Episode 112: Transcript

Episode: 112: Plastic Problems with William Gibson

Transcription by Keffy

Annalee: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, the podcast about science fiction and society which is made entirely of biodegradable materials. I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist and science fiction writer, and my most recent book is Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age.

Charlie Jane: [00:00:17] I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I'm a science fiction writer and bon vivant. And my most recent book is Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak, the second book in my young adult trilogy about LGBTQ heroes who save the galaxy.

Annalee: [00:00:31] This week, we're talking about a long chain polymer that has completely changed the world, often in kind of terrible ways. That's right. This episode is about plastic. It was once considered a futuristic material that would enrich our lives. And now it's one of the most pernicious forms of pollution in our landfills and oceans. How did this fossil fuel derived polymer make its way into every crevice of our lives over the past 70 years? And what is a nurdle? We’ll tell you all about that. And then later in the episode, we're joined by science fiction author, William Gibson, who also thinks a lot about plastic. 

[00:01:07] On our audio extra next week, we'll be talking about how the show Doctor Who has tackled the plastic problem since its earliest days as a show. And if you want to hear that audio extra, there's one simple way to do it. Become a patron of this podcast. Because, as you may know, or as you may not know, this podcast is entirely funded by you, the listeners. We're an independent podcast. We're scrappy, we're just trying to get enough money to get by here. So if you join our Patreon, you can go to patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. You'll get audio extras every week, you'll get to hang out in our Discord server with us, which we hang out there all the time. Right, Charlie? 

Charlie Jane: [00:01:50] We sure do. 

Annalee: [00:01:50] Yeah, I mean, we give people like tips on the best breakfast cereals to eat in that Discord. We like to talk about books and the games that we're playing. And all of that can be yours for just a few bucks a month. So please consider backing this podcast on Patreon and helping us to keep putting it together every couple of weeks.

[00:02:12] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]

Annalee: [00:02:40] There's this famous moment in the movie, The Graduate from 1967, where the recent college graduate Dustin Hoffman is freaking out because he has no idea what to do with his life, which is pretty relatable. His parents threw him this big party, and one of their friends pulls Dustin Hoffman aside to give him a little advice.

The Graduate Clip: [00:02:59] I just want to say one word. Just one word. 

Yes, sir. 

Are you listening?

Yes, I am.

Plastics. 

Exactly how do you mean?

There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?

Yes, I will.

Enough said. That’s a deal.

Charlie Jane: [00:03:24] Yeah, that scene is so iconic. And it just really underscores how plastics were kind of strongly associated with the future in the mid 20th century, to the point where it was kind of a joke, but it was also a thing that people were really excited about. But at this point, over 50 years later, plastic has become associated with dystopia and environmental destruction. And how did that happen?

Annalee: [00:03:47] I think partly it has to do with plastic manufacturing. So to go back in time, as I love to do with my archaeology brain. Plastic was actually invented by indigenous people in Central America about 3000 years ago or more. They would harvest sap from gum trees and use it to make rubber. So that could be used as an epoxy, but they also used it in shoe soles and most famously, as rubber balls for the many games that they played. So, they had a bunch of different uses for rubbers and plastics. 

[00:04:20] But then in the early 20th century, scientists started inventing forms of synthetic plastic. And that's derived from fossil fuels like crude oil and natural gas. Synthetic plastic requires us to extract fossil fuels from the earth, which is a problem for the environment. And according to a 2021 UN report, plastics contributed to about 4% of global warming in 2015. And that's expected to reach 15% by 2050. But that's not actually the only issue.

Charlie Jane: [00:04:52] Right. I mean, there's also just the problem of plastic trash, right? It doesn't biodegrade. It just stays in the environment and destroys habitats and at this point all of us have seen those horrible pictures of plastic trash just washing up on beaches. John Oliver just had this insane internet segment about dozens of plastic baby dolls that are washing up in on a beach in Texas and horrifying people because they look like something out of a horror movie. And of course, birds eat plastic trash, and it eventually kills them.

Annalee: [00:05:20] Yeah, that's right. According to the International Standards Organization, plastics accounted for 2 million tons of pollution in 1950. And in 2020, it was about 400 million tons. 

Charlie Jane: [00:05:33] Holy cow!

