{"id":1027,"date":"2017-07-27T16:58:58","date_gmt":"2017-07-27T16:58:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/?p=1027"},"modified":"2017-07-27T17:03:58","modified_gmt":"2017-07-27T17:03:58","slug":"ftv-waste-not-want-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/?p=1027","title":{"rendered":"FTV: Waste not, want not"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u00a0Have you had a family grill out lately? \u00a0If you did, it was probably on a gas grill or a good old fashioned charcoal grill, which is my personal favorite. \u00a0Either way, we all owe a debt of thanks to Henry Ford for kick starting this little piece of Americana tradition. \u00a0When Ford\u2019s Kingsford, Michigan sawmill was churning out parts for his motor cars (why else would the Kingsford High School sports teams be called \u2018The Flivvers\u2019?), Henry looked out at the accumulating piles of sawdust and decided that there had to be a use for what had previously been considered \u201cwaste material\u201d. \u00a0\u00a0Waste, \u00a0it seems, is the mother of innovation and Henry\u2019s research department eventually developed the process to create charcoal briquettes. \u00a0With vast Upper Peninsula forest holdings and other sawmills across the landscape \u00a0(like those at Sidnaw, Alberta and Pequaming), Ford had a vested interest in eliminating waste while stimulating new economic growth in the northland. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0There is a similar story told that John D. Rockefeller also had an epiphany when he looked out over one of his oil refineries and asked, \u201cWhat\u2019s that burning?\u201d when he saw flames shooting from some smokestacks. \u00a0It was one of the by-products of the oil refining process, ethylene gas, that was being disposed of. \u00a0Legend has it that Rockefeller testily replied, \u201c \u00a0I don\u2019t believe in wasting anything! \u00a0Figure out something to do with it!\u201d \u00a0Whether or not this conversation actually occurred is immaterial. \u00a0What counts is that Rockefeller\u2019s Standard Oil Company was the first to learn the trick of isolating hydrocarbons from crude petroleum which helped spur the modern petrochemical industry that produces the raw, unprocessed polymers known as resins. \u00a0In 1933, two British chemists at the Imperial Chemical Industries were tinkering around to find something useful to do with these resins. \u00a0When they hit upon the process for producing polyethylene, they set in motion an industry that would see polyethylene become the first American plastic to sell more than one billion pounds in a year.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In her fascinating book <\/span>Plastic: \u00a0A Toxic Love Story <\/span><\/i>(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2010), Susan Freinkel traces the rise of plastics from a 19th century curiosity to a 21st century juggernaut. \u00a0To illustrate how the plastic industry evolved, she looks at it through the lens of everyday items like combs, chairs, medical equipment, and toys like Hula Hoops and Frisbees. \u00a0Like most modern innovations, the plastic age began before modern plastics were even dreamed up. \u00a0Take the humble comb. \u00a0One of the oldest tools unearthed, combs were first made of bone, wood, cattle horn, and the shell of the hawksbill turtle. \u00a0When overharvesting of the turtle shells began to affect the comb industry, human innovators began looking for a suitable replacement material. \u00a0The same can be said for billiard balls. \u00a0By 1867, warning flags were being raised that the indiscriminate harvesting of elephant tusks was pushing the species toward extinction, particularly in Ceylon where the best quality billiard ball ivory was found. \u00a0As early as 1863, a billiards supplier in New York offered a \u2018handsome fortune of $10,000 in gold\u2019 to anyone who could find a suitable replacement for ivory. \u00a0The cause was taken up by one John Wesley Hyatt in Upstate New York. \u00a0With no formal training in chemistry, he began an extensive period of trial and error experimentation using the cellulose in cotton paired with various solvents. \u00a0The substance he eventually produced was dubbed \u2018celluloid\u2019 by his brother Isaiah (meaning \u2018like cellulose\u2019). \u00a0The first versions did not have the same bounce as ivory and later versions made such a loud cracking sound when the balls collided, early saloon keepers found their clientele reaching for their guns after a particularly loud retort. \u00a0Hyatt never collected the prize money, but then again, he didn\u2019t have to. \u00a0The celluloid he invented turned out to be the perfect material to mass produce combs, and eventually moving pictures.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Hyatt\u2019s marketing campaign claimed, \u00a0\u201cCelluloid (has) given the elephant, the tortoise, and the coral insect a respite in their native haunts; \u00a0and it will no longer be necessary to ransack the earth in pursuit of substances which are constantly growing scarcer.\u201d \u00a0\u00a0He said it was just like \u201cPetroleum coming to the relief of the whales.\u201d \u00a0Celluloid could be manufactured to resemble any number of more expensive, natural materials used in the comb industry and for a fraction of the cost. \u00a0If there was a product out there to be mass produced, celluloid became the manufacturer\u2019s material of choice. \u00a0When the process for rendering images on thin celluloid film was developed, there was a profound cultural shift in human entertainment. \u00a0Ironically, film nearly destroyed the comb industry when movie star Irene Castle bobbed her previously long hair. \u00a0Female fans followed suit and the comb industry began to disappear. \u00a0Faced with the inevitable, comb manufacturer Sam Foster told his workers not to worry; \u00a0\u201cWe\u2019ll make something else.