Okay, okay - here's another look at plastics.

Art Graham is the very model of a socially responsible businessman. His business diverts garbage from the landfill, his plants obey emissions guidelines to the letter, and a framed certificate from former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) director William Reilly, commending him for service to the environment, hangs in the lobby of his factory. But here's the catch: His business isn't making compost, rehabilitating discarded wine bottles, or being entrepreneurial in any of the other ways beloved by environmentalists. His business is melting and reshaping polystyrene, better known by the brand name Styrofoam, into plastic "popcorn" shipping pellets.

A couple of months ago I visited one of his plants, a neat, nondescript building on a cul-de-sac in an industrial area south of San Francisco. I'd been expecting to slip away after the tour with my press packet and my impressions, but instead found myself sitting across a conference table from the boss. He let me have it with both barrels.

Why, he demanded, did plastics recycling have such a bad rap among environmentalists? How could people fail to see that all packaging has environmental costs, and that his product - made from polystyrene that already existed, that would have been landfilled - had fewer costs than most? Look, he went on, these little pellets were the perfect material for preventing breakage, and preventing breakage was a good and environmentally sound goal, right? What were people supposed to ship, say, expensive computer components in? Popcorn? Wood shavings? Please! What did people (he meant "people like you" but was too polite to say it) have against plastics recycling?

His righteous indignation gave me a lot of food for thought on the way home: What do environmentalists have against plastic recycling? Is it just that we don't like plastic? Is it just that what's being made from recycled plastic - polyester T-shirts, polyester blankets, polyester lawn furniture - are things many of us think the world could do quite nicely without? Or are we right to suspect that recycling an environmentally problematic material doesn't make the problems go away?

There's not much room for debate about the environmental cost of plastics manufacture. Refining oil, natural gas or coal into simple chemicals like ethylene and propylene, then combining them into giant chain-like molecules or polymers, uses substantial energy, poses risks to workers and creates significant pollution. The energy bill for manufacturing a pound of PET (polyethylene terephthelate) plastic is 36,000 BTU (a British Thermal Unit is the amount of heat needed to raise the temperature of a pound of water one degree Fahrenheit). Plus, since the oil used to make the PET won't, be used for fuel for cars or homes, there is "opportunity cost." Add it all up, and it totals six times the energy cost of manufacturing a pound of glass. (However, as PET defenders point out, you can make a lot more containers from a pound of PET than a pound of glass.) Workers in plants making polyvinyl chloride (PVC) - another kind of plastic - have highly elevated risks of liver cancer and brain tumors; polystyrene manufacture involves benzene, a carcinogen. And the plastics industry produces somewhere between seven and 42 billion pounds of hazardous waste annually. (If the spread seems enormous, it's par for the course. Statistics on every aspect of plastics, from how much we use to how much we throw away, differ radically from source to source.)

Plastic is also the most obvious and enduring component of litter. Case in point: In 1991, a zoologist reported to the journal, Nature, that he'd just returned from an uninhabited Pacific atoll 292 miles from the nearest inhabited island and 3,000 miles from the nearest continent. On a 1.5 mile stretch of beach he found, among other things: 14 plastic crates; 71 plastic bottles; 268 unidentified or broken plastic pieces; 113 buoys and 66 pieces of buoys that were mostly plastic; a plastic coat hanger; and three plastic cigarette lighters. "If so much rubbish is washed ashore on small and extremely isolated islands," he concluded, "it makes one wonder just how much more is still floating on the surface of the oceans."

And that was in 1991, when plastic accounted for about 20 percent of municipal solid waste. Plastic production has grown 10 percent a year for the past 30 years, says the EPA, and about half our municipal solid waste will be plastic by the year 2000. How much plastic flotsam will be on that beach then?

