Plastic: A Toxic Love Story

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I n t r o d u c t i o n

Plasticville

In 1950, a Philadelphia toy company came out with a new accessory for electric-train enthusiasts: snap-together kits of plastic buildings for a place it called Plasticville, U.S.A. Sets of plastic people to populate the town were optional.
 It started as a sleepy, rural place where trains might roll past redsided barns to pull into a village with snug Cape Cod homes, a police department, a fire station, a schoolhouse, and a quaint white church with a steeple. But over the years, the product line spread into a bustling burb of housing tracts filled with two-story Colonials and split-level ranch houses and a Main Street that boasted a bank,
a combination hardware store/pharmacy, a modern supermarket, a two-story hospital, and a town hall modeled on Philadelphia’s historic Independence Hall. Eventually Plasticville even gained a drivein motel, an airport, and its own TV station, WPLA.
 Today, of course, we all live in Plasticville. But it wasn’t clear to me just how plastic my world had become until I decided to go an entire day without touching anything plastic. The absurdity of this experiment became apparent about ten seconds into the appointed morning when I shuffled bleary-eyed into the bathroom: the toilet seat was plastic. I quickly revised my plan. I would spend the day writing down everything I touched that was plastic.
 Within forty-five minutes I had filled an entire page in my Penway Composition Book (which itself had to be cataloged as partly plastic,
given its synthetic binding, as did my well-sharpened no. 2 pencil,
which was coated with yellow paint that contained acrylic). Here’s some of what I wrote down as I made my way through my earlymorning routine:

Alarm clock, mattress, heating pad, eyeglasses, toilet seat, toothbrush,
toothpaste tube and cap, wallpaper, Corian counter, light switch, tablecloth, Cuisinart, electric teakettle, refrigerator handle,
bag of frozen strawberries, scissors handle, yogurt container, lid for can of honey, juice pitcher, milk bottle, seltzer bottle, lid of cinnamon jar, bread bag, cellophane wrapping of box of tea, packaging of tea bag, thermos, spatula handle, bottle of dish soap, bowl,
cutting board, baggies, computer, fleece sweatshirt, sports bra,
yoga pants, sneakers, tub containing cat food, cup inside tub to scoop out the kibble, dog leash, Walkman, newspaper bag, stray packet of mayo on sidewalk, garbage can.

“Wow!” said my daughter, her eyes widening as she scanned the rapidly growing list.
 By the end of the day I had filled four pages in my notebook. My rule was to record each item just once, even those I touched repeatedly,
like the fridge handle. Otherwise I could have filled the whole notebook. As it was, the list included 196 entries, ranging from large items, like the dashboard of my minivan — really, the entire interior
— to minutiae, like the oval stickers adorning the apples I cut up for lunch. Packaging, not surprisingly, made up a big part of the list.
 I’d never thought of myself as having a particularly plastic-filled life. I live in a house that’s nearly a hundred years old. I like natural fabrics, old furniture, food cooked from scratch. I would have said my home harbors less plastic than the average American’s — mainly for aesthetic reasons, not political ones. Was I kidding myself? The next day I tracked everything I touched that wasn’t made of plastic.
By bedtime, I had recorded 102 items in my notebook, giving me a plastic/nonplastic ratio of nearly two to one. Here’s a sample from the first hour of the day:

Cotton sheets, wood floor, toilet paper, porcelain tap, strawberries,
mango, granite-tile countertop, stainless steel spoon, stainless steel faucet, paper towel, cardboard egg carton, eggs, orange juice, aluminum pie plate, wool rug, glass butter dish, butter, cast-iron griddle,
syrup bottle, wooden breadboard, bread, aluminum colander,
ceramic plates, glasses, glass doorknob, cotton socks, wooden dining-room table, my dog’s metal choke collar, dirt, leaves, twigs,
sticks, grass (and if I weren’t using a plastic bag, what my dog deposited amid those leaves, twigs, and grass).

Oddly, I found it harder and more boring to maintain the nonplastic list. Because I’d pledged not to count items more than once, after the first flood of entries, there wasn’t that much variety — at least not when compared with the plastics catalog. Wood, wool, cotton,
glass, stone, metal, food. Distilled further: animal, vegetable, mineral.
Those basic categories pretty much encompassed the items on the nonplastic list. The plastic list, by contrast, reflected a cornucopia of materials, a dazzling variety of the synthetica that has come to constitute such a huge, and yet strangely invisible, part of modern life.
 Pondering the lengthy list of plastic in my surroundings, I realized I actually knew almost nothing about it. What is plastic, really?
Where does it come from? How did my life become so permeated by synthetics without my even trying? Looking over the list I could see plastic products that I appreciated for making my life easier and more convenient (my wash-and-wear clothes, my appliances, that plastic bag for my dog’s poop) and plastic things I knew I could just as easily do without (Styrofoam cups, sandwich baggies, my nonstick pan).
 I’d never really looked hard at life in Plasticville. But news reports about toxic toys and baby bottles seemed to suggest that the costs might outweigh the benefits. I began to wonder if I’d unwittingly ex-
posed my own children to chemicals that could affect their development and health. That hard-plastic water bottle I’d included in my daughter’s lunch since kindergarten has been shown to leach a chemical that mimics estrogen. Was that why she’d sprouted breast buds at nine? Other questions quickly followed. What was happening to the plastic things I diligently dropped into my recycling bin? Were they actually being recycled? Or were my discards ending up far away in the ocean in vast currents of plastic trash? Were there seals somewhere choking on my plastic bottle tops? Should I quit using plastic shopping bags? Would that soda bottle really outlive my children and me? Did it matter? Should I care? What does it really mean to live in Plasticville?

