Plastic (38 page)

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"
It embodies the enthusiasm
": von Vegesack and Remmele,
Verner Panton,
94.

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One magazine featured a model posing
: From a biographical essay on Panton posted on the website of London's Design Museum,
http://designmuseum.org/design/verner-panton
.

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There are hundreds of millions
: Alice Rawsthorn, "Celebrating the Everychair of Chairs,"
International Herald Tribune,
February 4, 2007; Mariana Gosnell, "Everybody Take a Seat,"
Smithsonian
magazine, July 1, 2004. Both authors have written perceptively about the ubiquitous but essentially invisible monobloc.

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one conspiracy-minded blogger
: Debate over the significance of the chair in the video of Berg's killing took place on
functionalfate.org
, a website devoted to the monobloc chair.

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They've been spotted
: Jens Thiel, "Sit Down and Be Counted,"
ArtReview
(April 2006): 58–61.

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far beyond the rarefied realm of design
: Author interview with Jens Thiel, creator of
functionalfate.org
, March 2008.

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the raw plastic could be had for less than
: Author interview with Stephen Greenberg, Canadian Mercantile Trading Corporation, June 2008.

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Though monobloc chairs are cheap
: Cost of an injection press from Gosnell, "Take a Seat"; cost of molds from author interview with George Lemieux, KCA Plastics Consultants, April 2008.

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intense competition eventually winnowed
:The playing field is less cluttered, but plastic furniture still remains a difficult business. For instance, Bill Adams, the founder of Adams Manufacturing, doesn't make a penny on his basic model. He considers the chair a loss leader, as do the retailers that sell it—they all but give it away in order to get people into the store.

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Adams had no regrets
: Author interview with Bill Adams, the founder of Adams Manufacturing, March 2008.

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"
I have six monoblocs
": In an age when irony is as abundant as plastic, it is perhaps inevitable that even the profoundly unhip monobloc would eventually acquire some cachet—if not strictly as furniture, then at least as cultural commentary. Spanish designer Marti Guixé graffitied plastic chairs with slogans such as
Stop Discrimination of Cheap Furniture
and
Respect Cheap Furniture
and then sold them as limited editions (no doubt for more than the price of a six-pack). Other conceptual artists have shredded them, stacked them in huge piles, hung them from buildings, drilled them full of tiny holes, even remade them in wood.

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there are an estimated one hundred manufacturers
: Author interview with Thiel.

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design of monoblocs is largely the result
:Author interviews with Lemieux, Adams.

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a throne for the common man
: The phrase comes from Antonelli's unpublished essay "A Chair for the Common Man."

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Hank Stuever summed up the scorn
: Quoted in Gosnell, "Take a Seat."

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"
in the city of Basel
": Fehlbaum's hometown is not unique. A number of cities, including Bratislava, Helsinki, Berne, Switzerland, and Los Gatos, California, have passed laws forbidding businesses from putting out the chairs. The Los Gatos ordinance was designed to protect the "quiet" character of it 1940s-era historic downtown.

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Ultradur
: It's a relative of the same plastic used to make soda bottles, polyethylene terephthalate, or PET.

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Alice Rawsthorn praised
: Alice Rawsthorn, "Konstantin Grcic's New Chair Design, the MYTO,"
International Herald Tribune,
November 9, 2007.

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Starck's feelings about plastic
: Author interview with Philippe Starck, May 2008.

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"
when we design a chair
": Quoted in Fiell and Fiell,
1000 Chairs,
9.

3. Flitting Through Plasticville

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Since the flying discs were introduced
: Wham-O won't divulge sales figures; that's the estimate of a source familiar with the company.

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Plastics constitute
: The basic industry statistics come from the Society of the Plastics Industry, "Fast Facts on Plastics," accessed on the SPI website,
http://www.plasticsindustry.org/Press/content.cfm?ItemNumber=798&navItemNumber=1323
. According to the SPI, there are nearly 18,500 plastics-related facilities in the United States, with the largest number based in Texas and California.

