Rust: The Longest War

by Jonathan Waldman

  Frederick vom Saal, the respected biologist, also won’t buy canned foods or beverages, and won’t allow polycarbonate plastics in his home. In a 2010 interview with Elizabeth Kolbert, in the Yale University online magazine Environment 360, he recalled an act straight out of the industry playbook. When he studied a dose of BPA 25,000 times lower than anybody had studied, in 1996, and found developmental harm, Dow suggested that he not publish his results. When he did, BPA manufacturers called and threatened him. So did the chemical industry. He said that toxicologists are off by anywhere from one to eight orders of magnitude. For regulatory agencies, he reserves greater criticism, calling them “locked into procedures decades out of date,” unable to acknowledge, let alone perform, modern science. He’s published studies on endocrine disruptors in two dozen journals, including Nature, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). He called the system fossilized, a lie, and a fraud. “This is the highest volume endocrine-disrupting chemical in commerce,” he told Kolbert. “We don’t know what products it’s in. We know that in animals, it causes extensive harm. There are now a whole series of human studies finding exactly the same relationship between the presence of Bisphenol A and the kind of harm shown in animals. That scares me. I don’t think that’s alarmist. This is a chemical about which we know more than any other chemical with the exception of dioxin. Right now, it is the most studied chemical in the world. NIH has $30 million of ongoing studies of this chemical. Do you think that federal officials in Europe, the United States, Canada, and Japan, would all have this as the highest priority chemical to study, if there were only a few alarmists saying it was a problem?”

  Mike Adams, the FDA chemist, is not reluctant at all to drink out of cans. “I know how we evaluate these things,” he said. “We’ve got, like, the most nervous toxicologists on the planet. They’re very careful about their decisions. I don’t have any hesitation.” Of the simulations, he said, “we are one hundred percent sure that this is not gonna be a problem.” Of BPA concerns, he called it “paranoia.” He told me that the testing labs are “really, really pushing levels of analytical capabilities.”

  Ball employees are not hypocrites: they eat and drink out of their cans. Some employees believe that cans will keep getting better; that this end-of-the-line talk is nonsense. Others say there’s no more room for improvement: that cans are already over engineered, and manufactured with minuscule failure rates. That today’s can—cheap and utilitarian and wonderful—is the best possible mousetrap. But it’s not perfect. Because most see BPA as a business concern rather than a health concern, they refuse to admit that BPA-free cans would be an improvement.

  Oddly enough, Ball’s already done it. The company makes BPA-free cans for a small Michigan company called Eden Foods. Four varieties of beans and four types of chili are available in BPA-free cans. According to Sue Potter, the marketing director and wife of the company president, they tried to put tomatoes in the cans, but they were too acidic. Actually, plain tomatoes were okay, but tomatoes with garlic, onion, and basil weren’t. Ball said they’d last for only six months. Potter told me that the BPA-free cans, made with an oleoresinous enamel—that is, a natural, oily coating—cost 2.5 cents more than standard cans. “I think everybody should do it,” she said. “I don’t get it.”

  Everybody dances around what to call the can’s internal corrosion inhibitor. The FDA calls it a resinous and polymeric coating. Ball calls it an organic coating, or water-based polymer. The EPA calls it a chemical pollutant. Health researchers call it an endocrine disruptor, and a chronic toxin. Everybody’s dancing because most of us are addicted to cans. We’re no more capable of giving them up than we are of giving up beer.

  The Breast Cancer Fund, in San Francisco, has urged its members to contact food makers—Del Monte, General Mills, and ConAgra included—and demand BPA-free cans. Legislators in half the states in the country have introduced bills banning BPA products, but most of the bills died as so many do, in commerce committees. America produces millions of gallons of BPA a year, for profits exceeding $6 billion. Few elected officials are going to stick their necks between that and the American Chemistry Council, the Grocery Manufacturers Association, and the US Chamber of Commerce.

