Accumulation The Material Poli - Jennifer Gabrys

Accumulation
From food punnets to credit cards, plastic facilitates every part of our daily
lives. It has become central to processes of contemporary sociomaterial living.
Universalized and abstracted, it is often treated as the passive object of pol-
itical deliberations, or a problematic material demanding human manage-
ment, but in what ways might a ‘politics of plastics’ deal with both its specific
manifestation in particular artefacts and events, and its complex dispersed
heterogeneity?
Accumulation explores the vitality and complexity of plastic. This inter-
disciplinary collection focuses on how the presence and recalcitrance of plas-
tic reveal the relational exchanges across human and synthetic materialities. It
captures multiplicity by engaging with the processual materialities or plasti-
city of plastic. Through a series of themed essays on plastic materialities,
plastic economies, plastic bodies and new articulations of plastic, the editors
and chapter authors examine specific aspects of plastic in action. How are
multiple plastic realities enacted? What are their effects?
This book will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, human
and cultural geography, environmental studies, consumption studies, science
and technology studies, design, and political theory.
Jennifer Gabrys is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of

London, and Principal Investigator on the ERC-funded project ‘Citizen
sensing and environmental practice’.
Gay Hawkins is a Professorial Research Fellow in social and cultural theory

and Director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University
of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.
Mike Michael is Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of

Sydney.
Culture, Economy and the Social
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Change
Editors
Professor Tony Bennett, Social and Cultural Theory, University of Western
Sydney; Professor Penny Harvey, Anthropology, Manchester University;
Professor Kevin Hetherington, Geography, Open University
Editorial Advisory Board

Andrew Barry, University of Oxford; Michel Callon, Ecole des Mines de
Paris; Dipesh Chakrabarty, The University of Chicago; Mike Crang,
University of Durham; Tim Dant, Lancaster University; Jean-Louis Fabiani,
Ecoles de Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales; Antoine Hennion, Paris
Institute of Technology; Eric Hirsch, Brunel University; John Law, The
Open University; Randy Martin, New York University; Timothy Mitchell,
New York University; Rolland Munro, Keele University; Andrew Pickering,
University of Exeter; Mary Poovey, New York University; Hugh Willmott,
University of Cardiff; Sharon Zukin, Brooklyn College City University New
York/Graduate School, City University of New York
The Culture, Economy and the Social series is committed to innovative

contemporary, comparative and historical work on the relations between
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orizing or epochal accounts of social change. The series addresses the diverse
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which ‘the social’, ‘the cultural’ and ‘the economic’ are apprehended as tan-
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thus aims at enriching theoretical and methodological discussion, building
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Series titles include:
The Media and Social Theory (2008) Inventive Methods: The happening
Edited by David Hesmondhalgh and of the social (2012)
Jason Toynbee Edited by Celia Lury and
Nina Wakeford
Culture, Class, Distinction (2009)
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Elizabeth Bortolaia Silva, Alan socio-cultural analysis (2012)
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Dueck McLean, Elizabeth B. Silva,
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Sport and the Transformation Woodward
of Modern Europe: States,
media and markets 1950–2010 Accumulation: The material politics
(2011) of plastic
Edited by Alan Tomlinson, Edited by Gay Hawkins, Jennifer
Christopher Young and Richard Holt Gabrys and Mike Michael
Theorizing Cultural Work: Labour, Devising Consumption: Cultural
continuity and change in the cultural economies of insurance, credit and
and creative industries spending (forthcoming)
Edited by Mark Banks, Rosalind Liz Mcfall
Gill and Stephanie Taylor
Unbecoming Things: Mutable objects
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the eyes of the city (forthcoming) (forthcoming)
Beatriz Jaguaribe Nicky Gregson and Mike Crang
Accumulation
The material politics of plastic
Edited by
Jennifer Gabrys, Gay Hawkins
and Mike Michael
First published 2013
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2013 selection and editorial material Jennifer Gabrys, Gay Hawkins and
Mike Michael; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial
material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted
in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
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without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Accumulation : the material politics of plastic / edited by Jennifer Gabrys,
Gay Hawkins, and Mike Michael.
p. cm. – (Culture, economy and the social)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Plastics–Material aspects.. 2. Plastics–Social aspects. 3. Plastics–
Political aspects. I. Gabrys, Jennifer, editor of compilation. II. Hawkins,
Gay, editor of compilation. III. Michael, Mike, editor of compilation.
HC79.S3A25 2013
338.4'76684–dc23
2012050792
ISBN: 978-0-415-62582-1 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-203-07021-5 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman

by Taylor & Francis Books
Contents
List of illustrations ix
List of contributors xi
Introduction: From materiality to plasticity 1

JENNIFER GABRYS, GAY HAWKINS AND MIKE MICHAEL
PART I
Plastic materialities 15
1 Plastics, materials and dreams of dematerialization 17

BERNADETTE BENSAUDE VINCENT
2 Process and plasticity: Printing, prototyping and the prospects

of plastic 30
MIKE MICHAEL
PART II
Plastic economies 47
3 Made to be wasted: PET and topologies of disposability 49

GAY HAWKINS
4 The material politics of vinyl: How the state, industry and citizens
created and transformed West Germany’s consumer democracy 68
ANDREA WESTERMANN
5 Paying with plastic: The enduring presence of the credit card 87

JOE DEVILLE
PART III
Plastic bodies 105
6 The death and life of plastic surfaces: Mobile phones 107

TOM FISHER
viii Contents
7 Reflections of an unrepentant plastiphobe: An essay on plasticity
and the STS life 121
JODY A. ROBERTS
8 Plasticizers: A twenty-first-century miasma 134

MAX LIBOIRON
9 Plastics, environment and health 150

RICHARD C. THOMPSON
PART IV
New articulations 169
10 Where does this stuff come from? Oil, plastic and the distribution
of violence 171
JAMES MARRIOTT AND MIKA MINIO-PALUELLO
11 International Pellet Watch: Studies of the magnitude and spatial

variation of chemical risks associated with environmental plastics 184
SHIGE TAKADA
12 Plastic and the work of the biodegradable 208

JENNIFER GABRYS
Index 228
Illustrations
Figures
I.1 Academics and plastic at work 1
5.1 Example of the first plastic American Express credit card 90
5.2 Understanding the new plastic society 95
8.1 Long polymer strands make up plastics, while plasticizers nestle
among the polymer strands, unbound, and can leave their host
through off-gassing or leaching 140
8.2 Endocrine receptors accept cells that complement their shape 141
10.1 Villagers in Tetriskaro in Georgia meet in the construction
corridor of the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan oil pipeline and its sister
South Caucasus Gas Pipeline, to complain about how the heavy
use of dynamite to shatter rock had also shattered their walls 175
10.2 Nearby residents march to Burnaz beach in south-eastern
Turkey in 2009, opposing further industrialization of their
coastline alongside the existing oil terminals 177
10.3 Turkish fisherfolk set out into the Gulf of Iskenderun, dwarfed
by the Dugi Otok super-tanker collecting crude from the BTC
Terminal near Ceyhan 178
11.1 Plastic resin pellets 185
11.2 Pellets from all over the world 187
11.3 Concentration of PCBs in beached plastic resin pellet 189
11.4 Plastic fragments from a beach on Easter Island 191
11.5 PCB concentrations in five samples from a remote beach in
Uruguay 193
11.6 Models of chemical exposure on seabird via food-web and
ingested plastics 194
11.7 World Cap project: nonylphenol concentrations in plastic caps
of bottles of mineral water purchased in various countries 198
11.8a Sampling locations of beached plastic caps 199
11.8b Nonylphenol concentrations in plastic caps from markets and
beaches 200
11.9 Leaching plastic-derived chemicals in landfill 202
x Illustrations
11.10 Concentrations of plastic additives: nonylphenols, Bisphenol-A
and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) in leachate from
landfills of Asian countries 203
12.1 ‘The Nurdler’ (2011), The Sea Chair Project 220
12.2 ‘Nurdle Collection’ (2011), The Sea Chair Project 221
12.3 ‘Plastic Sample: Black’ (2011), The Sea Chair Project 222
12.4 ‘The Sea Chair Tools’ (2011), The Sea Chair Project 223
12.5 ‘The Sea Chair’ (2011), The Sea Chair Project 223
Contributors
Mandy Barker is a photographic artist working in the United Kingdom. Since

graduating from the MA Photography at De Montfort University (2011),
her work involving plastic marine debris has received international recog-
nition. Her series of work, ‘SOUP’, has been published in over 15 coun-
tries, and has circulated in Time magazine and on CNN. As part of the
Blurb Photography Book Now Award, her images were projected on to the
walls of The Aperture Foundation in New York. Selections of her work
have been made by Stephanie Braun of The Photographer’s Gallery
London and for Source magazine. Francis Hodgson of the Financial Times
nominated Mandy’s work for the fourth cycle of the Prix Pictet Award
2012, which is the world’s leading photographic award in sustainability. In
June 2012, Mandy joined scientists aboard a Plastic Research Expedition
sailing from Japan to Hawai’i through the Tsunami Debris Field in the
Pacific Ocean. Her objective was to continue her work at source and from a
location not previously attempted, alongside scientists, in order to generate a
deeper understanding of the detrimental effects of plastic on marine life.
Bernadette Bensaude Vincent is a philosopher and historian of science. She is
currently a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Université Paris
I Panthéon-Sorbonne and a member of the Institut universitaire de France.
Her research topics span from the history and philosophy of chemistry to
materials science and nanotechnology, with a continuous interest in science
and public issues. Among her recent publications are La science et l’opi-
nion. Histoire d’un divorce (2003); Se libérer de la matière? Fantasmes
autour des nouvelles technologies (2004); Chemistry: The Impure Science
(coll. Jonathan Simon, 2008); Matière à penser (2008); and Les Vertiges de
la technocience: Façonner le monde atome par atome (2009).
Joe Deville is a researcher based at the Centre for the Study of Invention and
Social Process at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is currently writ-
ing a book looking at consumer credit default and collection, drawing on
research from his PhD thesis, completed in 2011. It will follow the chan-
ging calculative landscapes through which heavily indebted and defaulting
consumer credit borrowers move, from periods of borrowing, to managing
xii Contributors
debts, to being confronted by debt collectors. It also focuses on the prob-
lematic of debt default from the point of view of the collector, exploring
the increasingly sophisticated techniques being used to attempt to convince
debtors to repay.
Tom Fisher is Professor of Art and Design at Nottingham Trent University,
United Kingdom. A graduate in Fine Art, he has worked as a designer and
maker of furniture, and wrote his PhD in the Sociology Department at the
University of York, concentrating on everyday experiences of plastic
materials. His current research focuses on the materiality of human-object
relationships and their implications for sustainability. In this, he draws on
his background as a maker and on perspectives from the sociology of
consumption. He recently published Designing for Re-Use: The Life of
Consumer Packaging (Earthscan, 2009), which reports on ethnographic
work in the United Kingdom that uncovered the range of ways in which
people reuse packaging. The book presents a number of ways of thinking
about the phenomenon of packaging reuse, and indicates the role that
design can play in promoting it.
Jennifer Gabrys is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of
London. Her research investigates environments, material processes and
communication technologies through theoretical and practice-based work.
Projects within this area include Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of
Electronics (University of Michigan Press, 2011), which examines the mate-
rialities of electronic waste, and a study currently underway on environ-
mental sensor technologies and practices, titled Program Earth: Environment
as Experiment in Sensing Technology.
Gay Hawkins is a Professorial Research Fellow in social and cultural theory
and Director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the Uni-
versity of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. She is currently completing a
book on the rise and impacts of bottled water called Plastic Water. Pre-
vious publications include The Ethics of Waste (Rowman and Littlefield,
2005); and ‘Plastic Materialities’ in Braun and Whatmore (eds), Political
Matter (University of Minnesota Press, 2010). In 2013 she is commencing
a major study called The Skin of Commerce, investigating the pragmatics
and performativity of plastic food packaging: how plastic became a market
device in post-war food economies, how it contributed to major urban
waste problems, and how it has become a political material.
Max Liboiron is a postdoctoral fellow in Media, Culture and Communication
at New York University, where she researches theories of scale in relation
to environmental change. Her dissertation, ‘Redefining Pollution: Plastics
in the Wild’, investigates scientific and advocate techniques to define plas-
tic pollution, given that plastics are challenging centuries-old concepts of
pollution as well as norms of pollution control, environmental advocacy
and theories of contamination. Her work has been published in eTOPIA:
Contributors xiii
Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Social Movement Studies: Journal of
Social, Cultural and Political Protest and in the Encyclopedia of Con-
sumption and Waste: The Social Science of Garbage. She writes for the
Discard Studies Blog (discardstudies.wordpress.com), and is a trash artist
and environmental activist. See www.maxliboiron.com.
James Marriott and Mika Minio-Paluello are part of Platform, a London-
based arts, human rights and environmental justice organization that has
pioneered diverse and far-reaching responses to issues of international
importance for more than 25 years. Based on core values of solidarity,
creativity and democracy, Platform combines art, activism, education and
research to achieve long-term systemic goals. Since the mid-1990s, the
group has had a strong focus on the international oil and gas industry –
researching, campaigning against its impacts and creating artworks in a
wide range of media. Together, they have recently published The Oil
Road: Journeys from the Caspian Sea to the City of London (Verso, 2012).
See www.platformlondon.org.
Mike Michael is Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of
Sydney. He is a sociologist of science and technology with research inter-
ests in the relation of everyday life to technoscience, biotechnological and
biomedical innovation and culture, and process methodology in the social
sciences. Recent research projects include an examination of the ethical
aspects of HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (with Marsha Rosengarten) and
the exploration of energy demand reduction through sociological and
speculative design techniques (with Bill Gaver and Jennifer Gabrys).
Jody A. Roberts is the Director of the Center for Contemporary History and
Policy at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia, PA, United
States. Roberts’s work explores the intersections of emerging molecular sci-
ences and public policy and the ways in which tensions brought about
between the two get resolved. He received advanced degrees in science and
technology studies from Virginia Tech, where he cultivated an interest in the
practice of the molecular sciences and the ways in which they are shaped by
internal architecture and design (e.g. technologies of the laboratory) and the
politics of the broader world (e.g. chemical regulations). He also holds a
Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from Saint Vincent College.
Roberts held fellowships at CHF before joining the staff of the Center for
Contemporary History and Policy in 2007. He lectures in the History and
Sociology of Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania and the
Centre for Science, Technology, and Society at Drexel University. He is also
a Senior Fellow in the Environmental Leadership Program.
Shige Takada received his PhD from Tokyo Metropolitan University in
1989. His speciality is trace analysis of organic micropollutants. The
target compounds include persistent organic pollutants (POPs; e.g. PCBs,
DDTs, PBDEs, PAHs), endocrine-disrupting chemicals (e.g. nonylphenol,
xiv Contributors
bisphenol A), pharmaceuticals, as well as anthropogenic molecular mar-
kers. His research field encompasses Tokyo Bay and its vicinities, to South-
East Asia, to Africa. In 2005, Shige Takada started International Pellet
Watch, the global monitoring of POPs by using beached plastic resin pellets
(www.pelletwatch.org). He has been working with ~50 non-governmental
organizations and individuals who have concerns about marine plastics
pollution. Shige Takada (Hideshige Takada) has authored more than 100
peer-reviewed papers in international journals and has attended more than
20 invited conferences.
Richard C. Thompson is Professor of Marine Biology at Plymouth University,
United Kingdom. He is a marine biologist specializing in the ecology of
shallow-water habitats. He has a first-class degree in Marine Biology from
the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and a PhD from the University of
Liverpool. He moved to Plymouth University in 2001, where he helps run
the BSc Marine Biology degree programme and lectures in marine ecology.
Much of his work over the last decade has focused on marine debris. In
2004, his group reported on the presence of microplastics in the environ-
ment in the journal Science. Subsequent research examined the extent to
which microplastics were retained upon ingestion by marine organisms,
and the potential for microplastics to transport persistent organic pollu-
tants to organisms. In 2007, he was invited to be lead guest editor for a
200-page volume of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B,
focusing on plastics, the environment and human health. He is a co-author
of the European Union Marine Strategy Framework Directive Task Group
10 on marine litter, and recently has prepared two reports on marine debris
for the United Nations Global Environment Facility: Marine Debris as a
Global Environmental Problem: Introducing a Solutions Based Framework
Focused on Plastic (2011); and Impacts of Marine Debris on Biodiversity:
Current Status and Potential Solutions (2012).
Andrea Westermann works in the History Department of the University of
Zurich, specializing in the history of science and technology and environ-
mental history. She wrote her first book on the history of plastics in West
Germany. She is currently writing a book on knowledge validation in late
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century geology. Recent publications
include ‘Disciplining the earth: earthquake observation in Switzerland and
Germany circa 1900’, in Environment and History, and ‘Inherited terri-
tories: the Glarus Alps, knowledge validation, and the genealogical orga-
nization of nineteenth-century Swiss alpine geognosy’, in Science in
Context. She is partner investigator with Gay Hawkins on the research
study, The Skin of Commerce.
Introduction
From materiality to plasticity
Jennifer Gabrys, Gay Hawkins and Mike Michael
Figure I.1 Academics and plastic at work
In Figure I.1, two of the editors are busily working on the introduction to this
volume, moments after we had decided on how to approach it. It should be
obvious that we are surrounded by plastic. There are plastic objects such as
pens and computers, the plastic packaging of a water bottle and a punnet of
cherries; there is plastic covering the chairs, laminating the table and encasing
the printer; and there is plastic making the meeting physically feasible –
plastic in the light fittings, in the carpets, in the window frames (it was a cold,
dank London June day). Inevitably, there is plastic in our clothes and on our
bodies. This is our first meeting together since the Accumulation conference,
2 J. Gabrys, G. Hawkins & M. Michael
an event we had co-organized the year before that brought together a number
of the authors included in this collection to examine the material force of
plastic as raw material, object and process. Organizing this interdisciplinary
event and collection of speakers would have been impossible without a wealth
of other plastics, from the plastic in trains and airplanes to the plastic in
credit cards. All this simply goes to underscore how central plastic has
become to processes of contemporary sociomaterial living.
This is an easy observation to make. From the first fully synthetic plastic –
Bakelite, developed in 1907 – to the current proliferation of polymers, we
produce, consume and dispose of plastics in untold quantities. In the corres-
ponding plethora of studies on the rise of plastic, its rapid uptake and ubi-
quity are regularly noted. Previous research on plastics seems to have
appeared every decade or so since its widespread application within post-
World War II consumer economies. As early as 1957, cultural critic and
semiotician Roland Barthes wrote a classic essay on plastic, which he devel-
oped as a comment and critique of this substance as he witnessed it arrayed
in a plastics exhibition in Paris. In 1986, designer Ezio Manzini published The
Material of Invention, which emphasized the material performativity and
interchangeability of plastics. In 1995, historian Jeffrey Meikle wrote a
sophisticated and nuanced account of how plastics had influenced American
culture. More recently, an increasing number of pop-culture and pop-science
commentaries on plastics are emerging that chart the toxicity, intractability
and spread of plastics. Susan Freinkel’s (2011) Plastic: A Toxic Love Story
exemplifies this trend by mixing due recognition of the benefits and necessity
of plastic with a consumer guide to its environmental and noxious horrors. In
different ways, these texts explore how things have become decidedly synthetic
to the point where plastic now appears as the archetypal material of
invention, mass consumption and ecological contamination.
Beyond this opening vignette, and gesturing toward post-war and recent
literature, a host of other plastics-related issues are waiting to be excavated.
The purpose of this collection is to explore the vitality, complexity and irony
of plastics, and to examine a range of plastics-related issues that cut across art
and design practices, humanities, natural sciences, politics and the social sci-
ences. We are not seeking to establish a general narrative about the evolution
of plastics. Nor do we wish to frame plastic as emblematic of social and
environmental change. Rather, the aim is to capture the multiplicity and
complexity of plastic by engaging with its processual materialities, or plasti-
city. As we suggest here, plasticity extends not just to the multiple forms and
uses of plastics, but also includes the ways in which plastics are integral to
contemporary material processes, and even give rise to events such as
environmental or bodily accumulation that present unexpected and often
undesirable modes of material transformation.
Accumulation engages with the particularity of plastics in order to draw out
these aspects and implications of plasticity. The collection presents a series of
chapters that address plastic in its concrete manifestations, including PET
(polyethylene terephthalate) water bottles, credit cards, degrading and bio-
degradable plastics, everyday litter, marine debris, rapid prototyping, mobile
phones, oil and oil transportation. These examples provide richly detailed
accounts of the ways in which plastic is woven into and enacted through
social, cultural, political, technoscientific, ecological and economic practices.
In all of these accounts, plastics are part of transformative material engage-
ments. What emerges through these empirical object studies is how plasticity
provides particular ways of thinking about and advancing understandings of
materiality as process.
Both the fact that plastic has become an object of variegated analysis more
generally, and that this collection has become possible to assemble, deserve
comment. On the one hand, we can put this down to a number of develop-
ments in the social sciences – for instance, the recent ‘turn to the object’
exemplified in such perspectives as material culture studies, science and tech-
nology studies (STS), or recent versions of the sociology of everyday life.
These approaches have been particularly useful in helping us to engage with
plastic materials and objects, not least by rendering them ‘seeable’ and lifting
them from their fog of familiarity or background passivity, thereby making
them interestingly and productively unfamiliar. Plastic complicates this turn,
however, for it is not just the world of objects that is defamiliarized, but also
the material properties that constitute those objects. Plastic draws attention to
the materiality of objects and the shifting properties of those materials.
Plastics have also become defamiliarized by making their presence felt, by
becoming a very insistent matter of concern, where discarded plastics and a
whole range of plasticizers added to polymers increasingly are understood to
induce harmful effects on bodies and environments. More than any other
material, plastic has become emblematic of economies of abundance and
ecological destruction. If the post-war ‘Plastic Age’ was cleaner and brighter
than all that preceded it, this boosterism has now become intertwined with
significant anxiety as the burden of accumulating plastic waste registers in
environments and bodies. The indeterminate and harmful materialities of
plastic are now surfacing and demanding urgent attention. Over the last 10
years, there has been increasing public controversy about the endocrine-
disrupting effects of plastic, about the emergence of massive plastic gyres in
several oceans, and about the ethical and environmental impacts of the global
spread of disposable plastic cultures. Because they are made in part from
petroleum, plastics have become a marker of dwindling natural resources and
accumulating synthetic pollution, with their limited degradability signalling
indefinite processes of environmental degradation. Plastics simply refuse to go
away, and their material recalcitrance forces us to acknowledge the ways in
which plastics persist long after their use value is exhausted (Gabrys 2011).
This edited collection then engages with these multiple qualities of plastic
to think through questions related to emerging areas of materialities research.
There are a growing number of studies on the ways in which materials matter
and inform political engagements (Bennett 2010; Braun and Whatmore 2010;
Hawkins 2010). We situate this volume in conversation with these studies, and
through these investigations into plastics consider how plasticity distinctly
informs our ways of encountering and mobilizing material research. Among
the questions to be addressed in this collection, we ask how it may be possible
to engage with the processual materiality or plasticity of plastic without fixing
it as an object of study or illustrative case. In the various chapters presented
here, we ask how the recalcitrance of plastic, its durability and persistence,
might reveal the material and relational exchanges that take place between
humans and non-humans. We also consider further how recognition of the
material force of plastics prompts new forms of politics, environmental
responsibility and citizenship. A key concern running through these questions
is how we might begin to develop an analytics attentive to plastics in order to
provoke invention and invite new forms of material thinking. This, as we
suggest in this introduction and throughout this collection, involves attending
to the material politics that emerge through the processual materialities of
plastics.
Material politics and the event of plastics

