Plastic

In the first decade of 2000, says Susan Freinkel in Plastic: A Toxic Love Story, we produced as much plastic as did the entire 20th century.

Freinkel’s book begins with a description of her casual plan to document how thoroughly plasticized modern life has become.

Her resolution not to touch plastic for twenty-four hours was abandoned almost immediately, when she realized she couldn’t sit down on her plastic toilet seat in the morning.

She then reversed her plan, documenting every new article of plastic that she touched over the day.  Her list was 196 items long, from her minivan dashboard to the sticker on her apple to both the notebook and the acrylic-coated pencil she used for her list-making.