Plastic: A Toxic Love Story

Amazon Exclusive: A Q&A with Author Susan Freinkel Q: Why did you decide to write a book about plastic? A: In San Francisco, where I live, there’s been a lot of talk about the problems of plastic for several years. I decided to try getting through one whole day without touching anything plastic. The absurdity of this experiment became clear ten seconds into the appointed morning when I walked into the bathroom and realized the toilet seat was plastic. So instead, I spent the day writing down everything I touched that was plastic. By day’s end I was staggered to see how thoroughly synthetic materials permeated my life. Like most people, I completely overlooked the extent to which modern life depends on plastic. Q: What did you learn about plastic that most surprised you? A: I was shocked to realize how fast our world became plasticized. In 1940, few plastics existed and scarcely anything was made of plastic. Today, there are thousands of different types of plastic and the average person is never more than three feet from something plastic. Even after years of research, I keep discovering plastic in unexpected places. For instance, the tiny beads in face scrubs are often made of plastic. Or here’s one for the yuck files: It’s also an ingredient of chewing gum. Q: Why is the book subtitled "A Toxic Love Story"? A: In researching the history of plastic, I was struck by how our relationship with it resembled a love affair gone bad. People initially were infatuated with these new materials, eager to use them in every possible way. In the ‘40s, pollsters found that "cellophane" was considered one of the most beautiful words in the English language, after "mother" and "memory." By the 1970s, when I was a teenager, plastic had acquired a much worse reputation; it was the stuff of pink flamingos, shiny suits, tacky furniture. It was synonymous with shoddy and fake. Today we’re discovering truly serious problems because of our reliance on plastic—health hazards, wasting of resources, pollution. And yet every year, the amount of plastic produced and consumed goes up. We’re trapped in an unhealthy dependence, the hallmark of a toxic relationship. Q: Does plastic really last forever? A: The lifespan of a plastic depends on a lot of variables. Some plastics might last less than a year; others can persist for decades or possibly centuries—especially in the ocean. When I started the book in 2008, I took a pair of plastic grocery bags and tacked one onto the fence in my backyard and tied the other to the branch of a nearby tree. Three years later, the bag on the fence is still there looking scarcely the worse for wear. The bag in the tree is gone—but only because the tree died. Q: Did working on the book change your feelings about plastic? A: I became both more appreciative and more worried about plastic than I’d been before. I gained a better understanding of how plastic transformed fields like medicine, or transportation, or construction, making it possible to replace, say, a failing heart valve or build Boeing’s new super-lightweight Dreamliner plane. Early in my research I attended a convention on eco-friendly construction and discovered that "green" builders love Styrofoam because it’s a great insulator and is long-lasting. But many of the pluses plastic provides come with minuses. For instance, the qualities that make Styrofoam a friend of the environment in construction make it a disaster for the environment when it’s used to make disposable cups. Q: With huge environmental issues like climate change or loss of biodiversity facing us, why should we care about plastic? A: For one thing, we’ve produced more plastic in the last decade than the entire previous century. Yet a lot of it is going to trivial one-time uses, which is an incredible waste of a very valuable resource—and one that could be very useful in helping us address the problems posed by climate change. But I also think how we use plastic is symptom and symbol of significant issues, like our dependence on finite fossil fuels, or our daily exposure to hazardous chemicals. Something like the fight over the plastic shopping bag might seem trivial, yet when we grapple with the plastic shopping bag, we’re grappling with our whole throwaway culture—and the environmental problems that culture of convenience has created. Talking about plastics is really a conversation about just how deeply we want to transform the natural world, what kind of legacy we want to leave to the generations that succeed us. Q: Have you changed the ways that you use plastic? A: I am more conscientious about how I use plastic. I’ve really tried to reduce my dependence on single-use plastics, like bags, and to buy more in bulk when possible to reduce packaging waste. Because my family loves fizzy water, we bought a seltzer maker that comes with reusable bottles. The funny thing is how easy it is to overlook the place of plastic in your life—even when you’re writing a book on it! Two years into my research, I was making tea one day when I suddenly realized my electric teakettle was made of plastic. Given what I had learned about the ways heat can accelerate the breakdown of polymer bonds, which allows chemicals to leach out, I decided to swap it out for a metal teakettle. Q: What are the five things people can do to improve their relationship with plastic? A: Unlike many troubled marriages, this is one relationship that can be bettered without a lot of pain: 1. Refuse single-use freebies: Bring your own bag when shopping. Carry a travel mug for your daily caffeine fix. Tell your waiter you don’t need a straw. 