What stands out from the photograph with which we began this introduction
is the sheer number of plastic objects and materials that surround the ‘human
subjects’. There are now over 10,000 types of plastic polymers in use, and
worldwide consumption of plastic has gone from barely measurable quantities
in 1940 to 260 million tons per annum today (Thompson et al. 2009). As
such, we might ask how we should think about the multiplicity of plastics that
make themselves present in the event of this meeting and beyond. Is there a
plurality of different plastics and their related objects – some of which feature
overtly or covertly in this scene? Or is there a singular family of plastics the
common, unique and abiding property of which is the capacity to take on
multiple forms? This raises the issue of the ontological status of plastic. Is it
something that has certain intrinsic properties or recalcitrance, or does plastic
emerge from the multiple relations in which it is embroiled: in chemistry, in
industry, in processes of marketing and consumption, in plastics waste man-
agement? Or is this dichotomy itself less than useful? Put another way, can we
move beyond this staging of the issues by, rather than applying this dichotomy
(and its problematization) to plastic, thinking it through the specificities of
plastics. In this way, the focus shifts to developing an empirical ontology of
how multiple plastic realities are enacted and their effects.
What is plastic doing in the world? What might it do? Questions about the
concrete effects of specific manifestations of plastics quickly lead to political
entanglements, but the political questions that emerge in this study do not just
stem from a human assessment of ‘bad impacts’. Instead, we suggest that
plastics generate a series of causes or political reverberations that genuinely
constitute modes of material politics, which emerge from the concrete events
of plastics in the world. The material politics of plastics can then be seen as
emergent and contingent, where plastics set in motion relations between
things that become sites of responsibility and effect. From this perspective, a
material politics informed by plastics is less oriented toward asserting that
materials are always already political. Instead, in this collective study on
plastics, we variously focus on when and how plastics as materials become
political. Through which material processes and entanglements do plastics
‘force thought’ and give shape to political concerns (Stengers 2010)?
Plastics, as it turns out, may teach us something about politics. The mut-
ability of this material generates distinct political encounters and events.
Rather than assume the prior political status of materials, we then ask in
relation to plastics: in what ways are these materials political, and how do
political moments and matters of concern emerge in relation to these mater-
ials? This point is important, since from this perspective we begin to think
about the new relationalities that plastic is generating, and how these rela-
tionalities become sites of responsibility. Rather than argue for the simple
elimination of plastics, we suggest that the material politics of plastics require
that we attend to these unfolding relationalities and responsibilities in order
to ask: to which material and political futures are we committing ourselves,
and in what ways might an inattention to the material politics of plastic
foreclose opportunities for inventing different material futures?
This collection seeks to offer insight into the ways that a ‘politics of plas-
tics’ must deal with both its specific manifestation in particular artefacts
and events, and its complex dispersed heterogeneity. This approach challenges
the abstraction and universalization of plastic as the passive object of political
deliberations or a problematic material demanding human management.
Instead, the focus is on how plastics rework material relations within and
through synthetic and dynamic processes. Plastics, in this sense, can refresh
thinking on materiality by forcing an attention to material processes within
which we are specifically situated, but which are not bounded objects of study.
As the plastics photograph and this discussion suggest, the event of plastics
is a key way in which the materiality of plastics is encountered and under-
stood. Even to talk about the photograph that frames this introduction as a
representation of plastics is to neglect the fact that it is doing something.
Clearly, by foregrounding certain elements of plastic and the academic
approach to the study of plastic while downplaying others, the photo is set-
ting up – performing, enacting – a very particular vision of plastic and aca-
demic work. This vision can have effects – at the very least, to persuade
readers that they should subscribe to that vision (and change their practice
accordingly). However, the performative dimension of plastic resides not
simply in our enactment of it through a photograph; plastic is enacted more
broadly through the complex relations that comprise it.
Framing the photograph in a different way, we can see before us an event in
which a series of elements come together – from the sub-atomic to the social-
relational – to render plastic in a range of ways. We have touched on some of
these already: plastic tools, materials, components, markers of resource
depletion and environmental degradation, objects of academic study. How-
ever, out of the event emerge not only the non-human elements, but also the
human. In other words, we also see the array of plastic partially enacting the
academics: in the specificity of the event (we might also call this an assem-
blage), these plastics (along with myriad other elements) enable particular
sorts of humans to emerge.
It will not have escaped notice that to talk about enactment, emergence and
indeed affect is also tacitly to raise the matter of causality. Causality under-
pins much of the assessment of the environmental impact of plastics, but this
is not necessarily a linear causality. Often the impact of plastics operates
within complex systems in which it is not at all clear what the outcomes will
be. That is to say, in this collection of plastics studies we attend to the
‘emergent causality’ of plastics (Bennett 2010), and how this is at play in both
the production of environmental impacts and the sociomaterial enactments of
humans – and indeed, more-than-humans.
This last phrase – the more-than-human – also throws into relief the fact
that our initial reading of the photograph may be disingenuous on another
level. We have been seeing plastics and humans separately, as distinct entities
interacting with one another. Yet this opening commentary has in many ways
focused mainly on their intra-actions: their mutual emergence, their becoming-
with. Or, to frame it another way – which is somewhat less concerned with
the standard units of human and non-human – what we can also see are
concrescences (here drawing on Whitehead 1929), at least minimally com-
posed of combinations of academic and computer, or academic and pen. As
such, when we turn to the analysis of emergent causality or enactment, we
also need to ask about what might be the most fruitful units of analysis. At
which level can plastic objects and events be identified, and with which sorts
of entanglements are these objects and events further connected?
Material thinking as inventive problem making

Finally, and relatedly, the photograph and the taking of the photograph are,
like plastic, nothing if not oriented to the future. The photograph points to
the future promise of a book, just as plastic is wrapped up in a panoply of
expectations, hopes, fears and hypes of plastic. However, these promissory
accounts that accompany plastics are but another element in the event in
which plastics emerge – they are performative of what plastic might be, and
how plastic might affect the world – but there is no guarantee of realizing that
particular promise, or any particular future. The event, including the event of
plastic, is chronically open. This begs the question of not just what our unit of
analysis should be, but also when and how it must incorporate this openness.
More provocatively, what does analysis mean when our object is fundamen-
tally in-process? Is the function of this volume to provide a solution to the
problem of plastic’s processuality? Somehow to pin it down? Or is it to pose
the problem better, more inventively?
Such ‘inventive problem making’ (Fraser 2010; Michael 2012) is a stra-
tegy we have developed by bringing together diverse perspectives on plas-
tics. In editing this volume, we have gathered together an interdisciplinary
range of engagements with plastics. The chapters collected here draw on
very different epistemic traditions, from cultural studies to design and the
sociology of science and technology, as well as history, geography, econo-
mic sociology, organic biochemistry, environmental science and environ-
mental politics. The immediate issue that might arise would concern the
‘management’ of such interdisciplinarity, but we might see such discipli-
nary interactions as an opportunity for producing new ‘objects of knowl-
edge’ by virtue of the reconfigured relations brought together through
such interactions. Here, what counts as ‘object’ and ‘knowledge’ can shift
dramatically.
In this sense, we could see the interplay of two classical epistemological
directions, respectively and crudely, from knowledge to the material, and
from the material to knowledge. Another way of saying this would be that
changes in knowledge reshape our engagement with the material world, at the
same time as the material world affects our knowledge and knowledgeability.
This dynamic is at the heart of ‘material thinking’ (Carter 2004; Thrift 2006).
One of the objectives of this book is to trace how distinct types of material
thinking emerge and might yet be invented in relation to the specificities of
plastics. Such a move in part takes up Stengers’s interest in engaging non-
humans ‘as causes for thinking’, which, because they ‘force’ thought, cannot
be taken for granted within a standard ‘state of affairs’, but must be encoun-
tered as shifting connections and new, if problematic, sites of collective
becoming (Stengers 2010: 14–17).
‘Ecologies of practice’ across humans and non-humans, as well as dis-
ciplines, is a term that Stengers (2005) coins to describe these moments when
new connections, obligations and possible modes of speculation emerge. We
take up such an experiment in ecologies of practice, working not just across
carbon-based humans and polymer-based non-humans and the multiple new
arrangements that emerge through these intersections, but also drawing on an
interdisciplinary range of approaches to plastics. Interdisciplinarity is a pro-
cess in which often mutually incompatible framings are brought together, but
do not always easily align.
New plastic objects and ways of encountering plastics emerge through these
reconfigured relations, and participants may even change in the process of
negotiating what counts as thinking with plastics. These changes are not
simply cognitive or epistemic, or even ethical – they are also affective. That is
to say, in interdisciplinary discussions of plastic, there is a certain human
plasticity that is exercised – an affective accommodation of the other that
allows for initial toleration if not always understanding, and common prac-
tical orientation if not always mutual comprehension. The point is that it will
also be necessary to address how the juxtaposition of approaches that char-
acterize this volume yields partial connections that can resource a complex
reimagining (that operates on epistemic and affective registers) of how plastic
can be known and, indeed, enacted.
Accumulation brings divergent perspectives into a timely dialogue around
and through the multifarious materialities and events that comprise plastics.
Our inventive approach to the complex material issues of plastics is to work
from within the concrete events and relations that specific types of plastics
enable or sustain. Through a series of themed sections on Plastic Mater-
ialities, Plastic Economies, Plastic Bodies and New Articulations of plastic,
specific aspects of plastic in action are examined in the chapters that follow.
These themes are both conceptual in the sense that they frame how we
approach plastic and also ontological in the sense that they signal the
empirical unfolding of plastics in the world. To talk of ‘materialities’ is to
acknowledge the stuff of plastic, the physical properties of a substance and
also the issue of materiality as a key focus of recent social theory. To talk of
‘economies’ is to recognize plastic as a locus of value both as a global indus-
try and a specific market device. In the work of everything from packaging to
the credit card, plastic co-articulates economic actions; it is both a medium of
business and a material actant. To talk of ‘bodies’ is to focus on the ways in
which we are entangled with plastic, the multiple interminglings in which
humans (and non-humans) find themselves becoming with plastic, whether
they like it or not. To talk of ‘new articulations’ is to wrestle with plastic as a
material that forces thought. The problematic ontologies and matters of con-
cern that emerge with plastics become manifest in particular artefacts and
events from oil pipeline protests to ocean gyres. In this way, plastic is articu-
lated as complex dispersed heterogeneity, not simply as bad stuff to be elim-
inated or avoided but as a material with the capacity, in certain settings and
events, to provoke political actions.
Plastic materialities
What is plastic if not material? Despite all the fascination with plastic objects
and their ubiquity, what about the material locked up in these things? How
can we investigate the relationship between the properties of plastic as a
chemical-material substance and all the things and products it becomes? This
interaction between physical properties and the seemingly endless capacity of
the material to be materialized is the focus in Part I of this collection. Taking
up Manuel DeLanda’s imperative to study the behaviour of matter in its full
complexity, our aim is to understand the processes whereby plastic emerges as
a distinct material and the ways in which its material properties – expected
and unexpected – emerge and are enacted in objects. This is much more than
an historical investigation or a venture into chemistry or materials science. As
DeLanda (2005) argues, the behaviour of materials is as much a philosophical
issue as an empirical one. The close observation of materials and direct
interaction with their properties was the basis of the earliest philosophies of
matter. Many of these early practices of material thinking explored the
variability and behaviour of materials; they were sensual and metaphysical as
well as empirical. This diversity was lost with the rise of specialisms and the
desire to identify essential and fixed properties in materials. The rise of
chemistry was symptomatic of this shift, signalling ‘the complete concentra-
tion of analysis at the levels of molecules [and] an almost total disregard for
higher levels of aggregation in solids’ (DeLanda 2005: 2).
However, it couldn’t last. As Bernadette Bensaude Vincent shows in her
opening chapter, ‘plastics’ challenged many of the conventions of chemistry.
For it was what they could do – the multiplicity of arrangements of molecules
and forms that emerged – that defined them. Unlike glass or wood, this
material was referred to by its properties, by its capacity for change and pro-
liferating uses. In this way, ‘plastic’ and ‘plasticity’ were as much cultural
classifications as technical ones, but these entanglements across material
capacity, technical understanding and cultural uses were shifting and uneven.
Initially, as Bensaude Vincent shows, this very changeability was regarded
with disdain, as a sign of inferiority and cheap substitution. Plasticity was a
mark of the inauthentic. However, as the post-war Plastic Age escalated, these
very properties became markers of positive value. Plasticity was an indicator
of ‘protean adaptability’ and mass accessibility; it was the material that
democratized consumption. This cultural shift reflected the dramatic expan-
sion of uses and applications as the performance of plastic was enhanced. The
development of thermosetting polymers foregrounded the philosophical com-
plexity of plastic – namely, the way in which, through processes of synthesis
and shaping, matter and form emerge simultaneously.
If Bensaude Vincent documents the plasticity of plastic, Mike Michael
draws attention to the limits of such plasticity – that is, through the labora-
tory and factory processes where plasticity comes to be realized. Plasticity
thus belongs to the sphere of production – or rather, it has until very recently.
With the introduction of home 3D printers, it would appear that the plasti-
city of production now extends into the domestic sphere, and, with this
redistribution of plastic’s plasticity, anyone can produce anything at any time.
Michael traces how these abstract claims for the ‘democratization of produc-
tion’ of plastic objects are rendered, and the ways in which they are inter-
twined with reconfigurations and retrenchments of space (domestic, industrial,
environmental), human bodies and minds (manual and ICT skills) and the
future (utopian, apocalyptic). In other words, domestic 3D printers mediate
a range of plastic’s emergent properties that are complexly sociomaterial,
spatiotemporal and actual-virtual.
Plastic economies
In Part II of this collection, we investigate what plastic does in terms of gen-
erating economic value. What is the efficacy of plastic in processes of eco-
nomic accumulation? How can we think about plastic as an economic agent?
Here, the focus is on plastic as diverse industries and as distinct market
devices. Our interest is in understanding the evolution of the plastics and
petrochemical industries in the twentieth century, and to examine their inter-
relationships with governments, markets, consumers and the environment. We
also investigate how particular plastic artefacts become central to the organi-
zation of exchange, practices of value and markets. How would the accumu-
lation of surplus value happen without the ubiquitous credit card, or the retail
packaging that makes commodities and consumption fluid and mobile?
In Chapter 3, Gay Hawkins explores the rise of polyethylene terephthalate,
or PET as it is commonly known. Her goal is to understand how this distinct
plastic, which most often takes the form of disposable single-use bottles,
became ‘economically informed’ – that is, how it acquired the capacity to
articulate new economic actions in the beverages industry. Central to her
analysis is a concern with the nature of disposability. How did plastic come to
acquire the character of a throw-away or single-use material? What economy
of qualities was developed to enact a temporality of transience, and how did
this generate troubling shadow realities such as massive increases in plastics
waste? Hawkins uses a topological approach to pursue these questions. She
traces how the PET bottle can be considered a conduit of topological rela-
tions that connects plastics waste with plastics production and consumption.
In her analysis, the bottle is a medium by which the multiple enactments of
disposability become co-present and related, showing how the ever-growing
flow of plastic moves in chaotic and multiple directions. PET bottles are made
to be wasted and their anticipated future is inscribed in their multiple presents.
If Hawkins emphasizes the role of PET in modes of disposability, Andrea
Westermann focuses on the capacities of vinyl in advancing consumer
democracy in West Germany from the 1930s onwards. Vinyl was a key ersatz
material that enabled a proliferation of consumer goods (and wartime mater-
ials) that at once advanced German industry and contributed to individual
prosperity. Westermann emphasizes the extent to which vinyl facilitated
a version of consumer democracy based on consumer citizens. Vinyl effec-
tively became a material-political medium that generated and reinforced the
possibilities for individual choice and mass consumption. However, vinyl has
not been without its problems, and Westermann charts how consumer citizens
became citizen activists when confronted with increasing evidence of the
toxicity of vinyl.
The final chapter in this section focuses on that quintessential plastic object
of economic exchange: the credit card. Joe Deville charts the rise of the credit
card, and maps the practices and campaigns whereby credit cards became
more prevalent as a medium of exchange, and indeed enabled more plastic or
fluid modes of credit and consumption. Deville considers the extent to which
the plasticity of the credit card is a key part of its circulation, and extends this
analysis to contemporary examples of debt and default. In these cases, the
material presence of the credit card may become a site where the promise of
credit is revoked through the demand that credit cards be cut up or returned,
or it may become a site of protest, where credit card users refuse to comply
with the material demands of credit card companies. The plasticity of credit
cards, Deville suggests, is not incidental to the functioning of credit, but
becomes a feature that unfolds in multiple and at times contradictory ways.
Plastic bodies
While plastic economies in many ways demonstrate the ways in which plastics
have become more pervasive and central to the circulation of value, plastic
bodies grapple with the ongoing effects of living in increasingly plasticized
environments, as explored in Part III. Flesh and environments alike are now
being reconstituted through the lingering and residual effects of plastics, but
many of these effects are relatively new phenomena of study, with endocrine
disruption and the concentration of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) now
becoming topics of more thorough-going concern and research. Our daily
and bodily exposure to plastics forms even before they circulate as residual
and wasted matter in environments, and may settle at the level of habits and
affective attachments as much as bodily incorporations. As Tom Fisher
documents in his design-based discussion on plastic surfaces and mobile
phones, the tactile engagements with touch-screen surfaces are a critical part
of the processes through which we engage with mobile phones, and eventually
disengage when these plastic objects begin to show signs of wear. The prox-
imity of mobile phones and touch screens to bodies, Fisher finds, gives rise to
distinct practices and material evaluations of plastics. The process of sustain-
ing flawless plastics and disposing of them when degraded, he argues, can be
highly influenced by how our physical interaction with devices unfolds
through affective modes of embodiment.
The intimate and persistent ways in which we encounter plastics begin even
before birth, as Jody Roberts precisely inventories in his compelling account
of the delivery of his daughter, Helena, who was required to spend her first
days and weeks of life in intensive care in order to receive medical attention, a
process thoroughly dependent upon plastics. Roberts explores how someone
who previously had counted himself a ‘plastiphobe’, and who had deliberately
avoided the use of plastics, began to grapple with these new dependencies on
plastics and all that they enabled. Drawing on a science and technology
studies perspective, Roberts unflinchingly examines the ways in which we have
and continue to become plastic – and the molecular, bodily and environ-
mental plastic practices and effects with which increasingly we are entangled.
Following on from this assessment of the many ways in which we are
entangled with both the seemingly indispensable and yet often harmful effects
of plastics, Max Liboiron suggests that the particular behaviours of plastics
and plasticizers may require that we rethink our models of pollution.
Liboiron proposes a move away from an exclusively linear point-source
understanding of pollution as occurring from a discrete source and moment
in time, and instead suggests we reconsider the older and seemingly folkloric
understanding of pollution as a miasma in order to account for the dispersed,
multifarious, potentially low-level and yet persistent exposures to plastics and
plasticizers in the environment. A miasma model of pollution, Liboiron sug-
gests, may influence corresponding approaches to environmental policy and
justice by focusing on environmental distributions and concentrations of
harm, for instance, rather than individual exposure to individual substances.
Concluding this section on the entanglements of plastics and bodies,
Richard Thompson brings a perspective from marine biology to the impacts
of plastics on humans and non-humans. He draws connections across how the
effects of phthalates and Bisphenol-A (BPA) on marine organisms, for
instance, may also have consequences for humans. While uncertainty still
persists about the effects of many plastics and plasticizers, harmful effects
have been documented, which Thompson suggests require practical actions to
address these plastics issues. He outlines proposed areas of intervention –
including green chemistry and redesign of products – that might be seen as
practices that plastics now provoke or force through their ongoing
proliferation and problematic rematerialization of bodies and environments.
New articulations
In the final section of this collection, Part IV, we bring together chapters that
consider the new articulations that are emerging or might emerge as specu-
lative practices responding to the material politics of plastics. These are
practices that are not necessarily oriented towards ideal solutions, but rather
bring us back to the challenge articulated earlier in this introduction to think
about more inventive forms of problem making. At what point do plastics
become evident as material events that force thinking and spark new types of
political engagement? James Marriott and Mika Minio-Paluello (members of
Platform, a London-based arts, human rights and environmental justice
organization) begin this section with a discussion of the prehistory of plastics
in the form of petroleum and its distribution across Azerbaijan to Germany
and England. Marriott and Minio-Paluello craft their discussion of the con-
tentious material infrastructures that are essential to the substance and
making of plastics by opening a plastic carton of ice cream, and then tracing
the geopolitical commitments and invisible violence that have contributed to
the material form and availability of this consumer good. Is it possible, these
authors ask, to begin to think of consumer goods that are not reliant on oil?
Part of the process of making plastics evident as a matter of concern may
involve bringing citizen scientists into the fold of environmental science in
order to study the spatial variation and chemical risks associated with plastics
in the environment. In his collaborative project, International Pellet Watch,
Shige Takada asks volunteers to collect and return by post pellets and plastic
fragments that collect on shores across the world. These microplastics are
valuable geographic samples because they can be tested for concentrations of
POPs. From these widely gathered and mailed-in pellets, International Pellet
Watch has generated maps that document the spread and concentration of
plastics through seas worldwide. Bringing plastics and practices of studying
plastics to wider publics is a process whereby plastics may be seen to be con-
tributing to the emergence of distinct types of scientific practice for studying
these matters of concern.
If Takada captures shifts in practices for studying and reporting on plastics,
then Jennifer Gabrys proposes that the multiple participants involved in
working through and variously breaking down plastics might also begin to be
taken into account in the emerging plastic environments of oceans. ‘Carbon
workers’ is a term that she adopts to develop a strategy for making evident
the multiple more-than-human entities that are working through leftover
plastics that collect in seas, and to describe the practices, processes and pol-
itics that emerge when oceans are effectively reconstituted through plastics. In
the final chapter of this section, the ways in which plastics are not just exter-
nal objects of study – epitomizing consumer cultures of disposability – but
also material agents that rework bodies and environments, become increas-
ingly evident. What are the practices that sustain our plasticized bodies and
environments, and what are the consequences of these entanglements as plas-
tics and plasticizers circulate, break down and transform bodies and
environments over time?
In this range of plastic encounters, objects and events, we begin to assemble
an account of plastic as a transformative, multiply constituted material that
contributes to the emergence of distinct types of practices and political
engagements. The plasticity of plastics – as a material in process – emerges
and generates distinct responses as captured here, whether through inter-
disciplinary study, creative practice or proposals for political action. If this
edited collection brings one thing to the multiple engagements with plastics
that have been generated over the decades since its post-war proliferation, it
is to ask how plastics as a material-political force will spark new types of
collective engagements with our contemporary and future material worlds.
We would like to thank the contributors to this volume for participating in
this ongoing plastics conversation and interdisciplinary experiment. We would
also like to thank the Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process,
the Department of Sociology and the Department of Design at Goldsmiths,
University of London, and the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the
University of Queensland, for funding provided in support of the initial
Accumulation event in June 2011, and this subsequent publication.
References
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Straus and Giroux, 97–99
Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Braun, B. and Whatmore, S. (eds) (2010) Political Matter: Technoscience, Democracy,
and Public Life, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Carter, P. (2004) Material Thinking: The Theory and Practice of Creative Research,
Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
DeLanda, M. (2005) ‘Uniformity and Variability: An Essay in the Philosophy of
Matter’, museum.doorsofperception.com/doors3/transcripts/Delanda.html (accessed
7 March 2012).
Fenichell, S. (1996) Plastic: The Making of the Synthetic Century, New York: Harper
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Fraser, M. (2010) ‘Facts, Ethics and Event’, in C. Bruun Jensen and K. Rödje (eds)
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Books, 52–82.
Freinkel, S. (2011) Plastic: A Toxic Love Story, New York: Houghton Mifflin Court.
Gabrys, J. (2011) Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics, Ann Arbor, MI:
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Matter: Technoscience, Democracy and Public Life, Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 119–38.
Manzini, E. (1986) The Material of Invention, Milan: Arcadia Edizioni.
Meikle, J.L. (1995) American Plastic: A Cultural History, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
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——(2010) ‘Including Nonhumans in Political Theory: Opening Pandora’s Box?’ in
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Free Press.
Part I
Plastic materialities
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1 Plastics, materials and dreams
of dematerialization
Bernadette Bensaude Vincent
‘Plastics happen; that is all we need to know on earth.’ This remark is

