Ryan Waller

SINCE the 1930s, when the product first hit the market, there has been aplastic toothbrush in every American bathroom. But if you are one ofthe growing number of people seeking to purge plastic from their lives,you can now buy a wooden toothbrush with boar’s-hair bristles, alongwith other such back-to-the-future products as cloth sandwich wrappers,metal storage containers and leather fly swatters.

The urge to avoid plastic is understandable, given reports of toxic toysand baby bottles, seabirds choking on bottle caps and vast patches ofocean swirling with everlasting synthetic debris. Countless bloggerswrite about striving — in vain, most discover — to eradicate plasticfrom their lives. “Eliminating plastic is one of the greenest actionsyou can do to lower your eco-footprint,” one noted while participatingin a recent online challenge to be plastic-free.

Is this true? Shunning plastic may seem key to the ethic of livinglightly, but the environmental reality is more complex.

Originally, plastic was hailed for its potential to reduce humankind’sheavy environmental footprint. The earliest plastics were invented assubstitutes for dwindling supplies of natural materials like ivory ortortoiseshell. When the American John Wesley Hyatt patented celluloid in1869, his company pledged that the new manmade material, used injewelry, combs, buttons and other items, would bring “respite” to theelephant and tortoise because it would “no longer be necessary toransack the earth in pursuit of substances which are constantly growingscarcer.” Bakelite, the first true synthetic plastic, was developed afew decades later to replace shellac, then in high demand as anelectrical insulator. The lac bugs that produced the sticky resincouldn’t keep up with the country’s rapid electrification.

Today, plastic is perceived as nature’s nemesis. But a generic distastefor plastic can muddy our thinking about the trade-offs involved when wereplace plastic with other materials. Take plastic bags, the emblem forall bad things plastic. They clog storm drains, tangle up recyclingequipment, litter parks and beaches and threaten wildlife on land and atsea. A recent expedition researching plastic pollution in the SouthAtlantic reported that its ship had trouble setting anchor in one siteoff Brazil because the ocean floor was coated with plastic bags.

Such problems have fueled bans on bags around the world and in more thana dozen American cities. Unfortunately, as the plastics industryincessantly points out, the bans typically lead to a huge increase inthe use of paper bags, which also have environmental drawbacks. But thebigger issue is not what the bags are made from, but what they are madefor. Both are designed, absurdly, for that brief one-time trip from thestore to the front door.

In other words, plastics aren’t necessarily bad for the environment;it’s the way we tend to make and use them that’s the problem.

It’s estimated that half of the nearly 600 billion pounds of plasticsproduced each year go into single-use products. Some are indisputablyvaluable, like disposable syringes, which have been a great ally inpreventing the spread of infectious diseases like H.I.V., and evenplastic water bottles, which, after disasters like the Japanese tsunami,are critical to saving lives. Yet many disposables, like the bags,drinking straws, packaging and lighters commonly found in beachclean-ups, are essentially prefab litter with a heavy environmentalcost.

And there’s another cost. Pouring so much plastic into disposableconveniences has helped to diminish our view of a family of materials weonce held in high esteem. Plastic has become synonymous with cheap andworthless, when in fact those chains of hydrocarbons ought to beregarded as among the most valuable substances on the planet. If weunderstood plastic’s true worth, we would stop wasting it on trivialthrowaways and take better advantage of what this versatile material cando for us.

In a world of nearly seven billion souls and counting, we are not goingto feed, clothe and house ourselves solely from wood, ore and stone; weneed plastics. And in an era when we’re concerned about our carbonfootprint, we can appreciate that lightweight plastics take less energyto produce and transport than many other materials. Plastics also makepossible green technology like solar panels and lighter cars and planesthat burn less fuel. These “unnatural” synthetics, intelligentlydeployed, could turn out be nature’s best ally.

Yet we can’t hope to achieve plastic’s promise for the 21st century ifwe stick with wasteful 20th-century habits of plastic production andconsumption. We have the technology to make better, safer plastics —forged from renewable sources, rather than finite fossil fuels, usingchemicals that inflict minimal or no harm on the planet and our health.We have the public policy tools to build better recycling systems and tohold businesses accountable for the products they put into the market.And we can also take a cue from the plastic purgers about how to cutwasteful plastic out of our daily lives.

We need to rethink plastic. The boar’s-hair toothbrush is not our only alternative.