Hey! I'm back from Grand Rapids and boy howdy did I have a great time! My presentation went swimingly and the feedback was awesome.
I have included my presentation below. For the PowerPoint visuals, click here.
Hello. My name is Chandler Slavin and I am honored to be here, representing Dordan Manufacturing, a 50-year-old family owned and operated custom thermoforming company based in Woodstock, IL.
Some of you may know me from the work I have been doing on behalf of packaging and sustainability, and efforts to recycle clamshell packaging. However, I am not here today to speak to you about sustainability.
Instead, I wanted to take this unique opportunity to present to our most respected colleagues, peers, competitors, and industry allies on something close to all our hearts as representatives of both the plastics and packaging industries.
Susan Freinkel, in her provocative investigation of plastics and the environment in Plastics: A Toxic Love Story, summarizes these forces:
In 2008, more than 400 pieces of plastics-related legislation were introduced at the local, state and federal levels, including: over 200 anti-bag measures, bans on PS fast-food packaging, phthalate laden toys, and BPA baby bottles. While the plastics industry had dealt with instances of public animosity before, never had plastics come under attack on so many fronts.
But that’s not all. In June of this year, a poll conducted by Quora reported that plastic clamshell packaging was voted the “worst piece of design work ever.” Search “clamshell packaging” on YouTube or Twitter and you will be bombarded with negative representations of this innovative and effective packaging medium.
Today’s presentation is going to describe this “New Packaging World Order” as an unchartered yet all consuming plateau where bloggers have just as much clout in their areas of expertise as national news sources; where industry must be proactive in both sustainability and social media should it wish to thrive; and, where issues of plastics and the environment will continue to percolate public discourse, requiring us—as representatives of the plastics industry—to become informed producers in order to postulate plastic thermoformed packaging as the ideal packaging medium in this “New Packaging World Order.”
While attending a Sustainable Packaging Coalition meeting, I had he opportunity to witness a presentation by a popular “green” cleaning-products company. The presenter began by showing emotional images of plastic pollution, including photographs of decaying Albatrosses with plastic debris in their stomachs; he used the problem of “plastics pollution” as justification of the company’s commitment to eradicate all plastic packaging from it’s product lines. The presenter went on to describe how this commitment was actualized via a recent packaging redesign case study, where a PCR HDPE jug was replaced via the “bag and the box concept;” that is, a flexible pouch holding cleaning product suspended within a molded pulp shell. The shell is collapsible, allowing for the alleged recycling of both the outer shell and inner pouch.
As a practitioner of LCA modeling tools like COMPASS, I am aware of the life cycle impacts of material substitutions in the packaging design phase. I am aware of the high water and energy demands of pulp and paper production compared with recycled resin production and the end of life management implications of a high-value commodity material like HDPE vs. molded pulp / flexible PP. Consequently, I was slightly perplexed by the cleaning products company’s postulation that removing plastic from all product packaging lines was the environmentally responsible thing to do, as manifest in this packaging redesign case study. So I took to the mic, inquiring if an LCA study had been performed comparing the cradle-to-grave impacts of the new “bag in a box” concept to the old PCR HDPE jug. Not to my surprise, no such study had been carried out, and the presenters articulated that eradication of plastic—perhaps not overall environmental impacts—was company’s end goal.
This contradiction between scientific fact and public perception in the context of plastics and plastics packaging is what I want to describe now; it is my hope that in painting a contextualized picture of the sociological construction of “plastics”—yesterday and today—the industry will be better positioned to develop a proactive communications strategy that will emphasize, above all else, the value of plastics.
Freinkel writes, “Plastic, that ubiquitous material that at once represents our mastery over nature and cheap disposability.” In 1907 Belgian Leo Baekland created Bakelite, the first fully synthetic polymer made entirely of molecules that couldn’t be found in nature. His Corporation boasted, “humans had transcended the classic taxonomies of the natural world: the animal, mineral, and vegetable kingdoms. Now we had a fourth kingdom, whose boundaries are unlimited.”
Today, however, plastics are no longer synonymous with man’s ingenuity but representative of our over-consumptive and disposable society, as dramatically illustrated by the previous narration. Historian Jeffery Miekle has noted this transition of the perception of plastics in the social imagination of the western world, calling our society an “inflationary culture,” one in which we invest ever more of our psychological well-being in acquiring things while also considering them of such low value ‘as to encourage their displacement, their disposal, their quick and total consumption.’ Consider our recycling rates: We recycle less plastic than any other commodity material—scarcely 7% overall, compared to 23% of glass, 34% of metals, and 55% of paper. Clearly we have lost sight of plastics worth.
Freinkel summarizes:
We are burying the same kinds of energy-dense molecules we spend a fortune to pump from the ground, scrap from mines, and blast mountaintops to reach. When we put these previous molecules into products we designed for the briefest of uses, we inevitably lose sight of their worth. We forget that an item like a used soda bottle is an item worth saving, not trash to be thrown away.
How else could the plastic shopping bag—a modern engineering marvel that is waterproof, durable, and a feather light packet capable of holding more than a thousand times its weight—be so maligned to encourage the development of policy aimed at its eradication?
