Skip over navigation
Plasticity: 100 years of Making Plastics
-
-
Science Museum, Exhibition Road, London, SW7 2DD
-
-
- Artist Fran Crowe from Woodbridge in Suffolk is currently engaged in the process of ‘saving’ one square mile of the ocean by collecting rubbish while she walks on the beaches near her home. Six months into the project she’s walked 79 miles and gathered more than 227kg of rubbish, most of it plastic. She says ‘I keep thinking that it will become more difficult to find rubbish on my local beaches but each time I visit still more has been left behind or washed up. The 33,000 pieces I have collected are literally just a splash in the ocean… It’s a frightening picture of our society that we use so much plastic and dispose of our debris so carelessly’. According to the UN, there 46,000 pieces of plastic litter per square mile of ocean across the planet and they cause the death of more than 100,000 marine mammals and turtles and a million seabirds each year.
As our awareness of plastic’s impact on the environment has grown it has come to be seen as a bad guy but that wasn’t always the case, as an exhibition opening at the Science Museum on Tuesday sets out to demonstrate. Subtitled ‘100 Years of Making Plastics’, the show asks how fantastic plastic really is. It tells the story of Bakelite, the world’s first entirely man-made material, invented in 1907 by Dr Leo Baekeland, a Belgian (British scientist Sir James Swinburne was also working on the formula but Baekeland got there just 24 hours ahead), and the new plastics it paved the way for. The positive impact of the humble plastic bucket on the developing world will be explored in a show that also acknowledges that at the moment fewer than ten per cent of plastics are recycled and looks at the ecological damage done by the material that lasts and lasts.
The exhibition makes a forceful case for the development of greener plastics (it’s supported by Defra and SITA Trust, which distributes funding to community and environmental projects within ten miles of an active SITA UK landfill site). Alongside a phone, a television, a rare coffin made from Bakelite and iconic items such as ’60s kinky boots, visitors will be able to see Toyota’s i-unit vehicle on display in Britain for the first time, a working chandelier made from hundreds of Bic biros and an office chair designed by Herman Miller that is made from recycled materials and is itself 96 per cent recyclable. The story is brought up to date with a look at cutting-edge uses for plastics, including plastic blood and planes that can change shape during flight to avoid detection.
- Bookmark
-
-
-
-
-
- |
- Send to a friend
-