2. Reuse where possible: Give that sandwich baggie a week’s workout; use that empty yogurt tub for leftovers. 3. Quit the bottled water habit. You can stay just as hydrated with a reusable bottle made of stainless steel, aluminum, or BPA-free plastic. 4. Learn what you can recycle. Find out what plastics your community recycler accepts. Explore other recycling resources: UPS stores will take back shipping peanuts; many grocery chains will take used bags and plastic film; many office supply chains will take back used printer cartridges. 5. Don’t cook in plastic. Heat can cause hazardous chemicals to leach out of some polymers, so transfer food to glass before microwaving. From Publishers Weekly "What is plastic, really? Where does it come from? How did my life become so permeated by synthetics without my even trying?" Surrounded by plastic and depressed by the political, environmental, and medical consequences of our dependence on it, Freinkel (The American Chestnut) chronicles our history with plastic, "from enraptured embrace to deep disenchantment," through eight household items including the comb, credit card, and soda bottle (celluloid, one of the first synthetics, transformed the comb from a luxury item to an affordable commodity and was once heralded for relieving the pressure on elephants and tortoises for their ivory and shells). She takes readers to factories in China, where women toil 60-hour weeks for a month to make Frisbees; to preemie wards, where the lifesaving vinyl tubes that deliver food and oxygen to premature babies may cause altered thyroid function, allergies, and liver problems later in life. Freinkel's smart, well-written analysis of this love-hate relationship is likely to make plastic lovers take pause, plastic haters reluctantly realize its value, and all of us understand the importance of individual action, political will, and technological innovation in weaning us off our addiction to synthetics. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved. "It turns out that plastic is not only an ongoing environmental peril, but a compulsively interesting story. This well-reported and lively history helps us see the last decades in a different light. Buy it (with cash)."xa0—Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth, founder 350.org "A must-read, and a fun-read, for anyone who wonders how our society became so plastics-saturated and who wants to do something about it."u3000—Annie Leonard, author of The Story of Stuff "In a world glutted and fouled with fake plastic crap we never missed during nearly our entire history, Susan Freinkel's timely book on the subject is the real thing. No animals or children were harmed by its writing, I'm sure—butu3000thanks to her diligence,u3000a whole lot of them just might be saved."xa0—Alan Weisman, author of The World Without Us "Plastic is everywhere, and Susan Freinkel explains why. Plastic: A Toxic Love Story is gracefully written and deeply informative."xa0—Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe "The first step to creating change is understanding, and the first step to understanding anything to do with plastic is reading Susan Freinkel’s compelling, much-needed, and truly brilliant book."xa0—David de Rothschild, Leader of the Plastiki Expedition "Who’d have thought that combs, Frisbees and lighters could have such secret histories and such disturbing futures? Susan Freinkel’s page-turner brings together history, science and culture to help us understand the plastic world that we have wrought, and has become part of us. Although we should all worry that plastics will persist for centuries, Plastic deserves to endure for years to come."xa0—Raj Patel, author of The Value of Nothing "Susan Freinkel’s book exponentially increased my desirous love and my hate for plastic. What a great read—rigorous, smart, inspiring, and as seductive as plastic itself." —Karim Rashid, Designer "What is plastic, really? Where does it come from? How did my life become so permeated by synthetics without my even trying?" Surrounded by plastic and depressed by the political, environmental, and medical consequences of our dependence on it, Freinkel (The American Chestnut) chronicles our history with plastic, "from enraptured embrace to deep disenchantment," through eight household