Death Before Inconvenience

Consumed: How Big Brands Got Us Hooked on Plastic
By Saabira Chaudhuri
Blink Publishing

In 1956, the editor of Modern Plastics magazine, an industry booster named Lloyd Stouffer, advised that “the future of plastics is in the trash can.” The hundreds of wildly varying polymer-based substances we call plastics were cheap and easy to produce, moldable into almost any shape and texture and convenient for users. But plastics companies needed to cut loose from outmoded notions of reusability and “concentrate on single use,” said Stouffer. That’s because “the package that is used once and thrown away,” he explained, “represents not a one-shot market for a few thousand units, but an everyday recurring market measured by the billions of units.”  

Seven years later, addressing the National Plastics Conference in Chicago, Stouffer congratulated the industry on the proliferation of the single-use behavioral model. In less than a decade, the companies had sold the American public on disposability as a new form of liberty — the right to conspicuously waste. “You are filling the trash cans, the rubbish dumps and the incinerators with literally billions of plastics bottles, plastics jugs, plastics tubes, blisters and skin packs, plastics bags and films and sheet packages,” Stouffer told the conferees. 

Between 1937 and 1962, the plastics industry grew eight times faster than the U.S. economy as a whole. And it would continue to grow as the throwaway culture it had promoted in vast advertising campaigns embedded itself in American life. This tale of industry-driven profligacy and waste, with its result of overflowing landfills and toxifying microplastics on the loose, is the subject of Saabira Chaudhuri’s deft new critical history “Consumed: How Big Brands Got Us Hooked on Plastic.”   

The hooking of the consumer took some doing at first. “Contrary to what companies would have us believe, regular people weren’t clamoring for disposable diapers, coffee cups, soda bottles, shampoo sachets and food packaging,” writes Chaudhuri. “Companies poured millions of dollars into convincing us to shift to disposables.” 

Once disposability became de rigueur, it “fundamentally altered the way we live.” It changed how we raised children — toddlers don’t get potty-trained as early because of use-and-toss diapers — and how we ate and what we drank, with to-go coffee and a newfound obsession with bottled water. 

“As disposable packaging paved the way for Americans to drink more frequently, they ate more often too,” writes Chaudhuri. The success of the fast-food industry model of customer service, which so transformed Americans’ relationship with food, was dependent on disposable plastic containers and cutlery. The traditional three meals a day gave way to a “state of seemingly constant indulgence, helped by packaged food that appeared just about everywhere.” Plastic itself had “become a driver of appetites once constrained by time, place, expense or just convention.” It may have contributed to the obesity and diabetes epidemic, too, as single-use plastics encouraged not only more increasingly convenient visits to unhealthy fast food chains but also more consumption of sweet (and savory) snacks and sugary soft drinks.  

Industry executives early on knew that plastic packaging encourages more consumption of everything. “We are interested in the eye appeal, the attractiveness, the stimulus to impulse buying which transparent wrapping film can impart to many lines of consumer goods,” wrote Francis E. Simmons of the American Viscose Corporation in a 1949 article. “The use of transparent wrapping films in packaging is serving to bring about something of a minor revolution in the experience of marketing.”  Data gathered by chemical giant DuPont showed that cellophane spurred more purchases of more items. 

As plastics production skyrocketed, so did the amount of garbage, in a country that by the 1980s was belching out 230 million tons of the stuff every year, four times as much as Japan with only twice the number of people. Packaging was the reason: The amount of it in garbage increased 80% between 1960 and 1987, to make up a third of what Americans threw away. Today, the U.S. produces more garbage than ever — roughly 292 million tons annually, triple the amount in 1960 — and it’s now the largest per capita emitter of plastic of any major economy.   

Chaudhuri notes that, starting in the 1970s, the public has experienced almost decadal waves of revulsion toward their own plastics habit and industry’s pushing of it. The backlash happened in the 1980s when municipal landfills were overflowing, in the early 2000s when scientists first warned of forever chemicals leached out of plastic waste, and in the last decade in the horror over oceanic garbage gyres, sea turtles with bloodied straws up their noses, and spreading microplastics in air, water, soil, food and bodies, both human and animal.  

Chaudhuri documents in damning detail how industry has always responded to crises of consumer confidence by fogging the air with deceits about recycling. Recycling, she writes, was intended to deflect away from the fact that no substantive change to the industry would be allowed that would negatively impact profits. As early as the 1980s, “despite the chemical companies publicly touting recycling as the answer to plastic waste, many knew that, for most plastics, recycling was unlikely to amount to much more than a public relations exercise.” About this “giant marketing campaign,” a former head of product development for plastics at DuPont tells Chaudhuri that within the industry, “I don’t think there was ever a sense that a high percentage of plastics would be recycled.” He recalled informing a board member of the Council for Solid Waste Solutions, an industry-backed lobbying group, that “hitting a recycling rate of 10% for all plastics would be a big achievement.”  

Only 5% of plastic is recycled today in the U.S., because it’s extremely uneconomical to do so. Virgin plastic remains cheap; sorting the dozens of different types of plastics that are variable in chemical composition is very expensive. The only plastics recycled in large volumes are bottles and jugs made from PET and HDPE.  There has “been little progress on recycling everything else,” according to Chaudhuri. 

As for long-term consequences, the human race will likely face a globe-spanning health disaster caused by ingestion of the dangerous chemicals that ooze out of plastics as they degrade. Scientists with the Norwegian Research Council, a government entity, last year identified 16,000 chemicals as present or potentially used in plastics. More than 4,200 of these chemicals are “concerning,” because they are toxic, spread in fresh and drinking water, and/or persist in the environment and accumulate in human or animal bodies. Only 6% of the 16,000 chemicals are regulated globally. 

A 2024 study in the New England Journal of Medicine linked the presence of microplastics to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. When found in plaque buildup in arteries, microplastics may make the plaque more susceptible to rupture, which leads to a blood clot that can cause a stroke or heart attack. In August, researchers at Shanxi Medical University in China looked at how microplastics spread in single-use takeout food containers are ravaging human gut health. Other studies suggest that so-called forever chemicals from plastics are linked to increased risk of cancer and diabetes, impaired immune function and brain development, early puberty, miscarriage and premature birth. Endocrine disruptors leached from plastics are so disruptive to hormones for human reproduction that a large and growing number of scientists now believes this may be the causal factor in declining fertility. “The power of these chemicals to impact fertility is mind-boggling,” a professor of molecular bioscience tells Chaudhuri. “We have all sorts of evidence that indicates, ‘Whoa, we’re in serious trouble here.’”  

Can we get out of it? Chaudhuri’s reporting leads to one conclusion about plastic: “We’re all massively overusing it.” She calls for “a fundamental reset” in our behaviors and expectations, the end of “addiction to disposability,” coupled with sharp regulation by the state to “limit the various types of plastics out there, the chemicals used to make them, and the uses they’re approved for.” “We need,” she says, “a total revamp of how products are priced to account for their impacts on the environment and human health.”

Of course, none of that is happening. Half of all plastic ever made was produced and consumed in the last 13 years, with no sign of production letting up. If current trends hold, global plastics use is projected to nearly triple by 2060. In the meantime, the garbage gyres widen, the wildlife chokes, the chemicals disseminate and, apparently, some of us are now breathing aerosolized microplastics at the rate of as much as 16.2 bits per hour — equivalent over the period of a week to breathing in the total amount of plastic in a credit card.