Plastic’s Stellar Story

The Story of a Planet & it’s Plastic

Radiolarians, a type of plankton found in the oceans of the Precambrian and the precusor of our planet’s plastic today. Art by Ernst Haekel (Kunstformen der Natur, 1904). This is the third installment of a series laying out a new ethical theory of green. This week we go far back to the primordial Earth origins of plastic — and lay out the groundwork for the theory.

OVER 5 BILLION YEARS AGO, IN A SWIRL OF INTERSTELLAR DUST our solar system came together. As cosmic matter collided and coalesced, growing ever denser, our sun ignited. Assimilating the remaining debris, clumps of matter and momentum began to form, falling into orbit around our young star. On one such proto-planet, a particular pattern began to unfold — and the Earth came to be.1

Like its neighbouring planets, the Earth had its own particular combination of mass, chemistry, orbit, moon and magnetosphere. And like its fellows, for its first two billion years, the Earth was a barren, desolate place. The atmosphere was full of carbon dioxide and the climate was harsh and unstable. The Earth’s surface, was governed solely by raw geological cycles: the ebb and tide of tectonic plates, of ocean currents and atmospheric flows — planetary cycles with no vestige of a beginning and no prospect of an end1.

As these early Earthen cycles inexorably spun, the particular pattern of our planet began to unfold. For as the sun shone down, entropy demanded dissipation. Like the run of rain down a hillside, the Earth’s cycles absorbed and adapted to the sun’s energy in their unique Earthen way. New molecular configurations unfolded and new chemical combinations occurred, ever arranging themselves towards the…