Rethinking Plastics

I’ve had this idea recently about rethinking the Industrial Revolution – what would we as engineers do if we could go back 250 years only retaining the knowledge of the consequences of our choices of how to produce and use energy, goods, transportation, etc. What would we do differently, knowing that relying so heavily on one type of fuel would have atmospheric implications that we never anticipated? Could we avoid disasters like leaded gasoline, asbestos in insulation, unnatural junk in food? That all turned out to be too big a topic for one blog post, and I grew weary with how political the whole topic was getting as I tried to write something that didn’t sound trite or preachy, so I had to cut it back. It’s still a great idea for a discussion, but I’m going to have to work on how to present it in a non-political sort of way.

Plastics seemed like an easier topic to approach, especially since much of what I do is so closely tied to plastics design and molding, and its a very relevant topic these days, and something we can actually do something about.

Plastics materials are in the news. And since plastics design is part of how I make my living, I wanted to comment on this a little bit. First of all, I do think plastics are a valid material option, but I also think that from a social responsibility point of view, we have to rethink some of how we use plastics.

Remember the “good old days” when the grocery store sent you home with paper bags, and then we (really, some activist) decided that paper bags were bad for the environment because you cut down trees. So we started using plastic bags, which now another activist has pointed out can’t be recycled, kill whales, and don’t  degrade in the short run. So now we all carry our own little bags made out of recycled bottles to the grocery store. This seems like a workable solution that reuses resources, and doesn’t add any cost to anything except the initial cost of the bags, which is a few dollars each, but not bad overall.

If you remember back farther, you remember returnable glass milk bottles. Remember you had a box by the front door, and the milkman would deliver glass half-gallon bottles? You’d put the empties back in the box.

As engineers, we don’t always have a say about the products we are asked to design, but sometimes we do. Sometimes the marketing department specifies something needs to be a “consumable”, which is code for “cheap one-use disposable junk”. It’s the “disposable junk” part of plastic that is giving plastics and those of us in the industry a bad name.

I think we are going to see a return to the days of reusable stuff. Durable stuff. Solid, well-designed, more expensive, stuff that lasts and is more satisfying to use. Especially with what I see as a positive turn away from China as the global purveyor of cheap disposable junk, there is a change coming, and this is a change to the more durable ways of the not-so-distant past. The days of convenience and short-range vision are going to have to take a back seat to producers of goods not piling up mounds of throw-aways. I often reference the movie Wall-E when I start thinking about this. It was kind of a strange dystopian movie, with no dialog for the first 15 minutes or so, but it envisions a world where we ran out of space to throw away trash, with mounds bigger than buildings everywhere, and no room for life. So we escaped into space for hundreds of years while the robots (Wall-E) cleaned up the mess. Ok, it was a silly movie, but once you look past the silliness, you kind of get the point. Looking at dirty cities, landfills, and trash-covered water, you see how the movie relates to the issue at hand here.

I’m not turning activist on you here, I’m just looking at a current problem that we as engineers (and indeed I) are involved with and thinking how we might solve it. We’ve let the bean counters make decisions, and it hasn’t turned out very well. I hate to say that we need to regulate this kind of thing, but the change has to happen somewhere. If you let people do what they wanted to do, you’d have a Ford LTD up on blocks in every front yard in America, and that isn’t very nice, is it, precious?

So next time you get a design spec that calls for a disposable part, think if you can make it a durable part, or maybe a shareable part, reusable in some way. If it has to be disposable, maybe you can use a more appropriate material that decomposes more quickly.