Annalee: [00:05:35] So it’s ballooned. And even worse, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development determined that less than 20% of all plastics are recycled and an even smaller amount than that is effectively recycled. Because it turns out, it's actually really difficult, if not impossible, to recycle most plastic, which actually might come as a big surprise to people because for a really long time companies that manufacture plastic, starting in the 1990s, started telling consumers okay, we’re going to start recycling plastic, don't worry. Plastic is actually going to be something that becomes sustainable really quickly. 

[00:06:14] But then in 2020, NPR and PBS Frontline did this big investigative report revealing that plastic companies actually knew that their products couldn't be recycled, despite what they were telling consumers, or the plastics could be maybe recycled one time. But over time, the material becomes so degraded that it can't be remolded into new devices and new objects.

Charlie Jane: [00:06:40] Yeah, this came as a huge shock to me when I found out.

Annalee: [00:06:42] Yeah. I mean, it’s a big deal. And I think a lot of people still believe that if you toss your plastic in the recycling bin that it's going to a happy place, and that it's not going into a bird’s tummy. But in fact, it is a big problem. 

[00:06:56] And so earlier this year, the UN Environment Assembly met in Nairobi, and they essentially agreed to make an agreement in 2024, that all plastics would have to become sustainable. So that means that they haven't made the agreement yet they're agreeing that in 2024, they'll make this agreement. And then the next steps will be, according to the UN, to produce plastic alternatives, like carbon neutral bioplastics, which are made of things like corn and sugar cane, but they also want plastic that actually can be recycled and biodegraded, effectively. So, we're starting to see these new generation plastics even now. And the hope is that this will become the vast majority of plastics manufacturing.

Charlie Jane: [00:07:45] Yeah. And you know, I mean, I hope it's not a thing where they make an agreement to make an agreement, and then they make the agreement and then they have a committee to discuss implementing the agreement. And then it's like years and years past. And clearly, the thing is, this is a global emergency. It's a huge global emergency caused by science. And part of what blows my mind is that we don't see a lot of science fiction stories that talk about the plastic menace, except of course for Doctor Who, which we'll be talking about in next week's audio extra for all our Patreon listeners. 

[00:08:13] There is a recent novel by Alison Stein called Trashlands, which takes place in a future Appalachia, which has been overrun with by with plastic waste after a lot of flooding and the main character is collecting plastic scraps, which kind of power a subsistence economy. But that's kind of a rare outlier.

Annalee: [00:08:30] Yeah, that's a sort of plastic twist on a trope that you see a lot in science fiction. It's in Blade Runner 2049, where there are all these kids who are picking through garbage in giant warehouses, and it's all sort of like e-waste and trash that's covered in plastic. It's also the origin story of one of the characters in Becky Chambers’ amazing novel, A Closed and Common Orbit, where there are these horrifically treated orphans, who are trained to pick apart and repair e-waste, which, again, it involves plastic, but it's not focused on plastic. It's not like these are stories that are centered on plastic like Trashlands is.

Charlie Jane: [00:09:12] Right, and you know, most of the times you do see stories that kind of deal with pollution as sort of a nebulous concept, or perhaps chemical toxins in the atmosphere is a thing that we read about in a lot of classic sci fi. And of course, Chen Qiufan, who was a guest on the show, wrote this amazing novel that everybody should read, called Waste Tide, which is about the horror of e-waste. But again, it contains plastic, but it isn't plastic, per se. And that's not really what Waste Tide is focusing on. And of course, then there's a million movies like The Host directed by Bong Joon Ho where chemical spills create a terrible monster.

Annalee: [00:09:45] Yeah, I love The Host. And The Host, again, it's one of these stories where there's pollution in the harbor and it creates a kaiju that comes and eats a bunch of people. But no one’s sort of saying, hey, this is caused by plastic. It’s just the sort of nebulous chemicals. 

[00:10:04] I was also thinking of the movie Wall-E, which again, totally focused on trash. Wall-E is a trash robot. And we see Wall-E living among these giant piles of trash, which do contain lots of plastic and he rescues little bits of trash and turns them into toys and he refurbishes like a TV set and watches TV. So he's able to kind of rebuild some of these plastic things, because they're just not biodegrading at all. 

[00:10:32] And then, of course, I think we have to have a shout out to the most important movie in this genre of pollution stories. Godzilla vs Hedorah, also known as Godzilla vs The Smog Monster, which is about a monster created by toxins in the ocean around Japan. And it led to an amazing song about pollution, which got a hilarious English translation in the American version of the movie in the early 1970s. 