In order to understand how we have arrived here, we must first understand where we’ve been; hence, a discussion of the rise of the “Age of Plastics” is in order.
According to Freinkel, the “Age of plastics” began in “the mid-nineteenth century, when investors started developing new, malleable semi-synthetic compounds from plants to replace scarce natural resources such as ivory.” In 1869 John Wesley Hyatt invented celluloid, a substitute for Ivory, in response to the contemporary fear of elephant extinction:
As petroleum came to the relief of the whale, so has celluloid given the elephant, the tortoise, and the coral insect a respite in their native haunts; it will no longer be necessary to ransack the earth in pursuit of substances that are constantly growing scarce.
While celluloid was initially invented as substitute for Ivory billiard balls, it found further application in combs—a previously luxurious product now made available for the masses. By replacing materials that were expensive, celluloid “democratized a host of goods for an expanding consumption-oriented middle class.” 1907 marks the creation of the first fully synthetic polymer Bakelite, mentioned above. In 1941 after Pearl Harbor, the director of the board responsible for provisioning the American military advocated the substitution, whenever possible, of plastics for aluminum, brass, and other strategic metals. Thereafter, in product after product, market after market, plastics challenged the traditional materials and won, taking the place of steel in cars, paper and glass in packaging, and wood in furniture.
Freinkel summarizes:
The proliferation of goods helped engender the rapid social mobility that took place after the war. We were a nation of consumers now, a society increasingly democratized by our shared ability to enjoy the conveniences and comforts of modern life…Through the plastics industry, we had an ever-growing ability to synthesize what we wanted or needed, which made reality itself seem infinitely more open to possibility, profoundly more malleable.
Indisputably, plastic does offer advantages over natural materials. However, the proliferation of plastics in the mid-late-nineteenth century was also the result of the rise of the petrochemical industry; that is, “the behemoth that came into being in the 1920s and ‘30s when chemical companies innovating new polymers began to align with the petroleum companies that controlled the essential ingredients for building those polymers.” Legend has it that one day John D. Rockefeller was looking over one of his oil refineries and suddenly noticed flames flaring from some smokestacks. “What’s burning?” he asked, and someone explained that the company was burning off ethylene gas, a byproduct of the refining process. “I don’t believe in wasting anything!” Rockefeller supposedly snapped. “Figure out something to do with it!” That something became polypropylene. Legend aside, it is fact that Rockefeller’s company Standard Oil was the first to figure out how to isolate the hydrocarbons in crude petroleum. That innovation helped give rise to the modern petrochemical companies that produce the raw, unprocessed polymers know as resins. Most of today’s major resin producers—Dow Chemical, DuPont, ExxonMobil, BASF, Total Petrochemical—have their roots in the early decades of the twentieth century, when petroleum and chemical industries began to develop alliances or form vertically integrated companies. Producers had begun to realize that there might be a use for the waste created in the processing of crude oil and natural gas and in the making of chemicals: rather than being burned off as a worthless byproduct ethylene could be retrieved and profitably deployed as a raw material for polymers. The growing reliance on fossil fuels helped drive the growth of the modern plastics industry, even though the production of plastics consumes only 4% of the country’s oil and natural gas reserves. Environmentalist Barry Commoner explains, “By its own internal logic, each new petrochemical process generates a powerful tendency to proliferate further products and replace existing ones.”
Taken together, that is, the association between plastics and mans’ ingenuity plus the understanding of plastic as democratizing agent via consumption, coupled with the rise of the petrochemical industry and the economic opportunities generated therefrom, allowed for the proliferation of plastics into modern life:
The amount of plastic the world consumes annually has steadily risen over the past seventy years, from almost nil in 1940 to closing on six hundred billion pounds today. In 1960, the average American consumed about thirty pounds of plastic products. Today, we’re each consuming more than three hundred pounds of plastics a year, generating more than three hundred billion dollars in sales.
However with its rise came the development of a large, and largely unregulated, global industry. Freinkel explains,
While US resin manufacturers have long supplied the plastics industries of the world, this lopsided trade balance is changing. Historically, American and Western European companies have dominated the global industry, with the West supplying most of the nearly six hundred billion pounds of plastics now produced annually. But a “seismic shift is underway” as the industry’s center of gravity is shifting from the developed to the developing world, where production costs are lower, and demand and consumption are growing faster. China, India, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East have all been gearing up to produce their own raw plastics resins.
Now for the past 30 years, the Guangdong Province in the Pearl River Delta, a region just north of Hong Kong, has been “the heart pumping Chin’s emergence as a global economic power.” To a large extent, what makes this beehive of productivity possible is plastic, the material used most often by industry. This is the most concentrated center for making plastic goods in China, if not the world, with some eighteen hundred factories and a half a dozen huge wholesale resin markets where brokers peddle pellets around the globe.
Freinkel concludes,
There are twice as many people working in plastics in that single province then in the entire US plastics industry. The smog overlying the province is so thick and persistent that it killed off the region’s centuries-old silk industry. By the 1990s, the silkworms just couldn’t be kept alive.
