In the Science Times section of the August 28, 2018 issue of The New York Times, Xiaozhi Lim wrote about the disintegration of plastic objects in museum collections and the research on plastics being carried out by scientists and conservators at the Getty Conservation Institute, the Smithsonian Institution, and other museums ("
When Plastics Perish") . The lay person who reads the description of the disordered molecules in a plastic with lots of gaps between them slowly reorganizing and packing themselves more efficiently, will never look at a coffee cup lid in quite the same way again.