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Green Metropolis:
When a French-American salvage expedition, beginning in the mid-1990s, retrieved items from the RMS Titanic, which sank in 1912, none of the thousands of recovered articles—'gold and silver wrist- and pocket watches, buttons, bracelets, jeweled necklaces, rings, tiepins and hairpins, gold pince-nez spectacles, leather goods, several hundred English coins, ivory combs, mirror cases, and hairbrushes'—included anything made of plastic, the first truly modern form of which, Bakelite, had only just been invented when the ship set sail.
If, say, one of Princess Cruises' massive consumption ships sank today (nearly 110 years after the Titanic's first and last trip) and was not recovered for 100 years, our distant and possibly more environmentally enlightened descendants would be appalled by the thousands upon thousands of articles—cell phones, headphones, microphones, blow-dryers, vibrators—made of petroleum-based plastic.