items including the comb, credit card, and soda bottle (celluloid, one of the first synthetics, transformed the comb from a luxury item to an affordable commodity and was once heralded for relieving the pressure on elephants and tortoises for their ivory and shells). She takes readers to factories in China, where women toil 60-hour weeks for $175 a month to make Frisbees; to preemie wards, where the lifesaving vinyl tubes that deliver food and oxygen to premature babies may cause altered thyroid function, allergies, and liver problems later in life. Freinkel's smart, well-written analysis of this love-hate relationship is likely to make plastic lovers take pause, plastic haters reluctantly realize its value, and all of us understand the importance of individual action, political will, and technological innovation in weaning us off our addiction to synthetics . (Apr.)-- Publishers Weekly "An informative treatise on our complicated and dependent relationship with plastic...Freinkel presents a balanced, well-researched investigation into a controversial and versatile human creation." --Kirkus "Susan Freinkel had me from the minute I finished reading about her attempt to try to live without plastic for a week...Ms. Freinkel has penned a fascinating—and at times extremely disturbing—book about material that has literally invaded and, as her research reveals, infected every aspect of modern life."- — From the Inside Flap It turns out that plastic is not only an ongoing environmental peril, but a compulsively interesting story. Buy it (with cash). Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth, founder of 350.org Susan Freinkel s book exponentially increased my desirous love and my hate for plastic. What a great read rigorous, smart, inspiring, and as seductive as plastic itself. Karim Rashid, Designer Plastic built the modern world. Where would we be without pacemakers, polyester, computers, cell phones, sneakers, or chewing gum? (Plastic in gum? Yes!) But a century into our love affair with plastic, the romance is starting to fray. Plastics draw on dwindling fossil fuels, leach harmful chemicals, litter landscapes, and destroy marine life. And yet each year we use and consume more; we ve produced as much plastic in the past decade as we did in the entire twentieth century. We re trapped in an unhealthy dependence a toxic relationship. In this engaging and eye-opening book, journalist Susan Freinkel shows that we have reached a crisis point. She treks through history, science, and the global economy to assess the real impact of plastic on our lives. Freinkel tells her story through eight familiar plastic objects: comb, chair, Frisbee, IV bag, disposable lighter, grocery bag, soda bottle, and credit card. Each one illuminates a different facet of our synthetic world, and together they give us a new way of thinking about a substance that has become the defining medium and metaphor of our age. Her conclusion? We cannot stay on our plastic-paved path. And we don t have to. Plastic points the way toward a new creative partnership with the material we love to hate but can t seem to live without." Praise for Plastic: “In a world glutted and fouled with fake plastic crap we never missed during nearly our entire history, Susan Freinkel’s timely book on the subject is the real thing. No animals or children were harmed by its writing, I’m sure—but thanks to her diligence, a whole lot of them just might be saved.”—Alan Weisman, author of The World Without Us “Plastic is everywhere, and Susan Freinkel explains why. Plastic: A Toxic Love Story is gracefully written and deeply informative.”—Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe “The first step to creating change is understanding, and the first step to understanding anything to do with plastic is reading Susan Freinkel’s compelling, much-needed, and truly brilliant book.”—David de Rothschild, leader of the Plastiki Expedition “Who’d have thought that combs, Frisbees, and lighters could have such secret histories and such disturbing futures? Susan Freinkel’s page-turner brings together history, science, and culture to help us understand the plastic world that we have wrought and that has become part of us. Although we should all worry that plastics will persist for centuries, Plastic deserves to endure for years to come.”—Raj Patel, author of The Value of Nothing “A must-read, and a fun -read, for anyone who wonders how our society became so plastics-saturated and who wants to do something about it.”—Annie Leonard, author of The Story of Stuff SUSAN FREINKEL has written for the New York Times , Discover , Smithsonian , and Health , among other publications. She is the author of The American Chestnut , which Mary Roach called “a perfect book” and Richard Preston described as “a beautifully written account” filled with “top-notch” writing and reporting. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. I n t r o d u c t i o n Plasticville In 1950, a Philadelphia toy company came out with a new accessoryfor electric-train enthusiasts: snap-together kits of plasticbuildings for a place it called Plasticville, U.S.A. Sets of plasticpeople to populate the town were optional.xa0It started as a sleepy, rural place where trains might roll past redsidedbarns to pull into a village with snug Cape Cod homes, a policedepartment, a fire station, a schoolhouse, and a quaint whitechurch with a steeple. But over the years, the product line spreadinto a bustling burb of housing tracts filled with two-story Colonialsand split-level ranch houses and a Main Street that boasted a bank,a combination hardware store/pharmacy, a modern supermarket, atwo-story hospital, and a town hall modeled on Philadelphia's historicIndependence Hall. Eventually Plasticville even gained a driveinmotel, an airport, and its own TV station, WPLA.xa0Today, of course, we all live in Plasticville. But it wasn't clear to mejust how plastic my world had become until I decided to go an entireday without touching anything plastic. The absurdity of this experimentbecame apparent about ten seconds into the appointed morningwhen I shuffled bleary-eyed into the bathroom: the toilet seatwas plastic. I quickly revised my plan. I would spend the day writingdown everything I touched that was plastic.xa0Within forty-five minutes I had filled an entire page in my PenwayComposition 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'ssome of what I wrote down as I made my way through my earlymorningroutine: Alarm clock, mattress, heating pad, eyeglasses, toilet seat, toothbrush,toothpaste tube and cap, wallpaper, Corian counter, lightswitch, tablecloth, Cuisinart, electric teakettle, refrigerator handle,bag of frozen strawberries, scissors handle, yogurt container, lidfor can of honey, juice pitcher, milk bottle, seltzer bottle, lid of cinnamonjar, bread bag, cellophane wrapping of box of tea, packagingof 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 toscoop out the kibble, dog leash, Walkman, newspaper bag, straypacket of mayo on sidewalk, garbage can. "Wow!' said my daughter, her eyes widening as she scanned the rapidlygrowing list.xa0By the end of the day I had filled four pages in my notebook. Myrule was to record each item just once, even those I touched repeatedly,like the fridge handle. Otherwise I could have filled the wholenotebook. As it was, the list included 196 entries, ranging from largeitems, like the dashboard of my minivan ' really, the entire interior" to minutiae, like the oval stickers adorning the apples I cut upfor lunch. Packaging, not surprisingly, made up a big part of the list.xa0I'd never thought of myself as having a particularly plastic-filledlife. I live in a house that's nearly a hundred years old. I like naturalfabrics, old furniture, food cooked from scratch. I would have saidmy home harbors less plastic than the average American's ' mainlyfor aesthetic reasons, not political ones. Was I kidding myself? Thenext day I tracked everything I touched that wasn't made of plastic.By bedtime, I had recorded 102 items in my notebook, giving me aplastic/nonplastic ratio of nearly two to one. Here's a sample from thefirst hour of the day: Cotton sheets, wood floor, toilet paper, porcelain tap, strawberries,mango, granite-tile countertop, stainless steel spoon, stainless steelfaucet, paper towel, cardboard egg carton, eggs, orange juice, aluminumpie plate, wool rug, glass butter dish, butter, cast-iron griddle,syrup bottle, wooden breadboard, bread, aluminum colander,ceramic plates, glasses, glass doorknob, cotton socks, woodendining-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 depositedamid those leaves, twigs, and grass). Oddly, I found it harder and more boring to maintain the nonplasticlist. Because I'd pledged not to count items more than once, afterthe first flood of entries, there wasn't that much variety ' at leastnot 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 onthe nonplastic list. The plastic list, by contrast, reflected a cornucopiaof materials, a dazzling variety of the synthetica that has come to constitutesuch a huge, and yet strangely invisible, part of modern life.xa0Pondering the lengthy list of plastic in my surroundings, I realizedI actually knew almost nothing about it. What is plastic, really?Where does it come from? How did my life become so permeated bysynthetics without my even trying? Looking over the list I could seeplastic products that I appreciated for making my life easier and moreconvenient (my wash-and-wear clothes, my appliances, that plasticbag for my dog's poop) and plastic things I knew I could just as easilydo without (Styrofoam cups, sandwich baggies, my nonstick pan).xa0I'd never really looked hard at life in Plasticville. But news reportsabout toxic toys and baby bottles seemed to suggest that the costsmight outweigh the benefits. I began to wonder if I'd unwittingly ex-posed my own children to chemicals that