<
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-plastics-went-from-a-sustainability-solution-to-an-environmental-crisis/>
"In 1864
Scientific American published a competition launched by a
billiard-table manufacturing company: “Ten Thousand Dollars for a Substitute
for Ivory.” The owners of Phelan & Collender were pleased to see it; they wrote
to the magazine to elaborate on what they were looking for in an “ivory
alternative” that could be used to make billiard balls and hoped it would “have
the effect of stimulating the genius of some of your numerous readers.” The
real stuff from elephant tusks had become scarce, but its elasticity, hardness
and density were hard to find in another material.
A printer from Albany, N.Y., named John Wesley Hyatt came up with an answer in
celluloid, a moldable, compound material made up of cellulose nitrate, a
polymer that held the ball together; camphor, an organic compound that provided
flexibility and durability; and ground-up cow bone, to give the ball the right
mechanics for play. Rather than accepting the $10,000 reward and signing away
the rights to his invention, Hyatt patented his object in 1869 and started his
own company, selling celluloid billiard balls that conservation scientist Artur
Neves, writing in 2023, called “the founding object of the plastics industry.”
The creation of the “first plastic” was essentially an answer to a
sustainability problem. There were only so many elephants, tortoises and
silkworms to go around, and their tusks, shells and fibers were increasingly in
demand. Articles and advertisements from the early era of the plastics industry
portray such materials as relieving pressure on natural resources. In a 2023
paper in
PNAS Nexus, Neves and his colleagues called Hyatt’s celluloid
billiard balls one of “the first successful efforts to substitute materials to
assist the survival of endangered animals.”
The billiard ball and other reinforced polymer composites were predecessors to
commercial plastics. But the term “plastic” was nebulous, more marketing
language than scientific category. Philip H. Smith, writing in
Scientific
American in 1935, defined it as “the name given to a more or less arbitrarily
chosen group of substances which, when properly compounded and treated, become
plastic and can be molded or cast to shape.”
In
American Plastic: A Cultural History, published in 1995, Jeffrey L. Meikle
writes that the fear of an ivory shortage that stimulated plastics development
shifted in the 20th century to the idea of democratizing luxury items. Mass
production of plastics for a wide range of uses began in the 1940s, when
production in the U.S. nearly tripled over the war years. This expansion
coincided with the replacement of bio-based materials (such as cotton, soybeans
and sugar) in polymer bases with fossil fuels, which were promoted as an
abundant resource. To give products specific properties, additives such as
colorants, plasticizers (such as phthalates and bisphenol A) and flame
retardants were included in the polymers during manufacturing.
You know where this story goes. By the 1970s, Meikle writes in his book,
“plastic’s ability to transcend nature often no longer seemed utopian but
instead simply disastrous.” Plastics had ushered in an era of excessive stuff
that was cheap to make. Materials originally celebrated for their durability
and longevity became popular in single-use items. Ninety percent of plastics
aren’t technically recyclable anyway, and some now argue that recycling
campaigns only encouraged people to feel better about buying more plastic
things. Because plastic is not biodegradable, it simply accumulates,
fragmenting into ever smaller pieces over hundreds or thousands of years. In
2009 the first comprehensive review of the impact of plastics on the
environment and human health was published—a collection of consequences and
warnings that have gotten only more dire."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
