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Topic: Domestic plastic
TOPIC:
Domestic plastic
Plastics may seem mundane, the stuff of washing bowls and fairground gewgaws. Yet, the plastics industry has claimed that dreams are made of plastics and a plastic utopia is always just round the corner. Why has the perfect world filled with plastics never arrived? Would we be happy if such a world existed? Our feelings about plastics have always been ambivalent, yet our dependence on goods made from plastics continues to grow.
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Topic section: Plastic dreams
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Since the 1920s, the plastics industry has promoted the concept of a ‘Plastic Age’, portraying plastics as the solution to many of our problems, the material that ensures that hitherto expensive items are available to all, ‘a democracy of luxury’.  > more

Topic section: Plastic success
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Plastics have been successful: they have entered our homes and are useful in many different ways. Even if we do not live in a plastic paradise, the hype was not completely wrong. Even the Queen uses Tupperware.  > more

Topic section: Resistance to plastics
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For all the benefits that plastics have brought us, we continue to sneer at them. . When plastics are successful, expensive and desirable, we don’t call them plastic. In our world view, plastics will always be tacky.  > more
 
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