Plastic (2 page)

Indisputably, plastic does offer advantages over natural materials. Yet that doesn't fully account for its sudden ubiquity. Plasticville became possible—and perhaps even inevitable—with the rise of the petrochemical industry, the behemoth that came into being in the 1920s and '30s when chemical companies innovating new polymers began to align with the petroleum companies that controlled the essential ingredients for building those polymers.

Oil refineries run 24–7 and are continuously generating byproducts that must be disposed of, such as ethylene gas. Find a use for that gas, and your byproduct becomes a potential economic opportunity. Ethylene gas, as British chemists discovered in the early 1930s, can be made into the polymer polyethylene, which is now widely used in packaging. Another byproduct, propylene, can be redeployed as a feedstock for polypropylene, a plastic used in yogurt cups, microwavable dishes, disposable diapers, and cars. Still another is the chemical acrylonitrile, which can be made into acrylic fiber, making possible that quintessential emblem of our synthetic age AstroTurf.

Plastics are a small piece of the petroleum industry, representing a minor fraction of the fossil fuels we consume. But the economic imperatives of the petroleum industry have powered the rise of Plasticville. As environmentalist Barry Commoner argued: "By its own internal logic, each new petrochemical process generates a powerful tendency to proliferate further products and displace pre-existing ones."
The continuous flow of oil fueled not just cars but an entire culture based on the consumption of new products made of plastics. This move into Plasticville wasn't a considered decision, the result of some great economic crisis or political debate. Neither did it take into account social good or environmental impact or what we were supposed to do with all our plastic things at the end of their useful lives. Plastic promised abundance on the cheap, and when in human history has that ever been a bad thing? No wonder we became addicted to plastic, or, rather, to the convenience and comfort, safety and security, fun and frivolity that plastic brought.

The amount of plastic the world consumes annually has steadily risen over the past seventy years, from almost nil in 1940 to closing in on six hundred billion pounds today.
We became plastic people really just in the space of a single generation. In 1960, the average American consumed about thirty pounds of plastic products.
Today, we're each consuming more than three hundred pounds of plastics a year, generating more than three hundred billion dollars in sales.
Considering that lightning-quick ascension, one industry expert declared plastics "one of the greatest business stories of the twentieth century."

The rapid proliferation of plastics, the utter pervasiveness of it in our lives, suggests a deep and enduring relationship. But our feelings toward plastic are a complicated mix of dependence and distrust—akin to what an addict feels toward his or her substance of choice. Initially, we reveled in the seeming feats of alchemy by which scientists produced one miraculous material after another out of little more than carbon and water and air. It's "wonderful how du Pont is improving on nature," one woman gushed after visiting the company's Wonder World of Chemistry exhibit at a 1936 Texas fair.
A few years later, people told pollsters they considered
cellophane
the third most beautiful word in the English language, right behind
mother
and
memory
.
We were prepared, in our infatuation, to believe only the very best of our partner in modernity. Plastics heralded a new era of material freedom, liberation from nature's stinginess. In the plastic age, raw materials would not be in short supply or constrained by their innate properties, such as the rigidity of wood or the reactivity of metal.
Synthetics could substitute for, or even precisely imitate, scarce and precious materials. Plastic, admirers predicted, would deliver us into a cleaner, brighter world in which all would enjoy a "universal state of democratic luxury."

It's hard to say when the polymer rapture began to fade, but it was gone by 1967 when the film
The Graduate
came out. Somewhere along the line—aided surely by a flood of products such as pink flamingos, vinyl siding, Corfam shoes—plastic's penchant for inexpensive imitation came to be seen as cheap ersatz. So audiences knew exactly why Benjamin Braddock was so repelled when a family friend took him aside for some helpful career advice: "I just want to say one word to you... Plastics!"
The word no longer conjured an enticing horizon of possibility but rather a bland, airless future, as phony as Mrs. Robinson's smile.

