“We have a very short history, in comparison to other materials, in understanding how long those materials last,” said Hugh Shockey, lead conservator at the Saint Louis Art Museum.

Metal, stone, ceramic and paper have survived thousands of years, while plastics have existed for a little over 150 years. In that short time, however, they have risen to dominate the materials we use today. And plastics increasingly appear in art and artifacts nominated for preservation.

A walk through various Smithsonian Institution museums makes that clear. There’s the art, of course: acrylic paintings, a polyester parabolic lens with a mirror-like surface, a fiberglass sculpture of a middle-aged woman poised to dig into a melting banana split.

There are the triumphs of human ingenuity: the first artificial heart, Ella Fitzgerald’s LPs, the Apple I computer, a D-Tag device that helped researchers track and save endangered right whales.

And there are the mundane objects, the documentation of human life: an electric can opener, a pink Princess rotary telephone, Tupperware, a six-by-eight array of coffee cup lids, all with different designs.

“You have these objects in any museum collection, especially historic objects — they take you back to a time. But holding that moment in time in a material sense is tough,” said Odile Madden, a plastics conservation scientist at the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles.