by Donovan Hohn
Here again are the windmills and the cracked road leading to the end of the world or at least to the edge of the United States. Asphalt gives way to dirt. We stop at a gate and I clamber out to open it, noticing beside it, lashed to a post, a yellow sign commanding me not to approach monk seals. We ramble along the red dirt road, slowly, jouncing, and soon enough we’ve traveled farther, I can tell, than I made it the day before on foot. “This coast is so bad,” Gilmartin says, “debris comes up faster than you can keep it clean. It gets continuous onshore winds and it’s in the way of the easterly currents.” Perhaps Moore should have pointed the Alguita west instead of south, I find myself wondering. By Gilmartin’s calculations, twenty tons of trash wash up along the eastern coast of South Point every year. “Even if everything stopped today, it would keep washing in.” Unlike Pallister, Gilmartin doesn’t expect to win. He just can’t think of a better way to spend the weekends of his retirement than this—hauling debris in his truck.
The clouds this morning are gray and low. Out the window, through the shrubbery, I catch glimpses of ocean. We come to a big pile of bright blue bags, left here by a cleanup group akin to GoAK. Gilmartin and I hurl these into his truck. Then we come to a big mess of derelict net, which Gilmartin hooks to his truck’s winch, mounted just behind the cab. The engine whines, the cable hauls the heavy net in. At last the tires of Gilmartin’s truck crackle up to the edge of Kamilo Beach, which is everything Moore had led me to expect: a beach of plastic, finely ground. There are twigs of driftwood, and igneous pebbles, and a few errant coconuts, but they’re far outnumbered by the shrapnel of debris. This is where the flotsam I saw yesterday ends up. Washing in and out, the surf and the sun grind it down and the currents deposit it here, and here, until a flood tide or a storm surge sweeps it out to sea, it remains; Gilmartin can’t bother with the plastic sand. There’s simply too much of it.
It’s almost beautiful, all those unnatural colors and shapes in such a natural landscape, beautiful because incongruous. It occurs to me now, as it has before, that this is what I have been pursuing these past months, this is what I found so spellbindingly enigmatic about the image of those plastic ducks at sea—incongruity. We have built for ourselves out of this New World a giant diorama, a synthetic habitat, but travel beyond the edges or look with the eyes of a serious beachcomber and the illusion begins to crumble like flotsam into sand. Incongruities emerge, and not just visual ones.
For instance: In 1878, nine years after its invention, a sales brochure promoted celluloid as the salvation of the world. “As petroleum came to the relief of the whale,” the copy ran, so “has celluloid given the elephant, the tortoise, and the coral insect a respite in their native haunts; and it will no longer be necessary to ransack the earth in pursuit of substances which are constantly growing scarcer.” Ninety years later, in the public mind, plastic had gone from miracle substance to toxic blight. In 1968, at the dawn of the modern environmental movement, the editor of Modern Plastics argued that his industry had been unfairly vilified. Plastic was not the primary cause of environmental destruction, he wrote, only its most visible symptom. The real problem was “our civilization, our exploding population, our life-style, our technology.” That 1878 sales brochure and that 1968 editorial were both partly, paradoxically right. Petroleum did save the whale, or at least some whales; plastics did save the elephant, not to mention the forest. Modern medicine would not exist without them. Personal computing would not exist without them. Safe, fuel-efficient cars would not exist without them. Besides, they consume fewer resources to manufacture and transport than most alternative materials do. Even environmentalists have more important things to worry about now. In the information age, plastics have won. With the wave of a magical iPod and a purified swig from a Nalgene jar, we have banished all thoughts of drift nets and six-pack rings, and what lingering anxieties remain, we leave at the curbside with the recycling.
Never mind that only 5 percent of plastics actually end up getting recycled. Never mind that the plastics industry stamps those little triangles of chasing arrows into plastics for which no viable recycling method exists. Never mind that plastics consume about 400 million tons of oil and gas every year and that oil and gas will in the not too distant future run out. Never mind that so-called green plastics made of biochemicals release greenhouse gases when they break down. What’s most nefarious about plastic, however, is the way it invites fantasy, the way it pretends to deny the laws of matter, as if something—anything—could be made from nothing; the way it is intended to be thrown away but chemically engineered to last. By offering the false promise of disposability, of consumption without cost, it has helped create a culture of wasteful make-believe, an economy of forgetting.
