Of Plastic Bags and Toxic Post-Industrial Swidden Heaps
A personal reflection pursuant to reading an article in the LA Times, Headlined “A Reporter Kept a Diary of Her Plastic Use. It was Soul Crushing.”
Even though I've been reading and thinking for many years about the profusion of plastic that we wear, wrap stuff up in, sit on, ride in, drive, and throw away each day, the absolute ubiquity of disposable petroleum based polymer bags in my life didn't really sink in for me until New York banned single-use plastic shopping bags. I applauded … still applaud … that law. But I have to say it was a little more of an adjustment than I thought it would be. The problem was not about what to carry my groceries home in. Rather, it was about all the other ways I used plastic grocery bags. Until that point I had lined our trash baskets with plastic grocery bags, used them as poop bags when we walked the dog, wrapped some foodstuffs in them, stuffed them in boxes as low-weight packing for boxes we shipped, and any number of other things. I’d even try to remember to carry some to the grocery stores to reuse them as grocery bags … and on occasion, I'd even take a plastic grocery bag packed full of other plastic grocery bags to a dedicated plastic bag-lined receptacle box at the grocery store, where I could toss my own plastic bags and they were suposedly recycled … although even at the time I doubted that really happened, and in retrospect I’d bet they went straight to the landfill.
What Mary and I never did, ever, was to simply throw plastic shopping bags away. Maybe we're extremist, I don't know. But we kept them until they were bulging out of the drawers and boxes we kept them in. We had so many of them that we had to devise new ways to store them. Mary found that old wine boxes worked well as dispensers; with one bag protruding from the plastic spigot hole, they would pull out like tissues, even without the benefit of the two pieces of fine film of plastic found on either side of the hole of most tissue boxes. The wine boxes multiplied, and by the time plastic bags were outlawed, we thought we had an inexhaustible supply. But they disappeared faster than we ever expected, and we threw them away one at a time as they got filled with various classes of trash, ranging from dirt and dust bunnies from the vacuum cleaner, or poop or food waste, or got thrown out as we discovered they had tears and holes that made them unusable.
Even before we ran out, the pandemic set in, and NY put a hold on the law to discourage the person-to-person contact that reusable bags required. But during that time, also, I started baking all our own bread. I don't like to put bread in heavy ziploc plastic bags … it just seems so excessive. And besides that, plastic easily results in condensation that can make bread lose its charm very quickly. What I discovered, with Mary's help and guidance, is that other types of bags work much better. The bags from cereal boxes, for instance, are far superior. Sure, nowadays they're still plastic, but a different type of plastic that simulates the wax paper that used to be used. Bread simply does not sweat or mold in those bags nearly as bad as it does in the 'cling-wrap' variety. I also found that some brands of potato and tortilla chips come in bags that have that same kind of condensation resistance. I haven't found a completely plastic-free chips bag, but some of them are paperish on the outside and have some sort of foil-like plastic coating on the inside, and those are particularly good. And in fact one brand, Xochitl, is actually made of paper, and has only a microfilm inner lining of plastic. Just a tiny smidgen of plastic. They can't be as bad as the others. Right? I hoard those, because they are my favorite … except for the great big simulated cellophane plastic bags used for the Bauducco brand panettone loaves we buy at the local discount store, Ocean State Job Lots, on rare occasion, which can be washed out and dried an astonishing number of times, more than I would bother counting, although less than endlessly: one of them finally broke open one day a few months ago after more than a year's use, and I had to throw it away. Sad. Really great bags.
Anyway, the real point is that we have become conservators of all sorts of regular plastic bags, or paper or foil and plastic bags … from the commercial bread bags that we rarely buy, to the chips or whatever other packaging we bring into the house. Even the extremely flimsy veggie bags from the grocery store get saved, and used as depositories for garbage I won't throw in the mulch pile and don't want to throw in the kitchen trash. This would be stuff that will smell before trash day and force me to take out the kitchen garbage early, thus losing most of the capacity of the oversized garbage bag we're forced to use because we really love our can with the automatic lid that opens when we put our hands down to it … but which requires a much larger bag than we can fill up in one week. So I'll put the oil I fried the fish in, or the chicken bones, or the unidentifiable mold-covered lump from a forgotten jar in the refrigerator in one of the veggie bags, and trot it out to the outdoor trash can where it's like, 'who cares if it stinks?'.
The bottom line is that the only kind of plastic bag we buy anymore are sandwich bags for small, easy food storage (we use wax paper for sandwiches). And despite not buying plastic bags, the bags we salvage have that same promiscuous and prolific quality as butter tubs and cottage cheese containers; they multiply exponentially in the privacy of the drawer, so that sometimes we have to cull some of them and just plain throw them away.
It has occurred to me that, loosely speaking, this kind of buy and toss lifestyle is a much less palatable and sustainable modern replication of Swidden Agriculture … which is the slash and burn survival technique of most indigenous agricultural cultures throughout history. They would cut and burn the trees or brush, farm the field for a few years until the soil was depleted, then move on to another site. What's interesting for latter day ethnohistorians, though, is that in places like the Amazon (probably everywhere, but this is the region I know about), the fertility of the land would last long enough for the local community to develop a trash pile.