  I asked Jamil Baghdachi what he thought of amending the government warning that appears on alcoholic beverages, such that it said, “according to the Surgeon General, women should not drink alcoholic or canned beverages during pregnancy, because of the risk of birth defects.” He said, “A lot of people nowadays are reading labels. Will it help? It will help. It’s a step forward. It’s like global warming. The sooner we begin the discussion, by labels, by books, by articles, the better it is.” But he emphasized that he personally wouldn’t advise the change, because the industry would shun him. He said an authority like the Surgeon General would have to make the change.

  Long after Can School, I stumbled across two homages to the can as the perfect container. Both precede the can-making industry’s reliance on BPA-based epoxies and the publication of Silent Spring. Both predate the industry’s recent turn toward secrecy, lobbying, denying, delaying, and deceiving. In that sense, they seem naive, for there’s no hint of maneuvering between cost and health, or between quantity and quality.

  Metal cans, filled with beer or Mountain Dew or Bob’s Energy Drink, yearn to rust, but to these men, the stakes were only unsightly black dots or an unpleasant off-taste. Before the era of endocrine disruption, these men took pride in having briefly stopped entropy. Where most of us never noticed the crown atop the pedestal, these two men did.

  The first homage was delivered by Colonel William Grove of the Quartermaster Corps of the US Army. In February 1918, at the annual convention of the National Canners Association, in Boston, he recited this poem:

  We can march without shoes;

  We can fight without guns;

  We can fly without wings

  To flap over the Huns.

  We can sing without bands,

  Parade without banners,

  But no modern army

  Can eat without canners.

  The second was delivered by William Stolk, CEO of the American Can Company, creator of the first beer can. In New York, on April 21, 1960, he said,

  There is a fashion today, the world around, of judging material progress in terms of the big and the spectacular. Underdeveloped countries, for instance, vie with each other as to who shall have the biggest steel plants, the tallest hydro dams, and the most important refineries. And then, in the same way, progress is sometimes measured in terms of missiles, rockets, and space ships. We at American Can Company have never entered either of these spectacular races—for size or speed. Most of our one hundred twenty–odd plants are comparatively small. Our products are opened today and thrown away tomorrow. Our most cherished achievements have been unknown and all but invisible to the consumer. Yet they rank with the telephone, the automobile, and the electric light in the revolutionary effects they have had on modern living. They have lightened the work of millions of housewives. They have opened up for farmers vast new markets for quickly perishable foods. They have helped eliminate such dietary diseases as scurvy and pellagra. They have made possible the supermarket, the almost clerkless food store, and the servantless household. In fact, they have helped make possible our largest cities and smallest towns, and without them our whole population would be quite differently distributed.

  I want to feel like those men. I want to be a can evangelist. But I’m torn, because I’d also like to raise a kid someday, and I’d like that kid not to be exposed to a potent endocrine disruptor for the sake of convenience. I’d like to have more faith in industry and government, and feel like I did on the second day of Can School, before I got pulled aside, when I was drinking coffee from a paper cup, marveling at the only thing there not in a can.

  * * *

  1. Pitting potential studies were pioneered by a giant in the fie
ld, Herbert Uhlig, who started the corrosion lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that now bears his name, and who also wore a swarthy little mustache.

  2. If you happen to have a fume hood and half a liter of sodium hydroxide, you can expose the epoxy coating by dissolving the aluminum. Alternatively, if you fill a can with a solution of copper chloride, having scratched the coating first, after a half hour you can tear it open and peel the coating out.

  5

  INDIANA JANE

  The rustiest place in America is not open to the public. Patrolled by private security guards and town police, the site is enclosed by a tall chain-link fence, which bears these warnings:

  PRIVATE PROPERTY

  NO TRESPASSING

  VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED

  NOTICE:

  THIS AREA UNDER SURVEILLANCE

  DANGER

  KEEP OUT

  PELIGRO

  The place is the Bethlehem Steel Works, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Once the world’s second largest steel producer, it has been rusting since the middle of the Civil War, when iron was first made there. Until the mid-1970s, when dust filters arrived, rust from “the Steel” coated the surrounding city too. It settled on windshields and windowsills, and prevented residents from hanging laundry out to dry. Old steelworkers, correlating more rust with more steel production, swear they could tell from the thickness of the rust how big their paychecks would be. In 1995, with the American steel industry in shambles, the paychecks stopped, and the last blast furnace shut down. Since then, the place has done nothing but rust. Now, from the air, the abandoned complex looks like a decrepit brown castle in an otherwise green city.

