Is Ceramics Bad for the Environment?
Overall, ceramics gives out good vibes, an earthy feel that seems in sync with a natural life. It’s not plastic (unless it’s polymer clay which is basically plastic). It’s a natural material that you can dig in your backyard. What can be more earth friendly than dirt? Potters always have their hands dirty and are often inspired by nature. The potters I know seem to always double up as hippyish tree huggers (or maybe it’s because I live in Oregon). Ceramics is around since prehistoric times. It must be good for the environment, right? Or at least not actively bad? The short answer is no, ceramics is bad for the environment, and in many different ways.
Mining:
Like any type of manufacturing, ceramics requires raw material that need to be dug out of the ground from mining, not a very earth friendly endeavor. You need them to make clay (“almost all clays are a mixture of several different kinds of minerals. Ball clay, for example is almost always a mixture of kaolinite, quartz, mica, and a tiny bit of pyrite. All four ingredients are minerals” (excerpt from Clay Minerals by Dave Finkelnburg published in Ceramic Monthly)
Of course, you can find clay in your backyard and dig it out. I’ve heard of potters who do just that, but I only know one personally. There are plenty of blog posts and books telling you how to use wild clay and process it. The general consensus amongst potters is that it’s not worth the hassle. Clay manufacturer have the machines and scale to make clay with a lot less effort that it would take any individual potter. To make clay that is useable, the one you dig in your backyard will have to get through a lot of processing and will probably still be not up to par with commercial clays. As a side note, the one potter I know who is digging his own clay lives in Oregon and goes to New Mexico to collect his clay. Travelling halfway across the country every time you need a new batch of clay might not be super earth friendly either.
Headon China Clay Works by Derek Harper, (Headon China Clay Works - geograph.org.uk - 3545328, CC BY-SA 2.0)
Besides the clay, you need to manufacture the glazes. That requires more minerals, and therefore more mining. Excerpt from a page from the Big Ceramic Store webpage: understanding pottery glazes.
Every glaze is made of the following 3 materials:
o Silica – Creates glass. Examples: quartz, flint, pure silica
o Alumina – Stiffens the glaze so it doesn’t slide off the clay. Examples: clay (kaolin, ball clay, or fire clay), alumina hydrate
o Flux – Causes the glaze to melt at a low enough temperature to be used in ceramics. Examples: feldspar, whiting
Plus a glaze may include one or more additives:
· Opacifiers – to make the glaze opaque instead of transparent. Examples: tin oxide, zirconium or Zircopax, titanium, zinc
· Suspenders – to keep the glaze in suspension instead of settling out. Examples: bentonite
· Colorants – to provide various colors. Examples: cobalt oxide, copper oxide
So, you need even more minerals to make glazes that you need to make clay.
But when glazes are still in liquid form, they can also end up in the drain when potters clean their brushes or their sponges after applying the glazes and potentially contaminate the water. One studio I heard about asked people to rinse off their buckets, sponges and brushes in a succession of water barrels before they could use the sink. Most studios I have been in just put a plastic tub in the sink to catch most of the sludge, mostly the clay that clogs the pipes. I hope the commercial studios have clay traps and filters to clean the water, but I’m not sure most home potters do.
Because ceramics has this earth friendly vibe, a lot of hobby potters do not realize the potential harm they can do to themselves, others and the environment when doing ceramics. Ceramics is a string of chemical transformation creating potential toxic materials, from breathing in silica dust from dried clay to ingesting toxic components leached in your coffee when you drink from a mug with a bad glaze. All pottery classes should come with a handout about potential risks and best practices, not to scare people away from ceramics, but at least to inform them that ceramics comes with certain risks attached. But in my experience it is rarely the case besides a few cryptic messages. Ceramic students are here to learn a new skill and have a good time and no one wants to rain on their parade
Shipping
The second problem with ceramics is shipping. Once you mine all these ingredients to create clay or glazes from a variety of sources, they need to get shipped. There are local suppliers of ceramic materials, but most of their primary material is shipped to them! Furthermore, depending on what type of art you want to create, you might be hostage to a specific material that comes from overseas. For example Grolleg Kaolin is used to create pristine white porcelain clay. It is mined in England. I read about a substitute that comes from New Zealand, hardly closer if you live in the US.
Shipping is the big elephant in the room for a lot of human activities. Whether you ship the material to you for manufacturing or you ship the final product to your customers, and often both, it’s not an earth-friendly practice. The main discussion about whether art is bad for the environment in general seems to center around international art exhibition like Art Basel, which requires shipping huge art pieces and attracts customers from all over the world who produce quantities of carbon dioxide to get there. I am sure that at some point we will have some carbon-neutral transportation protocol, but we’re not there yet.
Firing:
Finally, once you have your clay and your glazes, you need to fire your pieces, usually twice (bisque, then final firing). There are three types of energy used to fire ceramic kilns: electric, gas and wood. If you are in a studio, then you share the kiln with lots of people, so you’re reducing your carbon footprint, but it also means you are not completely in control of your practice. Having your own kiln is necessary if you want to be in control of your art. But kilns use a lot of energy.
