The Age of Plastics

The March 1930 issue of Fortune announced the “Plastics Age”. Since 1914, the value of the plastics materials had grown by a factor of fifteen. Executives expected their industry “to rank with steel in two decades”.1 Plastics materials provide one path to examine the interactions of technology, commerce and culture that linked Modernism in the arts with the modernisation of the economy and society. Methods of production can impede consumer acceptance. For instance, the lack of control in manufacturing delayed the adoption of kitchenware made from plastics materials. Their colours were fast only if the appropriate ingredients had been formed in the correct way. Elsewhere, dyes from bottle tops bled into consumable liquids, while the packaging of food in coloured plastics gave rise to a rash of concerns.2 Hence, to map the coming to Australia of the Age of Plastics requires paying attention to the chemistry of colour, to marketing and to popular responses.3 Solid colour did not become possible in plastics until chemists could attach a colour molecule to each plastics molecule so that the colour would not scratch off, peel or bleed. The addition of pigments or dyes to resins was complicated by how each colouring agent reacted with base components. The plastics manufacturers had inherited colouring agents that had been designed for textiles, printing and paints. In need of paints specific to automobiles, Du Pont developed Duco throughout the 1920s, eventually replacing its nitro-cellulose resin with synthetics to ensure consistent colours.4 By 1949, some fabric firms had produced dyes specifically for rayons. Even with those aids, the technicians in charge of colouring plastics had to cope with day-to-day conditions, such as the weather, or the availability of raw materials. Post-war shortages encouraged manufacturers to substitute powders suitable for one method to another. As a result, throughout the 1950s, the search for consistency was “still largely in the pioneering stage”.5