Book excerpt: 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.