Home > Author > Susan Freinkel
1 " This is where the will to grapple with our hard and pressing environmental problems begins: in relationship to something other that you love beyond any utility, beyond any logic. "
― Susan Freinkel , American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree
2 " If you can't reuse or repair an item, do you ever really own it? Do you ever really own it? Do you ever develop the sense of pride and proprietorship that comes from maintaining an object in fine working order?We invest something of ourselves in our material world, which in turn reflects who we are. In the era of disposability that plastic has helped us foster, we have increasingly invested ourselves in objects that have no real meaning in our lives. We think of disposable lighters as conveniences -- which they indisputably are; ask any smoker or backyard-barbecue chef -- and yet we don't think much about the tradeoffs that that convenience entails. "
― Susan Freinkel , Plastic: A Toxic Love Story
3 " If the day comes when our descendants can venture with wonder into chestnut forests, we will have gained back more than a perfect tree. We will have gained a new reason for hope. "
― Susan Freinkel
4 " Plastic should be a high value material... [It] should be in products that last a long time, and at the end of the life, you recycle it. To take oil or natural gas that took millions of years to produce and then to make a disposable product that last minutes or seconds, and then to just discard it--I think that's not a good way of using this resource. (Robert Haley) "
5 " I'm not out there suggesting that we should ban every plastic product. But there are some whose environmental costs exceed their utility, and the [plastic] bag is one of them. "
6 " For all the environmental troubles single-use shopping bags cause, the much greater impacts are in what they contain. reducing the human footprint means addressing fundamentally unsustainable habits of food consumption, such as expecting strawberries in the depths of winter or buying of seafood that are being fished to the brink of extinction. "
7 " Manufacturers have long chosen plastic for their products on the basis of price and functionality., But creating a more sustainable relationship with plastics will require a new dexterity on our part. It will require us to think about the entire life cycle of the products we create and use. "
8 " An editorial in the Los Angeles Times [1923] wistfully asked, 'Will eating chestnuts by crackling log fires become one of the lost arts preserved by a devoted people only in poetry and romance? "
9 " We take natural substances created over millions of years, fashion them into products designed for a few minutes’ use, and then return them to the planet as litter that we’ve engineered to never go away. "
10 " A painter need only imagine a picture and then put it to canvas, "
11 " Looking at the two chairs together, I see a fair representation of the partner we've found in plastic: a Janus-faced companion who can rightly inspire our deepest admiration and our strongest disgust. "
