The Convenient Lie

We didn't fall in love with plastic. We fell in love with not having to think. Plastic just happened to be standing there, looking easy, when we needed something that didn't ask questions. It could be anything. It could hold anything. It could be thrown away without consequence — or so we told ourselves, the way we always do when the bill hasn't arrived yet. The bill, as it turns out, was sent to the lungs of infants and the stomachs of whales and the groundwater of places we'll never visit. We signed for it decades ago. We just hadn't opened the envelope. This is not a story about plastic. This is a story about us. And like most stories about us, it begins with a reasonable idea and ends with someone asking, "How did we get here?" I'll tell you how. We got here the same way we always do: one reasonable decision at a time.

I. The Mercy

Here is something I did not know until recently: plastic was invented as an act of mercy. I find this almost too painful to contemplate, so naturally I've been contemplating it for months. In the 1860s, the American billiard industry faced a problem. Billiard balls were made of ivory, and ivory was expensive — supply was becoming a concern. As Susan Freinkel documents in Plastic: A Toxic Love Story,¹ a New York firm reportedly offered a $10,000 prize to anyone who could produce a suitable substitute. John Wesley Hyatt, a printer with no formal chemistry training and apparently a lot of free evenings, began experimenting with cellulose nitrate. By 1869, he had patented celluloid. The marketing language of those early years is almost unbearably poignant now. Freinkel unearthed a promotional pamphlet promising that celluloid would mean "it will no longer be necessary to ransack the earth…"¹ Another declared it would "give the elephant, the tortoise, and the coral insect a respite…" A respite. Plastic was going to save nature by replacing it. The dream was conservation through imitation. We would spare the living world by learning to fake it.

Bakelite came next, in 1907 — the first fully synthetic plastic, born from a very practical problem: not enough beetle secretions. Shellac, the resin that lac beetles produce, was essential for electrical insulation. Demand was outstripping supply. Leo Baekeland produced a thermoset polymer that would never melt again. Those early plastics engineers were so pleased with their unbreakable, unmeltable, permanent materials. They thought permanence was the feature. It turned out to be the bug.

And then something shifted. By the mid-twentieth century, plastic had become braided into modernity itself. In 1955, Life magazine published a now-infamous photograph that crystallised the new gospel: a family surrounded by airborne disposable objects — plates, cups, cutlery — with a caption celebrating "Throwaway Living."¹ The text beneath the image noted that cleaning the depicted items would take forty hours. But no one had to clean them. They were "all meant to be thrown away after use." There it is. The pivot. Plastic had begun as a substitute to save scarce nature. Now it was a disposable to save human effort. Same material. Different promises. Same species reaching for the easier path — which is to say, the only path we've ever reliably taken.

I don't want to be too hard on us. As neuroscience research published in PNAS has established,² the brain consumes roughly twenty percent of the body's energy despite being only two percent of its weight; effort avoidance isn't laziness, it's metabolic policy. When someone offers you a way to skip the washing-up, the forty hours, the labour that never ends — of course you take it. I took it. You took it. We all took it. Convenience is the word we use when we mean "I don't want to know." Convenient food means I don't want to know who picked it, or how far it travelled, or what was sprayed on it, or what happens to the container when I'm done. Convenient clothing means I don't want to know whose hands made this, or what the dye is doing to the river outside the factory, or why it costs less than lunch. Plastic is the material form of not wanting to know. It is epistemological laziness you can hold in your hand.

II. The Pattern

Here is what we keep missing: this is not new. We have done this before. Not with plastic — the material changes — but with the mechanism. The engineering of distance between action and consequence is perhaps the oldest human technology we possess.

In Victorian Britain, waste was still visible. "Dust-yards" sorted household rubbish — ash, cinders, rags, bone — and sold it as input for other industries. Rag-and-bone men worked the streets with carts. You could see where it went because it went somewhere you might walk past. Then came the bin. The Public Health Act of 1875 helped formalise municipal refuse removal in Britain, as waste historians have documented. The bin — that humble object behind the hedge, the thing you carry out once a week without quite looking at — became the interface between household and system. A small cabinet of forgetting, placed exactly where we don't have to see it. In Paris, the transformation was even more explicit. Catherine de Silguy's history of waste management records that in 1883–84, the prefect Eugène Poubelle required residents to use lidded containers for waste.³ The bin wasn't sold as convenience first. It was sold as relief from disgust. And once disgust is managed, people can stop thinking about consequences. Discomfort is information. Remove it, and you remove the signal that something needs attention.