Yet a sound environmental case exists for some uses of some plastic. Cars are lighter now, thanks to up to 2,000 pounds of metal-replacing plastic in their bodies. They burn less fuel as a result, and that's good. Plastic containers markedly reduce transportation costs, which are a big element in any environmental cost/benefit analysis. That's good, too. And there's an average of 30 percent less plastic in plastic containers these days, due to the industry's efforts at light-weighting. That must be good. Given that modern life is hardly thinkable without plastic, doesn't it make sense to recycle what's out there?

The answer is, I'm afraid, "That depends." It depends on what you mean by recycling, what kind of plastic you're talking about, and whether or not you agree that plastic is a really a problem. In other words, whether or not to recycle plastic is shaping up as another one of those dreary late 20th century dilemmas - is NAFTA good or bad for the environment? is dolphin-safe tuna really dolphin safe? - that just doesn't have a simple answer.

Don't you just hate it when that happens?

For the past 10 years or so, environmentalists and recycling entrepreneurs have been debating the definition of recycling with all the energy of medieval scholars squabbling over the relative sizes of angels and pins. Purists insist that recycling is nothing less than a closed loop: the transformation of a bottle, can or sheet of paper into another bottle, can or sheet of paper, practically ad infinitum. Plastics entrepreneurs, on the other hand, want the dogma of recycling to embrace a wider meaning: the transformation of old, discarded stuff into new stuff that people will pay money for. And the reason they want to broaden the definition of recycling is that the definition of plastics is so broad.

The problem is that plastic isn't one thing, but many. There are literally thousands of polymers around, each with different molecular configurations and different properties, making everything from artificial hearts to the sails on your sailboard.

Six of these polymers, however, account for 97 percent of post-consumer plastic waste: polyethylene terephthelate (PET), high and low density polyethylene (HDPE and LDPE), polyvinyl chloride (PVC), expanded polystyrene (PS), and polypropylene (PP). Unfortunately, from the point of view of pure recycling, that's about five too many. If all plastics could be collected and processed together, as cans, bottles and newspapers are, there might be no plastics recycling problem.

When mixed or "commingled" plastic waste - old HDPE milk jugs, PET soda bottles, PVC cooking oil bottles - is collected and melted down, the result is a drab polymer pudding. Because its component plastics have different chemical properties, the resulting resin can't be used for anything with demanding specifications, such as food containers or car bumpers. Instead, it's turned to such humble products as recycling bins, cushioned floor covering for animal stalls, or plastic lumber.

"And what's wrong with that?" ask the entrepreneurs. Why isn't extending the life of a plastic bleach bottle from a month to 20 years an endeavor worthy of being called recycling? Because, say the purists, when this extended life is over, our children will just have to take it to the landfill. If the goal of recycling is to reduce the amount of junk in circulation, making new junk out of old plastic doesn't do the trick.

As it happens, however, the academic argument over the definition of recycling is moot. The marketplace has spoken, and it has said "no" to the recycling of commingled plastic. Take plastic lumber, for example. If you can ignore its aesthetic shortcomings - admittedly a stretch - plastic lumber is probably not such a terrible idea. Marketed as a material for picnic tables, park benches, play structures and marine pilings, it resists weathering and doesn't leach preservatives into the soil the way pressure-treated wood does. Also, at least theoretically, it saves trees.

But no one will buy it. Aesthetics isn't the problem; nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. Economics is the problem. Despite its trashy origins, plastic lumber costs twice as much as the real thing. And few individuals, businesses or city governments can afford that much eco-conscience. To choose a less dramatic but more ironic example, recycling bins made of recycled commingled plastic cost perhaps 20 percent more than bins made of virgin resin. One of the key factors in this dilemma is that old environmental bugaboo, the price of oil. As of late 1993, oil prices were slipping daily; as an inevitable corollary, the price of virgin resin was 40 percent lower than that of recycled. Advocates of plastic recycling insist that this is a temporary situation, and they may well be right. The problem is, they may not be around to take advantage of it when oil prices rise again.

In order for postconsumer plastic to be recycled in the purist's sense of the closed loop, or even remade into anything slightly upscale, the different plastic types need to be sorted. This, theoretically, would insure a pure feed-stock that could be mechanically ground up, melted down, or otherwise remade into containers like the ones from which they came.

