By James Aitchison

Once revered for its convenience, plastic is becoming a curse.  Certainly, it was a curse for its inventor.  He died a lonely eccentric, bitterly at war with his son.  His wealth then became a curse for his family — fueling a descent into greed, madness and murder.  His grandson was decadent.  His great-grandson murdered his mother and tried to kill his grandmother — then, in a final twist of irony, suicided by suffocating himself with a plastic bag.

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Plastic is polluting the world.  The figures are alarming.  Half of all plastic ever made has been produced in the last 20 years.  Production is frenzied; from 2.3 million tons in 1950 to 448 million tons by 2015.  Production is expected to double by 2050.  Despite the best efforts of a recent United Nations forum, plastic will continue to wreak havoc.

Every year, about eight million tons of plastic waste is dumped into the oceans from coastal nations.  According to National Geographic, “That’s the equivalent of setting five garbage bags full of trash on every foot of coastline around the world.  On uninhabited Henderson Island in the Pitcairn Group, isolated halfway between Chile and New Zealand, scientists found plastic items from Russia, the United States, Europe, South America, Japan and China, carried there by a circular Pacific Ocean current.”  Single-use plastic bottles, food wrappers and bags account for 40 per cent of the plastic produced each year; thrown-away, they can persist in the environment for at least 400 years before they break down.

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Who do we have to thank for plastic?

Leo Hendrik Baekeland, born 1863 in Ghent, Belgium, defied his cobbler father and entered university studying chemistry.  Immigrating to the United States with his wife, he invented Velox photographic paper which would take images using artificial light and sold the rights to George Eastman of Kodak fame.  Rich beyond his dreams, he established a laboratory at his home in Yonkers, New York.  There, he invented the world’s first synthetic, easily mouldable plastic which he patented in 1906 as Bakelite®, making his second fortune and ushering in the Age of Plastics.  Starting with his own steam pressure Bakelizer, he soon opened the Bakelite Corporation producing mouldable plastic for radios, telephones, electrical insulators and a thousand other things.

As Baekeland grew older he became more eccentric, waging fierce battles with his patriotically named son and heir George Washington Baekeland.  He sold the Bakelite company to Union Carbide  in 1939.  Baekeland Senior became a recluse and died in 1944.  Meanwhile, George Baekeland roamed the world, hunting big game and shooting grouse in Scotland.

It was George’s decadent son Brooks Baekeland who would ignite one of America’s most notorious scandals when he married Barbara Daly, a New York model, in 1942.

Brooks was handsome, clever, unstable and addicted to the easy life.  He claimed to be a writer but never wrote.  Inherited wealth supported his wild social adventures.  When his sister introduced him to the beautiful Barbara Daly, he found his perfect match.  The glamorous couple partied from Paris to Manhattan with fabulous friends such as Greta Garbo and Yasmin Aga Khan.   

While Daly often graced the pages of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, she brought mental illness to the union.  Her father suicided, and her mother Nini Daly suffered a mental breakdown before Barbara was born.  This dark, troubled history followed Barbara all her life.

In 1946, Barbara Daly Baekeland gave birth to their only son, Anthony.  Paraded like a “show pony” before the jet set, Anthony harboured his mother’s madness.  Barbara doted on the boy, determined to control his life, describing him as “brilliant and charming”; however, friends detected the child’s darker side.  When teenaged Anthony Baekeland declared he was gay, Barbara was shattered.  She sought to “cure” him with prostitutes.  Meanwhile, Barbara’s marriage was on the rocks; Brooks had an affair with one of his son’s female friends. 

Brooks and Barbara divorced in the mid-1960s.  Barbara and Anthony moved to London, where they lived in a Chelsea penthouse.  Their relationship grew increasingly toxic.  Barbara was so obsessed with her son’s homosexuality that she decided she could “cure” him by sleeping with him herself. 

On 17 November 1972, after years of manipulation and mental instability, Anthony’s tormented mind snapped.  He stabbed his mother to death with a kitchen knife.  It was a particularly savage murder, yet when the police arrived they found Anthony on the phone, calmly ordering Chinese food.

Anthony was sentenced to Broadmoor, a high security prison for the criminally insane.  After eight years, and due to a bureaucratic mistake, he was released in July 1980.  At his grandmother Nini Daly’s insistence, he returned to live with her in New York.  Within a week, he attacked her with a knife.  She survived.  Anthony was sent to Riker’s Island to await trial for attempted murder.

On 27 July 1981, on the day of his court appearance, Anthony Baekeland was found dead in his cell.  He had suffocated himself with a plastic shopping bag.

His father Brooks Baekeland delivered his son’s epitaph; he called him “an enormous failure of intelligence.”