Increasingly,
plastic makes up the material world we live in and the objects we interact with on a daily basis. Injection molding is responsible
for the bulk of these objects, where the plastic compound is heated to a liquid state
and forced into a cavity, typically a rigid mold made of a durable metal like
steel or aluminum. The thermoformed plastics that make up these injection
molded parts are carefully engineered to have the kind of traits that make them
perfect for mass production. They are widely available, generally cheap, and
re-usable- compared to thermoset plastics (relatively expensive, less variety
in formulations, no possibility of reuse), they are a natural fit for consumer
goods.
The consumer
object emerges from this process and with every fresh casting, the cost per
unit drops; the high water line of market saturation is redrawn. This curve of
cheapness can encourage overproduction, where units are cranked out en masse
and the mold retired. The delays created by a production run below market demand
(re-instating the mold, shifting other projects to other machines or off the
schedule, shipping, etc.) frequently leads to a higher overall cost. Put
plainly, the cost of producing too few units is potentially greater than the
cost of producing too many. The sometimes counterintuitive arithmetic of mass
production is partially to blame for the constant glut of consumable products. The
real, literal cheapness of these objects, the ease of replacement (low cost,
high availability) along with the seamless duplicity- (each copy is an exact
copy) means an increasing comfort in discarding the objects
derived from these mass production methods, reducing an already slim likelihood of any emerging
sentimental value.
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| A potential consumer browsing a plastic menagerie at a flea market. (photo: Lionel Allorge) |
There
is little appreciable human "wear" factor on plastics, the object is
not imbued with any human presence through its use. It has little past, less
history, and no maker's mark spare the odd ejection dent or parting line. It
could be made anywhere in the world, by any number of interchangeable
factories. It belongs to no region, no culture, no land. Our end experience as a consumer is as uniform
as the process that created it.
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