That proliferation of goods helped engender the rapid social mobility that took place after the war. We were a nation of consumers now, a society increasingly democratized by our shared ability to enjoy the conveniences and comforts of modern life. Not just a chicken in every pot, but a TV and stereo in every living room, a car in every driveway. Through the plastics industry, we had an ever-growing ability to synthesize what we wanted or needed, which made reality itself seem infinitely more open to possibility, profoundly more malleable, as historian Meikle observed. Now full-fledged residents of Plasticville, we began to believe that we too were plastic. As House Beautiful assured readers in 1953: "You will have a greater chance to be yourself than any people in the history of civilization."

Reprinted by arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt from Plastic: A Toxic Love Story by Susan Freinkel. Copyright © 2011 by Susan Freinkel.

4 Comments

1. 1. Happy Phil 05:18 PM 5/29/11

   Thank you for printing this article. It answered a question that I have wondered about for years. My mother would tell us that she thought dad's death by cancer was somehow connected to his work on the Manhattan Project.
   
   We thought she was embellishing reality a bit, because though dad might be considered the father of modern plastics, what did plastics have to do with atomic bombs?
   
   So, thank you for publishing this article and helping to clear up that little mystery.

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2. 2. diducthat 09:48 AM 5/30/11

   Very interesting and thoughtful article. However I must say that the spam on this site is getting worse. It is clearly generated by an auto spam-blogger which randomly generates usernames and passwords.
   
   This is incredibly easy to stop by using a CAPTCHA - I know this is a little inconvenient for the poster, but so is scrolling through all the annoying shopping ads

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3. 3. tombaxter 05:32 PM 6/1/11

   ERROR!! "(That nitric acid–cotton combination, called gun-cotton, was daunting to work with because it was highly flammable, even explosive. For a while it was used as a substitute for gunpowder until producers of it got tired of having their factories blow up.)"
   Gun-cotton is used as an accelerant in almost every firearm, including cannons. It's called smokeless power. Without it machine-guns would be useless because of the smoke. I worked in a smokeless power plant and the dangers were close to an oil refinery. Look out for sparks! Tools were all plastic, stainless steel and bronze.

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4. 4. JohnPlasticAdams 06:23 AM 9/11/12

   I enjoyed reading this article it has a lot of depth, I would be interested in reading more about the future of the plastic industry as the effect of plastics on the environment is becoming more of a concern.
   
   We have the technology to engineer biodegradable plastics and most uses of plastics could use this, those that are not suitable for biodegradable plastics should be easily recycled. Both of these steps are not being fully implemented at the moment and it is having terrible effects on the environment especially in our oceans. The next step for the <a href="http://wheatleyplastics.co.uk/sectors">plastics industry</a> is to further develop these bio degradable plastics and work with their suppliers to switch.

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