Hedorah song: [00:11:00] The sea has cobalt, it’s full of mercury. Too many fumes in our oxygen. All the smog now is choking you and me. Good Lord, where is it gonna end? Got to get it…

Annalee: [00:11:16] So it's like we can see pollution. We can understand it as a giant blob of bad stuff. But we can't pick it apart and understand that pollution is actually a bunch of very different things. It's carbon emissions. It's non-biodegradable garbage. It's topsoil runoff, its habitat destruction, like clear cutting the Amazon forest. It’s toxins from e-waste, and just a ton of other stuff. And like all those other specific kinds of pollution, plastic is sort of an unspoken horror in a lot of climate fiction. And I'd really like to see that change because dealing with plastic requires a totally different kind of approach than say, cleaning up agricultural runoff even though both of them are polluting the ocean.

Charlie Jane: [00:12:01] And speaking of things that remain unspoken. I just wanted to remind you that you did promise you would explain what a nurdle is. I am on the edge of my seat which is actually not made of plastic.

Annalee: [00:12:14] I think there is plastic in your chair, Charlie Jane.

Charlie Jane: [00:12:16] There is some actually. Yeah, that’s true.

Annalee: [00:12:16] If you look carefully at that Aeron chair. 

Charlie Jane: [00:12:19] That's true, there is some plastic. 

Annalee: [00:12:22] A lot of plastic and that plastic comes from nurdles. Nurdle is a term of art from plastics manufacturing. So basically, the process of making plastic comes in several stages. You first convert say crude oil into ethane. And then there are a series of steps that result in this polymer resin. It’s a sort of goo. And the resin is turned into a bunch of teeny little hard blobs that look sort of like lumpy grains of rice or maybe like those candies called nerds, if you've ever eaten those. Those are called nurdles and they can be melted down into pretty much any shape, which is why people love plastic. It's so moldable and versatile. And it comes from such a delightful source, the nurdle.

Charlie Jane: [00:13:08] It's kind of but it's kind of evil, too.

Annalee: [00:13:11] Yeah, it is. It is very evil. So we're gonna take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about how plastic went from futuristic hero to villain with William Gibson who's thought a lot about this.

[00:13:25] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]

Charlie Jane: [00:13:31] If you're searching for a show that pulls back the curtain on the mystique of the writing life, look no further than The Writer Files.

Annalee: [00:13:42] Host Kelton Reid studies the habits, habitats, and brains of the biggest and brightest authors of our time. Tune in each week to learn exactly how acclaimed writers keep the ink flowing, the cursor moving and avoid writer's block.

Charlie Jane: [00:13:55] Recent highlights include chats with New York Times Best Selling novelist Emma Straub, author of This Time Tomorrow, award winning novelist and Pulitzer Prize finalist Hernan Diaz, author of Trust, and recent National Book Award winner Jason Mott, author of a Hell of a Book.

Annalee: [00:14:13] Follow The Writer Files wherever you get your podcasts. 

[00:14:17] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]

Charlie Jane: [00:14:22] William Gibson is a science fiction writer and essayist who has written some of our favorite novels, including Pattern Recognition, Virtual Light, Neuromancer and The Peripheral. His latest novel is Agency. Thanks so much for joining us, Bill.

William: [00:14:35] It's a pleasure.

Annalee: [00:14:35] So, we have been talking about plastic and I remember you saying that you had your first sightings of plastic when you were a kid, and you kind of watched it as it took over the world. Can you tell us about what it was like the first time you encountered plastic? What did you see and what did it feel like and all that stuff?

William: [00:15:01] I was born right at the end of the 1940s. So, I don't remember any of that. But my earliest memories are of the early ‘50s and I have pictures of me playing with my toys and whatnot. And none of the toys are made of plastic. They're made of metal, usually enameled, probably with something with lots of lead. 

Annalee: [00:15:32] Yeah. 

William: [00:15:34] In the enamel, and wood, and rubber. Some of the rubber was molded. You know, if they put it into a mold, which foreshadowed the real beginning of plastic in my life, because what I think of, what we think of as plastic today, I first saw as little bits of trim on metal or wooden toys. And I think they were there to make it look classy, because initially, it was novel. Injection molded styrene was a novel substance that hadn't been around before. 

