Plastic
A Toxic Love Story
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
How can we learn to live with the material that never dies?
Plastic built the modern world. It's everywhere: just try to get through a day without touching anything made from it. But our love affair with this endlessly versatile and alluring substance is turning out to be a very complex relationship. Plastics draw on dwindling fossil fuels, leach harmful chemicals, litter landscapes and destroy marine life. And we've produced nearly as much of the stuff in the past decade as we did in the entire twentieth century.
Susan Freinkel delves into history, science and the global economy, reporting from China, Australia and across the United States, to assess the full impact of plastic on our lives. With a blend of lively anecdotes and analysis, she points the way to a new creative partnership with the material we love to hate but can't seem to live without.
'It turns out that plastic is not only an ongoing environmental peril, but a compulsively interesting story.' Bill McKibben
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"What is plastic, really? Where does it come from? How did my life become so permeated by synthetics without my even trying?" Surrounded by plastic and depressed by the political, environmental, and medical consequences of our dependence on it, Freinkel (The American Chestnut) chronicles our history with plastic, "from enraptured embrace to deep disenchantment," through eight household items including the comb, credit card, and soda bottle (celluloid, one of the first synthetics, transformed the comb from a luxury item to an affordable commodity and was once heralded for relieving the pressure on elephants and tortoises for their ivory and shells). She takes readers to factories in China, where women toil 60-hour weeks for $175 a month to make Frisbees; to preemie wards, where the lifesaving vinyl tubes that deliver food and oxygen to premature babies may cause altered thyroid function, allergies, and liver problems later in life. Freinkel's smart, well-written analysis of this love-hate relationship is likely to make plastic lovers take pause, plastic haters reluctantly realize its value, and all of us understand the importance of individual action, political will, and technological innovation in weaning us off our addiction to synthetics.
