Mr Cellophane

If you happen to have seen Chicago the musical perhaps you will remember the character of Mr Cellophane? He is the foil for the intoxicating female lead, Roxie Hart, and a plot based around a glut of homicides committed by women in the Chicago of the 1920s. The character of Mr Cellophane, who gets some good numbers in the show, is her sweet-natured, naive, and ignored husband (…nobody not even my parents noticed me. One day I went to school, and when I came home, they moved!’).

This happens of course to be a Lord Copper article, so it’s not the stage production that’s up for discussion but cellophane, the material - and how this incredible multi-use substance which transformed the food packaging industry for ever, would one day be consigned to the recycle bin of history.

Living close to Bridgwater in Somerset, my home is within eight miles of where between 1935 and 1937 Courtaulds founded the British Cellophane Company (BCL). For those of us here it would be hard not to come across the story. Closed in 2005, two years before I decamped here from Surrey, Bridgwater had been more famous for its smell than its people; and the credit for this went to the airborne by-product of cellophane’s manufacturing process – the breaking down of wood pulp by means of toxic carbon disulphide (CS₂). Arriving here too late, I think I just might have caught the last whiff.

They tried to save the plant that made the type of non-plastic biodegradable material the world needs today. Photo courtesy of Mr Dave Chapple, Bridgwater

So, why lament?

One reason is because, unless you are a chemist, you might not realise that cellophane is not a plastic. Despite the downside of its process, it is in fact an entirely biodegradable and recyclable product. And in an age when we seek materials with these qualities you might have thought it would be about time for a show-stopping revival?

An offshoot of the production of viscose, it was invented by three English chemists, Charles Frederick Cross, Edward John Bevan and Clayton Beadle in 1898, and a material that found a mass use that we can only dream of today.

For me there is also another element to the story. My trading grandfather in Vienna delivered Japanese-made Iwai celluloid sheets to Britain in the 1930s and so participated in the supply chain of the material of the moment at that time. A slightly less toxic by-product of this was that it saved my 21-yr-old father’s life by providing a ready-made business on his arrival to the UK in 1938.

So, I have a soft spot for a material that gave us Cellotape and Scotch tape, and was the first clear, thin-film plastic-type material to be applied for the wrapping of fresh foods such fruit, veg, and meat. The precursor for the petrochemicals products that replaced it, it revolutionised the food industry as much as the tin can.

When the Bridgwater factory, which had employed 3000 workers at its peak, closed in 2005, Britain lost the facility to produce this sustainable form of packaging. Meanwhile, around the same time, Sir Jim Radcliffe bought the Grangemouth petrochemical refinery in Scotland and was soon not only able to provide us with the benefit a whole lot of cheap plastic but his wisdom too.

Bridgwater, a county town with a once rich history as a port for the export of minerals to Wales, and the import of coal, has suffered all the malaise of post-industrial Britain. No bilateral trade with Wales these days, cellophane - one of its two big industries - simply left town, leaving a toxic brownfield site that is gradually being re-purposed for the various ancillary needs of EDFs European Pressurised Reactor (EPR) sited at nearby Hinkley Point.

Between nuclear and plastics, you might think that Bridgwater would consider itself unlucky. But far from it: the town hankers after work and the salaries that come with it.

Today, the original cellophane production process using carbon disulphide which was so toxic has been replaced in other parts of the world by a closed-loop system called the Lyocell process. So, ironically, the prevailing cheap price of oil that once killed cellophane’s UK production makes it attractive again with oil is over $100 per barrel. But, of course, it’s too late.

As we reach the 2030s (a hundred years after BCL came to Bridgwater), the incentive for re-shoring industrial processes grows by the day, so it’s dispiriting that this once universally useful material, ‘Made in Britain’, is no longer here to do its job.

Rather like the invisible character in Chicago, the only place you can go to get an idea of its former scale is a small glass cabinet on the top floor of Bridgwater’s Blake Museum where you may admire a photo of the production line and some samples, one of which includes a ladies’ black hat with cellophane florets.

Model of the BCL casting line - Courtesy of The Blake Museum, Bridgwater, Somerset

A better way to hear about the once great plant is to speak to some of the ex-workers, now elderly, who will recall with ambivalence the material that both harmed their lives but also gave them work.

Anthony Lipmann

04.10.26