The sanitary landfill completed the disappearing act. Compress the waste, keep pests out, cover it with soil to hide it and kill the smell. A scholar summarising this shift noted that "garbage simply disappeared... throwing away seem normal." That's the magic trick named. Modern disposal works by making material consequences unavailable to perception.

Six steps to "away": Containment — the bin, the lid, the hedged-off object Routinisation — collection day, the chore you do without thinking Sensory muting — the landfill that doesn't smell like a dump Distance — the processing happens somewhere you'll never visit Domestic integration — the bin becomes furniture Moral offloading — "I rinsed it. I put it in the right bin."

The ritual replaces the reckoning.

This is the pattern underneath the pattern. Easter Island, we said, cut down every tree for their statues and destroyed themselves. The story was too neat, too satisfying as a cautionary tale. A 2024 Nature study analysing ancient Rapanui genomes found the collapse was more complicated⁴ — slave raids, disease, the usual catastrophes Europeans brought as gifts. We wanted a morality play about self-inflicted doom because it confirmed what we already believed: that humans are doomed to exhaust what sustains them.

Rome's lead pipes tell a similar story. The Romans poisoned themselves with lead plumbing, we say, and this contributed to imperial decline. The lead was real — a study published in PNAS found Roman tap water contained up to a hundred times more lead than spring water.⁵ But whether this explains Rome's trajectory is a question historians have largely answered with a shrug. The lead was there. The neat causal story isn't.

We reach for these parables because we want to believe we're the first generation to face consequences. We're not. What we are is the first generation to engineer distance so thoroughly that we can't see the hillsides.

Because here's what connects Easter Island's disputed deforestation, Rome's documented lead exposure, and our plastic bags: we engineer distance between action and consequence, then tell ourselves we didn't know. The mechanism is ancient. We just keep getting better at it.

"Away" is not a place. It is a pattern. It is what humans do when we want something without wanting to know what it costs. We build systems that hide the evidence, routinise the forgetting, offload the moral weight. Bins and landfills for our rubbish. Factories in countries we don't visit for our goods. Microplastics in oceans we don't swim in, until they're in our blood and we call it a surprise.

The pattern is always the same. Create distance. Mute the signals. Distribute the consequence so widely that no single person feels responsible. Call it progress.

III. The Mirror

So what now? I get asked this question a lot, usually by people who want the essay to end with a plan. Switch to bamboo toothbrushes. Canvas bags. Metal straws. The right purchases, and we'll be absolved. I understand the impulse. The desire for instructions, for a checklist, for something to do that would make the discomfort stop. But the real work doesn't happen in the moment of consumption. It happens after, in the quiet, when you can't escape what you've seen.

The historical record offers something less comfortable than a plan: evidence that we can see the hillsides, when we're forced to.

In seventeenth-century Japan, they faced a forest crisis. Centuries of castle-building and keeping warm had stripped the hillsides. By 1700, everyone who needed wood could see the problem, because they could see the deforestation. Bald slopes. Obvious scarcity. Conrad Totman's The Green Archipelago documents what happened next:⁶ the Tokugawa shogunate responded with managed forestry. Regulations on cutting. Requirements for replanting. Enforcement. It worked. Japanese forests recovered. Not because they were wiser than us, but because the feedback was visible. The hills were right there, accusing them. Our feedback is less visible. That's the problem. We've engineered the conditions under which we can't see the hillsides.

In Aotearoa New Zealand, Māori communities have practised rāhui for centuries — a temporary prohibition on harvesting from a particular area or resource, as Maxwell and Penetito describe in their research on the practice.⁷ If shellfish numbers decline, a rāhui is placed; gathering stops; the population recovers; the rāhui is lifted. What strikes me about rāhui is how ordinary it is. Not a grand civilisational reckoning — just a pause, a recognition that some things need time to return. The restraint is built into the culture, available when needed, no drama required.

And then there's Elinor Ostrom, the political economist who won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics for demonstrating that the "tragedy of the commons" is not inevitable.⁸ Her life's work was documenting cases where communities successfully managed shared resources — fisheries, forests, irrigation systems — without either privatisation or top-down control. Humans are capable of collective restraint. We just have to design systems that make the consequences visible. The hillsides have to be visible.