So here we are. We have arrived at the gates to the “New Packaging World Order.” We have outlined the rise of the Age of Plastics and the collective anxiety resulting therefrom. We have put into the green cleaning-products company’s assumption that only in removing all plastics from its product lines will society move towards more sustainable modes of production and consumption. Let us now describe a social media case study, where the divide between science and perception as it relates to plastics couldn't be more evident, to our industries’ disappointment.
I was perusing my Twitter feed several weeks back when I came across a Tweet by “TeensTurningGreen;” for those of you unfamiliar, this non-profit markets itself as “a collaborative youth movement to change the world.” Projects include “sustainable food,” “ethical fashion,” “project green clean,” and “project green prom,” to name a few.
21-year-old founder Erin Shrode has presented at the White House and every industry event of mention, representing the voice of the “millennials;” that is, those born of the baby boomers; they are social media savvy and environmentally conscious. Reusable water bottles are “cool” and socially and environmentally informed purchasing decisions assumed.
TeensTurningGreen boasts almost 3,000 Twitter followers; their founder Erin, over 4,000. So when they have something to say, a lot of people are listening. And, a lot of people were listening that day when they tweeted “Plastics are cheap, nasty and toxic.” I followed the link of the tweet to a website advertising NatraCare Sisters beauty products, a “green” CPG brand masquerading around as a lifestyle site and endorsed by TeensTurningGreen. On this website was a blog post titled “Plastics are Forever,” which vaguely describes why plastics are toxic and should be avoided at all costs. Plastics pollution, plastics ocean debris, plastics chocking wildlife / sea life, leaching chemicals, etc. were all touched on in this reductionistic and uninformed treatment of plastics and the environment.
This blog post coincided with another news bit published in Plastics News titled, “Seabird Study shows Spike in Plastic Ocean Litter.” Here researchers out of the University of British Columbia found that increased concentrations of plastic debris in seabirds’ stomachs corresponded to the increased amount of plastic ocean debris. Having recently participated in a panel discussion on ocean debris—which consisted of lead scientists from the Ocean Conservancy, the Sea Education Association, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—I was confused by this assertion as it was here I learned that while production of plastics has increased four-fold in the last 40 years, plastic ocean debris remained constant the last 20.
So, I published my rebuttal to both NatraCare Sisters’ postulation that plastics were “cheap, nasty and toxic” and the Seabirds study, which claimed plastics ocean debris had increased in the last decade, on my blog. This post titled, “Plastics are ‘cheap, nasty and toxic’ HA! Investigation into plastics ocean debris” received the highest traffic to date; and, was picked up by Plastics News, which featured the discussion in the perspective section of its publication. Then, the Plastics News feature was included in the SPC’s parent company GreenBlue’s August Newsletter, which is distributed to 70,000+ subscribers.
As it currently exists, this debate into the scientific reality vs. the social perception of plastics and the environment—as narrated in my blog post, the Plastics News perspective feature, and GreenBlue Newsletter highlight—has generated over 20 comments; some good, some bad, but engaged nonetheless. It is this “word of mouth” feature via social media channels that I wish to emphasize here today. If we, as representatives of the plastics and packaging industry, continue to ignore the social media fervor surrounding plastics, and more specifically plastics packaging, we may find ourselves unable to re-position plastics on its rightful pedestal of innovation and material mastery.
I want to conclude by emphasizing the good news for thermoformers in the context of plastics and the environment and social media.
In regards to the former, plastics continue to percolate modern life with such force due to its lightweight and versatile nature; the feedstock, a waste product re-engineered with a value added proposition—will allow for the continued competitive advantage of this family of materials. In LCA after LCA comparing the life cycle impacts of plastics vs. other packaging material substrates, plastics generally perform better.
For instance, Dr. Mark Rossi—Research Director for Clean Production Action, an environmental group that promotes the development and use of green chemicals, sustainable materials, and environmentally preferable products—worked on an influential LCA study in 1992 that found that plastic packaging wasn't the thorough environmental villain often supposed. The study found that some of the most significant environmental impacts of packaging are a consequence of weight. Plastics permit smaller and lighter packages, which require less energy to product than glass or paper or other materials.
Freinkel summarizes,
As they did in the late 19th century, plastics have a vital role to play in a world of dwindling natural resources. And they will be even truer in coming decades as we grapple with climate change More and more of our decisions about how we build our homes, transport ourselves, and package our stuff will be driven by carbon calculations. By that measure, lightweight, energy-efficient plastics can offer extraordinary opportunities.
In regards to the latter, that is, the utilization of social media, few plastics industry organizations and plastics manufactures have a Facebook page; fewer still a Twitter account; consequently, there is a huge opportunity for informed plastics professionals to utilize these channels to communicate and emphasize the value of plastics. Through collaboration, word of mouth, and transparent and accurate accounts of the role plastics play in society and the environment, the industry can work to reposition plastics as a valuable resource; and, its packaging, an engineering marvel.
It is only when the positives of plastics are communicated on every social media channel that our customers—consumers first—are consuming information, that the social construction of plastics will transition from this notion of cheap disposability to indicative of humanity’s ability to transcend the material limitations of our planet through innovation, intellect, and understanding.
Welcome to the “New Packaging World Order,” come follow us.