Never gonna give you up: how plastic seduced America

Once we lived without it, now we can't escape it. A historian unpacks the origins of our plastic addiction

In 1957 Disneyland opened the Monsanto House of the Future, an all-plastic dwelling. Over the next 10 years millions of visitors passed through its fantastical rooms, designed by MIT architects with curved walls and large windows. The house was equipped with plastic chairs and plastic floors, the kitchen with precise stacks of plastic plates and plastic cups. Monsanto's house trumpeted the wonders of science, as well as the chemical industry and its products. Plastic, it proclaimed, was the material of tomorrow.

Related: Plastic wrapped in plastic: the wasteful reality of America's grocery stores