Can Humanity Escape Its Toxic Relationship with Plastic?

II. The History of Plastic

China is the world’s largest consumer of plastic, with an annual consumption of 80 million tonnes, averaging around 50 kg per person per year. Yet the US leads in per capita use, at 216 kg annually. How did we reach this point?

Tracing the development of the plastics industry may help shed light on this historical trajectory.

Although the technology to produce plastic was mastered as early as 1907, the rise of the plastics industry can arguably be “attributed” to the US “military-industrial complex”.

In 1941, shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the head of the US Army’s equipment supply division proposed replacing aluminium, brass, and other strategic metals with plastics wherever possible. The major plastic materials we know today—polyethylene, nylon, acrylic, and expanded polystyrene—were only mass-produced during the Second World War.

The raw materials for most plastics are, in fact, by-products of oil refining. Consequently, after the war, the plastics sector—operating as part of the petrochemical industry—worked tirelessly to find new applications for these wartime-born products, seeking to replace traditional materials such as steel, paper, glass, and timber.

One could argue that the rapid proliferation of plastic in human society is itself a by-product of oil, the bedrock of the American economy. This is particularly evident in the plastic bags, beverage bottles, disposable plates, takeout containers, and nested pastry wrappers that now saturate our daily food consumption. Rather than stemming from careful forethought, this plastic saturation—now so commonplace that we have grown both accustomed to it and weary of it—occurred almost by default.

At the same time, an unexpected consequence is that without the plastics industry consuming these refining by-products and thereby keeping oil prices low, humanity might not have generated such vast quantities of greenhouse gases that drive global warming.

However, the author does not crudely paint plastic as an inherently villainous material, but rather acknowledges the legitimate human need for it. Plastic’s distinct advantage lies in its exceptional malleability and versatility, along with its ease of hardening into finished products. This material profile has not only liberated us from the limitations of natural resources, boosting manufacturing capabilities, but has also led many to feel that modern society itself possesses the same boundless mouldability as plastic.

Freinkel observes: “Nineteenth-century patents brim with combinatorial inventions featuring cork, sawdust, rubber, viscose, and even blood and milk protein. All these designs aimed to produce materials with some of the characteristics of what we now call plastic.” In other words, long before the word “plastic” entered the lexicon, humanity already harboured the intention and desire to explore and create this category of synthetic materials.

So how did plastic come to inspire such alarm among environmentally and health-conscious circles, becoming a universal target for condemnation?

The answer lies in plastic’s unique nature: its production requires the extraction of finite petroleum resources from the natural world. Yet when discarded as waste, its light and thin composition allows it to be easily scattered and carried by wind and water, spreading pollution across wider areas. Worse still, nature has yet to evolve microorganisms capable of breaking down these giant, complex long-chain molecules.

III. Plastic, a Metaphor for Contemporary Life

Within traditional communities and households, reuse was a practice deeply embedded in everyday life: leftovers served as animal feed; human waste was composted; old garments were stitched into new clothing or repurposed as raw material for rugs; and damaged goods were mended or taken apart for spare parts to be used later.

Such a community or household functioned as a self-sufficient cycle: once an item served its purpose, it was not discarded as waste, but retained as raw material for further use.

Yet by the mid-to-late nineteenth century, this way of life began to unravel. Households were increasingly flooded with manufactured goods, while domestic production and handcrafting skills steadily declined. As capitalist metropolises expanded, many young people living in apartments simply lacked the time and space their parents had to accumulate and store possessions.

Furthermore, as the British Marxist Raymond Williams observed, a defining characteristic of modern society is “fluent accumulation” — the unseen flow of commodities and information through electrical, hydraulic, gas, and telecommunications networks that binds the private home to the wider world. These public utilities dispensed with the domestic chores of lighting fires, cleaning lamps, and hauling timber, coal, and water. Consequently, homes were freed from the “messy” tools and raw materials that once filled living spaces, resulting in an environment of striking tidiness.

This transformation in lifestyle is equally evident in modernist aesthetics. In his 1958 film *Mon Oncle*, French director Jacques Tati satirised a modernist spatial ideal characterised by sparse living rooms, monochrome palettes, rigid linear geometry, and spotless technological fixtures. Yet, rather than remaining a mere parody, this aesthetic came to dominate everyday modern life, a legacy that persists to this day.

Plastic that releases toxic fumes when burnt, plastic drifting across oceans unable to break down in nature, plastic killing animals from within, and microplastics that have already infiltrated the food chain and our own bodies – these are merely the by-products of our contemporary way of life. The true crisis is that within less than a century of widespread use, we already know what plastic waste will bring, yet the very structure of modern living makes it almost impossible to stop relying on single-use plastic. It mirrors how so many find themselves unable to extricate themselves from a toxic relationship.

We certainly cannot expect to solve this problem by simply reverting to a pre-modern past. Modern society offers no shortage of solutions for managing contemporary waste. Yet these very solutions demand rigorous scrutiny. During the American counterculture movement of the 1960s, radical environmentalists began championing lifestyles and philosophies built on recycling. Artists even elevated the collage and repurposing of discarded materials into art. Over time, these ideas were absorbed into mainstream values, prompting governments to establish municipal recycling networks. However, centralised recycling infrastructure further drove to extinction the ‘informal’ circular economies that had long been woven into traditional ways of living.

There are, of course, technological fixes on offer: polyester bottles repurposed into raw materials for synthetic wool, plastic resin codes designed to streamline sorting and recycling, and ongoing research into biodegradable bioplastics. Yet recent findings by Chinese scientists indicate that biodegradable plastics continue to pose risks to both the environment and human health.

We cannot dismiss these modern endeavours. Yet whether through the ‘alternative’ lifestyles of a fringe minority, state-run centralised recycling, or corporate technological innovations, none have succeeded in untangling the distorted relationship between most people’s daily routines and the material world they inhabit. The future of our relationship with plastic remains steeped in crisis and uncertainty: cumulative global plastic waste now stands at 9.2 billion tonnes, with merely 9 per cent recycled, 12 per cent incinerated, and a staggering 79 per cent buried or left to accumulate in the natural environment.

So, where precisely has the system broken down? Guided by the unique insights Freinkel provides in this book, should we not be working to recalibrate this imbalanced relationship within the material framework of modern society? If we do not, humanity will merely keep breeding unhealthy new cravings and dependencies on plastic. Food delivery services are a prime illustration. Delegating our meals to courier platforms has spawned an enormous surge in plastic waste. Reports indicate that order volumes on China’s leading delivery apps skyrocketed from 1.7 billion in 2015 to 17.12 billion in 2020. In the same period, plastic consumption leapt from 57,000 tonnes to 574,000 tonnes – a tenfold increase in just five years.

Human society may well invent further conveniences akin to food delivery that only amplify our need for plastic. Freinkel argues that the genuine path forward lies in severing our unhealthy reliance on the material and cultivating an entirely new relationship with it. Put simply, we must stop fixating on plastic itself and instead ask: which products are truly best suited to plastic design and manufacture? How must we use plastic goods to prevent the generation of vast quantities of unrecyclable waste that degrades the Earth’s ecosystems?

Foodthink Author

Zheng Yuyang

An INTP from the Second Livestock Farm in Bayan County, Heilongjiang Province, now navigating life in Beijing. After spending four months delivering meals in the capital, he now focuses primarily on digital technology, agricultural innovation, and sustainable development.