Plastic (8 page)

The showroom felt like a cross between an art gallery and Ikea: plain white walls, recessed lighting, and every piece in the catalog out for display. The wares were grouped by color. There was a cluster of shiny reds: a sleek chair, a stool, a table with a lacy perforated top. Next to it was an orange array, followed by a gaggle of yellows. Across the room, a grouping of green chairs, tables, lamps, and vase-shaped pedestals shared a lighted platform. On the adjacent platform, much the same in cool shades of blue. Sunlight flooded through the floor-to-ceiling windows, making all those plastic surfaces extra glittery. It was like being inside a diamond—or, rather, a cubic zirconia. As someone accustomed to an earth-toned domestic world of pillowy upholstery and wood, I found the gleam and frank primary colors a little unsettling. Yet, I reminded myself, it wasn't as if my softer, more cushiony world was any less full of plastic. Like most modern furniture, my upholstered couches and chairs have polyurethane cushions, the covers are part polyester and sprayed with Teflon-like stain protectors, and many of my "wood" tables and bookshelves actually consist of fake wood veneers and epoxies over a partially plastic pressed-wood core.

Many of the pieces in the showroom were created by the legendary Philippe Starck, one of several prominent designers that the company began recruiting in the 1980s in an effort to upgrade its image. Starck's feelings about plastic echoed that earlier generation of designers: he loved the material for its democratic possibilities and because, unlike natural materials, it was the product of "human intelligence, so it fits with our human civilization." He also considered plastic environmentally preferable to using wood resources.

One of Starck's best-known designs is a beautiful chair called the Louis Ghost. Made of clear, hard polycarbonate plastic, the chair has an oval back, gracefully downturned arms, and curving legs—all taken from some classic and yet unspecified period in French history. Starck explained that he deliberately muddied the heritage: "I chose this icon to be the ghost of Louis 'I don't know what.'"
Playful yet elegant, solid yet ethereal, the Louis Ghost has appeared in ads and in fashion magazines all over the world. Stylists have set it in starkly modernist rooms as well as in rooms filled with antiques. In either setting, it works.

Since its introduction in 2002, the chair has been one of Kartell's most popular pieces, selling many hundreds of thousands. This despite the fact that it costs four hundred dollars—which is not much for a traditional armchair but still quite a ways up the food chain from the unpedigreed monobloc. Somehow, the Louis Ghost has avoided both the pitfall of the avant-garde that kept the Panton chair from succeeding in the commercial marketplace and the stigma of cheapness that still bedevils the monobloc. I suspect the Louis Ghost has been so successful because it hits that sweet spot between cool and comfortable. Raymond Loewy, the grandee of twentieth-century industrial design, called it the MAYA principle—the most advanced yet most acceptable. The Louis Ghost takes full advantage of what plastic has to offer artistically without radically revising what we expect in a chair. The chair works because Starck accepted plastic on its own terms and plumbed its shiny, shallow waters for a genuine synthetic aesthetic.

I was curious to see how a monobloc chair would stack up against the Louis Ghost. So that afternoon I brought along one I had purchased at Home Depot, a model dubbed the Backgammon for no apparent reason. To my relief, the store manager was unfazed when I walked in with my Backgammon in tow. "Of course," he murmured smoothly when I explained I wanted to compare the two, as if it were an everyday request.

I took a couple of turns sitting in one and then the other. I can't say the Louis Ghost was much more comfortable than my chair from Home Depot. It was roomier than the Backgammon and provided more back support. But it was also so slippery that it was hard to comfortably settle in. The Backgammon dipped slightly when I plunked down in it. In truth, neither was a seat I'd want to spend a whole lot of time in. (Though I am sure the Louis Ghost would hold up better over time than my Backgammon. Not long after my visit to Kartell, my son leaned back in it too hard, and the spokes cracked.)

"It could be said, that when we design a chair, we make a society and city in miniature," the British architect Peter Smithson wrote.
I look closely at the Louis Ghost and my Backgammon, trying to imagine the societies they evoke. One conjures a world of dazzling possibilities, the other a realm of cheap utility.

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 both our deepest admiration and our strongest disgust.

I was outside the store on another day when a man and a woman came walking by arm in arm. They stopped for a moment to peer through the window.

"Look," the man said in a tone of utter incredulity, "it's
plastic
furniture."

