The essayist Isaac Nadeau wearing a straw hat and a blue-gray shirt, with a blank notebook and pencil.
The bowl on my windowsill is not exactly empty. It holds a story. It is a composite of generosity, of imagination, and — stay with me here — love as much as it is of high-density polyethylene. It’s made of hydrocarbons drawn from the broken-down bodies of organisms that lived a hundred million years ago, and it’s made of the plastic containers we use in our daily lives here on the east side of Madison.
The bits of plastic that make up this bowl came to the city via the 65,000 oilfields dotting some of the most remote wild places on Earth as well as from the plastic manufacturing plants in some of Earth’s most densely populated and industrialized cities, from Shanghai to Berlin. The plastic arrived on the shelves of Madison stores in the form of colorful containers filled with everyday necessaries like dish detergent and heartworm pills and then to our home and the homes of our neighbors, who took the time to carefully rinse them out and drop them off on our front porch.
At our house, my son Hollis, 10, is responsible for taking out the recycling. He’s not super into it. But when we started wondering whether we could make cool stuff out of our own plastic waste, the job got more interesting.
Our search for plastic recycling ideas led us to Precious Plastic, an open-source initiative that provides plans for building small-scale shredders, extruders and other machines that Hollis and I might need were we to take a stab at DIY plastic recycling. The problem: I don’t know a jackhammer from a ladder jack, which is to say, I don’t know jack about building such machines. But as it happens, we live just a few blocks from the makerspace Sector67. It’s a place where people can fix or make (or break) almost anything, from laser-cut sheet metal portraits of Toni Morrison to 3D-printed Millennium Falcons, from circuit boards to cutting boards.
Hollis and I walked over to the big metal building on Corry Street that Sector67 calls home. We met Chris Meyer, the founder of the whole beautiful mess, who turned out to be some kind of friendly super-genius and who was as excited as we were about the idea of a hyperlocal, community-based plastic recycling project. In fact, Sector67 had already received a grant from the Schenk-Atwood-Starkweather-Yahara Neighborhood Association to work on just that.
Hollis and I spent the winter helping Chris build a shredder and revive a couple of nearly junked extruders. Under Chris’s generous tutelage, we learned about wiring and torque and horsepower. We learned how to use a fancy digital caliper and how to put a V-belt on a pulley. We learned how to use the sandblaster (yeah!). We even tried our heavily gloved hands at welding. Meanwhile, we began to collect plastic from our neighbors and made plans for creating a little business.
In January, we shredded our first load of plastic. Chris used the plasma cutter to cut the pieces for a mold that we could use to make bowls. In February, we filled the mold with shredded bits of plastic and put it in the oven — like a cobbler, for an hour at around 350° F. We let it cool and then took it out of the mold. Our first bowl.
That lovely purple is from a laundry detergent bottle, which Nelson (whom I held as a baby and who, somehow, 35 years later, now lives just down the block) rinsed out and dropped off on our front porch. That swirl of green is from the sled, cracked from a winter of hard use at Olbrich, that we got from my son’s classmate.
There’s a bit of a milk jug from Joman, who lives three blocks away, and with whom I walked these very sidewalks growing up — before there was a thing called climate change — and whose own kids are now grown. And there’s a bit of a water jug from Steffi, my mom’s pal, who walks her dog Bruce over to say hi and drop off plastic.
Like all plastics, the HDPE in this bowl is a polymer, which comes from the Greek “poly” (many) + “mer” (parts). But it’s fair to say it’s made of our neighborhood, too. It’s a vessel of vessels, containing the containers that once held the food, the medicine, the soap, and even the children themselves, of the people we live with.
The truth is, recycling plastic, even into beautiful, useful things, is not going to solve the problem of plastic pollution. The solution is actually reducing the production and consumption of single-use plastics. Given the scale of the problem, and the fact that the production of virgin plastic is accelerating even as the recycling of plastic, modest as it was, has been curtailed in recent years, the problem feels impossible to solve.
Recycling, at best, simply prolongs the useful life of a petroleum product that will, sooner than we might think, be back in a landfill, or on a beach, or in our blood, bumping along with our red blood cells, filtering through the nephrons in our kidneys, chatting up the immunoglobulins on their commute through our hearts. The best-case scenario for this bowl might well be its incineration, 10 years from now, in a purpose-built, relatively clean-burning facility to generate power. It may be that, as a solution to the plastic problem, our bowl is a symbol of futility.
But might it be that as a response to the disintegration of community connections, the bowl is more than symbolic? What if the connections we are making in this project bind us more closely together? What if through it, my son finds confirmation of his belonging to this place? And what if he gains a sense of being answerable to his neighborhood? How much of an impact could that have?
It’s only a bowl, I know. And I know that there’s a whole lot of other stuff going on. Life is complicated. But I’m just saying, look at this! This is going on, too! This is something good we’re doing. And it’s the we doing as much as the what it is we are doing — which is recycling broken sleds and takeout containers and pill bottles to make bowls and flower pots, which are beautiful — that is beautiful.
Isaac Nadeau is a writer and naturalist from Madison. He is currently working on a memoir about sense of place.
If you are interested in writing an essay for Isthmus, please query lindaf@isthmus.com.