[00:16:28] My mother would say, look at this, dear. It’s plastic, it's this new thing. And so the Fuller Brush men who were salesmen who came to the door, that notoriously had a suit and tie and hat, would give my mother little things made out of plastic. Like a letter opener with a handle in the shape of a Fuller Brush man with a hat. And my mother would show it to people when they came over and say, “Look at this stuff. It’s called plastic.”

Annalee: [00:17:06] And what did it look like to you? Did it look like? I mean, it was this sort of futuristic substance, but did it resemble something else? Like did it just look like fancy enamel to you? 

William: [00:17:19] Well, I was seeing it at such an early age that everything looked new to me in a way. Everything was novel, but this material was a different material. I didn't get to find out anything about its characteristics like that you could break it if you tried hard enough, break it fairly easily, until they started mass-producing toys made of it which took a few years.

[00:18:01] I remember watching probably the first season of The Mickey Mouse Club in black and white television and they advertised the very first Mattel toys machine gun. 

Charlie Jane: [00:18:21] Oh my god.

William: [00:18:24] You wound it up and it fired an entire row of caps at one go. And but it was mostly stamped sheet metal. But the parts of it that actually made it look vaguely like a gun were made of this black plastic, which was sort of unlike anything else in the house. Like if you open a tool drawer or cutlery drawer, in anyone's house at that time, nothing would have a plastic handle. For us now for forever, it's been so ubiquitous that it becomes really difficult to imagine what the world was like without it. 

[00:19:13] But it simply became more and more ubiquitous. But it didn't develop in any steady fashion. Like I was completely accustomed to plastic in the spring of 1967. I built models of airplanes, and Frankenstein and whatnot. out of injection molded styrene. I’d been doing that all my life, it seemed at that point. Then I got on a bus. I was, I think 18. I got on a bus in Washington DC for Toronto, and I was like, I'm getting out of the United States. I'm going to go see what Canada’s like. And so we went through the border in the dark, sort of at nine in the evening or something, and I fell asleep. And when I woke up, we were driving to a small town in this other country I've never seen before. And, and everywhere there were these black weird, glossy bundle-like things sitting, dozens of them beside the road. And I initially had no idea what they were. And I eventually figured it out, because I saw one that someone had torn up. I mean, it was a garbage bag. 

So this was my first glimpse of this completely ubiquitous thing that would be completely ubiquitous in North America, at least, for the rest of my life. They’re still around. But that first sight of them was, what the heck are those? And I had gone and I knew it was absolutely my first sight. I'd taken another bus from southwestern Virginia to Tucson, and then back about six months previously and I hadn't seen a single one of these things. And it was all still metal garbage cans with smelly garbage in them in the brown bags that the food had come in. 

Annalee: [00:21:26] No liner to make the trash can clean with more pollutants.

William: [00:21:35] Yeah, no longer. So, things appeared that way.

Annalee: [00:21:40] I mean, it's so interesting, the way you described those garbage bags looking almost like alien blobs, because they just don't make sense in the landscape. Like, why are there shiny, weird black things? And I wonder… I feel like plastic was being portrayed as super futuristic at the time. Did it feel futuristic to you when you were encountering it in the environment? Did it feel like you were witnessing like a transformation into a new era?

William: [00:22:13] No, not really, I thought that I was probably paying more attention to it than most of the people around me because I was a science fiction fan. And I knew, okay, I didn't know the term emergent technology, but it was an emergent technology. I was thinking today that I must have, I think that I encountered transparent plastic, flexible plastic film earlier? Because I thought, well, they must have been, maybe first they use it on dry cleaning for taking your clothes home. 

[00:22:58] Then I thought, what did they use before that? I can't remember. Maybe they had… Did they have, like, white paper slip covers or something? What was it? I don’t even know. There must have been something and I know that we had it. We’d been getting it at the supermarket getting little transparent ones for fruit for quite some time. But it just sort of slid into things and very quickly ceased to be seen as futuristic in any way.

[00:23:43] The last time I remember thinking it was futuristic was the first season of the transistor radio. And most of them had injection molded plastic cases and that was a novelty. That made them seem more futuristic. Not only were they tiny, and tubeless. But they also had these these lightweight, brightly colored cases. And prior to that, portable radios, which weighed about as much as a suitcase full of bricks in those days would be wood covered with imitation leather wrap. Kind of woven actual fabric over the speakers. And the first television we ever had in my family was wood and this tapestry-like fabric. And I think that the surround for the screen was sort of matte gold toned molded plastic. So it was just a little bit of plastic put on to sort of say, hey, this may look boring. This machine when you're when it's not actually working, but actually it's got some cool new thing going on, or something like that.

