There are a bunch of answers to your question the way you asked it (eg electrical components, or chemical processes that can only be contained in certain polymers) but let's skip them.
The scale of human society requires -a lot of stuff-, and plastics make that possible. Building materials, clothing, tools, storage, etc.
It costs an order of magnitude more to manufacture something out of wood or metal or glass than to make it out of plastic. And then the thing would often be more fragile or cumbersome.
Plastics do such a good job here that we get caught up in the problems their overabundance creates. But without them, costs of living globally would be drastically higher and way more people would be suffering from dire want.
I don't think it's so much that things wouldn't exist if plastic didn't exist. Rather it's that they would be so much different that they would almost be different products.
There's tons of things like automobiles, firearms, and appliances that are dramatically lighter due to plastics.
The non-plastic alternatives for clothing that protects from rain and cold are much more limited. Generally only wool and plastic clothing insulates while wet. In terms of actual rain jackets you'd have to go back to rubber, waxed cotton, or oilcloth.
rubber is a plastic, in the sense that it's a thermoset hydrocarbon polymer that's synthetically crosslinked and commonly shaped by molding, if we're talking about vulcanized natural latex. all the other kinds of rubber are even more obviously plastic: silicone, buna-n, polyurethane, etc.
I can think of plenty of products that would only be available to as many people as they are because of plastic. We should still do something about plastic waste, though.
you can't think of a single product that only exists thanks to plastic? barring trivial examples like 'plastic bottles', 'synthetic fibers', and 'plastic pipes', which are just plastic versions of products that could be produced otherwise, i can think of a few:
· condoms that prevent disease (sheepskin condoms are okay as contraceptives but are not considered safe against hiv)
· transparent flexible medical feeding tubes
· disposable scalpels
· disposable pipette tips, crucial for biology work
· catheters (one company does make them from a bioplastic but it's still a plastic)
· i was going to say 'printed circuit boards' but it turns out that some of them are made out of sapphire instead. so i guess i'm limited to 'impact-resistant printed circuit boards'
· communications satellites (they'd've weighed too much to launch without much larger rockets, and they'd also break during launch)
· cell phones
· playground slides that don't cause burns when it's sunny
· spray foam insulation
· permanent markers (the ink is a plastic)
· bulletproof vests (plastics are the only materials with the necessary combination of strength and lightness)
· landfill liners
· magnetic tape
· photographic film, as opposed to glass plates, and therefore pocket cameras and motion pictures
· pneumatic tires, and therefore bicycles and automobiles that can go faster than a walking pace
· insulating panels for houses
· garbage bags
· breast implants
· adhesive tapes, including duct tape, scotch tape, packing tape, and masking tape (pressure-sensitive adhesives are plastics)
· band-aids
· lcds (the liquid crystals are a plastic, just one that's molten at room temperature; the polarizing filters are also a plastic, a solid one, although conceivably you could find a way to use wollaston prisms for this instead)
· phonograph records. if you're unwilling to consider shellac a 'plastic', even though it's a moldable thermoplastic organic polymer, this can be restricted to 33rpm and 45rpm phonograph records
· compact discs, probably. although you could surely micro-etch a surface to store digital data without plastic, the stamping process crucially depends on plastic's ability to mold to submicron precision as a way to mass-produce the resulting shape
· hologram stickers, similarly
· baby bottles. the nipples are plastic (rubber, a plastic, is the only natural material that will work) and if you make the bottle itself out of glass, the baby will break it
· flexible electrical wires that don't short out if they get wet, I think. you can't insulate flexible wires with glass or porcelain. certainly insulating wires with cloth (silk for small wires) was commonplace in the early 20th century, and although you can get wires insulated with an layer of ceramic so thin it's flexible, i don't think it's flexible enough or abrasion-resistant enough for household use
those are things you can't make at all without plastics. in most other cases, you could make do: by molding things out of beeswax or glass, stamping them out of steel, carving them out of wood, machining them out of brass or mykroy/mycalex (if you don't consider that a 'plastic'), molding them out of plaster, using decay-prone natural fibers instead of stable plastic ones, painting cotton cloth with linseed oil, oxidatively cross-linking linseed oil or urushi as a binder for other uses, sintering sapphire, or bolting together pieces of porcelain or granite that had been ground to shape
that would work for clothing, camping, rock climbing, sailing, electronic components, paints, electrical equipment, automobiles, and most industrial processes. but not for the bullet list above
however, even in those cases, the resulting products would in most cases be orders of magnitude more expensive, so the aspect of modern life that would be missing would be that non-wealthy people have access to them. they would also be much shorter-lived in most cases because they would rot and break more easily
· more generally, safety glass other than tempered glass—tempered glass shatters into tiny pieces that won't slash open your arteries, but sometimes safety actually requires the broken glass to remain intact, as in car windshields
· transparent riot shields
· safety glasses and visors (glass glasses increase the risk of eye injury from projectiles in the right size range, rather than decreasing it)
· plywood, particleboard, and osb (though perhaps in theory you could make them with binders that aren't plastic, plastic resins are for some reason the only things actually being used, so i consider it unproved that you could make them with something like hide glue)
· glue strong enough to reconnect the broken stem of a wine glass
· superglue (superglue is a plastic)
· hot glue guns
· o-rings and other gaskets that don't leak. historically these used to be made of leather, but leather is of course porous. as a result
· virtually anything that hermetically seals around a rotating shaft
· the monterey bay aquarium
