The Public Problem of Plastics

Introduction When I was about nine years old, my mother patiently taught me how to knit. As we sat in her tiny sewing room and she showed me the impressive collection of yarn, knitting needles and patterns that she had collected throughout her life, my mother handed me a rigid spherical ball – two equal parts that could be screwed together, hollow on the inside and with a small circular hole in one of the halves. My mother explained that a plastics company had invented this ball ostensibly to keep the wool from either unravelling or being soiled. She said that after World War II companies were inventing anything and everything to make with plastics. Even as a child of the later 20th century, immersed from birth in a plastics world, I remember thinking that this was a strange object. Many years later, as a waste studies researcher, I find this object in equal measure both unsurprising and shocking. Plastics characterize our contemporary society. They proliferate within our homes and workspaces, are embedded in the fabric of our clothing, footwear, personal hygiene products, our bicycles, cars and other modes of transportation, our food, and even the human placental barrier. Like the proverbial lobsters in a slowly heated pot, we have become so accustomed to plastics’ incessant overabundance that we are overwhelmed by our current plastics waste crisis. From the giddy ‘miracle’ years of plastics and their seemingly limitless applications and everyday benefits to the public’s current disaffected dependence on plastics, this chapter focuses on how plastics have been framed by, primarily, the oil and gas industries that provide the raw materials needed to make plastics, and governments trying to appease publics’ growing concerns with plastics’ negative impacts on human health and the environment. Over 170 countries, from Canada to Kenya, the United Kingdom to China, Zimbabwe to India, have signed on to ‘significantly reduce plastics’ by the year 2030 (Masterson, 2020: np). At the same time, oil and gas industries have steadily (and sometimes exponentially) increased their plastics production, and make no secret of their plans to increase plastics production further.

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