Charlie Jane: [00:25:20] Yeah, so it's easy to see how computers and video games and the internet have been changing our civilization over the last several decades, but arguably plastic has changed our civilization just as much. And how do you feel like plastic has changed us?

William: [00:25:33] I suppose it's introduced us to our capacity for doing terrible, terrible damage with things that we initially regard as absolutely mundane and harmless. That would be one way. It's taken a long time. It's taken really a long time to do that. And no one seeing their first green garbage bags, would have thought, where's that stuff going to go? What happens to it when it totally breaks down and we start eating it.

Charlie Jane: [00:26:25] But you talked about being a science fiction writer or a science fiction fan and that's why I kind of you were noticing plastic kind of creeping into everything. And most people were just taking it for granted. But you were thinking of it as an emerging technology. Why is it so hard for most people to see how plastic is transforming our world and how much of our crucial stuff is now made out of plastic?

William: [00:26:48] That which is familiar to us from birth in an absolutely daily way. I mean, looking around, I'm in a room filled with a million plastic objects. And I but I never think of that. I think of it once a week when I'm getting the recycling together, how much plastic there is. But if you're born into a situation where something has this kind of universal ubiquity, you don't even notice it. And there have been generations and generations of people born into that ubiquity since I first noticed it. 

[00:27:45] The different way I've been noticing it lately is that when I go to the kitchen cupboard to get a plastic bag to put some kind of mess in, there aren’t any. There used to be these things that the stores gave away for free, and we could reuse them and feel rather virtuous about reusing something. And in Vancouver, they're gone. The stores are no longer allowed to give give away or sell plastic bags, it's all paper and you have to pay 25 cents or something for each one. And they really want you to bring your own. And so I noticed that and that actually seems kind of a shocking change. Still occasionally, I go wow, they’re serious about this. No more plastic bags.

Annalee: [00:28:48] But you still can have plastic guns, no problem. Plastic everything else.

William: [00:28:54] Yeah. And now people are printing their own plastic at home and actually making their own firearms, in some cases, out of plastic.

Annalee: [00:29:08] What do you think people think about now when they see plastic, if they notice it, like you were saying that they are aware now, at least in Vancouver. And also it's in the case in San Francisco where we live, that there are now regulations that prevent stores from giving you plastic bags. But what do you think an ordinary person thinks about plastic? It's no longer futuristic. It's everywhere. What does it mean to us?

William: [00:29:39] Well, I don't know. I mean, actually, one of the things I find hardest of all to imagine is what a quote “ordinary person” thinks.

Annalee: [00:29:50] Well, that's true.

William: [00:29:52] In 2022. The meanings of things can change so much. If I’m out. as I was earlier today at it's sort of a sunny day, and people are wearing shorts and I’m wondering what people are under a certain age, what they think of tattoos, because it's like the whole meaning, social meaning of tattooing has changed so much from what it was when I first encountered it in my life, where it was kind of really totally other, forbidden territory. Unless you were a sailor, and maybe sailors were kind of forbidden territory, depending on where you live. It's just like a major, major statement. 

[00:30:51] And then, the receptionist in the doctor's office has like $5,000 worth something on her arm. And like, things mean differently. And I think that really becomes the hardest thing to… it becomes harder to know, the longer you live. And it's something that I don't know if it can even be dealt with really in a science fiction novel. I think sort of thing is right on the edge of the edge of trying to naturalistically imagine what the future might be like for people.

Annalee: [00:31:43] Mm-hmm. I mean, it's interesting, because I feel like in your work, you're one of the few authors who often does call attention to plastic and polymers. I love that you'll always have polymers showing up in a scene. And in The Peripheral there's that great moment where we meet a character who's living in an Airstream trailer, right. And he's coated the entire inside in a polymer. We never know what the polymer is. It's just a polymer to preserve it. 

