THE BIRTH OF THE AGE OF PLASTIC
One of the saddest concepts of the green movement is that of the ‘shifting baseline’. Each generation has a mental image of a baseline of how the world looked in their youth. In our mind, we compare any change in our environment and in our life to this baseline. Younger generations accept as normal a world that, to older generations, seems tainted and degraded. Transposed to the plastic pandemic, today’s level of plastic waste pollution on and off land will soon – and probably already does – appear normal to kids and young adults. Images of turtles tangled up in the loops of plastic that hold a six-pack of beer together, footage of a whale ingesting plastic or of a diver in Bali swimming in the plastic soup will not only lose their power to shock, they will quickly appear normal.
The man who coined the phrase ‘shifting baseline’, Callum Roberts, Professor of Marine Conservation at the University of York, is in himself very jolly, so I can say with some certainty that he didn’t come up with it to depress us all and make us feel hopeless. Rather he wanted to articulate urgently that we must stay alert to this phenomenon. The ‘societal amnesia’ of the shifting baseline lowers our expectations and our level of ambition when it comes to protecting and restoring nature. There must, however, be no societal amnesia about the scourge of plastics. We must bang the drum loudly and never stop.
It’s clear: if you love wildlife and nature, you need to kick as much plastic out of your life as possible. So it’s a tremendous shock and a considerable irony that the initial appeal of plastic, and one of the reasons why it was invented in the first place, was to take the pressure off wildlife.
BEGINNINGS
I recently made a pilgrimage to Hackney in east London, where I stared up at an unassuming brick wall. My gaze alighted on a plaque, in the familiar corporation font, arching around the Hackney civic crest. It read:
FIRST PLASTIC IN THE WORLD. Known as ‘Parkesine’, invented by Alexander Parkes. First made near this site, 1866, at the Parkesine works.
Being a plastics nerd, I would take issue with the London Borough of Hackney because in actual fact Alexander Parkes first filed his patent for Parkesine in 1855, when he was still living in his native Birmingham. But let’s not split hairs, or indeed polymers. Alexander Parkes was a prolific Victorian inventor who no doubt would have been bemused by the very fact that there is a plaque commemorating Parkesine, just one of his many innovations, in Hackney. Out of the sixty-six metallurgic patents and fourteen patents in other materials, such as rubber and waterproofing formulations that Parkes filed, Parkesine was in many ways the least successful during his lifetime. The waterproofing process that he sold to Mackintosh, the famous raincoat brand, earned him substantially more plaudits, and money, while he lived. So, he may have thought, why a plaque for this one?
THE ANIMAL’S FRIEND
Although Parkesine wasn’t Alexander Parkes’ most successful invention, the opening of the Hackney factory addressed an emerging need. Today, the London E9 postcode has been colonised by the hipster community, but in the late 1860s it would have been a thriving hub of garment manufacturing and button production. The garments of the era were complex constructions: shirts required separate, stiff collars and everything required a huge number of buttons, which were traditionally fashioned from cow horn, mother of pearl, tortoiseshell or ivory. This put a huge strain on natural materials as, all across the British Empire, wild animals were hunted down and killed so that great quantities of buttons could be carved in Hackney Wick.
No tortoises, however, were in fact harmed in the making of buttons, rather the poor hawksbill sea turtle: ‘No shell has been put to greater uses than the tortoise-shell, which has nothing to do with the tortoise,’ the Lancaster Gazette advised readers in 1885. ‘For the tortoise-shell of commerce is derived from the beautiful horny plates of the hawk’s-bill or imbricated turtle (Eretmochelys imbricata), though from those animals only that weigh at least 160 lb as the plates are otherwise too thin’.
The Victorian appetite for tortoiseshell was insatiable; hair combs, belt and shoe buckles, snuff and trinket boxes, picture frames and jewellery were all made from the material. Not since Ancient Rome, when the hawksbill shell was in demand as a baby bath, had the population been under so much pressure. By targeting the bigger, fully grown turtles, which were harpooned like whales, hunters were removing the kingpins of their population. The fact that the English also tended to see the species as floating bowls of soup, added to the issue. In the 1880s the London Evening Standard bemoaned the extortionate price of turtle soup due to a scarcity in the wild and cheered on attempts to establish large-scale hatcheries. Today, unsurprisingly, the beautiful hawksbill turtle is critically endangered.
For a few years, until the factory closed, Parkes found a market for his Parkesine as a man-made substitute in collars, cuffs and buttons. His plastic invention offered the wild hawksbill population a reprieve. Without Parkesine – and the subsequent plastics by which it was soon eclipsed – would the hawksbill sea turtle have become extinct?
THE PLASTICS RACE
The early plastic pioneers were the archetypal geniuses in sheds, their methods conforming to Edison’s idea of achieving scientific greatness and transforming the world through ‘one per cent inspiration, 99 per cent perspiration’. Sometimes the journey to discovery was just plain bonkers, laden with risk in a way that our modern safety-conscious society doesn’t really do. Contemporaneous reports describe Parkes preparing inflammable solvents and dissolving them in fire-raising phosphorus in a basement ‘laboratory’ where he somehow avoided ‘serious accident’.
The race to make plastic on a manufacturing scale was intensely competitive, giving the whole process a dynamic story arc with characters that we possibly learned about in school science lessons, such as Sir James Swinburne, who took plastic to the next stage and made it fireproof, and later Leo Baekeland of Bakelite fame, who is also frequently referred to as the ‘father of plastics’ and who created the first thermosetting plastics that could be heated and shaped.
