Lessons from the History of Plastic Creation

The history of plastic offers an important lesson: technology capable of solving one problem can often create new ones, the impacts of which only become apparent decades later. In the 1860s, a billiard company in the United States offered a prize to anyone who could find a substitute for elephant ivory for making billiard balls. The competition was held to reduce dependence on ivory while addressing the scarcity of this natural raw material. Alexander Parkes subsequently developed a material that became the forerunner of celluloid, which was later perfected by John Wesley Hyatt. From this, the first commercial billiard balls made from celluloid were born. The discovery is considered one of the early milestones in the development of modern plastics.

This continued in 1907, when a Belgian-American chemist named Leo Baekeland created Bakelite, the first fully synthetic plastic made entirely from chemicals, not from natural materials. Bakelite had many advantages: it was cheap, strong, and did not conduct electricity, and it was easy to mould. This marked the beginning of plastic materials that could be used for a wide range of human needs. During the Second World War from 1939 to 1945, plastic was used for military equipment, electrical insulators, aircraft components, parachutes, and even helmets.

After the war ended, industries that had mastered plastic production technology began seeking markets beyond military needs. Plastic was then produced and widely used by the public. Initially, cheap, durable, and long-lasting plastic was considered an environmental saviour because it helped reduce the use of elephant ivory and animal horn, while also lessening dependence on wood for making furniture, paper, and various other products. However, the current reality shows a different irony. Humans are increasingly dependent on plastic. Its production continues to rise, its use is ever more widespread, and at the same time, plastic pollution continues to grow. It is now estimated that billions of tonnes of plastic have been produced since the invention of modern plastic. Most of this material remains in the environment, either in whole form or as small, micro, or even nano-sized fragments.

Microplastics are very small plastic particles, generally less than 5 millimetres. These particles can originate from the breakdown of larger plastic items or from products that contained micro-sized plastic particles from the outset. Meanwhile, nanoplastics are far smaller, measuring less than 1 micrometre or even just a few nanometres. For comparison, their size is much smaller than the diameter of a human hair and even approaches the size of several biological components within the body. Due to their extremely small size, microplastics and, especially, nanoplastics can spread throughout almost the entire environment and are incredibly difficult to remove.