Rigid
"Y'ever notice how most of the places which had some tech breakthrough early ended up badly? It's like there's some cosmic force that doesn't want us finding advanced stuff and bringing it back here."
"Whatever, Sew-crates. I got three of these dividing walls up by myself while you were jabberin'. Wanna help me get the fourth one back in place?"
A World Less Malleable
Baseline residents often forget that plastics have only been around for an average human lifespan, so ubiquitous have they become. Only a few do more than tut sadly when reminded they will exist for several thousand human lifetimes once discarded. On the world BREACH has termed, with some reluctance1, "Rigid", there was a much stronger push to solve this problem.In the early 1980s, several of the right dominos lined up in just the right order to produce remarkable advances in retroviral engineering. Unlike Logan, this didn't end in global disaster... at least not on the same scale. A plastic-eating bacteria was designed, intended to devour its way through landfills and junkpiles, with built-in genetic timers to limit its reproductive ability. It would stop producing more of itself after a few generations, so it could be carefully contained and controlled.
Anyone from the dozen or so worlds where 'Jurassic Park' was a major literary and cinematic success could tell you what happened next. Life, ah, found a way. (The version where Ian Malcolm was played by Robin Williams is a very hot bootleg in certain circles.)
Anything that reproduces quickly will mutate quickly, and when a mutation is the difference between leaving offspring and not in the most direct way, it is selected for with ruthless efficiency. It soon became obvious the bacteria had expanded far past its projected borders (a New Jersey landfill), and it travelled through plastic-rich underground aquifers into equally polluted oceans and was soon global. Over the course of two years, every form of plastic was devoured.
This caused multiple overlapping crisis. Food stored in plastic was exposed and rotted. All the tiny little plastic pieces in everything from trucks to televisions failed. Anything not entirely made of metal, glass, ceramic, and so on was affected in some way. The machinery needed to replace plastic-dependent systems with other materials was itself reliant on plastic components. Telephones, computers, all the tools holding modern society together began to fail.
Even when the equipment involved was mostly non-plastic, anything built in the past few decades likely had plastic pieces, such as wire insulation, buttons, knobs, fasteners, and many other bits. While these could be replaced, the tools needed to make the replacement parts were being rendered non-functional, as were the tools to fix them, and so on.
After the collapse came rebuilding. The world in 2023 has recovered, mostly, though national borders have shifted, as has the distribution of global power (see sidebar), and the population is about 75% of Baseline's. It's mostly TL 6+1, with the TL 7-equivalent items all weighing and costing about 20% more. With no disposable syringes, vaccinations are slower and costlier, increasing rates of preventable disease. Telephones are bulky things. A "portable" typewriter, all metal, weighs about 20 lbs. Almost nothing is disposable any more. There have been advances in metallic alloys -- for obvious reasons, there's a need for lighter, more flexible, metals. Nations whose economies relied on the export of cheap, disposable goods on Baseline remain impoverished. While the ecological damage of plastics has been reduced, there's more need for metal, wood, rubber, and so on, with the attendant pollution and habitat destruction.
BREACH
This world would be a minor curiosity, another potential site for political maneuvering by Baseline factions, were it not for the fact the bacteria is likely still dormant in air, soil, and water, and even if it can't survive destabilization, samples can be sequenced and analyzed locally (once appropriate plastic-free tools have been made), and reproduced. Inevitably, some clever people will decide they can find ways to control and tame it, to use it on other worlds or Baseline itself. While not quite an Omega File level threat, it is considered a top priority for investigation and response.1 By BREACH tradition (to the extent an organization barely a decade old has 'traditions'), the First-In team will have naming rights, and each team has their own method of deciding. This world's team chose a 'last man standing' drinking contest.
Some Assembly Required
Even more than average, this ignores how different the post-plastic world would be. While the apocalypse was less dire than full nuclear war, global plague, or alien invasion, there was widespread collapse throughout the industrial world, leading to significant deaths from food shortages, riots, lack of medical care, and quite a few small-scale wars and revolutions. The "third world", lacking a lot of "advanced" infrastructure, was the least affected directly, and the cast-off "war surplus" gear sold to various nations used as Cold War proxies in Africa, Central America, and Southern Asia (among others) remained functional when more modern equipment failed in various ways. As such, when recovery happened, it started in those areas, whose supply and manufacturing chains could start building new tools, weapons, and other goods, and could manufacture non-plastic components to allow the repair and use of many of the failed items.This would create a very interesting world, geopolitically, but it's one I don't have enough time to work out in full detail, as to do it well would require a lot of research on both the status of many nations in the early 1980s, and on which manufacturing processes would be hardest hit. We tend to really not grasp how complex it is to make even simple items when you have to look at the parts to make the parts to make the parts, going all the way back to the machines needed to extract raw materials... which are themselves the end products of hugely complex webs of production. And that element is less interesting, for game purposes, than the social and political element, which is less objective and requires more study and then projecting forward over decades.
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