Some potters think that electric kilns are better for the environment, because usually you fire at a lower temperature and electrical energy can be renewable. On the other hand because you fire at lower temperature you need to add some ingredients to your glazes so it will melt at a lower temperature, so you encourage the mining of more minerals from the ground. Nevertheless, gas is a fossil fuel and therefore bad for the environment when it gets burned. As for wood firing, it seems like the worst possible way to fire your ceramics, because it’s extremely inefficient: you burn a LOT of wood to fire a wood kiln. Of course you can just “smoke fire” your pieces in a barrel in your backyard, but actual wood firing takes a lot more resources. According to an article from the Oregonian dating back to 2011 by Bob Hicks about the East Creek Anagama kiln in Oregon : “East Creek Anagama Kiln is fired up and rumbling, its ash-inducing heat transforming roughly 500 pieces of raw-formed clay into glazed and hardened finished works of art. Fired by six cords of wood, the kiln is about 16 feet long by 6 feet wide by 5 feet tall”. There was a recent article by David Bates on Oregon Artswatch website about the same place that doesn’t give any estimate about the amount of wood burned in the kiln. That’s not a conversation most wood fired ceramic artists want to have.
On the other hand, this kind of wood firing is so labor intensive that few potters practice it. It’s usually a group effort, so like firing in a studio, the number of pots produced per firing reduces the carbon footprint somewhat. The other argument from ceramicists that use wood to fire their pieces is that - unlike fossil fuel- wood is part of the natural cycle. Besides, we burn wood for many other reasons besides ceramics, starting with heating. Furthermore, outside of controlled burning, there is a lot of unplanned burning as well. If you look at natural wildfires, the carbon footprint of wood-fired ceramics is most certainly ridiculous in comparison.
Plastic:
This is a side issue, but plastic is almost irreplaceable in ceramics for its ability to keep clay moist. All clay come in plastic bag and greenware pieces (raw clay) are kept under plastic to keep moist and control the drying process. Slow and even drying is your friend when you’re doing ceramics, and plastic helps a lot with this. Before plastic, potters and sculptors kept their clay and wet pieces under a wet canvas and had to keep moistening it so it wouldn’t dry. During the pandemic, I didn’t have access to my locker in a community studio for a year. I was convinced that my clay would be hard as rock, but it was just fine. A little spritz of water and it was good to go. Plastic is really a fantastic material in some aspects. Too bad it’s also terrible for our planet. I have been hoarding plastic bags fearing the day when it’s banned outright, or I need a special potter’s permit to get my hands on plastic sheeting, an art dispensation of some sort.
clay inside plastic
colored slip in plastic boxes
Now what?
Now I laid out all the reasons why ceramics is bad for the environment, I should explain why I still create ceramics and how I live with my conscience.
Manufacturing anything is bad for the environment and yet people have always created and transformed their environment to survive. We manufacture cars, cell phones and plastic plates that require raw material, and on top of that we usually ship it across the globe, so it’s not like ceramics is the worst culprit. Handmade ceramics is a tiny drop in the overall manufacturing footprint, and even in the ceramics industry. Ceramics is used widely for creating refractory products, catalysts and catalyst carriers for chemical and petrochemical processing, pipes and other parts for fluid processing, filtration and separation media, cutting tools, abrasives, bearings, nozzles and valves (info from the page “ceramics and glass in industry” on the ceramics.org website).
The other reason that creating ceramics is legitimate in my opinion is that it’s one of the oldest craft there is. It exists since prehistoric times. Populations who had no choice but to live in harmony with nature, because nature was all around them created ceramics, so ceramics is not evil. It’s part of humanity’s ancient history. Potters belong to an old tradition that unites very different cultures such as Japan, England and the Middle East. We can’t let it go.
Wedgwood vases circa 1790 by Sean Pathasema/Birmingham Museum of Art, PortlandVaseCopy-Wedgwood-BMA, CC BY 3.0
Handmade ceramics is not as efficient as a big company creating mugs or plates, but if we let only big manufacturers create dinnerware, then humanity is losing a part of its soul. Furthermore if you create handmade ceramics and sell it locally, you contribute to less people buying cheap mugs made in China, and that has to count for something. Local is good. Local art is great.
I think a big part of why I feel bad about my ceramic carbon footprint is that deep down I can’t shake the feeling that what I am doing is not necessary. I keep reminding myself that art is not a luxury. It has to exist. When we take stock of what practices we need to get rid of to live in harmony with nature, art cannot go, because art is necessary to our survival too. In other words, we can survive without mass-produced plastic plates, but we need handmade ceramic plates. Everyday objects have a soul.
The way Shelly Fredenberg, a fellow potter, squares with her own conscience is by creating only the best ceramic art she can make, and not a bunch of cheap trinkets to sell fast. Less is more.
I like this, especially because I don’t produce much, so I can say I’m being ecologically minded and not just a really slow potter.
It takes time to breathe a soul into your creations.
Update: since writing this piece I found this blog post “how to make your pottery practice greener” from the craft council in the UK which addresses some of the same issues and give some advice, and this other blog post on the same subject.
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As a side note, ceramics is of course not the only art facing this issue. An entire branch of art is created with recycled materials, found objects or natural material (land art). If you are a poor starving artists, using this type of material to create art might be the only option. Art supplies are expensive. As a bonus, your art is environmentally friendly.
Detail of César’s “compression” sculpture using a motorcycle