How plastic is taking over the world

Plastic is everywhere; here’s how it conquered the world ABC, RN By Keri Philips and Tiger Webb for Rear Vision, 15 June 17 A hundred years ago, almost everything in our daily lives would have been made of natural materials like wood, leather and cotton. Today, the world we live in is full of things made of plastic. The first plastics were developed as an alternative to ivory. One of the earliest was called celluloid. Semi-synthetic, it was made through mixing camphor and cellulose into a material that, according to historian Jeff Meikle, resembled a kind of baking dough……

The first totally synthetic plastic

In the first decade of the 20th century, a Belgian-American inventor, Leo Baekeland, stumbled upon a form of plastic that could replace shellac…….

World War II fuelled a demand for new plastics. Commercial production exploded in the 1950s, as the big chemical companies — and sole entrepreneurs — looked for ways to turn their wartime discoveries into domestic consumer goods…..

The rise of the plastic bag

By the early 1970s, “plastics” included single-use items: drink bottles, plastic wrap, dry-cleaning bags, garbage bags. There was, Freinkel says, only one place where paper bags still reigned supreme: the checkout……

Professor Sella says, “We now have a real legacy of plastic in the environment.”

Large chunks of plastics take a long time to degrade and end up in gyres at the centre of oceans. On the other side of the scale, micro-plastics are ingested by organisms at every level of the food chain.

“We don’t really understand where this will take us,” says Professor Sella.

Our plastic addiction

Over the last century, plastic has gradually crept into every corner of our lives. For historian Jeff Miekle, it is difficult to imagine life today without it. “Plastics have … created an array of products that could not have existed before.”

As for the negatives, Freinkel reminds us that plastic isn’t the agent: we are. “We use this stuff, and what it does to our lives depends on how we do that.”

“We can take that ingenuity that created some amazing plastic stuff and use it to make useful things for us.

“Or, we can use it to fill the world with silly crap that nobody needs and is going to last for centuries.”http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-14/plastic-how-it-conquered-the-world/8614236