Her neon mouth with a bleeding talk smile
Is nothing but electric sign
You could say she has an individual style
She’s a part of a colorful time
Super-sealed lady, chrome-color clothes
You wear ’cause you have no other
But I suppose no one knows
You’re my plastic fantastic lover
Your rattlin’ cough never shuts off
Is nothing but a used machine
Your aluminum finish, slightly diminished
Is the best I’ve ever seen
Cosmetic baby, plug into me
And never, ever find another
And I realize no one’s wise
To my plastic fantastic lover
The electrical dust is starting to rust
Her trapezoid thermometer taste
All the red tape is mechanical rape
Of the TV program waste
Data control and I.B.M.
Science is mankind’s brother
But all I see is draining me
On my plastic fantastic lover
— “Plastic Fantastic Lover” written by Marty Balin, Jefferson Airplane
I am addicted to plastic. How can I freak out about the sea mammals drowning in plastic nets and six-pack packaging, or the seagulls eating lighters and condoms off the beach, when I give no second thought to picking up a plastic comb in an airport shop, even if I decline the plastic bag?
For most of history, combs were made of almost any material humans had at hand, including bone, tortoiseshell, ivory, rubber, iron, tin, gold, silver, lead, reeds, wood, glass, porcelain, papier-mâché. But in the late nineteenth century, that panoply of possibilities began to fall away with the arrival of a totally new kind of material — celluloid, the first man-made plastic. Combs were among the first and most popular objects made of celluloid. And having crossed that material Rubicon, comb makers never went back. Ever since, combs generally have been made of one kind of plastic or another.
The word plastic comes from the Greek verb plassein, which means “to mold or shape.” The flexibility derives from long, bouncey chains of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen atoms arrayed in repeating patterns that behave like a snake’s skin.
Snakeskin is a good example, because biology has been knitting these molecular daisy chains for hundreds of millions of years. The cellulose that makes up the cell walls in reptiles is a polymer. So are the DNA proteins that code the polymeric stems and flowers of daisies, and our muscles, skin and bones, and the long spiraling ladders that entwine the genetic destinies of daisies and bones, DNA. Take some of these protein chains, rearrange them slightly, and you get a dancing line of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen, their choreography dictating specific productions of polymers.
“Bring chlorine into that molecular conga line, and you can get polyvinyl chloride, otherwise known as vinyl; tag on fluorine, and you can wind up with that slick nonstick material Teflon.” — Susan Freinkel, author of PLASTIC: A Toxic Love Story
Take just a moment and lets walk back a step. The dancing line of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen were no more than air and water, rearranged. But now we throw in chlorine and fluorine and what happens? Permanence. That substance has withdrawn from the contract with nature whereby all things must return full cycle, each with its own sunset clause.
The first artificial plastics — celluloid combs developed in 1869 by a young inventor in upstate New York — arrived at a moment of cultural transition. The turn of the 20th Century marked the birth of the consumer culture, the global switch from growing and preparing your own food and making your own clothing (unless you were aristocracy) to consuming mass market simulacra from factories. As historian Jeffrey Meikle pointed out in
American Plastic: “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.”
Or as Susan Freinkle put it, plastics “offered a means for Americans to buy their way into new stations in life.”
They also offered a way for air and water to shirk their stations in life.
Unintended Consequences
Cellulose was a gateway drug. In 1907, Leo Baekeland combined cancerous formaldehyde with phenol derived from foul-smelling and nasty coal tar, and voila! His Bakelite was a tough, slick polymer that could be precisely molded and machined into nearly anything.
Families gathered around Bakelite radios (to listen to programs sponsored by the Bakelite Corporation), drove Bakelite-accessorized cars, kept in touch with Bakelite phones, washed clothes in machines with Bakelite blades, pressed out wrinkles with Bakelite-encased irons — and, of course, styled their hair with Bakelite combs. “From the time that a man brushes his teeth in the morning with a Bakelite-handled brush until the moment when he removes his last cigarette from a Bakelite holder, extinguishes it in a Bakelite ashtray and falls back upon a Bakelite bed, all that he touches, sees, uses will be made of this material of a thousand purposes,” Time magazine enthused in 1924 in an issue that sported Baekeland on the cover. — Susan Feinkel
Bakelite inspired companies like DuPont, Dow and Eastman to get into the race. Discoveries followed and mass production of plastic products commenced. But Bakelite introduced something new to nature that was largely unappreciated at the time. Once those molecules were linked into a daisy chain, they couldn’t be unlinked. Microbes don’t care to spend the energy required to break those tough bonds if they can find food elsewhere more easily.
You can break a piece of Bakelite, but you can’t make it into something else. It does not degrade. It never goes away. This is why you’ll still find vintage Bakelite phones, frames, radios and combs that look nearly brand-new, and why today plastic debris is piling up on land and in the open ocean, in the entrails of dead whales on shorelines and in living crustaceans on the deepest seabed of the Marianas Trench.
