The Strange Tale of Orange Bear

All photos courtesy of Sophia Beem

By Sophia Beem

One morning, I sit idly in bed and toss my teddy bear in the air, catching him on my chest and throwing him back up again. Of the myriad stuffed animals that once populated my childhood bedroom, most are now gone. But with his name reflecting unparalleled creative instinct, Orange Bear stayed. I toss him up again, making him somersault in the air. Once bright orange, Orange Bear has softened to tangerine, paling pink, and yellow in patches. He smiles with an earnest grin stitched in black thread, seeming never to tire of playtime. But his once plush body is now worn, the stuffing lumpy, the fabric matted. On the next toss, a flash of white catches my eye. A loose thread? A piece of lint? I flip him over. No, it’s Orange Bear’s tag. Of course, it has been there for over 20 years, but I never took a moment to really look.

“Polyester fiber, PE pellets in cloth bag,” it reads, in faded red lettering. Most people don’t know where these materials come from, or even what exactly they are, but they’re everywhere in our products and toys. The stuffing that gives the “bag” — the irreverent name for a stuffed animal’s main body — its plumpness and shape is made of fluffy fibers or tiny pellets. These fillers, which may be synthetic polyester cotton, polyethylene, and polypropylene, are hyper compressed and heated up oil products. The process: Refined petroleum and crude oil is morphed under intense heat and high pressure into a malleable plastic. This is spun and pulled and pinched by big machines, transforming raw fossil fuels into soft fibers and smooth, round pellets. From the oil refinery to the guts of a child’s best friend, polyethylene pellets and polyester fiber are what gave life to Orange Bear. Orange Bear, like most stuffed animals, only exists because of the burning of fossil fuels.

Orange Bear wears the label “Ty Incorporated” on his tag. This multimillion-dollar company is responsible not only for Orange Bear, but also the Beanie Babies craze of the 1990s, a whirlwind era of rampant consumerism. Like Orange Bear, Beanie Babies are also filled with plastic pellets. At the height of the company’s success, millions were captivated by Beanie Babies. Limited edition releases, surprise retirements of certain models, and soaring resale values fueled a buying frenzy. Mass production, theft and counterfeit, and a hysteria that ended in a huge bust in the value of these plush toys all generated waste. When the fad ended, many Beanie Babies were thrown away.

Ty Inc. is based in Oak Brook, Illinois. Yet Orange Bear began his life overseas: “Made in China,” the tag cites. There, in a factory, he came together in fragments — cutting, sewing, binding, stuffing — an ear here, an eye there, a leg and an arm on an assembly line being fit to a hollow body before seamstresses sewed up his body and stuffed it with filling. This process is decentralized. Maybe his eyes were shipped in on a hulking cargo ship from a different factory, the stuffing in his belly spun from melted petroleum in a different country. We do know what the process entails: Scrap fabric and plastic bits tossed into heaping piles to be dumped into landfills; columns of thick smoke billowing out of factories; machinery dumping toxic particles into nearby waterways until these are saturated with gunk and oil. After a quality inspection, packaging, and warehousing, Orange Bear was deemed fit for play, then wrapped up in more plastic and tucked away until the supply chain sailed him across the ocean, loaded him onto a truck, then plopped him onto a shelf conveniently placed at toddler eye height.

In 2020, retail sales of plush toys in the United States amounted to approximately $1.25 billion. Americans love their stuffed animals. A lot. There are thousands of kids with clones of Orange Bear or a menagerie of other creatures — birds, lizards, cats, elephants, cows, frogs — that each offer a comforting presence. Up to 70% of children develop strong attachments to objects such as stuffed animals or blankets, for good reason. The emotion and nostalgia they embody is enough to earn them a permanent bedroom home. They’re a friend who will never fight with you, a companion to clutch in the nighttime darkness. But here’s a troubling consideration: These toys are often discarded as children grow older. While some, such as Orange Bear, endure as special mementos, most others are tossed aside, adding to the list, and garbage pile, of consumer culture victims. Orange Bear himself has witnessed the gradual disappearance of his many friends from my early childhood collection. Kids grow up and move on. Old friends become unwanted and few survivors remain.

Each year, an estimated 8 million stuffed animals are thrown away, ending up in landfills or oceans. How many people buy a cheap stuffed toy to commemorate a vacation or as a last-minute gift for a niece or nephew, only for it to be thrown out two months later? It’s just who we are: A society that puts convenience and quick purchases at a premium. While these cute animals seem harmless, once thrown out their remnant forms prey on biodiversity and ocean life. Severed stuffed bear limbs float in the ocean for unwary fish to swallow. Dismembered stuffed animals drift together in vast numbers in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, like a floating island of misfit toys. In landfills, their non-biodegradable synthetic fabrics and stuffings can take hundreds of years to decompose. Plastic eyes deteriorate and poison the soil. The one-time playmates of imaginary games, the once-were gifts to friends, kids, grandkids, the long-ago guardians of a scared child from the monster under the bed, now degrade slowly and are forgotten. They find themselves down the gullet of a hungry pelican or into the downy hollow of a burrowing vole or snatched up by tiny grasping raccoon hands, hurting the very creatures they were modeled after. Yes, recycling programs exist, and resale shops are available for redistribution, but there are simply too many plush toys in the world to prevent the majority from ending up as waste, along with all the detrimental impacts on wildlife that their abandonment entails.

​​My bedroom is full of mementos and personal artifacts, Orange Bear among them, that will all be thrown away. Is the future of disposal and decomposition darker than the light of the memories I associate them with? To some extent, yes. In my room, Orange Bear is nestled between a purple pillow and a panda bear stuffed animal. The panda holds marginally lower sentimental status, a fact that nearly guarantees its fate in the Great Pacific garbage patch. Yet, despite holding high favor in my stuffed animal court, Orange Bear will also eventually be thrown out, sitting next to Unnamed Panda on a faraway garbage heap, waiting to be incinerated. There is no stuffed animal rainbow bridge; how much we love them doesn’t change where they end up.

Orange Bear and Unnamed Panda.

The arbitrary lifespan of these toys ultimately serves as a reminder of how we’re treating the planet like we do everything else. Disposably. For now, however, my plush friend smiles cordially, unaware of the damage wrought by his creation and the forthcoming hazard of his fate. After 20 years of being loved deeply and unapologetically, Orange Bear is old and tattered, but it will take 450 years for the polyethylene pellets in his feet and legs to decompose. He is falling apart already, but pieces of him will take years to dissipate slowly through the soil and ocean waters — all long after I’m gone. Once an inseparable friend, he’ll be lost and reduced to microplastic particles, with no child to squeeze him at night or toss him in the air.

About the Author …

Sophia Beem is a junior from Springfield, Ill., studying Creative Writing and Global Studies with a minor in German. She is pursuing the Certificate in Environmental Writing and is a Communications Intern for iSEE. Sophia is involved with campus environmental organizing as the Media Officer of Students for Environmental Concerns and the Editor-in-Chief of the Green Observer.

This piece was written for ESE 360, the introductory course in the Certificate in Environmental Writing, in Spring 2024.