This is the second part of our series, The History of Plastic. You can find the first chapter on the invention of throwaway living here.
Wouldnât it be nice if we could point our fingers at one single entity and blame them for our worldâs current single-use plastic catastrophe? At the very least, it could help us direct our feelings of frustration over the prevalence of disposable silverware, straws getting pulled out of turtles, and wasteful, plastic-lined wrappers getting tossed in the trash. But at the very best, it might help us learn exactly how we got into this disastrous mess. We could understand where we went wrong, how we can possibly make it better, and how we can avoid this kind of mistake again.
It sounds almost too convenient to have only one responsible party for our societyâs current reliance on single-use plastic. And we donât want to point fingers, but itâs hard to ignore one massively influential company in particular which isnât merely a player in the game of big biz plastic wasteâit may have inspired the normalization and accepted use of single-use plastic.
