Plastic Everlasting

On weaning ourselves from plastic pollution

In the spring, Alice's favorite toys were the soft gray catkins from the willows that grow here around the lake. I had never really noticed them before, but once they caught her attention we'd have to go outside three or four times a day to pick them. Then it was the tiny pinecones we found down in the woods by the water. Then when summer hit it was the honeysuckle berries. (Thankfully, she has no interest in eating them, just possessing them for a time.) All over my living room are little piles of these precious objects.

Eventually these things become smushed, or crushed, or dry out and disintegrate. They get swept up in the general floor detritus and tossed away, having served their purpose.

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Not everything returns to the earth so gracefully.

We've been in the process of returning to a simpler life for the last few years, for reasons both environmental and spiritual. We ditched social media and television and replaced them with family time and crafty hobbies, like knitting. I bought some new wool and a few patterns for baby clothes, excited to be working with a natural fiber. A few months later, I happened upon this blog post and discovered that a large portion of my merino wool stash is "superwashed." I didn't notice the term when I bought the "pure, natural" wool from a boutique retailer of high end yarn. Or maybe I did, and assumed it to be akin to preshrunk cotton. I don't recall. But the truth is despite its simple-sounding name, superwashing is a process that uses chemicals to damage wool fibers so it can be coated in Hercosett 55, a plastic. This technique makes wool take on some of the properties of a synthetic fabric. Unlike natural wool, which will shrink or felt unless hand washed, the plastic coated ends of superwashed fibers ensure it can be washed in a machine and in some cases even dried. (This isn't a rare technique, pretty much all wool socks and base layers are superwashed. Manufacturers say consumers would never stand for the need to hand wash such basics.) Like most plastic products, superwashed fabrics are found throughout the whole strata of the retail market — from high-end athletic-wear to a Walmart sweater. Wool socks you can wash in a machine. Wool baby clothes that won't shrink or felt. Washable wool base layers for hiking. A marvel of science, some might say. And because the plastic coating makes up only a small portion of the material, these textiles can (and always are) labeled 100% wool. Hence my surprise.

But they are also plastic, and plastic persists.

It was only in the last few years that I began hearing the term "plastic" applied to clothing. I never thought of it that way, at least not growing up. The synthetic in "synthetic fibers" was always whispered, their formal names made to sound unique or exotic: cozy polar fleece, flowing rayon, high tech spandex. And I suppose that is the point — to not see it as plastic.

Now though, all I see are tiny plastic bags threaded through our things. The wool was a particularly tough gut punch — I had already knit several baby items from it — but that wasn't the end of it. The silky nightgowns that hang on my bathroom door that aren't actually silk, the satin-y bathrobe that isn't satin, the vintage nylon slips I wore under my work clothes for years, all false, an imitation of rare and precious natural fibers. A perfect example of man's folly with technology: an imitation of something special manufactured faster and easier, but with a terrible cost to our planet.

It is not how we want to live.

So we decided to wean ourselves from plastic as much as possible. If you've never walked around and consciously identified how much plastic you live around, it is a sobering experiment. When most people think about plastic they think of single use plastics — the much-maligned plastic water bottles and plastic bags that the environmentally conscious know to avoid. But what about the plastic honey jars, plastic bottles of earth-friendly castile soap, plastic containers of rice and pasta, plastic bottles of organic shampoo, plastic pens, plastic clothes, plastic shoes, plastic hair ties and wallets? Most chemicals that only a few years ago were packaged in metal tins now come in plastic too, more often than not in fluorinated containers (a flowery word for the PFAS family of forever chemicals). These chemicals make the plastic more resilient, more resistant. Gas cans are plastic now. I was in college when toothpaste tubes all turned from metal to plastic. There's no need for the paint keys I used to keep in our old pantry, because paint cans are plastic now, too.

But plastic persists.

In our oceans, in our air, in our bodies. Like climate change, the science is there, but no one wants to listen. Digging around the yard here at the cabin, I found a round plastic container in the dirt. Although it looked brand new I recognized it as the container of earthworms my father used to buy from the local store here, to fish, over 30 years ago. It looks like it could've been made yesterday.

It is a work in progress, letting go of plastic. Reducing the plastic in our lives seems to come down to living with fewer things, spending more effort on some chores and tasks, and accepting the imperfection of doing things in traditional ways. We are far enough now into the plastic era that the old ways of doing things are being forgotten. When I pull up a King Arthur Flour recipe — a brand associated with natural, from-scratch cooking — I note the ubiquity of nonstick pans and chemical-infused parchment paper. When I make banana bread, I coat the pan in thick butter, like my grandmother did, and dust it lightly with flour. It works reasonably well, but sometimes a bit of food will stick and get left behind. Parchment paper, silicone baking mats, and nonstick pans work more predictably, the experts would say. And they are right. But they are also wrong, because we have to give up these false luxuries in order to live in a way that doesn't pollute our planet, just like we have to give up the convincing softness of synthetic silk.

We've slowly phased out a lot of heavily used plastic items, like liquid dish and hand soap. I wash my dishes with a hanging dish brush, and solid soap. It's not as fast or easy as liquid soap. We wash our hands with bar soap, like I did as a kid, back when only public restrooms had liquid soap dispensers.  

I think back to Alice's catkins and pine cones, the idea that it's okay to know that something we own, even something we treasure, won't last forever. A baby's toy belongs to babyhood. A container for food belongs to the time we use it. A cotton dress belongs to the years we wear it. A ceramic cup might fall to the floor and break. Wood decks rot, wood floors eventually get scratched and stained and worn. It is the way of natural things, to have a lifetime.

It feels like man is chasing a kind of immortality in the worst way — instead of building families and traditions that will continue, he is making the very things that should be impermanent last forever. Children's plastic toys that will never break down, electronics that we are told will survive being dropped to the floor (but are obsolete in a manner of years). Fine things, cheap things, broken things, it doesn't matter —  they all last forever.

It is hard to do this, try to stop using plastic. Friends tell me it sounds impossible. Sometimes it does feel impossible. But we have to try to live another way, to push ourselves to return to a sustainable kind of existence, to walk away from what is not good for us, one step at a time.