(Feb. 22, 2008) — I have always loved plastic. After graduating from the University of Illinois in 1965, I went right to work designing fiberglass aerodynamic bodies for my motorcycle. No other material did what I wanted to do.
My career began in the postmodern era. In postmodern thinking, you may know, “Anything is OK. There is no right or wrong.” Plastic was the darling material of the era because it has no shape of its own. Plastic could be anything.
Forty years later, plastic can be found everywhere. In fact, a nagging concern today is that maybe it should not be everywhere.
The problem, we are discovering, is that our plastic products don't “go away” when we are done with them. When God designed the universe, He provided a system that reduced and recycled His creations. Leather beetles can eat the flesh off an animal in a week. Termites reduce wood to compost. Oxygen reduces iron and aluminum. What reduces plastic?
Not much, because plastic is not natural. Living things don't know how to deal with plastic. Let me give you a personal example.
Twenty years ago, my brother's dog died. At the time we did not know the cause of death, but three years later, when my brother exhumed his dog, he found the skeleton abdominal cavity was filled with plastic film. The dog had been eating sandwiches — plastic wrap and all. Though the dog was mostly gone, the plastic was still there, clogging his digestive tract.
Plastic kept the sandwiches fresh but killed the dog. There is a general fear today that plastic may be doing something like this to all of us. Containers, bottles and films are used once and discarded. They go somewhere. Turns out, they become huge islands of flotsam. They litter the ocean floor, wash up on our shores and consume landfill space.
Because plastic is not natural, it doesn't go away naturally. We think we solve the problem by taxing plastic containers as an incentive to take them to recycling centers. We offer free advertising space along highways to folks who will pick up the litter. It is not very effective. Somebody has to do extra work to recycle plastic, but the job is so big, it is not being done. Wouldn't it be better if plastic would recycle itself?
Isn't it possible to engineer into the DNA of the plastic itself a mechanism that reduces the plastic into something useful when its job is finished? Like termites that reduce wood, we need “plasmites,” as my designer friend John Marsh called them, to reduce plastic.
The creator of the universe has shown us what to do. Now we must figure out how to do it.
Vetter founded U.S. motorcycle maker Vetter Corp. The Carmel, Calif.-based industrial designer is inventor of the Windjammer fairing and a member of the Motorcycle Hall of Fame. He may be contacted at [email protected]