Plastic (9 page)

These cheap, lightweight, flexible materials vastly expanded play possibilities while raising profit margins. Fleshy vinyl permitted the manufacture of dolls that would "'feel' real as well as look real."
Or not, as in the case of the impossibly curvaceous Barbie, who debuted in 1957. There were model cars, trains, and planes that had more detailing than wood or metal had ever allowed but that could still be sold for just a couple of bucks each. There were types of playthings never seen before, such as Silly Putty, developed by a scientist who was trying to create a synthetic rubber for the army in the early years of World War II. The military couldn't figure out what to do with it, but an entrepreneurial toy-store owner had an idea.
And the SuperBall, which appeared in 1965 (and which Charles Eames considered one of the most elegant designs of the year). I remember how amazed my friends and I were by that little sphere of compressed black rubber (packed with so much energy that one early prototype tore apart the molding machine trying to get out). We'd spend recess bouncing the balls over one another, over the jungle gym, over the fences, over the roof until our exasperated teachers confiscated them.

The major plastics producers ran aggressive campaigns pushing plastics on Toyland. To promote its house brand of polystyrene, Styron, Dow Chemical invited manufacturers to submit toys made of the stuff for a corporate seal of approval. Those that passed muster were allowed to carry the Styron label, touting the material as "5 times tougher!" (Did anyone ask: "Than what?") Even after rejecting nearly half of the nineteen hundred submitted items, the company still issued well over ten million labels by the end of 1949. Companies also appealed directly to consumers: "Take it from the
Real
Santa Claus," a beaming Saint Nick declared in one 1948 ad in the
Saturday Evening Post,
"Toys of Monsanto Plastics bring Christmas Cheers."

But plastics' ascension was also the inevitable result of their sheer low-cost availability. In the early fifties, for instance, eight different chemical companies quickly built factories to start producing polyethylene, widely viewed as the most promising of the new plastics.
Prices plunged to less than a dime a pound. The low cost stimulated scores of new applications, which absorbed supplies of the plastic, which in turn stimulated more production. All at once there was a host of new cheap toys, like dime-store cowboy-and-Indian sets and snap-together pop beads (which at one point were absorbing forty thousand pounds of polyethylene a month).
Such boom-bust cycles have long driven the plastics industry, though throughout the wild ups and downs, for many decades it continued to grow, in some years and for some plastics at double-digit rates.

The most dramatic example of the ping-ponging relationship between supply and demand occurred when Phillips Petroleum tried to perfect production of a new semirigid variety of polyethylene. The manufacturing was tricky, and Phillips kept running into problems, turning out one unusable batch after another. Its warehouse filled with tons of off-spec, unsold plastic, a situation that threatened disaster until Wham-O came to the rescue in 1958. It started buying up the stockpiles to produce a new toy it had developed, the Hula-Hoop. After the singer Dinah Shore featured the spinning rings on her TV show, the hoops started flying off the shelves so fast that Wham-O couldn't keep up with orders. Tens of millions of hoops sold that first year, making short order of fifteen million pounds of material that until then Phillips hadn't been able to give away.
Then, like so many fads, the craze for Hula-Hooping died as suddenly as it had taken off—and nearly took Wham-O down with it. Overnight, orders for Hula-Hoops dropped to zero. "We damn near went broke," Rich Knerr later recalled.

The Frisbee, however, has proved more enduring. And that's probably due to several things Wham-O did after securing the rights to Morrison's flying saucer. For one, Melin and Knerr rechristened Morrison's baby, picking a trademark that would distinguish their disc from the other Space Saucers, SkyPies, and Super Saucers then crowding the skies.
Frisbee
was a slight variation on the name used for a similar object in New England; since the 1930s, folks there had been tossing cake and pie tins from the Frisbie Pie Company and calling the sport Frisbieing.

