Plastics: Mapping the Childhood of Modernity’s Worst Material

This dissertation, “Plastics: Mapping the Childhood of Modernity’s Worst Material,” traces plastic’s fall from grace, from its utopian interwar beginnings to the proliferative and detrital form it takes today. It seeks to answer the question of why certain plastics are regarded as disposable and finds the answer in part in children’s toys. Children’s toys are a vital manifestation to understand plastics as fit for disposal. Starting with a historical background in early plastics to set the stage for its later deterioration, it then takes three key thermoplastics – polystyrene, polyethylene, and polyvinyl chloride – and their key material interlocutors – pez dispensers, hula hoops, and pool toys – and demonstrates how the growth of the toy industry was intimately intertwined with changing ideals of consumption, obsolescence, and discard with respect to plastics. The pairing of polystyrene with foodstuffs is the subject of the second chapter, focusing on the intimate and intertwined relationship between toy and packaging. The role of the hula hoop in changing ideals of hygiene, and in the rise of the use of synthetic detergents, is the subject of the third chapter. Finally, the fourth chapter regards the role of polyvinyl chloride pool toys in teaching postwar children that plastic is a fundamentally ephemeral material, while indelibly associating it with childhood. This association meant that ultimately the material was infantilized, and one of the things that one discards when they “put away childish things.”