Plastic Page 2

  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

  IF 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.

  Plant cellulose was the raw material for the earliest plastics, and with peak oil looming, it is being looked at again as a base for a new generation of "green" plastics. But most of today's plastics are made of hydrocarbon molecules—packets of carbon and hydrogen—derived from the refining of oil and natural gas. Consider ethylene, a gas released in the processing of both substances. It's a sociable molecule consisting of four hydrogen atoms and two carbon atoms linked in the chemical equivalent of a double handshake. With a little chemical nudging those carbon atoms release one bond, allowing each to reach out and grab the carbon in another ethylene molecule. Repeat the process thousands of times and voila!, you've got a new giant molecule, polyethylene, one of the most common and versatile plastics. Depending on how it's processed, the plastic can be used to wrap a sandwich or tether an astronaut during a walk in deep space.

  This New York Times dispatch is more than a hundred and fifty years old, and yet it sounds surprisingly modern: elephants, the paper warned in 1867, were in grave danger of being "numbered with extinct species" because of humans' insatiable demand for the ivory in their tusks. Ivory, at the time, was used for all manner of things, from buttonhooks to boxes, piano keys to combs. But one of the biggest uses was for billiard balls. Billiards had come to captivate upper-crust society in the United States as well as in Europe. Every estate, every mansion had a billiards table, and by the mid-1800s, there was growing concern that there would soon be no more elephants left to keep the game tables stocked with balls. The situation was most dire in Ceylon, source of the ivory that made the best billiard balls. There, in the northern part of the island, the Times reported, "upon the reward of a few shillings per head being offered by the authorities, 3,500 pachyderms were dispatched in less than three years by the natives." All told, at least one million pounds of ivory were consumed each year, sparking fears of an ivory shortage. "Long before the elephants are no more and the mammoths used up," the Times hoped, "an adequate substitute may [be] found."

  Ivory wasn't the only item in nature's vast larder that was starting to run low. The hawksbill turtle, that unhappy supplier of the shell used to fashion combs, was becoming scarcer. Even cattle horn, another natural plastic that had been used by American comb makers since before the Revolutionary War, was becoming less available as ranchers stopped dehorning their cattle.

  In 1863, so the story goes, a New York billiards supplier ran a newspaper ad offering "a handsome fortune," ten thousand dollars in gold, to anyone who could come up with a suitable alternative for ivory. John Wesley Hyatt, a young journeyman printer in Upstate New York, read the ad and decided he could do it. Hyatt had no formal training in chemistry, but he did have a knack for invention—at the age of twenty-three, he'd patented a knife sharpener. Setting up in a shack behind his home, he began experimenting with various combinations of solvents and a doughy mixture made of nitric acid and cotton. (That nitric acid-cotton combination, called guncotton, was daunting to work with because it was highly flammable, even explosive. For a while it was used as a substitute for gunpowder until producers of it got tired of having their factories blow up.)

  As he worked in his homemade lab, Hyatt was building on decades of invention and innovation that had been spurred not only by the limited quantities of natural materials but also by their physical limitations. The Victorian era was fascinated with natural plastics such as rubber and shellac. As historian Robert Friedel pointed out, they saw in these substances the first hints of ways to transcend the vexing limits of wood and iron and glass. Here were materials that were malleable but also amenable to being hardened into a final manufactured form. In an era already being rapidly transformed by industrialization, that was an alluring combination of qualities—one hearkening to both the solid past and the tantalizingly fluid future. Nineteenth-century patent books are filled with inventions involving combinations of cork, sawdust, rubbers, and gums, even blood and milk protein, all designed to yield materials that had some of the qualities we now ascribe to plastic. These plastic prototypes found their way into a few decorative items, such as daguerreotype cases, but they were really only intimations of things to come. The noun plastic had not yet been coined—and wouldn't be until the early twentieth century—but we were already dreaming in plastic.

  Hyatt's breakthrough came in 1869. After years of trial and error, Hyatt ran an experiment that yielded a whitish material that had "the consistency of shoe leather" but the capacity to do much more than sole a pair of shoes. This was a malleable substance that could be made as hard as horn. It shrugged off water and oils. It could be molded into a shape or pressed paper-thin and then cut or sawed into usable forms. It was created from a natural polymer—the cellulose in the cotton—but had a versatility none of the known natural plastics possessed. Hyatt's brother Isaiah, a born marketer, dubbed the new material celluloid, meaning "like cellulose."

  While celluloid would prove a wonderful substitute for ivory, Hyatt apparently never collected the ten-thousand-dollar prize. Perhaps that's because celluloid didn't make very good billiard balls—at least not at first. It lacked the bounce and resilience of ivory, and it was highly volatile. The first balls Hyatt made produced a loud crack, like a shotgun blast, when they knocked into each other. One Colorado saloonkeeper wrote Hyatt that "he didn't mind, but every time the balls collided, every man in the room pulled a gun."

  However, it was an ideal material for combs. As Hyatt noted in one of his early patents, celluloid transcended the deficiencies that plagued many traditional comb materials. When it got wet, it didn't get slimy, like wood, or corrode, like metal. It didn't turn brittle, like rubber, or become cracked and discolored, like natural ivory. "Obviously none of the other materials ... would produce a comb possessing the many excellent qualities and inherent superiorities of a comb made of celluloid," Hyatt wrote in one of his patent applications. And while it was sturdier and steadier than most natural materials, it could, with effort, be made to look like many of them.

  Celluloid could be rendered with the rich creamy hues and striations of the finest tusks from Ceylon, a faux material marketed as French Ivory. It could be mottled in browns and ambers to emulate tortoiseshell; traced with veining to look like marble; infused with the bright colors of coral, lapis lazuli, or carnelian to resemble those and other semiprecious stones; or blackened to look like ebony or jet. Celluloid made it possible to produce counterfeits so exact that they deceived "even the eye of the expert," as Hyatt's company boasted in one pamphlet. "As petroleum came to the relief of the whale," the pamphlet
stated, so "has celluloid given the elephant, the tortoise, and the coral insect a respite in their native haunts; and it will no long­er be necessary to ransack the earth in pursuit of substances which are constantly growing scarcer."

  Of course, scarcity has long been key to the collection of qualities that make an object luxurious and valuable. There are few things we long for more insistently than those that are just beyond our reach. The writer O. Henry captured the sting—and ultimate emptiness—of that longing in his 1906 story "The Gift of the Magi." Della, the young wife, falls in love with a set of combs she spies in a store on Broadway: "Beautiful combs, pure tortoise shell, with jewelled rims ... They were expensive combs, she knew, and her heart had simply craved and yearned over them without the least hope of possession." There is no way Della can afford such combs, not on her husband's twenty-dollar-a-week salary. Nor, it seems, does Della come from a family that might bequeath such exquisite heirlooms. Living in an eight-dollar-a-month flat that looks out on an airshaft, saving pennies "one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher," Della at the start of the story defines her world by what she lacks rather than what she has. Yet in the end that nagging sense of lack—the driver of modern consumption—is not what motivates Della. On Christmas Eve, she cuts and sells her hair—her proudest possession—to buy a watch fob for her husband's treasured gold watch. Meanwhile, he sells the watch to purchase Della her tortoiseshell heart's desire. In that pair of selfless acts, both define themselves by what they give up—what they don't have—rather than by what they hope to consume.