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Plastic is everywhere, and so is photography now. Leo Baekeland’s association with both is legendary. Around 1894, Leo perfected a photographic paper that would allow enlargements to be printed by artificial light, which he named "Velox". It was the first commercially successful photographic paper. To make up for the lack of an investor, he found a partner and established the Nepera Chemical Company in New York. In 1899, Leo and his partner sold Nepera to George Eastman of the Eastman Kodak Co. for $750,000, signing a non-compete clause: Leo agreed not to do research in photography for at least 20 years. So he set out to find another promising area of research. In 1907, Leo invented bakelite, the world’s first fully synthetic plastic and coined the term ‘plastic’.
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What can I do? Plastic is ubiquitous in our lives in the modern world. The wings of the plane you fly in uses carbon-fibre reinforced plastic, glass-fibre reinforced plastic and quartz-fibre reinforced plastic extensively. We have produced more plastic in the last decade than in the whole last century, 50 percent of it is in the form of single-use or disposable products, says a UN Environment report. Every year the world uses 500 billion plastic bags. What can I do? You don't need Quora for answers. Reduce. Reuse. Recycle.
Credits: UN Environment, Wikipedia.