The word plastic is itself cause for confusion. We use it in the singular,
and indiscriminately, to refer to any artificial material. But there are tens of thousands of different plastics.* And rather than making up a single family of materials, they’re more a collection of loosely related clans.
 I got a glimpse of the nearly inexhaustible possibilities contained in that one little word when I visited a place in New York called Material ConneXion, a combination of a consultancy and a materials larder for designers pondering what to make their products out of. Its founder described it as a “petting zoo for new materials.” And I did feel like I was in a tactile and visual wonderland as I browsed some of the thousands of plastics on file. There was a thick acrylic slab that looked like a pristine frozen waterfall; jewel-colored blobs of gel that begged to be squeezed; a flesh-toned fabric that looked and felt like an old person’s skin. (“Ugh, I’d never want to wear anything like that,” one staffer commented.) There were swatches of fake fur,
green netting, gray shag rug, fake blades of grass, fabric that holds the memory of how it’s folded, fabric that can absorb solar energy and transmit it to the wearer. I looked at blocks that mimicked finely
* For a brief description of the more common plastics, see “Cast of Characters” at the end of the book.
veined marble, smoky topaz, dull concrete, speckled granite, grained wood. I touched surfaces that were matte, shiny, bumpy, sandpapery,
fuzzy, squishy, feathery, cool as metal, warm and yielding as flesh.
 But a plastic doesn’t have to be part of the exotic menagerie at Material ConneXion to impress. Even a common plastic such as nylon offers wow-inducing possibility. It can be silky when serving in a parachute, stretchy when spun into pantyhose, bristly when fixed at the end of your toothbrush, or bushy on a strip of Velcro. House Beautiful swooned over such versatility in a 1947 article titled “Nylon
. . . the Gay Deceiver.”
 However much they differ, all plastics have one thing in common:
they are polymers, which is Greek for “many parts.” They are substances made up of long chains of thousands of atomic units called monomers (Greek for “one part”) linked into giant molecules.
Polymer molecules are absurdly huge compared to the tidy, compact molecules of a substance like water, with its paltry one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms. Polymer molecules can contain tens of thousands of monomers — chain links so long that for years scientists disputed whether they could actually be bonded into a single molecule.
You might as well claim, said one chemist, that “somewhere in Africa an elephant was found who was 1,500 feet long and 300 feet high.” But the molecules did exist, and their hugeness helps account for plastic’s essential feature: its plasticity. Think of the ways a long strand of beads can be manipulated — pulled or stretched, stacked or coiled — compared to what can be done with just a single bead or a few. The lengths and arrangement of the strands help to determine a polymer’s properties: its strength, durability, clarity, flexibility,
elasticity. Chains crowded close together can make for a tough,
rigid plastic bottle, like the kind used to hold detergent. Chains more widely spaced can yield a more flexible bottle ideal for squeezing out ketchup.

It’s often said that we live in the age of plastics. But when, exactly,
did we slip into that epoch? Some say it began in the mid-nineteenth century, when inventors started developing new, malleable semi-
synthetic compounds from plants to replace scarce natural materials such as ivory. Others fix the date to 1907, when Belgian émigré
Leo Baekeland cooked up Bakelite, the first fully synthetic polymer,
made entirely of molecules that couldn’t be found in nature. With the product’s invention, the Bakelite Corporation boasted, humans had transcended the classic taxonomies of the natural world: the animal,
mineral, and vegetable kingdoms. Now we had “a fourth kingdom,
whose boundaries are unlimited.”
 You could also peg the dawn of the plastics age to 1941, when,
shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the director of the board responsible for provisioning the American military advocated the substitution, whenever possible, of plastics for aluminum, brass, and other strategic metals. World War II pulled polymer chemistry out of the lab and into real life. Many of the major plastics we know today
— polyethylene, nylon, acrylic, Styrofoam — got their first marching orders during the war. And having ramped up production to meet military needs, industry inevitably had to turn its synthetic swords into plastic plowshares. As one early plastics executive recalled, by the war’s end it was obvious that “virtually nothing was made from plastic and anything could be.” That’s when plastics truly began infiltrating every pore of daily life, quietly entering our homes, our cars,
our clothes, our playthings, our workplaces, even our bodies.
 In product after product, market after market, plastics challenged traditional materials and won, taking the place of steel in cars, paper and glass in packaging, and wood in furniture. Even Amish buggies are now made partly out of the fiber-reinforced plastic known as fiberglass.
By 1979, production of plastics exceeded that of steel. In an astonishingly brief period, plastic had become the skeleton, the connective tissue, and the slippery skin of modern life.
 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 preexisting 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?