In nature nothing is permanent. Everything is food for someone else. Composers and decomposers co-evolved in an endless dance —a harmony and rhythm that defines life. There is birth and there is death. But we could not accept that.
In the last half-century, there have been many drastic changes to the surface of our planet, but one of the most astonishing is the ubiquity and abundance of plastic. Even if we go extinct, that plastic will persist. We have only slowly moved from thinking of this as an aesthetic problem — litter and flotsam — to grokking that the choking and entanglement of wildlife threatens us. Dead reefs and red tides are sending warnings: destroy the marine food chain and you’ll choke your own.
I find this addiction particularly difficult to break. And yet, break it we all must. There are ways. I will explore these in future installments, so please come back.
George Straight on Sun, 12th Aug 2018 10:40 am
Albert, we will break the habit of plastic,
It will be just one legacy left of our time as a species when we humans are no longer.
I have one better, we changed the composition of the atmosphere and the water chemistry of the waters. Ice going guys!
MASTERMIND on Sun, 12th Aug 2018 11:14 am
The Economist Poll: Is capitalism rigged in favor of elites?
https://debates.economist.com/debate/capitalism?state=summary
onlooker on Sun, 12th Aug 2018 11:41 am
MM, Billions of people have known the last few decades that it is rigged in favor of the elites. It is just a deluded first world citizens who thought the “American Dream” was real. So, now as they continue to steal from everyone and everything, we finally realize the game was rigged all along.
onlooker on Sun, 12th Aug 2018 12:01 pm
It’s called extend and pretend and pretend and extend. The Earth will make sure we break the plastic habit. We have used the Earth like a credit card. Well the bill is coming due.
Davy on Sun, 12th Aug 2018 12:01 pm
“MM, Billions of people have known the last few decades that it is rigged in favor of the elites.”
Give me a break onlooker, it has always been rigged for the rich…always. You are so naive about life and your class wareful meme.
MASTERMIND on Sun, 12th Aug 2018 12:39 pm
Davy
Shut the hell up..You are scared to open a science paper..You are a total pussy..And you post click bait from zerohedge..I bet you think you are very similar to Tyler Durden from fight club don’t you?
Davy on Sun, 12th Aug 2018 12:44 pm
Poor bastard can’t even talk right. Where did you get that phony PHD mnm?
MASTERMIND on Sun, 12th Aug 2018 12:55 pm
‘WORSE THAN 2007’: Top central banker warns of looming wave of worldwide bankruptcies
http://www.businessinsider.com/worse-than-2007-top-banker-warns-of-looming-wave-of-worldwide-bankruptcies-2016-1
Government Intervention is triggered by a Keynesian belief that aggregate demand can be increased by lower interest rates and by increasing government deficits thereby somehow spurring economic growth. Debt grows faster than income growth and eventually has to be restructured, i.e., everyone loses in the end. Since 2007, global debt has grown by US$57 trillion and it’s had disastrous results. Greece, Detroit, Puerto Richo, Venezuela are just the beginning of this trend. Soon, it will be followed by larger countries like China and United States.
https://imgur.com/a/XYl8YIB
JuanP on Sun, 12th Aug 2018 2:00 pm
Are you going to contribute something or just keep fighting with everyone, Exceptionalist? You are such a goat fucked motherfucker!
Harquebus on Sun, 12th Aug 2018 4:17 pm
“You are such a goat fucked motherfucker!”
Sounds like someone looking for a fight to me.
Anonymouse1 on Sun, 12th Aug 2018 7:22 pm
When excpetionalturds and their sock puppets fight!
How messed up do you have to be, to stage faux ‘fights’ with your own sock puppet on a semi-regular basis?
DerHundistLos on Sun, 12th Aug 2018 8:54 pm
Harquebus:
“Sounds like someone looking for a fight to me.”
Really? Sounds much more like someone moderating the gross incivility of a serial abuser. You failed to mention that the comment was in response to:
“Give me a break onlooker, it has always been rigged for the rich…always. You are so naive about life and your class wareful meme.”
This sounds like someone looking for a fight to me.
Harquebus on Mon, 13th Aug 2018 3:37 am
DerHundistLos
Thanks for that.
My point being, the response is as bad as the attack.
anon on Mon, 13th Aug 2018 11:00 am
the chemical (and radiological) pollution of the earth is a much bigger and messier problem than the politically correct ‘climate change’ that has been thrown up as a combination diversion and official narrative to justify any whim…. and future generations will, when theyre not toiling to eke out a subsistence level survival, puzzle at the legacy left by their ancestors, and curse their names and their deeds.
Sissyfuss on Mon, 13th Aug 2018 1:19 pm
Rise above responding and the assortment of scatological ad homs might start fading.