Innovation, plastics and the merits of carbon

The West has lost the plot in innovation – but the whole world needs to rehabilitate ‘stuff’, plastics and the sixth element in the periodic table. Published in Russian and English

From the article published in Russian – FULL PDF copies of the Russian and English versions available from link after this introduction.

Russia is different from the West. Yet even in Russia, and certainly in India and China, the West’s fashionable hostility to material wealth, to goods and to economic growth may be growing among the middle classes.

In the West, you can see it very early on, in The Graduate (1967), the famous film of Mike Nichols, who just died. In that film, an executive tries to suggest to the young, 1960s-ish Dustin Hoffman, that his future career should be centred around something he is already suspicious of: plastics. So by now, it should be no surprise that books have been published in America, Australia and Britain on the subject of what they call ‘affluenza’, the nasty and even infectious side-effects of owning too much stuff. Since 2011, indeed, two American corporate high-flyers, Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, have together penned no fewer than seven books on so-called minimalist consumer habits – quite a feat of trees-to-paper consumption in itself. Equally, the London-based futurologist James Wallman has popularised the idea of ‘stuffocation’ – the feeling you get ‘when you look in your wardrobe and it’s bursting with clothes but you can’t find a thing to wear’.

Yet most of the world is not bursting with too much choice. In this light, the plastics industry now needs to rally to the defence of ‘stuff’. And, to advance its efforts in innovation, Russia needs to recognise the manufacturing advantages that it could reap from its rich endowment of hydrocarbons.

The world’s manufacturing sector has lately begun to chalk up impressive advances. Do these advances amount to what Peter Marsh, an encyclopaedic English analyst of manufacturing, terms ‘the new industrial revolution’? Do these advances presage what he calls ‘the end’ of mass production? Hardly. Yet whatever setbacks they are likely to face over the next 10 years, scientific, technological and economic developments promise a world of cheaper, more sophisticated products than the ones available today.  Instead of heaping yet more scorn on manufacturing, Russia should take the lead in arguing that there is much that manufacturing – not least, with plastics, and with carbon more generally ­– has to offer, both for humanity and for progress.

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To open and download the Full PDF versions of ‘Innovation, plastics and the merits of carbon‘, click on this English or this Russian link.