Can We Live Without Plastic?

We’re living in a plastic age, and innovation is now needed for the invention that went horribly right.

- Andrew Leci

It's cheap, it's safe, it’s versatile and it lasts forever. What is there not to like about plastic? In the nearly 150 years since its invention, it’s made all our lives better and enabled some of the most remarkable technological innovations that have changed the world. For the better… right?

Strangely, perhaps, we have billiards to thank for the ubiquity of plastic… and environmentalists. Back in the late 19th century, one or two people were concerned with the plight of elephants, whose tusks were being used to make billiard balls, piano keys, and other products vital to the survival of a species, such as knife and fork handles.

Clearly this had nothing to do with the fact that ivory was expensive to source and procure (not to mention dangerous) and that the manufacturers of balls and keys were looking for cheaper alternatives. Regardless of motivation, it had the effect of stimulating the imagination of one bright spark – John Wesley Hyatt (no relation to the hotel group, although he was accommodating) – who responded to an advert placed in a US newspaper in the 1860s by a man named Michael Phelan – aka, the ‘father of American billiards’.

Phelan had gone into the manufacturing of balls, tables and ancillary equipment and needed to produce his bits and pieces faster than people in far-flung places were capable of massacring elephants, so he offered a prize of US$10,000 (roughly US$3 million today) to anyone who could come up with a less expensive – I’m sorry; a ‘more environmentally conscious’ – material for use.