Today, few other materials we rely on carry such a negative set of associations or stir such visceral disgust. Norman Mailer called it "a malign force loose in the universe ... the social equivalent of cancer."
We may have created plastic, but in some fundamental way it remains essentially alien—ever seen as somehow unnatural (though it's really no less natural than concrete, paper, steel, or any other manufactured material). One reason may have to do with its preternatural endurance. Unlike traditional materials, plastic won't dissolve or rust or break down—at least, not in any useful time frame. Those long polymer chains are built to last, which means that much of the plastic we've produced is with us still—as litter, detritus on the ocean floor, and layers of landfill. Humans could disappear from the earth tomorrow, but many of the plastics we've made will last for centuries.

This book traces the arc of our relationship with plastics, from enraptured embrace to deep disenchantment to the present-day mix of apathy and confusion. It's played out across the most transformative century in humankind's long project to shape the material world to its own ends. The story's canvas is huge but also astonishingly familiar, because it is full of objects we use every day. I have chosen eight to help me tell the story of plastic: the comb, the chair, the Frisbee, the IV bag, the disposable lighter, the grocery bag, the soda bottle, the credit card. Each offers an object lesson on what it means to live in Plasticville, enmeshed in a web of materials that are rightly considered both the miracle and the menace of modern life. Through these objects I examine the history and culture of plastics and how plastic things are made. I look at the politics of plastics and how synthetics are affecting our health and the environment, and I explore efforts to develop more sustainable ways of producing and disposing of plastics. Each object opens a window onto one of Plasticville's many precincts. It is my hope that taken together, they shed light on our relationship with plastic and suggest how, with effort, it might become a healthier one.

Why did I decide to focus on such small, common things? None have the razzle-dazzle that cutting-edge polymer science is delivering, such as smart plastics that can mend themselves and plastics that conduct electricity. But those are not the plastic things that play meaningful roles in our everyday lives. I also chose not to use any durable goods, such as cars or appliances or electronics. No question any of these could have offered insights into the age of plastics. But the material story of a car or an iPhone encompasses far more than just plastics. Simple objects, properly engaged, distill issues to their essence. As historian Robert Friedel notes, it's in the small things "that our material world is made."

Simple objects sometimes tell tangled stories, and the story of plastics is riddled with paradoxes. We enjoy an unprecedented level of material abundance and yet it often feels impoverishing, like digging through a box packed with Styrofoam peanuts and finding nothing else there. 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. We enjoy plastics-based technologies that can save lives as never before but that also pose insidious threats to human health. We bury in landfills the same kinds of energy-rich molecules that we've scoured the far reaches of the earth to find and excavate. We send plastic waste overseas to become the raw materials for finished products that are sold back to us. We're embroiled in pitched political fights in which plastic's sharpest critics and staunchest defenders make the same case: these materials are too valuable to waste.

These paradoxes contribute to our growing anguish over plastics. Yet I was surprised to discover how many of the plastics-related issues that dominate headlines today had surfaced in earlier decades. Studies that show traces of plastics in human tissue go back to the 1950s. The first report of plastic trash in the ocean was made in the 1960s. Suffolk County, New York, enacted the first ban on plastic packaging in 1988. In every case, the issues seized our attention for a few months or even years and then slipped off the public radar.

But the stakes are much higher now. We've produced nearly as much plastic in the first decade of this millennium as we did in the entire twentieth century.
As Plasticville sprawls farther across the landscape, we become more thoroughly entrenched in the way of life it imposes. It is increasingly difficult to believe that this pace of plasticization is sustainable, that the natural world can long endure our ceaseless "improving on nature." But can we start engaging in the problems plastics pose? Is it possible to enter into a relationship with these materials that is safer for us and more sustainable for our offspring? Is there a future for Plasticville?

