501. Plastics: They Kill

BROWDERBOOKS

The Alliance for Independent Authors advises self-publishing authors to go WIDE in distribution.  This means making your book available on Amazon, IngramSpark (the other publisher of self-published books), Apple Books (only possible for those with Mac computers), Kobo, and other distributors that most Americans have never heard of.  

Then you should also hire an outfit called an aggregator to market your e-book -- a seeming duplication of your efforts that will get you distribution in places you could never access on your own.  Having done all this, you will have worldwide distribution of 97%, meaning that you have made use of almost all the distributors available.  To reach readers outside the US, this is necessary.  Kobo, for instance, is the prime distributor in Canada.  There is a market for English-language books not just in Britain, Ireland, and the Dominions, but also in India and Japan.  I'm hoping that a book about New York and New Yorkers will have appeal there.  The front cover is a big help.

My first step: Apple Books.  I have a Mac computer, so that's no problem.  But pray for me; their website is not user-friendly -- not to me, at least.  So far, I've just gone in circles there, but maybe I can finally figure it out.  And this is just distribution.  It is meaningless, unless marketing lets people worldwide know that you and your book exist.  

                 PLASTICS:  THEY KILL

In the 1967 film The Graduate, the young protagonist (played by Dustin Hoffman) is taken aside at a cocktail party by an older friend of his parents who has a single word of advice to give him.  “Are you listening?” the older man asks.  “Yes, sir,” says Hoffman.  And the oracle speaks: “Plastics!”

In the film it is a superbly humorous moment, but in the years since then plastics have turned into a lamentable fact of life — of all our lives — and have come to signify the artificial and superficial, the non-genuine, something oppressive and inescapable.  

Of course there are rare exceptions among us.  Andy Warhol, the Prince of Pop, called himself a “deeply superficial person” and embraced Hollywood because there “everything’s plastic, but I love plastic.  I want to be plastic.”  (See my book Fascinating New Yorkers, chapter 24, on Warhol.)

But “plastic” is now far more than a common concept and fact of life. It has become a threat of phenomenal proportions.  It is filling our landfills, choking our rivers, and polluting the world’s oceans.  And it will continue to do so for years to come, because it degrades slowly; like diamonds and true love, plastics are forever.  And tiny bits of plastic — microplastics — are everywhere, even in the food we eat and the air we breathe.

Yes, we’re recycling it.  Here in New York rigid plastics are recycled — those almond milk cartons, yogurt cups, pill bottles, and Ajax detergent containers that I put out with glass and metal objects, in hopes of improving the planet.  But what do I discard them in?  Old grocery bags: non-rigid plastic!  Try as you will, you can’t escape the stuff.

But at least those bags are getting reused.  The real villain of the story is what’s called single-use plastic: plastic items that are used once and then thrown away.  Some 80% of the plastic in the oceans comes from land-based sources, and most of it is single-use items.  

Well, I’m trying.  When I go to the supermarket, I take my purchases home in my shoulder bag, or in a cloth bag that is decidedly not plastic.  But gooey garbage soaks through paper bags, so in the kitchen I use plastic grocery bags instead.  I recycle paper and cardboard items — the bulky ones torn neatly into smaller pieces — but what did I used to put them in?  Those damn plastic grocery bags!  But now, being more environmentally aware, I put the stuff in paper bags.  

I survey the foods I buy.  That box of raisins — cardboard, therefore  recyclable.  But what about the wrapping of the raisins inside the box?  I check: paper, not plastic — well and good.  

My olive oil comes in a glass container — bravo! — but my bread, including even the organic bread I get in the greenmarket, comes, alas, in plastic wrapping.  Try as I do, some of what is in my kitchen is going to end up in the world’s oceans, where it will persist for a good five hundred years.

One consolation: my books — both those that I acquire and read, and those that I write and get published — are paper.  Yes, paperbacks, which means that they will in time deteriorate.  By way of contrast, the old hardcover books in my bookcases, their wounded bindings reinforced with tape, persist and endure.  Now there is quality.  But how about the sticky tape I’ve used to repair their wounded bindings?  Plastic!  Yes, inescapable.  I give up.

© 2021 Clifford Browder