How Plastics Went from a Sustainability Solution to an Environmental Crisis

Plastics Started as a Sustainability Solution. What Went Wrong?

By Jen Schwartz edited by Seth Fletcher

In 1864 Scientific American published a competition launched by a billiard-table manufacturing company: “Ten Thousand Dollars for a Substitute for Ivory.” The owners of Phelan & Collender were pleased to see it; they wrote to the magazine to elaborate on what they were looking for in an “ivory alternative” that could be used to make billiard balls and hoped it would “have the effect of stimulating the genius of some of your numerous readers.” The real stuff from elephant tusks had become scarce, but its elasticity, hardness and density were hard to find in another material.

A printer from Albany, N.Y., named John Wesley Hyatt came up with an answer in celluloid, a moldable, compound material made up of cellulose nitrate, a polymer that held the ball together; camphor, an organic compound that provided flexibility and durability; and ground-up cow bone, to give the ball the right mechanics for play. Rather than accepting the $10,000 reward and signing away the rights to his invention, Hyatt patented his object in 1869 and started his own company, selling celluloid billiard balls that conservation scientist Artur Neves, writing in 2023, called “the founding object of the plastics industry.”

The creation of the “first plastic” was essentially an answer to a sustainability problem. There were only so many elephants, tortoises and silkworms to go around, and their tusks, shells and fibers were increasingly in demand. Articles and advertisements from the early era of the plastics industry portray such materials as relieving pressure on natural resources. In a 2023 paper in PNAS Nexus, Neves and his colleagues called Hyatt’s celluloid billiard balls one of “the first successful efforts to substitute materials to assist the survival of endangered animals.”

On supporting science journalism

If you’re enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

The billiard ball and other reinforced polymer composites were predecessors to commercial plastics. But the term “plastic” was nebulous, more marketing language than scientific category. Philip H. Smith, writing in Scientific American in 1935, defined it as “the name given to a more or less arbitrarily chosen group of substances which, when properly compounded and treated, become plastic and can be molded or cast to shape.”

In American Plastic: A Cultural History, published in 1995, Jeffrey L. Meikle writes that the fear of an ivory shortage that stimulated plastics development shifted in the 20th century to the idea of democratizing luxury items. Mass production of plastics for a wide range of uses began in the 1940s, when production in the U.S. nearly tripled over the war years. This expansion coincided with the replacement of bio-based materials (such as cotton, soybeans and sugar) in polymer bases with fossil fuels, which were promoted as an abundant resource. To give products specific properties, additives such as colorants, plasticizers (such as phthalates and bisphenol A) and flame retardants were included in the polymers during manufacturing.

You know where this story goes. By the 1970s, Meikle writes in his book, “plastic’s ability to transcend nature often no longer seemed utopian but instead simply disastrous.” Plastics had ushered in an era of excessive stuff that was cheap to make. Materials originally celebrated for their durability and longevity became popular in single-use items. Ninety percent of plastics aren’t technically recyclable anyway, and some now argue that recycling campaigns only encouraged people to feel better about buying more plastic things. Because plastic is not biodegradable, it simply accumulates, fragmenting into ever smaller pieces over hundreds or thousands of years. In 2009 the first comprehensive review of the impact of plastics on the environment and human health was published—a collection of consequences and warnings that have gotten only more dire.

Now researchers are investigating the wide-ranging presence and effects of microplastics—tiny specks that leach toxic chemicals into the environment. Single-use items such as water bottles are an obvious part of the problem, but there are many other culprits. Until the mid-1990s, natural fibers dominated the fashion industry; in 2023 synthetic polymers made up 67 percent of global fiber production, with polyester alone making up 57 percent of all new clothing, home textiles and shoes. These products shed microplastic fibers with every wash, contributing to pollution in groundwater. These contaminants, which are basically impossible to clean up, are not just present in soil and water: A new study found the leaves of plants absorb microplastics from the air. All animals studied, including us, are not just eating plastic in our food and drinking it in our water; we now have plastic in our organs.

The solution to one environmental sustainability problem has become one of the biggest and most intractable environmental crises of our time. As Rebecca Altman wrote in a 2021 article in Science, celluloid “purportedly spared the elephant, especially from the billiard ball industry. [But] market data show that celluloid did not decrease ivory demand, which grew in the years after celluloid’s introduction.” Celluloid, she adds, also accelerated the demand for camphor, a product distilled from an evergreen tree prevalent in Taiwan. Competition to control the camphor trade destroyed Taiwan’s forests and displaced its Indigenous communities. The advent of synthetic polymers didn’t free humanity from the limits of natural resources.

What started as a competition to invent an alternative to ivory has turned into competitions for inventing methods to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and other sprawling plastic icebergs in oceans the world over. In 1942 Williams Haynes, a historian and promoter of the chemical industry, declared that synthetic materials would have “more effect on the lives of our great-grandchildren than Hitler or Mussolini.” He couldn’t have imagined the biggest impact on future generations might be nanoplastic fragments in their brains.

It’s Time to Stand Up for Science

If you enjoyed this article, I’d like to ask for your support. Scientific American has served as an advocate for science and industry for 180 years, and right now may be the most critical moment in that two-century history.

I’ve been a Scientific American subscriber since I was 12 years old, and it helped shape the way I look at the world. SciAm always educates and delights me, and inspires a sense of awe for our vast, beautiful universe. I hope it does that for you, too.

If you subscribe to Scientific American, you help ensure that our coverage is centered on meaningful research and discovery; that we have the resources to report on the decisions that threaten labs across the U.S.; and that we support both budding and working scientists at a time when the value of science itself too often goes unrecognized.

In return, you get essential news, captivating podcasts, brilliant infographics, can’t-miss newsletters, must-watch videos, challenging games, and the science world’s best writing and reporting.

There has never been a more important time for us to stand up and show why science matters. I hope you’ll support us in that mission.