When the pandemic caused us to shutter ourselves into our homes, artist Jess Irish began digging into her trash. The plastic debris she found there was a source of awe and confusion. With her mother dying across the country and a teenage daughter at home, Irish was thinking about motherhood and mortality. “Why will ordinary things outlast us all, by generations?” she wrote in a poem that later became a lyrical documentary film called This Mortal Plastik. “My convenience contains an absurdity of time.”
Jess dug through archives to uncover the history of plastic, which was heralded in the 1890s as a way to spare whales and elephants and other animals that we had hunted to near extinction to meet our demands for materials.
Jess and I walked the length of the East River Park this week, a park soon to be razed to accommodate rising sea levels, and talked about how the pursuit of pleasure has led us to a false plastic paradise and what happens after we discard that take-out box.
TPR: Before we talk about plastic, it seems we should talk about whales. They get prime billing in your film. Why is that?
Jess Irish: Whales are ridiculous and so amazing. They're our global migrants. Whales swim from the Arctic down to Mexico, while pregnant. Their fluke is the strongest muscle on earth and they have the biggest heart.
It's a giant pain in the ass to be a whale. If you’re a whale, you can't just fall asleep in some cozy dark cave. You sleep near the surface with half of your brain asleep while the other half is breathing. You have to come up. And then they have to dive into deeper waters. That's where the plankton is. Boats and all of our garbage are a continual threat for whales as they are coming up for air and going down to feed.
TPR: Is that the connection between whales and plastic?
Jess Irish: It’s more than that. Whales existed long before we did. They evolved into the sea in search of food. They still have five finger bones inside their fins and they have remnant hip bones from their legs. The stuff that we call plastic is made from fossil fuels, which are ancient organisms made of animals like whales that have been in the Earth for millions of years. We make stuff out of it, use it once or twice and then toss it. A lot of it ends up in the ocean where it will last for generations.
We've opened Pandora's box and the Pandora is now everywhere, wrapped in nested plastic with lots of byproducts and dioxins. Maybe if you think, “Oh, this stuff is like millions of years old!” then maybe you would actually think it is incredible. It's a precious resource. It used to be ancient beings and now it's just trash. To me, that is the weirdest contrast.
TPR: So, what is plastic, exactly?
Jess Irish: Plastic is a byproduct of fossil fuel. They add all these chemical additives that shape incredible properties like tensile strength, color, firmness and stretch. It's so useful. I’m wearing a jacket made from plastic right now. Cars have plastic. But it's divorced from any of its ancestral origins. It's like nothing and everything. It's very strange.
When they first came out with plastic, they tried to claim that plastics were the fourth kingdom. Like, along with animals, plants, and minerals, there is plastic. I read that and thought, are you kidding me?
TPR: If you could see the molecular structure, what would it look like?
Jess Irish: It's not a singular thing. There's are thousands of variations. One of the inventors described it as, “the most beautiful thing you've ever seen, this molecule goes on like a cathedral for miles.” It is inscrutable unless you're the person in the lab making it. And then you're thinking about how can I make this feel better? How can I make it stronger? How can I make it lighter? You're solving problems when you’re designing it as a molecule.
TPR: But probably not thinking so much about designing for its afterlife.
Jess Irish: The whole recycling thing is a joke. 2% is effectively fully recycled. Even if you're recycling, you're only down-cycling for one or two generations. It’s still gonna be here basically forever. There's no market incentive to recycle and the responsibility is placed on the consumer.
One of the things that's so disturbing is all of these things are going to poor countries. China's no longer accepting our plastic so it's going to Ghana, Ecuador, and different places around the world, which is ridiculous. It takes a lot of energy to carry this stuff back and forth across the planet. It's really nuts.
TPR: I imagine a lot of it is just incinerated.
Jess Irish: Of course, and then you're creating dioxins, which are carcinogens and harmful for human health. This system wouldn't exist if we didn't have enough poor people to scavenge through stuff, looking for the certain types of plastics that have value.