[00:32:09] But meanwhile, there's characters who are in the Pacific garbage gyre. And they're extracting plastic from the ocean and recycling it into this plastic island, basically. And I just wonder, why do you think you gravitate toward descriptions that call our attention to plastic? Is this just generally like a fascination with materials and what things are made from? Or do you feel like plastic kind of stands out for you?

William: [00:32:40] Well, it’s probably just, you've probably just managed to effectively reduce the frequency of my use of the word polymer, which does go back a ways. So I think I initially, I think the thing that really brought polymers to my attention was someone describing “that new car smell.” Nothing but the scent of polymers, the carcinogenic scent of polymers. And I think I stuck with that, because it wasn't a word. It wasn't a word that one encountered in everyday conversations as one does the word plastic. But very possibly over the years, I’ve redone it. What it makes me wonder is what we will call… will there be a next plastic? Or will we have words for all of the different zegen [unclear] that we write? Will we have separate words or will it be one term for anything like that, because people are not going to want to waste their time just using exact terms for what the ice cream spoon is made of. So I bet there’ll be maybe just a slang term for whatever, cheap, disposable, and recyclable things come to be made.

Annalee: [00:34:31] I mean, it might just get called plastic. People call the materials that are made from corn and sugarcane and stuff. They'll just say bio plastic and—

William: [00:34:42] Yeah, bioplastic.

Annalee: [00:34:41] I doubt people will say bioplastic, I think people will just say plastic.

William: [00:34:49] You know, I think you're probably right. It'll just remain. It'll remain remain plastic it does the same thing. I guess eventually they could make wind up submachine guns out of it.

Charlie Jane: [00:35:08] Biodegradable machine guns. 

Annalee: [00:35:09] Out of corn. 

Charlie Jane: [00:35:11] I mean, that'd be a great band name The Biodegradable Machine Guns. I would go see them in concert.

Annalee: [00:35:18] I love their second album. 

Charlie Jane: [00:35:19] Yeah, yeah.

[00:35:19] What do you think is the future of plastic? Do you think there's a post-plastic future in which it kind of goes away as seamlessly as it appeared?

William: [00:35:28] Assuming, that we can get it together and sufficiently quit making more, I would imagine that there's enough of it to be sieved out of the world's oceans, that we could recycle that forever. We've already put so much of it out in the world. If we had the technology to recover it all, melt it down and turn it into really cozy sweatshirts and sweatpants and stuff. Not only that, or turn it into automobile tires.

Charlie Jane: [00:36:14] I mean, maybe it'll be a fashion trend. You know, everybody will want to wear clothes made out of Pacific plastic waste.

William: [00:36:23] Well, I don't know if it's a trend yet. But there are certainly enough companies around now, like startups, selling, you know, 100% recycled clothing as a thing. There's one about six miles from here that I haven't really had time to look into. But according to the spiel in the window, it's all made of stuff dug out of landfill. And it looks, the ironic thing about it is it all looks very organic. It’s in Earth tones.

Annalee: [00:37:06] I love the idea of like having recycled clothes that are sourced to a particular place like oh, well, this is from a French landfill. And this is from the Pacific garbage gyre, or not to be confused with like the South Pacific garbage gyre which has a totally different vibe.

William: [00:37:21] That’s it. That’s it. I really like that.

Charlie Jane: [00:37:26] There could be a lot of snobbery. Excuse me. 

[00:37:30] So we talked a lot earlier in our episode about how there's a lot of science fiction that kind of just talks about pollution in very general terms, and it's just sort of pollution as kind of an abstract concept. Or, occasionally, it will be garbage as an abstract concept. But there's not a lot of science fiction that really draws attention to the ubiquity of plastic. Why do you think that is? Why don't people focus on that? And are there any stories about plastic that you find especially compelling?

Annalee: [00:37:59] Yeah, do you have any origin story with science fiction about plastic that really struck you as compelling?

William: [00:38:07] I can't think of anything offhand. But there must have been a point at which plastic, the word “plastic” acquired its other adjectival meaning of being, ah, she’s too plastic. I think that came in fairly early as something that was just sort of endlessly replicable. [Crosstalk] exciting to look more or less like whatever you wanted it to be, wasn't authentic. It acquired all of those meanings as well, but I'm not sure when it did.

Charlie Jane: [00:38:56] Yeah, Frank Zappa has a song in 1967 called “Plastic People, that's kind of about. I think that was hugely influential. 