could affect their developmentand health. That hard-plastic water bottle I'd included in mydaughter's lunch since kindergarten has been shown to leach a chemicalthat mimics estrogen. Was that why she'd sprouted breast buds atnine? Other questions quickly followed. What was happening to theplastic things I diligently dropped into my recycling bin? Were theyactually being recycled? Or were my discards ending up far away inthe ocean in vast currents of plastic trash? Were there seals somewherechoking on my plastic bottle tops? Should I quit using plasticshopping bags? Would that soda bottle really outlive my children andme? Did it matter? Should I care? What does it really mean to live inPlasticville? The word plastic is itself cause for confusion. We use it in the singular,and indiscriminately, to refer to any artificial material. But thereare tens of thousands of different plastics.* And rather than makingup a single family of materials, they're more a collection of looselyrelated clans.xa0I got a glimpse of the nearly inexhaustible possibilities containedin that one little word when I visited a place in New York calledMaterial ConneXion, a combination of a consultancy and a materialslarder for designers pondering what to make their products outof. Its founder described it as a 'petting zoo for new materials.' AndI did feel like I was in a tactile and visual wonderland as I browsedsome of the thousands of plastics on file. There was a thick acrylicslab that looked like a pristine frozen waterfall; jewel-colored blobsof gel that begged to be squeezed; a flesh-toned fabric that looked andfelt like an old person's skin. ('Ugh, I'd never want to wear anythinglike that," one staffer commented.) There were swatches of fake fur,green netting, gray shag rug, fake blades of grass, fabric that holdsthe memory of how it's folded, fabric that can absorb solar energyand 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 endof the book.veined marble, smoky topaz, dull concrete, speckled granite, grainedwood. I touched surfaces that were matte, shiny, bumpy, sandpapery,fuzzy, squishy, feathery, cool as metal, warm and yielding as flesh.xa0But a plastic doesn't have to be part of the exotic menagerie atMaterial ConneXion to impress. Even a common plastic such as nylonoffers wow-inducing possibility. It can be silky when serving ina parachute, stretchy when spun into pantyhose, bristly when fixedat the end of your toothbrush, or bushy on a strip of Velcro. HouseBeautiful swooned over such versatility in a 1947 article titled 'Nylon. . . the Gay Deceiver."xa0However much they differ, all plastics have one thing in common:they are polymers, which is Greek for 'many parts.' They aresubstances made up of long chains of thousands of atomic unitscalled monomers (Greek for 'one part') linked into giant molecules.Polymer molecules are absurdly huge compared to the tidy, compactmolecules of a substance like water, with its paltry one oxygen andtwo hydrogen atoms. Polymer molecules can contain tens of thousandsof monomers ' chain links so long that for years scientistsdisputed whether they could actually be bonded into a single molecule.You might as well claim, said one chemist, that 'somewhere inAfrica an elephant was found who was 1,500 feet long and 300 feethigh.' But the molecules did exist, and their hugeness helps accountfor plastic's essential feature: its plasticity. Think of the ways a longstrand of beads can be manipulated ' pulled or stretched, stackedor coiled ' compared to what can be done with just a single beador a few. The lengths and arrangement of the strands help to determinea 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 morewidely spaced can yield a more flexible bottle ideal for squeezing outketchup. 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-nineteenthcentury, when inventors started developing new, malleable semi-synthetic compounds from plants to replace scarce natural materialssuch as ivory. Others fix the date to 1907, when Belgian émigréLeo Baekeland cooked up Bakelite, the first fully synthetic polymer,made entirely of molecules that couldn't be found in nature. With theproduct's invention, the Bakelite Corporation boasted, humans hadtranscended the classic taxonomies of the natural world: the animal,mineral, and vegetable kingdoms. Now we had 'a fourth kingdom,whose boundaries are unlimited."xa0You could also peg the dawn of the plastics age to 1941, when,shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the director of the boardresponsible for provisioning the American military advocated thesubstitution, whenever possible, of plastics for aluminum, brass, andother strategic metals. World War II pulled polymer chemistry outof the lab and into real life. Many of the major plastics we know today" polyethylene, nylon, acrylic, Styrofoam ' got their first marchingorders during the war. And having ramped up production to meetmilitary needs, industry inevitably had to turn its