A lot of people are too poor to buy even a full bottle of shampoo so, in places like Asia, they buy the little teeny tiny satchels of things. It's designed waste. All of this is beautifully documented in the excellent film, The Story of Plastic.
TPR: Let’s talk about how plastic relates to pleasure. Because of plastic, we can have fresh raspberries in the middle of January, we can pump soap out of a plastic bottle so we don’t have to touch it. So many good intentions. But, like pleasure, there is a responsibility that goes with it, too.
Jess Irish: Yes. It's supposed to make our lives easier. I mean, you're hungry so you go buy something, and it's fresh. That's a pleasure. Energy is pleasure. Fossil fuels bring us pleasure. I got to fly out to see my mother in her last days and that was a pleasure. You can't deny it. You have to hold both things. But it's at this level now where it's stupid and suffocating. It's poisoning our atmosphere and our bodies, our oceans, and our communities, especially communities of color, which are always the places where the refineries go. It's important to have it but equally important to restrict it and to change the game of how it's valued. Right now, it's used for the profits of a few at the cost of many. That is the problem.
TPR: So how could we pull back? Is that even possible at this point?
Jess Irish: We think we are being good consumers when we recycle it but why is it on me to figure out how to dispose of it? Recycling is a false solution. Corporations have a whole analysis for the cost of doing business but as things stand now, there's no need to factor in the cost of what happens to the byproduct.
It would be great if businesses were required to deal with the end product but it would be better if we stopped making the stuff altogether. We know enough now that we can think of other ways of doing business without it being toxic.
TPR: Are you at all hopeful?
One thing that I did in the film was put in ancient prayers. Every major religion talks about having stewardship for the earth. People do all kinds of stuff if they believe that what they do matters to God, or source, or spirit, or however you phrase it. We're not robots, we have souls. I don't know, though, the plastic takeout box is still a tough one.
TPR: Have you made changes in your plastic consumption?
Jess Irish: You can't not use it. I try to pack my stuff when I can. I pack my lunches, my coffee. But I travel and when you stay in a hotel you get your plastic-wrapped soap waiting for you. There are so many things outside of your control. A way forward is through policy and conversations, in particular with young people who will shape the future. We have to invite them into the conversation and let them say, “This sucks. I don't want to do this anymore.”
TPR: I don't think you can talk about it honestly, without a sense of despair. But, I think what you've done with the film is to bring in poetry and awe and reverence for what we have created.
Jess Irish: I felt like I had to lean into the humanity and poetry of it. I had to make it beautiful so that it could be received in a way other than, “Hey we're making too much garbage.”
Maybe somebody else can ruminate on this crazy setup. Millions of years are used in seconds to make something that will persist for generations. And the other crazy thing is that it's only happened in one lifetime. My mother was born in 1940. She just passed away earlier this year. There was nothing in her childhood that had any of this. It's breathtaking.
When it comes to plastic, we will have many opportunities to reflect. There is a chance to rip something open and toss it out nearly every day. Maybe after watching the film, you’ll think about it differently. Maybe you’ll remember that Rachel Carson quote, “The ocean is a place of paradoxes. It is home of the largest animal that ever lived and living things so small that your two hands might scoop as many of them as there are stars in the Milky Way.”
If the pandemic has shown us anything, it’s that nobody knows what's coming. But one thing is for certain, this stuff is gonna exist whether we're thinking about it or not. We're going to be touching it and holding it and sorting it forever.
FROM THE INSTITUTE OF PLEASURE STUDIES
This Mortal Plastik has won dozens of awards at film festivals around the world including Cannes and and NYFA. It is 21 minutes of poetry about the paradox of plastic. ”Plastics have become our 21st century whale. Their ancient bodies, the organisms they feasted on eons ago are now mined as fossil fuels, the fodder for our most dominant plastic, polyethylene… Surely that would be a feat of magic. Instead, it’s rubbish.”
You can see more of Jess’s work here.
The Story of Plastic contains a tool-kit for diving deeper into plastic policy.
As always, thank you for reading.