ENVIRONMENT × TECHNOLOGY

The Plastic Age

~1950 CE

History · Contemporary · Holocene · Meghalayan

Around 1950, synthetic polymers left the laboratory and remade the material world: packaging, textiles, construction, medicine. The full accounting is recent and stark: roughly 8,300 million tonnes produced by 2015, more than three quarters of it now waste, only nine percent ever recycled, and an estimated 5 to 13 million tonnes entering the ocean each year from coastal countries. Plastics now sediment into rock, a human stratum in the making.

Why it matters

Plastic is the signature material of the Great Acceleration: cheap, versatile, everywhere, and nearly immortal. The same durability that made it miraculous makes it a planetary residue, from Mariana Trench to human placenta, and a marker future geologists could read. It poses this timeline's recurring modern question in its purest form: a wonder-technology whose costs arrive one generation after its benefits.

Dating & uncertainty

Synthetic plastics date from the early twentieth century, but mass production takes off around 1950, where the global accounting begins: some 8,300 million tonnes made by 2015, of which 79 percent had accumulated in landfills or the environment, 9 percent recycled. Geologists now treat plastics as a stratigraphic indicator of the Anthropocene: the layer identifies itself.

Sources

1. Geyer, Jambeck & Law (2017), Science Advances · Production, use, and fate of all plastics ever madedoi:10.1126/sciadv.1700782
2. Jambeck et al. (2015), Science · Plastic waste inputs from land into the oceandoi:10.1126/science.1260352
3. Zalasiewicz et al. (2016), Anthropocene · The geological cycle of plastics and their use as a stratigraphic indicator of the Anthropocenedoi:10.1016/j.ancene.2016.01.002

Our species’ history as one day

23:59:3920.8 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day