Consumed

'A must read for anyone who buys anything plastic' MICHAEL MOSS, PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF SALT, SUGAR, FAT

'Fantastic reporting!' BILL MCKIBBEN, AUTHOR OF THE END OF THE WORLD

'The terrifying tale of how we wrapped our world in plastic' SIMON CLARK, AUTHOR OF THE KEY MAN

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've poured billions of dollars into convincing us we need disposable diapers, cups, bags, bottles, shampoo sachets and ultra-processed foods.

We were never clamouring for any of this. 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 - today, the equivalent of one garbage truck of plastic waste ends up in the ocean every minute - and we are only just starting to understand its effect on our own health.

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.