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Waisblum, who at that point oversaw
: He left Wham-O in 2009 after new owners bought the company.

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Morrison joined his girlfriend Lucille's family
: Morrison told the story in his 2006 book
Flat Flip Flies Straight! True Origins of the Frisbee
Wethersfield, CT: Wormhole Publishers, 2006), which he cowrote with Frisbee collector Phil Kennedy. The title refers to the directions originally written by Morrison's wife, Lucille, and which are still pressed into the underside of every Frisbee:
Flat flip flies straight, Tilted flip curves—Experiment! Play catch—Invent games.

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another redesign
: Tim Walsh,
Wham-O Super-Book
: Celebrating Sixty Years Inside the Fun Factory San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2008), 77.

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One day, when Morrison was demonstrating
: Morrison and Kennedy,
Flat Flip Flies Straight!,
106.

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Wham-O's early catalog
: Walsh,
Wham-O Super-Book,
30–34.

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"
You couldn't buy those things
":
Ibid., 17.

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Though there had been plastic toys
: Celluloid rattles and kewpie dolls were popular, and in the 1930s celluloid acetate was used to make toy musical instruments.

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"
where childish hands find nothing to break
": Yarsley and Couzens,
Plastics,
154.

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During the peak years of the baby boom
: Donovan Hohn, "Moby-Duck: Or, The Synthetic Wilderness of Childhood,"
Harper's
magazine (January 2007): 57. Today, three billion toys are sold annually in the United States, according to Michael Luzon, "No Toying Around,"
Plastics News,
December 22, 2008.

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an ever-increasing number of those toys
: Hiram McCann, "Doubling, Tripling, Expanding: That's Plastics,"
Monsanto
magazine (October 1947): 5.

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Today, plastics are a given
: Author interview with Robert von Goeben, cofounder of Green Toys, September 2007.

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Fleshy vinyl permitted
: "Trends in Toys,"
Modern Plastics
(June 1952): 71.

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Silly Putty
: Fenichell,
Plastic,
260–62.

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To promote its house brand
: Bill Hanlon,
Plastic Toys
: Dimestore Dreams of the '40s and '50s Atgen, PA: Schiffer Publishing, Inc., 1993), 10–14.

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eight different chemical companies quickly built factories
: By that time, the original inventors of polyethylene, DuPont and Britain's Imperial Chemical Industries, had lost control of their invention in an antitrust action. That opened the doors for other chemical companies to start producing it. Meikle,
American Plastic,
189–90.

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pop beads
: Ibid., 190.

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Such boom-bust cycles
: The industry's growth has slowed in recent years. For instance, as
Plastics News
reported, the total compounded sales growth for plastic sales between 1973 and 2007 was 4.2 percent, but in the final six years of that period, the rate of growth was half that amount. The slowdown at the end of that thirty-four-year-long stretch reflects how the market cooled "after major conversions from materials like wood and metal took place in the 1970s and 1980s . . . it's also a sign of how production moved from North America to parts of the world with lower labor and production costs." Frank Esposito, "Resin Market Slows in North America,"
Plastic News,
September 10, 2007.

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the ping-ponging relationship
: Meikle,
American Plastic,
190; Walsh,
Wham-O Super-Book,
62–69. At the fad's height, Wham-O was making twenty thousand hoops a week.

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"
We damn near went broke
": Walsh,
Wham-O Super-Book,
69.

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Melin and Knerr rechristened Morrison's baby
: Ibid., 78–79. Morrison groused about the name, complaining it didn't describe anything. But for all his grumbling, he recognized, his deal with Wham-O made him wealthy, and for many years he continued to work with the company, promoting flying discs. By the time Morrison died, in 2010 at the age of ninety, Wham-O had changed hands repeatedly, and he had little contact with it anymore.

