Plastic Soup

Fifteen minutes of fame

De Lemniscaatkrant (The Lemniscaat Newspaper) asked me to write a column about Plastic Soup. I wrote the following:

Andy Warhol said: “In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” I used to dream that one day when I was a great writer (having written a brilliant young adult novel) I would experience those fifteen minutes of fame. I never would have thought that a book on plastic waste would put me in the limelight. And for even longer than fifteen minutes!

Five months ago, I was assigned to write a book on the plastic soup—the gigantic amount of floating plastic in the Pacific Ocean. I thought all that plastic must surely be unpleasant, but we’ll just clean it up. I was wrong …

Plastic—that fantastic wonder material that you find everywhere: in your iPod and computer, wrapped around your newspaper, magazine, and the food you eat, in your television set, your Wii and your Nintendo—it is not as harmless as it looks.

To begin with, the advantage of plastic is at the same time a disadvantage when it ends up in the wrong place—it does not decompose, it only breaks down into very small particles. In sea water, these small particles resemble food to fish and other marine life; which end up eating the particles.

Also, many types of plastic have another curious property: they attract toxins (such as pesticides, insecticides and incombustible particles found in fuels) that have been discharged into the water.

And, finally, chemical agents are added to all kinds of plastic so as to make them more flexible, or to make them hard, to add color, or to make them fire-resistant. These agents are highly toxic, not only for fish or the environment, but also for us.

This revelation didn’t exactly lift my spirits. On the contrary, it made me angry. Fortunately, however, I discovered that things can be done differently … All plastic can be produced free of toxins. For all toxic agents, there are non-toxic alternatives which, in most cases, are even cheaper. Now we only need to convince the plastics industry to understand that we don’t want toxins in our plastic. And you can help in achieving this.

A large part of the plastic waste problem is caused by disposable plastic. From now on, if you refuse to accept plastic bags, but use your own instead, you’re already helping to reduce the amount of waste. In the same way, when you bring a cup to school, you avoid having to use a plastic cup each time.

But in particular, think about what you buy. Nowadays, you will find a little symbol on plastic products: a triangle consisting of arrows with a number in the middle. The number indicates the type of plastic. When you avoid numbers 3 (PVC), 6 (polystyrene), and 7 (other plastic, such as polycarbonate)—the most toxic forms of plastic—and leave them on the shelves, you are letting the plastics industry know that you don’t want them.

As long as they last, I will use my minutes of fame on TV, radio, newspapers and magazines to spread this message: We can make difference. We can do better. Let’s start doing it then.

Or to quote Barack Obama: “Let’s go change the world!”

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