The bowl on my windowsill is not exactly empty. It holds a story. It is a composite of generosity, of imagination, and — stay with me here — love as much as it is of high-density polyethylene. It’s made of hydrocarbons drawn from the broken-down bodies of organisms that lived a hundred million years ago, and it’s made of the plastic containers we use in our daily lives here on the east side of Madison.
The bits of plastic that make up this bowl came to the city via the 65,000 oilfields dotting some of the most remote wild places on Earth as well as from the plastic manufacturing plants in some of Earth’s most densely populated and industrialized cities, from Shanghai to Berlin. The plastic arrived on the shelves of Madison stores in the form of colorful containers filled with everyday necessaries like dish detergent and heartworm pills and then to our home and the…