  One woman is exceptionally familiar with the place. Her name is Alyssha Eve Csük. (Her last name rhymes with book.) The granddaughter of a steelworker, she is a photographer. She photographs rust. She is, as far as I know, the only person who makes a living finding beauty in rust. As such, I joined her at the motherlode—which she calls her playground—on a snowy late-November day, to see how she does it.

  I met Csük at a downtown Bethlehem coffee shop. In her late thirties, she wore jeans and a tan sweater. Long, streaked blond hair fell below her shoulders. Of medium height, she seemed half stoic and half distracted. On her advice, I bought a muffin and a bagel, for a later snack, and stowed them in a brown paper bag in my jacket pocket. Then we walked across the street, to her studio, where she answered some emails and geared up for a day at the Steel. While she got ready, I marveled at her prints, so much more vivid in person than on her website. Many, from her collections Abstract Portraits of Steel and Industrial Steel and the Yards and Slate Abstracts, were leaning against a wall next to her front door. Some were stacked on top of a wide cabinet, and many more were inside sliding drawers. A stack of small prints lay on a kitchen table. Above Csük’s desk hung a spooky, cerulean print that looked simultaneously in and out of focus. A twenty-year-old splotchy-brown cat named Sweet Pea followed me around.

  Aside from three small Rodin sketches, almost everything in the studio hinted at Csük’s photography career. On a bookcase, I saw photo books on Henri Cartier-Bresson, Marina Abramović, and Mary Ellen Mark. Next to a blank to-do list, I saw this, assembled from a magnetic poetry set: “you are a wild universe goddess & your art belongs in a world of a thousand dreams.” It wasn’t far from the truth. Her work, which has been featured in photo magazines and the New York Times, hangs in galleries and private homes and corporation lobbies. Corrosion, as Csük sees it, isn’t brown and dreary, nor does it suggest age and decay. It’s alive and glowing, much more wonderful and exciting than silver. Though a few of her prints seem merely Pollockian, most are far more compelling, evoking the skin of some wild animal, or the patina on Western sandstone, or the aurora borealis, or the lick of flames. When she zooms in on metal, she captures speckled reds, lumpy yellow waves, green crests, serrated blues, orange slashes. One print looks like a Japanese watercolor, another like Japanese calligraphy. My favorite, which I nearly drooled on, suggested a thin cascade of the purest blue water over the darkest Yosemite granite.

  Eventually Csük emerged in black North Face ski pants, a gray turtleneck sweater, and a long, black, hooded down jacket. She wore gray hiking shoes and soon put on red half-finger biking gloves with leather palms. She packed two camera bags: a black backpack and a green canvas shoulder bag. She also grabbed a carbon-fiber tripod. Then we hopped in her SUV.

  Making art requires bending rules, and the same goes for Csük and her rust art. Technically, she has permission to enter the fenced-off steelworks—property now owned by the Bethlehem Sands Casino Resort—as long as she stays on the ground level. When this does not appeal to her, which is often, she sneaks in. With me, she snuck in.

  Csük drove a mile south, just over the Lehigh River, and parked near the New Street Bridge. Under the bridge, we crossed five sets of railroad tracks, then ascended the grassy levee separating the tracks from the river, and took a right. I held the tripod close, to conceal it. A half mile ahead, five two-hundred-foot blast furnaces loomed. Csük walked toward them with purpose. She’d contemplated walking out of sight, on the rocks along the river, but the snow made that route treacherous. On the grassy levee, the snow just soaked our feet. Halfway to the Steel, a white pickup truck approached from behind on the gravel road beside the tracks. As the bearded driver—presumably a railroad employee—passed us, he waved. Having no choice, we waved back. Later, I wondered if he had called us in.