"Yes," his companion answered, "but the designs are
gorgeous.
"

3. Flitting Through Plasticville

W
HEN MY OLDER SON
was born, a well-meaning friend—who had no children of her own—gave him a beautiful cherrywood rattle. It was smooth to the touch, safe to mouth, made a lovely plinking sound when shaken—and my son wanted nothing to do with it. He wanted the gaily colored set of plastic keys and, later, the squeaky vinyl bath book and, still later, the bright orange car with big blue wheels that made clicking sounds when it was pushed along the floor. Plastic is the medium of play today, so like most families with young children, we soon filled our house with enough junk to stock the midway at a state fair. We were forever tripping over remote-controlled cars, pulling plastic soldiers from between couch cushions, and cursing Lego when we stepped barefoot on the sharp-edged blocks in the middle of the night. My two sons accumulated an arsenal of plastic guns and Jedi swords. My daughter gathered a nursery of plastic baby dolls. (So much for our efforts to fight gender stereotyping.) For birthday parties, I stocked the goody bags with items from the catalog of the Oriental Trading Company, specialists in cheap plastic doodads: 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 made perfect sense. "Balls are boring," he declared, then quoted another enthusiast who wrote that "when a ball dreams, it dreams it's a Frisbee."

In Frisbee genealogy, all descend from the original flying disc developed by the man Waisblum reverently referred to as "our inventor," Walter Frederick Morrison. In 1937, when he was a high-school student in Southern California, Morrison joined his girlfriend Lucille's family for Thanksgiving dinner, where he was introduced to the family game of "flipping" a big metal popcorn-pot lid. It was way more fun that just tossing around a ball, he decided. The next summer he and Lucille were flipping cake pans back and forth on the beach when a sunbather approached and asked if he could buy one. A business was born. The couple began peddling cake pans all along Southern California beaches, and Morrison started dreaming of ways to streamline and merchandise a better flying disc.

The business would have a long gestation. After serving as a fighter pilot in World War II, Morrison returned to Southern California, still enthralled by what he called "the Flittin' Disc idea." His stint in the U.S. Air Force had taught him something about what it takes to make things fly, and his cake-pan experience had convinced him he needed a material more pliable and less ding-prone than tin. Having seen how the new synthetic materials performed during the war, he thought to himself:
Plastic, that's just the ticket.
He spent several years trying out various designs and varieties of the recently introduced thermoplastics, hawking each new incarnation at county fairs. He and Lucille flitted the discs back and forth, mesmerizing onlookers with these new playthings that floated, dipped, skipped, and sailed in a repertoire of motion that balls rarely attained. The couple teased the crowds, claiming the discs were pulled along an invisible wire. The wire cost money, but anyone who bought one would get a disc for free!

In 1955, Morrison embarked on yet another redesign. This time he thickened and deepened the rim to increase its centrifugal force, and he added new details to give it more of a flying-saucer look, a nod to the public's growing fascination with UFOs. He added a small cupola on the top, where little green men might sit, along with the names of all the planets. He and Lucille, now married, dubbed it the Pluto Platter. It was their best flying disc yet.
The discs were sold in plastic bags covered with references to the space theme, including the dubious instruction
Use bag for space helmet, if head fits.
One day, when Morrison was demonstrating Pluto Platters at a downtown Los Angeles parking lot, a man stepped out of the crowd and told him that the management at a local company had been thinking about marketing a flying disc. "It might be worthwhile to meet with the Boys at Wham-O," the man said.

The Boys were Rich Knerr and Arthur "Spud" Melin, high-school friends who had teamed up in 1948 to sell slingshots and sporting goods by mail order. Wham-O's early catalog was a modern parent's book of nightmares, filled with items guaranteed to put someone's eye out, if not remove a limb. There was the Malayan blowgun, with its "tempered steel hunting darts"; the throwing dagger, which was "balanced to stick"; and the cap pistol that "actually shoots peas, beans, tapioca, etc."
As Knerr later recalled, "You couldn't buy those things just anywhere."
Good as sales of such items were, by the 1950s, the pair could see there was an even brighter future in the business of toys.

The modern toy industry is in many ways the product of two major developments in the post-World War II era: the baby boom and the polymer boom. Though there had been plastic toys since the early days of celluloid—think of the kewpie doll—the convergence of those two broad trends sealed the marriage of plastic and play.
After ramping up production for the war, the major manufacturers were swimming in supplies of the new thermoplastics, materials that could truly fulfill the British chemists' utopian dream of a world "where childish hands find nothing to break, no sharp edges or corners to cut or graze, no crevices to harbor dirt or germs."
Thanks to the phenomenal postwar birthrate, there were millions of childish hands eager to play. During the peak years of the baby boom, annual toy sales leaped, from $84 million in 1940 to $1.25 billion in 1960.
And an ever-increasing number of those toys were made of plastic: 40 percent by 1947.
Today, plastics are a given in toy making; they're "like air," one manufacturer told me.