Consumed: How Big Brands Got Us Hooked on Plastic

Longlisted for the FT Business Book of the Year
A vital investigation into how disposability has transformed our lives and why we've been unable to kick our plastic habit by Wall Street Journal reporter Saabira Chaudhuri.

*FINANCIAL TIMES BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2025*

'This book will change the way you see the world and could change the world itself', CHRIS VAN TULLEKEN, BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF ULTRA-PROCESSED PEOPLE

'Chaudhuri does a mighty job of showing how plastic came to take over our lives, and why we have repeatedly failed to curb it' , FINANCIAL TIMES

'A must read for anyone who buys anything plastic', MICHAEL MOSS, PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF SALT, SUGAR, FAT

'Eye-popping, engaging and rigorous', MIKE BERNERS-LEE, AUTHOR OF A CLIMATE OF TRUTH

'As alarming as it is entertaining. brilliant', HUGH FEARNLEY-WHITTINGSTALL, HOST OF WAR ON PLASTIC WITH ANITA AND HUGH

Over the past seventy years, McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Unilever and other consumer goods makers have harnessed single-use plastics to turbocharge their profits. They've poured billions of dollars into convincing us we need disposable diapers, cups, bags, bottles, shampoo in sachets and plastic-packaged ultra-processed foods.

We were never clamouring for any of these items, but this shift towards disposability has fundamentally transformed our daily habits. Think of toddlers kept in disposable diapers for far longer than their parents wore cloth, our obsession with bottled water and our insatiable appetite for convenient snacks and coffee. While at first we shaped plastics, somewhere along the way, plastics took over and began shaping us.

Like any addiction, our plastic habit has consequences. It is damaging our climate and biodiversity and we are only just starting to understand its effect on our own health.

How did plastic take over our lives? And why have we been unable to rein it in? In investigating how we got here, Consumed arms us to make better decisions about where we go next. It is only by understanding this history that we will stop accepting the same failed solutions and demand better from the brands that got us hooked on plastic in the first place.

'An important and engaging read', ADAM ALTER, BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF IRRESISTIBLE AND ANATOMY OF A BREAKTHROUGH

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