Welcome to the Green Alliance podcast. We are the charity and think tech that is all about ambitious leadership for the environment.

I'm Libby Peek, had a resource policy, and a lot of my time over the past couple of years has been dedicated to thinking about plastic,

and particularly why we need to be thinking about more than just plastic.

Unless you've been living under the rock for the past few years,

it won't have escaped your notice that the world has a problem with plastic pollution,

and people are right to be concerned and to demand a solution to protect ecosystems

and human and animal health from what has been actually described as a global scourge.

But what we don't want in searching out a solution is to store up future problems by failing

to think about what we're doing.

And in the past few years, one of my favourite stories has been a cautionary tale from the

invention of plastic itself.

I've been on a mission to tell as many people as possible the surprising fact that plastic

was actually invented to prevent an

environmental catastrophe, the extinction of the elephants, who were at risk after billiards

exploded in popularity as each set of billiard balls required the slaughter of two animals.

And as elephants became increasingly scarce, an ivory increasingly expensive, an alternative to the

slaughter was sought. In 1863, Michael Fellin, who was known as the father of American billiards,

took out an ad offering $10,000, which is about $200,000 today, for the invention of a substitute

for ivory. John Wesley Hyatt, a young printer with no formal training in chemistry, took up the challenge

and eventually stumbled upon something that would transform the world as we know it.

Celluloid, the first industrial plastic.

Now, celluloid didn't actually work out as a substitute for ivory as it had a nasty habit

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