Plastic Was Supposed to Be Sustainable

Synthetic polymers became one of our biggest environmental crises instead

- Jen Schwartz

IN 1864 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN published a competition launched by a billiard-table manufacturing company: “Ten Thousand Dollars for a Substitute for Ivory.” The owners of Phelan & Collender were pleased to see it; they wrote to the magazine to elaborate on what they were looking for in an “ivory alternative” that could be used to make billiard balls and hoped it would “have the effect of stimulating the genius of some of your numerous readers.” The real stuff from elephant tusks had become scarce, but its elasticity, hardness and density were hard to find in another material.

A printer from Albany, N.Y., named John Wesley Hyatt came up with an answer in celluloid, a moldable, compound material made up of cellulose nitrate, a polymer that held the ball together; camphor, an organic compound that provided flexibility and durability; and ground-up cow bone, to give the ball the right mechanics for play. Rather than accepting the $10,000 reward and signing away the rights to his invention, Hyatt patented his object in 1869 and started his own company, selling celluloid billiard balls that conservation scientist Artur Neves, writing in 2023, called “the founding object of the plastics industry.”

The creation of the “first plastic” was essentially an answer to a sustainability problem. There were only so many elephants, tortoises and silkworms to go around, and their tusks, shells and fibers were increasingly in demand. Articles and advertisements from the early era of the plastics industry portray such materials as relieving pressure on natural resources. In a 2023 paper in PNAS Nexus, Neves and his colleagues called Hyatt’s celluloid billiard balls one of “the first successful efforts to substitute materials to assist the survival of endangered animals.”