"Throwaway Living"—Things You Did Not Know About The Story Of Plastic

How it all started. LIFE magazine 1955 issue celebrates and gives praise to the new ''throwaway'' culture. 

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lastic is made from fossil fuels and is the same 'byproduct' of the oil and gas industry besides carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, lead, and particulate matter. Most of us grew up just thinking of fossil fuels as the ones causing the smog—heavily polluted air we ingest by staying in the metropolis. The real byproduct or waste in the story of fossil fuels is plastic. Do not just look at the plastic bags on the beach that suffocate marine life, look more with dread at the plastic that has transformed into the invisible smog of microplastics alarmingly prevalent across all ecosystems, habitats, and food webs. Researchers have measured that the average person may be eating and drinking as much as 5 grams per week of plastic debris by the seafood and sea salt one eats. One research review published in 2019 calculated that the average American eats, drinks, and breathes in more than 74,000 microplastic particles annually.

There is no more question about whether or not there is plastic pollution. One does not even need to go to the beach in order to check for oneself because plastic is already flowing right within the human bloodstream and it is deposited incessantly in our body tissues and internal organs. The poster above is from the 1955 Life Magazine, which was a promotion of the catchphrase 'Throwaway Living'. It was a promotion of the use of disposable items made of plastic to cut down household chores. It was perceived as magical when on television a woman who was washing the dishes and when the bowl fell on the floor, it bounced! More than half a century later we are starting to discover that something is wrong with the story of plastic when it first fused with our human story.

The story of plastic began in an effort to get off on the right foot, particularly with the invention of plastic bags to save the planet. This is according to Raoul Thulin—the son of Swedish engineer Sten Gustaf Thulin who created them in 1959. In 1965, the one-piece polyethylene shopping bag designed by Thulin, was patented by the Swedish company Celloplast which rapidly replaced cloth and plastic in Europe. The bags were developed bearing in mind the conservation of forest trees from being chopped down. The production of paper bags uses more energy and water and they are also heavier to transport, hence, more energy-intensive. For those bags made of cotton, they need to be used more than a hundred times to account for the huge amount of water that went into growing the raw materials. The problem of plastic is deeply entrenched in a lopsided value system and merits, not a one-size-fits-all response. All the floodgates should be checked, but the greatest hurdle is a person's consumerist mentality. Pope Francis's clarion call in his first Encyclical letter Laudato Si' is "ecological conversion." It is a psycho-spiritual, socio-economic, and politico-religious conversion. He simply puts it as "change now while there is time." There will always be trade-offs, and that is why it has to go through personal conversion.

Currently, the majority of plastic bags are not recycled, because they were designed for single-use purposes which end up in landfills where they take up to 1,000 years to degrade. Raoul Thulin told the BBC: “To my dad, the idea that people would simply throw these away would be bizarre... He always carried [a plastic bag] in his pocket folded up. You know what we’re all being encouraged to do today, which is to take your bags back to the shop, he was doing back in the Seventies and Eighties, just naturally, because, well, why wouldn’t you?”

Pope Francis in Laudato Si' criticized this kind of Throwaway Living which is a lopsided value system. With this new awareness, what am I willing to do to solve the problem of plastic pollution? How am I going to retell the true story of plastic? Fr JM Manzano SJ

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