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    Plastic: A Toxic Love Story

    Plastic: A Toxic Love Story

    4.9 7

    by Susan Freinkel


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    $9.99

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      ISBN-13: 9780547549149
    • Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
    • Publication date: 04/18/2011
    • Sold by: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
    • Format: eBook
    • Pages: 336
    • Sales rank: 234,526
    • File size: 526 KB
    • Age Range: 14 - 18 Years

    Susan Freinkel has written for the New York Times, Discover, Smithsonian, and Health, among other publications. She is the author of The American Chestnut, which Mary Roach called “a perfect book” and Richard Preston described as “a beautifully written account” filled with “top-notch” writing and reporting.

    Read an Excerpt

    I n t r o d u c t i o n

    Plasticville

    In 1950, a Philadelphia toy company came out with a new accessory
    for electric-train enthusiasts: snap-together kits of plastic
    buildings for a place it called Plasticville, U.S.A. Sets of plastic
    people to populate the town were optional.
     It started as a sleepy, rural place where trains might roll past redsided
    barns to pull into a village with snug Cape Cod homes, a police
    department, a fire station, a schoolhouse, and a quaint white
    church with a steeple. But over the years, the product line spread
    into a bustling burb of housing tracts filled with two-story Colonials
    and split-level ranch houses and a Main Street that boasted a bank,
    a combination hardware store/pharmacy, a modern supermarket, a
    two-story hospital, and a town hall modeled on Philadelphia’s historic
    Independence Hall. Eventually Plasticville even gained a drivein
    motel, an airport, and its own TV station, WPLA.
     Today, of course, we all live in Plasticville. But it wasn’t clear to me
    just how plastic my world had become until I decided to go an entire
    day without touching anything plastic. The absurdity of this experiment
    became apparent about ten seconds into the appointed morning
    when I shuffled bleary-eyed into the bathroom: the toilet seat
    was plastic. I quickly revised my plan. I would spend the day writing
    down everything I touched that was plastic.
     Within forty-five minutes I had filled an entire page in my Penway
    Composition Book (which itself had to be cataloged as partly plastic,
    given its synthetic binding, as did my well-sharpened no. 2 pencil,
    which was coated with yellow paint that contained acrylic). Here’s
    some of what I wrote down as I made my way through my earlymorning
    routine:

    Alarm clock, mattress, heating pad, eyeglasses, toilet seat, toothbrush,
    toothpaste tube and cap, wallpaper, Corian counter, light
    switch, tablecloth, Cuisinart, electric teakettle, refrigerator handle,
    bag of frozen strawberries, scissors handle, yogurt container, lid
    for can of honey, juice pitcher, milk bottle, seltzer bottle, lid of cinnamon
    jar, bread bag, cellophane wrapping of box of tea, packaging
    of tea bag, thermos, spatula handle, bottle of dish soap, bowl,
    cutting board, baggies, computer, fleece sweatshirt, sports bra,
    yoga pants, sneakers, tub containing cat food, cup inside tub to
    scoop out the kibble, dog leash, Walkman, newspaper bag, stray
    packet of mayo on sidewalk, garbage can.

    “Wow!” said my daughter, her eyes widening as she scanned the rapidly
    growing list.
     By the end of the day I had filled four pages in my notebook. My
    rule was to record each item just once, even those I touched repeatedly,
    like the fridge handle. Otherwise I could have filled the whole
    notebook. As it was, the list included 196 entries, ranging from large
    items, like the dashboard of my minivan — really, the entire interior
    — to minutiae, like the oval stickers adorning the apples I cut up
    for lunch. Packaging, not surprisingly, made up a big part of the list.
     I’d never thought of myself as having a particularly plastic-filled
    life. I live in a house that’s nearly a hundred years old. I like natural
    fabrics, old furniture, food cooked from scratch. I would have said
    my home harbors less plastic than the average American’s — mainly
    for aesthetic reasons, not political ones. Was I kidding myself? The
    next day I tracked everything I touched that wasn’t made of plastic.
    By bedtime, I had recorded 102 items in my notebook, giving me a
    plastic/nonplastic ratio of nearly two to one. Here’s a sample from the
    first hour of the day:

