This article was originally featured on Knowable Magazine.
It was hailed as a wonderful thing: During the oil boom in the 1950s, chemists began to render the waste coming out of refineries into plastic—plastic packaging, plastic furniture, plastic fibers woven into synthetic cloth. These were miracle materials, moldable and pliable but strong and lasting. In the decades since, annual global plastic production has skyrocketed: Humans have created 8 billion metric tons of plastic.
That boom has, to put it lightly, brought problems. More than half the plastic ever produced—some 5 billion metric tons—lies smeared across the surface of the Earth. Every day, more than 10,000 metric tons of plastic wash into the oceans. Plastic’s durability, one of the properties that makes this material so miraculous, has rendered it a potent pollutant.
To be fair to the early boosters, plastics have changed the world. So many essential technologies—from motor vehicles to cell phones to computers—use plastic. Foam insulation has helped to make homes 200 times more energy efficient. Plastic films extend the shelf life of perishable foods.
“I don’t like how people demonize plastics as if it is the most evil thing we have ever made,” says Eleftheria Roumeli, a physicist at the University of Washington and coauthor of a 2023 examination of sustainable polymers in the Annual Review of Materials Research. “It is a product of brilliant engineering.”
Rather than abandon this material, she thinks, we need to find a better, kinder version—polymers with the tensile strength and flexibility of modern plastics that are derived from sustainable biological sources and can be effectively returned to the environment.
This means rethinking plastic production from the ground up.
From monomer to polymer
The current approach to plastic production consists of two big steps: first a breaking down, then a building back up.
The breaking…
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