Properties of Plastic Educator Guide

Exploratorium Staff Scientist Julie Yu changes and manipulates the physical and chemical properties of plastic bottles by exposing them to heat. This is how plastic bags and bottles can be recycled and used over and over again.

I have a plastic bottle on my desk.  It once contained the cola beverage I really should stop drinking.  I go through at least one of these each day, a habit cut down from a former 6-pack-a-day deluge.  I know the cola isn’t good for me, but now I’m thinking the plastic bottle is even worse.

I have something else on my desk: a pamphlet compiled by Peter Bryant of UC Irvine titled, “What’s Wrong with Plastic Water Bottles?”  Did you know that each year, “144 BILLION beverage containers end up in U.S. landfills, roads, streams and parks?”  Laid end-to-end, according to Bryant, those containers would “encircle the Earth 720 times, or reach to the Moon and back 38 times.”  In the United States, only 10 to 12% of plastic bottles are recycled.  That waste is truly astronomical.  And keep in mind that it takes at least 1000 years for those plastic bottles to break down in the landfill.

Most plastic bottles are made of polyethylene terephthalate, or PET.  That’s a petroleum product.  “4% of the world’s oil production is used as “feedstock” for plastic," according to Bryant, “and another 4% provides the energy to transform it into plastic.”  And of course then there’s the fuel needed to transport it to market.  San Francisco has some of the cleanest, freshest water in the world coming out of the taps. Yet it wouldn’t take you long to find someone walking down the street with a bottle of water that came from France or Fiji at 1000 times the price of the water coming from the kitchen faucet.  Why?

No doubt anthropologists of the future will be scratching their heads wondering why we paid for and wasted so much resources on something we already had pumped into our own homes.

And now due to our addiction to disposable plastic, something even more sinister is happening in the ocean.  In the middle of the Pacific is a circulating place known as the North Pacific Gyre. This vast area, reportedly twice the size of Texas, contains 6 times more plastic than plankton and is now more commonly called the Pacific Garbage Patch.  And this is a expanding environmental problem.  Plastic bags, bottles, buckets, rope, toys, trash and everything in between is making its way down rivers and streams, from storm drains and beaches, to the center of the ocean.

There are many reasons why we should kick the habit of disposable plastics.  But that probably isn’t going to happen soon.  So in the mean time we should get better at reusing and recycling.  As we showed in this QUEST Lab, plastic can be easily changed and modified to be used over and over again.  It’s incumbent upon us to make sure this resource isn’t just wasted, thrown away or worse, becomes more of an environmental hazard.

I’m looking at you, soda bottle on my desk.

Watch QUEST Lab – Properties of Plastic.

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

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Trash in the Los Angeles River, en route to the ocean. Photo: kqedquest.

Plastic bottles, aluminum cans, plastic knives and forks, tangled fishing line, plastic bags, food wrappers, cigarette butts… all this and more will be collected from California’s beaches this coming Saturday, September 25, on Coastal Cleanup Day.  On last year’s Coastal Cleanup Day, volunteers collected over 1.4 million pounds of trash from California’s beaches and waterways. That is a mind-blowing amount of trash!

All this trash has a devastating effect on ocean life. Sea turtles eat plastic bags, mistaking them for jellyfish. Marine mammals get tangled in abandoned fishing nets. Sea birds are found with bellies full of colorful plastic shards. And, plastics can leach chemicals into ocean water. Bisphenol A, the chemical in hard plastic water bottles, has been found in seawater. Bisphenol A and other chemicals can mimic animals’ hormones and disturb their development. It can also bioaccumulate in fish and shellfish—and could potentially end up on our dinner plates.

The trash that washes up on our beaches is only a tiny fraction of the debris in the ocean. Check out QUEST’s TV Story, Plastic in the Pacific, to get a sense of the Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch. This collection of trash, caught in a gyre in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, is perhaps twice the size of Texas. It isn’t just floating plastic water bottles—it’s also a soup of tiny, confetti-like fragments of plastics that have started to break down, but will never completely disappear.

Coastal Cleanup Day is a great opportunity to clean up California’s coasts and prevent this trash from getting swept out to sea. It also sends a message: people care about minimizing the impact of trash on the environment. Last year, over 80,000 people volunteered on Coastal Cleanup Day. To find locations where you can volunteer this Saturday morning, look here.

Ultimately, we need to decrease the amount of trash we produce. In Germany, a policy was put in place in 1991 that made manufacturers and stores responsible for recycling all the packaging material for the products they make and sell. Customers unwrapped their purchases at the checkout stand and left all the wrappers at the store. (My dad tried this at home in Virginia—it didn’t go over so well.) This forced German manufacturers and retailers to create a recycling program to deal with all the trash, and provided a strong incentive to reduce the amount of packaging they used in the first place. A few California cities are off to a good start with localized bans on plastic bags. Let’s come up with other ways to ensure that in the coming years, volunteers on Coastal Cleanup Day will have less work to do!

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Life was easier back before I produced this piece. Now everywhere I look and everything I touch seems to be made of plastic.

