16-05-2025
Plastics are poisoning your body – and the effects are terrifying
The products are used for just a few seconds; their materials will last for hundreds of years. What does that mean for humankind? The journalist Saabira Chaudhuri answers this question in Consumed, the story of plastic packaging. The brief for her engaging book sounds narrow, but it touches on all manner of related topics, from the science of polymers to the sociology of marketing.
Plastic was once seen as the environmental choice. In the 1860s, with the advent of snooker-balls and combs made of celluloid, who knows how many elephant and tortoise lives were saved? And since 20th-century plastic packaging was both lighter and stronger than paper – which is also, it's true, more polluting and resource-intensive than many of us realise – what wasn't to like?
The assumption grew, incorrectly, that plastics were environmentally inert. As a result, the post-Second World War era saw wild enthusiasm for the use-and-discard lifestyle. In November 1963, Lloyd Stouffer, editor of Modern Plastics magazine, addressed hundreds at a conference in Chicago: 'The happy day has arrived when nobody any longer considers the plastics package too good to throw away.' They certainly didn't. McDonald's rolled out polystyrene clamshell containers across America in the 1970s, and, Chaudhuri relates, up to four billion of them were going to landfill every year. McDonald's claimed they would 'help aerate the soil'. The idea was self-serving, but not ridiculous: the prevailing assumption was that landfills worked as giant composters. But landfill waste doesn't decompose so much as become mummified.
Plastic, over the decades, spread inexorably across the globe, into the oceans as well as on land. There was a backlash in the 1980s, but it petered out. A stronger instance began in 2015, and was led by, among other things, a viral YouTube video of a turtle found off the coast of Costa Rica with a plastic straw lodged in his nose. Other videos, more testimony and more anger followed. Plastic became inexorably linked in the public mind, across the globe, with destruction. This material, so casually thrown away, was killing the natural world.
Rather than moving beyond disposability, however, manufacturers simply tried to make plastics recyclable (or at least compostable). The problem, as Chaudhuri explains, is that it's extremely difficult to recycle plastic; and commercial logic reduced much of that effort to little more than a giant marketing campaign for the supposedly virtuous companies using plastics – what she brands 'a get-out-of-jail-free card in a situation otherwise riddled with reputational risk'.
Recycling wouldn't, in any event, address a more fundamental difficulty. Microplastics – plastic particles ranging from 0.001 to 5,000 micrometres across – first turned up in salt, honey, teabags and beer. In recent years, Chaudhuri explains, they have been detected in 'human blood, breast milk, placentas, lungs, testes and the brain'. You, dear reader, almost certainly have microplastics in your body. In 2024, the New England Journal of Medicine linked them to an increased risk of strokes and heart attacks.
The humble plastic sachet – developed in India to serve a market underserved by refuse collectors and low on running water – provides Chaudhuri with what, to my mind, is her most striking chapter. You've probably used these single-use plastics yourself, maybe countless times: at takeaways, at restaurants, at bars. They have an astonishing range of uses, especially outside the West. 'In 2021,' Chaudhuri relates, 'nearly 41 billion shampoo packages were sold in India. Of these, 99 per cent were sachets.' They're so cheap that they undercut bulk purchases; so tiny that no recycler can make anything from gathering them; so smeared with product that no recycling process could handle them anyway. Beyond their tiny delivery of fluid, they have no redeeming qualities.
Consumed is an engaging book, written in an efficient style and bolstered by a wide range of interviews. Chaudhuri, a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal, brings a critical but never censorious light to bear on the machinations of a wide cast: businesspeople, regulators, campaigners and occasional oddballs. For, at its heart, this is a story about plastic's pioneers and detractors, propelled to unexpected successes and stymied by unforeseen problems – and a corporate class who steeped the world in chemicals causing untold damage to us all.