At Plastic Beach, I crouch down, scoop up a handful of multicolored sand, and sift it through my fingers. This then is the destiny of those toy animals that beachcombers fail to recover: baked brittle by the sun, they will eventually disintegrate into shards. Those shards will disintegrate into splinters, the splinters into particles, the particles into dust, the dust into molecules, which will circulate through the environment for centuries. The very features that make plastic a perfect material for bathtub toys—so buoyant! so pliant! so smooth! so colorful! so hygienic!—also make it a superlative pollutant of the seas. No one knows exactly how long a synthetic polymer will persist at sea. Five hundred years is a reasonable guess. Globally, we are currently producing 300 million tons of plastic every year, and no known organism can digest a single molecule of the stuff, though plenty of organisms try.
Just a few weeks before my voyage in the Opus, Sylvia Earle, formerly NOAA’s chief scientist, delivered a speech on marine debris at the World Bank in Washington, D.C. “Trash is clogging the arteries of the planet,” Earle said. “We’re beginning to wake up to the fact that the planet is not infinitely resilient.” For ages humanity saw in the ocean a sublime grandeur suggestive of eternity. No longer. Looking at the debris at Gore Point or South Point, we see that the ocean, vast as it is, is perhaps smaller and more vulnerable than we’d thought; that we have, perhaps, taken dominion over the watery wilderness, too. Now it is the sublime grandeur of our civilization but also of our waste that inspires awe.
THE FOURTH CHASE
Chuckedy-chuckedy-chuck goes the rubber duck machine.
—Eric Carle
RED MAGIC
Entering the Toys & Games Fair at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center felt a bit like falling down the rabbit hole into Wonderland. Alice, however, was nowhere to be seen, and upon inspection the white rabbit turned out to be a battery-powered plush toy with an MP3 player tucked inside its foamy bowels. And as they watched the synthetic fauna flash and beep and dance, there were no expressions of wonderment on the faces of my fellow travelers to Wonderland, unless you count as wonder the naughty twinkle in the eyes of the silver-haired Chinese man peeping through his spectacles at a dozen little plastic dogs industriously pantomiming the procreative act. Humping Dog, the toy was called—I HUMP UNTIL DISCONNECTED, the tagline ran.
At a booth up in Expo Hall 2, a crowd had gathered around an upholstered table on which a salesman was demonstrating a remote-controlled dune buggy that could leap from a ramp, land with a bounce, and zip back around for another go. With every jump, the crowd murmured approvingly. I’d never seen so many adults among so many toys. I passed a British sales rep piloting a remote-controlled helicopter that actually flew—no wires or anything—circling his head like a performing dragonfly. Down the aisle, another crowd had formed in front of the booth of Creative Kid, a “Camera-Interactive Entertainment System,” where a woman dressed in black was playing a purportedly educational video game called Bubble Music. Gesticulating with a plastic baton, a look of grim concentration on her face, she sent an on-screen avatar, some sort of jellyfish, chasing after cartoon bubbles that chimed out the melody of “London Bridge” as they popped. The woman’s performance was strangely mesmerizing. If you didn’t know the
screen was there you might have thought she was swatting at invisible flies, or practicing tai chi.
This trade show, the toy industry’s largest in Asia, was the first stop on what I intended to be a kind of economic safari, a sightseeing expedition into China’s industrial wilderness. It wasn’t really China I’d traveled halfway around the planet to see but the means of production, which were to me, a child of consumerism, unimaginable. We are not meant to know where our possessions come from, we American consumers, or from what ingredients and by what mysterious processes they were spun and by whom. And so long as our possessions pose no risk to us or to our loved ones, I don’t think we really want to know. Such knowledge would be overwhelming. Willfully suspending disbelief, we prefer instead to pretend that our possessions were begotten, not made, and the marketers of consumer goods are happy to assist in the illusion.
