When Saabira Chaudhuri began covering consumer-goods companies for The Wall Street Journal, she thought she was writing about marketing campaigns, product launches, and quarterly results. What she found instead was a tale of industrial ingenuity turned liability: a business model built on disposability, dressed up in the rhetoric of sustainability. Her new book, Consumed: How Big Brands Got Us Hooked on Plastic, traces how plastic became indispensable to modern capitalism and why efforts to rein it in have so often failed. Chaudhuri’s route into journalism was neither straightforward nor inevitable. Growing up in Bangalore in the 1990s, she imagined a legal career like her grandfather’s, until she realized her memory may be too poor for the courtroom. A scholarship to Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts opened another path. After earning a sociology degree and submitting more than a hundred job applications, she landed at Forbes as a multimedia producer. That first foothold in journalism led to Fast Company in New York, Mint in New Delhi, Dow Jones, and finally the Journal, where she spent 12 years reporting from New York and London. She stepped down in May 2025, after the publication of Consumed, to work as a freelance journalist. Her book grew out of reporting that began in 2018, as consumer unease about single-use plastics swelled. Bags, bottles, straws, and cups—once symbols of convenience—had become emblems of waste. Companies scrambled to demonstrate environmental responsibility, touting biodegradable packaging or recycled content. Yet Chaudhuri soon noticed a pattern. “The more I reported…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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