In 1987, a barge called Mobro 4000 departed Islip in New York’s Suffolk County loaded up with 3,100 tons of waste, a fair bit of which was Styrofoam containers. The barge was supposed to unload its undesirable cargo into a landfill in North Carolina, but that proved harder than expected. No one wanted the trash. Mobro barge ended up wandering the eastern seaboard for six months, dipped into the Caribbean, and even made it as far as Belize without finding a suitable dumpsite.

The fiasco drew media attention and ignited a national conversation about landfills, recycling, and the environment. Not surprisingly, Styrofoam emerged from this debate as the logical bad guy since it does not biodegrade and thus, it was argued, would crowd landfills and pollute our oceans. In 1988, New York’s Suffolk County enacted the first Styrofoam ban in the United States, but a plastics lobby quickly formed in response and succeeded in overturning the ban. Since then, similar bans have been put in place around the country—on Styrofoam, plastic bags and, most recently, plastic straws—resulting in years of litigations and millions of dollars worth of legal fees.

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We’ve been stuck in the same debate for the past 30 years. Styrofoam is still here—but is that good or bad? Turns out, there’s no simple answer. And Styrofoam’s story is certainly complicated.

A Wonder Product or a Waste Nightmare?

First discovered in 1839 in Berlin, Styrofoam’s precursor—expanded polystyrene (EPS) foam—became immensely popular during World War II as an inexpensive building material for military aircrafts. Between 1939 and 1945, the rate of polystyrene production increased expotentially. In 1946 the Dow Chemical Company trademarked Styrofoam. In the process of trying to make polystyrene more flexible, Dow scientist Ray McIntire mixed together styrene and isobutene in a reactor and heated them. The result was extruded polystyrene foam, a strong material that is moisture resistant and composed of 98 percent air—so incredibly lightweight and buoyant that it was considered a wonder product. Its low cost and ease of production catapulted Styrofoam into our lives. From energy efficient building insulation to surfboards, and from soilless hydroponic gardening to airplane construction, Styrofoam was heralded as the wave of the future—until the environmental issues came up.