The little numbers in the chasing arrow triangles on the bottoms of plastic containers were supposed to be a first step toward making that happen; their appearance in 1988 allegedly signaled the industry's commitment to recycling. But as of 1994 everyone is having second thoughts; some environmentalists are asking that the numbers be removed, and industry spokespeople now say the system was never intended for use by the general public.

Why all the controversy? For starters, hardly anyone even knows the numbers are there. (I conducted an informal number-awareness survey in Aisle Two of my local supermarket and got the following answers: "Huh?" "No, I never noticed," and "How am I supposed to read that?")

Furthermore, the numbers implicitly promise recycling, not just recyclability. Consumers who feel duped by them can turn nasty. Case in point: Ever since the coding system was instituted, staff at the San Diego office of the Environmental Action Foundation (EAF) have been besieged with phone calls from irate consumers asking how to recycle their numbered containers. The volume rose to a crescendo, as the public relations campaign to emphasize plastics recyclability gained steam. In 1992, EAF fought back. They began recommending that callers send stamped and addressed plastic containers to the American Plastics Society (APS) in Washington in protest. (APS maintains they got no plastic; according to EAF, moles inside APS headquarters reported a heart-warming inundation.) Whatever the actual numbers, something is changing the way the plastics industry thinks about the symbols. In May 1994, the National Recycling Coalition and the Society of the Plastics Industry are scheduled to announce their decision on changing the resin codes; industry insiders believe the chasing arrows will go, though the numbers may remain.

Clearly, the plastic recycling codes are either nuttily optimistic or deliberately misleading, depending on how dark a view of the world you tend to take. Yet because of them - or in spite of them - there are some small plastics recycling success stories. In nine states, soft-drink bottle bills have led to the capture of high percentages of the PET waste stream. As a result, somewhere between 20 and 40 percent of PET is now recycled. A small percentage of that ends up as new bottles: both Coke and Pepsi market some bottles with 100 percent recycled content. Some is made into other sorts of consumer goods - the carpet fiber and polyester fleece and ski parka filling that has recently been so highly touted. The problem is that recycled PET is only a drop in the postconsumer plastics bucket: some sources estimate it constitutes as little as one percent. (And as skeptics have noted, enough PET is collected each year to make ski jackets for every man, woman and child in America.) HDPE recycling is happening, too, after a fashion: Procter & Gamble now markets fabric softeners in 100 percent recycled container bottles, and Helene Curtis is the first major "personal care" company to use recycled plastic in its new shampoo bottles.

None of this activity, of course, is market-driven in the classical sense. Corporations are using recycled plastics in their containers because consumers demand it; consumers demand it because they think recycling is the right thing to do. On purely economic grounds, no manufacturer in his or her right mind would use recycled materials.

But in the best free-market tradition, chemists and engineers have spent the last few years trying to make recycling cheaper. To reduce the cost of hand-sorting, engineers have developed machines that can read a chemical marker identifying the resins in containers as the containers whiz past on a conveyor belt. They've devised ways to separate shredded mixed plastics by flotation, so flakes of individual resin types can be skimmed off. They've figured out how to chemically separate some individual resins from mixed resins. And the latest wrinkle, depolymerization, is what permits new bottles to rise, phoenix-like, from their melted ancestors. Heat (from 400 to 900 degrees) and chemical catalysts strip polymers of their side chains, reducing them to monomers that can then be repolymerized in their original or other configuration.

By any standards, that's a closed loop. So, are environmentalists happy? Happier, maybe, but not happy. They point out that a polymer can be depolymerized seven times, on average, before it degrades into uselessness and joins the waste stream. More seriously, profound chemical alteration like that involved in depolymerization can be nearly as environmentally problematic as the oil refining that produced the plastic in the first place.

