A Toxic Love Story

Plastic: A Toxic Love Story In the words of Susan Freinkel, “Plastic has built the modern world”. In this book, Freinkel recounts plastic’s original origins dating back to 1869 when the young inventor John Wesley Hyatt created a “white material with the consistency of shoe leather but a capacity to do much more”. This began the descent into the world we now know as Plasticville, and Freinkel’s information on the backstories of the eight most used plastic products: chairs, credit cards, combs, disposable lighters, grocery bags, IV bags, water bottles, and Frisbees. Freinkel starts off stating that plastic was once considered a green product, due to the fact that it would save precious resources such as ivory and tortoise shells. The call to invent a material with the qualities of plastic was mainly due to the necessity of reducing ethylene gas, a major waste product, from the oil refining process and making it into polyethylene. Polyethylene is the most commonly used …show more content…
Referencing the title, the toxic love story of the human and plastic relationship made everything easier to make and be handled, however it came with risks that were not completely understood at the time of production. Plastic was designed to generally be used for a limited amount of time, but last an unlimited amount of time. Stemming from that is a contribution to the damaging effects of fossil fuels, the injection of harmful chemicals, the ever present litter on once natural landscapes, and the destruction of marine life. Despite all of the negative aspects of the large scale use of plastic objects, the human race has used more plastic in the last decade than in the whole 20th