  Five minutes afterward, in the shadow of the Steel, a few obstacles stood in our path. The first was a train, stacked two high with containers, parked on the middle track. Fortuitously, it blocked us from sight. Csük looked both ways, and then slid down the slippery levee, and climbed up and over it. I followed close behind. She looked both ways again, and jogged over to the second obstacle, the chain-link fence. When she realized that we had left footprints in the snow, she stepped back and tried to brush them away, which only made them worse. From there, we walked along the fence in gravelly spots, so as not to leave footprints. I followed her a bit farther—past the no-trespassing signs—and then, just before noon, we climbed up and over. Alyssha went first, and then me.

  Over the next five hours, I watched Csük wander around a mazelike industrial complex of greater entropic value than a sub-Saharan market, calmly and boldly, without a map, in search of aesthetic minutiae that most people miss entirely. To reach good vantage points, she scampered atop a large pipe, thirty feet up, and along a giant crane, even higher. She set up her tripod seven times and took sixty-nine exposures. Only once all afternoon did she seem nervous, and not on account of heights. First, though, she hurried through a courtyard overgrown with shrubs and vines and littered with glass shards and old buckets. Massive brown tanks loomed above. She hurried because she was not comfortable out in the open, where she was visible. She made her way to blast furnace D, her favorite. Then she climbed a few steep flights of rusty stairs. Immediately, on the streaked wall of an enormous gas stove, she saw something appealing. A layer of metal pipes had been removed from the stove and tossed into a huge pile on the ground, and now a new rusty surface was visible.

  She said, “There’s something beautiful here. I don’t know if it’ll fit my format. I’ll have to see it with my camera. This is probably just gonna be a sketch.” She opened the tripod and placed it on a metal grate. She put her camera—a Canon EOS 1D Mark IV, with a 35-millimeter lens—on the tripod. Behind it, she half-squatted, with her left knee down, her right knee up, and her right elbow balanced on her right knee. The pose was very Rodin. She looked through the camera. She moved the tripod back two feet. She said, “I can’t use this lens. Too much distortion.” She put the 35 millimeter in her right jacket pocket, and put on a 24–105 millimeter. She zoomed to 100 millimeters and raised the tripod a hair. “Just like I thought, this really doesn’t fit my format. There’s the potential for something. The image is just a square, but I’m trying to make it fit. Lemme try
moving back a little bit.”

  Csük might spend fifteen to forty-five minutes fiddling with a composition. In this case, she could tell it wasn’t worth it. Before she packed up, she looked at me and asked, “Did you hear that?” I told her I thought it was the sound of a motorcycle somewhere in town. She said, “Sometimes, things fall here.” She told me later that thirty- or forty-pound objects—heavy enough to guarantee death—rain down regularly.

  Csük climbed another flight of stairs and walked to a spot where more light struck the stove. She walked slowly, with her head tilted a bit to the left. She said, “I wish we had more of this going on, like a whole brigade of this. Over here is beautiful. I gotta shoot this.” I looked, saw no formation—brigade or platoon or even a mere patrol. She continued, “This was stuff I never got to see before, because it was all covered up. And this’ll weather more, ’cause it’s all exposed.” Positioning the tripod back a few feet, she hunched on both knees. Her head remained askew, soothsayer-like. Then she moved the tripod a few inches. She looked through the viewfinder and moved the camera a few more inches. She looked again, and moved the camera a bit to the right. Then a few inches back. Then up a hair. Then to the right a hair. Then up a bit. Finally, with a shutter-release cable on a three-foot cord, held in her right hand, she took a shot. She leaned back, resting her head on a rusty railing, and said, “It’s kinda nice.”

  On the opposite side of the towering stove, at a spot facing south, Csük set up again. She said, “There might be some vibration, so I’ll take a bunch.” The vibration was from a train going by eighty feet below. Even without trains rolling by, she might take dozens of exposures and still not get a shot. She might return five times to the same scene, at all hours of the day and night, in all varieties of weather, and still not get it. This time, though, she had a feeling. “There’s something really beautiful about this image,” she said. She took exposures from 0.8 seconds to 2 seconds. Then she moved the tripod a few feet to the left. “This isn’t nearly as interesting,” she said. She took one shot. She moved the tripod a few more feet left. Four shots. Satisfied, she stood up and looked out over the railing, as if to take it all in. She noticed some green moss she hadn’t seen before and followed her nose in its direction. Checking out the metal, she walked out of sight.