Category: Plastic

There is reason for hope, but we all have to act NOW.

The biggest problem with plastic is also its greatest strength: it lasts forever. It doesn’t break down. Since the widespread use of plastics began, around the time I was born in the 1960s, we have poured a steady avalanche of...

Occasionally a tale of childhood turns up in the soil broken by spade and hoe as we dig up ancient roots:   once a small hard rubber ball that now rests on the top shelf of my bookcase; once a tiny black   horse of...

A disposable water bottle these days is an astounding piece of engineering. Of course, these are flimsy, cheap substitutes and almost collapse when the water is gone. But I can look at them as a piece of magic. It is a skin for...

HELP! HELP ME! Iam drowning in a quicksand of plastic. I’m being sucked under into a shiny morass of polymers, asphyxiated inside a plastic bag. Here is my lunch, a healthy serving of tofu and kale, sitting in a plastic take-out...

I have been an anti-plastic activist since I was 5 years old. I started my protest at Grandma Ida’s, in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. One holiday when I was visiting, I ran over to the big bowl of fruit on the table. I was excited to...

 Scene One: the Hockomock Swamp My turtle trap is about two hundred feet from the edge of the wetland, so I have some swamp-walking to do.  Peering across the marsh grasses with my binoculars, I see ripples around the trap, a...

While enjoying a leisurely breakfast this past summer with my 10-year-old granddaughter, my husband opened the refrigerator door and removed a bottle of water to take with him to the gym.  My granddaughter levitated six inches...

At the dermatologist’s office I noticed: they’re calling themselves Berkshire Plastic Surgery now?  But I’m not ‘getting work done.’ I was merely getting my skin checked, a painful ritual, pay-back from the days of frying myself...

We use it in our packaging and when we’re building homes, And medical gadgets devised to help us live longer; And cars and trucks and furniture and pillows made of foam, And a bunch of ways to make strong things even stronger....

“Break the chains so we’ll be free”