Paper or Plastic?

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Raise your hand if you like to wash dishes. Scrub muffin tins? Sweep the challah crumbs off the table? Raise your hand if you haven’t raised your hand yet. Yeah probably all of you. No worries. Just get out the disposables — plates cutlery cups muffin pans serving trays disposable tablecloths.

What other disposable items do you regularly use? It generally goes like this: Rip open the package. Throw out the package. Use the item once then throw it out. Open a new package. Use it. Throw it out. And again. We have so much access to disposable goods we’re known as the “Disposable Generation.”

Plastic Revolution

Take a look at the room around you. What are most objects made from? How many items are made from plastic or other manmade materials? Probably a lot. This wasn’t always the case. At the beginning of the 19th century factories made goods from natural resources such as wood copper iron natural rubber glass and clay. But many of these raw materials were expensive and hard to acquire. So inventors and scientists all over the world got busy working on formulas to fake them by making them out of synthetic substances like rubber and plastic.

In 1907 Belgian-American chemist Leo Hendrik Baekeland struck gold with the first fully-synthetic commercially successful plastic. Its scientific name was polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride (don’t even bother trying to pronounce it). To make it easier he called in Bakelite. What a great product. So versatile. Manufacturers in every industry started using Bakelite to make jewelry telephones automobile parts and everything in between. Even the clothing industry started using plastic fibers such as nylon in their garments. Soon enough other plastics such as Dacron Styrofoam and vinyl became commonplace.