Of all the things that we teach in our chemistry classes, it seems like “the chemistry of plastics” is perhaps one of the most overlooked topics. Most organic chemistry textbooks explain the molecular structures associated with poly-this-and-that, but do little more than that. Textbooks for other chemistry courses may say even less. So the following article caught my eye.
“How Plastics Are Poisoning Us” by Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, 3 July 2023
(trigger warning: inserted halfway through the article is a small comic showing Brad Pitt? and a young woman in a compromising situation)
This short article (4 pages) appeared in The New Yorker magazine carries the heading “Annals of Science”, but it is actually a book review. The 4 books summarized by Kolbert are:
- Matt Simon, “A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies”
- Oliver Franklin-Wallis, “Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future”
- Eve O. Schaub, “Year of No Clutter”
- Imari Walker-Franklin, Jena Jambeck, “Plastics”
But before you go marching off to locate these books, I strongly recommend you take a look at Kolbert’s short article, if only for the first page which provides a useful and little-known history of how plastics came about. Apparently the first attempt at making something like plastic was the preparation of a nitrocellulose derivative that became known as “celluloid”. The inventor was motivated by a $10,000 financial reward for whomever could find a satisfactory substitute for ivory — obtained from elephant tusks — that could be used to make billiard balls. Celluloid was followed by the invention of Bakelite, and this eventually led to the various familiar “Poly This” and “Poly That” chemical compounds that we talk about today.
Pages 2-4 tackle the article’s main focus, beginning with the poorly recognized fact that plastics, especially so-called microplastics (“usually defined as bits smaller than five millimeters across”, italics are mine), and the chemicals that adhere to their surfaces, are ubiquitous in the environment and are potentially poisoning us. If your baby’s bottle is made of plastic, then you are giving your baby a sort of “plastic soup” to drink. But the problem goes deeper than the bottle. Microplastics have even been found in breast milk and meconium.
With all this in mind, one naturally asks, “If the use, reuse, and disposal, of plastic are so problematic, how can we solve the problem?” The usual 3R’s for managing expensive and hazardous materials are Reduce-Reuse-Recycle. But, as Kolbert explains, reuse of plastics merely exposes us over and over again to hazardous chemicals, and plastics recycling has been a failure (but a “failure” only in the sense that it is no cure for the plastics problem; plastics recycling has been successfully promoted by fossil fuel companies eager to avoid regulation of plastic manufacturing). For now, this leaves Reduce as the only viable option for dealing with the many harms that plastics cause. Unfortunately, as Kolbert acknowledges, reducing our use of plastics is a tough sell in the face of established habits, familiarity, and convenience.
