Consumed: How Global Brands Got Hooked on Plastic

Longlisted for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award.
’This book will change the way you see the world and could change the world itself’ CHRIS VAN TULLEKEN, BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF ULTRA- PROCESSED PEOPLE

’Chaudhuri does a mighty job of showing how plastic came to take over our lives, and why we have repeatedly failed to curb it’ FINANCIAL TIMES

’A must read for anyone who buys anything plastic’ MICHAEL MOSS, PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF SALT, SUGAR, FAT

’Sharp research and a gripping story’ BEN COHEN AND JERRY GREENFIELD, CO-FOUNDERS OF BEN & JERRY’S

’Fantastic reporting! This book will entertain you even as it raises your blood pressure’ BILL MCKIBBEN, BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE END OF THE WORLD

’Eye-popping, engaging and rigorous’ MIKE BERNERS-LEE, AUTHOR OF A CLIMATE OF TRUTH

’An important and engaging read’ ADAM ALTER, BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF IRRESISTIBLE
Over the past seventy years, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Unilever and other consumer goods makers have harnessed single-use plastics to turbocharge their profits. They’ve poured billions of dollars into convincing us we need disposable diapers, cups, bags, bottles, shampoo sachets and ultra-processed foods. We were never clamoring for any of this. But this shift towards disposability has fundamentally transformed our daily habits. Think of toddlers kept in disposable diapers for far longer than their parents wore cloth, our obsession with bottled water and our insatiable appetite for convenient snacks and coffee. While at first we shaped plastics, somewhere along the way, plastics took over and began shaping us. Like any addiction, our plastic habit has consequences. It is damaging our climate and biodiversity and we are only just starting to understand its effect on our own health.

How did plastic take over our lives? And why have we been unable to rein it in? In investigating how we got here, Consumed arms us to make better decisions about where we go next. It is only by understanding this history that we will stop accepting the same failed solutions and demand better from the brands that got us hooked on plastic in the first place.

Saabira Chaudhuri has covered consumer goods companies for the Wall Street Journal for the past decade. She previously reported on the banking industry for the Journal from New York. She was the Journal’s Asia fellow to New York University, earning an MA in business and economic reporting. She also has a BA in sociology from Mount Holyoke College. Saabira grew up in Bangalore. She lives in London with her husband, two children and dog.