I was born in 1988. So for me there was no time before plastic. For as long as I can remember, pretty much every commodity has been made of plastic, or at least has plastic parts in it. Depending on your age, you either feel the same way, or you can still remember the radical change that swept our world in the 60s and 70s. Because there wasn't always plastic, just think of the milkman who brought milk and took away empty glass bottles. Those times are long gone. We live in the era of plastic
I keep finding myself wondering what goods were originally packaged with. Plastic seems irreplaceable in its usefulness. At the same time, however, it is now more than clear what problems plastic is causing us. Plastic waste accumulates on land and in the sea, polluting the environment there. With luck, the whole thing can be degraded in a few hundred years or not at all. And until then, it will kill masses of creatures in our oceans, not to mention the dangers for humans. The slow move away from single-use plastic has now begun, but there is still a long way to go. In order to understand how we got to this point in the first place, it is worth asking:How long has plastic been around?
The early history of plastics
The name "plastic" already indicates that this must be a fairly new development. And of course, that's true. That doesn't mean, however, that people haven't been using materials quite similar to today's plastic for a long time. At its core, plastic consists of so-called polymers:chemical substances that consist of several relatively large molecules and are precisely for this reason that they are stable and malleable. Today's plastic is therefore an artificial product, but there are also polymeric substances in nature, for example amber, tree resin or skins and leather. And people used them very early on for exactly the same reasons as they do today:they were tough and malleable at the same time. Perfect for packing and protecting goods.
Since the end of the Middle Ages, the possible uses of these substances continued to increase and inventors recognized new ways of producing such polymers (although no one knew what a polymer was). In the 16th century, for example, the so-called artificial horn was produced from ... of all things ... goat's cheese. Incidentally, this substance was probably more practical and also much less odorless than it appears at first glance... In the centuries that followed, new natural plastics also found their way to Europe, such as rubber. But of course:That wasn't plastic in today's sense either. This required the developments in modern chemistry that were only achieved in the 19th century. But then it went one after the other.
It all started with Charles Goodyear, who invented modern rubber in the 1830s by adding sulfur to rubber. However, he himself did not make tires from it, as one might actually assume from his name. Goodyear instead produced gloves, shoes, and other everyday items. Today's tire company Goodyear is "only" named in his honor. Other plastics entered the market very soon after:celluloid, linoleum, bakelite, and PVC, to name a few. But what was this plastic made of back then? In the 19th century, this was actually still relatively diverse and many plastics were based on natural raw materials. Today one would probably call it bio-plastic. However, the heyday of plastic did not come until the 20th century and since then the starting material for most plastics has been different:it comes from the oil and gas industry.
The golden era of plastic
The plastics industry of the 19th century had a fundamental problem. Although all developments of the time arose in experiments of the new chemical industry, the inventors of the time had no idea what exactly the chemical composition of plastics looked like and what made it special. As already mentioned, we now know that the properties of plastic come from its polymeric structure. Back then, you had to guess, and with luck and intuition, inventors always found new plastics. There may have been a system, but the process was certainly not really efficient. However, after the German chemist Hermann Staudinger recognized the chemical structure of the polymers in 1917, completely new possibilities opened up for industry almost overnight. With the knowledge of the nature of plastics, there was no longer much to prevent large-scale production and, with some delay, Staudinger also received the Nobel Prize for this in the 1950s. No one knew what problems his invention would bring us...
In the same 1950s we also encountered the modern plastic boom. Now those plastics were produced on a large scale that are still the most widely used today:polyethylene derived from natural gas and polypropylene based on petroleum. That was nothing but a revolution! Up to that point, packaging was either light and fragile (such as paper and cardboard) or heavy and usually just as fragile as glass or clay. There were also wooden barrels and boxes, which weren't particularly practical either. The new plastics, on the other hand, seemed to offer everything that the developing consumer society needed. They were light and malleable, but at the same time strong and durable, and on top of that they became cheaper and cheaper to produce. When exactly plastic finally became popular and widespread depends a little on the region, but from the 70s onwards the material was an integral part of most people's everyday lives.
However, the way plastic is used has changed significantly over time. In its early days, the plastic was used almost exclusively in durable and reusable products. One of the most iconic and still best-known uses of the time was certainly the Tupperware, which you can also see in the image accompanying this article (it shows a Tupperware party in Florida in the 1950s, by the way). But with the generation change and the further development of consumer society, a new type of use was added from the 1970s, which still causes us the most problems today:disposable plastic. Plastic was now so incredibly cheap to produce that you might as well throw it away after use. It would be a good thirty years before the resulting pollution became a big issue. Today there is again a slow movement away from “single use plastics” and towards reusable or biodegradable plastics. However, the consequences of the plastic revolution of the 20th century will probably continue to accompany us throughout the 21st.
The most obvious use of modern plastic is certainly packaging. I've already mentioned a few things, but this week's podcast I'm going to take a detailed look at the history of packaging materials. When did humanity start packing goods? What materials were used for this before plastic and where is all this supposed to lead? Listen!