“My mind is like a plastic bag That corresponds to all those ads It sucks up all the rubbish That is fed in through by ear I eat Kleenex for breakfast And use soft hygienic Weetabix To dry my tears”--X-Ray Spex, “Plastic Bag”

A Week Without Plastic continues. See the first post here and the second post here.

Plastic History:

So what is plastic, anyway? Early on, all I really understood was that it's cheap, it's everywhere, and it doesn't biodegrade. I didn't understand much about the stuff itself or how things got to be that way. I’m still no expert—and plastic is nothing if not complicated—but I did get to do some research into the topic a few years back, when I was a graduate student working on a paper about plastic as a motif in Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow. The research didn’t necessarily make plastic less scary, but it did make it more interesting. Here is a tour of some of the things I learned.

The word “plastic” refers to a set of compounds synthesized from hydrocarbons obtained from coal or petroleum. Plastics are polymers, or long chains of repeating molecules bonded to one another; each molecule of a polymer is called a monomer. Though there are a few polymers that appear in nature (amber is one of them; so is cellulose, the main ingredient in the earliest man-made plastic, celluloid), and though there are also “biopolymers” essential to living systems, including carbohydrates, proteins, and lipids, when we say “plastic,” we’re generally talking about synthetic polymers.

Plastics are organic compounds, meaning that they consist primarily of carbon and hydrogen. They are malleable—capable of being pressed, pulled and molded into any shape imaginable—and also durable, degrading extremely slowly.

The study of plastics falls under the heading of organic chemistry—the study of carbon- and hydrogen-based compounds. Organic chemistry differs from inorganic chemistry in that chemical structure is of key importance. In inorganic chemistry, a molecule can be described simply by listing how many of which kinds of atoms make it up; in organic chemistry, it is necessary to understand how the atoms and atomic bonds are arranged within the molecule.

The concept of chemical structure was grasped by Freidrich August Kekulé, a German chemist, in the 1850s (allegedly it came to him in a dream of an ouroboros, or a snake biting its own tail!); an 1865 paper by Kekulé describing the chemical structure of the benzene molecule helped to set the fairly new discipline of organic chemistry on its feet—as did the discovery that coal and petroleum, which are composed mainly of hydrocarbons, could be broken down into raw materials to serve as building blocks for the synthesis of new organic compounds.

During the twentieth century, chemists figured out how to synthesize a number of novel organic compounds, including plastics, synthetic dyes, and certain types of drugs. The first synthetic polymer, Bakelite, was invented in 1907; it was made from phenol—which is derived from benzene, which in turn is derived from coal and/or petroleum—and formaldehyde. As the petrochemical industry matured, Bakelite was followed by many other types of plastic including polystyrene, polyvinyl chloride (PVC), and nylon, which poured out of corporate labs in both Europe and America during the years before World War II.

Some of the first popular mass-produced plastic items included Bakelite jewelry and radios, and nylon stockings. The science is interesting, even though I’ve just learned enough to begin to grasp how much I don’t know, but the most interesting part of the plastic story to me is the cultural history—on one hand, how the rise of plastic as a material is all caught up with the history of World War II and the rise of large-scale corporate capitalism, and on the other hand, the history of all the ways that ordinary people have reacted to the presence of plastic in their midst, and how those have evolved over time. More about all that tomorrow! But for now, because I feel like I’m starting to go on and on here, a word on how things went on my plastic-free Tuesday.

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