There is a small unnamed beach on the Richmond shoreline that I have been coming to for years. I grew up in Richmond and spent a lot of time beach combing with my mom on the tiny beaches scattered around the Bay. We would find small duck skulls – perfectly white against the sand – bits of dried shark skin, fish vertebrate, and broken bits of shells from mussels and oysters. The small unnmamed beach, midway between Meeker Slough and Shimada Friendship Park, is where I celebrated the last Mother’s Day with my mom before she died from Alzheimer’s and complications.
The beach is on a small bay connecting the Inner Harbor to the marsh and at high tide the beach is mostly submerged. Every time I visit the beach, I find close to one pound of small plastic and microplastics tangled in the dried eel grass that washes up on the sand. The Bay around Richmond is a marine prairie; a rare patch of eel grass that we can’t see from the shore but that captures carbon and provides a vital ecosystem for so much marine life. And it is filled with plastic.
As an artist who grew up in and still lives in Richmond, it is a particularly meaningful place to think about plastic waste. Richmond is home to Chevron, the second largest petroleum refinery in the United States. Plastic is made from oil and gas and at every step in production, use, and decomposition, it is toxic. I am of the generation that was taught to recycle in unrelenting and fatalistic messaging given to us from early childhood through now. I am now in middle age. I have said goodbye to both my parents slowly for the ten years that it took for dementia to erase them completely. I have a 12 year old kid who will inherit these beaches and who is still being told to recycle; I have a 12 year old kid who feels the anxiety of putting an empty container in the wrong bin. And it doesn’t matter. Only 5% to 8% of plastics we use and buy and then fret about which bin to put them in are actually recycled. We have swallowed the lie that recycling works. The burden of plastic was always going to be ours.
In Plastic: An Autobiography, Allison Cobb writes, “Most of the plastic ever made remains with us, circulating through water, living bodies, and the atmosphere – and the waste keeps coming. The world tosses out [drops, breaks, loses] about 300 million metric tons of plastic every year, nearly the weight of the entire human population.” And a lot of this plastic, even the plastic we very optimistically put in the recycling bin, ends up in the ocean, washing up on the beaches, breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces.
I walk the tide line on the beach and bend down low and pick up colors - blues, greens, and yellows. The red and oranges of broken taillights, the less frequent pinks and purples. Black plastic on the beach is always in big pieces. Your eye gets used to seeing the difference between white shells and white plastic. I take these microplastics and small plastics back to my studio, a space that was once was a pesticide factory and is less than a mile from the city dump, and wash and sort the plastic. I press the plastics into circular lids and containers also found on the beach. I pack the colors in tightly next to each other, standing the pieces up end to end the way the Romans made micromosaics out of glass and stone. I wonder if this will all last as long as the Roman empire. I wonder about the folly of humans that created this material 100 years ago with no idea of how to get rid of it.
Plastic is everywhere and in everything and because of this, it has become invisible. Until it is in a place where we don’t expect it to be: the beach, a mountain top, a human placenta.
For more, I recommend reading Plastic: An Autobiography by Allison Cobb and Wasteland by Oliver Franklin-Walls