How big brands wrapped our world in plastic

Despite years of promises, targets, pledges and sustainability commitments, the plastics problem has not meaningfully improved. Packaging that was once sold as a solution has become, by most measures, an environmental and humanitarian crisis, and the distance between what companies promise and what they deliver remains wide.

In Consumed: How Big Brands Got Us Hooked On Plastic, Saabira Chaudhuri investigates the economic, geopolitical and commercial drivers that have led to us drowning in waste, with more on its way.

Chaudhuri is well placed to tell this story. Having spent years covering the consumer goods industry for The Wall Street Journal, reporting across the US, Europe and beyond, she brings both a journalist’s instinct for accountability and an economist’s understanding of how industries are structured to resist change. She grew up in India, which lends her account of plastic’s impact in emerging markets a perspective that goes beyond detached analysis.

The book exposes the plastics industry’s playbook, with meticulously researched and referenced examples behind every claim. Chaudhuri moves across considerable ground: tracing the industry’s acceleration through World War 2, examining how plastic reshaped global diets and consumption patterns, and mapping the financial stakes for chemical manufacturers and consumer brands alike.

What connects it all is a single, devastating insight: the economies of scale that made plastic cheap also made it nearly impossible to remove without significant financial consequences for the industries that depend on it.

Plastic had already found a foothold in domestic life long before its consequences were understood. In 1947, House Beautiful reassured its readers that with more women entering the workforce in the years immediately after the war “plastics are here to free you from drudgery … they are giving women the priceless gifts of more leisure and more energy”. What was framed as emancipation embedded itself as an enduring consumption habit, one the industry would spend the following decades working hard to deepen.

What connects it all is a single, devastating insight: the economies of scale that made plastic cheap also made it nearly impossible to remove without significant financial consequences for the industries that depend on it.

The book is structured in four parts, and the first, Throwaway Living, identifies the moment when the industry made its intentions plain. In 1956, the editor of Modern Plastics addressed his peers with a statement that would prove consequential: the future of plastics, he told them, was in the rubbish bin. The pivot from durable to disposable was not incidental but a strategic decision; the single-use plastics industry grew accordingly.

As evidence of that decision accumulated — in overflowing landfills, rising litter-management costs and growing public concern — the industry did not retreat. Chaudhuri’s second section examines what it did instead: it lobbied, deflected and reframed the debate. Incineration was presented as a responsible disposal method rather than the ecological and public health hazard it proved to be. Companies pledged to reduce plastic waste while simultaneously expanding production. By this point, the gap between stated intentions and commercial reality had become a defining feature of the industry’s approach to accountability.

Recycling as a public relations exercise

The recycling chapter is perhaps the most troubling. Chaudhuri examines how the promise of recyclability was extended to plastics that were never genuinely recoverable, buying the industry time and continued public goodwill while manufacturing and sales continued to grow. Later, in chapter 10, titled Farewell to the Age of Ecology, she returns to this theme in greater detail, documenting what she characterises as the recycling commitments of companies such as Coca-Cola and PepsiCo as a public relations exercise rather than a genuine business practice, supported by targets that, she argues, do not withstand scrutiny.

The book also traces how the industry extended its reach into emerging markets. Chaudhuri examines how plastic manufacturers, working closely with global consumer brands, supercharged consumption in economies where purchasing power was lower but appetite for growth was considerable.

The sachet is a telling case study: small, single-use and affordable, it allowed brands to reach consumers who could not buy full-sized products. Procter & Gamble’s 1995 launch of Pantene in India is one example the book investigates in detail, a model subsequently replicated across other emerging markets, including across Africa, where the packaging solution drove consumption while generating plastic waste that local infrastructure was wholly unequipped to manage.

The effects were quick to materialise. By 2001, The Lucknow Times was reporting that at least 100 cows were dying daily from ingesting plastic bags. The local environment was absorbing a cost that the industry had not priced in — and had no particular incentive to.

Nor did the flow of plastic run only in one direction. Chaudhuri examines the large volumes of waste, categorised as recyclable, that were exported from Western markets to Asia, offloading the problem of disposal while maintaining the fiction of a functioning recycling system. It was an extension of the same logic in which the consequences were real but were someone else’s responsibility.

The book does not limit itself to the environmental consequences of plastic waste. Chaudhuri also examines the direct health implications of the chemicals used in plastics. Among the ingredients she investigates is acrylonitrile, described as “a close relative of vinyl chloride, which was shown to cause more cancer in animals”. The stakes were not merely theoretical. In 1976, the non-profit Natural Resources Defence Council sued the Food and Drug Administration over a formulation of plastic used by Coca-Cola, arguing that “acrylonitrile and hydrogen cyanide could migrate from the plastic into the drinks”.

The book does not limit itself to the environmental consequences of plastic waste. Chaudhuri also examines the direct health implications of the chemicals used in plastics.

The book’s final section offers a measure of cautious optimism. In a chapter titled The Final Straw, Chaudhuri uses the widely circulated image of a sea turtle with a plastic straw lodged in its nostril as a marker of something shifting in public consciousness, a moment that crystallised, for many, the human cost of industrial indifference and helped galvanise a new wave of pushback against the industry.

Consumed is an unsparing account of an industry that, whether directly or through the consumer brands that depend on its products, appears to have little genuine interest in addressing the harm it causes. With more than 340 references, including interviews, Chaudhuri has gone to considerable lengths to ensure the book is grounded in fact rather than polemic.

For readers who feel the weight of what Chaudhuri describes and want to do more than simply absorb it, that is precisely the point: understanding how the industry has operated, and continues to operate, is the necessary foundation for anyone who wants to push back against it in any meaningful way. Consumed provides that foundation, and does so without flinching.