Island Press is “the nation’s leading publisher on environmental issues.” In its latest release, Thicker than Water, Erica Cirino, a photojournalist and licensed wildlife rehabilitator, explores what becomes of plastic—all 8 billion or so tons of it that humans have manufactured in the last 70-ish years.

Plastic’s greatest strength is also its greatest flaw: it takes eons to break down. It breaks apart, into smaller and smaller micro- and nano-sized particles. But unlike natural materials like wood and glass, plastic doesn’t break down into its constituent chemicals. Those micro- and nano-sized particles are still plastic. According to Alice Zhu, a graduate student studying plastics at the University of Toronto, this is because the carbon-carbon bonds that form the backbone of most plastic polymers require an immense amount of energy to break apart. And because these bonds are in synthetic arrangements, there are no microorganisms that can break most of them down (yet).

The big asymmetry

There is a marked disconnect between how long plastic sticks around and how long we get utility from it. Many single-use items, like straws and cutlery, are used for only minutes; thin plastic bags, like those needlessly wrapped around produce and almost everything we order online (and even plastic cutlery), are immediately thrown away. This thin plastic is made of low-density polyethylene, which is the most difficult kind to recycle and emits more climate-warming methane and ethylene when exposed to sunlight than other, harder types of plastic. It is also one of the most commonly produced.

Cirino’s account begins as an easy-enough read. She starts with a first-person narrative of her three-week boat trip on the Christianshavn from Los Angeles to Honolulu, a route that took her through the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This is only one of the garbage patches that has accumulated on the edge of the eastern North Pacific Gyre; there is another, smaller garbage patch on the west side of the Gyre, off the coast of Japan. The patches are “at least one thousand nautical miles in any given direction from landmasses inhabited by humans and their plastic societies.” 

The plastic the crew picks up ranges from “ghost” fishing gear—tangles of plastic ropes and nets discarded by fishing vessels that continue to entrap, maim, and kill marine life as they float along—to multicolored micro- and nano-plastics submerged below the surface. These tiny pieces are dangerous enough on their own; when marine animals ingest them, they block the movement of food through their digestive tracts so the animals eventually starve to death. 

But in addition to the toxic manufacturing chemicals and additives that are an inherent part of the plastic, these particles also act as vehicles for other poisonous substances—pesticides, heavy metals, pathogenic bacteria and viruses—that latch onto their uneven surfaces. As the plastic is buffeted around by wind and waves and broken into these smaller and smaller pieces, it also releases methane into the atmosphere. And the pieces are in freshwater, so we get to drink them as well.

Recycling hasn’t saved us

The book gets more and more distressing and hopeless as Cirino starts describing the scope of the problem and the miniscule effects of our solutions, when and where they can be implemented at all.

Beach clean-up efforts are great, but much of the plastic picked up can wind up back in the ocean anyway. Eschewing plastic altogether is not easy; you can give up bottled water, sure, but what if you want to buy shampoo, or ibuprofen, or chicken, or pasta?

Recycling, unfortunately, is a complete joke. We have no infrastructure to do it properly. We used to send our plastic trash to China, but in 2018, the country decided not to take it anymore. Other countries still take our recycling, but they often end up just burning the plastic rather than actually recycling it (burning plastic, shockingly, is not great for air quality). Plastic loses many of its desirable qualities—its hardness and its malleability—when it is melted down to be recycled into new products, so hard things like bottles are often recycled into softer items like fleece jackets, spandex leggings, and polyester carpets. 

Buying these recycled products keeps plastic out of landfills, where it would bake in the sun and release methane, but these plastic textiles release microfibers into the air and water when they’re washed, so we are constantly eating and drinking them and breathing them in. Just like all of the other species on Earth. 

At this point, recycling is basically just a ploy the petrochemical industry uses to shift the onus of plastic waste from their manufacturing plants onto us consumers and to assuage our guilt about our ridiculously wasteful way of life so that we will continue to buy more plastic. Recycled plastic can’t readily be made into new usable products, so it must be bolstered with the addition of newly manufactured plastic. 

An optimist could view plastics as the death throes of the oil industry, desperate to maintain its profits and power and thus turning to promoting plastics as the ultimate use for oil since people don’t want it for fuel anymore. Cirino ends on this note, reminding us that culture shifts are possible and that even mighty corporations can topple. The book remains eminently readable and pretty light and poppy throughout, even while tackling dire issues like environmental racism and throwing out informative statistics about plastic’s pervasiveness. You will definitely learn much more than you wish there was to know about plastic and its role in our world.

In 1967’s The Graduate, when Mr. McGuire advised the young Ben Braddock that “there’s a great future in plastics,” he was probably being more prescient, and more literal, than he realized. All of the plastic that was in the world in 1967 is still here, and it will be for centuries.