I think about plastic a lot.
As you may know from my last post, I have a 3D printer. This troubles me sometimes in an ecological sense, because even though the PLA¹ filament I use is bioplastic, realistically it is neither recyclable or biodegradable, so the wastage and sprews and support material is going to landfill, where the best case scenario is that it will remain there for a hundred thousand years, and the worst case is that it somehow ends up in the food chain.
Did you know there are now tiny particles of plastic amongst the sands of the furthest uninhabited reaches of the Sahara desert, as well as flowing through the bloodstream of every living human being.
The thought that I was adding to that worried me… And then I needed a bag.
I perform a little routine called Mystery of the Travelling Marbles; a Silent Mora creation in which a number of marbles vanish – one at a time – from under one folded cloth, and reappear under another. Amongst the many improvements made by other magicians (mostly Daryl) are the use of dice instead of marbles because they don’t roll, and using a pair of drawstring bags instead of the cloths, because then you can put the dice in one bag, that bag inside the other bag, and now you only have to carry one thing.
So I was looking on Google for squarish velvet drawstring bags, about 12cm a side, in different colours… and it kind of broke my brain.
Ignoring the plethora of people who don’t know what velvet is² what struck me is that I was looking for two drawstring bags. But there were hundreds of places and people I could buy them from, each of which had them in 4 different sizes and 8 colours. They all probably had thousands of each on the shelf in their warehouse, that meant an ecosystem consisting of at least 3 million velvet drawstring bags being churned out from a factory making nothing but drawstring bags, all of which have to exist so that I can carry a magic trick in a slightly more efficient way. And that’s just the bag, I use 4 different dice (wood, metal, glass and plastic) for textural purposes, meaning the same scale of production 4 times over. I buy little odd things like that for magic tricks all the time, each with its own sprawling economic web of manufacture and distribution.
And the most terrifying thing?
If I didn’t buy all these little things, that network of industry and commerce would still be there. Meaning there are countless supply chains of objects I will never see or want. Things I might never even conceive of. A constant churn of non-recyclable quasi-disposable stuff, clogging up the arteries of the planet and its inhabitants.
So when I find myself needing something so specific that it doesn’t exist already, something without an environmentally destructive supply chain behind it, and I can make it myself, I actually feel pretty good about being able to make just one.
Knowing that it’s the only one³, and there isn’t a warehouse shelf with millions of them stacked high.
¹ PLA, or PolyLactic Acid is a bioplastic polyester made from fermented plant starch (almost certainly corn) which is technically recyclable and technically biodegradable. That technicality is that I could theoretically granulate, melt and extrude new filament from the wasted plastic, but I don’t have the equipment to do that and no one is going through the trash to sort PLA for specialist recycling, so putting it in the recycling almost certainly just makes it harder to recycle the other plastics in there. As for biodegradable, the plastic WILL break down in an industrial high temperature composter, but our local waste management has no facility for that. Our compost bins can’t even deal with teabags.
² I spotted this when I got married, at wedding fairs there was a huge market for wedding favours consisting of tiny drawstring organza bags(10p) containing a couple of foiled chocolates(27p) were sold for roughly £2.50 each, because capitalism.
Whats worse is that this sudden trend of organza bags used as packaging has somehow thrown off searches for velvet bags because no one knows what materials are anymore.
³ I might make a backup. The worrying thing is that if I come up with a popular routine using this thing I might be tempted to publish it, and end up commissioning a factory somewhere to start churning out thousands of copies for magicians around the world⁴.
⁴ I didn’t wan to get into this in the footnotes but it’s something I discovered a few years ago when I was on a tour visiting (almost) all the magic shops in the UK. A lot of magic shops make their own props and gimmicks because something like Obliter8 was never gonna do thumb-tip numbers worthy of offshore manufacture, and different magic shops had different production capabilities. So if you wanted cut and folded card, Magic Tao (RIP pour one out) had a fly press. If you need something moulded or sculpted, Prop Dog had a studio with vacuum chambers and casting equipment, not to mention a true artisan at the helm. I was granted a tour of the studio area where the aforementioned Obliter8 was being manufactured and packaged up at the time and the realisation suddenly hit me that there was an economy of scale at play. Getting a single 8-ball gimmick designed and cast for a little kicker effect at the end of Wayne Fox’s standup routine was prohibitively expensive, but it could be made affordable by instead casting a few hundred and selling them as a standalone effect. You might think I’d disapprove of this, since I’ve spoken before about the slew of magic tricks being invented and marketed to sell out on release and never be performed, but there’s something rather noble about a magician wanting to perform something and being forced to release the method and props to the wider public as an economic necessity of its existence.