©2009 Full Circle Magazine.
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26
September 2009 Vol6 No9
the nature of things
PLASTICS forever
by Roy Siegfried
“Please to remember that I am a Victorian,
and that the Victorian tree cannot but be
expected to bear Victorian fruit.” So wrote the
English ‘Gentleman of Letters’ Montague
Rhodes James, who lived between 1862 and
1936.
We all are products of the ages we live in. I know
almost nothing, and never will know anything, about
multiplayer, online, computer games. They seem to
be so boringly masochistic. I do know about radio,
however. I know, for example, that each minute of
radio time requires some 80 words. I know this
because I once wrote scripts for broadcasting. It’s
not something that I’m illimitably proud of.
Several of the broadcasters of the day considered
themselves to be very precious people. They sought
to project their personalities into the public domain
as forcefully as possible. They demanded more and
more alliteration in the scripts that they were
required to speak on air. They simply wanted to
sound good, never mind the subject content of the
scripts. It made for some inflammatory dialogue off-
air between the writers and the speakers of radio
scripts. It’s interesting, but not what I want to write
about now. While radio, you see, did form a
distinguishing part of my age, it was nowhere as
prominently pervasive as plastics. I am, and many of
you are, of the age of plastics. We belong to the
world’s first era of synthetic chemicals. These
artificially made chemical compounds have never
before occurred in nature.
When, as a child, I first began tinkering with
crystal sets (an early form of radio receiver)
and electricity, the housings of switches and
connectors were made of brass. Then came
Bakelite, an early form of brittle plastic, used
for radios and telephones. It’s named after
Leo Baekeland, a Belgian-born American. He
made the world’s first synthetic phenolic
resin, which replaced natural shellac as a
coating available for electric wires. Shellac
came from the secretions of Asian insects
called lac. The age of synthetic polymers, in
the form of plastics, had begun. The world
would become a very different place. Almost
none of it would be ‘safe my mate’ from
plastic pollution, as exemplified recently by
traces of an oestrogen mimicker found in
polycarbonate bottles. These are the bottles
that are used to feed milk and juices to
babies.
After Bakelite, for me, came white nylon
shirts. For school, these were horribly hot and
sticky to wear. But a mother’s delight, since
they didn’t crease and didn’t require any
ironing. They came and went. Fortunately,
their regnum was a relatively brief one.
Minute fractions of them remain with us,
however. The demise of nylon shirts ushered
in the age of plastics proper. Now, many of us
depart the world of the living with plastic joints
in our bodies. The plastic bits go into the
ground or are incinerated. Their shapes
change, but plastics are set to be with us
and our descendants for a long time to
come. Not even our ‘Cape Doctor’ can blow
them away. This name, by the way, was first
used in the 18th Century by British colonial
officials from India, who said that Cape
Town’s windy summer compared favourably
with the climate of Bengal.
Synthetic polymers are everywhere.
Chlorine additives make PVC. Blowing gas
into polymers makes polystyrene, known as
Styrofoam. Cling-wraps are made of
polyethylene and polyvinyl chloride.
Tupperware has come into the housewife’s
kitchen. Plastic cups filled her brassiere and
then bolstered and ‘enhanced’ her flat chest
with surgical implants, if deemed desirable.
There is almost nothing that can’t be made
from moulded plastics. Tyres are made
entirely of rubber. Right? Wrong! Natural
rubber doesn’t come into it. At least, not
since Charles Goodyear discovered
vulcanisation in 1939. Many billions of used
tyres litter the surface of the Earth. The tally
grows daily. Synthetically made tyres don’t
degrade easily.
Warren Copelowitz is a director of a
company contracted to build thousands of
new low-cost houses in Gauteng. Started in
2006, the contract
John Gillie Bannatyne