    Cotton sheets, wood floor, toilet paper, porcelain tap, strawberries,
    mango, granite-tile countertop, stainless steel spoon, stainless steel
    faucet, paper towel, cardboard egg carton, eggs, orange juice, aluminum
    pie plate, wool rug, glass butter dish, butter, cast-iron griddle,
    syrup bottle, wooden breadboard, bread, aluminum colander,
    ceramic plates, glasses, glass doorknob, cotton socks, wooden
    dining-room table, my dog’s metal choke collar, dirt, leaves, twigs,
    sticks, grass (and if I weren’t using a plastic bag, what my dog deposited
    amid those leaves, twigs, and grass).

    Oddly, I found it harder and more boring to maintain the nonplastic
    list. Because I’d pledged not to count items more than once, after
    the first flood of entries, there wasn’t that much variety — at least
    not when compared with the plastics catalog. Wood, wool, cotton,
    glass, stone, metal, food. Distilled further: animal, vegetable, mineral.
    Those basic categories pretty much encompassed the items on
    the nonplastic list. The plastic list, by contrast, reflected a cornucopia
    of materials, a dazzling variety of the synthetica that has come to constitute
    such a huge, and yet strangely invisible, part of modern life.
     Pondering the lengthy list of plastic in my surroundings, I realized
    I actually knew almost nothing about it. What is plastic, really?
    Where does it come from? How did my life become so permeated by
    synthetics without my even trying? Looking over the list I could see
    plastic products that I appreciated for making my life easier and more
    convenient (my wash-and-wear clothes, my appliances, that plastic
    bag for my dog’s poop) and plastic things I knew I could just as easily
    do without (Styrofoam cups, sandwich baggies, my nonstick pan).
     I’d never really looked hard at life in Plasticville. But news reports
    about toxic toys and baby bottles seemed to suggest that the costs
    might outweigh the benefits. I began to wonder if I’d unwittingly ex-
    posed my own children to chemicals that could affect their development
    and health. That hard-plastic water bottle I’d included in my
    daughter’s lunch since kindergarten has been shown to leach a chemical
    that mimics estrogen. Was that why she’d sprouted breast buds at
    nine? Other questions quickly followed. What was happening to the
    plastic things I diligently dropped into my recycling bin? Were they
    actually being recycled? Or were my discards ending up far away in
    the ocean in vast currents of plastic trash? Were there seals somewhere
    choking on my plastic bottle tops? Should I quit using plastic
    shopping bags? Would that soda bottle really outlive my children and
    me? Did it matter? Should I care? What does it really mean to live in
    Plasticville?

