Had you happened to spend some time in early 2021 on the American Chemistry Council website, you might have come across “Lifecycle of a Plastic Product,” a contemporary iteration (since removed) of that curious sort of biography known to literary historians of the eighteenth century as the it narrative. Granted, the text presented under this heading did test the sense and strain the credibility of “lifecycle” as concept and promise: what you would have encountered was less an integral story of plastic’s key moments, whether in life or in cycle, and more a congeries of disparate, discontinuous plastic factoids starting with “Overview,” meandering through process and type, then landing, unceremoniously, at “End Life” and a time-saving flurry of bullet points. Midway through this haphazard congeries, however, came a section entitled “Plastic Uses” that, while offering no real purchase on the matter of “lifecycle,” did manage in its opening paragraphs to throw into relief some telling symptoms of what one could call the plastic condition. “Whether you are aware of it or not,” observed the American Chemistry Council’s anonymous polymer biographer, “plastics play an important part in your life.”