The late great comedian George Carlin once said that perhaps the reason why humanity was brought to earth by an all-powerful God was because he needed plastics, didn’t know how to make them himself, needed humanity to do it. It was, as he said, the answer to the age-old question “why are we here?” Plastics, Carlin responded in his God-like voice from on-high, adding the usual expletive after the comma. That’s why.
Everybody hates plastics. It’s hard to recycle. Microplastics are floating around the Pacific Ocean, eaten up by the fish we eat. But corporate investors still like them, probably because it’s not about plastics. It’s polymers – which can be found in organic materials or made synthetically from hydrocarbons as a derivative of the oil and gas industry. These polymers are made into plastics and resins and are the mother of all materials around us – from the keyboards we type on, the phones in our hands, the cars we drive, and the subway seats we sit on.
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