Can We Escape Our Toxic Relationship with Plastic?

II. The History of Plastic

China leads the world in total plastic consumption at 80 million tonnes a year, or roughly 50 kg per person. The United States, however, tops the per-capita ranking at 216 kg per person per year. How did all this come about?

Tracing the development of the plastics industry may help explain this historical trajectory.

Although the technology to produce plastic had existed since 1907, the industry’s rise is ‘thanks’ to, of all things, America’s military-industrial complex.

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

Most plastic feedstocks are, in fact, byproducts of oil refining. So when the war ended, the plastics sector — itself a part of the petrochemical industry — set about finding new uses for these wartime creations, aiming to displace steel, paper, glass, timber and other traditional materials.

In other words, the rapid spread of plastic through human society was itself a byproduct of oil, the bedrock of the American economy. The plastic bags, beverage bottles, disposable plates, takeaway containers and nested pastry wrappers that saturate our daily food consumption — all those plastic realities we have grown so accustomed to that they now bore us — were never the outcome of a carefully considered decision.

Meanwhile, there is an unexpected irony: without the downstream plastics industry absorbing the byproducts of refining and thereby driving down the price of oil, humanity might never have produced the vast quantities of greenhouse gases now warming the planet.

That said, the author does not crudely condemn plastic as a wholly irredeemable material; she acknowledges humanity’s legitimate need for it. Plastic’s unique advantage lies in its extraordinary malleability and ductility, as well as its ease of hardening into a finished product. These material properties not only freed us from the constraints of natural materials and expanded our capacity to manufacture, but even led people to feel that modern society itself was as endlessly malleable as plastic.

Freinkel notes: ‘Nineteenth-century patent filings are full of composite inventions combining materials such as cork, wood shavings, rubber, viscose, even blood and casein — every one of them an attempt to produce qualities we now associate with plastic.’ In other words, long before the word “plastic” existed, humans were already seeking and striving to create materials with precisely those characteristics.

So how did plastic become the kind of target that strikes terror at the mere mention of its name and draws calls for its wholesale eradication?

The answer lies in plastic’s particular nature. Producing it requires extracting finite petroleum resources from the earth, yet once discarded, its light, thin form makes it easy to scatter and drift across vast distances in wind and water, spreading contamination far and wide. Worse still, nature has yet to evolve microorganisms capable of breaking down these enormous, complex long-chain molecules.

III. Plastic as a Metaphor for Contemporary Life

In traditional communities and households, reuse was a habit woven into the fabric of daily life: leftover food could be turned into animal feed; manure could be composted; old clothes could be resewn into new garments or repurposed as raw material for carpets; broken items could be mended, or dismantled into parts for future use.

A community or a household could be understood as a self-sufficient circular system in which items, once used, were not defined as rubbish but as raw materials ready to be used again.

By the mid-to-late nineteenth century, however, this way of living began to unravel. A growing tide of consumer goods poured into homes, while the household’s capacity to produce and make things by hand withered. And as the capitalist metropolis grew, many young people living in apartments simply had neither the time nor the space to accumulate possessions the way their parents’ generation had.

Moreover, as the British Marxist Raymond Williams observed, one of the defining hallmarks of modern society is ‘mobile privatization‘ — the flow of materials and information through electric, water, gas and communications piping systems, linking the private home to the public world. These public systems eliminated the domestic labour of tending fires, cleaning lamps, and hauling wood, coal and water. This shift made people no longer accustomed to having ‘mess’ fill their domestic spaces with tools and raw materials, driving them instead towards extreme tidiness.

This transformation in lifestyle finds its echo in modernist aesthetics. In 1958, the French director Jacques Tati satirised, in his film Mon Oncle, the modernist spatial aesthetic made up of bare living rooms, monochrome palettes, rigid linear structures and gleaming, spotless technology — yet this aesthetic had in fact already become the dominant sensibility of everyday modern life and persists to this day.

Plastic releasing toxic gases when incinerated, plastic that cannot degrade in the natural environment and drifts across the oceans, plastic that kills animals from the inside, microplastics already embedded in the food chain and the human body — all of these are merely one consequence of this contemporary way of living. The real crisis lies in the fact that, in the less than a century since plastic came into widespread use, we have already come to understand what consequences plastic waste will bring, yet the very structure of modern life makes it extraordinarily difficult for us to stop using single-use plastic products, much as many people find it hard to break free from a toxic relationship.

Of course, we cannot simply hope to solve this problem by retreating to a pre-modern society. In the modern world, there is no shortage of solutions for dealing with modern waste. Yet we must also scrutinise those solutions carefully. As early as the 1960s American counterculture movement, some radical environmentalists were already championing a lifestyle and philosophy centred on recycling and reusing waste; some artists even treated the collage and reconstruction of rubbish as a form of artistic creation. In time, the ideas they championed were absorbed into mainstream societal values, and governments established municipal-level recycling systems — but centralised waste-recycling systems further accelerated the disappearance of the “informal” reuse networks that had been rooted in traditional ways of life.

There are, of course, also technological solutions: PET bottles that can be recycled into raw material for synthetic wool, resin identification codes to facilitate sorted recycling, and research into biodegradable bioplastics. However, the latest research by Chinese scientists has found that the environmental and human-health hazards of biodegradable plastics persist nonetheless.

We cannot deny that these efforts belong to modern society, yet neither the “alternative” lifestyle of a minority, nor centralised government recycling systems, nor technological innovations by tech companies can alter the distorted relationship between everyday life for most people in modern society and the material environment around them. The future of our relationship with plastic remains fraught with crisis and uncertainty: cumulative global plastic waste currently stands at 9.2 billion tonnes, of which only 9 per cent can be recycled, 12 per cent incinerated, and 79 per cent landfilled or accumulated in the natural environment.

So where exactly does the problem lie? Taking the unique insight Freinkel offers us in this book, should we work to recalibrate the imbalanced relationship on the material foundations of modern society? If we do not, humanity will simply keep generating new, unhealthy demands for and dependencies on plastic — food delivery being a case in point. When people delegate their meals to delivery services, vast quantities of plastic waste are generated. A research report shows that orders on China’s mainstream food-delivery platforms surged from 1.7 billion in 2015 to 17.12 billion in 2020, while plastic consumed rose from 57,000 tonnes in 2015 to 574,000 tonnes in 2020 — a tenfold increase in five years.

In the future, human society may well generate more new phenomena like food delivery that drive up plastic demand. Freinkel believes the real way forward lies in breaking free from an unhealthy dependence on plastic and establishing a new relationship with it. In other words, what we need to consider is not plastic itself, but which products are better suited to being designed and manufactured in plastic, and how we should use plastic products so as not to generate vast quantities of unrecyclable plastic waste that destroys the planet’s ecological environment.

Foodthink author

Zheng Yuyang

A young INTP, who grew up on the Second Livestock Farm in Bayan County, Heilongjiang Province, now drifting in Beijing, where he once spent four months delivering takeaway food. Currently focused primarily on issues of digital technology, agricultural technology and sustainability.