\u201d \u00a0His new gimmick, sunglasses, were a big hit and they created another new mass market product whose tag line \u201cWho\u2019s that behind those Foster Grants?\u201d carried the company to Hollywood and beyond.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Wars are never a good thing, but they are always boon for human innovation, particularly when searching for ways to replace naturally occurring resources with synthetic ones. \u00a0\u00a0One of the most innovative couples of the last century, Charles and Ray Eames, used their artistic talents to design better ways to mass produce molded medical supplies during WWII. \u00a0Unfortunately, the demand for plastic prosthetics created by the same war negated the positive product developments spurred forward in a wartime economy. \u00a0There were so many plastic like synthetics created before and after World War II that very little time, money, or effort goes into developing new forms of plastic today. \u00a0Instead, chemists tinker with the five main formulas to produce cheaper, more versatile products. \u00a0Hundreds of billions of tons of plastic products now dominate the world economy, but unlike the natural materials that the plastics replaced, they are making us all \u201ca little plastic\u201d. \u00a0\u00a0Freinkel points out that we are only now beginning to understand the long term environmental and health effects of our plastic consuming lifestyle, hence her subtitle: \u00a0\u00a0<\/span>A Toxic Love Story.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0On a sunnier note, a no more successful plastic story can be found than that of the Frisbee.<\/span><\/p>\n

Today, we most associate the Frisbee with that corporate giant of fun Wham-O who also brought us the Hula-Hoop and the Slip \u2018n Slide. \u00a0Wham-O was started in 1948 by high school friends Rich Knerr and Arthur Melin (also known as \u201cSpud\u201d) so they could sell slingshots and other sporting goods by mail. \u00a0If it was a toy that could put your eye out, The Boys probably marketed it through Wham-O. \u00a0They hit it big time when Phillips Petroleum\u2019s attempts to perfect a new semi rigid form of polyethylene left them with tons of unusable plastic stashed in their warehouses. \u00a0It turned out to be perfect for Wham-O\u2019s new fad toy of 1958, the Hula-Hoop. \u00a0The fifteen million pounds of waste plastic that Phillips couldn\u2019t giveaway made Wham-O a lot of money, but then nearly broke them when the fad died off and the orders dropped from tens of millions of units to zero. \u00a0Fortunately for The Boys, they had purchased the rights for the Frisbee from Walter Frederick Morrison. \u00a0As the Hula Hoop is to a flash in the pan, the Frisbee has been the little battery advertising bunny for Wham-O, but it took some time to get it right.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Walter Morrison started the ball rolling (or the disk flying) in 1937 when his girlfriend\u2019s family introduced him to a family game they called \u201cflipping\u201d that involved tossing a metal popcorn-pot lid. \u00a0When he and Lucille were flipping a cake pan at the beach the next summer, someone approached them and asked if they could buy one and suddenly, they were in business. \u00a0Walter returned to California after serving as a fighter pilot in WWII with a pretty good idea of what makes things fly. \u00a0His wartime experience with plastics put him on the road to a new design that he sometimes convinced people flew on an invisible wire when he and Lucille demonstrated their product at county fairs. \u00a0By the time he met The Boys at Wham-O, it had morphed into The Pluto Platter which fit right in with the late 1950 surge of interest in all things sci fi and UFO.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The Frisbee as we know it today evolved when Knerr and Melin put \u201cSteady\u201d Ed Headrick to the task of developing the sport of Frisbeeing. \u00a0The name was a take off from the Frisbie Pie company tins that were used for flipping in New England since the 1930s. \u00a0After he signed on with Wham-O in 1964, \u00a0Headrick improved the aerodynamic design, added the concentric ridges on the top (now known as the \u201clines of Headrick\u201d to those in the Frisbee universe), and jump started the many Frisbee disc sports we see today. \u00a0Headrick himself invented Frisbee golf and when he passed away in 2002, he had his ashes molded into Frisbees so his friends could throw him around.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Frisbee manufacturing was centered in Southern California until The Boys sold the company in 1982. \u00a0Since then, the manufacturing of the iconic disks shifted first to Mexico, then to Hong Kong and China, and it is now slowly shifting back to the United States. \u00a0This mirrors the entire plastics industry that has seen production shift overseas with Saudi Arabia becoming the new hub of the plastics industry. \u00a0A 140-gram Frisbee starts out as less than a penny\u2019s worth of resin that the toy manufacturer will pay about twenty cents to purchase and another dollar to make the actual Frisbee. \u00a0By the time it hits the seller, the price tag will start at $8. \u00a0Of course, the more specialized the disk (for Frisbee golf, Guts Frisbee, Ultimate Frisbee and so on), the higher the price.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0If two titans of industry like Ford and Rockefeller could see the benefit of not wasting anything, why do we find it so difficult to see the advantages of recycling and remanufacturing things today? \u00a0There is money in them thar mountains of trash but only if we go after it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Top Piece Video: \u00a0I am sure Brodie Smith makes Headrick proud (even though he is dead)!