By Thomas Cleary, Monica Callaghan, and Peiyu Guo Chapters 5&6 By Thomas Cleary, Monica Callaghan, and Peiyu Guo

5-Matter Out of Place •When investigating a patch of the Pacific Ocean that accumulated an enormous swirl of trash the author finds a disposable plastic lighter •She called the address on the lighter and found that it originated from Hong Kong •She found that it came from a wine company that had not supplied disposable lighters in years •The author’s point is that plastics that are meant for relatively short term uses remain in our environment for years after they have outlived there usefulness

Plastic Everywhere Freinkel describes how the diets of albatrosses and other birds are becoming increasingly full of plastic She recounts how one chick had a piece of a bomber that was shot down in WWII She relates this to how plastics are invading the human world as well since even the plastics that are disposed of properly can be found in our environment and might possibly enter into our food

The Lighter Freinkel calls the lighter “an icon of the throwaway mentality that began to take shape in the years following World War II” The lighter was made possible by the new plastic technologies that came out of WWII It was conceived of by Bernard DuPont of the French DuPont family, he realized that he could make a plastic disposable version of his metal lighter that could be sold for much cheaper This product was first sold in France as the Cricket and soon American companies caught on

Impact From here the author talks about the science of a lighter being released into the environment Lighters are made of particularly durable plastic so they are ideal for remaining in the environment and trafficking invasive species The process of ingraining this plastic in our environment may well be past a tipping point as trillions of pieces of plastic that inhabit earth’s beaches this microdebris ingrains itself so much in our world that it is difficult to detect it let alone combat it

Conclusion Freinkel asks the reader if “you can’t reuse or repair an item, do you ever really own it?” She claims that we are becoming more and more invested in disposable objects that have no meaning to our lives She concludes with the image from a 1955 Life picture that displayed the then brand new plastic products suspended in midair. She says this is how people have looked at plastics for too long thrown up in the air and never coming down to affect the earth

Chapter 6- Battle of the Bag By the late 1950’s, plastic bags had been introduced to the general public and were replacing paper bags in supermarkets In 1959 there was a growing concern with these bags, as over 80 infants and toddlers had accidentally suffocated themselves, and over 17 adults had committed suicide with them

In 1962, a Swedish company had started designing a new model for these plastic bags, now known as the t-shirt bag Mobil Oil was the leading producer of polyethylene film and quickly adopted the new version of the bag However, when the new version of the product was introduced to the US public in 1976, they didn’t like how the bag would not stand up and that the cashier at the grocery store would “lick his fingers” when grabbing one

Plastic bags are fairly cheap, as they cost only a few pennies as opposed to paper bags, which cost about 4 times as much Because of this, in 1982, Safeway and Kroger made the switch from paper to plastic bags, and many other major chains soon followed suit

In Conclusion By the new millennium, the t-shirt bag had become one of the most widely used consumer product on the market About half of all goods are now contained or otherwise wrapped in plastic In 2007, San Francisco became the first major US city to ban plastic grocery bags. Other states and cities soon followed, and other major chains like Ikea, Whole Foods and Target soon banned them as well