Can Humanity Escape Its Toxic Relationship with Plastic?

II. The History of Plastic

China is the world’s largest consumer of plastic by total volume, with annual consumption reaching 80 million tonnes and an average of about 50 kg per person per year. The United States, however, has the highest per capita usage, at an average of 216 kg per person per year. How did all of this come about?

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

Although humanity had already mastered the technology for producing plastic by 1907, the rise of the plastics industry is, in a sense, “owing to” the American “military-industrial complex.”

In 1941, shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. military official in charge of equipment supply proposed replacing aluminium, brass, and other strategic metals with plastic products wherever possible. The major plastic materials we know today—polyethylene, nylon, acrylic, and expanded polystyrene—were only mass-produced during the Second World War.

Most of the raw materials for plastic are, in fact, by-products of oil refining. After the war, the plastics industry, as part of the petrochemical sector, strove to find new uses for these wartime-born products, seeking to replace traditional materials such as steel, paper, glass, and wood.

One could say that the rapid spread of plastic through human society was itself a by-product of oil, the bedrock of the American economy—especially the plastic bags, drink bottles, disposable plates, takeaway containers, and nested pastry packaging that now flood our daily food consumption. None of these plastic phenomena, which we have grown so accustomed to that we find them almost tedious, was the outcome of any carefully considered decision.

At the same time, an unexpected consequence is this: had there been no downstream plastics industry to absorb the by-products of oil refining and thereby drive down the price of petroleum, humanity might never have produced so much of the greenhouse gas that drives global warming.

That said, the author does not crudely cast plastic as an irredeemably evil material but acknowledges the legitimate human need for it. Plastic’s unique advantage lies in its extraordinary malleability and extensibility, and in the ease with which it can be hardened into a finished product. These material properties have not only freed humanity from the constraints of natural materials and enhanced our capacity to manufacture goods, but also given people the sense that all of modern society, like plastic itself, possesses an endless malleability.

Freinkel notes: “The patents of the nineteenth century were full of composite inventions combining materials such as cork, sawdust, rubber, glue, even blood and milk protein—all designed to produce some of the properties we would today call plastic.” In other words, before the word “plastic” even existed, humanity already had the intention and desire to explore and create this kind of material science.

So how did plastic become an object of near-universal dread and denunciation among so many environmentally and health-conscious groups?

That begins with plastic’s particular nature: its production requires extracting finite petroleum resources from the natural world, yet when it is discarded as waste, its light, thin constitution means it easily scatters and drifts at the mercy of wind and water, spreading pollution over a far wider area. Worse still, nature has not yet developed microorganisms capable of breaking down these enormous, complex chain molecules.

III. Plastic, a Metaphor for Contemporary Life

In traditional communities and households, reuse was a habit woven into everyday life: leftovers could be used as animal feed; excrement could be composted; old clothes could be re-sewn into new garments or used as raw material for carpets; damaged items could be repaired, or taken apart for parts to be used later.

A community or a household could be understood as a self-sufficient cyclical system, in which items, once used, were not defined as waste but as raw materials that could be reused repeatedly.

But by the mid-to-late nineteenth century, this way of life began to gradually disintegrate. An ever-growing stream of consumer goods flooded into households, and the capacity for in-house production and handcrafting steadily declined. With the growth of the capitalist metropolis, many young people living in apartments simply did not have the time or space to accumulate items the way their parents’ generation had.

Moreover, as the British Marxist Raymond Williams observed, a notable hallmark of modern society is “the flow of the private “—that is, material and information flowing through systems of electricity, water, gas, and communications pipelines, thereby connecting the private household to the public world. These public systems eliminated the need for making fires inside the home, cleaning lamps, and hauling wood, coal, and water. This shift meant people no longer grew accustomed to domestic spaces being cluttered with “dirty and disordered” tools and raw materials, and became extremely tidy.

This transformation in lifestyle can also be seen in modernist aesthetics. In 1958, the French director Jacques Tati satirised in his film My Uncle this modernist spatial aesthetic composed of empty living rooms, a single colour palette, straight-lined structural forms, and immaculate technological products. Yet this aesthetic has in fact become the dominant consciousness of modern daily life and continues to this day.

Plastic that releases toxic gases when incinerated, plastic that cannot degrade in the natural environment and drifts in the ocean, plastic inside animals’ bodies that kills them, microplastics that have already entered the food chain and the human body—these are all merely consequences of this contemporary way of life. The real crisis lies in the fact that in less than 100 years of widespread plastic use, we have already come to recognise what consequences plastic waste will bring, yet the arrangements of modern life make it very difficult for us to stop using single-use plastic products—just 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 modern society, there is no shortage of solutions for dealing with modern waste. But we also need to scrutinise these solutions carefully. As early as the 1960s American counterculture movement, some radical environmentalists had already begun to champion the lifestyle and philosophy of waste recycling, and some artists even treated the collage and reconstruction of waste as a form of artistic creation. Subsequently, the ideas they championed were absorbed into society’s mainstream values, and governments established municipal-level waste recycling systems—only for centralised waste recycling systems to further drive the disappearance of the “informal” recycling systems originally rooted in traditional ways of life.

Of course, there are also technological solutions, such as PET bottles that can be processed into raw material for artificial wool, resin identification codes that facilitate sorted recycling, and the development of biodegradable bioplastics. However, the latest research by Chinese scientists has found that the hazards of biodegradable plastics to the environment and human health persist.

We cannot deny that these are efforts belonging to modern society, yet whether it is the “alternative” lifestyle of a minority, centralised government waste recycling systems, or the technological innovations of tech companies, none can alter the distorted relationship between most people’s daily lives in modern society and their surrounding material environment. Our future with plastic remains fraught with crisis and uncertainty: the cumulative global stock of plastic waste currently stands at a staggering 9.2 billion tonnes, of which only 9 per cent can be recycled and reused, 12 per cent is incinerated, and 79 per cent is buried or accumulates in the natural environment.

So where exactly has things gone wrong? If we follow the unique insight Freinkel offers us in this book, should we not be striving, on the material foundations of modern society, to readjust this imbalanced relationship? Otherwise, humanity will simply keep generating new unhealthy demands for and dependencies on plastic, with food delivery being one such example. When people outsource eating to food delivery, vast quantities of plastic waste are generated. A research report shows that order volume on China’s major food delivery platforms grew from 1.7 billion in 2015 to 17.12 billion in 2020, with plastic consumption rising from 57,000 tonnes in 2015 to 574,000 tonnes in 2020—a tenfold increase in five years.

Perhaps in the future, human society will produce new phenomena like food delivery that increase demand for plastic. Freinkel believes the real way out lies in breaking free from our unhealthy dependence on plastic and establishing a new relationship with it. In other words, what we should be considering is not plastic itself, but what kinds of products are better suited to being designed and manufactured with plastic, and how people should use plastic products so as not to generate large amounts of non-recyclable plastic waste that damages the Earth’s ecological environment.

Foodthink author

Zheng Yuyang

A young INTP who grew up at the Second Livestock Farm in Bayan County, Heilongjiang Province, and now drifts in Beijing. He once did food delivery in the city for four months. He currently focuses primarily on issues of digital technology, agricultural technology, and sustainable development.