Plastics Now addresses one primary question: why do we build with plastics the way that we do?

For decades, plastics have been described over and over again as "the future," yet we still do not know precisely what to do with them. Billie Faircloth argues that this inertia is due to plastics indecipherability, which has prevented them from becoming fully known.

The author tracks the process by which plastics became defined as a class of building materials. Drawing on original data from industry press, original timelines, hundreds of historical and contemporary images, advertisements...