Reply from Tom's of Maine

Last week I received a response from Tom's of Maine to my letter of June 9 about their switch to plastic toothpaste tubes. Reprinted here in full (scroll to read):

June 16, 2011

Dear Harold,

Thank you for your letter -- not only for your commitment to the environment and sustainability, but also for your willingness to share your concerns. Although we are unhappy to hear you are disappointed with our new toothpaste tube material, we do track consumer comments closely, and are especially interested to hear how our valued users feel about this new packaging.

As you can probably imagine, switching to our new laminate tube was a very big decision for us. The aluminum tubes had been a part of our company for over 40 years, and we only made the decision to switch after giving the subject lengthy, holistic consideration. This included commissioning an environmental study from the University of Michigan which compared the environmental impact of the old aluminum tube vs. the new laminate material. The results were presented in terms of life-cycle energy, greenhouse gas emissions, acidification potential, carcinogen production, eutrophication, solid waste, and air and water emissions and indicated that in general, the old aluminum tubes had two to three times greater environmental impact than the laminate tube.

That being said, we recognize that these laminate tubes are not a perfect option. Although the tubes are recyclable as #7 plastic, we share your concern about them ending up in the trash. We've identified a partner who will recycle and reuse the material as packaging products and are currently inviting consumers with limited recycling options to save up their tubes and return them back to us. We are happy to reimburse any postage paid with new Tom's product. We are also investigating additional ways to make it easier for consumers to return these tubes back to us here in Maine.

The sustainability of our packaging is a critical component of our Stewardship Model. We originally chose aluminum because of this commitment, and kept it as a primary consideration in making the change to laminate. But we are actively interested in opportunities to improve this sustainability, and believe that consumers such as you may be our greatest resource. We appreciate your feedback, and if you uncover additional relevant research or potential packaging options, we hope you will pass them our way!

In fact, seeing as that you live just up the coast, we'd be more than happy to meet with you in person to discuss this further -- either now or in the future.

Thank you again for your feedback. We wish you the best of health!

Sincerely,
Bridget M. Burns
Citizen's Advocacy Representative

My open response.

Dear Ms. Burns,

Thank you for your thoughtful reply. But you've missed the thrust. My concern isn't plastic ending up in trash; it's plastic ending up in the ocean. Ever more of it. Which is happening now. Today. You asked for research. I've just completed a year-long survey of the pollution reaching my Bay View beach in Saco. Of the 8,456 pieces of litter & garbage left behind or washed in, 78-80% were plastic. Persistent plastic that doesn't go away. Ever.

Your old material, aluminum, is a closable loop. Even food-fouled aluminum can be melted, the dross skimmed off, and the aluminum placed back on shelves in weeks. Better still, it can even be recovered from landfills, often at percentages higher than from freshly mined bauxite ore.

The plastic in your new laminate isn't a closable loop. It's a downward spiral, requiring virgin plastic to replace what is bought from store shelves. Depending on whether Tom's is willing to pay a premium for partially-recycled product, you are using anywhere from 60 to 100% virgin plastic in each tube. (Information gathered from this article on plastic barrier laminate.) Your switch adds to our modern addiction to more, ever more, virgin plastic.

And much of it will get littered, one way or another, despite anyone's good intentions.

Littered aluminum degrades back to the stuff of soil & bedrock. Plastic doesn't. It persists. For centuries. Plastics also accumulate -- and leach -- toxins. Plastics foul pristine beaches and fill the bellies of animals that have never seen a human being, killing them through poison or starvation.

This plastic all came from the gut of ONE dead sea turtle
(from http://www.seaturtle.org)

Does your environmental report consider end-of-life factors like this? If not, it's incomplete. There's also the light-weighting argument for plastic over aluminum. Let's assume that a filled aluminum tube really is significantly heavier than a filled plastic tube. Does the report consider the entire supply stream (and carbon footprint) of virgin plastic, from synthesis to pellets to formulation to shipping? Or the excellent closed-loop recyclability of aluminum? Or the supply stream & footprint of that recycled aluminum? After all, there are many aluminum foundries in New England alone, practically in Tom's back yard.

If, after all that, plastic still seems cheaper on the front end, please look again at that photograph above. That's what the end of the plastic life cycle looks like. That is not science fiction, or melodrama. That is today.

So, again, Tom's of Maine, I believe you care. And that you want to do good while doing well. But this change to plastic toothpaste tubes is the wrong choice. It will leave its legacy swirling around our oceans, and washing up on our shores, for lifetimes to come.

Please be a true leader, and buck the plastic trend.

An Open Letter to Tom's of Maine

A couple months ago, a strange confluence occurred. First, I noticed that Tom's of Maine had changed their toothpaste tubes from aluminum to plastic. Shortly afterward, I found an aluminum tube washed up on my beach. It was already rotting back to nothing, which a plastic tube will never do.

So, an open letter to Tom's of Maine (a copy also sent directly to the Consumer Dialogue Dept.):

June 9, 2011

Tom’s of Maine Consumer Dialogue Department

302 Lafayette Center

Kennebunk, ME 04043

I wanted to show you something that washed up on my beach in Saco, Maine April 25 this year.

