Whensday: The beginning of plastic

Before the world went crazy for corona rules and we started finding blue face masks everywhere along the streets, discarded along with used tissues which no one dared pick up - even if they had wanted to - the talk in all the media was about reducing plastic use. Straws were outlawed and paper sacks were even returning to grocery stores. In the stores in Europe you had to pay if you wanted something in a bag, whether the bag was plastic or not. 

A few years earlier, a young Dutch man had come up with a way to clean up the plastic soup - the plastic found in the ocean gathered together and formed islands after having been tossed in the rivers which flowed to the seas. Plastic was one of the worst environmental disasters. This was stated unequivocally, even though we could probably not survive without plastics anymore. 

Plastic comes from oil. They can also be made from natural gas, corn or cotton - all products which can run out, can be used up, becoming extinct, or which must continually use resources to be grown. And if plastics are made from corn, the idea of taking the food out of someone’s mouth comes to mind )as with ethanol). 

The first synthetic plastic was made back in 1909 with the Belgian Henricus Baekeland. It was made from a reaction between phenol and formaldehyde by this Belgian chemist and inventor who lived in Yonkers, New York. You would know it as ‘Bakelitte” if you know it. You might have seen an old (and I mean old) rotary telephone, almost always black and quite heavy. Or a radio made of a mottled brown material. But you could also find colorful jewelry or silverware with fanciful handles. This was bakelite. This was the beginning of the plastics industry. 

These days plastics are in everything, including your clothes and tea sacks. Recently in Belgium the coffee pads and tea sacks, which one previously would have dumped in the green container for composting, were no longer welcome in the compost container. This was because the papers used for the pads and sacks was now most often made of or included plastic. 

How much would your life change if you were to drop this invention discovered back in 1909 by a Belgian chemist living in New York?