Summary
People often grumble that plastics are too durable. Water bottles, shopping bags, and other trash litter the planet, from Mount Everest to the Mariana Trench, because plastics are ubiquitous and don’t break down easily. But some plastic materials can change over time. They crack and frizzle. They “weep” out additives. They melt into sludge. All of which creates huge headaches for institutions, such as museums, trying to preserve culturally important objects. The variety of plastic objects at risk is dizzying: early radios, avant-garde sculptures, celluloid animation stills from Disney films, David Bowie costumes, the first artificial heart. Museums are doing everything they can to save culturally important items from similar fates. Over the past decade, conservators have developed better tools to identify vulnerable objects. Some conservators have also started to run experiments to shore up preservation practices and arrest decay.