How Did We Get Hooked on Plastic?
The Inquiry
BBC
4.6 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 1 February 2018
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The story of how the search for a material to replace ivory changed our lives forever. In the 19th century a billiard ball company placed an advert in a newspaper offering $10,000 to anyone who could come up with a substitute for ivory. There was growing concern that companies were hunting elephants into extinction so they could use their ivory for billiard balls, buttons and umbrella handles. The story that follows takes us from explosive factories that often went up in smoke to the modern world we find ourselves in today. How did plastics go from being a saviour of the environment to a cause for concern? How did we get hooked on plastic?
Presenter: Helena Merriman Producer: Phoebe Keane
Photo: A man checks used plastic bottles for recycling at a recycling station in Agartala Credit: ARINDAM DEY/AFP/Getty Images
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Inquiry Podcast from the BBC World Service with me, |
| 0:03.7 | Helena Merriman. It's good to be back. Each week we bring you four expert |
| 0:08.8 | witnesses answering one pressing question from the news. This week exploding billiard balls, radar and |
| 0:16.8 | stockings. We bring you the extraordinary story of plastic. In January this year, Halifax, a town on the East Coast of Canada, had a problem. |
| 0:31.0 | Its recycling plant was full. waste plastic was piling up in bins outside |
| 0:36.0 | people's homes. So they buried it, 300 tons. |
| 0:46.0 | In Alberta on the other side of Canada, the same problem. 5,000 tons of plastic with nowhere to go. |
| 0:50.0 | This time they stockpiled it in sheds, trailers and warehouses. |
| 0:55.0 | It's a similar story across the US and Europe. |
| 0:59.0 | Millions of tons of waste plastic sitting in recycling plants and ports. |
| 1:05.0 | And that's because China, the world's largest recycler of plastic, has said enough. |
| 1:11.5 | On January 1st, it banned imports of most of the waste plastic that sent its way. |
| 1:17.2 | And now, as the plastic mountains grow, concerns around plastic are becoming harder to ignore. |
| 1:23.2 | At our current rate of consumption, experts predict there will be 12 billion tons of plastic |
| 1:30.2 | in landfill or in a natural environment by 2020 |
| 1:34.0 | and most of it will take hundreds of years to break down. |
| 1:38.0 | So how did we get here? |
| 1:40.0 | This week we're going to tell you a remarkable story, a story of a great love affair with a material that changed the world. |
| 1:49.0 | In this week's inquiry we're asking, how did we get hooked on plastic. |
| 1:54.0 | Part one, the birth of plastics. |
| 2:12.0 | It was a world of wood and glass and iron and cotton and wall. |
| 2:14.0 | That's Susan Frankel, author of a book on the history of plastics. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.