Julian groaned audibly when he saw his assigned research topic. What could be more boring than the history of plastic? There is very little in Julian’s home made from plastic. Plastic is just too rare and expensive a material for everyday use. Like land on the planet, there is just so much of it and no more. But it wasn’t always like that. At one time nearly everything from water bottles, to fishing nets, to automobiles was made from plastic. Reluctantly Julian started his research. He pulled up several articles on the 3-D screen and cut and pasted some boring notes into a file.
The use of plastic to mold society proliferated from the 1960’s well into the 21st century. It was cheap, plentiful, malleable, lightweight, and durable. But there was a down side to all this; plastic items produced plastic waste. Plastic waste quickly became a planet-wide problem on land and in the oceans affecting both people and wildlife. Earth needed a worldwide cleanup.
“If everyone wouldn’t have wasted it all, we would still have plastic available today,” Julian grumbled. In an effort to turn the tide, politicians banned plastic shopping bags and plastic straws. Julian actually got a chuckle over the outrage over drinking straws back then. The controversy didn’t subside until several years later when someone finally developed workable straws made from hemp. Plastic was made from petroleum and eventually the production of any new plastic was banned altogether, along with a ban on combustible engines and extracting petroleum from the ground.
But existing plastic could be recycled. Plastic waste became a valuable commodity in high demand. Adults as well as children scoured the beaches for saleable plastic. Once the most accessible plastic waste became scarce, investors seined the oceans and waterways and mined landfills to recover plastic for a plastic hungry market. But the greatest entrepreneur of them all was Jake Ridley who built a plastic empire.
Then Julian remembered there had been a movie made of the Plastic Kingdom. Julian’s interest was suddenly piqued. He looked down at his team ring made of high grade plastic. He had saved his money for months before he could afford one.
The single heaviest concentration of plastic waste at that time was the Great Pacific Garbage Patch caught in a comparatively quieter area of the Pacific Ocean boxed in by four powerful Pacific Ocean currents. Trapped in this gyre of swirling ocean currents, 20% of the world’s plastic waste had been compressed into a plastic wasteland dense enough to drive a truck on. As the story goes, Jake Ridley not only drove a truck on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, he settled on it, with a floating factory ship “offshore.”
The floating factory ship recycled plastic into sturdy construction blocks, which Ridley used to build his plastic house. It started off as a simple ten by twelve foot one room cabin, but over the decades it grew into a plastic mansion. As an American citizen, the World Government Organization demanded Ridley pay property tax on his residence. Ridley fought the tax bill in International Court claiming the U.S. government had no jurisdiction on his plastic island and won.
The fight didn’t end there. Ridley shipped a vintage Ford truck to his island that had been restored to mint condition. The truck had a gas engine, therefore it could only be a collectors’ item. It was illegal for a private citizen to burn fossil fuel. Ridley, on the other hand, had a second factory ship built, this one utilizing technology that had been developed before the combustible engine ban, to convert plastic back to the petroleum products used to make it and distilled his own gasoline.
Governments around the world became enraged. The use of combustible engines by private citizens was a direct violation of the World Energy Control Treaty. For the planet’s safety, Jake Ridley must be apprehended and imprisoned. Several countries formed an alliance and an invasion of the Plastic Kingdom, Operation Recycle, as it had been dubbed, was launched.
But there was another force that no one had anticipated at work here. Years of mining the plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and the towering buildup of the Plastic Kingdom had made the island top-heavy. As the invading force approached, the island reached its tippy point. Like an oversized, top-heavy iceberg that has been compromised by seawater eating away at its mass below the water line, the Plastic Kingdom toppled, wiping out the factory ships as well as the invading fleet. Many people lost their lives —the news a sensational media hit. In the end, the leaders of the alliance nations divided up the plastic island to compensate for the loss of their ships and crews.
Julian completed his report relieved he got it done. Before retiring to his bed, he took off his plastic team ring, placed it in its special box, and locked it in the safe. Imagine living in a world where plastic is plentiful!
