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Why Plastic Is a Design Failure
And the brands and designers innovating to change that
As a material for use in design, plastic only became readily available and widely used in the 1950s. Since then, we’ve managed to amass over 8 billion tons of the stuff. And every single piece of this 8 billion tons remains on our planet. Much of it exists as microplastics within our water system, where it’s an issue for our health and is causing havoc for marine life in our oceans.
Plastic is a design failure. It was born as a useful material, but without due thought into where it would end up and whether it could be reused.
So why was plastic invented in the first place?
Plastics are a category of materials otherwise known as polymers, which are made of long chains of molecules, meaning that they’re pliable and easily shaped. These polymers exist in nature — for instance, cellulose, the material that makes up the cell walls of plants, is a common polymer. It’s only over the last 200 years that we’ve learned how to make polymers synthetically to produce a cheap, strong, lightweight, and flexible material: plastic.
The very first plastic is generally accepted as Parkesine, invented in 1856 by Alexander Parkes. It was made using the cellulose polymer found in the cell walls of plants. It was widely used as a synthetic version of tortoise shell, which was traditionally made from the shell of the Hawksbill tortoise.
Ironically, given that Parkesine was originally produced as an alternative to killing them for their shells, Hawksbill tortoises are now one of the animals most affected by ocean plastic waste, and are now endangered.
It wasn’t until 100 years later, in the 1950s and ’60s, that plastic became widely used in design. Designers in the 1960s were experimenting with new materials to create shiny objects in vivid colors and fluid shapes. Plastic was the perfect material for this experimentation. One famous example from this era of design is the Panton Chair.
Why is plastic a design failure?
Once you produce plastic, it’s here to stay. Currently, we produce around 300 million tons of plastic every year, and 91% of that…