extracted from Gain, a novel by the American writer Richard Powers (1998:
395). The novel gives an account of a successful family business that has
grown into an international chemical company. A woman, Laura Bodey, who
lives nearby the chemical plant, finds she is dying from ovarian cancer, which
is presumably induced by substances produced by the company. To her ex-
husband, who has advised her to sue the company, Laura replies that, even if
the products manufactured by this plant did actually cause her condition,
they have given her everything else and moulded her life. It is therefore
impossible to balance the costs and gains of plastics. In her view, it does not
make sense to blame plastics because they are an integral part of our world,
of our lives.
In quoting Laura’s reply in Gain, Philip Ball (2007: 115) comments that,
‘Plastic stands proxy for all our technologies: Plastics generated an entire
industrial ecosystem, a technological large-scale-system, which can no longer
be controlled’. Taking Ball’s stance in a different direction, in this chapter
I will argue that plastics have also shaped a new concept of technological
design and a specific relation between humans and materials. In particular,
they have encouraged the dream of dematerialized and disposable artefacts.
Plastics are more than just ubiquitous manufactured products that are used
all over the world. As plastics began to spread in the daily experience of
billions of people, new concepts of design were developed that reshaped our
view of nature and technology. The phrase ‘Plastic Age’ – often used to
characterize the twentieth century – has been modelled on the epochal cat-
egories of Stone Age and Iron Age. Such phrases suggest that the materials
used for making artefacts shape civilizations, and that new materials propel
a new age. Although our experience of materials is often occulted in daily
life by the prevalence of the shapes and functions of the artefacts we use –
phones, computers, automotive cars, aircraft – materials do matter. They are
the core of technological advances and artistic creations; they drive economic
exchange and the social distribution of wealth. Each substitution of a mater-
ial for another one – for instance, iron, aluminium and plastics – engages new
relations between nature and artifice, and determines specific relations
18 Bernadette Bensaude Vincent
between science and technology. Cultural historians have described the inter-
action between plastics and American civilization. For Robert Sklar (1970),
the Plastic Age started after World War I when the traditional values of
refined society gave way to mass culture, while Jeffrey Meikle (1995)
convincingly argues that plastics gradually came to be identified with the
American way of life and culture in the second half of the twentieth century,
with the emergence of new aesthetics and new societal values.
This chapter aims to provide a better understanding of the interplay
between the materiality of plastics and their anthropological dimensions.
Previous materials, such as glass, wood and aluminium, are referred to by the
name of the stuff of which they are made. By contrast, the common name of
synthetic polymers derives from one of their physical properties. The adjective
‘plastic’ may be a predicate of humans as much as it is of things. The phrase
‘Plastic Age’ was already in use in the 1920s in the title of a film, and seems
to refer to the malleable teenage years, when someone can be changed
through life experience. A few years later, in his Chemistry Triumphant,
William J. Hale announced the ‘Silico-Plastic Age’ (Hale 1932). The linguistic
preference for the term ‘plastic’ is an indicator that plasticity gained a cultural
meaning in the twentieth century. This requires a closer look at the physical
and chemical properties of the class of materials gathered under the umbrella
‘plastics’, as well as at their production process. The entanglement between
material, technical and cultural aspects shapes artefacts themselves, and
reconfigures the relationship between nature, artefacts and culture.
Following a brief historical sketch about the emergence of plastics-as-
plastics and reinforced plastics, the chapter will describe how synthetic poly-
mers contributed to the emergence of a new relationship between technology
and matter as they generated the concept of materials by design and ‘materi-
als thinking’ – a new approach to materials in technological design. The next
section looks more closely at the cultural values associated with the mass
consumption of plastics, such as lightness, superficiality, versatility and
impermanence. I will emphasize the utopian dimension of plastics and the
striking contrast between the aspirations to dematerialization or imperman-
ence and the neglected process of material accumulation upstream and
downstream, which are respectively the precondition and the consequence of
the Plastic Age. Finally, taking up the traditional issue of the relations
between the natural and the artificial, I will consider how plastics are
reconfiguring the contemporary vision of nature.
Expanding technological capabilities

In the twentieth century, plastics have replaced and displaced wood and
metals in many commercial applications. This was by no means a natural and
easy movement of substitution. While natural gums and resins such as gutta
percha were manufactured in the nineteenth century for their insulating
Plastics, materials, dematerialization 19
properties in electrical appliances, semi-synthetic polymers – such as Parkesine,
presented by Alexander Parkes at the London World Exhibition in 1862, and
the celluloid manufactured by John Wesley and Isaiah Hyatt in the 1870s –
were promoted as alternatives to more conventional solid materials. Lightness
and versatility were their most striking novelty. Celluloid was described as a
‘chameleon material’ that could imitate tortoise-shell, amber, coral, marble,
jade, onyx and other natural materials. It could be used for making various
things, such as combs, buttons, collars and cuffs, and billiard balls. However,
as the historian Robert Friedel (1983) argues, Parkesine and celluloid did not
bring about a revolution and did not easily overtake more traditional mate-
rials. Celluloid was viewed as just one of myriad ‘useful additions to the arts’
(Friedel 1983: xvi). Iron, glass and cotton continued to be produced in the
millions of tons, while the light celluloid never exceeded hundreds of tons. In
addition, the fact that celluloid made out of cellulose and camphor could be
given a variety of shapes, colours and uses did not strike consumers as a sign
of superiority; on the contrary, its versatile and multipurpose nature was
viewed as a major imperfection.
The alliance between one material and one function – still visible in
common language when we use phrases such as ‘a glass of wine’ – was seen
as a mark of superiority. This traditional view of nature was reminiscent of
Aristotle’s view when he claimed that the knives fashioned by the craftsmen
of Delphi for many uses were inferior to nature’s works because ‘she makes
each thing for a single use, and every instrument is best made when intended
for one and not for many uses’ (Aristotle n.d.: 1252b). In this traditional view,
multifunctional instruments are for barbarians who don’t care for perfection,
whereas distinction and discrimination signify the perfection and generosity
of nature. Eventually – and despite its flammability – celluloid managed to
win a place on the market when it was recognized that it was ideal for a
number of applications, such as photographic films. Materials meeting all
demands, purposes and tastes were not regarded as dignified. Far from being
praised as a quality, plasticity was the hallmark of cheap substitutes, forever
doomed to imitate more authentic, natural materials. It is only in retrospect,
in view of the ways of life and the values generated during the Plastic Age,
that we have come to value multifunctional artefacts.
Today, plastics are no longer considered cheap substitutes. They are praised
because they can be moulded easily into a large variety of forms and remain
relatively stable in their manufactured form. Certainly, the success of plastics-
as-plastics is due to the active campaigns of marketing conducted by pub-
licists who promoted them as materials of ‘protean adaptability’ that could
meet all demands and bring comfort and luxury into everyone’s reach (Meikle
1995). Chemical companies in America presented plastics as a driving force
towards the democratization of material goods. In the 1930s, chemical sub-
stitutes were also praised as pillars of social stability because they provided
jobs and fed the market economy: ‘a plastic a day keeps depression away’
(Meikle 1995: 106).
Enhancing the performances of plastics
In addition to the social benefits expected from plastics, a number of
technical aspects related to their process of production account for plastics
overtaking more traditional materials. Wood and metals pre-exist the
action of shaping them: wood is carved or sculpted; metals are ductile and
malleable – they melt at high temperatures, then the molten metal can be
cast in a mould or stamped in a press to form components into the
desired size and shape. By contrast, plastics are synthesized and shaped
simultaneously. The process of polymerization is initiated by bringing the
raw materials together and heating them – it is not separate from mould-
ing. In more philosophical terms, matter and form are generated in one
single gesture. This specific process is due to the ability of carbon atoms to
form covalent bonds with other carbon atoms or with different atoms.
Thus, a chain of more than 100 carbon atoms can make a single macro-
molecule. The resulting thermosetting polymers are rigid, with remarkable
mechanical properties; furthermore, unlike celluloid they are not heat sen-
sitive. They are lightweight, have a high strength-to-weight ratio, are cor-
rosion resistant, remain bio-inert, and have high thermal and electrical
insulation properties. However, they cannot be reheated and moulded again.
Soon, a newer category of polymers came on to the market: these form
weaker chemical bonds, and consequently can be reheated, melted and
reshaped. These thermoplastic polymers, such as the polyethylene manu-
factured in the 1930s, are less rigid and more plastic than thermosetting
polymers.
The synthetic polymers manufactured after World War II were already
more plastic than early plastics and thermoplastics – such as polyethylene,
polypropylene, polyester and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) – and undoubtedly
had a wide spectrum of applications. However, the plasticity of plastics
can still be enhanced because various ingredients are added to the raw mate-
rials and included in the process of polymerization. Pigments were regu-
larly added to produce a variety of colours, which became a distinctive feature
of plastic materials in the 1930s. Inorganic fillers of silica were also used to
make cheaper materials. Other additives can improve various properties:
thermal or UV (ultraviolet) stabilizers increase resistance to heat and light;
plasticizers are added to make them more pliable or flexible (Andrady and
Neal 2009); improved mechanical properties are obtained thanks to the
addition of reinforcing fibres. Glass fibres were first added to reinforce plastics
in the 1940s for military applications such as boats, aircraft and land mines
(Mossman and Morris 1994). Reinforced plastics enabled expansion of the
market in plastics in the 1950s for civil applications such as electric insulators
and tankers. Initially, reinforced plastics were introduced for the purpose
of weight saving and cost reduction in transport and handling. However,
they generated a deep change in design, and facilitated a new approach to
materials research.
Composites and materials by design
Because the mechanical properties of heterogeneous structures depend upon
the quality of interface between the fibre and the polymer, it was crucial to
develop additive substances favouring chemical bonds between glass and
resin. The study of interfaces and surfaces consequently became a prime
concern, and gradually reinforced plastics gave way to the general concept
of composite material (Bensaude Vincent 1998). Although most commercial
composites are made of a polymer matrix and a reinforcing fibre, composites
may be made of metal and fibre. The concept of the composite that came out
of plastics technology has been extended to all materials associating two
phases in their structure where each one assumes a specific function: steel or
iron is used as a support for toughness; plastics are useful for weight saving;
and ceramics are included for heat resistance and stiffness. Creating a com-
posite material means combining various properties that are mutually exclu-
sive into one single structure. Composites were created initially in the 1960s
for aerospace and military applications. In contrast to conventional materials
with standard specifications and universal applications, they were developed
with both the functional demands and the services expected from the manu-
factured products in mind. Such high-tech composite materials, designed for a
specific task in a specific environment, are so unique that their status becomes
more like that of artistic creations than standard commodities.
While reinforced plastics were aimed basically at adding the properties of
glass fibre or higher-modulus carbon fibres to the plasticity of the polymer
matrix, composites did reveal new possibilities and generated innovations.
For instance, the substitution of old chrome-steel bumpers of the cars of the
1950s for plastic bumpers did not immediately entail the cost reduction that
was expected because the composite had opened new avenues for change.
Manufacturing and shaping the chrome steel were two successive operations;
in the case of plastic they became one and the same process. Car designers
were consequently free to curve the bumper along the line of the shell. Instead
of a separate part that had to be manufactured independently and then
welded to the car, the shell was integrated with the body of the car like a
protective second skin. In addition to protection, other functions could simi-
larly be integrated. Thus, ventilators and radiator grilles were combined with
the same unit at the front. Integration proved useful because it reduced the
number of parts and assembly steps. New concepts thus emerged that gradu-
ally integrated more and more functions into the same structural part. How-
ever, local change in the material structure of one part called for redesigning
the whole automotive structure and, thanks to the synergy between structure,
process and function, composites contributed to the development of a new
specific approach to designing materials. The interaction of the four vari-
ables – structure, properties, performances and processes – is such that chan-
ges made in any of the four parameters can have a significant effect on the
performance of the whole system and require a rethinking of the whole
device. Engineers had to give up the traditional linear approach to innovation
(‘given a set of functions, let’s find the properties required and then design
the structure combining them’), and convert to ‘materials thinking’. They
simultaneously had to envision structure, properties, performance and process.
Thanks to the enhancement of the intrinsic chemical and physical proper-
ties of plastics through materials thinking, their market expanded to profit-
able and successful applications in transportation, sports items and a wide
range of other products. Materials thinking also played a crucial part in the
emergence of a new relationship with materials and matter in general. For
materials designers, ‘materials thinking’ basically refers to a systems
approach – a new method of design that takes into account all parameters
simultaneously rather than sequentially. It has no connection with the phrase
‘material thinking’ in the vocabulary of social scientists, which mainly refers
to the materiality of thinking (Carter 2004; Thrift 2006). Despite the diver-
gence of references, the rapprochement between the two contexts is interesting
in terms of opening the question of the meaning to be given to this new
practice of design. Social scientists use the expression ‘material thinking’ in
order to emphasize the active participation of materials in the mental activity
of thinking. Similarly, the designers of artefacts could insist on the role of the
physical and chemical properties of plastics that afford new opportunities in
terms of design. They could emphasize that materials become active partici-
pants in the design process rather than passive objects of manipulation.
However, in their discourse, materials have no say in the creative process. On
the contrary, engineers and designers seem to emphasize that materials are no
longer a prerequisite for design, as they adopt the phrase ‘materials by
design’. This phrase suggests that they are emancipated from the constraints
and resistance of matter.
Materials themselves can be purposely tailored to perform specific tasks in
specific conditions. For instance, in the 1960s, space rockets required never-
seen-before combinations of properties: they had to be lightweight and resis-
tant to both high temperatures and corrosion. Early composite materials were
designed for such applications, and a number of them have been transferred
successfully to everyday commodities such as sports articles or clothes.
Materials are no longer a prerequisite for the design of artefacts, and would
no longer limit our possibilities of creation. Thanks to the enhanced plasticity
of composites, designers could feel emancipated from the constraints of
matter, free to create artefacts, buildings or haute couture clothes according
to their own inspiration.
Composites encouraged the quest for the ideal material, with a structure in
which each component would perform a specific task according to the
designer’s project. Matter came to be presented as a malleable and docile
partner of creation – a kind of Play-Doh in the hands of the clever designer
who informs matter with intelligence and intentionality. Just like the demiur-
gos in Plato’s Timaeus, the material engineer can impose forms on a passive,
malleable chora. For instance, in the 1990s, a French company manufacturing
sheet-moulding compounds for making composites advertised its products
with the image of a plastic toy car and the following comment: ‘What is fan-
tastic with Menzolit play doughs [sic] is that one can press, inject, twist them,
they lend themselves to all your ideas.’ The plastic resin being shaped and
informed by human intelligence becomes a smart composite material. The ad
proudly concluded: ‘Grey matter [is] the raw material of composite materials’
(Menzolit 1995).
Designing materials with built-in intelligence is the ultimate goal of a
number of research programmes launched in the 1990s. Smart or intelligent
materials are structures with properties that can vary according to changes in
their environment. They are plastic insofar as they can adjust to changing
conditions or self-repair in case of damage. For example, materials with a
chemical composition that varies according to their surroundings are used in
medicine to make prostheses. This requires them to have embedded sensors
(for strain, temperature or light) and actuators so that the structure becomes
responsive to external stimuli.
The stuff that dreams are made of

