"Ink?" was the response, but "plastic" was the reply.
To which those present sort of nodded in ponderous agreement.
Think of a world without plastic...indeed think of just a kitchen or a bathroom without plastic.
Think of an automobile without plastic, or the interior of a passenger aircraft without the stuff.
We wear it every day in either buttons and zips or the clear faces on our watches.
We carry combs and brushes and pens and things...and even the old driver's licence is made of the stuff...along with every bank card we care to possess.
Indeed...'tis everywhere and as the bloke on the show about nothing in particular pointed out, the world would be a very different place without it.
Steel, timber, rubber, ceramics, glassware, shellac used to rule the construction and production roost but not any more.
Bakelite started it back in the early 1900s.
It was a rather crude but immediately embraced early form of what would morph into plastic, and the world and life and everything would never be the same again.
Nor would the landfills or the oceans unfortunately, and it was with some concern (but I can assure you I don't lean to the green side) that I read recently the seas around distant and isolated Antarctica have become home to drifting plastic particles.
A lot of them apparently - tests showed an estimated 2.5 tonnes of plastic particles had found their way into the Southern oceans over the past decade.
Little wonder that emperor penguin they called Happy Feet left home and turned up on a beach near Wellington about six years ago.
Yep, plastic has long been a popular thing and now we simply could not live without it.
Back in the 1920s and '30s it really started taking off and by the end of World War II it was a phenomenon.
In America a plastics trade show staged in 1946 resulted in nearly 90,000 members of the public lining up to take a look at what it was being made into.
And so the talk I stumbled into about its pluses and minuses sort of wandered along like a stream of slowly melting plastic, and then became slightly bizarre.
Someone made the point that without plastic the average car would be about 15 per cent heavier...as would the average anything.
Many appliances would be a whole lot heavier as steel and ceramics and hardened rubber would have come into play, and that meant the average house would weigh probably another ton.
"We would be living in a heavier world," it was suggested and yep, for a few seconds I sort of considered that and agreed.
Until, of course, it was recognised that everything had to come from somewhere on earth so there would be no alterations to weight as everything was here anyway.
The oils and chemicals which made the plastics would have just stayed in the ground.
Then someone remarked that if anything the world was getting lighter as we were burning more coal and timber than we were creating and smoke doesn't weigh anything.
And then it was pointed out however that we could nurture seedlings and keep planting pine trees and not fell them...until there were millions more and that meant a few million tonnes added to earth's weight.
It all got too complicated for me and I felt the cells in my brain beginning to fracture so I picked up the remote and changed the channel.
The plastic remote.
Then I got the fire going...those pines are taking over.
Yep, I think I need a vacation.
