One Word: Plastics

Just this morning I poured cereal from a box containing a plastic bag into a plastic bowl and drenched it in milk from a plastic jug and wolfed it down with a plastic spoon. First, stop judging. Also, it is a miracle that I lived to talk about it, not to mention that the Earth itself has not disintegrated. So says Salon, in their hatchet job against our favorite petroleum product:

We’re all stuck in Plasticville, intimately yoked to “a variety of synthetica” that makes our lives more livable. Yet, as the subtitle suggests, our passionate, decades-long affair has an evil flipside: This marvelously malleable material imperils the environment, wrecks our genes, and diminishes our very humanity.

Spooked by all this, I made sure to eat my lunch on a granite plate. Sadly, I dropped the plate on my foot and broke it in three places. My foot, that is. The plate is fine.

Why It Can Kill You

Plastic seems benign but it can launch an attack at any time. It begins with a single-use plastic bag stuck in a tree branch.

• Riding a gust of wind, the bag leaps from the tree right onto your head.
• You grab at the bag trying to remove it, but the volatile compounds unleash an off-gassing that disorients you, causing you to twist the handles and tie the bag tighter.
• Having lost your balance, you fall into an open manhole cover, or walk in front of a bus, or slip between the bars of a tiger cage.
• Another gust of wind frees the bag from your lifeless body and goes on to mercilessly kill again.