The other modeling material

[John Wagenseil]

This month's Scientific American Magazine (April 2016) has an article about things that were made out of plastic are self-destructing and turning into green goo that behaves like Alien blood.
This is another reason paper models beat plastic. As they grow old paper models might fade or crumble, but they do not do a "bleeding alien" to your display shelf or out-gas toxic corrosive fumes that attack adjacent items.

Preview of the article:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/deteriorating-plastic-threatens-to-ruin-museum-treasures/

(A long time ago I worked at a place that had a huge medical image archive on acetate film. The storage room stank of acetic acid from the decaying film base, the images were peeling off the shrinking and crumbling film base, the fumes were attacking the paint and rusting the shelving and the archive itself was disappearing as many linear feet of film were being stolen and sold to silver recyclers.)