It’s Plastastic! – Part 1
How plastic saved the turtles.
At the school bus stop recently I complimented a neighbor’s daughter for her new tortoise shell patterned glasses frames. And then I gave a quick explanation of what perhaps what should have been obvious, namely that plastic, like the sort used in her glasses frames, saved the turtles.
Saved the turtles? How can that be? Indeed, another neighbor once described how her own daughter was reduced to tears by her classmates for having the gall to use a plastic straw when so many turtles were dying in plastic strewn in the ocean.
As Michael Shellenberger explains in his book Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, there’s a mostly love-love relationship between plastic and turtles:
For thousands of years, humans around the world made exquisite jewelry and other luxury items from the shells of hawksbill sea turtles … Craftsmen heated the turtles over a fire, sometimes alive, so they could peel the misnamed “tortoiseshell” away from their skeletons. Sometimes the de-shelled sea turtles were returned to the sea. Scientists estimate that since 1844, humans have killed nine million hawksbill turtles, or about sixty thousand each year. Humans killed so many hawksbill that the dramatic reduction in the species altered the function of coral reef and seagrass ecosystems around the globe. Around the world, artists and artisans used heat to flatten and mold tortoiseshell into various luxury items including eyeglasses, combs, lyres, jewelry, boxes, and, at least in Japan, penis rings, penis sheaths, and condoms. Tortoiseshell was considered valuable in ancient Rome. Julius Caesar was thus overjoyed when, after invading Alexandria, Egypt, he discovered warehouses filled with the material. He went on to make the tortoiseshell a symbol of his victory. What was special about the shell of sea turtles wasn’t just that it was smooth and beautiful but also that it was so plastic, which originally referred to things that were easily molded or shaped. Tortoiseshell consists of keratin, a durable protein that protects cells from stress and damage. Keratin also comprises nails, horns, feathers, and hooves. Tortoiseshell is special in that it can be peeled into thin sheets to create veneer while remaining hard and water-resistant. When broken, it can even be repaired through the reapplication of heat and pressure.
Elephants, too, were prized for their plastic-like biological material:
Like tortoiseshell, the ivory tusks of elephants were prized for their beauty and plasticity in making artistic and luxury items, including combs, piano keys, and billiard balls. The ancient Greek sculptor Phidias created a thirty-foot statue of Athena, daughter of Zeus and goddess of war, from gold and ivory. It was displayed for many years inside the Parthenon. In the Middle Ages, ivory was used to make caskets, goblets, and handles for swords and trumpets. Demand for ivory increased greatly in the nineteenth century as the material came to be used at an industrial scale. Americans, in particular, loved the material. From the 1830s to the 1980s, one of the largest ivory processing plants in the world was in Essex, Connecticut. It processed up to 90 percent of all ivory imported into the United States. Concerns about ivory shortages rose shortly after the American Civil War ended. “Dealers in ivory express considerable alarm lest the supply of elephants should run short in a few years,” reported The New York Times in 1866, “and so throw them out of business.” The reporter estimated twenty-two thousand elephants were being killed each year just “to supply the cutlery establishments of Sheffield, England, with handles for the knives and other cutlery made there.” Already demand for ivory billiard balls had outpaced the available supply. “For some articles—billiard balls, for instance—made from ivory, no substitute for that material has been found,” reported the Times. “A large dealer in billiard stock has offered a reward of several hundred dollars to any person who will produce a substance from which billiard balls can be made as durable and cheaper than ivory ones. As yet, no one has responded.” Seven years later, in 1873, a reporter for the Times was despondent that a viable substitute for ivory would be found. “Think of the silence in the land, unless we could get ivory to make our piano-keys with!” The reporter estimated that U.S. ivory demand resulted in the killing of fifteen thousand elephants. Later, a Times reporter estimated that the British imports resulted in the killing of eighty thousand elephants annually.
When ivory became more rare, its price rose, and as a result efforts to find substitutes for ivory intensified:
Rising prices had encouraged entrepreneurs to look for alternatives. “The high price of ivory, together with its liability to warp and shrink have led to numerous efforts to find some good substitute for the article.” Those included walrus and hippopotamus teeth, and the albumen of palm trees grown in the Andes, which was already being used to make rosaries, toys, and crucifixes. In 1863, in upstate New York, a young man named John Wesley Hyatt learned about the billiard ball maker’s offer of a $10,000 reward to anyone who could create a suitable substitute to ivory, and he started experimenting in his backyard shed with various materials. Six years later, he had invented celluloid from the cellulose in cotton. By 1882, The New York Times warned of rising prices. “During the last quarter of a century ivory has been steadily increasing in price, until now it is selling at more than double its cost twenty years ago.” Europe and the United States were consuming two million pounds of ivory annually, which represented about 160,000 elephants. “A prominent ivory merchant, who is a pessimist on the subject of the scarcity of ivory was recently heard to declare that it was his conviction that ivory would eventually grow to be so rare that in generations to come an ivory ring would be looked upon as one of the most costly gifts which a wealthy suitor could place upon the hand of his betrothed.”
And innovators sought substitutes for tortoiseshell as it became more rare as well:
After Japan opened up to foreign trade in 1859, cheap, mass-manufactured products came into the country from Europe. “As Japan industrialized along Western patterns,” notes a historian, “plastics replaced tortoiseshell for many of its uses, including the production of hair ornaments ...” Combs were one of the first and most popular uses for celluloid. For thousands of years, humans had made combs of tortoiseshell, ivory, bone, rubber, iron, tin, gold, silver, lead, reeds, wood, glass, and porcelain. Celluloid replaced most of them. By the late 1970s, ivory was no longer used for piano keys. While some musicians claimed a fondness for ivory keys, most asserted the superiority of plastic. “I was glad to see it go,” a quality control manager for a piano keyboard maker told The New York Times in 1977. “The tusks had to be handled very carefully to prevent disease. The plastic covering we use today is a far superior product in terms of its durability.” And it’s not the case that plastic was uglier. “The best ivory has no grain and looks just like plastic.” Celluloid had the advantage of being colored in ways to imitate the distinctive marbling of tortoiseshell combs. Hyatt produced a pamphlet boasting of the product’s environmental benefits, claiming “it will no longer be necessary to ransack the earth in pursuit of substances which are constantly growing scarcer.”
As Shellenberger summarizes:
We must overcome the instinct to see natural products as superior to artificial ones, if we are to save species like sea turtles and elephants. Consider how dangerous that instinct was in the case of tortoiseshell … [I]t is only by embracing the artificial that we can save what’s natural.
In the next essay, we’ll examine yet more bad raps against plastic wraps.