Plasticity, the distinctive property of synthetic polymers, has permeated
through culture. The French philosopher Roland Barthes (1971) devoted a
few pages to plastics in his review of the mythologies of modernity. ‘Plastics’,
he wrote, ‘are like a wonderful molecule indefinitely changing’ (Barthes 1971:
171–72). Plastics are shapeless; they have pure potential for change and
movement. They connote the magic of indefinite metamorphoses to such a
degree that they lose their substance, their materiality, to become virtual
reality. Plastics have thus encouraged the utopia of an economy of abundance
that could consume less and less matter by using cheap, light, high-tech
plastics. Although Barthes witnessed only the debut of the flood of cheap
fashionable and disposable products especially designed to become obsolete
after a few uses, he saw the coming of a new relation of our culture to time.
Whereas gold or diamond conveys a view of permanency and eternal faith,
plastics epitomize the ephemeral, the ever changing. They invite us to
experience the instant for itself as detached from the flux of time.
In his remarkable study of plastics in American culture, Jeffrey Meikle
(1995) emphasizes that plastics have often been presented as ‘utopian mater-
ials’, and that they gradually came to epitomize a kind of dream world. Such
a utopian world is played out not only in the rapprochement between plastics
and Disney World, which relies on the abundance of fibreglass-reinforced
polyester structures in the amusement park at Orlando, but also through the
material-cultural values developed along with the use of everyday plastic
objects, from BIC pens to razors, telephones and credit cards. In this way, the
daily experience of plastics transformed American culture: ‘Increasingly that
culture was seen as one of plasticity, of mobility, of change, and of open
possibility for people of every economic class’ (Meikle 1995: 45). Indeed, the
counter-culture movement, which criticized the American way of life, used the
term ‘plastic’ as a metaphor for superficial and inauthentic people whose lives
were driven by a passion for consumption and change.
Such critics could also point to the inherent paradox of plastics. These
light, colourful and cheap materials, apparently liberated from the constraints
of gravity, from rigid shapes and duration, are inextricably linked to the
accumulation of huge quantities of matter and energy. As Jean Baudrillard
(2000) points out, plastics instantiate the contradictions of a society oriented
towards the mass manufacture of more and more disposable products. About
300 million tons of plastics are produced each year. These ephemeral com-
modities generate tons of durable waste, since thermoplastics can persist for
extended periods of time in the environment (Barnes et al. 2009). From urban
suburbs to the most remote places in the countryside, they have invaded the
natural habitats of living species on earth and in the oceans. Furthermore, as
most synthetic polymers are made out of fossil fuels, they use about 4 per cent
of the world’s oil in material substance (and 4 per cent of the world’s oil in the
form of energy for manufacturing).
Plastics irreversibly consume the vestiges of plants accumulated over thou-
sands of years. The two processes of accumulation surrounding the short life
of plastic commodities clearly indicate that their ephemeral character is
delusory. Despite its hedonistic inclinations, the Plastic Age developed a
mathematical notion of time as an abstract space consisting of a juxtaposition
of discrete points or instants, blurring all issues of persistence and perman-
ence. Plastics are supposed to be ephemeral only because – like the flying
arrow of Zeno’s paradox commented on by Bergson (1946) – they are sup-
posed to be at rest, as moments of being. By contrast, our Plastic Age con-
fronts the issue of duration. The ephemeral present of plastics is not just an
instant detached from the past and the future. It is the tip of a heap of
memory, the upper layer of many layers of the past that have resulted in crude
oil stored in the depths of the soil and the sea. The cult of impermanence and
change has been built on a deliberate blindness regarding the continuity
between the past and the future. Plastics really belong to Bergson’s (1946)
duration; they cannot be abstracted from the heterogeneous and irreversible
flux of becoming. The present is conditioned by the accumulated traces of
the past, and the future of the earth will bear the marks of our present. While
the manufacture of plastics destroys the archives of life on the earth, its waste
will constitute the archives of the twentieth century and beyond.
Plastic nature
According to cultural historians, the Plastic Age culminated with the fashion
for artificial fabrics, paintings and dyes. In the plastic items manufactured in
the 1960s and 1970s, shining, fluorescent and flashy surfaces prevailed over
the traditional preference for pastel colours that looked more natural or gen-
uine. The cult of the artificial exemplified by Andy Warhol paintings broke
with the early plastics, which desperately attempted to imitate wood, horn,
shell or ivory in appearance and colour. They had no intrinsic value – they
were praised only for their cheapness and their potential for the democra-
tization of comfort. They were also occasionally valued because synthetic
substitutes could spare the life of tortoises, elephants and baby seals. For
instance, Williams Haynes (1936: 155) claimed that ‘The use of chemical
substitutes releases land or some natural raw material for other more appro-
priate or necessary employment’. The synthetic was thus a useful detour in
the conservation and protection of nature.
The Plastic Age radically transmuted the cultural values attached to the
natural and the artificial, and reinforced the cultural stereotype associating
chemists with Faust or the alchemists who challenged nature. At first glance,
it could be expected that, by design, the light, quasi-immaterial materials
would reinforce the culture of the artificial initiated by thermoplastics in the
mid-twentieth century. What could be more unnatural than composite
materials as light as plastic with the toughness of steel and the stiffness or
heat resistance of ceramics? Like the centaurs invented by the Ancients, they
combined different species into one body, into their inner structure. They
could consequently revive the mythical figures of Prometheus or Faust.
Indeed, the Promethean view of engineers ‘shaping the world atom by atom’
has been revitalized by the promoters of nanotechnology. The slogan of the
US 2000 National NanoInitiative announced an era when materials would be
designed and engineered bottom-up, with each part of the structure perform-
ing a specific task (Bensaude Vincent 2010). The ambition to overtake nature
with our artefacts is still very much alive today.
It is nevertheless counterbalanced by a back-to-nature movement that
emerged in the 1980s. The more pressing the quest for high-performance and
multifunctional plastics, the more materials chemists and engineers turned to
nature for inspiration. Most of the ‘virtues’ embedded in materials by
design – such as minimal weight, multifunctionality, adaptability and self-
repair already exist in natural materials. Amazing combinations of properties
and adaptive structures can be found in modest creatures such as insects and
spiders. Spider webs attracted the attention of materials engineers because the
spider silk is made of an extremely thin and robust fibre, which offers an
outstanding strength-to-weight ratio. Wood, bone and tendon have a complex
hierarchy of structures, with each different size scale – from the angstrom to
the nanometre and micron – presenting different structural features. Their
remarkable properties and multiple functions are the result of complex
arrangements at different levels, where each level controls the next one.
Nature displays a level of complexity far beyond any of the complex
composite structures that materials scientists have been able to design. In
addition, nature designs responsive, self-healing structures that quickly adapt
to changing environments. Above all, the plastic structures designed by nature
avoid the vexing issue raised by human-made plastics, namely accumulating
tons of litter all around the world. They are degradable and recyclable.
Finally, what materials designers most envy is nature’s building processes.
Synthetic chemists managed to get polymerization and moulding, matter
and form, into one single operation. Nature goes even further, thanks to the
self-assembly of molecules. While synthetic polymers are built with strong
covalent bonds, molecular self-assembly is a spontaneous organization of
molecules into ordered and relatively stable arrangements through weak non-
covalent interactions. Molecular self-assembly is extremely advantageous
from a technological point of view, because it generates little or no waste and
has a wide domain of application (Whitesides and Boncheva 2002). Self-
assembly appears to be the holy grail for designing at the nanoscale, where
human hands and conventional tools are useless. It is the key to a new age:
‘The Designed Materials Age requires new knowledge to build advanced
materials. One of the approaches is through molecular self-assembly’ (Zhang
2002: 321).
Because molecular self-assembly is ubiquitous in nature, nature seems to
capture all the attributes of plastics. Whereas in the early twentieth century
natural structures were characterized as rigid, stiff, resistant and resilient in
contrast to synthetic polymers, one century later the same natural structures
investigated at the nanoscale are characterized as ‘soft machines’ (Jones
2004): highly flexible, adaptive, complex and ever changing.
Despite their admiration for nature’s achievement, biomimetic chemists
are not inclined to revive natural theology and its celebration of ‘the wonders
of nature’. Rather, biomimicry proceeds from a technological perspective on
nature. Nature is depicted as an ‘insuperable engineer’ that took billions of
years to design smart materials. They study the structure of biomaterials and
the natural process of self-assembly with the conviction that nature has
worked out a set of solutions to engineering problems. With its exquisite
plasticity, nature affords a toolbox to inventive designers of advanced mater-
ials. Atoms and molecules are functional units useful for making nano-
devices such as molecular rotors, motors or switches. Biopolymers provide
smart tools: the two strands of DNA are used to self-assemble nano-objects;
liposomes are used as drug-carriers. Living organisms such as bacteria are
being re-engineered or even synthesized to perform technological tasks. ‘E-coli
moves into the plastic-age’ was the title of one research news item announcing
that plastics that are part of our lifestyle would be synthesized by E-coli bac-
teria with no waste disposal, and no more pollution or contamination of the
environment (Lee 1997).
Conclusion
In following the migrations of the term ‘plastic’ from the realm of materials
to the realm of humans and to nature throughout the twentieth century, this
chapter has emphasized the interplay between materials and culture. From a
view of nature as a stable, rigid order, our culture has shifted to a view of
nature as plastic, versatile and based on the ever-changing arrangements of
molecular agencies. The success story of plastics, which combined the specific
features of synthetic polymers and the markets in which they flourished,
deeply reconfigured consumer practices as well as those of design. Because
plastics are objects of design, they are more than polymers. The classical ter-
minology of polyethylene, polystyrene, polypropylene, phenol-formaldehyde
and so on is not really adequate, since the properties and uses of plastics
depend on plasticizers, fillers, UV protectors and the like. The traditional
classifications of materials become obsolete when plasticity is so highly
praised that design embraces materials themselves. Thus, plastics renewed the
ambition of shaping the world according to our purposes with no resistance
from nature.
This chapter has also pointed to the blind spots generated by the Plastic
Age. In cultivating plasticity as a chief value, the twentieth century had to
develop a sort of blindness about the impacts of material consumption on the
environment and on the future. Indeed, mass consumption in general requires
no concern with the afterlife of commodities, however much the cult of dis-
posability and ephemerality associated with plastic reinforced and per-
petuated this denial. The cultural history of plastics must be completed by
agnotology studies pointing to the social construction of ignorance necessary
for the mass diffusion of plastics (Proctor and Schiebinger 2008). This sort of
ignorance is a denial – a self-deception – that allows us to live in a fool’s paradise.
Although the twenty-first century seems to be more aware of environmental
issues and more concerned with the future, plastics retain their utopian
nature. Plastic items may have acquired a very bad reputation for many
people, but the concept of plastic as malleable matter is still extremely
attractive. The emerging economy of biopolymers and biofuels designed at
the molecular level is based on the vision of nature as a limitless field of
potentials. Design from bottom up, proceeding from the ultimate building
blocks of nature, is supposed to meet no resistance and to afford a free space
for creativity. It encourages the view of matter as purely plastic, passive and
docile, subject to the designer’s purposes. The techno-utopia of the Plastic
Age is not over. It continues through the denial of the constraints imposed by
matter and nature’s laws. Just as ‘the light dove, cleaving the air in her free
flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be easier
in empty space’ (Kant 1965: 48), contemporary designers cherish Plato’s illu-
sion that we could be free from matter and venture beyond it on the wings of
ideas. In paraphrasing Kant’s (1965) criticism of Plato, one could say that the
Plastic Age will be over when the dove-designer realizes that resistance might
serve as a support upon which to take a stand and to which he could apply
his powers.
Acknowledgements
This paper benefited from the support of the French-German programme
‘Genesis and Ontology of Technoscientific Objects’ (ANR09-FASHS-036-01).
I am indebted to Dr Robert Bud for the references on early occurrences of
‘Plastic Age’.
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2 Process and plasticity
Printing, prototyping and the prospects
of plastic
Mike Michael
Introduction
This chapter1 is concerned with the emerging future of plastic as it enters
into the home in a new guise. With the rise of new technologies and their co-
constitutive discourses, plastic is being opened up – ‘democratized’ – as a
newly manipulable material. At the same time, this ‘democratization’ requires
particular technical skills of production and consumption. As such, the
chapter is interested in a specific material – plastic – politics in which the
capacities of humans and non-humans together are reconfigured, enacted and
performed in particular ways (e.g. Braun and Whatmore 2010).
Now, obviously, plastic is a long-standing cohabitant in most Western
homes: it has become a stock material out of which a plethora of products are
constructed, or partly constructed. A quick survey of the products in David
Hillman and David Gibbs’s (1998) Century Makers: One Hundred Clever
Things We Take for Granted Which Have Changed Our Lives over the Last
One Hundred Years reveals just how many have plastic as an integral com-
ponent: hairdryers, toasters, washing machines, irons, frozen food, ballpoint
pens, training shoes, Velcro®, child-resistant caps, LCDs. Yet these are very
much products. They are consumables that have emerged from design houses
and factory production lines. These are not easily made at home: even the
smaller (plastic) component parts that go to make up the final product cannot
be easily, if at all, manufactured within the domestic – or craft – sphere, as the
designer Thomas Thwaites’s (2011) Toaster Project, during which he
attempted to construct a toaster from scratch, demonstrates only too clearly.
There is no doubt an element of stating the obvious in the foregoing, and
yet it would appear that this obviousness is in the process of being over-
turned. In the specific instance of plastic, this seeming shift is, it can be
argued, a partial outcome of the emergence of rapid prototyping or 3D
printing technology that uses plastic as one of its primary materials. More
specifically, the 3D printer is moving out of the domain of professionals and
specialists (designers, model makers, product developers, manufacturers) and
into the space of the home. Or rather, this movement is beginning to recon-
figure such spaces – it is a movement that, potentially, peculiarly and
Process and plasticity 31
problematically re-spatializes the domestic sphere and the workplace (where
workplace throughout this chapter refers to industrial or manufacturing
rather than, for example, office settings). Moreover, it is, potentially at least,
re-articulating other ‘global’ inter-relations: to domesticate production is also
to have an impact on contemporary global patterns of manufacturing (from
China to the home) and on global ecological patterns of waste production
(from the irredeemably broken to the readily reparable). The emergence of
the domestic 3D printer is thus instrumental in generating a series of com-
plex, sometimes ironic, relationalities that range across, for instance, craft
and expertise, informed materials and ‘disinformed’ humans, consumption and
production, global and local, sustainability and profligacy, expectation and
fantasy.
The implications of 3D printing are clearly enormous and extend well
beyond the scope of this chapter, which restricts itself mainly to a discussion
on the potential impacts on the domestic user. So, in what follows, there is
an initial consideration of the apparent sociotechnical position of plastic in
contemporary Western societies. This leads into a discussion of the comp-
lex relations of plastic to ‘plasticity’, not least as these inflect with issues of
spatial divisions between workplace and home, and the role of craft and
skill within such divisions. In the subsequent section, the theoretical under-
pinnings of the chapter will be explicated and the debts to such writers
as Whitehead and Deleuze laid bare. There will then be a discussion of
3D printing, especially with regard to the ways plastic has been ‘eventuated’
in relation to various contested futures and the contrasting capabilities of
both machines and humans. In the next section, we go on to address the
apparent rise of the domestic 3D printer. In light of the accompanying
claims made for its utility, plastic takes on a role in the renewed blurring
of the boundaries between home and workplace, production and consump-
tion. At the same time, new boundaries look set to emerge. In the final sec-
tion, the meaning of this patterning of de- and re-territorialization is further
interrogated, not least in the light of other possible futures of 3D plastic
printing.
So little plasticity in plastic?

Without retracing a history of plastic, we can say that plastic is a material
that is quintessentially industrial. From the extraction of the source material
(e.g. oil), through the chemical process of its production, and onto the pro-
cedures of design and manufacture by which plastic artefacts are made, plas-
tic belongs to the realm of the factory. It is not a material that is easily
manipulable beyond the specialist combinations of machines and humans that
chemically compose and process, dye, extrude, mould and finish plastic goods.
Plastic, as an icon of post-war Fordist industrialization, and even the batch
production of post-Fordism, has a role in the policing of the spatial
boundaries between home and factory (Lefebvre 1974).
32 Mike Michael
This remoteness of plastic production, despite the many intimacies of its
consumption, can be reframed in terms of the idea of craft. In the first of a
series of videos that accompanied the Victoria & Albert Museum’s exhibition
the ‘Power of Making’, there is a comment by a flutemaker: ‘I think craft or
making things with your hands is fundamental to being human.’ Of course,
this can be read in a number of ways: an insistence on the dignity of a part-
icular sort of labour; a lament over the rise and predominance of industrial or
Fordist production; a definition of the human in terms of a practical –
handed – engagement with the world (see Sennett 2008). Yet this all assumes
that the appropriate materials and tools are to hand. Or rather, it assumes a
special sort of relationality between maker, tool and material. Some materials
do not lend themselves, or lend themselves in very limited ways, to the
potential craftsperson. These materials can be said to be ‘informed’ (Barry
2005; Bensaude Vincent and Stengers 1996) insofar as, paraphrasing Barry
(i.e. replacing ‘pharmaceuticals’ with ‘plastics’):
[Plastics] companies do not produce bare molecules … isolated from their

environments. Rather, they produce a multitude of informed molecules,
including multiple informational and material forms of the same mol-
ecule. [Plastics] companies do not just sell information, nor do they just
sell material objects … The molecules produced by a [plastics] company
are already part of a rich informational material environment, even
before they are consumed.
(Barry 2005: 59)
In the case of plastic, this informedness partially manifests itself through

exclusion: only certain industrial actors have the capacities to make and
mould plastic. The (domestic) human hand is marginalized. As hinted at
above, plastic is perhaps the example par excellence of what, from the per-
spective of the domestic and of craft, is an abject relationality – the impov-
erished possibilities of re-inventing and re-informing plastic. In sum, plastic is
a material with a ‘composition’ (where ‘composition’, read through a White-
headian lens, implies that the chemical properties of plastic are mediated by
the co-presence of a nexus of technologies, systems, skills, environments and
so on) that precludes manipulation outside of an industrial setting. Thus,
while plastic affords innumerable uses in its forms, it imposes considerable
constraints in its substance (see Shove et al. 2007).
However, we need to tread warily here. While plastic does indeed take on
many discrete forms and functions, these can be domestically adapted to
alternative uses. Examples abound. At one end of the spectrum there are
basic reuses: carrier bags become mini-binbags; margarine tubs, yoghurt car-
tons, sawn-off plastic bottles become containers for screws, for nuts and bolts,
for soil and seeds and so on. At another end of the scale, plastic cutlery is
transformed into art, and the square cup-shaped piece of plastic that once
attached a D-lock to a bike frame is turned into an elegant and efficient
attachment-cum-receptacle for the supporting arms of a resurrected child’s
bicycle seat (though I say it myself). However, these are gross interventions:
pieces, or existing shapes, of plastic are redeployed, and at most are cut or
sawn or melted down to size (or glued or taped together up to size). There is
no constitutive reshaping or recasting, say, of the many different bike light
plastic fitments; once these break, one can’t mend them, or manipulate other
fitments to accommodate now fitment-less bicycle lights. The upshot is a col-
lection of bicycle lights that either remain unused or require ad hoc forms of
attachment (such as strapping to handlebars with electrical tape).
In a word, there is little plasticity in plastic, especially if we take plasticity
to connote the potential for new or renewed connections to be rendered
domestically (i.e. outside of a professional or industrial setting) and thus for
the functions of plastic to be recovered or altered or adapted or invented.
This differs somewhat from, but also supplements, Bensaude Vincent’s (2007)
formulation of plasticity, which, within a discussion of the changing borders
between the natural and the artificial, places its emphasis on the mass pro-
duction of polymers and the rise of the Plastic Age with its profusion of
plastic goods. Accordingly, ‘plasticity’ signifies the multiplicity of goods and
functions that a single material (or, rather, class of materials) can yield. By
contrast, nature was marked by inflexibility and limitation.
In the present analysis, the notion of plasticity is partly developed with
reference to localization in neurophysiology, where function is mapped onto
particular locations on or within the brain such that if a particular area is
damaged or destroyed then there is a permanent loss of the correlated func-
tion. If the part of the cortex responsible for a specific set of movements is
destroyed through stroke, say, the capacity for that movement is lost. By
contrast, plasticity allows for neural adaptation in which new connections can
be made that ‘correct’ for the damaged or destroyed area and enable lost
functions to be, more or less, recovered. In the case of motor-neurone
damage, it has been found that adjacent undamaged areas take over the work
of the damaged area.
However, we should take heed of Susan Leigh Star’s (1989) observation
that the comparative privilege enjoyed by theories of plasticity versus loca-
tionalism reflect and mediate the particular sociomaterial conditions of the time
(e.g. World War I renders locationalism more ‘useful’ as a way of dealing –
coping – with, and treating, the enormous number of brain-damaged soldiers
returning from the front; arguably modern neuroimaging techniques such as
fMRI and PET are instrumental in the apparent contemporary resurgence of
locationalism). The general point here is that plasticity is itself a plastic con-
cept, its content and utility varying under different circumstances. The present
aim is not to map or typify the versions of plasticity but merely to trace some
of the specific ways in which the plasticity of plastic might be undergoing
change through an emergent nexus of sociomaterial relationalities associated
with 3D printing.
34 Mike Michael
Above I argued that we needed to be circumspect about the plasticity of
plastic as we move from form to substance, or from the production of variety
to the consumption of specific plastic artefacts. However, a note of caution
now needs to be sounded. Drawing on a different literature, we can say that
the use of plastic tends toward ‘standardization’. Its function is scripted
(Akrich 1992; Akrich and Latour 1992) into the objects of which it is a part.
There is a specified and necessary range of capacities and skills ‘built into’
(the functioning of) the plastic child-proof bottle cap. Of course, as Latour
(1992) has pointed out, these scripts also serve to discriminate against certain
bodies – sometimes these discriminations are positive (as in the case of chil-
dren, obviously enough), sometimes they are negative (as is the case for
elderly people with less strength or mobility in their hands). Further, though,
such mundane technologies can also invite a certain sort of craft: for instance,
they can be used to precipitate resistance, subversion or protest, that is to
engender sociomaterial innovation (Michael 2000a).
In addition, there is also the matter of aesthetics (or the aesthetics of
matter) to take into account: there is a craft to ‘how’ one opens a child-proof
cap that is partially captured by such terms as elegance, skilfulness, style. This
simply points – as much recent literature on consumption does (e.g. Lury
1996) – to the performativity of engagement with objects, plastic or not. Use
is as much about expression as utility, and as such it performs not only
practical functions but also social relations (often indissolubly so). This per-
formativity is evidenced even in those plastic technologies that seemingly
require no skill at all. Michael (2006; also see Halewood and Michael 2008)
has suggested that Velcro® is emblematic of unproblematic functionality: as it
says on the Velcro® website in relation to Velcro® packages, these are
‘designed and engineered for all ages and motor skill levels’.2 Yet problems
abound. Indeed, to make Velcro® work seamlessly, or skill-lessly, a lot of
craft has sometimes to be mobilized. Michael recounts the frequent episodes
with his daughter when her fine hair would get caught in the Velcro® strips
that were attached to her cycling helmet. Over time, and with considerable
negotiation, movements became mutually choreographed so that, with some
craft, hair and Velcro® remained disconnected. This was a delicate, shared
reconfiguration of comportments – it was a collective sociomaterial perfor-
mance (or instance of heterogeneous performativity) in which not only func-
tion but also, indissolubly, an emerging relationship between daughter and
father was enacted (also see Mol 2002).
In this section, we have considered how plastic can be portrayed as a
material that has served in the differentiation of the sociomaterial spaces of
industrial workplace and home, and between the practices of production,
craft and consumption. At the same time, we have also noted that these
divisions are not simple: that craft attaches to the way that even the most
mundane and putatively skill-less plastic artefacts are put to work, not least
when craft is understood in terms of a heterogeneous performativity that strad-
dles both the practical and the expressive. As such, we have moved from a
view of plastic that, within the confines of the everyday, has a diminished
plasticity, to a vision of plastic as occasioning numerous ‘small’ relationalities
that make up a sort of subterranean plasticity in which minute, often unnoticed
or unremarked, adaptations and innovations are instituted as a matter of
routine. Ironically, these little plasticities serve in the reproduction of plastic’s
lack of plasticity (see Bowker and Star 1999) – that is to say, they reinforce
the impression of plastic’s limited plasticity in everyday life. In the next sec-
tion, we consider how we might better theorize this dynamic, especially in
light of the emergence of rapid prototyping or 3D printer technology that can
be used to make plastic objects.
From plasticity to plastic event