    The word plastic is itself cause for confusion. We use it in the singular,
    and indiscriminately, to refer to any artificial material. But there
    are tens of thousands of different plastics.* And rather than making
    up a single family of materials, they’re more a collection of loosely
    related clans.
     I got a glimpse of the nearly inexhaustible possibilities contained
    in that one little word when I visited a place in New York called
    Material ConneXion, a combination of a consultancy and a materials
    larder for designers pondering what to make their products out
    of. Its founder described it as a “petting zoo for new materials.” And
    I did feel like I was in a tactile and visual wonderland as I browsed
    some of the thousands of plastics on file. There was a thick acrylic
    slab that looked like a pristine frozen waterfall; jewel-colored blobs
    of gel that begged to be squeezed; a flesh-toned fabric that looked and
    felt like an old person’s skin. (“Ugh, I’d never want to wear anything
    like that,” one staffer commented.) There were swatches of fake fur,
    green netting, gray shag rug, fake blades of grass, fabric that holds
    the memory of how it’s folded, fabric that can absorb solar energy
    and transmit it to the wearer. I looked at blocks that mimicked finely
    * For a brief description of the more common plastics, see “Cast of Characters” at the end
    of the book.
    veined marble, smoky topaz, dull concrete, speckled granite, grained
    wood. I touched surfaces that were matte, shiny, bumpy, sandpapery,
    fuzzy, squishy, feathery, cool as metal, warm and yielding as flesh.
     But a plastic doesn’t have to be part of the exotic menagerie at
    Material ConneXion to impress. Even a common plastic such as nylon
    offers wow-inducing possibility. It can be silky when serving in
    a parachute, stretchy when spun into pantyhose, bristly when fixed
    at the end of your toothbrush, or bushy on a strip of Velcro. House
    Beautiful swooned over such versatility in a 1947 article titled “Nylon
    . . . the Gay Deceiver.”
     However much they differ, all plastics have one thing in common:
    they are polymers, which is Greek for “many parts.” They are
    substances made up of long chains of thousands of atomic units
    called monomers (Greek for “one part”) linked into giant molecules.
    Polymer molecules are absurdly huge compared to the tidy, compact
    molecules of a substance like water, with its paltry one oxygen and
    two hydrogen atoms. Polymer molecules can contain tens of thousands
    of monomers — chain links so long that for years scientists
    disputed whether they could actually be bonded into a single molecule.
    You might as well claim, said one chemist, that “somewhere in
    Africa an elephant was found who was 1,500 feet long and 300 feet
    high.” But the molecules did exist, and their hugeness helps account
    for plastic’s essential feature: its plasticity. Think of the ways a long
    strand of beads can be manipulated — pulled or stretched, stacked
    or coiled — compared to what can be done with just a single bead
    or a few. The lengths and arrangement of the strands help to determine
    a polymer’s properties: its strength, durability, clarity, flexibility,
    elasticity. Chains crowded close together can make for a tough,
    rigid plastic bottle, like the kind used to hold detergent. Chains more
    widely spaced can yield a more flexible bottle ideal for squeezing out
    ketchup.

    It’s often said that we live in the age of plastics. But when, exactly,
    did we slip into that epoch? Some say it began in the mid-nineteenth
    century, when inventors started developing new, malleable semi-
    synthetic compounds from plants to replace scarce natural materials
    such as ivory. Others fix the date to 1907, when Belgian émigré
    Leo Baekeland cooked up Bakelite, the first fully synthetic polymer,
    made entirely of molecules that couldn’t be found in nature. With the
    product’s invention, the Bakelite Corporation boasted, humans had
    transcended the classic taxonomies of the natural world: the animal,
    mineral, and vegetable kingdoms. Now we had “a fourth kingdom,
    whose boundaries are unlimited.”
     You could also peg the dawn of the plastics age to 1941, when,
    shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the director of the board
    responsible for provisioning the American military advocated the
    substitution, whenever possible, of plastics for aluminum, brass, and
    other strategic metals. World War II pulled polymer chemistry out
    of the lab and into real life. Many of the major plastics we know today
    — polyethylene, nylon, acrylic, Styrofoam — got their first marching
    orders during the war. And having ramped up production to meet
    military needs, industry inevitably had to turn its synthetic swords
    into plastic plowshares. As one early plastics executive recalled, by
    the war’s end it was obvious that “virtually nothing was made from
    plastic and anything could be.” That’s when plastics truly began infiltrating
    every pore of daily life, quietly entering our homes, our cars,
    our clothes, our playthings, our workplaces, even our bodies.
     In product after product, market after market, plastics challenged
    traditional materials and won, taking the place of steel in cars, paper
    and glass in packaging, and wood in furniture. Even Amish buggies
    are now made partly out of the fiber-reinforced plastic known as fiberglass.
    By 1979, production of plastics exceeded that of steel. In an
    astonishingly brief period, plastic had become the skeleton, the connective
    tissue, and the slippery skin of modern life.
     Indisputably, plastic does offer advantages over natural materials.
    Yet that doesn’t fully account for its sudden ubiquity. Plasticville
    became possible — and perhaps even inevitable — with the rise of the
    petrochemical industry, the behemoth that came into being in the
    1920s and ’30s when chemical companies innovating new polymers
    began to align with the petroleum companies that controlled the essential
    ingredients for building those polymers.
     Oil refineries run 24-7 and are continuously generating byproducts
    that must be disposed of, such as ethylene gas. Find a use for that
    gas, and your byproduct becomes a potential economic opportunity.
    Ethylene gas, as British chemists discovered in the early 1930s, can
    be made into the polymer polyethylene, which is now widely used
    in packaging. Another byproduct, propylene, can be redeployed as a
    feedstock for polypropylene, a plastic used in yogurt cups, microwavable
    dishes, disposable diapers, and cars. Still another is the chemical
    acrylonitrile, which can be made into acrylic fiber, making possible
    that quintessential emblem of our synthetic age AstroTurf.
     Plastics are a small piece of the petroleum industry, representing
    a minor fraction of the fossil fuels we consume. But the economic
    imperatives of the petroleum industry have powered the rise
    of Plasticville. As environmentalist Barry Commoner argued: “By
    its own internal logic, each new petrochemical process generates a
    powerful tendency to proliferate further products and displace preexisting
    ones.” The continuous flow of oil fueled not just cars but an
    entire culture based on the consumption of new products made of
    plastics. This move into Plasticville wasn’t a considered decision, the
    result of some great economic crisis or political debate. Neither did
    it take into account social good or environmental impact or what we
    were supposed to do with all our plastic things at the end of their
    useful lives. Plastic promised abundance on the cheap, and when in
    human history has that ever been a bad thing? No wonder we became
    addicted to plastic, or, rather, to the convenience and comfort, safety
    and security, fun and frivolity that plastic brought.
     The amount of plastic the world consumes annually has steadily
    risen over the past seventy years, from almost nil in 1940 to closing in
    on six hundred billion pounds today. We became plastic people really
    just in the space of a single generation. In 1960, the average American
    consumed about thirty pounds of plastic products. Today, we’re each
    consuming more than three hundred pounds of plastics a year, generating more than three hundred billion dollars in sales. Considering
    that lightning-quick ascension, one industry expert declared plastics
    “one of the greatest business stories of the twentieth century.”