And the more profound the alteration, the more energy-intense and polluting it is. Take pyrolysis, currently the most ballyhooed method for what's being called chemical recycling of plastics. It involves cooking plastic waste at temperatures of up to 1,400 degrees. That heat has to be generated somehow: Will it have an environmental cost larger than the environmental cost of landfilling the plastic? And the supposed payoff of pyrolysis is that it generates marketable chemicals like naptha and benzene that can be used to make more plastic. But with the price of oil in free-fall, it would be foolish to assume there will be a market for them.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that if plastics recycling is left to fend for itself in the marketplace, it will go down for the count, and we'll continue using and tossing an ever-growing volume of plastic. We could try to prop it up, of course. Requiring product producers to use recycled resins is increasingly being proposed as a way to get the ball rolling. California, for example, has a recycled content law for plastics.

The container industry and the resin producers, unsurprisingly, have fought such laws tooth, nail and checkbook. In the past few years, both Massachusetts and Florida have seen such measures go down to defeat: Petrochemical companies gave more than $2 million to finance a last-minute TV blitz that defeated Proposition 3 in Massachusetts, and Florida's 1992 bottle bill lost by a slim margin, after intense efforts by lobbyists for resin manufacturers and industry consortia. Some observers speculate that recycled content laws make the link between packaging and trash too close in the consumer's mind for manufacturers' comfort; others note that businesses reflexively fight government regulation of any stripe. Mandatory recycled content laws are clearly a good idea, but just as clearly, they're going to be a hard sell.

There is an easier way to get a lot more mileage out of plastic. Though not technologically sexy, it sidesteps the supply/demand hurdle and provides nearly the feel-good quotient of recycling. It also takes advantage of the undeniable virtues of plastic: its light weight and unbreakability. It's that old standby: reuse.

In 1947, when glass was king, the United States had such an efficient setup for refilling bottles that 86 percent of them went back to the store. In 1993, that figure was seven percent. What happened? First aluminum, and then plastic. And the tendency of contaminants to leach into organic (carbon containing) materials like plastic was at least one reason that the refilling infrastructure was abandoned.

However, technology, spurred by consumer and government pressure, has come to the rescue. In Germany, bottlers use a machine that inserts a probe into plastic bottles on the assembly line to check their cleanliness before they're refilled. The result? Liter and half-liter bottles are reused an average of 35 times. Admittedly, refillable bottles have to be twice as heavy as their single-use siblings, but the economics are still impressive. According to a report on refillables by the environmental research organization Inform, it takes 225 pounds of PET to get 1,000 gallons of liquid to consumers in one-way bottles; in round trip bottles with 25 returns, the figure is 21 pounds.

It may not be practical to reinstate a refillable system for soft drinks in the U.S., now that the system for collections and returns has been dismantled. (It's even less practical to enact my solution, which is to ask for a national moment of silence while everyone ponders the following question: "Why are we drinking all this stuff.?") But even if it won't work for all beverages everywhere, it might work for some beverages in some places. Take milk, which is often produced and distributed by small local dairies.

A shining example of the possibilities can be found in Saratoga Springs, New York. There, Stewart's Dairy delivers some of its milk in half-gallon containers of Lexan, a high-end plastic produced by General Electric. Each plastic container costs Stewart's a dollar, as compared with the eight cents they'd pay for a cardboard container, but with 50 to 60 roundtrips per container, the cost drops to around 2.5 cents. Stewarts can charge a nickel less for milk in refillables, and everyone is happy.

Well, maybe not everyone. The people who make the cardboard containers replaced by plastic probably weren't happy. But then, the people who made the glass containers replaced by the cardboard containers weren't happy, either. Civilization, such as it is, seems always to have involved replacement of one material by another; stone by bronze, bronze by iron, iron by steel. If we could figure out how to replace materials selectively, reserving each one solely for uses tailored to its virtues, we wouldn't be doing so many technological and economic back flips, trying to make plastic behave like glass.

