Consumed: How Big Brands Got Us Hooked on Plastic

Summary

Over the past seventy years, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, and other consumer goods makers have harnessed single-use plastics to turbocharge their profits.

They have poured billions of dollars into convincing us that we need disposable diapers, cups, bags, bottles, shampoo in sachets, and plastic-packaged ultraprocessed foods.

We were never clamoring for any of these items, but this shift towards disposability has fundamentally transformed our daily habits. Think of toddlers kept in disposable diapers for far longer than their parents wore cloth, our obsession with bottled water, and our insatiable appetite for convenient snacks and coffee.

While at first we shaped plastics, somewhere along the way, plastics took over and began shaping us. Like any addiction, our plastic habit has consequences. It is damaging our climate and biodiversity and we are only just starting to understand its effect on our own health.

How did plastic take over our lives? And why have we been unable to rein it in? In investigating how we got here, Consumed arms us to make better decisions about where we go next. It is only by understanding this history that we will stop accepting the same failed solutions and demand better from the brands that got us hooked on plastic in the first place.