    The rapid proliferation of plastics, the utter pervasiveness of it in our
    lives, suggests a deep and enduring relationship. But our feelings toward
    plastic are a complicated mix of dependence and distrust — akin
    to what an addict feels toward his or her substance of choice. Initially,
    we reveled in the seeming feats of alchemy by which scientists produced
    one miraculous material after another out of little more than
    carbon and water and air. It’s “wonderful how du Pont is improving
    on nature,” one woman gushed after visiting the company’s Wonder
    World of Chemistry exhibit at a 1936 Texas fair. A few years later,
    people told pollsters they considered cellophane the third most beautiful
    word in the English language, right behind mother and memory.
    We were prepared, in our infatuation, to believe only the very best
    of our partner in modernity. Plastics heralded a new era of material
    freedom, liberation from nature’s stinginess. In the plastic age, raw
    materials would not be in short supply or constrained by their innate
    properties, such as the rigidity of wood or the reactivity of metal.
    Synthetics could substitute for, or even precisely imitate, scarce and
    precious materials. Plastic, admirers predicted, would deliver us into
    a cleaner, brighter world in which all would enjoy a “universal state
    of democratic luxury.”
     It’s hard to say when the polymer rapture began to fade, but it
    was gone by 1967 when the film The Graduate came out. Somewhere
    along the line — aided surely by a flood of products such as pink flamingos,
    vinyl siding, Corfam shoes — plastic’s penchant for inexpensive
    imitation came to be seen as cheap ersatz. So audiences knew exactly
    why Benjamin Braddock was so repelled when a family friend
    took him aside for some helpful career advice: “I just want to say one
    word to you . . . Plastics!” The word no longer conjured an enticing
    horizon of possibility but rather a bland, airless future, as phony as
    Mrs. Robinson’s smile.
     Today, few other materials we rely on carry such a negative set of
    associations or stir such visceral disgust. Norman Mailer called it “a
    malign force loose in the universe . . . the social equivalent of cancer.”
    We may have created plastic, but in some fundamental way it remains
    essentially alien — ever seen as somehow unnatural (though it’s
    really no less natural than concrete, paper, steel, or any other manufactured
    material). One reason may have to do with its preternatural
    endurance. Unlike traditional materials, plastic won’t dissolve or rust
    or break down — at least, not in any useful time frame. Those long
    polymer chains are built to last, which means that much of the plastic
    we’ve produced is with us still — as litter, detritus on the ocean floor,
    and layers of landfill. Humans could disappear from the earth tomorrow,
    but many of the plastics we’ve made will last for centuries.