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Headrick redesigned the Frisbee
: Ibid., 191.

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Standard Oil was the first to figure out
: Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner,
Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 235.

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production of plastics consumes
: Anthony Andrady and Mike A. Neal, "Applications and Societal Benefits of Plastics,"
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B
364 (June 2009): 1980; Anthony Andrady et al., "Environmental Issues Related to the Plastics Industry: Global Concerns," in Andrady, ed.,
Plastics and the Environment
Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2003), 38. The American Chemistry Council states that plastics production accounts for about 4 to 5 percent of natural gas consumed in the United States annually and about 3 percent of oil.

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an industry based on waste
: Barry Commoner, introduction to Geiser,
Materials Matter.
Also, author interview with Ken Geiser, director of the Lowell Center for Sustainable Production, January 2010.

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With the rise of integrated
: Meikle,
American Plastic,
82–83.

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Polyethylene was discovered
: Fenichell,
Plastic,
200–202; ICI chemist quoted in Meikle,
American Plastic,
189.

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British took advantage of that dielectric quality
: Fenichell,
Plastic,
202.

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"
stiffer than steel
": Colin Richards, "Polyethylene, a Phenomenon,"
Plastiquarian
40 (October 2008): 14.

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polyethylene was the first plastic
: Society for the Plastics Industry, "Definition of Resins-Polyethylene," accessed at
http://www.plasticsindustry.org/AboutPlastics/content.cfm?ItemNumber=1400&navItemNumber=1128
.

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we encounter many other kinds
: Richard Thompson et al., "Our Plastic Age,"
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B
364 (2009): 1973. The
Concise Encyclopedia of Plastics,
page 57, states there are about seventeen thousand different varieties of plastic, and other experts offer higher estimates, in the range of thirty thousand.

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the five basic families of commodity plastics
: American Chemistry Council,
The Resin Review 2008,
16–17. U.S. polymer production peaked at 115 billion pounds in 2007. But with the recession that followed, resin production fell below 100 billion pounds for the first time in a decade as demand from various end markets shrank, according to the American Chemistry Council.

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No significant new plastics have been introduced
: Author interviews with industry consultant Glenn Beall, Glenn Beall Plastics, Ltd., March 2008; and David Durand, senior consultant, Townsend Solutions, March 2008. To illustrate the challenges of making entirely new polymers, Beall described General Electric's fifteen-year, $50 million push to make Ultem, or polyetherimide, a plastic designed to withstand very high temperatures. By the time the plastic was ready for the market, the patents had just about run out. Kevlar, the material used in bulletproof vests, cost DuPont $500 million before its 1982 launch. Emsley,
Molecules at an Exhibition,
143.

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For decades, it's constituted about a third
: American Chemistry Council,
Resin Review 2008,
25–31.

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according to calculations by Skidmore College
: Author interview with Raymond Giguere, June 2008. Giguere did his calculations in 2006 and assumed that the average weight (mass) of an American was 150 pounds and that the U.S. population was 300 million, which results in a total of 45 billion pounds. The U.S. produced about 39 billion pounds of polyethylene in 2006. Production was down slightly in 2009, to 26 billion pounds, but the population had certainly increased.

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Dow arrived here in 1940
: Dow had gotten into that business accidentally. In the process of harvesting minerals from brine, the company accumulated byproducts, such as ethyl chloride. Company chemists began investigating ways to use them; one of the products proposed was ethyl cellulose, a semisynthetic polymer made with wood pulp, which Dow began marketing in 1935 under the name Ethocel. Likewise, the company got into making polystyrene in the late 1930s as a way to deal with excess supplies of ethylene. Ethylene could be reacted with benzene, another processing waste product, to form ethyl benzene, which in turn could be made into styrene, the base ingredient for polystyrene, the plastic Dow sold under the trademarked name Styron. Jack Doyle,
Trespass Against Us
: Dow Chemical and the Toxic Century Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2004), 146–47.