This is an aluminum toothpaste tube. It wasn’t littered by a beachgoer, or tossed out a car window. That’s not what happens to toothpaste tubes. It was thrown in the trash, and somehow managed to get into the ocean. That’s what litter does. Always has, always will. But notice: This aluminum tube is already disintegrating back to nature. It is becoming aluminum oxide, the stuff of soil that the world has evolved with over billions of years. In months it will disintegrate and be gone.

Your new plastic toothpaste tubes never do this. When littered into the environment -- as they will be -- they’ll persist. Nothing in nature knows how to return plastic to its building blocks. Your new tubes will run down gulleys, then rivers, eventually the ocean. There they will remain plastic. Even as they photodegrade into small bits, they’re still plastic. They will float, collecting in one of the massive gyres of plastic soup now swirling far from land. There, they will either get ingested by a sea animal, get stuck, and starve it to death... Or accumulate toxins to ~100,000 times background levels, killing more quickly... Or be spit back onto someone’s shore, perhaps distant, perhaps somewhere on the Maine coast, fouling it.

This is the result of our plastic world:

One of 1000s of albatross on Midway who died eating plastic

This has happened in just a couple generations. Under our nose and on our watch. Environmental studies claiming plastic as a better alternative are fundamentally flawed. They don’t account for pollution or persistence. Or the poor recyclability. Aluminum is melted down; impurities are easily skimmed off, and the aluminum can be back on the shelf in weeks. A truly closed loop. Plastic cannot be superheated to sterilize. It must be clean to be processed, which is why major recyclers don’t accept plastic toothpaste tubes. Your take-back scheme, though laudable, only downcycles the waste. And as few consumers will spend money to return your tubes to you, most tubes you sell have a one-way trip to the landfill... or the ocean.

I believe that Tom’s of Maine is genuinely forward-thinking, ecologically responsible. I believe that you have switched to plastic thinking that you are doing a good thing. You are not. You have been misled, and the pollution that your new products will cause will just add to the persistent ecological disaster of our times. Please be a true leader and buck the plastic tide.

Thanks for your time.

Sincerely,

Harold Johnson

The Flotsam Diaries

http://www.theflotsamdiaries.org

Collection Report April 25, 2011

Back stateside after a great week in England. And slowly getting back into the flotsam frame of mind. At long last, the collection report from April 25.

9:50 AM, 2 hrs past high-tide; drizzly

For the first time in weeks, the beach held a visible kelp line -- finally things were making it back in to Saco Bay from the wider Gulf of Maine. (And of course, where there's kelp, there's plastic.) Then again, it wasn't really surprising that kelp had returned. I mean, when you stroll a familiar beach and find this washed up:

21+ feet of ancient tree brought in by a recent tide

...you know it's been an interesting week. How interesting? Well, let's see. First, Zone N:

105 finds:

• Building materials: 16 (10 chunks of asphalt, fence slat, 3 wood offcuts, brick, tile)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 25 (all kinds)
• Fishing misc.: 17 (lobster trap bumper, shotgun shell wadding, 2 trap coatings, 2 trap scraps, 5 claw bands, 4 bits of rope, 2 bait bags)
• Food-related plastics: 6 (Capri Sun + straw wrapper, straw, Mondavi wine label scrap, "Simplify" Advanced H2O water bottle, Blue Diamond hickory-smoked almonds wrapper)
• Food-related metal/glass: 5 (can, scrap, glass mouth fragment, unID'd metal scrap, toothpaste tube)
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 26 (5 baggies/wrappers, 8 string/ribbon/tiestring, twisted coil, black tape, 5 scraps > 1", 6 scraps < 1")
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 8
• Paper/wood: 1 (note)
• Misc./unique: 1 (string)

On Sunday, April 1417, there had been some surfing event that had filled the main parking lot & half the overflow. Given human nature, clearly some of the above comes from those beach-goers. (The food packs, cigarettes, probably some of that explosion of styrofoam.) Still, some stuff clearly wasn't the result of local litter.

Decaying aluminum toothpaste tube

It's hard to see a scenario where someone has chucked a tube of toothpaste out at the beach -- or out a car window into a gulley. There's surely a more interesting story behind this bizarre find. Much as there is with many of the pieces of debris that I find washed in. Careless & malicious littering are part of the story. They are not the whole story.

The bad news: Toothpaste tubes are one of the latest casualties of the "Make Everything Plastic" campaign. This aluminum tube is returning to the dust from which it came. 2011's varieties won't ever do that. As more of our world becomes plastic, more of it will persist when it gets lost to the environment. That's our future. Our present.

On to Zone S:

54 finds:

• Building materials: 17 (14 asphalt chunks, 2 brick, shingle)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 10 (inc. obvious bits from Zone N)
• Fishing misc.: 4 (2 trap bumpers, 2 trap coatings)
• Food-related plastics: 3 (straw, cup, cap seal)
• Food-related metal/glass: 3 (can scraps -- one freshly torn)
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 13 (2 bag scraps, 2 string bits, 1 tiedown, golf ball, pushpin head, melted cup, 1 scrap > 1", 4 scraps, < 1")
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 3
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 1 (cloth rope)

Little of note here, except a nice window into how styrofoam blows down a beach.

So after a few weeks of calm, the storm returns. 159 more pieces of manmade junk, from a quiet beach in Maine.

A parting photo for this week, from Zone N:

!

I will always wonder just what on earth this means.