I'm not offering these as templates. But the examples defeat despair. And despair is lazy. The story we tell ourselves about plastic — about convenience, about the inevitability of our worst tendencies — is a story of helplessness. We can't change. We're wired this way. The system is too big. The historical record says otherwise. Societies have faced constraints and adapted. Cultures have built restraint into their norms. Commons have been governed without tragedy. Not always. Not everywhere. But enough times, in enough places, to prove that the outcome is not fixed.

What we are less good at is noticing that the solution is tomorrow's problem wearing a different coat. Pesticides solved crop loss. The problem of pesticides is still introducing itself. Fossil fuels solved the problem of human-scale labour. The problem of fossil fuels is currently rearranging the weather. Plastic solved a thousand problems — and the problem of plastic is now inside the lung tissue of every person reading this sentence. This is not an argument against solving problems. It is an argument for longer sight-lines. For asking, before we scale the solution to a billion units, where it goes when it's done being useful. For keeping the hillsides visible.

The numbers now are staggering, if you let them stagger you. I'll try to make them land. The OECD's Global Plastics Outlook reports that global plastics production doubled from 234 million tonnes in 2000 to about 460 million tonnes in 2019.⁹ That's in the same order of magnitude as the mass of all humanity. Of the 353 million tonnes of plastic waste generated in 2019, the OECD found only 9 percent was ultimately recycled.⁹ Nineteen percent was incinerated. Almost 50 percent went to sanitary landfills. And 22 percent — nearly a quarter — was "mismanaged": dumped, burned in the open, or leaked into the environment. That 22 percent is the physical form of the "away" illusion. It's the portion that doesn't even make it to the engineered invisibility of the landfill. Peer-reviewed studies have now detected microplastics in human blood,¹⁰ placental tissue,¹¹ lung tissue,¹² and brain tissue.¹³ The material we invented to spare the elephant has colonised our bodies.

Here is what I know. Plastic was invented as mercy. As a respite for the elephants. As a way to stop ransacking the earth for scarce materials. The dream was genuine: conservation through substitution. But mercy without visibility is just distance. We saved the elephant by making a material that lasts forever and used it to wrap sandwiches. Then we threw the wrapper "away" and called it solved. The elephants are still dying. Approximately 20,000 elephants are killed each year for their ivory, according to WWF.¹⁴ We didn't spare them. We just engineered enough distance that we could stop looking at what we were doing to them while we slowly poisoned ourselves.

This is what "away" always was: false mercy. The pattern that lets us do harm while telling ourselves we meant well. The distance we engineer so we can have what we want without witnessing what it costs.

We are still ransacking the earth. We just do it for oil now, to make more plastic, to throw more things "away." The bin behind the privet hedge. The landfill you'll never visit. The microplastics in your blood that got there because we forgot — because we chose to forget — that there is no away.

I am often asked if I have hope. The question always strikes me as odd. Hope is not a conclusion you reach after evaluating the evidence. Hope is a practice — something you do because the alternative is surrender, and surrender is boring. We are a species that survived ice ages and plagues and each other. We have, on occasion, looked at a terrible situation and decided to make it less terrible, even when the effort cost us something. We have also, on occasion, done the other thing. The evidence is genuinely mixed. Some days the grammar comes easier than others. Some days you just conjugate the verbs and trust that fluency will follow.

Clarity is better than fog. Saying the true thing is better than the comfortable thing. The convenient lie is that "away" exists — that we can use without consequence, discard without witness, live without implication in the systems that sustain us. It's a lie we've been telling ourselves since the first lidded bin, the first covered landfill, the first promise that someone else would handle it. We handle it. All of us. Whether we see it or not.

The pattern is ancient. The material changes but the mechanism remains: engineer distance, mute the signals, distribute the consequence. We are very good at this. We have millennia of practice. But the hillsides are still there. They've always been there. We just have to be willing to look at them. Plastic is patient. It will be here long after the last human has forgotten what it was for. But we are not yet finished. The story is not yet told.

The elephants are still dying. The plastic is still in our blood. The "away" we engineered is returning to us in the bodies of our children. And the choice — to see the hillsides or build another bin to hide them — that choice is still ours to make.