Before the advent of plastics, consider what your grandparents did. They would carry their purchases home in their own bags—typically made of cotton or jute—and then wash and dry them so they would be ready for use again. They also employed bottles and glass and steel vessels. But now that we live in the plastic age, we all use plastic bags when we go to the market, the vegetable vendor, or the grocery store to buy things. Even water is packaged and transported by traders in plastic bottles and bags. When did the plastics era begin? Leo Baekeland, a chemist from Belgium, created the first plastic in 1907 by synthesising formaldehyde and phenol. He gave it the name Bakelite, mass manufactured it, and put it on the market. The age of plastics had just begun. Read More-