Plastic Soup: An Atlas of Ocean Pollution
Michiel Roscam Abbing
Island Press: 2019
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“Human Consumption of Microplastics”
Kieran D. Cox, Garth A. Covernton, Hailey L. Davies et al
Environmental Science & Technology
53 (12): 7068–74
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G.I. Joe was an early victim of the Vietnam War. Joe — an action figure and never a doll, as boys did not play with dolls — might not have served in-country, but his sales shrank along with support for US involvement. By 1969, he was focussed more on adventuring than on fighting communism. His place of manufacture switched from Japan to Hong Kong, where injection moulding plants were advanced enough to make the complex toy, which had joints that both bent and could hold a pose. In the early 1970s, he evolved into a tree-hugging environmentalist with swivelling eyes, a “realistic” beard and a kung-fu grip. Joe the eco-warrior better suited the times. But by late in the decade, his career was over, doomed not just by declining support for the military but by the rise in oil prices that had made plastics more expensive.

G.I. Joe was made in the factories of the Cheung Kong Group, the first company owned by Li Ka-shing, the Hong Kong property tycoon once popularly known as “Superman”, whose first fortune was built on injection moulded plastic. Joe’s story weaves together the threads of Asian development over the past fifty years: the economic boost from the Vietnam War which shaped the economies of the emerging Asian Tigers; the emergence of a new tycoon class that would dominate business across the region, forming vast conglomerates and making even bigger personal fortunes; and the advent of plastic as a driver of growth. And now there’s another thread: rising disillusionment and anxiety.

Petrochemical polymers built Asia: from Sony, to Formosa Plastics, to the Ambani brothers, to most of the manufacturing base in Hong Kong. In 1955, there was one factory making plastic flowers in Hong Kong. Just seven years later there were 997, employing more than 30,000 people. Artificial blooms had wilted by the late 1960s, but not Cheung Kong. Like many of the plastics companies, it had moved into property, eventually accounting for one in twelve privately built homes in the city, as well as office towers, hotels and ports. Li is the most famous of the billionaires who got their starts in plastic, but across Hong Kong vast amounts of wealth stems from the 1960s boom, when this miracle material, initially shunned for its brittle cheapness but eventually embraced for its practicality and endless potential, became ubiquitous. In 1950, about 1.5 million metric tons of plastic was made; now, it is around 350 million tons a year and is set to double by 2030.

Since Li began making plastic flowers as a twenty-four-year-old refugee from China, plastic has become the most manufactured material on earth. It was developed as a cheap substitute for much more valuable materials, a way to make billiard balls that looked as though they were ivory, or to mimic tortoiseshell or ebony. The basic building blocks of polymers are produced when oil is refined into petrol and its various by-products. Soon the production of ethylene and other chemicals began to exceed demand, so the oil majors invested billions in finding new ways to use them in plastics. That required new products, preferably adopted in a way that ensured ever-rising demand. The ubiquitous single-use plastic bags that foul our rivers and choke sea life were developed by a Swedish firm in the 1960s. The chemicals division of Mobil Oil began to push them on supermarkets in the early 1970s, but they were initially a failure. Consumers were wary of them: they were weak and spilled groceries in the trunks of cars. Dozens of children had died by suffocating while playing with dry-cleaning bags. Plastic was viewed as more life-threatening than life-enhancing; indeed, it was something of a joke. Audiences chortled in 1967 when Benjamin Braddock, the young protagonist of The Graduate, was taken aside at a pool party by a pushy neighbour, who told him: “One word: plastics … There’s a great future in plastics.”

• Tags: Garth A. Covernton, Hailey L. Davies, Issue 18, Kieran D. Cox, Michiel Roscam Abbing, Robert Templer