The Song of Styrene

An intimate history of plastics, written by a plastic-maker’s daughter turned environmental sociologist who, for the past decade, has searched for the origin story of plastic and how it is inextricably bound to her own.

In one generation, industry has created billions of tons of plastic. It's a forever material that is everywhere—on the wrack line, collecting in deep sea; falling with rain, circulating through us. For some, it's the ultimate fate of these plastics that holds the existential threat. But for others, it's the origins of plastics, and the story of how we got here, that illuminates something larger—the key to understanding what truly lies ahead for the permanent relationship that we've established between our species and this strange, enigmatic material. In Song of Styrene, Rebecca Altman turns her attention to plastics’ origins, both as an environmental sociologist and as a daughter. Before she was born, her father made plastics for Union Carbide, the first company to produce 1 billion pounds of plastic in a single year, and whose New Jersey plant, where he had worked, was once the “nerve center” of global plastics. For a period of their relationship, this inscrutable material seemed the only way for Rebecca and her father to bridge their emotional distance; and it's from this vantage point that Altman introduces us to the story of plastic as we've never heard it before. Alongside Altman and her father, we return to the plant, built during the Depression by “the father of plastics” himself, Leo Baekeland; we are introduced to the life and work of Primo Levi, the beloved writer who also made plastics and faced its consequences; and in the interplay between past and present, we are braided into Altman’s own family’s story. Song of Styrene traces plastics’ history and legacies, revealing along the way the industry’s ties to fossil fuels, its entanglement with empire, the paradox of recycling, the massive volume of by-products, wastes and other petrochemicals involved in its making, and the human cost of something so “cheap.” In an elegiac, deeply human narrative of the endless journey of plastics, Altman takes us through our own cyclical return to the same places, themes, and stories, in the process revealing our true inheritance—and the possibility of an alternate legacy.