Fantastic Plastic - a plastic bag might be the most overengineered object in history.

Stretchy seaweed. Reverse vending machines. QR-coded take-out boxes. To cure our addiction to disposable crap, we'll all need to get a little loony.

- By Clive Thompson

Some years back, I stopped by a French deli to buy some big chunks of cheese and carried them home in a plastic bag. The cheese was so heavy that the bag stretched and bulged, and the handle dug painfully into my hands. But the bag didn't break. That's because of the magical chemistry of plastic-essentially, oil turned solid, with carbon and hydrogen atoms that line up in repeating units to form long, noodle-like molecules.

These molecules are pliable and strong, which is what makes plastic so widely useful. And so durable: I unpacked the hunks of Camembert and Havarti and shoved the bag into the back of a kitchen drawer. When I stumbled upon it a few weeks ago, it was still pristine. Of course it was. Plastic bags can last, intact and usable, for decades.

Which is ... nuts, right? We create a bag rugged enough to span decades and then use it for minutes before shoving it in a drawer or, more likely, sending it off to a landfill, where it might break into fragments that stick around for hundreds of years. Like I said: the most over-engineered object in history.