Wham-O recognized that the Frisbee's longevity depended on its being seen as more than a novelty toy for playing catch. As Knerr and Melin had learned with the Hula-Hoop, even a best-selling toy can have a short shelf life. (Indeed, life in the toy market is so nasty and brutish that any toy that survives more than three seasons is considered a classic.) Sports, by contrast, have staying power and give rise to entire athletic ecosystems. Credit for nudging the Frisbee in that direction goes to a man known in disc circles as "Steady" Ed Headrick. After joining Wham-O in 1964, Headrick redesigned the Frisbee to make it more sport-worthy. He removed the goofy space references, broadened the saucer, and, to improve the aerodynamics, added concentric-circle ridges on the top, now known by discphiles as the "lines of Headrick." Such changes vastly improved the flight capabilities, making true disc sports possible for the first time.

Headrick himself invented disc golf, and he remained so passionate about the game and the disc that when he died, in 2002, he had his ashes molded into Frisbees. "He wanted all his friends to be able to throw him around," said Waisblum approvingly. "He wanted to come and rest on a roof somewhere, just out of reach, so he could bathe in the sun."

For all the advances in discs, the material used for the basic model has remained essentially unchanged since Morrison sold the company his Pluto Platter. It's the material that distinguishes a Wham-O Frisbee from a cheap knockoff (and cheap knockoffs are legion, since the disc-design patent has long since expired). Then, as now, it needed a material that was inexpensive, durable, and pliable, with the quality Waisblum called "givingness," which makes a disc pleasurable to catch and throw. Several plastics meet some of the specifications, but only one fulfills every item on Wham-O's wish list. That's polyethylene, the most commonly used polymer in the world and the one that, more than any other, molded the modern age of plastics.

Legend has it that one day John D. Rockefeller was looking out over one of his oil refineries and suddenly noticed flames flaring from some smokestacks. "What's that burning?" he asked, and someone explained that the company was burning off ethylene gas, a byproduct of the refining process. "I don't believe in wasting anything!" Rockefeller supposedly snapped. "Figure out something to do with it!" That something became polyethylene.

The story is almost certainly apocryphal. But I like it as myth, because it succinctly describes the origins of the modern petrochemical industry—a colossus grown from the principle that every hydrocarbon sucked from the ground can somehow help turn a profit. What is true is that Rockefeller's company Standard Oil was the first to figure out how to isolate the hydrocarbons in crude petroleum. That innovation helped give rise to the modern petrochemical companies that produce the raw, unprocessed polymers known as resins.

Most of today's major resin producers—Dow Chemical, DuPont, ExxonMobil, BASF, Total Petrochemical—have their roots in the early decades of the twentieth century, when petroleum and chemical industries began to develop alliances or form vertically integrated companies. Producers had begun to realize that there might be a use for the vast amounts of waste created in the processing of crude oil and natural gas and in the making of chemicals. Rather than being burned off as a worthless byproduct, ethylene could be retrieved and profitably deployed as a raw material for polymers. The growing reliance on fossil fuels helped drive the growth of the modern plastics industry, even though the production of plastics consumes a relatively modest amount of oil and natural gas. About 4 percent of global supplies of oil and gas is used as feedstock for plastics, and another 4 percent is used to actually produce them.
Of course, an industry based on waste had one great advantage over rival industries: the low cost of its raw materials.
The dregs of refining would always be cheaper than traditional materials such as wood or wool or iron.

With the rise of integrated petrochemical companies, the discovery and creation of new polymers became a more directed, rationalized process. Baekeland and Hyatt had gone hunting for synthetics that could replace natural materials in very specific applications, such as making billiard balls and electrical insulation. Starting in the 1920s and 1930s, industrial chemists became more interested in developing new polymers and only then finding ways to commercialize their discoveries.
Plastics were moving into the economic driver's seat.

Polyethylene was discovered in 1933 by two chemists at Britain's Imperial Chemical Industries who were noodling around in the lab exploring how ethylene reacted under high pressure. In a series of experiments—including one that blew their reactor and much of their lab to smithereens—they found that with extreme pressure and the catalytic cajoling of benzaldehyde and a bit of oxygen, ethylene molecules hooked together into chains of stupendous length. The flakes of snow-white waxy stuff they found at the bottom of the reactor vessel were "so unlike the polymers known at the time ... no one could envisage a use for it," one of the researchers recalled.
Yet uses were soon found. Polyethylene turned out to be an able buffer of both high frequencies and high voltages. During World War II, the British took advantage of that dielectric property to develop the airborne radar systems that allowed them to detect and shoot down German fighter planes.