synthetic swordsinto plastic plowshares. As one early plastics executive recalled, bythe war's end it was obvious that 'virtually nothing was made fromplastic and anything could be.' That's when plastics truly began infiltratingevery pore of daily life, quietly entering our homes, our cars,our clothes, our playthings, our workplaces, even our bodies.xa0In product after product, market after market, plastics challengedtraditional materials and won, taking the place of steel in cars, paperand glass in packaging, and wood in furniture. Even Amish buggiesare now made partly out of the fiber-reinforced plastic known as fiberglass.By 1979, production of plastics exceeded that of steel. In anastonishingly brief period, plastic had become the skeleton, the connectivetissue, and the slippery skin of modern life.xa0Indisputably, plastic does offer advantages over natural materials.Yet that doesn't fully account for its sudden ubiquity. Plasticvillebecame possible ' and perhaps even inevitable ' with the rise of thepetrochemical industry, the behemoth that came into being in the1920s and '30s when chemical companies innovating new polymersbegan to align with the petroleum companies that controlled the essentialingredients for building those polymers.xa0Oil refineries run 24-7 and are continuously generating byproductsthat must be disposed of, such as ethylene gas. Find a use for thatgas, and your byproduct becomes a potential economic opportunity.Ethylene gas, as British chemists discovered in the early 1930s, canbe made into the polymer polyethylene, which is now widely usedin packaging. Another byproduct, propylene, can be redeployed as afeedstock for polypropylene, a plastic used in yogurt cups, microwavabledishes, disposable diapers, and cars. Still another is the chemicalacrylonitrile, which can be made into acrylic fiber, making possiblethat quintessential emblem of our synthetic age AstroTurf.xa0Plastics are a small piece of the petroleum industry, representinga minor fraction of the fossil fuels we consume. But the economicimperatives of the petroleum industry have powered the riseof Plasticville. As environmentalist Barry Commoner argued: 'Byits own internal logic, each new petrochemical process generates apowerful tendency to proliferate further products and displace preexistingones.' The continuous flow of oil fueled not just cars but anentire culture based on the consumption of new products made ofplastics. This move into Plasticville wasn't a considered decision, theresult of some great economic crisis or political debate. Neither didit take into account social good or environmental impact or what wewere supposed to do with all our plastic things at the end of theiruseful lives. Plastic promised abundance on the cheap, and when inhuman history has that ever been a bad thing? No wonder we becameaddicted to plastic, or, rather, to the convenience and comfort, safetyand security, fun and frivolity that plastic brought.xa0The amount of plastic the world consumes annually has steadilyrisen over the past seventy years, from almost nil in 1940 to closing inon six hundred billion pounds today. We became plastic people reallyjust in the space of a single generation. In 1960, the average Americanconsumed about thirty pounds of plastic products. Today, we're eachconsuming more than three hundred pounds of plastics a year, generating more than three hundred billion dollars in sales. Consideringthat 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 ourlives, suggests a deep and enduring relationship. But our feelings towardplastic are a complicated mix of dependence and distrust ' akinto what an addict feels toward his or her substance of choice. Initially,we reveled in the seeming feats of alchemy by which scientists producedone miraculous material after another out of little more thancarbon and water and air. It's 'wonderful how du Pont is improvingon nature," one woman gushed after visiting the company's WonderWorld of Chemistry exhibit at a 1936 Texas fair. A few years later,people told pollsters they considered cellophane the third most beautifulword in the English language, right behind mother and memory.We were prepared, in our infatuation, to believe only the very bestof our partner in modernity. Plastics heralded a new era of materialfreedom, liberation from nature's stinginess. In the plastic age, rawmaterials would not be in short supply or constrained by their innateproperties, such as the rigidity of wood or the reactivity of metal.Synthetics could substitute for, or even precisely imitate, scarce andprecious materials. Plastic, admirers predicted, would deliver us intoa cleaner, brighter world in which all would enjoy a 'universal stateof democratic luxury."xa0It's hard to say when the polymer rapture began to fade, but itwas gone by 1967 when the film The Graduate came out. Somewherealong the line ' aided surely by a flood of products such as pink flamingos,vinyl siding, Corfam shoes ' plastic's