"Just one word for you......PLASTICS!"

Plastics in one form or another have been around since the 1860s, however it wasn't until World War II that large scale manufacturing of various plastics (long chain polymers such as nylon) became an important part of the war effort.  The post war economic boom combined with newly freed manufacturing capacity saw plastics make inroads in many applications.  In 1950,  2 million metric tons (4.41 billion pounds) of plastics were produced globally.  In 2015, 400 million metric tons (882 billion pounds) of plastics produced globally.  Forty percent of those plastics are for single use packaging.

What happened?  In the 1950s smoking was not just socially acceptable -it was cool, gasoline cost 22 cents a gallon, Ray Kroc began franchising McDonalds fast food restaurants and the concept of the convenience of disposability had become well entrenched in society.  

In 1956, a member of the Society of the Plastics Industry (SPI) named Lloyd Stouffer exhorted his colleagues in the industry to not think of plastics in packaging as reusable resources, but instead to see them as disposable.  At an industry conference in 1963 he congratulated them on the great beginning that had made to achieve his vision.

Back in 1956 when I spoke to an SPI conference in New York I pursued a theme which brought some rather startling reactions. I was quoted, in one sentence, in a newsletter, as saying that "the future of plastics is in the trash can."

What I had said in the talk was that it was time for the plastics industry to stop thinking about "reuse" packages and concentrate on single use. For the package that is used once and thrown away, like a tin can or a paper carton, represents not a one-shot market for a few thousand units, but an everyday recurring market measured by the billions of units. Your future in packaging, I said, does indeed lie in the trash can.

It is a measure of your progress in packaging in the last seven years that this remark will no longer raise any eyebrows. 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--and now, even plastics cans.  

The happy day has arrived when nobody any longer considers the plastics package too good to throw away.  (emphasis in mine)

Today the Society of the Plastics Industry has a new name, the Plastics Industry Association and a K Street address in Washington, D.C.  There is no question that plastics have improved the quality and/or reduce the cost of a myriad of products across multiple industries - automotive, construction, medical....  But, it is also unquestionable that petrochemical companies are counting on the continued growth of single use packaging plastics to generate profits.

The result of our demand for convenience and an industries desire for profits is a planet choked (buried) in plastic waste.