    This book traces the arc of our relationship with plastics, from enraptured
    embrace to deep disenchantment to the present-day mix of
    apathy and confusion. It’s played out across the most transformative
    century in humankind’s long project to shape the material world to
    its own ends. The story’s canvas is huge but also astonishingly familiar,
    because it is full of objects we use every day. I have chosen eight
    to help me tell the story of plastic: the comb, the chair, the Frisbee,
    the IV bag, the disposable lighter, the grocery bag, the soda bottle,
    the credit card. Each offers an object lesson on what it means to live
    in Plasticville, enmeshed in a web of materials that are rightly considered
    both the miracle and the menace of modern life. Through
    these objects I examine the history and culture of plastics and how
    plastic things are made. I look at the politics of plastics and how synthetics
    are affecting our health and the environment, and I explore
    efforts to develop more sustainable ways of producing and disposing
    of plastics. Each object opens a window onto one of Plasticville’s
    many precincts. It is my hope that taken together, they shed light on
    our relationship with plastic and suggest how, with effort, it might
    become a healthier one.
     Why did I decide to focus on such small, common things? None
    have the razzle-dazzle that cutting-edge polymer science is delivering,
    such as smart plastics that can mend themselves and plastics
    that conduct electricity. But those are not the plastic things that play
    meaningful roles in our everyday lives. I also chose not to use any
    durable goods, such as cars or appliances or electronics. No question
    any of these could have offered insights into the age of plastics. But
    the material story of a car or an iPhone encompasses far more than
    just plastics. Simple objects, properly engaged, distill issues to their
    essence. As historian Robert Friedel notes, it’s in the small things
    “that our material world is made.”
     Simple objects sometimes tell tangled stories, and the story of plastics
    is riddled with paradoxes. We enjoy an unprecedented level of
    material abundance and yet it often feels impoverishing, like digging
    through a box packed with Styrofoam peanuts and finding nothing
    else there. We take natural substances created over millions of years,
    fashion them into products designed for a few minutes’ use, and then
    return them to the planet as litter that we’ve engineered to never go
    away. We enjoy plastics-based technologies that can save lives as
    never before but that also pose insidious threats to human health.
    We bury in landfills the same kinds of energy-rich molecules that
    we’ve scoured the far reaches of the earth to find and excavate. We
    send plastic waste overseas to become the raw materials for finished
    products that are sold back to us. We’re embroiled in pitched political
    fights in which plastic’s sharpest critics and staunchest defenders
    make the same case: these materials are too valuable to waste.
     These paradoxes contribute to our growing anguish over plastics.
    Yet I was surprised to discover how many of the plastics-related issues
    that dominate headlines today had surfaced in earlier decades.
    Studies that show traces of plastics in human tissue go back to the
    1950s. The first report of plastic trash in the ocean was made in the
    1960s. Suffolk County, New York, enacted the first ban on plastic
    packaging in 1988. In every case, the issues seized our attention for a
    few months or even years and then slipped off the public radar.
     But the stakes are much higher now. We’ve produced nearly as
    much plastic in the first decade of this millennium as we did in the
    entire twentieth century. As Plasticville sprawls farther across the
    landscape, we become more thoroughly entrenched in the way of
    life it imposes. It is increasingly difficult to believe that this pace of
    plasticization is sustainable, that the natural world can long endure
    our ceaseless “improving on nature.” But can we start engaging in
    the problems plastics pose? Is it possible to enter into a relationship
    with these materials that is safer for us and more sustainable for our
    offspring? Is there a future for Plasticville?