These trash piles would get high enough that when the community moved on, the plants would quickly return, cover the rubble, and within just a very few years by all appearances would turn into just another small hill or hummock. What was characteristic of the hummocks, though, is that the trash of indigenous societies would include seeds from food or rope/fabric production, etc., from other locations in the forest. The seeds would sprout into groves and clumps of plants and trees that were quite different than the surrounding vegetation. So archaeologists and historical anthropologists found they could look for these distinct patches of plants, and dig under the vegetation to find a wealth of relics and ancient tools and other sorts of artefacts to learn about the cultural history of the people who lived there.
In our current hyper-intensive Industrial and Post-Industrial Revolution reality, we no longer practice slash and burn in the same way. Rather, we slash by sucking liquid carbon from deep, deep holes in the ground, and burn this carbon in more than sufficient quantities to irremediably corrupt our atmosphere … or we use the fruit of our subterranean slashing to make plastic which, along with all the immense quantity of other waste products we accummulate and toss, we pile into huge scaled up industrial swidden waste depositories euphemistically called ‘landfills.’ Like the mostly organic swidden trash dumps of old, these depositories usually are originally located in low areas … arroyos, or marshes, or gorges of one sort or another … on the periphery of the settlement. But because we don’t periodically relocate our population centers, and because the volume of our trash is astonishingly vast, they end up as high hills that inevitably become [sometimes leaky] reservoirs for deadly chemicals that leak into nearby waterways and belch methane and other noxious gasses. And as our towns and cities expand to swallow up the peripheral areas around the original settlements, it turns out that the old waste sites are surrounded by densely populated new neighborhoods and towns.
It's very common, at least around this part of upstate NY, to put 6” plastic pipes, capped with elbow fittings to keep rain from flowing down into the toxic mélange of byproducts of excessive human consumption. These pipes stick up four feet or so out of the ground every few hundred square feet like big bizarre snorkels from monster subterranean divers to allow for the escape of the toxic and highly inflammable gases that build up under the … you guessed it, at least one, and preferably two huge sheets of thick plastic to seal off the waste below. Then we spread out a thick skin of soil over the top sheet of plastic, sow grass seed, and put a big chain link fence around the area. The fence is necessary to keep people out, because although here in the verdant Northeast these contaminated new hills and hummocks invariably are quickly covered with beautiful, inviting green grass, these are not parks we want our children to play on, or that would be appropriate for families to spread a blanket out and sit to enjoy the beautiful view that some of them offer.
That’s unfortunate in many cases. Near where we live, for instance, on Lower Newtown Road leading to the Halfmoon Town Hall, there’s a beautiful field on the south side of the road, high up on the top of a hill, that offers an amazing view across the Hudson and over to the Green Mountains in Vermont. In the foreground, across the highway, is a field where dozens of deer graze almost every evening, and the valley and mountains to the north and east regularly reflect the evening winter sun with a peculiar, gorgeous maroon glow. It would make an outstanding park or scenic overlook. But sadly, this fenced off field has the characteristic large number of big white snorkels protruding from the ground, and is closed to the public, functionally forever.
Or going another direction out of Waterford, NY, you come to a high hill on Rt. 9, the township of Colonie’s tallest hill, overlooking the Mohawk. The hill is not a natural formation, it's pure garbage, and the trucks still rumble to the top in a steady stream to drop their loads of waste. The mound of trash spans many acres, and must be 100 meters or more above the River, at this point … maybe more! And what a view that hill might offer someday, if only it weren't going to be poison for a thousand years!
But hey! Give the world a few hundred years. If humanity can survive, perhaps future generations can don chemical protective clothing and dig down into the industrial swiddens marked by strange protruding white pipes rather than distinctive clumps of plants and trees that marked indigenous swiddens, to find old implements and artifacts of our own failed society. Should be interesting. Or perhaps if the state of humanity has deteriorated to a desperate quest for survival — a la Mad Max or McCarthy's The Road — future humans won't care about the risk. And maybe like the photos we see of men in developing countries clambering down into dangerous mud pits to extract bits of gold or other minerals, or like here in our own country with the coal powder blackfaced miners who descend deep into dark and foul shafts, the trash dump miners of the future will prioritize survival over health and dignity and dig without compunction to salvage whatever they can. Even those 6 inch PVC pipes, I mean, might somehow be valuable to a resource-starved population. And if human life expectancy falls to the point that few people live much longer than just beyond the age of diminishing fertility, as is the case with most wild mammals, maybe folks won't worry about the threat of developing cancer or other fatal diseases 10 or 20 years down the line.
Oh well. The past can't be undone, and the future seems increasingly in doubt. But at least if somebody in the distant future digs down into the Southern Saratoga Trash Dump, they'll find fewer plastic bags that emanated from Max and Mary's house. And I suppose in some very small way, some perhaps imaginary but still significant personal sense, that fact alone makes it worthwhile to me to keep hoarding Xochitl Chips bags.