In Praise of Plastics
June 13, 2025
We’ve come a long way since 1967’s film The Graduate, whose most famous line was one word: plastics. Spoken prophetically, as a bright future light. Today it’s uttered in dark tones once reserved for Satan, the bane of our existence, ruining the planet.
All too typically, we get caught up in such fixations, blind to the bigger picture. Thank you to The Economist for explaining what a vast boon plastics have been, since their 19th Century advent. Their chemistry makes for enormous versatility, able to replicate the properties of almost any other material — only lighter, hardier, cheaper.
Accelerating the industrial revolution. Also enabling more efficient shipment of goods, especially perishables. In comparison to plastic, glass bottles are twenty times heavier; paper bags six times heavier. Without plastic, transporting stuff would consume so much more fuel that a lot of global trade wouldn’t be economical at all.
Plastic-based construction components reduce building costs, making housing more affordable. In health care, plastics are essential for infection control. Many of our gizmos, like phones and computers, rely heavily on plastics. And using plastic bottles for drinks produces a fraction of the greenhouse gases than with cans or glass, even taking recycling into account.
But of course there’s no free lunch, and all these benefits come at a cost. We’ve all seen pictures of dead animals entangled in plastic waste. Its production and then disposal does create carbon emissions. And plastic can break down into micro-particles that get into our food and bodies. Though for all the alarm about that, it’s deleteriousness is far from clear. We repeatedly get health scares about all sorts of toxic stuff, when the fine print says you’d have to ingest vast quantities to be harmed. (I heard scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson on the panic over glyphosate traces found in ice cream. Turned out 100 pints would kill you — but you’d die first from the sugar in 20 pints.)
Anyhow, hair-shirt green scolds are clearly misguided in seeking banishment of plastics. A big hit to our quality of life. The answer is widely seen as more recycling.
But here’s the dirty secret: recycling is mostly Kabuki theatre. For all our effort to put stuff in correct bins, the bulk of it isn’t remade into new products but winds up in landfills or else burned (for energy, in the best case). The fact is that plastic comes in so many different permutations that organizing its recycling is highly complex, difficult, and costly.
We used to ship a lot to China for that, but China has called a halt. Some other poorish nations still do it, but it’s really nasty thankless work.
Here’s what I think. We shouldn’t give up on recycling, but recognize it’s a special, limited case. Burning plastic will tend to be a more realistic sensible option — as will sequestering it in landfills. The Economist’s article deems this “less environmentally ruinous than widely thought, as long as they are properly built and managed to [contain] harmful chemicals.” We can do this. It’s expensive, but necessary.
The problem, The Economist notes, is collecting plastic waste in the first place. Much plastic packaging never sees the inside of a blue bin, but is just chucked out into the wild willy-nilly. Such littering should henceforth incur the death penalty.
Locally, lately, landfills in or near urban areas have provoked much protest. Perhaps giving the idea we just no longer have room for them. But actually people occupy or utilize a small fraction of the planet’s land. Flying, I’m always struck by the vast expanses below with no sign of human incursion. Some landfills there would hardly even be noticeable.