I don’t know why I didn’t think about plastic before I produced this story about plastic from around the world that’s gathering and collecting in the Pacific Ocean. But now, everywhere I look and everything I touch seems to be made of plastic: this keyboard, pen, desk, the monitor in front of me, my water bottle, the phone to the left of me, the stacks of video tapes in plastic containers to the right, even the plastic office chair holding me up. But I’m not just struck by the fact that everything’s made of petroleum products. I’m stunned by the fact that I knew all the time that I was surrounded by plastic, but I’d found ways to ignore it, accept it and live with it.

Life was easier back before I did this piece. I didn’t think of albatross stomachs when I saw cigarette lighters for sale. I didn’t have to worry what to do with the plastic lid on the recycled paper cup after I drank my fair trade organic coffee. I didn’t get strange looks from the corner sandwich shop lady until I recently removed a lunch from the plastic bag she provided. I had to explain to her why I didn’t want the plastic bag she so carefully and skillfully packed with my chicken salad sandwich, cheddar cheese chips and juice (in an actual glass bottle).

I told her how plastic doesn’t go away for centuries, how it breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces, even nano-sized particles. I went on about how it could get into the food chain. She didn’t have an answer when I asked her if she knew what we’re doing to the ocean and the planet and our children. Plastic was the enemy and it was everywhere!

I knew I was getting carried away. But then I started thinking maybe I should get carried away. Maybe we all should get carried away, you know, talk about it, get informed about it, get angry about it, write our senators and members of Congress. But being a TV producer who’s always faced with making difficult cuts in the edit room, I knew when less was more. So I chilled out, gave her what I owed for the food and time and left a hefty tip, and started to leave. Her smile made me pause. She thanked me for telling her all about plastic. She said she’d speak to the owner about replacing the plastic bags.

Watch the Plastic in the Pacific television story online.

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The paint on this piggy bank tested for lead at 7253 parts per million (ppm); that is 11 times higher than the legal limit for lead paint.

Editor's Note: This week we have the first of two special reports on lead.

As a parent, there is a lot to worry about when it comes to the safety of my kids. Lead wasn't high on my list. Lead poisoning in children has dropped significantly in recent decades since the ban on lead-based paint in homes and the phase-out of leaded gasoline. Then came the record toy recalls of 2007, where millions of imported items coated in lead paint and made by household names like Mattel and Fisher Price violated the 30-year-old lead law.

Suddenly, parents, including me, eyed the toys in our homes and on store shelves with suspicion. Extensive research links lead exposure in children to lower IQ scores, neurological and behavioral problems, even anemia.

The toy recalls prompted congress to pass the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008.

The Act not only lowers limits for lead and bans certain kinds of phthalates–it makes manufacturers and distributors accountable for products sold to American consumers by requiring items to be certified by third-party labs. But the testing, or certification piece of the Act, was postponed for a year. That raised a lot of questions for me as a reporter and as a parent.

I contacted the Center for Environmental Health, which researches lead, and other toxics, in consumer items and has sued manufacturers and distributors for violating standards.

CEH and KQED were interested in looking at what's sold at discount chains and 99 cent stores because of the history of previous recalls. CEH, through its regular spot testing, also thought that many of the larger retail outlets seem to have improved their process to weed out lead in children's items after the 2007 recalls.

I got some tips from CEH about potentially problematic products to look for. We purchased about 200 items and then CEH did the first round of testing using an X-ray fluorescence (XRF) device. The XRF is a handy tool used by a lot of commercial lead inspectors. It shoots high-energy x-rays at the item and sends back a chemical analysis, including the lead content.

Most items that exceeded the lead limits (600 parts per million) set by the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act using the XRF device were then sent to a federally-accredited lab, MACS in Hayward, for detailed testing. At the lab, the parts or components that exceeded the lead limits were cut or scraped off and dissolved in an acid solution. Then tests were run to determine the lead content.

View a slide show of several of the items that violate the new lead limits below. We've also put together a list of items that violate the new lead limits, along with the test results.

So how can parents keep leaded toys away from kids? In addition to avoiding vinyl products, stay away from metal jewelry.

If you can, choose natural wood toys instead of painted items, especially if they are in yellow. Check the recall list posted by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Many companies sell home lead test kits for consumer products. They're not 100-percent reliable and can give false negatives-and false positives too. If you're really concerned about your child's lead level, the best thing to do is to get a blood lead test.

Listen to the Playing with Lead – Part 1 radio report online.

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It's hard to imagine the scope and breadth of the Great Garbage Patch that lies in the North Pacific Gyre in the Pacific Ocean between the West Coast and Hawaii. It's estimated to be about double the size of Texas. Most people think of it as an island of trash, but that's not accurate. It's floating debris – about 80 percent of it plastic, according to Charles Moore of Algalita Marine Research Foundation – that is caught between ocean currents. And that debris is getting thicker and thicker in the water.