In the previous section, an attempt was made to understand plastic in terms
of its reflection and mediation of particular spatializations (domestic/indus-
trial) and comportments (craft-ful/skill-less). The outcome was a complication
of these categories: craft was found in skill-lessness, and consumption of the
domestic sphere inflected (to some extent) with the production of the indus-
trial (on this score, also see Cowan 1987). In part, this complication arises
because the discussion has been premised on the assumption that there is such
a thing as ‘plastic’ per se. The proliferation of counter-examples and con-
tingencies above indicates that plastic, like all entities, is perhaps more fruit-
fully regarded in terms of process: it is something that emerges in events – it is
eventuated. This formulation derives from the process philosophies of A.N.
Whitehead and Gilles Deleuze. Without entering into details, we can propose
that what plastic is – its ontology – rests on the sorts of events (actual occa-
sions) of which it is a part and out of which it emerges, and thus on the
various social and material elements (prehensions) that come together and
combine (concresce) within that event (Whitehead 1929; also Halewood
2011). As such, ‘plastic’ is always eventuated in its specificity: in other words,
there is no abstracted plastic per se to which qualities such as cold, or green,
or flimsy, or industrial are attached. Rather, there is flimsy plastic, or green
plastic and so on; and any abstracted plastic is itself abstracted in its
specificity, say by a chemist or an historian or a designer.
This schema allows us to move away from the abstraction of plastic that
was deployed above, and to focus on its concrete eventuations. However, we
do need to unpack a little further the notion of event that is being used here.
The entities within the event are not simply ‘being with’ each other, they are
also in a process of ‘becoming together’ (see Fraser 2010) – rather than inter-
acting, they intra-act (Barad 2007). Put another way, there is always an ele-
ment of uncertainty or openness about the event as the elements become
together – what the event ‘is’ is immanent, it is open to the virtual, subject to
de-territorialization – at least in principle (see, for instance, Massumi 2002;
DeLanda 2002; Bennett 2010).
36 Mike Michael
Or rather, there are parallel processes of de- and re-territorialization: events
simultaneously ‘open up’ and ‘close down’. As Deleuze and Guattari (1988: 10)
frame it, ‘How could movements of deterritorialization and processes of
reterritorialization not be relative, always connected, caught up in one
another?’ For these authors:
there are knots of arborescence (rootishness) in rhizomes, and rhizomic

offshoots in roots. Moreover there are despotic formations of immanence
and channelization specific to rhizomes, just as there are anarchic
deformations in transcendent systems of trees, aerial roots and sub-
terranean stems. The important point is that the root-tree and the canal
rhizome are not two opposed models: the first operates as a transcendent
model and tracing, even if it engenders its own escapes; the second oper-
ates as an immanent process that overturns the model and outlines a
map, even if it constitutes its own hierarchies, even if it gives rise to a
despotic channel.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 20)
This seems particularly pertinent in relation to the ways that events are often
partly constituted of enunciations (e.g. narratives, theories, motifs, discourses,
slogans, abstractions) that are designed to characterize definitively those
events – to territorialize them in particular ways. However, the relation of
such enunciations to events are highly complex. Despite themselves, they
become ‘embroiled’ in the event and at once close it down and open it up.
Michael and Rosengarten (n.d.) discuss this complexity with regard to the
discursive abstractions of the ‘gold-standard-ness’ (broadly meaning scientific
excellence) of randomized controlled trials of pharmaceutical prophylactics
for people at high risk of HIV infection. In their analysis, an abstraction acts,
and is enacted, in a variety of contrasting ways. First, it is an attractor – a
sociomaterial ‘aspiration’ – toward which an event is moving. It is a specific,
virtual prospect which the concrete event is seen to be in the process of real-
izing. Second, an abstraction is a key element in the concrete making of the
event – it is a type of account that contributes to what the event is. Third,
in the complex specificity of an event, an abstraction is itself emergent – what
that abstraction ‘is’ is eventuated within and through the specific con-
tingencies and exigencies of the event. Fourth, an abstraction is an ironic ele-
ment in the problematization of the event – it is a spur to the de-territorialization of
the event that lures something ‘other’, a sort of anti-attractor. In sum, an
abstraction at once (i) characterizes an event, (ii) is a component of an event,
(iii) emerges through that event, and (iv) precipitates other abstractions that
differ from or counter it.
As we shall suggest below, this fourfold schema applies to the particular
eventuations of the 3D printing of plastic objects. What amounts to 3D
printing is at once commonsensical and fantastical, easy and difficult; and
plastic is a matter of opening up and closing down (for a similar discussion of
the designed ‘thing’, see Storni 2012).
The rapid rise of rapid prototyping

Rapid prototyping is a generic name given to a form of additive manu-
facturing where layers of a material are deposited and fixed on top of one
another in order to reproduce a shape that has been determined using
computer-aided design (CAD) systems. The materials can vary (e.g. metals
such as titanium, or paper, or resin), as can the specific processes of addition
and adhesion (e.g. electron beam melting, stereolithography), but here the
focus will be on those versions that use plastics (e.g. polylactic acid or poly-
lactide (PLA) and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS)), and methods such
as fused deposition modelling in which a nozzle directs melted plastic (down
to the scale of fractions of a millimetre) onto a support platform, where it
builds up into the required shape layer by layer.
This technology has been available for some 20 years or so and has been
mostly used in industrial and design settings where prototypes (or the com-
ponents of an artefact in development) can be rapidly produced, and mater-
ially examined for fit, aesthetics, usability and various other properties. The
key advantage afforded by rapid prototyping is that designers and engineers
can quickly and cheaply mock up a given component or artefact and discuss
it with the various members of the design or production team. As it was framed
in The Economist (2011), ‘It enables the production of a single item quickly
and cheaply – and then another one after the design has been refined’.3 The
upshot is that the process of product design is considerably and cost-effectively
accelerated.
Increasingly, however, it seems that this technology is moving toward
manufacturing as well as prototyping. Such are the improvements in 3D
printing that it:
is starting to be used to produce the finished items themselves … It is

already competitive with plastic injection-moulding for runs of around
1,000 items, and this figure will rise as the technology matures. And
because each item is created individually, rather than from a single
mould, each can be made slightly differently at almost no extra cost.
Mass production could, in short, give way to mass customisation for all
kinds of products, from shoes to spectacles to kitchenware.
(The Economist, 2011)4
Here we have a re-vivified realization of post-Fordist production (e.g. Lash

and Urry 1987) where customization of manufactured products can become
an inexpensive matter of course. Indeed, it has been suggested that, with the
diffusion of 3D printers, there is potentially a movement towards what Craig
Allison and his colleagues (n.d.) call a ‘hybrid of the consumer/producer
38 Mike Michael
dichotomy, a prosumer society … wherein the roles of the consumer and
producer merge’.5
Having noted this, when following up some of the comments on The
Economist’s website, we can note that this vision of the future is not an
unproblematic one. In reaction to a similar article entitled ‘The Printed
World: Three-dimensional Printing from Digital Designs Will Transform
Manufacturing and Allow More People to Start Making Things’ (The Econ-
omist, 2011),6 a number of sceptical comments were posted. The first two
query the claims made for 3D printing and its supposed advantages over
traditional methods of manufacture:
Nothing really has changed in the last 20 years – it is still a niche as

output is to [sic] low, cost high or properties are not met. Too much
enthusiasm for something that has obvious inherent problems such as low
structural strength and slow production times. Who knows where this will
be in 10 or 20 years, but for now it is an amusing sidebar merely. The
article does not show the full picture, it misses the advances of foundries,
fast milling machines, laser machining etc.
3D Printing is as close to the market as as [sic] the translation of the
Genome project’s insights into effective medicines to cure cancer. Watch
the hype!7
These comments reflect how the expectations raised by the enthusiasts for, or
advocates of, this or that technology precipitate a negative reaction – the
accusation that the claims are fanciful, unrealistic hype (e.g. Brown 2003).
Implicit here is a wariness toward the particular performativity of these
claims – they are as much concerned with enabling a given future (by gen-
erating enthusiasm and, indeed, markets) as depicting it (see Michael 2000b).
With these claims and counter-claims, plastic is specifically eventuated
(on The Economist website) as both a medium for the bespoke manufacture of
a multiplicity of objects (de-territorialization, high plasticity in Bensaude
Vincent’s sense of a material that can be turned into more or less anything)
and a material hampered by the limitations of a technology which can, as yet,
only produce ‘sub-standard’ artefacts (re-territorialization, low plasticity in
the sense of still failing to realize this promise or prospect of multiplicity).
Here are two more contributions to The Economist comments page:
OK – making progress toward replicators. How’s it going with

transporters?
we can print out chicken to eat!
In these two cases, there are more and less explicit references to the replica-
tors of Star Trek. A replicator is staple technology on the Star Trek family of
TV and film series, which can fabricate (usually) food (and its receptacles)
within a few moments of being verbally commanded to do so. These website
comments are, obviously enough, meant to be humorous: they gently and
ironically mock the aspirations of those who promote the 3D printer. Yet the
term ‘replicator’ seems to have considerable currency in discussions of the 3D
printer. For instance, on a ‘dornob: design ideas daily’ webpage there is the
following headline: ‘3D Printer + DIY Home Factory = Real-Life Repli-
cator.’8 On the iTWire (connecting technology professionals) website can be
found the recent headline: ‘Star Trek Replicator: 21st Century Version Might
be 3D Printer’.9 Finally, the start-up company MakerBot has named its new
two-colour 3D printer the ‘Replicator’.10
Inevitably, the web coverage of MakerBot’s innovation has not been shy of
referencing Star Trek (e.g. ‘MakerBot Replicator Beams In’; ‘MakerBot
Replicator: Out of Star Trek into Your Own Garage’). This connection with
the future is certainly present in the MakerBot Replicator’s own maker’s
accounts. For instance, MakerBot’s chief executive Bre Pettis has claimed that
‘It’s a machine that makes you anything you need’, and is hopeful that ‘if an
apocalypse happens people will be ready with MakerBots, building the things
they can’t buy in stores. So we’re not just selling a product, we are changing
the future’, which includes putting ‘MakerBots on the moon (to build) the
moon base for us’.11
These references to science fiction(-become-fact) eventuate the 3D printer
and plastic in a number of ways. The replicator is an abstraction that opens
up the eventuation of the 3D printer – that is, the replicator points it toward a
particular virtuality (or serves as an attractor or sociomaterial ‘aspiration’ for
the 3D printer), wherein the local production of anything becomes feasible.
There is, in other words, the prospect of ‘everything-ness’ that attaches to the
domestic 3D printing of plastic objects. At the same time, the replicator
serves to characterize the 3D printer in the here and now, while simultan-
eously being instantiated by – emerging in its specificity through – the 3D
printer. Finally, as we have seen, the ‘ingression’ of the replicator into the
eventuation of the 3D printer also triggers a negative reaction – the associ-
ations with science fiction serve simply to underscore the fictional, even
fantastical, status of the prospective futures of this technology.
Relatedly, part of the attraction of 3D printers lies in their apparent ease of
use – one’s CAD designs are seamlessly relayed to the printer through the
computer. Indeed, in the various Economist comments, it was notable how,
despite the criticisms, this ease of operation was assumed – but then many of
the posts were from engineers presumably familiar with CAD-like systems.
The Star Trek idealization of the 3D printer simply builds on this: instruc-
tions can be directly conveyed through speech. Oddly enough, it is in Star
Trek itself where this simplicity of operation is ironized. In an exchange
between Tom Paris and the replicator (in the episode ‘Caretaker’ of Star Trek
Voyager), it becomes clear that even apparently mundane instruction giving
requires an element of skill – instructions need to be highly explicit if they are
to be actionable by the replicator. When Tom Paris issues an order to the
replicator for tomato soup, the replicator keeps returning with a series of
40 Mike Michael
options for different and more specific sorts of tomato soup. The increasingly
frustrated Paris ends up growling at the replicator for what seems to him to
be the obvious sort of tomato soup – plain and hot. A comment on the same
YouTube page parodied the exchange: ‘i changed my mind i want pizza now;
There are 140 different kinds of …’ Tom Paris’ annoyance evokes the pro-
spect that, every time one uses a replicator, it would be like entering into a
Garfinkelian breaching experiment (Garfinkel 1967), in which what is nor-
mally implicit in smooth social intercourse is made frustratingly and dis-
ruptively explicit (thus revealing what is implicit). Put another way, specificity
in instructions is thus a technically demanding skill.
Home is where the 3D printer is …