penchant for inexpensiveimitation came to be seen as cheap ersatz. So audiences knew exactlywhy Benjamin Braddock was so repelled when a family friendtook him aside for some helpful career advice: 'I just want to say oneword to you . . . Plastics!' The word no longer conjured an enticinghorizon of possibility but rather a bland, airless future, as phony asMrs. Robinson's smile.xa0Today, few other materials we rely on carry such a negative set ofassociations or stir such visceral disgust. Norman Mailer called it 'amalign force loose in the universe . . . the social equivalent of cancer."We may have created plastic, but in some fundamental way it remainsessentially alien ' ever seen as somehow unnatural (though it'sreally no less natural than concrete, paper, steel, or any other manufacturedmaterial). One reason may have to do with its preternaturalendurance. Unlike traditional materials, plastic won't dissolve or rustor break down ' at least, not in any useful time frame. Those longpolymer chains are built to last, which means that much of the plasticwe'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 enrapturedembrace to deep disenchantment to the present-day mix ofapathy and confusion. It's played out across the most transformativecentury in humankind's long project to shape the material world toits 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 eightto 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 livein Plasticville, enmeshed in a web of materials that are rightly consideredboth the miracle and the menace of modern life. Throughthese objects I examine the history and culture of plastics and howplastic things are made. I look at the politics of plastics and how syntheticsare affecting our health and the environment, and I exploreefforts to develop more sustainable ways of producing and disposingof plastics. Each object opens a window onto one of Plasticville'smany precincts. It is my hope that taken together, they shed light onour relationship with plastic and suggest how, with effort, it mightbecome a healthier one.xa0Why did I decide to focus on such small, common things? Nonehave the razzle-dazzle that cutting-edge polymer science is delivering,such as smart plastics that can mend themselves and plasticsthat conduct electricity. But those are not the plastic things that playmeaningful roles in our everyday lives. I also chose not to use anydurable goods, such as cars or appliances or electronics. No questionany of these could have offered insights into the age of plastics. Butthe material story of a car or an iPhone encompasses far more thanjust plastics. Simple objects, properly engaged, distill issues to theiressence. As historian Robert Friedel notes, it's in the small things'that our material world is made."xa0Simple objects sometimes tell tangled stories, and the story of plasticsis riddled with paradoxes. We enjoy an unprecedented level ofmaterial abundance and yet it often feels impoverishing, like diggingthrough a box packed with Styrofoam peanuts and finding nothingelse there. We take natural substances created over millions of years,fashion them into products designed for a few minutes' use, and thenreturn them to the planet as litter that we've engineered to never goaway. We enjoy plastics-based technologies that can save lives asnever before but that also pose insidious threats to human health.We bury in landfills the same kinds of energy-rich molecules thatwe've scoured the far reaches of the earth to find and excavate. Wesend plastic waste overseas to become the raw materials for finishedproducts that are sold back to us. We're embroiled in pitched politicalfights in which plastic's sharpest critics and staunchest defendersmake the same case: these materials are too valuable to waste.xa0These paradoxes contribute to our growing anguish over plastics.Yet I was surprised to discover how many of the plastics-related issuesthat dominate headlines today had surfaced in earlier decades.Studies that show traces of plastics in human tissue go back to the1950s. The first report of plastic trash in the ocean was made in the1960s. Suffolk County, New York, enacted the first ban on plasticpackaging in 1988. In every case, the issues seized our attention for afew months or even years and then slipped off the public radar.xa0But the stakes are much higher now. We've produced nearly asmuch plastic in the first decade of this millennium as we did in theentire twentieth century. As Plasticville sprawls farther across thelandscape, we become more thoroughly entrenched in the way oflife it imposes. It is increasingly difficult to believe that this pace ofplasticization is sustainable, that the natural world can long endureour ceaseless 'improving on nature.' But can we start engaging inthe problems plastics pose? Is it possible to enter into a relationshipwith these materials that is safer for us and more sustainable for ouroffspring? Is there a future for Plasticville? Read more