and celluloid production led to the violent displacement of Indigenous communities, deforestation, environmental destruction, and workplace hazards. The expression ‘to be gassed’ originated in nineteenth-century vulcanized rubber factories, where low-wage workers suffered from a range of neurological problems due to toxic exposures.39 Viscose rayon, or ‘fake silk’, a fabric derived from cellulose, was also deadly to workers, leading to ‘acute insanity in those it poisoned’.40
We touched on the early history of rubber at the workshop on petrochemical markets, as part of the C4 (four carbon bonds) butadiene value chain. Our instructor showed us a slide about the first rubber boom from 1879 to 1912, casually observing that ‘natural rubber was Indigenous to Brazil, but all of the rubber trees in Brazil were killed off’.41 Then he described how the British explorer Henry Wickham ‘borrowed’ 70,000 rubber seeds from Brazil, brought them to Kew Gardens in London, and set up plantations in Sri Lanka and Malaysia. However, the violence of this colonial history was only implied, as a taken-for-granted backdrop to the key story behind all plastic origin stories: chemical innovation, exemplified by the scientific achievement of duplicating nature in synthetic form.
The first fully synthetic plastic, Bakelite, was produced in 1907, a thermoset plastic that was hard and strong, but could not be remelted or remoulded. During the polymer science revolution of the 1920s and 1930s in Western Europe and the United States, a vast array of thermoplastics (mouldable at high temperatures) were synthesized for commercial use: polyvinyl chloride (PVC) in 1926; polystyrene in 1930; polyethylene in 1933; nylon in 1935; and polytetrafluoroethylene (later known as Teflon) in 1938. Historians of science and business typically focus on the key inventors and company rivalries during this period of intensive scientific innovation, with the interwar period as a backdrop.42 It was the advent of the Second World War, though, that catapulted plastics onto the world stage of mass consumption.
The Second World War brought unprecedented demands for synthetic rubber, high-octane gasoline (using polymerized chemical additives), parachutes, aircraft components, bazooka barrels, mortar fuses, helmet liners, radar insulation, and a wide range of other military plastics uses.43 Plastics were even crucial for the atom bomb: fluorocarbon plastics (related to polytetrafluoroethylene) were used to contain the volatile gases.44 The war sparked the rapid growth of the petrochemical industry, which began using the by-products of oil (rather than coal) to create plastic resins, the building blocks of plastic products. Massive petrochemical plants sprang up next to oil refineries in the United States and Europe. Anticipating the glut of petrochemical capacity after the war, major chemical companies began to search for new uses for petrochemical products. DuPont started designing prototypes of plastic houseware products that could be marketed to consumers, with the advertising slogan ‘Better Things for Better Living … through Chemistry’.45
The petrochemical and plastics industries, like many modern capitalist industries, grew out of war. Yet there is an even darker side to this origin story. In the interwar period, the German chemical conglomerate IG Farben, one of the main players in the polymer science revolution, led an international cartel of corporations that restricted global trade in synthetic oil and rubber. During the Second World War, IG Farben operated a concentration camp using slave labour on one of its industrial sites, conducted medical experiments on prisoners, and supplied the toxic gas Zyklon B to the concentration camps.46 In 1941, the United States conducted an anti-trust investigation into Standard Oil (now Exxon) and its six subsidiaries for conspiring with IG Farben to restrict trade, indicting three corporate leaders, who resigned.47 Twenty-three of IG Farben’s directors were tried by the US Military Tribunal sitting at Nuremberg between 1947 and 1949 for war crimes and crimes against humanity, thirteen of whom were convicted. This was a hallmark international case for holding business leaders responsible for corporate crimes.48
In the aftermath of the Second World War, the petrochemical cartels dissolved. In 1951, IG Farben was broken up into different companies, including BASF, Bayer, and Hoechst, which each gained their own legal identities. However, tacit cooperation continued between the leading American and European petrochemical companies.49 This laid the historical foundations of industrial collaboration and collusion that continued in the toxic scandals of later years. The exponential growth of plastics in the post-war period was not an inevitable outcome of material innovation, as it is often framed, but a legacy of war.
Unlimited Plastics
The European plastics industry celebrated ‘100 Years of Plastics’ in December 2020 with the launch of a website about how plastics make life better and more sustainable. The tagline: ‘Unlimited Possibilities for the Future’.50 The hallmark achievement in 1920 was the publication of a ground-breaking research article by the German scientist and Nobel Prize winner Hermann Staudinger, which formed the basis for modern polymer science. A collaboration between the Macromolecular Chemistry Division of the Association of German Chemists and Plastics Europe Deutschland (the German branch of the Plastics Europe industry association), the website features monthly articles that showcase ways that plastics help society. The first article, ‘Plastics During the Pandemic’, singles out five plastics applications as making material contributions to COVID-19: protective clothing; plastics machinery (for making masks and other equipment); protective walls (transparent partition walls); medical sector materials; and the transport of vaccines (in insulated frozen boxes).51 Notably absent from this list are plastic bags and disposable food and beverage containers, which the industry had so actively promoted as the ‘sanitary choice’ at the beginning of the pandemic.52 Despite its centennial theme, the ‘100 Years of Plastic’ website avoids any mention of the wartime origins of modern plastics. Instead of reflecting on the past, it speculates on the future, using the occasion to capture the celebratory mood of the plastics revival of the pandemic. The unlimited possibilities for the future of plastics, naturally, are all about perpetual growth.
The capitalist pursuit of unlimited growth is the key problem underlying the plastics crisis. It is not unique to the plastics industry, but rather the defining feature of all corporations within modern capitalism. Publicly traded corporations are legally obliged to act in the ‘best interests’ of shareholders, which most people interpret to mean maximizing profits and growth. However, as anti-trust lawyer Michelle Meagher argues, the powerful norm of shareholder value exists only weakly in law and is unenforceable. In other words, according to Meagher: ‘Shareholder value is not the law – or it does not have to be, if we collectively agree that it is not.’53 Meagher notes that when corporations were first created in England in the seventeenth century to fund public projects, ‘the norm of accountability was not limited liability but actually unlimited liability’, as their principal obligation was to fulfil their public purpose. Of course, Meagher reminds us, the ‘public’ purpose that these early corporations served was tied to the colonial ambitions of the British Empire, but her point is that the norms governing corporations can change. The limited liability of the modern corporation, in her view, ‘removes responsibility and accountability’.54
Recently, business leaders have attempted to cast the corporation’s shareholder purpose in a new light. In April 2019, the Business Roundtable of more than 200 of the world’s top CEOs proclaimed that the new purpose of publicly traded corporations would be to serve the interests not only of shareholders but also of workers, communities, and the environment.55 This exemplifies what law professor Joel Bakan describes as the ‘new’ corporation of the twenty-first century: ‘doing well by doing good’, or ‘making money through social and environmental values rather than in spite of them’.56 The problem, Bakan argues, is that the legal structure of corporations – enforced by the profit-seeking imperative of capitalism – requires that they will always prioritize doing well over doing good. Furthermore, as the political scientist Peter Dauvergne observes, the business case for corporate sustainability is not just about deflecting criticism; it is also about gaining corporate power over regulations.57
Corporations Across the Plastics
