I want to say one word to you. Just one word.

Plastics — chemical compounds which are compressed under heat into desired shapes, and thereafter are not subject to corrosion — are increasingly in use. Some are made of coal-tar products, some of milk; and one... utilizes the Chinese soy bean. This useful plant, is, next to rice, the staff of life in the Celestial republic; like beans, peas, and other "legume" plants, it contains the proteins, or nitrogen compounds, for which we eat meat.

The mechanical uses of the soy bean (which does not resemble American beans) are of more recent discovery. It furnishes a fibrous flour, which gives body to a phenol (carbolic acid) compound. Under heat and pressure, this changes into a hard, strong, glossy substance, suitable for buttons, knobs, handles, mouldings, etc.

Excerpted from "Auto Made from Beans," Everyday Science And Mechanics, April 1936. (Tip of the hat to the Modern Mechanix blog.)

Fast-forward to the Environmental Building News feature from July, 2001, "Plastics in Construction: Performance and Affordability at What Cost?"

In 1967, when [the film] The Graduate appeared, U.S. plastic production totaled 15 billion pounds (6.8 million tonnes). By 1999, according to the American Plastics Council, the annual total had increased to just under 85 billion pounds (38.5 million tonnes), with more than 60,000 different compounds in production. Plastics are used in virtually every industry, and their use is continuing to grow — at a compounded annual growth rate of 6.4% for the period 1995 to 1999. Nowhere are the presence and growth of plastics more apparent than the construction industry. North American sales for building and construction represent more than 22% of all plastic resin sales, second only to the packaging industry. It's hard to imagine a building today without plastics. Along with the obvious uses (siding, flooring, piping, wiring, appliances, and foam insulation), plastics are used in everything from concrete to paint.

But at what cost to our environment?

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