While plastics are extremely useful materials for modern society, plastics production and waste generation continue to increase with worsening environmental impacts despite international, national and local policy responses, as well as industry commitments. The first of two reports, this Outlook intends to inform and support policy efforts to combat plastic leakage.

Plastics & Sustainability clearly lays out the thorny and contentious issues that we encounter at the nexus of plastics and sustainability. The book serves as a practical guide for making sustainability decisions about how plastics are made and used, including current developments in the newest bio-based plastics. Designers, marketers, academics, and engineers will all find something of value in this balanced and thoughtful second edition. Increased public scrutiny of plastics materials and the plastics industry has led, paradoxically, to both a deeper understanding and growing confusion about polymers, their origins, their uses, their risks, and ultimately their disposal. The author makes objective comparisons among major polymer grades and bioplastics including their life cycle assessments and practical performance in commercial applications.

“This eloquent, elegant book thoughtfully plumbs the . . . consequences of our dependence on plastics” (The Boston Globe, A Best Nonfiction Book of 2011). From pacemakers to disposable bags, plastic built the modern world. But a century into our love affair, we’re starting to realize it’s not such a healthy relationship. As journalist Susan Freinkel points out in this eye-opening book, we’re at a crisis point. Plastics draw on dwindling fossil fuels, leach harmful chemicals, litter landscapes, and destroy marine life. We’re drowning in the stuff, and we need to start making some hard choices. Freinkel tells her story through eight familiar plastic objects: a comb, a chair, a Frisbee, an IV bag, a disposable lighter, a grocery bag, a soda bottle, and a credit card. With a blend of lively anecdotes and analysis, she sifts through scientific studies and economic data, reporting from China and across the United States to assess the real impact of plastic on our lives. Her conclusion is severe, but not without hope. Plastic points the way toward a new creative partnership with the material we love, hate, and can’t seem to live without. “When you write about something so ubiquitous as plastic, you must be prepared to write in several modes, and Freinkel rises to this task. . . . She manages to render the most dull chemical reaction into vigorous, breathless sentences.” —SF Gate “Freinkel’s smart, well-written analysis of this love-hate relationship is likely to make plastic lovers take pause, plastic haters reluctantly realize its value, and all of us understand the importance of individual action, political will, and technological innovation in weaning us off our addiction to synthetics.” —Publishers Weekly “A compulsively interesting story. Buy it (with cash).” —Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature “What a great read—rigorous, smart, inspiring, and as seductive as plastic itself.” —Karim Rashid, designer

After over a century of worldwide production of all kinds trol persons, cost estimators, buyers, vendors, consultants, of products, the plastics industry is now the fourth largest and others. industry in the United States. This brief, concise, and prac The bulk of the book is the alphabetical listing of en tical book is a cutting edge compendium of the plastics tries. Preceding those entries is A Plastics Overview: Fig industry's information and terminology-ranging from ures and Tables (which presents eight summary guides on design, materials, and processes, to testing, quality control, the subjects examined in the text) and then the World of regulations, legal matters, and profitability. New and use Plastics Reviews (which presents 14 articles that provide ful developments in plastic materials and processing con general introductory information, comprehensive updates, tinually are on the horizon, and the examples of these de and important networking avenues within the world of velopments that are discussed in the book provide guides plastics). Following the alphabetical listing of entries, at the to past and future trends. end of the encyclopedia, seven appendices provide back This practical and comprehensive book reviews the ground and source guide information keyed to the text of the book. The extensive and useful Appendix A, List of plastics industry virtually from A to Z through its more than 25,000 entries. Its concise entries cover the basic is Abbreviations, lists all abbreviations used in the text.

The media and more recently journalism have provided rich areas of study for many years but magazines, perhaps the most prolific single medium, have been largely ignored. Mapping The Magazine aims to redress the balance with an unprecedented collection of original, scholarly, detailed but wide-ranging examinations of the magazine form. Drawing on a variety of theoretical approaches and a wealth of titles from around the world, the contributions demonstrate just how significant the magazine has been, and continues to be, in the realm of journalism and cultural production. From the science magazines of the Victorian era to women’s magazines of South Africa and Israel, via rock music and photojournalism past and present, the material in Mapping The Magazine illuminates and explores the all-encompassing, global and historical nature of the subject matter. Some of the most notable names in the field of magazine studies, including John Hartley, Sammye Johnson, David Abrahamson, Bethan Benwell, and Patrick Roessler contribute research based analyses of various aspects of magazine journalism from around the globe and across a wide historical span. This book will help to establish the magazine as a medium which is not only suitable for research but which also opens up a huge new field of possibilities. This book was previously published as a special issue of Journalism Studies