    Table of Contents

    Contents

    Introduction: Plasticville 1

    1. Improving on Nature 12
    2. A Throne for the Common Man 28
    3. Flitting Through Plasticville 52
    4. “Humans Are Just a Little Plastic Now” 81
    5. Matter Out of Place 115
    6. Battle of the Bag 140
    7. Closing the Loop 171
    8. The Meaning of Green 203
    Epilogue: A Bridge 233

    Cast of Characters 236
    Acknowledgments 240
    Notes 246
    Selected Bibliography 299
    Index 302

    What People are Saying About This

    From the Publisher

    "It turns out that plastic is not only an ongoing environmental peril, but a compulsively interesting story. This well-reported and lively history helps us see the last decades in a different light. Buy it (with cash)." 
    —Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth, founder 350.org

    "A must-read, and a fun-read, for anyone who wonders how our society became so plastics-saturated and who wants to do something about it." 
    —Annie Leonard, author of The Story of Stuff

    "In a world glutted and fouled with fake plastic crap we never missed during nearly our entire history, Susan Freinkel's timely book on the subject is the real thing. No animals or children were harmed by its writing, I'm sure—but thanks to her diligence, a whole lot of them just might be saved." 
    —Alan Weisman, author of The World Without Us

    "Plastic is everywhere, and Susan Freinkel explains why. Plastic: A Toxic Love Story is gracefully written and deeply informative." 
    —Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe

    "The first step to creating change is understanding, and the first step to understanding anything to do with plastic is reading Susan Freinkel’s compelling, much-needed, and truly brilliant book." 
    —David de Rothschild, Leader of the Plastiki Expedition

    "Who’d have thought that combs, Frisbees and lighters could have such secret histories and such disturbing futures? Susan Freinkel’s page-turner brings together history, science and culture to help us understand the plastic world that we have wrought, and has become part of us. Although we should all worry that plastics will persist for centuries, Plastic deserves to endure for years to come." 
    —Raj Patel, author of The Value of Nothing

    "Susan Freinkel’s book exponentially increased my desirous love and my hate for plastic. What a great read—rigorous, smart, inspiring, and as seductive as plastic itself." 
    —Karim Rashid, Designer

    "What is plastic, really? Where does it come from? How did my life become so permeated by synthetics without my even trying?" Surrounded by plastic and depressed by the political, environmental, and medical consequences of our dependence on it, Freinkel (The American Chestnut) chronicles our history with plastic, "from enraptured embrace to deep disenchantment," through eight household items including the comb, credit card, and soda bottle (celluloid, one of the first synthetics, transformed the comb from a luxury item to an affordable commodity and was once heralded for relieving the pressure on elephants and tortoises for their ivory and shells). She takes readers to factories in China, where women toil 60-hour weeks for $175 a month to make Frisbees; to preemie wards, where the lifesaving vinyl tubes that deliver food and oxygen to premature babies may cause altered thyroid function, allergies, and liver problems later in life. Freinkel's smart, well-written analysis of this love-hate relationship is likely to make plastic lovers take pause, plastic haters reluctantly realize its value, and all of us understand the importance of individual action, political will, and technological innovation in weaning us off our addiction to synthetics. (Apr.)
    Publishers Weekly

    "An informative treatise on our complicated and dependent relationship with plastic...Freinkel presents a balanced, well-researched investigation into a controversial and versatile human creation."—Kirkus

    "Susan Freinkel had me from the minute I finished reading about her attempt to try to live without plastic for a week...Ms. Freinkel has penned a fascinating—and at times extremely disturbing—book about material that has literally invaded and, as her research reveals, infected every aspect of modern life."—New York Journal of Books

    "I have rarely, if ever, come across a book that I would describe as "perfect." However, after finishing Plastic, I was convinced that the appellation might well be accurate, not only for American Chestnut, but possibly for Plastic as well."—James Arnett, The Brooklyn Rail

    "Susan Freinkel's book, "Plastic: A Toxic Love Story" is evenhanded, thorough, riveting and often lyrical."—Cleveland Plain Dealer

    "Evenhanded investigation."—Salon

    "It's impossible to read her book without developing an appreciation for and a concern about the role that plastic plays in our lives."—The Columbus Dispatch

    "Exhaustively researched and extremely readable, this eye-opening book has the potential, even, to influence a cultural change."—Kelly Roark, NewCity Lit

    "Susan Freinkel's book is an even-handed, thorough, riveting and often lyrical biography of plastics, also full of eccentric human players"—Star Tribune

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    “This eloquent, elegant book thoughtfully plumbs the . . . consequences of our dependence on plastics” (The Boston Globe, A Best Nonfiction Book of 2011).
     