· photolithography resists, such as used for making integrated circuits; all the photoresists used for photolithography are plastics. so without plastics you'd have to find a different way to make integrated circuits
· laminators, the kind that sandwiches paper between two sheets of transparent plastic
· aluminum soft drink cans, which depend on a thin coating of plastic to protect the aluminum from the acid
· mechanically stabilized earth walls, which are used for most cuts into the earth for highways and underpasses (often mistakenly believed to be concrete, because concrete plates are hung on their faces). these depend on layering the earth with geotextiles to keep it from slumping over time, and the only natural material that could be used for the geotextiles would be asbestos, which is unacceptable due to the resulting health hazards. natural organic materials would rot and metals would oxidize. conceivably glass fiber could work, but it might be unacceptably hazardous as well
· nomex firefighting suits; no natural material combines the light weight, heat resistance (370°), thermal insulation, and flexibility that aluminized plastics do
· the most common types of 3-d printers (fdm, sla)
· scratch-and-sniff
· pencil erasers (natural rubber, again)
· car batteries; only plastics have the necessary combination of acid resistance, impact resistance, electrical insulation, and waterproofness for this application
· hepa filters
· n95 masks
· carbon fiber (made by carbonizing fibers made from a thermoset plastic)
· silicon carbide fiber such as tyranno (made by carbonizing fibers made from a thermoset silicone plastic)
· asbestos-free brakes (nomex/kevlar again)
· fire poi (kevlar with fiberglass or cotton)
· ping-pong balls
· knife-resistant gloves for meatpackers and cooks (kevlar again)
well, some of them are pretty trivial (life without shrinky-dinks is just life) but others are pretty major. when i started out writing this i didn't realize that plastics were essential to literally every way to record motion picture or audio data until the invention of hard disks
i did mention that, but probably there is some alternative. for example, you could directly selectively etch away a vacuum-coated metal layer with lasers or electron beams, perhaps even using a shadow mask. so i suspect that's more a question of how expensive the products would be rather than whether they would be feasible at all
Should we apply the same logic to the oil industry and how bad things were before we could pump tetraethyl lead into our vehicles to go faster than a horse? It's not "plastics bad insanity" when there are verifiable issues with plastics having to do with our bodies - we've banned certain plastics from being used in food storage for this very reason.
probably? i mean, what would it look like to not apply the same logic to the oil industry? you'd argue for eliminating oil from machinery because it comes from the same industry that promoted tetraethyllead. it's the same kind of overgeneralization, but even more extreme
plastics are more similar than oil-company products, but they are not similar enough to make general conclusions about them like this. the only thing sodium polyacrylate, teflon, polyester, and epoxy have in common is that they're cheap, moldable solids made from oil
The point is that justifying something because life is "better" by some metric while calling the opposing side "insane" for having reservations about something already proven to be potentially dangerous is flawed. I chose the oil industry because it's another example of something which has helped humanity in innumerable ways, but brought its own risks which we should not ignore solely because one metric looks good.
I'm not advocating for tearing down any industry, just pointing out that such extreme rhetoric isn't very intellectual.
i think we need more nuanced examination of the risks and benefits of particular materials. i agree with the earlier commenter that erasing such nuance to the extreme of describing 'plastics' in general as 'things that are known to be bad' amounts to 'insanity'. it's overgeneralization to the point of total irrationality
in particular, i don't think polypropylene plastic mulch, whether embrittling in the sun or inert in a landfill, is any more harmful than the quartz that makes up a large fraction of the soil it's covering. (less so, actually, because inhaling polypropylene particles doesn't give you lung cancer.) and i don't think the endocrine effects of bisphenol-a or the bioaccumulation of dechlorane plus is relevant to that judgment, since polypropylene plastic mulch doesn't contain them. they might contain some other harmful additive, but the problem then is the additive, not the plastic
its pretty difficult to dig up any solid evidence plastic pollution has effects on health beyond banned plasticisers, and even then. whereas plastic mitigation efforts often result in exacerbating actual issues like leading to more carbon emissions
sure, plastic waste should be responsibly handled. but plastics have major benefits to solving many other problems. in this case it's compounded by readers that have nothing to do with farming (or who have a garden and think they could live off of it) thinking farmers are trying to kill them
also, the article railing against landfills is part of the issue to me. plastic that is landfilled is absolutely responsibly managed plastic. we /want/ our waste to become part of geology, not keep circulating, if possible
> its pretty difficult to dig up any solid evidence plastic pollution has effects on health beyond banned plasticisers, and even then.
Indeed. The presumption that plastics are a health risk is created by simply repeating that they are, with a healthy dose of hypothetical thinking and the precautionary principle. Eventually it becomes fixed in the echo chamber as common "knowledge", like the idea that GMOs are bad.
I find this all very illiberal, the notion that people should be prevented from actions because of the mere possibility of negative consequences (as if that possibility could ever be entirely excluded.)
agreed. i think there are certain plastic materials for which the preponderance of evidence tends toward significant health risks, though; specific things that come to mind include bisphenol-a as an endocrine disruptor, polybrominated diethyl ether flame retardants in polyurethane foams as endocrine disruptors, and heavy-metal catalysts used to add photodegradability to some otherwise stable plastics. it seems completely irrational to me to generalize this to plastics in general
the extreme excess and total neglect of the end of the lifecycle / negative externalities that every god damn company on earth likes to push onto people and the environment is the problem. Nobody said plastics aren't useful, why is that so hard to understand?
Plastic pollution denial is a thing now?