How plastic pollution threatens our health, food systems, and civilization itself
By Matthew Rozsa | 4/10/21 | Salon
One of the most memorable quotes from the classic 1967 film "The Graduate" turned out to be prophetic, too.
McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Braddock: Yes, sir.
McGuire: Are you listening?
Braddock: Yes, I am.
McGuire: Plastics.
McGuire, a would-be mentor advising a young man about his future, was correct about the growth of the plastics industry, although perhaps not in the way he intended. Indeed, we have overproduced plastic on Earth, to the extent that it is clogging our oceans and waterways, squirreling itself into our food and fisheries, and poisoning our bodies. Climate change is often billed as the greatest existential threat to humanity — yet plastic pollution is equally horrific in its capacity to disrupt civilization.
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Plastics are a relatively recent invention. When we think of "plastics," what we're really think of are synthetic polymers. Polymers are substances made from long chains of molecules — they can be found in nature, such as the cellulose in plants — and synthetic polymers are generally designed to be durable and flexible; hence why they are known as "plastic."
Plastics are often made of carbon provided by fossil fuels like petroleum, although that was not always the case. The first synthetic polymer, created in 1869 by American inventor John Wesley Hyatt, combined cellulose from cotton with a waxy substance known as camphor that usually comes from trees. This became known as celluloid, but it was only a partially synthetic plastic. The first plastic to contain no molecules found in nature was invented nearly four decades later, in 1907, by a Belgian chemist Leo Baekeland who was trying to find a way to mass produce electrical insulators. Business leaders quickly realized that his creation, known as Bakelite, could be used to make a wide range of products. By the time America needed to ramp up industry to fight in World War II, the plastics revolution had taken off.