    From pacemakers to disposable bags, plastic built the modern world. But a century into our love affair, we’re starting to realize it’s not such a healthy relationship. As journalist Susan Freinkel points out in this eye-opening book, we’re at a crisis point. Plastics draw on dwindling fossil fuels, leach harmful chemicals, litter landscapes, and destroy marine life. We’re drowning in the stuff, and we need to start making some hard choices.
     
    Freinkel tells her story through eight familiar plastic objects: a comb, a chair, a Frisbee, an IV bag, a disposable lighter, a grocery bag, a soda bottle, and a credit card. With a blend of lively anecdotes and analysis, she sifts through scientific studies and economic data, reporting from China and across the United States to assess the real impact of plastic on our lives.
     
    Her conclusion is severe, but not without hope. Plastic points the way toward a new creative partnership with the material we love, hate, and can’t seem to live without.
     
    “When you write about something so ubiquitous as plastic, you must be prepared to write in several modes, and Freinkel rises to this task. . . . She manages to render the most dull chemical reaction into vigorous, breathless sentences.” —SF Gate
     
    “Freinkel’s smart, well-written analysis of this love-hate relationship is likely to make plastic lovers take pause, plastic haters reluctantly realize its value, and all of us understand the importance of individual action, political will, and technological innovation in weaning us off our addiction to synthetics.” —Publishers Weekly
     
    “A compulsively interesting story. Buy it (with cash).” —Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature
     
    “What a great read—rigorous, smart, inspiring, and as seductive as plastic itself.” —Karim Rashid, designer
     

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    Publishers Weekly
    "What is plastic, really? Where does it come from? How did my life become so permeated by synthetics without my even trying?" Surrounded by plastic and depressed by the political, environmental, and medical consequences of our dependence on it, Freinkel (The American Chestnut) chronicles our history with plastic, "from enraptured embrace to deep disenchantment," through eight household items including the comb, credit card, and soda bottle (celluloid, one of the first synthetics, transformed the comb from a luxury item to an affordable commodity and was once heralded for relieving the pressure on elephants and tortoises for their ivory and shells). She takes readers to factories in China, where women toil 60-hour weeks for a month to make Frisbees; to preemie wards, where the lifesaving vinyl tubes that deliver food and oxygen to premature babies may cause altered thyroid function, allergies, and liver problems later in life. Freinkel's smart, well-written analysis of this love-hate relationship is likely to make plastic lovers take pause, plastic haters reluctantly realize its value, and all of us understand the importance of individual action, political will, and technological innovation in weaning us off our addiction to synthetics. (Apr.)
    From the Publisher

    "It turns out that plastic is not only an ongoing environmental peril, but a compulsively interesting story. This well-reported and lively history helps us see the last decades in a different light. Buy it (with cash)." 
    —Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth, founder 350.org

    "A must-read, and a fun-read, for anyone who wonders how our society became so plastics-saturated and who wants to do something about it." 
    —Annie Leonard, author of The Story of Stuff

    "In a world glutted and fouled with fake plastic crap we never missed during nearly our entire history, Susan Freinkel's timely book on the subject is the real thing. No animals or children were harmed by its writing, I'm sure—but thanks to her diligence, a whole lot of them just might be saved." 
    —Alan Weisman, author of The World Without Us

    "Plastic is everywhere, and Susan Freinkel explains why. Plastic: A Toxic Love Story is gracefully written and deeply informative." 
    —Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe

    "The first step to creating change is understanding, and the first step to understanding anything to do with plastic is reading Susan Freinkel’s compelling, much-needed, and truly brilliant book." 
    —David de Rothschild, Leader of the Plastiki Expedition