The 3D printer, it would seem, is about to become a household item. To read
through the various press releases, publicity materials and exhibition reports
around these new products is to be left with the impression that their arrival
in the home is imminent. This imminence rests on a number of factors: the
decreasing costs associated with 3D printers; the convenience of making
objects and components that are otherwise unobtainable or hard to obtain;
and the ease with which they can be used.
We have seen already how it is claimed, albeit hyperbolically, that the
MakerBot Replicator can make anything, but, additionally, it is also asserted
that this can be done easily: as it says on MakerBot’s website: ‘When you get
your MakerBot ReplicatorTM, you’ll have your machine up and running in no
time.’12 Similar declarations are made for the UP! 3D Printer, which is ‘The
world’s first new standard in personal Desktop 3D printing in price,
performance and ease of use!’13 This sense of the ‘ease of use’ is reinforced by
Dejan Mitrovic’s ‘Kideville’ activity at the Victoria & Albert Museum’s
‘Power of Making’ exhibition, where children were invited to help produce a
model city by designing their own house, which was then 3D printed. In sum,
in addition to the prospect of ‘everything-ness’, there is also the prospect of
‘easy-ness’: anything can be made by anyone, anytime, anywhere.
However, there is much here that is not so ‘easy’. First, there is the matter
of preparing the designs for 3D printing. As noted, this requires some
expertise with CAD systems. In some cases, designs may be downloaded from
open-source libraries made available by the 3D printer manufacturer. How-
ever, given that one of the key selling points of the 3D printer is customiza-
tion, one would expect that a facility with CAD is necessary. This seems to be
glossed over in many accounts of 3D printers.
Dejan Mitrovic describes the process of Kideville thus:
I encourage (the children) to split the paper (on which they sketch their
picture of a house) into 4 parts so that they think about the different
views of the house, so the front view, the side view, the top and then a 3D
view. Once they’ve done that, it helps them understand what their idea is,
and what they want their idea to look like, and then they move onto the
computer where they use special 3D software and quickly design it, mock
it up in the CAD and then make a 3D file. After that, I take the file, put
it onto the printer and it prints their house out of plastic.14
The 3D printer and plastic together become, that is to say, are enacted as, in
Bruno Latour’s (2005) terms, an intermediary that unproblematically trans-
forms ideas into material objects without deviation or corruption. Yet the
‘special 3D software’ serves more as what Latour calls a mediator: it realizes
individuals’ plans in the light of its own particular capacities (as well as in
reaction to the capabilities of its users). As such, what seems to materialize is
a ‘mock up’ – an ‘estimated’ version of the planned object. In this particular
eventuation of plastic through the 3D printer, it becomes a material of ready
manipulation (a matter of child’s play). Yet this is only possible because of the
co-presence of a set of skilled practices: drafting and modelling skills (making
Plasticine models was also part of Kideville); design skills (thinking about
different views of the home); CAD skills; and crafting skills (detaching the
plastic objects from the 3D printer, cleaning the object up – see below). At
each of these practical junctures, there is a translation of the ‘idea’ of the
house into the emerging plastic house.15
In a showcase video for the UP! 3D printer, a child takes her broken robot
toy to (presumably) her grandfather. The foot has come off. Grandfather
astutely notes that the other foot is identical, so detaches it from the robot
and using a digital LCD Vernier calliper takes a number of measurements.
The next shots are of the virtual foot taking shape in the CAD system (we are
not told how the measurements are transferred from calliper to computer).
The final version of the virtual foot is placed within a virtual printer space,
and the print command clicked. Two children are then shown looking eagerly
at the UP! 3D printer in operation. In a subsequent shot, the completed white
plastic foot is shown held in one hand while a second hand using pliers prises
a thin sheet of unwanted support plastic from the sole. (A similar but more
extensive cleaning-up process is shown in another demonstration video for the
UP!, where the excess plastic is removed from a ball bearing using both pliers
and an awl tool). The foot is then painted black, attached to the robot, and
tested for vertical movement by being swivelled up and down on the ankle
joint. When the feet are seen together frontally, it is obvious which is the
homemade foot (the replacement foot appears lopsided, and it is more matt in
colour). The repaired robot is restored to its delighted owner, who exercises it
excitedly.16
Again we glimpse a complex of complementary skills and capacities
necessary for the making of the 3D printed plastic objects. In addition to
design, CAD and crafting skills, there are, in this instance, measuring and
finishing skills to be taken into account (the latter being especially necessary
where the comparatively low resolution of the 3D printer produces an extru-
ded plastic object with a rough surface that requires filing and sanding). In
42 Mike Michael
consulting a designer colleague with very considerable experience of 3D
printing, it became apparent that a good deal of unexplicated practical
expertise and skill was needed for the imagined plastic object of desire to be
translated into a printed plastic product.
In summary, we can now draw out a fourfold analysis of (the abstraction
that is) ‘easy-ness’ and its place in the eventuation of 3D printing and its
plastics. As such, we can note that ‘easy-ness’: (i) operates as a tendency that
is an attractor toward which 3D printing and its plastics are moving; (ii) serves
to characterize the actual operation of 3D printers (this is the way that 3D
printers really function); (iii) is also emergent in relation to the contingencies
of 3D printing (we see that what counts as a manifestation of easy-ness is up
for grabs depending on how an event of 3D printing turns out); and (iv) pre-
cipitates a counter-reaction that questions the sociomaterial meaning of the
abstract idea of ‘easy-ness’.
Concluding remarks
This chapter has attempted to trace the eventuation of 3D printing and plas-
tic in terms of process and plasticity. The argument builds on Bensaude
Vincent’s (2007) version of plasticity as the pluralization of objects on the basis
of the particular capacities (informedness) of plastic – what has here been
called ‘everything-ness’. In addition to pluralization, there has also been a
supplementary emphasis on ‘easy-ness’ – the making of such a plurality of
plastic goods by anyone, anywhere, anytime that has been mediated by the
supposed establishment of 3D printing. However, these dual axes of plasticity
are, it has been argued, embroiled in the complex processes entailed in the
specific and concrete eventuation of 3D printing and its plastic. Developing a
fourfold analytic of the event, or rather of eventuation, it has been suggested
that these axes serve simultaneously as tendencies or attractors (prospects or
virtualities), as actual contributions to the characterization and instantiation
of the 3D printing and its plastic artefacts, as characterizations that are
themselves contingently emergent through these instantiations, and as
prompts for, or evocations of, the ‘other’ where the axes are problematized (a
few things in a few places, rather than everything everywhere).
In terms of the relationship between the 3D printer and sociomaterial
respatialization, we propose that the proclaimed collapse of the distinction
between domestic and manufacturing or design spaces (and between producer
and consumer bodies) might be overstated. Or rather, there is a reconfigura-
tion of these: a space like the ‘home post-Fordist factory’ rests on the avail-
ability of an array of skills – skills that are partly enabled and mediated by the
porosity of the home – not least to various knowledges (e.g. access to open-
source CAD libraries, websites such as Shapeways17 on which 3D designs are
traded). In other words, the domestic operation of the 3D printer still relies
on a ‘centre of design expertise’ even if that centre is virtual. However, we
might also tentatively predict that there will emerge something like a
punctuated, circulating expertise or skilfulness as accumulated experience and
novel domestically derived designs come to disseminate across the web (and
possibly go viral). In other words, we might imagine less a dramatic collapse
of the spaces of the ‘domestic’ and the ‘industrial’ than a complex shifting
interdigitation, one that will be rendered still more complex as the 3D printer
itself comes to be 3D printable at home.
Needless to say, the current discussion has been a rather limited one,
structured by concerns with the eventuation of plastic in manufacturing,
design and domestic spaces (everything-ness), and the relation of such making
to skill or craft (easy-ness). Another route might have taken in issues of
intellectual property rights (IPR). Might the copying and making of the
components of everyday technologies (the cooker knob crops up several
times, and is a trial product in one of the UP! promotional videos) infringe
the Registered Designs Act, Unregistered Design Right, copyright on 3D
Printer Design Files, or the Patents on the technology? As it turns out, in the
UK at least, all this is unlikely to be the case (Bradshaw et al. 2010). How-
ever, if 3D printing were to become highly popular, there is no guarantee that
design and manufacturing professional associations will not start lobbying for
additional IPR protections. If new IPR measures are put in place, this might
conceivably prompt another set of skills (as we see with music file sharing).
This possible eventuation of 3D printing and its plastic through the intra-
actions of IPR and their infringements are perhaps prefigured in the recent
case of the 3D printing of the standard key for Dutch police handcuffs
(derived from a high-resolution photograph of the key as it hung from a
police officer’s belt). The file for the key was put online, rendering Dutch
handcuffs potentially useless.18
One of the issues that was briefly mentioned above but is otherwise absent
from the discussion is the relation of 3D printing to the environmental prob-
lems posed by plastic. Given the still emergent character of 3D printing, we
can only hint at its implications for the environmental impact of plastic. To
start, we can note that professional 3D printing can be understood to even-
tuate plastic in relation to environmental matters of concern in contrasting
ways. On the one hand, it can save on the financially and environmentally
costly processes of making prototypes through retooling machines on the
factory floor; on the other hand, it can encourage designers to 3D print a
series of prototypes as the design is progressively – in cheap but environmen-
tally wasteful piecemeal steps – refined (although one of the plastics that is
typically used, PLA, is derived from corn starch or sugar cane, and is bio-
degradable). In relation to the domestic 3D printer, there are many additional
environmental issues to unpack, such as: learning to do 3D printing entails
waste (over and above the almost inevitable mistakes and false starts, freshly
3D printed objects arrive with excess plastic that needs to be removed); there
is a ‘hobbyist’ temptation to make per se, where the act of production is also
the act of consumption, and the means of 3D printing (rather than the fin-
ished articles) become the end; homemade plastic objects increasingly flow
44 Mike Michael
into local (gift) economies as they carry the additional value of ‘handcrafted’
and become acceptable as presents, keepsakes, mementos and so on. Con-
versely, as noted briefly above, 3D printing can resource the repairability of
plastic objects: no longer the ease of transition from utility to waste.
This potential proliferation of plastic stuff is, of course, grounded in the
plasticity of plastic mediated by domestic 3D printing. However, perhaps
what is at stake here lies less with 3D printing per se, and more with its
(projected) domesticity. The abstractions of everything-ness and easy-ness that
attach (albeit, as we have seen, problematically) to the domestic 3D printer
serve to individualize production as if it were in principle a good thing when
‘production tools become democratized’.19 Here, to ‘become democratized’
means to ‘become domesticated’. Put another way, this can be understood as
another neo-liberal twist in which people are faced with the environmentally
charged ‘choice’ of using 3D printers simply to consume more stuff (make
new objects, making as consumption) as opposed to making in order to
consume less stuff (by extending the lives of their existing plastic goods).
Notes
1 The author would like to acknowledge the advice and help of Andy Boucher and
David Cameron.
2 www.velcro.co.uk/index.php?id=124 (accessed 27 February 2012).
3 www.economist.com/node/18114327?story_id=18114327 (accessed 22 February 2012).
4 www.economist.com/node/18114327?story_id=18114327 (accessed 22 February 2012).
5 Allison, C., Davies, H., Gomer, R. and Nurmikko, T. (n.d.) ‘What are the Impli-
cations of Personal 3D Printers Becoming Domestically Available?’ eprints.websci.
net/8/1/comp_6048_3d_printing.html (accessed 25 February 2012).
6 www.economist.com/node/18114221 (accessed 22 February 2012).
7 Both quotes at www.economist.com/node/18114221/comments#comments (acces-
sed 22 February 2012).
8 dornob.com/3d-printer-diy-home-factory-real-life-replicator/ (accessed 22 February
2012).
9 www.itwire.com/science-news/energy/48686-star-trek-replicator-21st-century-version-
might-be-3d-printer (accessed 22 February 2012).
10 www.makerbot.com/blog/2012/01/09/introducing-the-makerbot-replicator/ (accessed 22
February 2012).
11 www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16503443 (accessed 24 February 2012).
12 store.makerbot.com/replicator-404.html (accessed 24 February 2012).
13 3dprintingsystems.com (accessed 24 February 2012).
14 www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/p/powerofmaking/ (accessed 24 February 2012).
15 However, we might well expect that the ‘idea’ of the object will also come to be
shaped by the capabilities of the 3D printer (e.g. Waldby 2000).
16 Both videos are at www.coolcomponents.co.uk/catalog/plus-personal-portable-prin
ter-p-644.html?gclid=CJbRi5WUpa4CFQ8gfAodvmJUPg (accessed 25 February
2012).
17 www.shapeways.com (accessed 28 February 2012).
18 www.shapeways.com/blog/archives/296-German-hacker-3D-prints-Dutch-police-hand
cuff-key.html (accessed 27 February 2012).
19 Ironically, the home is reterritorialized in distinction to the factory where 3D
printers, as opposed to the plastic objects, are made. (Presumably, this will continue
to be the case until 3D printers can replicate themselves.) In any case, this suggests
that to trace further the environmental implications of domestic 3D printing is to
find that plastic’s plasticity proliferates not only plastic objects but also the patterns
of de- and re-territorialization of making and consuming, of home and workplace.
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Part II
Plastic economies
3 Made to be wasted
PET and topologies of disposability
Gay Hawkins
What does plastic do in terms of generating economic value? What is the

efficacy of plastic in processes of economic accumulation? How can we think
about plastic as an economic agent? These are some of the questions driving
this part of the book, and there are many different ways in which they could
be answered. One strategy would be to delve into the growing body of
research into the evolution of the plastics and petrochemical industries in the
twentieth century, and to examine their interrelationships with governments,
markets, consumers and the environment. This approach combines political
economy with cultural and technological history, and it has produced some
excellent accounts of how the promise of plastic was realized as both a new
industry and a material that profoundly reshaped everyday experience. The
focus in this work is on how a steady flow of plastic as raw material exerted
a centripetal force on a wide range of industrial processes, organizations and
cultural practices – how plastics became central to the development of mass
consumption and synthetic modernity (Meikle 1995; Fenichell 1996).
However, as useful as these accounts are for investigating the rise of plastic
industries, they can sometimes render plastic a passive object of economic
forces. Plastic is represented as something that seems to have an unfolding
logic already within it – it is an instrument for capital accumulation. The
assumption is that plastic has intrinsic economic values that are realized in
processes of industrial research or market application. While there is no
question that plastic has been central to massive and diverse processes of
industrial and market development, my claim is that its economic capacities
are not so much intrinsic as enacted. Plastic’s economic values have to be
elaborated and produced. This is not to say that they are simply socially
constructed. Rather, the economic capacities of plastic emerge in specific
arrangements and processes, in which the material interacts with any number
of other devices – human and non-human – to become valuable.
In this chapter, I investigate how the economic capacities of one particular
plastic – polyethylene terephthalate (PET) – have been enacted. I want to
analyse how this plastic has acquired the ‘character of calculability’. This is a
term Callon and Muniesa (2005) use to describe the technical, material and
social processes whereby the qualities and value of goods are determined. For
50 Gay Hawkins
Callon and Muniesa, markets are key sites for the dynamics of calculation –
indeed, this is their primary function. However, they are by no means the only
site: the qualities or calculability of goods are continually subject to change as
they move through various assemblages from design to production to con-
sumption and more. All of these represent specific centres and forms of cal-
culation that elaborate the value of goods or requalify them in various ways.
The properties of goods, then, are never fixed; instead, they are continually
being enacted in multiple networks and interactions.
PET is the generic name for the bottle form of polyethylene terephthalate, a
plastic that forms the basis of the synthetic fibre polyester. Over the last 30
years, production of PET bottles has grown dramatically, and it increasingly
has been used to replace glass, metal and other plastic materials (Brooks and
Giles 2002). While the PET bottle is often hailed as the container that revo-
lutionized global bottle and beverages markets (Brooks and Giles 2002: 26),
in recent years it has also been recognized as a major contributor to the
growing environmental burden of plastics. Numerous studies have pointed to
the phenomenal growth in plastics waste over the last 30 years. The majority
of this plastic comes from food packaging and single-use items such as PET
bottles (see Thompson in this volume; Gandy 1994; Melosi 1981). This ava-
lanche of ever-accumulating discarded plastic has put enormous pressure on
existing urban waste infrastructures and the natural environments where it
often ends up.
Standard economic and corporate analyses of this disturbing waste reality
often dismiss it as an unfortunate externality – an inevitable outcome of
changed materials or irresponsible consumer practices. However, this dis-
missal denies the ways in which the calculability of PET has been predicated
on how easy it is to waste – on its disposability. This has been one of the key
defining qualities of this type of plastic. The issues are how this quality has
been elaborated and enacted, and the ways in which the material specificity of
PET might participate in or resist these elaborations. If, as Callon and
Muniesa (2005: 1234) argue, the properties of a good are neither intrinsic nor
extrinsic, but are ‘co-elaborated’, then what kinds of forces and processes have
been involved in making PET disposable? How is this disposability enacted as
a positive calculation or source of economic gain in some markets and as a
negative calculation in others?
In posing these questions, my aim is to situate waste as immanent to eco-
nomic actions rather than as something that follows after them, or that exists
as an externality. The tendency in so many accounts of plastics waste is to
frame it as a problem that emerges after use – to see the waste realities of
disposability as displaced to other times and other spaces.1 The single-serve
PET bottle disrupts this linearity. Like many plastic objects, it appears as
rubbish from the beginning. It may have momentary functionality as pack-
aging or as a container, but this is generally subsumed by its more substantial
material presence as a transitional object – as something that is made to be
wasted. As Meikle (1995: 186) says in his account of the rise of disposable
Made to be wasted: PET and disposability 51
plastic objects, ‘most remained stylistically rubbish, too anonymous and
ephemeral to do more than add to a vague consciousness of an ever greater
flow of plastic’. In Meikle’s suggestive analysis, ‘disposability’ emerges as a
complex sociomaterial quality central to the movement and apprehension of
an increasing number of plastic things since World War II. In relation to PET
bottles, it is a set of attributes or qualities that emerge in the processes of
making them calculable. However, these processes are immensely variable:
they do not simply revolve around the industrial production of bottles or exist
in consumption and the cultures of use. They also emerge in the destruction of
bottles and the industries that have developed to recycle PET – literally to
enact disposal. In each of these settings, the ‘disposability’ of PET means
different things and prompts different practices and forms of calculation. In
other words, disposability is a shifting quality of the PET bottle, and is con-
tinually being requalified in the different arrangements and economies in
which it is caught up.
How, then, do we make sense of the multiple economies of disposability?
My approach here will be ‘topological’.2 Thinking topologically makes it
possible to see how the anticipated future of the single-use PET bottle is
folded into the present. This approach understands disposability as an event,
and recognizes the extensiveness of this event across multiple spaces from sites
of production, usage, waste management and more. More critically, as
Michael and Rosengarten (2012) argue, topology does not see time and space
as external frameworks but as emergent. As they say, ‘transformations of the
relations between points are not causal or linear, but open and immanent’
(Michael and Rosengarten 2012: 1–2). This makes it possible to consider how
the spaces of plastics waste disposal are both distant – in the sense of mili-
tantly kept out of market frames – but also proximal, pressing in on processes
of production and consumption in ways that can make trouble for the equa-
tion of disposability with rapid disappearance. Meikle’s reference to dis-
posability as an ever greater flow of plastic is also usefully extended via a
topological perspective. Rather than see flow as structured by a logic of
product life-cycle, topology seeks to map the myriad entities and valuing
regimes that become connected in the multidirectional enactments of dis-
posability. In this way, waste – together with the negative value it represents –
does not emerge at the end of the product’s ‘life-cycle’. Instead, it has to be
understood as topologically interconnected with the enactment of dis-
posability as the ultimate expression of the convenience of plastic. In other
words, the afterlife of the bottle is anticipated before exchange, connecting the
value of convenience to the ease with which the bottle is discarded.
In what follows, I investigate three different settings where the disposability
of PET is enacted. First, I examine how PET was ‘invented’ and how the context
of industrial research and development (R&D) made this material calculable.
Key issues here are how the emergence of the PET bottle can be considered
an event, and how the materiality of this plastic became ‘economically
informed’. Next I explore how PET became a market device – something
52 Gay Hawkins
with the capacity to articulate new economic actions in the beverages industry
and to reconfigure drinking. How did this mass plastic become involved in
making mass markets and changed consumption practices? Central here is a
notion of ‘emergent causation’ (Bennett 2010), meaning the ways in which the
PET bottle acquired the capacity to generate effects – effects that were never
purely economic, but also cultural, environmental and more. At the heart of
these effects was a distinct enactment of disposability generated in cultures of
use. In what ways did consumers interact with the bottle and requalify it as
ephemeral, litter, always already waste? In what ways did the bottle suggest
such qualifications and encourage drinkers to do new things?
Finally, I examine an example of the literal enactment of disposability – the
recycling of PET bottles in Hanoi’s ‘plastic villages’. Once sites of craft pro-
duction for the growing city, in the twenty-first century these villages are now
focused on recycling the waste of Vietnam’s rapid urban and economic
development – much of it plastic. In the work of collecting and destroying
PET bottles in order to make the crushed pellets available for remanufacture
into new plastic objects, disposability is requalified as brute material recalci-
trance. In these informal household economies, the calculability of PET is
focused on how to dematerialize the single-use object, how to render the
incredible durability of PET amenable to new economic actions. In this
setting, the PET bottle presents itself as stubbornly non-disposable.
These three settings appear disturbingly linear – as if the PET bottle
demands a narrative of production, consumption and disposal. This is not my
intention. Rather, it is to develop a topological analysis that foregrounds the
ways in which enactment is always relational. In this way, the focus is on how
each of these specific enactments is folded into the others, and how the PET
bottle is the medium through which they become co-present and connect –
how the PET bottle becomes a conduit of topological relationships that are
continually reframing the play of disposability as material possibility and
problem.
Inventing PET
The standard story about the invention of PET goes something like this: by
the early 1970s, blow-moulded thermoplastic bottles had successfully replaced
glass in most household containers for everything from shampoo to deter-
gents. However, application to the beverages industry proved difficult. The
thermoplastics used for bottling detergents and other non-drinkable fluids
were considered unsuitable for carbonated drinks and fruit juice because the
carbonation or acid tended to attack the plastic. This instability led to a range
of effects, from deterioration, to explosion of the bottle under pressure of
carbonation, to chemical contamination (Freinkel 2011: 172). Beverages
therefore presented a vast field of possibility for the expansion of plastic bottle
packaging. This was an industry where glass bottles and, from the early
1960s, aluminium cans dominated. While the development of the single-use
aluminium can had had a major effect on the growth of markets – particu-
larly Coca-Cola’s and Pepsi’s decisions to diversify into them in 1967 – there
was still an interest in finding a stable plastic that could capture the beverages
market.
Then, in the early 1970s, a new form of polyethylene terephthalate was
teased out of the lab at DuPont. While this plastic had been around since the
1940s, it was used almost exclusively as a synthetic fibre with the trade name
of polyester. The key shift that occurred in the 1970s involved turning this
plastic fibre into bottle form. Engineers at DuPont had long been focused on
finding a suitable plastic to replace glass bottles. An object pathway was in
place, but a material innovation was needed to pursue it. The innovation that
was developed was a new method of plastic moulding. While bottle produc-
tion had always involved blow-moulding, the DuPont lab stretched a small
test-tube shape of polyester lengthwise and widthwise during the blow-
moulding process. This conferred remarkable new properties on the material.
By realigning the molecules of polyester – by putting them into different
relationships – a new substance and object emerged together that was
immensely suitable for beverage production. This bottle was very light and
virtually unbreakable, it conferred incredible strength on the plastic and gave
it remarkable optical qualities to rival glass. As Freinkel says:
Here was a plastic bottle that was tough enough to withstand all that
pressurized fizz but also safe enough to win approval from the FDA. It
was as clear as glass but shatterproof and just a fraction of its weight. Its
thin walls kept out oxygen that could spoil food contents while holding in
that expensive carbon dioxide. The PET bottle was yet another of those
pedestrian plastic products that humbly fulfilled a herculean set of
demands.
(Freinkel 2011: 172)
In the trade press, ‘PET’ rapidly became the generic name for the bottle form
of polyester. It was attributed to Daniel Wyeth, a DuPont engineer who
was hailed as the inventor of the PET bottle. Setting aside the implicit cele-
bration of Wyeth as an individual agent or ‘discoverer’ of the PET bottle,
what the trade press recognized was the research and development context of
industrial chemistry. Barry (2005) describes this context as shaped by an
‘operational realism’ in which new materials emerge out of instrumental and
empirical logics. Finding a suitable plastic for beverage bottle packaging
applications was the focus of many labs, and this was driven by the potential
to capture this lucrative and growing market. The ideal beverage bottle was a
singular case, an object that guided research and posed questions to existing
plastics and polyethylene bottles.
However, what is problematic about this trade history narrative is the way
that it can too easily move from ‘discovery’ to application – the way in which
the PET bottle seems to jump from the lab to the beverages industry in a
54 Gay Hawkins
relatively smooth process of diffusion. Obviously, in the best tradition of sci-
ence and technology studies (STS), we need to replace application with
translation and recognize how the laboratory, the beverages industry and all
the bottles out and about in kitchens and laundries and on supermarket
shelves generated what Shove et al. (2007) call the ‘co-production of possi-
bility’. In their account of plastic, they show that the physical and cultural
materialization of things feeds back into industrial research practices, invest-
ment and innovation, generating ‘promise requirement cycles’ and socio-
technical co-evolution (Shove et al. 2007: 97). Their point is that ‘specific
products are as important in shaping the image of plastic (including inter-
pretations of its properties and definitions of performance) as this image is
in shaping ideas about potential areas of use and application’ (Shove et al.
2007: 101).
This important account of co-evolution goes beyond celebratory rhetorics
of discovery and application, but it still doesn’t quite capture the ways in
which materials might participate in processes of invention and translation –
how they might inform or have a say in what they become. In this framework,
plastic emerges out of forces that are largely external to it. While Shove and
colleagues are not arguing that materials and products are simply social con-
structions, their approach is insufficiently attentive to the activity and agency
of materials. It is incapable of grappling with the complex ecology of rela-
tionships in which a new plastic such as PET was not simply a product of
contingent, path-dependent processes of industrial development and transla-
tion, but also an event, a novel entity, in which the molecules of plastic
revealed new associations and ways of relating. Of course, the molecules
didn’t do this spontaneously or alone. The emergence of a new material takes
place not simply due to things that are imposed on it, but via creative
processes of invention in which the material becomes ‘richer and richer in
information’, as Bensaude Vincent and Stengers (1996) argue in A History of
Chemistry.
Their concept of ‘informed materials’ suggests a way to extend Shove
et al.’s (2007) account of co-evolution – or what Callon and Muniesa (2005)
call co-elaboration – to the molecular level.3 For Bensaude Vincent and
Stengers, an informed material is one where the:
material structure becomes richer and richer in information. Accom-