Consider for a moment the aesthetics of packaging, the wrappings of enchantment, the clamshells and plastic blisters that serve as both miniature shop windows and seemingly sterile cocoons. Consider the little transparent sticker placed like a hermetic kiss across the cardboard flap. This box has never been opened, it is there to tell us, or even, more superstitiously, The contents herein have never been touched. Slit that seal with a fingernail and something changes. Magic escapes. Unused, untouched, the contents of that box are nonetheless no longer brand-new. The difference between the new and the brand-new is like the difference between youthfulness and chastity. Think of the components individually wrapped inside their little plastic sachets, the power cords crimped into perfect coils. Think of the nested loaves of Styrofoam—Styrofoam, which is quite possibly the cleanest, whitest, lightest, chastest substance chemists have ever confected (until, that it is, it goes adrift on polluted seas). It is functional, no doubt, preventing breakage while minimizing shipping costs. But it is also symbolic. The sound that snug Styrofoam makes as you coax it from the cardboard box is a Pavlovian signal: the squeak of the new.
And yet mystery has always acted like a pheromone on the human imagination. Browsing through the colorful circulars that spilled from the Sunday newspaper like candies from a piñata, or noticing yet again the ubiquitous phrase MADE IN CHINA embossed on one of Bruno’s toys, I’d found myself having vaguely mystical thoughts about the places and lives with which the chain of production invisibly entangled me. Having spent my life at the receiving end of that chain, curious and eager to learn what the business end was like, I set out to follow it back to its source.
I’d read that 70 percent of the toys we Americans buy—about $22 billion worth—are wrought by low-wage factory workers in Guangdong Province, and that 70 percent of those toys are blow-molded or injectionblow-molded or extruded out of plastic resin. I’d read disturbing reports about the Chinese toy industry, and now when, at bedtime, I read to Bruno Eric Carle’s Ten Little Rubber Ducks—which was itself printed and bound in China—and came to the scene of the woman in the brick-red dress painting brick-red beaks with her little paintbrush, I couldn’t help but think of Huangwu No. 2 Toy Factory, where, according to the nonprofit group China Labour Watch, in order to earn the legal minimum wage of $3.45 for an eight-hour day, a piece-rate worker in the spray department “would have to paint 8,920 small toy pieces a day, or 1,115 per hour, or one every 3.23 seconds.”
Did workers make the Floatees under similar conditions? Way back at the outset of my journey, before boarding the ferry to Sitka, I’d called The First Years Inc., which had recently been bought out. The current management seemed to know less about the Floatees than I did, or pretended to. There was no way they could tell me which factory produced that yellow duck of mine, they said. I assumed that my chances of finding the factory were slim, my chances of gaining access to it, nil.
At Curtis Ebbesmeyer’s suggestion, I contacted T. Berry Brazelton, founder of the Child Development Unit at Children’s Hospital Boston, and a professor emeritus of clinical pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. On the back of the 1992 packaging of the Floatees—alongside the claims that these toys were “dishwasher safe” and conformed to “ASTM Standard Consumer Safety Specification on Toy Safety F9693,” whatever that was—there had appeared the following endorsement: “Our products are inspired and pretested by parents, for parents. They are designed in consultation with Dr. T. Berry Brazelton and staff members of the Child Development Unit, Children’s Hospital in Boston. The First Years is a benefactor of the Child Development Unit.” Understandably perhaps, Ebbesmeyer had concluded that Brazelton, a celebrity among pediatricians, had designed the Floatees—understandably but mistakenly.
Brazelton had serious misgivings about his relationship with The First Years. Pediatric colleagues had criticized him for accepting donations from a corporate benefactor. In his own defense, he insisted that in lending his name to The First Years’ products, all he hoped to do was encourage the development of safe, educational toys that even the poor could afford. He played no part in designing the products, he said. Once a toy was in development, he and his staff would “sit around and discuss how a child might play with it.” And if the toy seemed worthy, then, and only then, would Brazelton bestow the imprimatur of the Child Development Unit. If I wanted to know more about the Floatees, Brazelton suggested that I contact his acquaintance Ron Sidman, the former CEO of The First Years Inc.