1. Improving on Nature

I
F YOU GO ON EBAY
, that virtual souk of human desire, you'll find a small but dedicated trade in antique combs. Trawling the site on various occasions, I've seen dozens of combs made of the early plastic called celluloid—combs so beautiful they belonged in a museum, so beguiling I coveted them for my own. I've seen combs that looked as if they were carved from ivory or amber, and some that were flecked with mica so they shone as if made of hammered gold. I've seen huge, lacy decorative combs of faux tortoiseshell that might have crowned the piled-high up-twist of a Gilded Age debutante, and tiara-like combs twinkling with sapphire or emerald or jet "brilliants," as rhinestones once were called. One of my favorites was a delicate 1925 art deco comb with a curved handle and its own carrying case; together, they looked like an elegant purse made of tortoiseshell and secured with a rhinestone clasp. Just four inches long, it was surely designed for the short hair of a Jazz Age beauty. Looking at the comb, I could imagine its first owner, a bright spirit in a dropped-waist dress and Louise Brooks bob, reveling in her liberation from corsets, long gowns, and heavy hair buns.

Surprisingly, these gorgeous antiques are quite affordable. Celluloid plastic made it possible, for the first time, to produce combs in real abundance—keeping prices low even for today's collector who doesn't have a lot to spend but wants to own something fabulous. For people at the dawn of the plastic age, celluloid offered what one writer called "a forgery of many of the necessities and luxuries of civilized life," a foretoken of the new material culture's aesthetic and abundance.

Combs are one of our oldest tools, used by humans across cultures and ages for decoration, detangling, and delousing. They derive from the most fundamental human tool of all—the hand. And from the time that humans began using combs instead of their fingers, comb design has scarcely changed, prompting the satirical paper the
Onion
to publish a piece titled "Comb Technology: Why Is It So Far Behind the Razor and Toothbrush Fields?" The Stone Age craftsman who made the oldest known comb—a small four-toothed number carved from animal bone some eight thousand years ago—would have no trouble knowing what to do with the bright blue plastic version sitting on my bathroom counter.

For most of history, combs were made of almost any material humans had at hand, including bone, tortoiseshell, ivory, rubber, iron, tin, gold, silver, lead, reeds, wood, glass, porcelain, papier-mâché. But in the late nineteenth century, that panoply of possibilities began to fall away with the arrival of a totally new kind of material—celluloid, the first man-made plastic. Combs were among the first and most popular objects made of celluloid. And having crossed that material Rubicon, comb makers never went back. Ever since, combs generally have been made of one kind of plastic or another.

The story of the humble comb's makeover is part of the much larger story of how we ourselves have been transformed by plastics. Plastics freed us from the confines of the natural world, from the material constraints and limited supplies that had long bounded human activity. That new elasticity unfixed social boundaries as well. The arrival of these malleable and versatile materials gave producers the ability to create a treasure trove of new products while expanding opportunities for people of modest means to become consumers. Plastics held out the promise of a new material and cultural democracy. The comb, that most ancient of personal accessories, enabled anyone to keep that promise close.

What is plastic, this substance that has reached so deeply into our lives? The word comes from the Greek verb
plassein,
which means "to mold or shape." Plastics have that capacity to be shaped thanks to their structure, those long, flexing chains of atoms or small molecules bonded in a repeating pattern into one gloriously gigantic molecule. "Have you ever seen a polypropylene molecule?" a plastics enthusiast once asked me. "It's one of the most beautiful things you've ever seen. It's like looking at a cathedral that goes on and on for miles."

In the post-World War II world, where lab-synthesized plastics have virtually defined a way of life, we've come to think of plastics as unnatural, yet nature has been knitting polymers since the beginning of life. Every living organism contains these molecular daisy chains. The cellulose that makes up the cell walls in plants is a polymer. So are the proteins that make up our muscles and our skin and the long spiraling ladders that hold our genetic destiny,
DNA.
Whether a polymer is natural or synthetic, chances are its backbone is composed of carbon, a strong, stable, glad-handing atom that is ideally suited to forming molecular bonds. Other elements—typically oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen—frequently join that carbon spine, and the choice and arrangement of those atoms produces specific varieties of polymers. Bring chlorine into that molecular conga line, and you can get polyvinyl chloride, otherwise known as vinyl; tag on fluorine, and you can wind up with that slick nonstick material Teflon.