The Consumption Conundrum

Cleaning up global plastic pollution is a major problem but the real headache is reducing the world’s appetite for this multifaceted material

Convenience. It is the most vital ingredient of our fast-paced, modern lifestyle and the single, biggest impediment to solving the most serious environmental problem faced by humans today. With our rapacious appetite for economic growth throughout the 20th century, convenience has become the most important factor in achieving time savings and better productivity. Our need for everything to be faster, cheaper, better has made convenience an essential need of every productive citizen.

Chasing Economic Growth: The Need for Speed

At the turn of the 20th century, with society still using centuries-old techniques to produce household items like porcelain plates and metal cutlery, nowhere was this pressure for progress more keenly felt than in the field of materials science. When the utility of porcelain and glass began to get outstripped by our demand for lower cost and higher efficiency, material scientists started looking for a better man-made solution – a cheaper, faster, more durable synthetic concoction that could provide all the conveniences that Nature could not.

The invention of plastics is one that truly revolutionised the 20th century. The first man-made plastic, Parkesine, invented in 1862 by Alexander Parkes, was integral to our understanding of creating synthetic polymers, using, in this case, natural substances like cellulose to create long chains of atoms arranged in repeating units to make polymers strong, lightweight and flexible. This initial breakthrough was followed up in 1907 by Leo Baekeland’s invention of Bakelite, the first fully synthetic polymer to use the plentiful carbon atoms provided by petroleum and other fossil fuels as building blocks to build a “pliable and easily shaped” material.

The ability to create an unbreakable, lightweight bowl by simply heating a substance and having it retain its shape when cool, not only made the manufacturing process cheaper, but plastic can also easily be shaped into whatever forms consumers wanted. However, what was most revolutionary about the material was not just its cost but the

TOP Single-use plastics make up half of the 300 million tonnes of plastic we produce a year OPPOSITE PAGE Some 79 percent of all plastic ends up in a landfill or in the natural environment