End Plastics
A World Without Plastics Already Existed
December 29, 2025
Walking around most stores today, it is hard to imagine a world without plastic. In the U.S., food packaging and containers alone account for over 82 million tons of plastic waste per year. Given that plastic is a staple material of 21st century life, you may be surprised to learn that a world without plastic is not some distant reality. In fact, all you have to do is look back less than a century to find a completely plastic-free world. Today, we are examining that plastic-free history to show that a plastic free world is possible.
The Eco-Friendly Solution of the 1800s
Although plastic has gained a deservedly bad environmental reputation over the years, one of the driving forces behind its creation was actually one of environmental concern. In the late 1800s, animal horn, specifically ivory, was a valuable source of malleable material used in applications as diverse as hair combs to billiard balls.
Since ivory is sourced from elephants, they were facing the acute threat of extinction as a result. This helped to prompt scientists to search for synthetic alternatives to materials like ivory. In 1869, John Wesley Hyatt invented the first synthetic polymer, which is a chain of atoms in repeating units, called monomers, often much longer than anything found in nature. In theory, this new material would relieve some of the pressure on the increasingly scarce natural resources, like ivory.
It wasn’t until World War II that plastic production really skyrocketed, with production in the United States increasing 300% as it was used to help make aircraft windows, helmets, parachutes, and body armor.
Soon after, civilian uses for plastic quickly took hold. A major development came in 1965 when the single use polyethylene plastic shopping bag was created by a Swedish company. In the following decades, plastic shopping bags would completely replace paper and cloth bags in grocery stores around the world. With these developments, plastic became a key component of the consumer ‘experience’.
Plastic Water
Humans have been packaging and storing goods, notably food and drink products, for thousands of years. With the packaging sector contributing the most plastic waste out of all sectors, it is important to understand both what alternate materials exist today, and which ones were utilized in the past, to help us break our present day plastic addiction.
The tradition of using bottles to transport and sell water can be traced back all the way to the Roman Empire, when mineral water from northern Germany was transported through the Empire in clay pottery. Botted water did not appear until the 18th century when glass bottling grew rapidly as major bottling companies in the United States were established.
In U.S. grocery stores, as late as the 1970s and 80s, soft drinks came packaged exclusively in glass bottles. These bottles could then be returned to supermarkets for recycling for a few cents.
There is already a strong and growing global interest in returning to using this recyclable glass bottling system for drinks and the recycled glass market is projected to grow significantly as a result, with sales approaching $2.6 billion by 2035. Right now however, just as with soft drinks, it is much more common to see most bottled water in plastic bottles.
The transition from glass to plastic water bottles primarily occurred in the 1970s. The key development was in 1973 when Nathaniel Wyeth, an American engineer, patented polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles. PET was lightweight, shatter-resistant, cheap, and versatile for molding into various shapes, which made it ideal for water and soda bottles.
A 2021 study, published by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the journal “BMC Public Health, reported that in 2016 more than 480 billion plastic drinking water bottles were sold worldwide, 60% higher than a decade earlier. The same study also noted that bottled water consumption is increasing annually by about 7% globally, with estimates that global consumption of bottled water would reach around 513 billion liters by 2025.
97% of all water sold globally is packaged in plastic bottles.
It is worth noting that drinking water from plastic bottles means we are probably drinking microplastics too. A 2024 study from Columbia and Rutgers Universities found roughly 240,000 plastic particles per liter of plastic bottled water, with most being tiny nanoplastics. They discovered lower levels of around just 5.5 particles per liter in tap water, according to a Penn State Extension summary.
Plastic Food
Food storage today also tends to involve some form of plastic. Specifically, around 60-70% of all food packaging globally is made from plastic.This large share of plastic packaging also corresponds to the fact that packaging as a whole accounts for about 40% of global plastic waste.
In the past, we used a variety of natural materials to store and preserve our food. In the 18th and early 19th century ceramic containers were popular as they served both a functional and decorative purpose. These containers were often ornately decorated with materials such as cobalt oxide glaze.
Ceramics are typically made from clay and other raw materials, hardened through a high-temperature firing process. At the time, stoneware clay pottery was an especially popular option for food storage because it held liquids without leaking and kept perishable goods cool.
Since household items were higher quality and not easily replaceable in the 18th and 19th century, society placed great importance on the concepts of reuse and repair. Newspaper advertisements from colonial America, for example, carry adverts touting the services of craftsmen dedicated solely to the art of repairing ceramics and other housewares.
In the present age, where everything is disposable, the idea of dedicated household repair professions might seem peculiar, but it could be making a much-needed comeback in the 21st century. In recent years, various not-for-profit repair shops, working to fix an array of household items, have popped up across the United Kingdom.
In the US, too, we are seeing a similar resurgence in the interest in these hands-on skills, with enrollment in mechanic and repair programs having increased 11.5% between spring 2021 and 2022, according to the U.S. National Student Clearinghouse.
Plastic Bans Revive Cultural Traditions in Mexico City
In 2020, Mexico City enacted a ban on single use plastic bags and various other plastic products. This set in motion not just a reduction in plastic trash, but a return to the use of traditional bags and food packaging. One of these traditional products is known as ayate bags.
Ayate is a fabric often made from the fibers of the agave plant. These fibers are known as ixtle by the Otomi indigenous people of central Mexico, who have been making products such as bags, brushes, and clothing from ixtle for hundreds of years.
Ixtle products were common throughout Mexico until the 1970s, when they were replaced by cheap plastic. With the plastic bag ban in place in Mexico City and other Mexican municipalities, ixtle products have seen a huge rise in popularity as a sustainable and durable alternative to plastic.
While ixtle represents a sustainable alternative to plastic, ixtle producers, such as the Wäda collective of Cardonal, Hidalgo, stress that a shift in mindset about how we consume goods must also accompany the shift away from plastic. Recently, for example, the collective rejected an order of 8,000 ixtle bags by a national company, explaining that they are not industrial producers, and do not want to overexploit their land.
The commitment of the Wäda collective to sustainable production, in line with the regenerative capacity of earth’s resources, is a potent reminder that changing the way we think and we consume is just as important as using sustainable materials.
Searching history for solutions to the plastic waste crisis can have significant environmental and cultural benefits. Although not every plastic substitute of the past can and should be replicated, what history shows us is that human societies successfully stored food, created home and personal care products, and adopted sustainable approaches for thousands of years before plastic was ever even an idea. Alternative packaging and shipping materials include other natural fibers such as coconut fiber, hemp, husk, oat hulls, cotton burs, jute (similar to burlap) and bagasse (a byproduct of sugarcane harvesting).
On top of that, science is inventing new non-plastic alternatives today as well. For example, In 2021, Hongli (Julie) Zhu, an associate professor of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at Northeastern University, developed a biodegradable plastic bag alternative made from bamboo fiber and sucrose. The bag, unlike most biodegradable materials, retains its strength in wet conditions and does not degrade until exposed to the outdoors. According to Zhu, once the bag is buried in the soil it will degrade completely in just 60 days.
Alternative ways of creating; packaging; and most importantly, placing value on our goods, could provide the solution to our plastic waste crisis. As the global population continues to skyrocket and consumer demand increases, it is likely that our waste production will also grow. So we need plastic alternatives, now more than ever.To keep the pressure on global governments to manage soaring plastic production we must collectively demand caps on the production of plastics. Please sign our Global Plastics Treaty Petition and tell the United Nations and all governmental organizations to slash plastic production globally by 60% by 2040.
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