The current flows eastward at the bottom (southern end) of the Gyre, and westward along the top (northern edge) of the Gyre. And another current runs northward right along the West Coast. In the center of all of those currents is the Gyre, and that's where all the debris drifts. It's like the center of a hot tub where bubbles tend to form. Because of all of the garbage in the Gyre, Moore says it’s "like a toilet bowl that never flushes."

So it's not a matter of this giant area getting any bigger. The concern is that the area will become much denser with plastic, given the increasing amount of plastic and other detritus going into our ocean. Plastic doesn't biodegrade, but it does degrade into smaller pieces, and those pieces are making the water in the Gyre a lot thicker and soupier. Right now, Moore says, there are places in the Gyre where plastic bits outnumber plankton 6 to 1.

There are five Gyres in oceans around the world, and data is just starting to be collected on how much trash and plastic are in all of them. Moore pegs the estimated amount of plastic in the North Pacific Gyre at 3 million tons.

What can be done about it? Biologists and environmentalists all have similar suggestions. Make less trash. Bring your own cup to the coffee shop. Use paper to-go containers at restaurants. Bring your own reusable bags to the grocery store. Recycle plastic containers. Try not to use single-use plastic water bottles. And volunteer for a beach cleanup, since the trash washing up on the beaches is pretty constant.

Listen to the Sea of Plastic radio report online, and find additional resources and links.

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Humans produce 500 billion plastic bags annually.

In China, they recently banned it. Australia, Bangladesh, Ireland, Italy, South Africa,Taiwan, Mumbai and India have either banned it or discouraged its use by raising taxes. And on March 27, 2007, San Francisco became the first city in the USA to ban it from large grocery stores.

More people are ditching plastic bags on a local and national level with good reason: we produce about 500 billion plastic bags world-wide, and less than one percent of that is recycled.

A recent QUEST report shows that plastic bottles are straining our environment, too: each year the USA alone produces 50 billion plastic bottles. Some would say to switch from plastic to paper bags – but reports show that paper bags aren't the most sustainable solution.

Plastic can have a longer shelf-live than humans do: it can persist in the environment for anywhere between 20 to 1,000 years. But a 16-year-old from Waterloo, Canada figured out to decompose it in only six weeks.

Daniel Burd, a student at Waterloo Collegiate Institute, discovered the key to decomposing plastic bags for a school science fair. Needless to say, he won.

"Almost every week I have to do chores and when I open the closet door, I have this avalanche of plastic bags falling on top of me," said Burd to The Record, a Waterloo newspaper. "One day, I got tired of it and wanted to know what other people are doing with these plastic bags."

First, Burd decided to isolate the microbes that break down plastic in polyethelene plastic bags. Burd ground plastic bags into powder and created a solution to break it down using tap water and yeast. Six weeks later, he found that the plastic weighed 17 percent less than the control group.

Burd then isolated the effective strains that caused the degradation – Sphingomonas and Pseudomonas – and tried the experiment again, adding sodium acecate.

Six weeks later – as opposed to 1,000 years – the plastic decomposed by 43 percent.

For his final report, Plastic Not Fantastic, Burd wrote that his process of polyethylene degradation can be used for large-scale plastic bag biodegradation.

"As a result, this would save the lives of millions of wildlife species and save space in landfills," wrote Burd.

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And how this metamorphosis saves Monkeys!

Colombia: a beautiful country, with incredible forests and diverse wildlife, but like many other countries, a trash problem. With no formal trash collection system, the forests and villages suffer from scattered plastic bags, endangering wildlife and creating a mess on village streets. One such village was Los Limites, until they came up with a most transformative solution: Eco-Mochilas!

The Eco-Mochila project was invented by the organization Proyecto Titi (Project Tamarin), a dynamic conservation program that combines field research, education, and community programs in an effort to protect the endangered Cotton Top Tamarin.

An Eco-Mochila is a bag made from crocheting 100 plastic bags into a colorful beach bag or purse. The innovative woman who create the bags are called the Asoartesanas. They encourage villagers and school children to collect plastic bags and as they go door to door to collect, they educate the people about their local wildlife. Then, they cut the bags into strips and begin their craft.

Eco-Mochilas are sold throughout the world at various venues and bring in a suitable salary for an artist. Of course, the collecting of thousands of plastic bags has other benefits: a more beautiful village, and a forest clear of trash, which makes a certain one-pound monkey very happy.

The endangered Cotton Top Tamarin is found only in the forests of Colombia. Deforestation and capture for the pet trade are the species' greatest threats. The Eco-Mochila project creates sustenance for villagers, an alternative to using the forest for such, and of course, offers a cleaner forest for all wildlife.

The program has been so successful that the Asoartesanas have trained people from other countries to begin similar project in their communities…

And in case this is important to their case, eco-mochilas are cute, come in different sizes, can be personalized, make great presents and are water resistant. I have three!

Click here to purchase an Eco-Mochila and help Cotton-Top Tamarins; and come visit the Tamarins at the Oakland Zoo anytime.

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"Do you plan to change your bottled water habits?"
( polls)

Josh Rosen is Series Producer for QUEST on KQED Television.

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