Free Plastic by Susan Freinkel Page B

whistles, bouncy balls, squirt guns, glow sticks, all of which would invariably break or disappear minutes after the goody bags were distributed. It was only years later that I began to wonder: Where does this stuff
come
from?
    My search for an answer to that question started one dreary winter day with a visit to the corporate headquarters of Wham-O, a company built on the wild, bouncy, springy, squishy, floaty possibilities presented by plastics. Wham-O introduced some of the most iconic toys of our age, from Hula-Hoops to Slip 'n Slides to its top-selling product, the Frisbee. Since the flying discs were introduced, in 1957, the company has sold more than a hundred million.Every American household surely has at least one; my family has somehow accumulated five, even though we almost never play with them.
    This simple but ubiquitous toy offers an ideal window into the plastics industry, to the plants and processes that bond us ever closer with polymers by feeding our consumer desires. Plastics constitute the nation's third-largest manufacturing industry, behind only cars and steel. About one million Americans work directly in plastics. It's a sprawling industry that reaches into every sector of the economy, encompassing a few dozen petrochemical companies that create raw plastic polymers, thousands of equipment manufacturers and mold makers, and many thousands more processors that take raw plastics and fashion them into finished parts and products, such as toys.
    Wham-O was started in Southern California, and its corporate headquarters are now in a modest one-story brick building in Emeryville, California, a sliver of a town wedged between Berkeley and Oakland. In the reception area, I was greeted by three big black-and-white photos of celebrities playing with Frisbees: a grinning Fred MacMurray (the classic TV dad from
My Three Sons
); the leads from
The Dukes of Hazzard
; and a distinctly pregubernatorial Arnold Schwarzenegger, in tight, skimpy shorts and a body-hugging T-shirt, spinning a disc on his finger. The prominence of the photos drives home how important the Frisbee remains to Wham-O even now, more than a half century after the toy's debut.
    "It's really our bread and butter," explained David Waisblum, who at that point oversaw all aspects of the Frisbee brand, from manufacture to marketing.It was a dream job for Waisblum, a former stockbroker and self-confessed Frisbee freak who'd been an avid player of disc golf since he got out of high school.
Disc,
he explained, is the generic term for the toy. The name Frisbee is trademarked, so it can be used only for the flying discs that Wham-O makes. When I met him, Waisblum was in his early forties but looked much younger, partly because he was dressed in teen uniform: baggy jeans, sneakers, and a hoodie sweatshirt. Stocky, with shaggy brown hair, a goatee, and a mile-a-minute mouth, he reminded me of the actor Jack Black.
    The company makes about thirty types of Frisbees and many were displayed on the wall in the conference room. It was a showcase of disc technology. Wham-O has found numerous ways to optimize discs: some glow in the dark; some have rims that make them easy for dogs to catch; some are heavy enough to slice through the blusters of a windy day. There are Frisbees specially engineered for the major disc sports: ultimate (a team game similar to football); disc golf (similar to regular golf except players aim for baskets, not holes); freestyle (spinning the discs and other discrobatics); and disc dog (just what it sounds like). Each demands a disc of a slightly different size, weight, and profile.
    Then, of course, there are the basic recreational discs for your run-of-the-mill game of catch; they account for about half of all Frisbee sales. Waisblum wouldn't say how many Frisbees the company sold each year, but he claimed it was more than the annual sale of all baseballs, footballs, and soccer balls combined. I was surprised and skeptical, but to Waisblum it