But polyethylene had other virtues. Lightweight, durable, "stiffer than steel, yet as soft as candle wax,"
chemically inert, endlessly remoldable—this was a polymer that could and would be pressed into all kinds of service, from garbage bags to artificial hips, Tupperware to toys. In the 1950s, chemists developed improved ways of making polyethylene by using metal-containing compounds called metallocenes rather than extreme pressure to catalyze the reactions that forged the polymer chain. The discovery allowed chemists to rearrange the daisy chains to create new variations on the polyethylene theme. High-density polyethylene, HDPE, a stiffer, semirigid material, became widely used for containers such as milk jugs and grocery bags. Low-density polyethylene, LDPE, and linear-low-density polyethylene, LLDPE, were flexible, stretchy materials, ideal for making filmy products such as plastic wraps and bags. Combined, they proved the perfect plastic for the basic recreational Frisbee.

Thanks to such versatility, polyethylene was the first plastic in the United States to sell more than one billion pounds a year,
making it the first commodity plastic, meaning high volumes of it sold at low prices. Today, it's one of five families of commodity plastics that dominate the world's markets. Here are the other four:
Polyvinyl chloride,
also known as PVC and vinyl, has a remarkable shape-shifting ability: mixed with different chemicals, it can be made soft and flexible for things like shower curtains, hard and rigid for house siding and water pipes, or clear and filmy for packaging wrap.
Polypropylene,
a flexible, moisture-proof polymer, is used for monobloc chairs and food containers such as margarine and yogurt tubs.
Polystyrene,
which can be made as a hard, clear plastic, is often used in combs, hangers, and disposable cups, and it can be puffed up into Styrofoam.
Polyethylene terephthalate,
a type of polyester better known as PET, is a flexible, clear plastic used for soda and water bottles and as a spun fiber for making clothing and carpet.

Every day, of course, we encounter many other kinds of plastics.
Altogether there are about twenty basic categories of polymers. They provide the foundation for tens of thousands of distinctive grades and varieties of plastics that are created by tweaking the essential characteristics of a given base polymer to make it more flexible, to increase its clarity, to improve its processing, or to confer any number of other desired properties. Still, the five basic families of commodity plastics make up the bulk of the market, accounting for about 75 percent of the roughly one hundred billion pounds of plastic produced and sold annually in the United States.
Interestingly, all five date from the golden age of polymer innovation, the years bookending World War II. No significant new plastics have been introduced for decades. It's just too expensive and time-consuming to develop and bring an entirely new plastic to market. Polymer chemists today spend most of their time tinkering with and modifying existing base materials.

Of all the many plastics we rely on, polyethylene remains the favorite. For decades, it's constituted about a third of all plastics produced, largely because it is the polymer of choice in packaging.
Indeed, according to calculations by Skidmore College chemist Raymond Giguere, the amount of polyethylene produced in America each year is nearly equal to the combined mass of every man, woman, and child living in the United States.

The company responsible for the biggest share of all that polyethylene is Dow Chemical. Which is why one spring day I found myself driving along Texas Highway 288 through a flat and treeless landscape toward the town of Freeport, where Dow has its biggest polyethylene plant. To see the origins of the plastic used in Frisbees, this was the place to go. Indeed, it would be the place to go to find the source of most of the plastics in my life: nearly all the raw plastic resins made in the United States come from petrochemical plants located along the fossil-fuel-rich Gulf Coast.

Dow arrived here in 1940, drawn not by petroleum but by the need for a new locale to sustain the historic heart of its business: extracting bromine and magnesium from brine to make chemicals. (The supply of brine in Midland, Michigan, where Herbert Dow founded the company in 1890, was almost tapped out. The Gulf of Mexico offered a near-limitless source.) But the region's deep stores of fossil fuels proved to be more important to the company as it expanded its production of polymers.
When Dow announced its decision to buy eighty acres in what was then a tiny fishing village, the Freeport town fathers welcomed them with open arms. Ever since, the town and company have been wrapped in a tight embrace.