plishing this requires detailed comprehension of the microscopic structure
of materials, because it is playing with these molecular, atomic or even
subatomic structures that one can invent materials adapted to industrial
demands.
(Bensaude Vincent and Stengers 1996: 206)
Barry (2005) extends this concept of informed materials very productively. In

his argument, chemical R&D does more than mechanically reshape or
develop new materials for application in various fields: it invents informed
materials in which the molecular is always constituted in complex informa-
tional and social environments. This topological approach to invention
understands it not as progressive evolution or discovery of fixed inherent
potential, but as a process of making materials more and more informed. In
this process, the environment is not external to the material but enters into its
constitution. As Barry (2005: 59) says, ‘the perception of an entity (such as a
molecule) is part of its informational material environment’.
In seeking to understand the emergence of PET, the concept of informed
materials is far more incisive than notions of translation for establishing how
economic calculability was established for this new plastic. This is because the
molecular rearrangement of polyethylene terephthalate into the PET bottle
produced rich new information about plastic that was not simply molecular,
but also economic and social. While there is no question that R&D processes
at DuPont were seeking to make the material qualities of polyethylene tere-
phthalate available for economic calculation in the beverages industry, the
molecules of polyethylene terephthalate were already economically
informed – they were already inscribed with information about plastic’s
diverse economic and social capacities.
Much of this information came from other thermoplastics. From the mid-
1950s, a wide variety of plastics began to be used in containerization and food
packaging. These applications helped to establish bottles as one of the key
objects where the material and economic possibilities of plastic were enacted.
Thermoplastic’s soft flexibility, produced through the development of blow-
moulding technology, made it the perfect substitute for glass. Here was an
unbreakable container that could be shaped in myriad ways. It could also be
coloured and squeezed, not just poured. All these qualities highlighted the
remarkable ‘bottleability’ of plastic. They also highlighted the emerging
qualities of plastic as a disposable material. As Meikle (1995: 190) argues,
abundant supplies of raw materials for thermoplastics and high-volume cheap
production following World War II contributed to a gradual shift in percep-
tions of plastic from being durable to becoming ephemeral. This shift is per-
fectly captured in an article from a 1957 issue of Modern Packaging on
‘Molded Plastic Containers’:
The biggest thing that’s ever happened in molded plastics so far as

packaging is concerned is the acceptance of the idea that packages are
made to be thrown away. Plastic molders are no longer thinking in terms
of re-use refrigerator jars and trinket boxes made to last a lifetime.
Taking a tip from the makers of cartons, cans and bottles, they have
come to the realization that volume lies in low-cost, single-use expend-
ability … consumers are learning to throw these containers in the trash as
nonchalantly as they would discard a paper cup – and in that psychology
lies the future of molded plastic packaging.
(n.a. 1957: 120, emphasis added)
56 Gay Hawkins
This history of the changing uses and meanings of thermoplastics was a cru-
cial part of PET’s informational material environment long before it was
invented. It showed not only how the molecules of thermoplastics could be
manipulated by blow-moulding, but also how these manipulations were
implicated in developments in bottle production and changing perceptions
of plastic. In relation to PET, what stretch blow-moulding of polyethylene
terephthalate did was form new relationships between the molecules of this
plastic that actualized the virtual in the form of a new, chemically stable
lightweight bottle. The invention of PET, then, was not the realization of a
limited set of possibilities inherent within the material. It was evidence of how
plastic became richer and richer in information over time through multiple
industrial, economic and social enactments.
Developments in post-World War II thermoplastics established bottles as
one of the key routes whereby material and economic information about
plastics’ performance became embodied in molecules. The object and the
material informed each other. The emergence of the PET bottle represented
new material information about molecules and the multiplication of relation-
ships of association between them. PET appeared to enact the ‘bottleability’
of plastic better than any other plastic. This invention was patterned by his-
torical routes already in place in industrial plastics production and research at
the same time as it actualized new properties for the molecules of poly-
ethylene terephthalate and created a new bottle. In this way, the distinct
molecular properties of PET need to be considered as historical more than as
stable physical entities (Barry 2005: 56). Barry explains this key distinction
using A.N. Whitehead: ‘Whitehead argued that a molecule should be con-
sidered an historical rather than a physical entity. In his view a molecule
should not be understood as a table or a rock, but rather as an event: “a
molecule is a historic route of actual occasions; and such a route is an event”’
(Barry 2005: 56).
DeLanda’s account of material variability echoes this argument that mo-
lecular relationships are historically patterned, informed and surprising. For
him, the processes of variability or material expressivity reveal the ways in
which materials can have a say in what they become:
We are beginning to recover a certain philosophical respect for the

inherent morphogenetic potential of all materials. And we now might be
in the position to think about the origin of form and structure, not as
something imposed from the outside on inert matter, not as a hierarchical
command from above as in an assembly line, but as something that may
come from the materials, a form we tease out of those materials as we
allow them to have their say in the structures we create.
(DeLanda 2005)
Teasing a new bottle form out of polyester was an historical, industrial and
molecular process shaped by the logics of extending the economic capacities
of plastic. However, as DeLanda shows, materials are not passive in these
processes – they express themselves in various ways. In the case of PET, these
expressions were not evidence of inherent fixed qualities but of molecular
possibilities shaped by the material informational environment that sur-
rounded thermoplastics at the time. The perception that plastic could be dis-
posable was part of this material informational environment. However, this
quality of disposability went hand in hand with other qualities that emerged,
such as PET’s extraordinary durability and clarity. The issue is how these
diverse and seemingly contradictory qualities interacted: durability and dis-
posability seem to be opposed qualities? A material that is remarkably tough
and unbreakable enables extended use and endurance over time and space.
Durability makes commodities mobile, and it enables long periods of storage
and extensive supply chain connections. In contrast, disposability implies
spatio-temporal transience – an ephemeral material always in the process of
becoming waste.
A topological approach shows how the anticipated future of the PET
bottle – its status as a throw-away material – was folded into its enactments in
markets and consumption. Durability and disposability didn’t follow each
other in sequence; instead, these qualities informed each other and became
complexly interconnected. Making PET calculable meant qualifying it both as
durable and as intended for a single use. Nor can we consider durability a
molecular quality and disposability purely cultural – the consequence of new
consumer habits, or ‘psychology’ to use Modern Packaging’s term. These
distinctions are impossible to maintain. To cite Whitehead (1929) again,
molecules are an historical route of actual occasions, and one of the emerging
occasions for thermoplastics following World War II was the perception that
high-volume, cheap production made them an abundant and expendable
material. This is how they became implicated in the growth of packaging, and
how they enabled new economic actions and consumption practices.
Enacting disposability: PET as a market device

In this section, the focus shifts to PET bottles as market devices and to the
ways in which disposability is enacted in market arrangements and con-
sumption practices. According to Muniesa, Millo and Callon (2007), a
market device is something that articulates economic action – always in rela-
tion to other devices. Market devices, then, are objects that do things.
Whether in a minimal instrumental fashion or a forceful determinist fashion,
they are things that act and make others act. This capacity for action is not
something possessed by the device: it is an outcome of the distributed agency
that emerges in market assemblages. As Callon (1998) argues, a market is not
an expression of an economic structure; it is a coordinating device, an end-
lessly variable assemblage for the calculation of value, the organization of
exchange and the distribution of goods, and everything involved in a market
arrangement becomes a calculating agent to differing degrees.
58 Gay Hawkins
This focus on the PET bottle as a market device and calculating agent
shifts attention from reductionist notions of cause and effect to the dynamics
of ‘emergent causation’ (Bennett 2010: 33). This inherently topological con-
cept describes the actual processes whereby agency emerges and circulates.
Rather than see the take-up of the PET bottle in beverages markets as simply
causing market expansion or increased plastics waste, a topological approach
maps the multiple effects and spatio-temporalities of the bottle as an actant
with emergent capacities rather than fixed or predetermined impacts.4 Track-
ing the actions of the PET bottle in beverages markets, then, means paying
close attention to the ways in which this plastic became caught up in new
relationships and generated effects that were both predictable and unpredict-
able. It also means investigating how these effects became implicated in fur-
ther changes via feedback loops. Emergent causation frames the bottle as an
object with contingent agentic capacities that are constituted in particular
market relationships and uses, but that also shape those relationships with
shifting degrees of power and effectivity (Bennett 2010: 33).
The take-up of the PET bottle as a new market device in beverages markets
had multiple effects. Here I focus on three effects that foreground the com-
plexities of disposability as potentiality and problem. These are the emergence
of PET as a mass material; the dynamics of material substitution; and shifting
practices of consumer use that revealed a new urban litter problem – namely,
increasing amounts of visible plastics waste. In each of these effects, we can
see patterns of emergent causation, or the complex processes whereby the
PET bottle acquired the capacity to have relational impacts on other things,
from plastic production processes to habits of discarding.
In order to make the PET bottle that emerged from the DuPont lab in the
early 1970s into a market device, it had to go through various ‘qualification
trials’ (Callon et al. 2002: 198). Callon and colleagues describe qualification
trials as a sequence of transformations involving different networks and
agents that the product singles out and binds together. The effect of these
trials, via processes of adjustment and iteration, is to establish and fix the
characteristics of the product. In the case of PET, the function of the trials
was to stabilize its material qualities and render them predictable – only then
could the bottle become a mass-produced market device. These trials involved
continued interactions between the plastics industry and both packaging
design and bottling companies. Throughout the late 1970s, aspects of PET
that resisted full commercialization were researched and revised. The earliest
PET bottles were slightly permeable to atmospheric gases, so small amounts
of oxygen could enter the bottle. This was enough to spoil the taste of fruit
juices and other beverages, and limit their shelf life. In addition, the bottles
could not be hot-filled because higher temperatures caused some break-
down of the plastic (Freinkel 2011: 172). All these issues had to be resolved
in order to realize the economic capacities of PET. One of the most critical
elements in PET’s articulation in markets was standardizing it, controlling
its material expressivity. To make PET a market device, it had to become a
well-disciplined material. This doesn’t mean PET was rendered permanently
docile – it was still capable of exceeding market regimes and prompting new
patterns of emergent causation; rather, stabilizing and standardizing the
properties of the plastic were necessary to making it calculable.
Qualification trials underpinned the development of PET not only as a
market device but also as a mass material. The emergence of PET as a mass
material worked in two registers: quantitatively and topologically. The quan-
titative sense refers to the rapid development of mass production of PET
bottles. Thanks to the ‘plastics explosion’ that had escalated during the 1950s
and 1960s in the United States, there were plenty of production facilities
making the raw materials necessary for numerous types of plastic. By the
1970s, the plastic packaging industry was extremely well developed, as was
the technology for blow-moulding bottles. PET bottles were easily incorp-
orated into existing industrial processes and infrastructures, making high-
volume production relatively easy and cheap. By the mid-1980s, PET bottle
production had increased phenomenally and glass containerization for bev-
erages was declining. While US commercial production of PET bottles was
negligible in 1977, by 1980 some 2.5 billion bottles were being produced, and
by 1985 production numbers were up to 5.5 billion units per year (Plastics
Academy n.d.).
However, the rapid proliferation of PET bottles also had topological
reverberations. Mass production revealed the extensiveness of the event of
PET across multiple registers beyond sales figures. This plastic – like many
others – generated the effect of being a mass material by being ‘ready-to-
hand’, to use Heidegger’s (1962) term – that is, something that involves
minimal attention by being available everywhere. Lury (2009) offers an inci-
sive account of the complexities of the term ‘mass’ in relation to assembling
markets. In her analysis, societies predicated on mass production generate
a culture of bewildering abundance, which is not stable; rather, it involves a
constant flow of products, services and experiences – an ontology of evanes-
cence and transience. As Lury (2009: 73) says, ‘mass products draw in the
public at the level of the senses, and lead to the restructuring of the very
conditions of experience, subjectivity and the body’. In this way, PET can be
understood as a mass material that inscribed abundance, ephemerality and
disposability in bodily experience. Or course, bodies in mass cultures were
already open or willing to be affected in this way. What the rapid accumula-
tion of PET bottles did was enrol those bodies in assembling new markets and
drinking practices with a plastic that was both ready to hand and ready to
waste.
The emergence and effects of PET as a mass material were also shaped by
its capacity to displace other packaging materials in the beverages industry.
This process of material substitution was a significant force in the ongoing
actualization of PET as a market device. As a new form of packaging, the
PET bottle had to be qualified in relation to other packaging in the beverages
industry, the liquids it contained and consumers. A key element in this
60 Gay Hawkins
process was how this new packaging interacted with the incumbent materials
in beverages packaging – how its qualities became calculated as superior. The
usual story of the invention of PET positions the plastic bottle in an almost
revolutionary relation to glass. It is represented as a substitute packaging for
the glass bottle, which it rapidly pushed aside to become a major competitor
with the can and then the market leader. However, the interactions between
glass, PET and aluminium were somewhat more complex than just straight-
forward market substitution. Initially, the characteristics of PET bottles and
glass bottles were defined in relationships of similarity. PET was hailed as
having qualities that were equal to glass. It was promoted as the first plastic
to match the optical standards of glass and to achieve equivalent translucency
and clarity. This made replacement of one material with another easier as
consumers’ expectations of being able to see what they were drinking were
not radically disrupted. Like glass, plastic revealed the contents of the bottle
to the buyer, preventing unpleasant surprises (see Cochoy 2012). However,
unlike glass, the PET bottle was unbreakable: it had durability without
fragility and this encouraged new drinking practices.
In relation to the aluminium can, PET was positioned as offering similar
possibilities for portability and mobility, but these bottles also suggested a
range of new drinking possibilities. For a start, they could be resealed – unlike
the spring-pull can – and this made them useful containers for constant sip-
ping over time rather than on-the-spot consumption. These multiple negoti-
ations with other packaging devices in the beverages industry were complex.
They involved the dynamics of market positioning that was structured by
relationships of similarity and difference. However, as PET became the pre-
ferred and dominant packaging material, it emerged as a market device in its
own right. It had acquired the capacity to diminish the value of other devices
and displace them.
In these patterns of emergent causation – making PET a mass material and
rapidly displacing glass and aluminium cans in single-use packaging – we can
see how PET’s disposability was qualified as a positive force, as a source of
market expansion. However, there were unpredicted effects that emerged as
PET was taken up in the beverages industry. Specifically, growing amounts of
plastics waste rapidly became a new ‘matter of concern’ in urban waste man-
agement. While glass beverage bottles and cans had already established the
practice of throw-away containers in recreational drinking, PET prompted
new disposal practices – indeed, it gave new meanings to disposability. Dis-
carding glass and cans often required a certain amount of care. Many, of
course, entered waste streams, contributing to the massive growth in con-
sumer waste following World War II as the use of disposable objects
increased. However, the fact that these forms of packaging had been around
for a long time meant that, in a lot of places, public bins, recycling or con-
tainer deposit systems had developed as an alternative to thoughtless dis-
carding. Both glass and aluminium also presented good opportunities for
recycling, as these materials could be reused in the making of new containers.
PET bottles disrupted these arrangements. When they swamped the market
industries for recycling plastic were far less developed. PET could also only be
downcycled because it was impossible to get the same optical clarity using
discarded plastic. Each new bottle required raw, not recycled, materials. This
absence of effective waste management systems enhanced connotations of
PET as more ephemeral and disposable than other packaging. As Freinkel
(2011: 174) argues, ‘the introduction of light, unrefillable PET bottles helped
seal the changeover to what the industry calls “one-ways”’. This was a sig-
nificant effect, and one that Freinkel regards as central to the abandonment of
two-way systems in place for other disposable packaging. ‘Non-returnables’
gave new and very problematic meanings to convenience and disposability.
Beyond the lack of any obvious pathway for the afterlife of the bottle, the
affordances of PET as transparent, almost weightless, barely there – unlike
the solidity of glass and cans – seemed to lead to an equation of lightness
with litter. The PET bottle seemed to invite cavalier waste practices. It gave
new meanings to the temporality of disposability and the idea of fleeting
utility. So, while PET was rapidly taken up as a replacement for glass, its
material performance generated new discarding practices that became
increasingly problematic. Its one-way status suggested that it could be dis-
carded with far less concern and care. Its lightness and unbreakability implied
that it could be dropped anywhere. It was.
These are some of the patterns of emergent causation that reveal how
the PET bottle became an actant in the packaging industry – how it acquired
the capacity to generate effects. These effects were shaped by various dynam-
ics, such as the topologies of beverages markets, which enrolled the PET
bottle in specific ways. At the same time, the materiality of the bottle inter-
acted with these dynamics and made its own suggestions, such as littering and
new practices of drinking; it was a device that ‘made’ consumers do new
things. Emergent causation challenges the idea of a simple linear process of
industry application or revolutionary material substitution. It foregrounds
economic assemblages as patterned by diverse and distributed forms of
agency beyond corporate and human intentionality. Via various processes of
discipline, massification and interference with other packaging, the economic
expressivity of the PET bottle emerged and its capacity as a market device
was enabled.
The point is that the PET bottle did not enter into the beverages industry
with a fixed identity that caused certain effects. Nor was it the passive victim
of inexorable economic imperatives or corporate intentions. Rather, it became
a participant in already existing markets and, through its interactions and
relationships with other devices, helped reconfigure and extend these markets.
The PET bottle forged a range of important alliances with continuous-flow oil
refining, bottling plants, multinational beverages companies, consumers and
more, and as it did so it gained strength to the point where it became capable
of profoundly rematerializing beverages packaging. Giles and Bockner (2002)
effectively capture the effect of PET as a market device:
62 Gay Hawkins
There is little question that the growth of PET packaging has been the
big success story in packaging in the 1990s. It now appears that this story
will continue to dominate our attention well into the future. PET has
demonstrated an unusually strong connection with consumers. For what-
ever reasons – portability, lightweight, convenience, safety – PET packaging
is helping brand owners sell product.
(Giles and Bockner 2002: 26)
Disposing of the disposable

