Unless I am very much mistaken this invention will prove important in the future.” Leo Baekeland wrote those words in his journal on July 11, 1907. He was in a good mood, and why not? At age forty-three, Leo Baekeland had done well for himself.
Baekeland was born in Belgium. If it had been up to his father, he would still have been there, mending shoes. His father was a cobbler; he’d had no education, and he didn’t understand why young Leo wanted one. He apprenticed the boy into the trade when he was just thirteen.
But his mother, a domestic servant, had other ideas. With her encouragement, Leo went to night school and won a scholarship to the University of Ghent; by the time he was twenty, he had a doctorate in chemistry. He married his tutor’s daughter, they moved to New York, and there Leo invented a new kind of photographic printing paper that made him a fortune—enough, at least, that he never needed to work again. He bought a house overlooking the Hudson River in Yonkers, just north of New York City.1 And he built a home laboratory, to indulge his love of tinkering with chemicals.
In July 1907, he recorded that he was experimenting with phenol and formaldehyde. The cheerful journal entries continued. July 18: “Another hot sultry day. But I do not mind it and thoroughly appreciate the luxury of being allowed to stay home in shirt sleeves and without a collar.” Not all rich men were so happy, Leo knew: “How about these Slave millionaires in wall street [sic] who have to go to their money making pursuit notwithstanding the sweltering heat. All day spent in laboratory,” he concluded with an unmistakable note of satisfaction. Perhaps Leo mused about whom he had to thank for this enjoyable, carefree life; the next day’s journal entry records that he wired $100 to his mother. Four days later: “This is the 23rd anniversary of my Doctorship. . . . How these twenty three years have gone fast. . . . Now I am again a student, and a student I will remain until death calls me again to rest.”2
Baekeland wasn’t entirely right about that. By the time death called him, at the age of eighty, his mental health had declined; he’d become an increasingly eccentric recluse, living off tinned food in his Florida mansion. But what a life he lived in the meantime. He made a second fortune. He became famous enough that in 1924 Time magazine put his face on the cover without needing to mention his name—just the words “It will not burn. It will not melt.”3
What Leo Baekeland invented that July was the first fully synthetic plastic. He called it Bakelite.
And he was right about its future importance. Plastics now are everywhere. When the author Susan Freinkel set out to write a book about them, she spent a day noting down everything she touched that was plastic: the light switch, the toilet seat, the toothbrush, the toothpaste tube. She also noted everything that wasn’t—the toilet paper, the wooden floor, the porcelain tap. By the day’s end, she’d listed 102 items that weren’t made of plastic—and 196 that were.4 The world makes so much plastic, it consumes about 8 percent of oil production—half for raw material that goes into the plastic itself, half for the energy required to make it.5
Leo’s Bakelite Corporation didn’t hold back in its advertising: humans, the ads said, had transcended the old taxonomy of animal, mineral, and vegetable; now the world had a “fourth kingdom, whose boundaries are unlimited.”6 That sounds hyperbolic, but it was true. Scientists previously had thought about improving or mimicking natural substances: earlier plastics, like celluloid, were based on plants, and Baekeland himself had been seeking an alternative to shellac, a resin secreted by beetles that was used for electrical insulation. Yet he quickly realized that Bakelite could become far more versatile than that. The Bakelite Corporation christened it “The Material of a Thousand Uses,” and, again, it wasn’t far wrong: the plastic went into telephones and radios, guns and coffeepots, billiard balls and jewelry. It was even used in the first atomic bomb.
Bakelite’s success shifted mind-sets. Bakelite—as Time eventually celebrated—did not burn or melt, and it was a good insulator. It looked good and it was cheap. So what other artificial materials might be possible, lighter or stronger or more flexible than you might find in nature, yet for a bargain price?7 In the 1920s and 1930s, plastics poured out of labs around the world. There was polystyrene, often used for packaging; nylon, popularized by its uses in stockings; polyethylene, the stuff of plastic bags. As World War II stretched natural resources, production of plastics ramped up to fill the gap. And when the war ended, exciting new products like Tupperware hit the consumer market.
But they weren’t exciting for long: the image of plastic gradually changed. In 1967, the movie The Graduate showed the young, listless hero Benjamin Braddock receiving unsolicited career advice from a self-satisfied friend of his parents’: “Just one word,” the friend promises, steering Benjamin toward a quiet corner, as if about to reveal the secret to life itself. “Plastics!” The line became much-quoted, because it crystallized the changing connotations of the word: for the older generation, “plastic” still meant opportunity and modernity; for the likes of young Benjamin, it stood for all that was phony, superficial, ersatz.8
Still: it was great advice. Half a century on, despite its image problem, plastic production has grown about twentyfold. Experts predict it will double again in the next twenty years.9 That’s despite growing evidence of environmental problems. Some of the chemicals in plastics are thought to affect how animals develop and reproduce.10 When plastics end up in landfills, those chemicals can eventually seep into groundwater; when they find their way into oceans, some creatures eat them. One estimate is that by 2050, all the plastic in the sea will weigh more than all the fish.11 (It’s not clear how confident we can be of this claim, since nobody has managed to weigh either quantity.12)
And there’s another side to the ledger: plastic has benefits that aren’t just economic, but environmental too.13 Vehicles—from cars to lawn mowers—made with plastic parts are lighter and so use less fuel. And plastic packaging keeps food fresh for longer, thereby reducing food waste. Before bottles were made of plastic, they were made of glass, which is both heavy and hazardous when carelessly thrown away.
Eventually, we’ll have to get better at recycling plastic, if only because oil won’t last forever. Some plastics can’t be recycled; Bakelite is one. Many more could be but aren’t. Only about a seventh of plastic packaging is recycled—far less than for paper or steel; for other products, that rate is lower still.14 Improving that rate requires some smart thinking. You may have seen little triangles on plastic, with numbers from 1 to 7; these are Resin Identification Codes, and they are one initiative of the industry’s trade association.15 They help with recycling, but the system is far from perfect.16 If the industry could do more, then so could many governments: recycling rates differ hugely around the world.17 One success story is Taipei. It has changed its culture of waste by making it easy for citizens to recycle, with frequent collections and text-message reminders. It also fines them if they don’t comply. As a result, Taipei recycles two-thirds of its waste—almost double the rate in the United States.18
How about technological solutions? One idea is the ProtoCycler: feed it your plastic waste, and it spits out filament for you to use in your 3-D printer.19 Unfortunately, just like corrugated cardboard, plastic cannot be recycled indefinitely before the quality becomes unacceptable. Still—the ProtoCycler is as close as we can currently get today to Star Trek’s replicator.
In its day, Bakelite must have felt as revolutionary as a Star Trek replicator feels to us. Here was a simple, cheap, synthetic product that was tough enough to replace ceramic tableware or metal letter openers, yet beautiful enough to be used as jewelry, and it could even replace precious ivory. It was a miracle material, even though—as with all plastics today—we now take it for granted.
But manufacturers haven’t given up on the idea that you can make something precious and practical from something cheap and worthless. The latest techniques “upcycle” plastic trash. One, for instance, turns old plastic bottles into a material resembling carbon fiber; the hope is that it can be made strong and light enough to make recyclable airplane wings. In general, mixing discarded plastic with other waste materials—and a dash of nanoparticles—promises to create new materials, with new properties.20
Leo Baekeland would have approved.