To my surprise, Sidman agreed to meet with me. In September of 2007, while receiving a crash course in oceanography at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, at the height of the Great Chinese Toy Scare, when every month seemed to bring news of yet another scandalous recall, I traveled from Woods Hole to Sidman’s Cape Cod home. Started by Sidman’s parents in the fifties, The First Years develops and markets safety products and playthings for infants and toddlers—rattles, teethers, plastic utensils, disposable sippy cups, bath toys. After chasing the Floatees, after recovering a pair of them from the Alaskan wilderness, I hoped to determine their origins, which I feared would be even more shadowy than their fate.
The plastic animals marketed under the brand name Floatees are no longer in production, and Ron Sidman is no longer in the toy business. In 2004, he and his shareholders sold The First Years for $136.8 million to RC2 Toys, the same Illinois company, it so happens, that in the summer of 2007, while I was messing around on boats with Chris Pallister, had recalled more than a million Thomas & Friends toy trains after routine tests detected “excessive levels of lead” in the paint. The main lesson to be learned from that and other recalls, in Sidman’s opinion, was not that the system was broken but that it had worked. “In the old days, these products would have been out there with no one knowing about it,” he said. Now the threat of “criminal and civil penalties” and the fear of bad publicity compel toy companies to test their products vigilantly and report any defects they find. “This is the toughest business in the world from a regulatory standpoint,” Sidman said. “When it comes to babies, it’s so emotional. If there’s any publicity about a safety hazard—even if it’s not a real hazard—there’s an overreaction to it.”
But wasn’t that what was so frightening to consumers—that toymakers had failed to meet product-safety standards despite those tough regulations? If the companies themselves couldn’t police their Chinese manufacturers, I asked Sidman, then who could? The Chinese government?
“I don’t see that that’s where the responsibility lies,” he said, sitting in a leather armchair, stroking the enormous head of his slobbery black Labrador. Behind him a picture window looked out over Cape Cod’s deciduous hills.
Sidman thought the responsibility lay with the manufacturers themselves. He wasn’t sure which Chinese manufacturer had made those plastic animals lost at sea, but he gave me the name of his old trading partner in Hong Kong, Henry Tong, vice president of the Wong Hau Plastic Works & Trading Company Ltd. If anyone still knew who’d made those toys it would be Henry, Sidman thought.
Yes, sure, he knew, Tong told me when I called his office in Hong Kong. They were made
at the Po Sing plastics factory in Dongguan. I asked if it might be possible to arrange a tour. Yes, probably, Tong said. The general manager there was an old friend of his, he said. He’d just need a few weeks’ notice to set everything up.
Dongguan, I learned, is an industrial town in the Pearl River Delta Economic Zone, an alluvial maze of factories and shipping routes radiating outward into Guangdong Province from Hong Kong. The Pearl River Delta is mainly what people have in mind when they talk about China’s “economic miracle.” Newspapers often refer to it as “the workshop of the world,” a phrase, first applied to England in the nineteenth century, that has in the twenty-first century drifted east. The iPod is manufactured in the Pearl River Delta, and so is Chicken Dance Elmo. So are most of the cheap, ubiquitous goods labeled MADE IN CHINA that we Americans buy.
Although, reading the newspaper, I tended to imagine the Pearl River Delta as a polluted wasteland where workers toiled miserably away in dark Satanic mills, not all my Pearl River dreams were bad ones. In The Oracle Bones, his exquisitely reported book about life in China at the turn of the millennium, Peter Hessler quotes a song sung in commemoration of the country’s thirty-year experiment with capitalism, an experiment that began when Deng Xiaoping established the Pearl River Delta Economic Zone. “In the spring of 1979,” one verse of this song goes,An old man drew a circle
on the southern coast of China
And city after city rose up like fairy tales
And mountains and mountains of gold
gathered like a miracle. . . .
For much of the past two decades, the Delta’s economy has been the fastest-growing in the world. The millions of itinerant laborers from China’s rural interior who moved there seeking work on the assembly lines ended up participating in what is often called the largest migration in human history. In Shenzhen, known as the Overnight City because of the speed with which it sprouted up, mushroomlike, out of the rice paddies and fishing towns that preceded it, the annual growth rate in some years surpassed 30 percent. Despite recent competition from Beijing and Shanghai, the Pearl River Delta remains China’s most productive region. Home to just 3 percent of the country’s population, it nonetheless accounts for more than 25 percent of China’s foreign trade.
