The Land of Plastic

Preface

Plastic is omnipresent. It is everywhere. Look at your air conditioner, wall clock, Tv remote, washing machine, ear-phones, Key-board, foot-wear, wrappers of your favorite chocolates, containers of skin-care products, your toothbrush, your water purifier...... I mean we can keep adding everything to the list and it would still be incomplete.

So, you think banning poly-bags would be enough to save the environment? That's adorable.

Time and again, we are introduced with a product that finds its place in our life and we are later suggested to do away with it without finding any suitable substitute. Let's know what led us to the world of plastics and how we are gonna choke on it.

Before plastic came

Long before any plastic could be manufactured, ivory (white material of tusk of elephant and teeth of an animal), horns, tortoise shell, etc were used to make art, crafts, and utensils. But the shelf-life of these products was poor. And you can imagine what animals had to go through to provide their ivory to human beings for their petty uses (I say petty because it is petty). The newspapers warned in 1867 that elephants were in grave danger of being "numbered with extinct species".

In 1862, Parkes made use of cellulose derived from plants which could be moulded in any shape. But it was not really durable. It would break easily. Hence, it was not a noble substitute.

Game of billiards

It took a game of billiards to realise that mankind needed an alternative to ivory. The balls used in billiards were made up of ivory and it would break soon after a game or two and it was rather expensive to get a new set of balls after every other game.

In 1863, a New York billiards supplier ran a newspaper ad offering "ten thousand dollars in gold" to anyone who could come up with a suitable alternative for ivory. Hyatt, a young man living in New York, came up with celluloid. After many failed experiments, he mixed cellulose with camphor and voila! It was more durable than its predecessors.

However, it lacked the bounce of ivory but it was not brittle and did not corrode like metal. It did not change colors like natural ivory. Celluloid was easier to find, mass-produced, a hell lot cheaper, and saving animals from suffering. It soon found a home in everyone's home. It was an era of industrialisation and people who could not afford metal-based products were now buying things made of celluloid. By replacing materials that were hard to find or expensive to process, celluloid democratized a host of goods for an expanding consumption-oriented middle class.

Hyatt never got his reward.

A Beetle and Bakelite

In the early phase of the 1900s, the world was electrifying! It is not a metaphor. It really means what it says. Electricity was invented in 1879 but we had to use some sort of wires to transfer it from one place to distant place and those wires needed an insulator which could be easily manufactured. In the early stages, scientists used shellac- a resin secreted by the female lac bug (beetle) on trees. It took fifteen thousand beetles six months to make enough of the amber-colored resin needed to produce a pound of shellac. And think about it, if electricity is to be transmitted from a grid to your room, how much shellac would be needed! I mean there is a limit to such natural resources. Not everything is as generous as our shining sun.

So naturally, scientists had to come up with an artificial product that could be used as an insulation to be used in transmitting electricity. You do not expect to transmit electricity without using any protective covering, right? Rubber from plants was being used as a protective covering but it was not heat-resistant. There had to be some sort of protection between copper wires and a rubber covering. In 1907, Leo Baekeland invented Bakelite (He named it after himself). It was the first fully synthetic plastic. It contained no molecules found in nature (unlike celluloid in which cells from plants were taken). It was more durable than celluloid and heat-resistant. It could be shaped or moulded into anything that would give endless possibilities to put it into use.