polyethylene (HDPE); low-density polyethylene (LDPE); linear low-density polyethylene (LLDPE); and polyethylene terephthalate (PET).14 The material qualities that make plastics so useful also make them flawed: everlasting, hydrocarbon-dependent, and easily fused with other substances. Instead of breaking down on a molecular level, plastics fragment into tiny pieces and persist in the environment. Our bodies and ecosystems are filled with petrochemicals and microplastics. Every stage of the plastics lifecycle, from extraction to refining to consumption and waste, poses significant risks to human health.15 Plastics production releases toxic substances that are linked to cancer, neurological damage, and reproductive and developmental problems.16 Toxic plastic pollution disproportionately impacts low-income and minority ethnic communities around the world.17 Millions of animals are killed by plastics every year, primarily through starvation and entanglement.18 The global environmental, health, and economic costs of plastic pollution are incalculable.
The list of facts goes on, all available with the tap of a finger on the Web. Unlike with global heating, there are no deniers of the plastics crisis. It is too tangible and traceable. Big brands Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Nestlé have been singled out by ‘Break Free From Plastic’ activists as the world’s worst plastic polluters, based on an annual audit of hundreds of thousands of plastic items collected by volunteers.19 Further upstream along the plastics value chain, a report by the Minderloo Foundation revealed that twenty major plastics producers (led by ExxonMobil, Dow, and Sinopec) accounted for more than half of all single-use plastic waste generated globally in 2019, and 100 accounted for more than 90%.20 Instead of deniers, there are detractors: people who dismiss the plastics crisis as a distraction from the climate crisis, or who insist that it is eminently solvable through improving recycling and waste management systems.
Many plastic facts are widely accepted, while some are more contested. Researchers have pointed out that predictions of how many fish or plastics will be in the sea in the future, for example, are speculative and uncertain.21 The petrochemical and plastics industries have taken advantage of public uncertainty about plastic facts to repeatedly cast doubt on scientific evidence about plastic toxicity in order to protect their markets.22 They also claim that plastic packaging is more environmentally friendly than alternative materials, relying on assumptions about single-use packaging markets and consumer behaviour.23 Other plastic facts are open to selective interpretation, such as the finding in 2018 that 90% of plastic waste in the ocean comes from just ten rivers, eight in Asia and two in Africa.24 This led industry representatives to say: ‘We know where the source of the problem is,’ pointing to inadequate waste management infrastructure in these regions.25 However, their framing occludes another fact: the highly unequal global trade in contaminated plastic waste. The largest exporters of plastic waste are the United States, Germany, and Japan. Since China announced a ban on plastic waste imports in 2017, global waste exports have been redirected to countries in Southeast Asia, which have struggled to cope with the inundation.26 Several of these countries have returned contaminated shipments, and Thailand and Vietnam have announced plans to ban all plastic imports, but the traffic continues.27 The global plastic waste trade is the latest frontier of ‘waste colonialism’, a term that politicians and activists have used to describe the unjust international trade in hazardous waste.28
After a deluge of depressing facts, the majority of books, films, and reports about the plastics crisis reach the same wilfully hopeful conclusion: that you can make a difference, by reducing your consumption of single-use plastics, recycling and reusing, and, if you’re really keen, going on beach clean-ups and raising community awareness. Some anti-plastic campaigners have taken this mission to heart, writing detailed guidelines about how to live plastic-free within plastic-filled societies.29 Other activists have taken aim at corporations. For example, the environmental NGO Greenpeace, the Break Free From Plastic movement, and the Changing Markets Foundation (which works in partnership with NGOs) have added plastic pollution to their long list of fossil fuel company sins and highlighted the ‘false solutions’ and ‘paper promises’ promoted by industry.30 However, these claims tend to be dismissed by policymakers and the public as ideological, following a predictable script of naming and shaming the ‘top polluters’. This book makes a different kind of intervention. Rather than laying bare the contours of the crisis or lambasting the top polluters, the book asks: how did we get to this point, and what can we do about it? To begin with, where did the drive to make so much plastic come from?
Origin Stories
‘I’m glad we have the Tupperware lady with us,’ our instructor said to a room of twenty-five participants, mostly male, at a workshop on petrochemical markets in London.31 The instructor was a former petrochemical manager with decades of experience in the industry, and his material was showing signs of ageing. He fetched some tatty-looking plastic containers from his satchel and laid them out on the corporate boardroom-style table, before launching into a discussion of polyethylene. ‘Tupperware was the first commercial product from polyethylene, and the beginning of home-selling,’ he began. Most of his plastic origin stories started with some kind of anecdote. Another one was about men using epoxy resins to fix their wives’ broken teacups: ‘Guys, this might work at home, but not in industry.’ The ‘Tupperware lady’ and I made eye contact after this comment, and we shook our heads together.
The plastics industry is used to ‘tired old jokes about plastic’, as the industry’s trade magazine referred in 1986 to the famous line from the 1968 film The Graduate: ‘I just want to say one word to you … just one word … plastics. There’s a great future in plastics.’32 Today, plastics still carry associations with stereotypical images of post-war American life. Other old quotes have resurfaced from this period, acquiring ironic status with the benefit of hindsight. For example, there is the brazen remark from Lloyd Stouffer, the editor of Modern Packaging Magazine, that the ‘future of the industry is in the trash can’.33 This quote is from a speech that Stouffer gave to a plastics industry conference in 1956, where he argued that industry needed to switch from making reusable plastics to making single-use plastics, in order to increase their profits. It echoes the theme of the 1955 photo in Life Magazine captioned ‘Throwaway Living’, which has done rounds on social media, of a family celebrating amidst a swirling array of disposable household products, which promise to cut down on household chores.
One of the most prescient quotes circulating about plastic is by the French cultural theorist Roland Barthes, from his 1957 book Mythologies (translated into English in 1972). Barthes observed that ‘more than a substance, plastic is the very idea of its infinite transformation’, and reached an ominous conclusion: ‘The hierarchy of substances is abolished: a single one replaces them all: the whole world can be plasticized, and even life itself since, we are told, they are beginning to make plastic aortas.’34 This sounds like both a self-fulfilling prophecy and a dare. Indeed, industry realized the tantalising prospects of playing God with nature, and predictably ignored the Faustian implications. As a plastics executive exclaimed towards the end of the Second World War: ‘[V]irtually nothing was made from plastic and anything could be.’35
It’s difficult to imagine the world before it became plasticized. The proliferation of plastics around the planet has been exponential, from the first plastics of the nineteenth century, to 2 million metric tonnes of plastics produced annually in 1950, to 368 million tonnes of annual plastics production in 2019.36 Most histories of plastic begin with the invention of Parkesine in the mid-nineteenth century, a semi-synthetic plastic derived from cellulose that was used as a cheap substitute for ivory and tortoiseshell accessories.37 According to environmental sociologist Rebecca Altman, a less-known story about celluloid is the fact that it ‘accelerated the demand for camphor, a tree product used as a solvent and plasticizer’, due to the rapid expansion of the celluloid market in the late nineteenth century for use in photographic and cinematic film.38 Altman contends that the early history of bioplastics (plastics made from trees and plants) anticipated many of the environmental health and labour injustices
