In the preface to her new book, Susan Freinkel, a science journalist and OnEarth contributor, recounts a startling discovery: Over the course of a single day, she found that she came into contact with almost twice as many plastic things (196) as she did other things (102). In Plastic: A Toxic Love Story (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Freinkel uses the stories of eight plastic objects -- a comb, chair, Frisbee, IV bag, lighter, grocery bag, soda bottle, and credit card -- to detail the history, science, economics, and politics of this once-celebrated, now-vilified material. Freinkel talked to OnEarth about the misconceptions around plastic, the difficulty of trying to live without it, and the fact that your grandparents were likely reusing their sandwich bags -- long before it was cool.

The book is unusually evenhanded -- plastic comes off as scary, but also as kind of amazing. Did your research leave you with a greater appreciation for plastic?

I'm the classic baby boomer, fairly accustomed to talking about plastic with a bit of a wrinkle in my nose. My aesthetic is not a real plastic-y aesthetic. I came out of my research more worried but also more cognizant of some of the upsides of plastic. For example, it played a role in democratizing consumer goods and making things more available for people of all means.

You write that we're now producing nearly 600 billion pounds of plastic each year. Do we cancel out plastic's upsides when we use so much of it?

Half of all the plastic produced goes to single-use items. That's just not sustainable. Plastic production really ramped up after World War II, and at first a lot of the plastics went into durable uses -- refrigerators, TVs, cars. But in the mid 50s there was a very conscious strategy on the part of industry to start developing disposable conveniences as a way to keep increasing the consumption of plastics. It's not a conspiracy -- it fit in very well with the way our culture and economy were evolving. But that was a new way of thinking for people who’d grown up during the Depression with reusing and saving. With the first coffee vending machines that dispensed little plastic cups, people tended to save the cups. The first sandwich bags came with instructions for how to wash and reuse them. Industry was saying, How can we figure out how to get people to realize they can throw things away?

Have you tried to reduce your own plastic consumption?

I’m much more careful about how I shop, but I’m not as hardcore as people who want to completely rid plastic from their lives. When I encounter something that is heavily packaged, I think a lot harder about whether I really need to get it. I’m very dogmatic about not taking plastic bags. I don’t buy bottled water. And I’m much more diligent about how I recycle. Even so, I produce a lot of plastic trash.

Is it possible to stop using plastic completely?

In my book I write about Beth Terry, who is really trying hard to purge plastic from her life. She produces only a pound or two of plastic trash a year. So I guess it depends on how hard you try. You can work very hard to make your own condiments and deodorant and shampoo, and you can carry around pots to put your shopping in. But I really don’t think you can shop your way out of the problem. You can decide you will buy BPA-free baby bottles, but then you might find that the new bottles are made with some BPA relative. You can’t stop your municipality from shipping recycling to China. There are limits to what we can do on an individual level, so a long-term solution to a lot of these things means governments and industry need to step up to the plate as well.

One of the items you focus on in your book is the plastic grocery bag. Any thoughts to add to the big debate?

The plastic bag is so maligned. We forget that it was hard to figure out how to make a viable carrier out of plastic. It's quite an engineering feat. It can hold more than 1,000 times its own weight, and it’s waterproof, very, very durable, and really cheap.

People think of the brown paper bag as a much more natural-feeling, environmentally friendly product, but on almost every measure of environmental impact, it's worse. A paper bag requires more water and energy to produce, generates more greenhouse gases, is heavier to transport and store, and is more expensive. One thing it beats out the plastic bag on, though, is that it can biodegrade. When paper bags get out into the landscape and the ocean, they will more or less melt away over time. A plastic bag will just last and last.

Will the backlash against toxic chemicals like BPA lead to significant changes in how plastics are regulated?

Until there are changes to the current system, where things are presumed safe until found otherwise, we will always be playing catch up. Phthalates are still widely used in medicine. Blood bags still contain the phthalate that people are most concerned about. Some replacements have been formulated to meet tougher European regulations, but they're still not being put to the test here. Until we have a strong and systematic way of assessing chemicals, all we can do is hope that the alternatives are really better than the known devil.

What's the most common misunderstanding about plastic?

People tend to think of plastic as one thing, and it really isn't. It's a family of materials that can be as different from each other as paper is from metal or glass. What the health considerations are, what the environmental impact is -- it really varies. You can't just say all plastic is toxic -- because all plastics aren't -- or all plastic will last forever in the environment, because all plastics don't.

Did you have any especially surprising moments during your research?

I was surprised to discover that Styrofoam as insulation is huge as green building material. When I went to a green building fair, Styrofoam was everywhere. As I thought about it, I realized it makes sense -- that's the double-edged thing about plastic. You take this material that's really good at insulating and will last forever, and that's great if you use it to build a house. But it's bad if you make it into a coffee cup, and use it for 15 minutes.