    "Who’d have thought that combs, Frisbees and lighters could have such secret histories and such disturbing futures? Susan Freinkel’s page-turner brings together history, science and culture to help us understand the plastic world that we have wrought, and has become part of us. Although we should all worry that plastics will persist for centuries, Plastic deserves to endure for years to come." 
    —Raj Patel, author of The Value of Nothing

    "Susan Freinkel’s book exponentially increased my desirous love and my hate for plastic. What a great read—rigorous, smart, inspiring, and as seductive as plastic itself." 
    —Karim Rashid, Designer

    "What is plastic, really? Where does it come from? How did my life become so permeated by synthetics without my even trying?" Surrounded by plastic and depressed by the political, environmental, and medical consequences of our dependence on it, Freinkel (The American Chestnut) chronicles our history with plastic, "from enraptured embrace to deep disenchantment," through eight household items including the comb, credit card, and soda bottle (celluloid, one of the first synthetics, transformed the comb from a luxury item to an affordable commodity and was once heralded for relieving the pressure on elephants and tortoises for their ivory and shells). She takes readers to factories in China, where women toil 60-hour weeks for $175 a month to make Frisbees; to preemie wards, where the lifesaving vinyl tubes that deliver food and oxygen to premature babies may cause altered thyroid function, allergies, and liver problems later in life. Freinkel's smart, well-written analysis of this love-hate relationship is likely to make plastic lovers take pause, plastic haters reluctantly realize its value, and all of us understand the importance of individual action, political will, and technological innovation in weaning us off our addiction to synthetics. (Apr.)
    --Publishers Weekly

    "An informative treatise on our complicated and dependent relationship with plastic...Freinkel presents a balanced, well-researched investigation into a controversial and versatile human creation." --Kirkus

    "Susan Freinkel had me from the minute I finished reading about her attempt to try to live without plastic for a week...Ms. Freinkel has penned a fascinating—and at times extremely disturbing—book about material that has literally invaded and, as her research reveals, infected every aspect of modern life."--New York Journal of Books

    "I have rarely, if ever, come across a book that I would describe as "perfect." However, after finishing Plastic, I was convinced that the appellation might well be accurate, not only for American Chestnut, but possibly for Plastic as well." --James Arnett, The Brooklyn Rail

    "Susan Freinkel's book, "Plastic: A Toxic Love Story" is evenhanded, thorough, riveting and often lyrical." --Cleveland Plain Dealer

    "Evenhanded investigation."--Salon

    "It's impossible to read her book without developing an appreciation for and a concern about the role that plastic plays in our lives."--The Columbus Dispatch

    "Exhaustively researched and extremely readable, this eye-opening book has the potential, even, to influence a cultural change." --Kelly Roark, NewCity Lit

    "Susan Freinkel's book is an even-handed, thorough, riveting and often lyrical biography of plastics, also full of eccentric human players"--Star Tribune

    Kirkus Reviews

    An informative treatise on our complicated and dependent relationship with plastic.

    Early in the book, journalist Freinkel (American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree, 2007) tracks her use of every plasticized object she touches, from toilet seat to light switch to fleece sweatshirt, wondering, "How did my life become so permeated by synthetics without my even trying?" The author examines plastic via a study of eight everyday objects: comb, chair, Frisbee, IV bag, disposable lighter, grocery bag, soda bottle and credit card. Each chapter details the innovations and innovators that allowed us to progress technologically as plastic replaced the ivory comb, the wooden chair and even human body parts. Though Freinkel does her best to create a lively exploration, some sections of the narrative get bogged down. The evolution of the plastic chair, for example, doesn't exactly make for compelling history. However, the author provides an engaging chronicle of the alacrity with which the plastic industry developed—today, "more than one million Americans work directly in plastics." Freinkel's argument that, due to our obsession with plastic, we "are facing frightening intimations of ecological collapse," gives the book an urgency that will be appreciated by scientists, industry leaders and environmentalists alike—especially in a country where the average individual consumes more than 300 pounds of plastic each year.

    General readers may find the narrative overly scientific at times, but Freinkel presents a balanced, well-researched investigation into a controversial and versatile human creation.

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