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Just One Word: Plastic

I had to get a cavity filled today. The process was amazingly quick and painless compared to the fillings of my childhood. I can barely imagine what Dad might have had in mind when he said then that he was grateful not to be living with the dentistry of his parents’ era. Curiously, the cost was lower, too; I don’t know what the price tag was when I was a kid, but twenty years ago, the price tag for a filling was higher in raw, unadjusted-for-inflation dollars than it is today. Golly.

I think it’s a result of acrylic fillings. In place of those horrid lead-gray metal fillings, we now have nearly-invisible plastic. It seems to take less preparation, and certainly sets faster. Setting faster, in turn, might explain why the dentist no longer numbs half my face for two hours to put the filling in place. Lower dosage, less risk, less discomfort. Probably cheaper than metal fillings, too—very little is cheaper than plastic. The two dentists I’ve asked agreed that acrylic is better in every way.

It reminds me of PVC pipe. Indestructible plastic is an environmental nightmare in general, but in one application, at least, plastic’s benefits outweigh environmental concerns enormously. When PVC pipe became available, plumbers converted immediately. Cheaper, lighter, easier to cut to length, non-toxic, immune to corrosion—for plumbing, PVC is a miracle product. And quite possibly less environmentally destructive, depending on how you measure it, than strip-mining ores for metal pipe.

Better living through plastic. Maybe it’s time to re-watch the episode of Connections that traces its invention.

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