ENVIRONMENT × TECHNOLOGY

The Plastic Age

~1950 CE

History · Contemporary · Holocene · Meghalayan

Around 1950, synthetic polymers left the laboratory and remade the material world: packaging, textiles, construction, medicine. The full accounting is recent and stark: roughly 8,300 million tonnes of virgin plastic produced by 2015, more than three quarters of it already waste, and only nine percent of that waste ever recycled. In 2010 alone, an estimated 5 to 13 million tonnes reached the ocean from coastal countries. Plastics are now sedimenting into the rock record, a human stratum in the making.

Why it matters

Plastic is the signature material of the Great Acceleration: cheap, versatile, everywhere, and nearly immortal. The same durability that made it miraculous makes it a planetary residue, from the Mariana Trench to the human placenta, and a marker that future geologists could read. It poses this timeline's recurring modern question in its purest form: a wonder-technology whose costs arrive one generation after its benefits.

Dating & uncertainty

Synthetic plastics date from the early twentieth century, but mass production took off around 1950, which is where the global accounting begins: some 8,300 million tonnes of virgin plastic made by 2015 and, of the 6,300 million tonnes that had already become waste, 9 percent recycled, 12 percent incinerated and 79 percent left in landfills or in the natural environment. Geologists now read plastics as a stratigraphic indicator of the Anthropocene: the layer identifies itself.

Sources

1. Geyer, Jambeck & Law (2017), Science Advances · Production, use, and fate of all plastics ever madedoi:10.1126/sciadv.1700782
2. Jambeck et al. (2015), Science · Plastic waste inputs from land into the oceandoi:10.1126/science.1260352
3. Zalasiewicz et al. (2016), Anthropocene · The geological cycle of plastics and their use as a stratigraphic indicator of the Anthropocenedoi:10.1016/j.ancene.2016.01.002

Our species’ history as one day

23:59:3920.8 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day