Plastic is wonderfully durable, so where's the logic in making it into throw-away containers, just because we can? My town, Berkeley, asked that very question four years ago, and answered it with a polystyrene ban. The results have been heartening, though perhaps not for the reasons the ban's architects envisioned. Just as predicted, carryout places replaced polystyrene with paper, a switch whose environmental virtues polystyrene manufacturers and environmentalists alike agree are debatable. But many of us, after burned fingertips demonstrated that paper cups had flaws of their own, started bringing our own mugs for our morning latte or cappucino. We leap-frogged from plastic to pottery, the right material for the task at hand.

Maybe the solution to the plastics recycling dilemma lies not in more recycling technology, but in thriftier, more intelligent use of the materials technology has given us. Such a strategy might even permit a tiny, tiny niche for recycled polystyrene peanuts. After all, when a Ming vase needs to travel, they're the only way to go.

Take Another Look at Garbage

If you can't change reality, change the subject, and hope nobody notices. That's the reasoning that seems to underlie the American Plastic council's (APC) $20 million media campaign asking us to "Take Another Look at Plastics."

The Council is a Washington DC-based partnership of the Society of the Plastics Industry and the Chemical Manufacturers Association, and the reality it can't change is that plastic packaging is hard to dispose of. Accordingly, the Council took to the airwaves in late 1992 with a series of 30-second spots focused on something else: the usefulness of plastics in things like car bodies, carpeting and medicine. Recycling was mentioned in passing, as were Styrofoam cups, but the take-home message was clear: Plastics are great.

Response to the initial campaign was mixed. As reported in the weekly trade journal Plastics News, APC research after the 1992-1993 ads showed that, while consumers remained uneasy about plastics, they conceded the material had some benefits. Those benefits were well defined: As APC's vice president of outreach told Plastic News, "When you ask the consumer what makes them not like plastics any less, they come back to health, safety and medical benefits."

Armed with this feedback, the Council fine-tuned a new series that debuted in January. The new spots - presumably aimed at replacing double negatives with positives, however lukewarm - will attempt to focus viewers' attention on plastics used in products like football helmets and artificial hips.

But as viewers may note, this isn't the subject we were talking about. Nobody objects to plastic football helmets. And even th most rabid polymerphobe thinks plastic joints and sutures and IV lines and disposable syringes are OK. The collective health benefits of these products probably even compensate for the health downside of plastics production.

The real subject is growing consumer wariness of single-use plastic packaging, and it is grounded in reality. These packages waste natural resources no matter what they're made of. And plastic, because it's durable, litters streambanks, beaches and highways for years after it's discarded. And if - as the ads imply - the industry wants recycling to succeed, the APC budget might be better spent on creating a recycling infrastructure than on changing the subject.

Decoding Plastics

The little numbers on the bottoms of your plastic bottles need be a mystery no more. Here's a handy guide.

1: Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is used for soda bottles because it holds carbonation so well. It has a recycling rate of over 27 percent and reappears in soda bottles, carpets and synthetic textiles.

2: High-density polyethylene (HDPE), can be shaped into bottles with handles, so it's often used for milk, water and detergents. It is the second most commonly recycled plastic and makes detergent bottles, recycling bins, irrigation pipes and the plastic cups that hold the bottom of PET bottles.

3: Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) appears in some cooking oil bottles and in film for meat packaging. There is a tiny but growing market to recycle PVC into pipe or fencing.

4: Low-density polyethylene (LDPE) makes shopping bags and other film products and flexible margarine tubs. It also has a very small recycling rate, but can be used for new bags and film.

5: Polypropylene (PP) is found in yogurt cups and ketchup bottles. It can be recycled into auto parts, carpets and textiles, but less than one percent is actually collected.

6: Polystyrene (PS) comes in two versions: clear, as in salad take-out trays; and foamed, such as Sytrofoam, which insulates food well. It is sometimes collected in bulk for recycling and can be remade into office products like rulers, cafeteria trays, toys and video cassette cases.

7: Everything else, especially products with a mixture of the other six resins. It's rarely recycled.