Tag: supply plastics’ feedstocks
The World Has One Big Chance to Eliminate Plastic Pollution
Plastics have always been global—even before science began tracking the peregrinations of microplastics across meridians, into rain, through the human placenta. At the industry’s outset, Civil War–era rubber goods were fashioned with latex extracted from the Amazon and later through Belgium’s brutal regime in the Democratic Republic of Congo. England imported gutta-percha from Southeast Asia for undersea telegraphy wires. Celluloid depended on Taiwanese camphor as a solvent and plasticizer. Today, tankers ferry hydrocarbons siphoned from beneath Appalachia’s shale basin to