Synthetic polymers shaped by heat and pressure — from Bakelite in 1907 to the petrochemical explosion of polyethylene, PVC, and PET — plastic remade daily life by making everything cheaper, lighter, and more durable. It is now an ecological reckoning: a material so permanent that it does not disappear, only fragments, and so pervasive that microplastics are found in human blood, Arctic ice, and the deepest ocean trenches.
In 1907 a chemist named Leo Baekeland mixed phenol and formaldehyde under heat and pressure and produced Bakelite: a hard, moldable, heat-resistant material made entirely from chemicals, with no counterpart in nature. He called it Bakelite. Within a generation, the material family it belonged to — synthetic polymers, or plastics — would replace ivory, wood, metal, and glass across almost every domain of life. Within another generation, the same property that made plastic miraculous, its near-indestructibility, would make it a catastrophe. Plastic is the material that granted a miracle and a curse in the same breath.