren land. It

had been two stories, brick, with vaulted-ceilings, itsmassive production equipment housed on the top floor.The security guard connected us with two employees, who,having learned that an old-timer had come back with hisdaughter, escorted us on to the property to get a closerlook. I stared at the footprints of old buildings as theyreminisced. Before taking us back through the front gates,the facilities manager gave my father a black-and-whiteaerial photo of the plant. My dad named the function ofeach structure: the storage tanks and distillation columns,the warehouses and water-cooling station. It was nearlyimpossible for me to reconcile what I saw in thephotograph with the landscape on which I stood. Whenplastics plants are shuttered, they rewild faster than Iwould have imagined.

Until a few years ago, plants like this were being closedacross the country. Market dynamics had incentivisedrelocation of many such facilities to China and the MiddleEast. But the natural gas industry – spurred by frackingand unconventional gas drilling – might reverse thattrend. Now producing abundant shale oil, gas, and ethane,American petrochemical companies are beginning toregrow their industry. From ethane, they can makeethylene, which can then be converted into styrene andother feedstocks necessary for making plastics.

‘Plants use natural gas like a bakery shop uses flour,’ saidDan Borne, president of the Louisiana ChemicalAssociation. ‘All this stuff,’ he continued, by which hemeant fertilisers and plastics, ‘starts with natural gas, our

Abasic feedstock, our daily bread.’

fter our tour of the Bound Brook plant, we turnedsouth toward Toms River. It was happenstancethat we found the Reich Farm Superfund site,

tucked behind a used car shop and Carl’s Fencing, whichnow occupies the former farmhouse. Red, white and blueflags billowed across the place. Around the back, two rowsof chicken coops stood at attention. There was nothing tosee, really. No drums. No signs. The land was wild. Iscanned for signs of trauma. It felt like a battleground, thekind of place people visit to reckon with their legacy, andknow their place in history, except my father was anxiousand wanted to leave immediately. We shouldn’t be here, hesaid, and steered us into an abrupt U-turn.

From Reich Farm, we drove back through town toRiverfront Landing – a small, out-of-the-way parkbordered by an abandoned dental office, a through streetand Toms River where it widens into Barnegat Bay. Theprevious fall, Hurricane Sandy had flooded the area. Thepark was empty, unkempt with foot-high dandelions.Litter rattled along the sidewalks.

Against a stand of shrubs leaned a stone memorial to thetown’s children lost to cancer. I counted 50 names etchedin multiple fonts; more had probably died after the firsthad been inscribed. My father approached the stone andbowed his head. He seemed at prayer.

I remember the Sundays I stood beside him in a churchpew, how after communion, the congregation would joinhands to recite the Lord’s prayer. Our Father, he would say,as he took my hand in his. Forgive us our trespasses. Hewould always hold on long after those final words.

The wind coming off the river blows an empty Kwik Martcup to my feet. I pick it up and trace the symbol imprintedon the plastic lid – arrows cycling around the letters PS –which tell me that the lid of the cup at the cancermemorial was made from polystyrene.

In the coming weeks, my dad will consider calling theToms River Town Hall to ask if he can clean up the park –to mow the grass, clip back the bushes, carry away thetrash. The sight of a forgotten memorial was unbearable tohim. He wanted their lives – and deaths – to seed whatchanges he feels must now come next.

Plasticity could well be the ironic answer tothe environmental dilemmas we now faceafter more than a century of petrochemistry

A year later, I would look up the origin of plants in theOxford English Dictionary, and instead stumble on a lesser-known meaning of plastic. For biologists, plastic refers to aspecies that responds quickly to environmental change,one capable of rapid evolution and self-preservation. Manyspecies of plants exhibit adaptive plasticity, I’m told by thebotanist Chris Martine.

Plasticity could well be the ironic answer to theenvironmental dilemmas we face after more than acentury of petrochemistry: to be more plastic and willing toevolve as conditions change.

And while I still don’t understand how factories came to beplants, I’ve come to believe that manufacturing plantsought at least to live up to their name. This is the positiontaken by industrial ecologists, who over the past quarter-century have argued that industrial systems mustacknowledge that plants are members of a bioticcommunity, in constant, mutual exchange with all cycles,systems and living beings around it.

My colleagues in environmental sociology debate whetheror not production systems can ever be benign. Standing atthe memorial that afternoon with my father – where ourevery step scattered dandelion seeds – I wasn’t particularlyoptimistic, but I desperately wanted something to root for.

My father reaches into his back pocket to pull out ahandkerchief. He wipes my eyes before his. We know therecan’t be closure. We stay there, side-by-side, beforeclimbing back into the car to follow the river to the sea.

—March 11, 2015

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