The very first wave of plastic products must have seemed like modern miracles to those who saw them. As with Parkesine and tortoiseshell, the earliest uses of the new invention were as a substitute for more traditional materials – many of which seem to us today downright repulsive.
As the nineteenth century progressed, an expanding American population also created a demand for natural materials. In the 1860s a billiards craze was sweeping America. It required fifty tusks from the Asian elephant in order to find one with the requisite smooth ivory, and just three or four billiard balls could be carved from each tusk. The early adopters of conservation worried that there would be a wild elephant shortage. In fact, this was realised, but some decades later. Ivory also became prohibitively expensive. Enter two stars of the sport, Michael Phelan and Hugh Collender, Irish-born American entrepreneurs who were both players and owners of billiard parlours. They evidently had a gift for marketing, too. In 1863 they placed an advertisement, setting down the challenge to invent a substitute for ivory and promising $10,000 in gold to the successful inventor scientist.
While there is no firm evidence that Phelan and Collender actually paid out, by popular assent a US inventor named John Wesley Hyatt was the winner of the challenge. He may not have claimed the billiard-ball gold but in 1869 his work on synthetic celluloid simplified the production process and brought us one step closer to ‘modern’ plastic. His invention also offered an alternative to the killing of thousands of wild elephants for their tusks. I think we can be pretty grateful for that. Hyatt’s material, patented as Celluloid, later found an application for use as dental plates. When used for billiard balls, the results weren’t always predictable. Nitrocellulose, also known as guncotton, was highly combustible. The billiard balls had a tendency to explode.16
Taking a historical perspective on plastics also allows us to acknowledge the groundbreaking nature of the innovation in the race to produce and commercialise plastics. Backstreet-genius chemists like Alexander Parkes and John Hyatt worked up solutions in basements and lean-tos that would have given health and safety inspectors of today major cause for concern. But make no mistake: this was breakthrough chemistry. It was subversive and extraordinary, as they moved away from the confines of classic organic chemistry. They were in effect making something that was entirely synthesised by their own hand.
These early experiments in plastic showed that human-kind didn’t have to be dictated to by nature. Limits weren’t set by using wood from trees or ore dug up from the ground where the behaviour, amount and structure of the material was already dictated. Instead chemists were able to tamper and alter the molecular chain of plastics, giving the material different properties. It could bend, stretch or become translucent or incredibly durable. It put the chemists in control.
As the chemistry progressed, substances that originated in a chemist’s test tube, rather than mined from the earth, were shown to be stronger than steel. Plastic could be produced with specific properties, such as extreme heat resistance. By the 1920s seemingly eccentric, individual discoveries – celluloid, cellulose, acetate, phenolic, amino plastic and nylon – had started to be grouped together as the family we now call ‘plastics’.
At this point, the production and process of polymerising molecules – the science of making big molecules out of small ones – must have seemed incredibly exciting. Here, for example, is a description of a plastic ruler from the Illustrated London News in 1943:
One of the early examples figured at an exhibition of modern glass-making, where a stick of it as long as an office ruler could be looked through all its length, as if it were without substance.17
It also had a noble purpose. This is from the same correspondent, a description of the uses of plastic that must have had particular resonance in 1943 for a nation at war:
Other examples of transparent plastics are the moulded shields that protect the bomber pilot or the domed cupolas of the powerful craft which speed to pick him up if he bails out into the sea.18
The use of plastic wasn’t just clever or chemically innovative, it was saving lives and helping to secure an Allied victory for the Second World War. If that’s not good PR that is likely to have long-term appeal and settle into a nation’s psyche, then I’m not sure what is. By the 1950s the commercialisation of plastic had arrived, and the stage was set for an incredible plastic binge that was to sweep up several generations of ‘consumers’. You could argue it was the start of the plastic pandemic. Photographs from 1950 show two scientists, Karl Ziegler and Giulio Natta, proudly holding small bins and buckets made of Hifax – their version of plastic. In retrospect, the products they’re holding in the pictures might not look particularly world-changing or exciting, but nevertheless Ziegler and Natta bagged the 1950 Nobel Prize for their work on polymerisation, the process of making plastic. You can’t get more ‘legit’ than that.
THE RISE AND RISE OF PLASTIC
Once legitimised, the commercialisation of plastic took off, and the material became allied to a post-war consumer boom. Once we took to plastic, we fell under its sway with indecent haste. In just a few short years, a make-do-and-mend domestic culture passed down from one generation to the next had been turned on its head.
The polyethylene bag, unknown to pre-war generations, is a symbol of this decisive shift. By 1960 over twenty million plastic bags were being produced in the UK. They went from zero to ubiquity in the space of ten years.
Then there was plastic packaging for consumer goods. By 1970, the UK was ploughing through 350,000 tons of plastic packaging every year. The last threads that linked us to grocers in brown aprons, who wrapped purchases in brown paper, were severed. The thin blown plastic film we now know as Cling Film, or Saran wrap in the US, became a substitute for greaseproof paper. Vegetables were pre-prepared and packed into plastic trays as society began to eat as if it was permanently on board a Pan Am flight. No longer would you select and pick nails and screws; they would be ready apportioned and captured behind a moulded pack. Then there was the posh plastic packaging that emerged (for me, this really conjures up Mike Leigh’s seminal play Abigail’s Party) conveying, improbably, some sense of luxe to whatever was encased inside. In order to be really posh – say, for a luxury product like bath crystals – the plastic jar could even be fluted, so it resembled glass.
If consumers loved it, the branding and marketing people loved it even more. When consumers could see something in a bubble or tamper-free pack, they were more inclined to buy it. It is this drive and enthusiasm for all things plastic that has got us to where we are now. Which is where, exactly?