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aise your hand if you like to wash dishes. Scrub muffin tins? Sweep the challah crumbs off the table? Raise your hand if you haven’t raised your hand yet. Yeah, probably all of you. No worries. Just get out the disposables — plates, cutlery, cups, muffin pans, serving trays, disposable tablecloths.

What other disposable items do you regularly use? It generally goes like this: Rip open the package. Throw out the package. Use the item once, then throw it out. Open a new package. Use it. Throw it out. And again. We have so much access to disposable goods, we’re known as the “Disposable Generation.”

Plastic Revolution

Take a look at the room around you. What are most objects made from? How many items are made from plastic or other manmade materials? Probably a lot. This wasn’t always the case. At the beginning of the 19th century, factories made goods from natural resources such as wood, copper, iron, natural rubber, glass, and clay. But many of these raw materials were expensive and hard to acquire. So inventors and scientists all over the world got busy working on formulas to fake them, by making them out of synthetic substances like rubber and plastic.

In 1907, Belgian-American chemist Leo Hendrik Baekeland struck gold with the first fully-synthetic, commercially successful plastic. Its scientific name was polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride (don’t even bother trying to pronounce it). To make it easier, he called in Bakelite. What a great product. So versatile. Manufacturers in every industry started using Bakelite to make jewelry, telephones, automobile parts, and everything in between. Even the clothing industry started using plastic fibers, such as nylon, in their garments. Soon enough, other plastics, such as Dacron, Styrofoam, and vinyl, became commonplace.

Indispensable Disposables

Lots of busy families, not to mention pizzes who witnessed workers at aNew Yorkfactory eating their lunch on thin pieces of scrap wood. Their ingenuity inspired him to create disposable paper dishware. It took him two years, but once he got them on grocery shelves in 190a shops, would totally shut down if not for the invention of the disposable plate. Many thanks to Martin Key3, they won instant popularity. And they haven’t lost it since. His Keyes Fibre Company is still pumping out those paper plates, and is most famous for their Chinet brand. Look for them in your local grocery.

Paper Towels

Cleaning ladies use them by the dozen. Environmentalists can’t stand them. Who am I? A paper towel. Its creation involved a railroad car, a teacher, and an innovator. In 1907, a railroad car full of the wrong type of paper was shipped to the Scott Company and owner Arthur Scott was in a quandary.