William: [00:39:01] Yeah, yeah. We see [unclear] influential very early in the formation of that kind of that kind of language. Yeah, that's the earliest usage of it that way that I now know of, anyway. Thank you for bringing that up.

Annalee: [00:39:25] Yeah, because it sounds like it immediately starts to take on a really negative valence. And we were we were talking about The Graduate, which is, I think, also 1967 where there’s that famous scene where Dustin Hoffman is sort of pulled aside and an older man is saying to him, “Think about plastic.” And Dustin Hoffman is like, “I don't understand what you mean, sir”. And it's again, it's being represented as like the older generation is kind of fake and is obsessed with things like plastic and of course it doesn't feel relevant to his life or whatever. Yeah. 

[00:40:05] So are there any plastic kind of danger stories that you remember being exposed to like, say Godzilla vs The Smog Monster or other stories like that, that kind of had a negative view of plastic that kind of seeped into your consciousness?

William: [00:40:26] No, not really. I have more feeling that it was somehow below the radar of genre SF in a way. And I wonder what JG Ballard did with it. I don't remember a lot of plastic in Ballard, but otherwise, he seemed to be wonderfully aware of all the evils rather early on. He may have been, he might have been a bit too old for it. Because his formative and indeed very traumatic childhood years were in Singapore under Japanese occupation. So maybe he was pre plastic. So, he wrote about the rawnesses of the car crashes and whatnot, but still, it was like steel.

Annalee: [00:41:30] Yeah, and also he sort of focuses a lot on buildings, and like, sort of the fate of buildings after a sea level rise. Yeah, that's interesting. So, I guess final question would just be what are your hopes for plastic? Do you imagine that if we continue to be aware of environmental problems that we are just going to completely get rid of plastic? What is your kind of vision of a post plastic world, if you have one?

William: [00:42:06] There could be two. One could be it’s post plastic because human beings are extinct, so there’s nobody to make any more. The other the other would be more like the first season of Star Trek back story that humanity got itself together after coming very near whatever the unspecified edge was. In our case, the edge was not being sufficiently careful with our plastics. And so that we aren’t really using it anymore. 

[00:42:48] It’s funny watching plastic in the world today becoming whatever it's becoming, because, new plastic artifacts of all different sorts tend to be marked with instructions for their recycle. Increasingly, everything has a symbol on it. You know, I have to go here. Only this kind and we will melt it down. 

[00:43:26] Or, the stuff that, it's plastic, but you can throw it into your into your compost, and it breaks down and is beneficial to making good compost. I think that's the step that will lead the way to your idea people just calling it plastic. It’ll be doing what we take plastic for granted for doing. But it'll be compostable and nontoxic. And then no one will think about it. It could be ubiquitous again and but harmless. And no one would ever, ever really have to think about.

Annalee: [00:44:10] Yeah, I think that that's interesting about how in the future we would just take for granted that it would all be labeled, too, like the way with clothing. We expect it to have a label that says here's how to wash it. And so now anytime you have an object that's like injection molded, it's like you're expecting the label. That's here's how to dispose of it.

William: [00:44:30] Yeah, if if it doesn't have one, that in itself, makes it seem kind of shockingly cheap or something. 

Annalee: [00:44:42] Yeah, that's true. 

Charlie Jane: [00:44:43] This was so awesome. It was so wonderful talking to you, Bill. Thank you so much for joining us.

Annalee: [00:44:47] Yeah, thank you so much for taking the time to talk plastics.

William: [00:44:50] Great talking to you both. I'm a big fan of you both.

Charlie Jane: [00:44:55] Aww!

Annalee: [00:44:55] Well, we’re your fans as well.

Charlie Jane: [00:44:58] Yes, it is so mutual. It is more than mutual. Thank you.

[00:45:03] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]

Annalee: [00:45:04] Thanks so much for listening to Our Opinions Are Correct on your plastic device or at least a device that contains elements of plastic. You can find us on Patreon at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect and we would love it if you would leave a review of the podcast on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to the podcast. You can find us on Twitter at @OOACpod. And all of those things will lead you to discovering that we're also on Discord, especially if you support us on Patreon, and we'll see you there. 

[00:45:41] Thanks so much to Veronica Simonetti, our amazing producer and audio engineer, and thank you to Chris Palmer for the music. And I think I've said enough final stuff so we'll talk to you later. Bye!

Charlie Jane: [00:45:53] Bye!