In this final section, the focus is on processes of recycling PET bottles and the
multiple shadow realities of disposability. This shift to the ways in which dis-
posable bottles are actually disposed of inevitably reinforces a notion of
product life-cycle: it assumes that we have come to the end of the PET story.
A topological approach undermines this linearity in several ways. For a start,
the claim throughout this chapter has been that the qualities of PET – parti-
cularly its disposability – have to be enacted, and in different assemblages
these qualities are reconfigured. In invention and mass production, dis-
posability was enacted in relation to high-volume production processes and
increasing applications of plastic as a single-use material. In beverages mar-
kets, it was enacted in new packaging, drinking and discarding practices. In
recycling, disposability is enacted very differently. While recycling proces-
ses for PET bottles may seem spatially and temporally separate from pro-
duction and consumption, the anticipated future of the bottle as rubbish is
implicitly folded into these. Disposability is not a sequence of requalifications;
it is a dynamic and extensive event mapped out in multidimensional rela-
tionships. These relationships have calculative continuities in the sense that
there is always a pressure to optimize disposability, to make it a positive
value – a source of economic gain. However, these calculative processes are
also internal to the spaces in which they emerge; they are not imposed by
external forces or coordinates but are emergent (Lury 2009: 77). In this way,
topological thinking makes it possible to see how a space for recycling PET
bottles has continuities with the other spaces and temporalities bottles inha-
bit – that it is part of an open network of relationships of variation in which
the possibilities for PET are multiple and multiplying.
In order to develop this topological mode of thinking, one site where PET
bottles are recycled will be described – what are referred to as ‘plastic craft
villages’ on the urban fringes of Hanoi in Vietnam.5 These villages were
traditionally the site of various forms of craft production, such as weaving,
lacquer work or woodwork, which served the needs of the growing city. With
mechanization and significant economic growth over the last 30 years, these
craft skills have declined and many residents have shifted to servicing the
demands of Hanoi’s rapidly industrializing economy. One of the new func-
tions identified has been the development of recycling businesses in different
villages to deal with the accumulation of specific discarded materials from
plastics to paper. These villages are now crucial spaces for the management of
the growing amounts of urban and industrial waste that Hanoi produces
(Pearse 2010).
Though the focus here is on one place, Hanoi’s plastic craft villages are not
being used as an illustrative example or as representative of the much larger
phenomena of global plastics waste accumulation. They have to be considered
in their own right. This is not to deny that they are topologically connected to
other PET plastics waste regimes and sites of hazardous plastics accumulation
in Vietnam and elsewhere. Instead, it is to stick to the detail and map how
processes of recycling PET requalify disposability and generate a complex
network of new associations and calculations for bottles. It is to insist, as Law
(2004) argues, that the specific and the concrete are where complexity is
located.
The key task of the informal recycling businesses in Hanoi’s plastic villages
is to materially transform PET bottles and other discarded plastics in ways
that make them suitable for remanufacture: to convert the wasted plastic
object into a raw material. This involves the enactment of distinct labour
practices for dematerialization and the calculation of new values. Of course,
value is also being generated in the informal economies and translations that
shape collection and salvage of the bottles before they are delivered to the
plastic villages, but, in the actual villages, the material transformations of
recycling have to displace any semblance of the bottles’ original object form.
Recycling has to render remaindered stuff ‘formless in order to be reformed’
(Gabrys 2011: 138). This is not a waste-free process. According to Gabrys, the
idea that waste can be recycled without remainder is a myth:
Remainder acquires a duration and delay, circulates through spaces, and

undergoes material deformation and transformation but, it persists
nonetheless in one form or another … Recycling, in this sense, is never
complete and always generates more waste.
(Gabrys 2011: 138)
The disassembly of PET bottles involves an enormous variety of sequenced

actions. It involves working with the brute materiality of the plastic, particu-
larly its remarkable durability, in order to transform the object into a mater-
ial. In these actions, the very affordances that make the bottle disposable,
convenient and mobile now become physically recalcitrant and require sig-
nificant effort to transform. The choreography of recycling involves removing
the labels that were stuck on in a microsecond by machine, sorting the lids
into different-coloured plastics, cutting off the top of the bottle where the
different PVC plastic of the lid leaves a lip, rinsing, and then mechanically
crushing, shredding or melting.
To get to plastic pellets or reusable PET flakes is to wrestle with the pres-
ence of the bottle as a very tough object, where the calculation of new value is
difficult to realize. What makes recycling such a labour-intensive practice, and
64 Gay Hawkins
therefore often concentrated where labour is cheap, is the demands this plastic
makes on the human, the ways in which it refuses to cooperate in processes of
dematerialization and requalification. In processes of recycling, the power of
the PET bottle to demand certain technical and human actions is significant.
So too is its power to endure, to enact the temporality of durability by
resisting destruction.
This part of the recycling assemblage is not the point at which final waste is
averted. Breaking up PET bottles is a filthy, polluting process that is intri-
cately connected to and affected by the diverse flows of waste materials into
the villages, and distribution and export out. Many of the PET pellets and
chips go back to the Vietnamese plastics production industry as plastic scrap
to be mixed with new PET stock in bottle production or to be made into PET
fibre, or cheap plastic objects such as coat hangers or chairs (Pearse 2010).
Many also go to China for use in the manufacture of carpets and polar fleece.
In the plastic villages of Hanoi, we see how entrepreneurial household busi-
nesses make the most of the market opportunities that growing amounts of
PET and other disposable plastic wastes are generating. There are many suc-
cessful businesses in the plastic waste villages, and relatively affluent homes
where numerous employees are working. However, this success is very
exposed to fluctuations in the wider international demand for recycled plastic
scrap, as well as local levels of supply and demand. In these plastic villages,
discarded PET is helping to produce new economic subjectivities that are
certainly less precarious than those of the waste pickers on the streets of
Hanoi, who are typically the lowest and most vulnerable labourers in
recycling.
However, the idea that recycling represents the straightforward requalifica-
tion and commodification of plastic waste has to be challenged. This assumes
that plastic recycling markets simply express underlying economic or macro-
social structures. In contrast, analysis of Hanoi’s plastic villages shows that
they operate as ‘coordinating devices’ – that is, distinct assemblages for the
dematerialization of PET bottles and the calculation of new values for the
raw materials that they become. In these calculations, plastic presents par-
ticular challenges to the enactment of new values. While it is a willing parti-
cipant in enabling disposability – cheap to produce, light and tough – when it
is freed from its role as convenience packaging, it acquires a range of new
capacities that generate very distinct challenges to the calculations of new
value. It emerges as remarkably non-disposable.
Recycling PET bottles is far from straightforward or linear. As the plastic
villages of Hanoi show, it is a network of contingent and precarious relation-
ships, choreography and translations that enact various realities. The man-
agement of plastic waste through informal household businesses is one of
these, but this reality is shadowed by other realities that have significant
‘stealth effects’ (Law and Lien 2010: 11) – specifically, significant hazards to
humans and the environment. While there is no question that ‘new’ raw
materials are being produced, and that new economic capacities for discarded
plastic bottles are being made present, recycling is also a waste-creating real-
ity. This is evident in the materials that cannot be transformed and are
dumped, in the flows of polluted water and plastic sludge running into local
rivers, the toxic fumes being released and inhaled as PET is melted, and the
millions of plastic chips that blow away in the process. These polluting and
occupationally hazardous effects are also being enacted: they are part of the
emergent causation of the bottle becoming ‘recyclable’ and waste. They per-
sist because of poor environmental and occupational health regulations and
enforcement in Hanoi, especially in relation to the informal and household
sector that dominates in the plastic villages. This is the extensiveness of the
event of recycling PET bottles in Hanoi.
Conclusion
This chapter has mapped the shifting economies of disposability enacted by
PET bottles. While there is no question that the invention of this plastic
object has transformed the packaging and beverages industries, changed how
people drink and discard, and contributed to massive increases in the global
accumulation of plastics waste, the aim here has been to think topologically
rather than through the logic of inexorable effects. The value of accounting
for the emergence of PET topologically is that it renders ‘effects’ as complex
interconnections and processes of emergence rather than as predetermined
causality shaped by external coordinates. Effects do not express hidden logics
or general laws; rather, they emerge in the relational enactment of the PET
bottle’s various capacities. As DeLanda (2011) argues, capacities are different
from material properties; they are what is actualized when things are brought
into relation. Capacities, then, are always relational and they are always an
event (DeLanda 2011: 4).
Using DeLanda’s framework, we can see how the disposability of the PET
bottle is a quality or capacity that emerges in its enrolment in packaging,
beverages markets, consumption, recycling and more. These various assemb-
lages are structured by distinct spaces of possibility that shape how dis-
posability is actualized: as high turnover, as expendable, as convenience, as
one-way, as stubborn material recalcitrance. These assemblages are also con-
nected in heterogeneous relationships and exchanges. Things that seem dis-
tant – such as production and consumption, commodity and waste, global
and local – ‘turn out to be far more promiscuous and can be shown to be in
far closer proximity than one might initially imagine’ (Michael and Rosen-
garten 2012: 12). In this way, the single-use PET bottle can be considered a
conduit of topological relationships that mixes up plastics waste with plastics
production and consumption. The bottle is a medium by which the multiple
enactments of disposability become co-present and connect. That shows how
the ever-growing flow of plastic moves in chaotic and multiple directions. This
was a bottle made to be wasted, and its anticipated future is inscribed in its
multiple presents.
66 Gay Hawkins
Notes
1 It is a standard strategy in corporate campaigns against the introduction of
Extended Consumer Responsibility Schemes or Container Deposit Schemes to
argue that the waste effects of disposability are completely unrelated to market
activities.
2 See the special issue on ‘Topologies of Culture’ (2012) in Theory, Culture and
Society 29(4/5) for an overview of current debates.
3 Thanks to Andrea Westermann for this very suggestive point.
4 My use of emergence here is shaped by Harman’s (2009) discussion of Latour in
Prince of Networks. Harman argues that Latour’s position is that things are defined
by their relations and their outward relational effects on other things, not by their
internal composition: ‘Latour veers toward a functional concept of emergence: a
thing emerges as a real thing when it has new effects on the outside world, not
because of any integral emergent reality in the thing itself ’ (Harman 2009: 158).
5 This section is based on research carried out with the assistance of Warwick Pearse
in Hanoi during 2009. I thank him for his assistance.
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Free Press.
4 The material politics of vinyl
How the state, industry and citizens
created and transformed West Germany’s
consumer democracy
Andrea Westermann
British historian Richard Evans recently restated what has become common
sense among scholars of German history:
Germany today is the product of the ‘economic miracle’ of the 1950s and
1960s, when rapid recovery from the devastation of the war fuelled a
prosperity and stability in the German economy that finally reconciled
ordinary Germans to the virtues of democracy.
(Evans 2011)
Yet the positive relationship between economic prosperity and democratic

conviction foregrounded by Evans has too often remained an assumption,
corroborated with hindsight by West Germany’s peaceful trajectory through
the decades of Cold War. The ‘acceptance of democracy as a life form’ per-
sists as a ‘core problem’ of research (Jarausch 2005: 71). I argue that focusing
on vinyl helps to describe and explain exactly how West Germans appro-
priated the values of democracy. Polyvinyl chloride (PVC), better known as
vinyl, was the first fully synthetic thermoplastic produced by German indus-
try in the 1930s, and the one most widely used in West Germany until the
mid-1970s.1 This chapter traces its development and uses before and after
World War II. Before 1945, vinyl came into being on an industrial scale
within the context of the National Socialist economy of autarky and war.
After 1945, it provided infrastructural support, generated myriad commod-
ities and produced a distinct aesthetic for the reconstruction of post-war West
Germany. Together with other thermoplastics, vinyl became the iconic
material of the social market economy – or, as the accompanying political
culture has aptly been called, of West Germany’s consumer democracy
(Carter 1997: 24).
In the twentieth century, ‘consumption became a political project intimately
bound up with the state’ (Hilton 2007: 66). Following this trend, the West
German state sought to achieve social coherence and gain the loyalty of its
citizens by promising mass consumption and individual prosperity. Under the
auspices of the Allied powers and the US European Recovery Program in
particular, West Germany created its own version of liberal democracy. Based
The material politics of vinyl 69
on the social market economy, it offered its citizens a form of social inclusion
that was not overtly political but sought to give an economic connotation to
the democratic principles of individual participation in society and electoral
freedom. Citizens were perceived as consumer citizens who would engage in
the sphere of consumption rather than in the political arena (Merritt and
Merritt 1970: 43; Grosser et al. 1996: 97; Schildt 2000).
As with any other artefact, the focus on vinyl pays off methodologically
because it makes visible connections between the micro-level of individual
action and the level of collective or organizational action (Krohn 1989;
Latour 1983; Shove et al. 2007: 93–116; Thévenot 2001). However, this
mediating capacity does not account for all of vinyl’s power of historical
explanation. Vinyl’s exemplarity regarding the analysis of a consumer
democracy also comes from its basic material properties – in particular, its
malleability and synthetic origins. As a thermoplastic, vinyl melts and
becomes malleable when heated; thus, it came close to fulfilling the dream of
infinite potential uses and unlimited forms that the plastics industry had pro-
moted since the introduction of celluloid in the 1870s (Friedel 1983). Taken
together, vinyl’s plasticity and its chemical creation captured what high mod-
ernity expected from technology at large: a world freed from the material
restrictions that nature traditionally imposed on humanity. By implication, we
would also have a world freed of scarcity, a world of plenty. From the begin-
ning, modern plastics were produced, used and praised to help meet the needs
of a mass culture in the making. In Imperial Germany, ‘surrogates’, as they
were called, lowered the costs of production of desired commodities by means
of imitation, making luxury goods affordable to many (Koller 1893: vii). The
National Socialist economy of autarky and war was an economy of scarcity in
many ways, and, as a rule, ersatz products, already known from World War I,
figured prominently as indicators of want (Tooze 2006: 145–65). Against this
backdrop, I suggest that, even in the Third Reich, vinyl was found on the side
of abundance. Grounded in scientific progress and abundant supplies of coal,
its production forged a path to the systematic and continuous extension of
material resources. National Socialist politics increased and refined the know-
how involved in the mass production of vinyl. It also relied on the cultural
link between plastics and mass consumption.
However, to some people, vinyl was not a true indication of how science
and technology facilitated abundance in the twentieth century. Since the
1950s, it had given them reason to criticize what they believed was wrong
with the rise of mass culture. Thermoplastics became a symbol of the down-
side of affluent society. Malleability meant shoddiness, falsity and veneer.
Critics condemned thermoplastics for their superficiality and their cheap
copying of expensive materials and craftsmanship, all contributing to the
mere ‘façade luxury’ of the West German ‘economic miracle’ (Kogon 1964:
104). They felt that Ludwig Erhard’s ‘freedom of consumer choice’ was only a
‘surrogate of individual freedom’ (Freyer 1957: 112). Also, vinyl’s omnipres-
ence and non-biodegradability made waste problems tangible, and nowhere
70 Andrea Westermann
was this more evident than in the growing piles of discarded plastic pack-
aging. Furthermore, vinyl’s chemical composition created unintended health
hazards. As the critiques accumulated, overlapping and corroborating each
other, vinyl became a powerful source for the rise of consumer activism. The
widespread disappointment and concern about vinyl had a mobilizing effect
(Hirschman 1982). People started to re-evaluate the very foundations of West
Germany’s consumption-based political culture.2 In this way, vinyl served
both efforts: a consumer democracy conceived by the state in the immediate
post-war period and based on depoliticized notions of integration and abun-
dant choice, and the emergence of citizen activists who re-politicized con-
sumer democracy from the late 1960s onwards. The mechanisms of these two
modes of participation are explored in the latter sections of the chapter.
Finally, do plastics drive history? I take up this methodological question in
the concluding section in order to link my findings to the overall issue of the
book: the material politics of plastic.
The ‘better’ ersatz materials: thermoplastics in an economy

of autarky and war, 1933–45
Thermoplastics were mainly produced at chemical giant I.G. Farben, Germany’s
largest corporation in the interwar years. In 1927, 13 per cent of its sales
volume went into research and development (R&D) and half of that was spent
on developing new products such as thermoplastics. Even after cutting back
half of its R&D expenditure in 1931, I.G. Farben continued to invest 6 per
cent of its sales in research – a level unsurpassed by foreign rivals. Plastics’
share of the R&D budget shows that this field ‘counted among the most
important new research sectors between 1932 and 1935’ (Abelshauser 2004:
237, 267–68; Plumpe 1990: 337; Stokes 2000b: 405). In the early 1930s, the
I.G. Farben laboratories achieved impressive results. Vinyl turned out to be
the most interesting plastic because it was suitable for many purposes
(Plumpe 1990: 154, 333). Yet the first items made of vinyl were presented in
modest terms at a meeting of the newly established I.G. Farben committee on
plastics in October 1930 (Hoechst Company Archives 1966: 42). An engineer
had made some vinyl plates. Without considering them a ‘big success’, he
emphasized that compression moulding of PVC, ‘which to many of us had
seemed a hopeless substance’, had worked after all.3 By the mid-1930s, syn-
thetics were becoming ideal vehicles to comply with National Socialist decrees
of self-sufficiency. Two documents show how chemically produced ersatz
materials began to articulate the decrees: an I.G. Farben exposé on the ‘new
targets and tasks with respect to I.G. Farben’s politics of R&D and produc-
tion resulting from the developments in Germany and on the world market’,
drafted in 1935 (Hayes 1987: 128–30; Lindner 2008: 272–77), and Hitler’s
Four-Year Plan memorandum of 1936 (Treue 1955; for an English summary
Tooze 2006: 219–22). I.G. Farben’s internal memorandum reminded readers
that the changed world market in the aftermath of World War I had left the
corporation with only half of its export revenues due to German reparations,
new international competitors and increased state investments in these indus-
tries as a result of global rearmament efforts. The domestic market, in con-
trast, now made up 60 per cent of I.G. Farben sales, and promised a growing
demand for synthetic substitutes because most of them ‘may also become of
importance militarily’. The analysis stated the need for a private-sector com-
pany to ‘adjust to changes in foreign and domestic demand which have
already occurred and which are likely to be even more extensive’ (Lindner
2008: 264). The company readily turned its back on international markets in
exchange for a lucrative domestic economy of autarky and war.4
While the document testified to I.G. Farben’s self-mobilization, Hitler’s
memorandum of 1936 called for the general mobilization of industry. In
keeping with the future-oriented language of National Socialism, combining
promise and command (Ehlich 1989: 23–24), it pictured a pending emergency
situation to which the launch of a Four-Year Plan was a response. ‘Catas-
trophe was near’, Hitler proclaimed. The ‘final destruction’ of Germany
loomed large. He famously concluded that ‘the German economy must be fit
for war within four years’ (Treue 1955: 205, 210, 220). Hitler saw no point in
merely repeating that Germany lacked raw materials and foodstuffs. Referring
to industry’s flexibility, he polemically called for its representatives to join in
Germany’s struggle for survival and provide creative solutions:
Either we possess today a private industry, in which case its job is to rack
its brains about methods of production, or we believe that it is the gov-
ernment’s job to determine production methods, and in this case we have
no further need of private industry.
(Tooze 2006: 221)
Hitler modelled the solutions as technical ones and explicitly called for the
‘rapid’, ‘determined’ and ‘ruthless’ development and use of synthetic technol-
ogies. In radical jargon, he dismissed the issue of economic viability as ‘totally
irrelevant’ (Treue 1955: 208).
Hitler’s Four-Year Plan memorandum specifically mentioned synthetic
rubber, synthetic fuel, synthetic fat and light metals. Yet thermoplastics also
had a role in the material politics of National Socialism. It was often heard
that, in the case of mobilization, ‘we have to secure also the raw substances
and additives, all available in Germany, for plastics like polyvinyl chloride
or polystyrol’.5 This remained true even though thermoplastics’ share of
I.G. Farben’s overall investments in R&D and general plant construction
declined after 1940 and never competed with two of the most ambitious
ersatz programmes of both the state and the I.G. Farben corporation, syn-
thetic (air) fuel and synthetic rubber (Birkenfeld 1964; Lorentz and Erker
2003; Plumpe 1990: 338; Tooze 2006: 449). Exact numbers are hard to come
by, but a graph prepared by the Imperial Office of Economic Advancement
in 1940 visualized the production of thermoplastics. It showed that vinyl
and its various compounds that came under the name ‘Igelite’ remained the
most widely produced items within the emerging group of thermoplastics.6
‘Igelite’ was the plural form of ‘Igelit’, the I.G. trademark for polyvinyl
chloride, but other names for vinyl also existed. In different compositions it
was sold as Mipolam, Astralon or Luvitherm. In 1936, a total of 267 tons of
vinyl were produced, compared with 1,467 tons in 1938 and 11,000 tons in
1940. The plan was almost to double production by 1942. The war stimulated
the actual use of vinyl, as was confirmed by an I.G. Farben manager. He
explained that, while the vinyl production plant built in Bitterfeld in 1938 had
‘started out producing for the stockpile’, ‘things changed for the better for
vinyl, almost from one day to the next, because armament efforts led to a
lack of traditional materials’ (Westermann 2007: 317). By 1944, a vinyl quota
was officially allocated to 11 commissions set up within the war regime of
economic dirigisme.7 Vinyl substituted a variety of materials: glass, leather,
rubber and non-ferrous metals in the cable and pipe fitting industries, as well
as in the chemical and textile industries.8 At the end of the war, considerable
experience with polymerizing vinyl on a large scale, and with wide-ranging
technical applications of the thermoplastic, had been developed. For instance,
innovations regarding polymerizing procedures had been made, which dra-
matically increased the quantities of vinyl produced at one time (Westermann
2007: 76).
The early uses of vinyl not only yielded technical know-how, but also
forged vinyl’s symbolic association with growing mass consumption. Plastic
experts justified the significance of vinyl by celebrating its properties. To the
developers, vinyl and other thermoplastics were not like other ersatz mater-
ials: they were ‘better’ ersatz materials for various reasons. Recycling of
materials and the long-term planning of raw material supplies simply per-
petuated traditional practices of economic thrift. Thermoplastic research,
in contrast, revealed untapped opportunities. Unlike synthetic fuel or food,
these surrogates were not confined to substituting particular natural resour-
ces, but lent themselves to a variety of industrial uses, driving innovations in
the industries processing them into finished goods. They were suited not only
to coping with shortage but also to achieving post-war prosperity. By 1932,
I.G. Farben and its partners had already produced prototypes of virtually all
the vinyl commodities that would be in use by the late 1950s. ‘Soap boxes,
containers, balls, bowls … jam jars, other packaging cans, cups’ were extru-
ded out of hard and soft PVC films, and the list was getting longer, includ-
ing ‘bed linen, posters, passport covers, dials and other printed foils,
windows, shields for gas masks, records, movable type for letterpress print-
ing’.9 In the early 1930s, those researching and developing vinyl expected a
flourishing mass culture to emerge. Even as the Nazi economy of autarky and
war started to restructure both market realities and business organization in
the mid-1930s, plastics scientists and engineers emphasized the ‘promise’
rather than the ‘command’ side of National Socialist propaganda: ‘It is up
to the German chemists to fine-tune the material properties and make them,
according to requirements, solid or liquid, soft or flexible, hard or brittle’,
declared the editor of the journal Vierjahresplan and head of the chemical
section of the Four-Year Plan organization, Johannes Eckell (1937: 283).
Plastic pioneers diverted notions of factual constraint and ersatz towards
ideas of innovation (the name ‘Neustoffe’ was suggested to replace ersatz),
feasibility and variety, including peacetime uses (Leysieffer 1935: 6).10 This
sense of long-term change and creativity associated with their objects of
study was well founded: they felt they were part of a new and exciting field
of research: macromolecular chemistry (Furukawa 1998; Westermann 2007:
60–80).
National Socialism started to use vinyl for the production of finished
consumer goods: raincoats, shower curtains, shoe soles and shoes, or the
inner walls of the planned ‘people’s refrigerator’ (Westermann 2007: 49, 80).
At times, politics explicitly strengthened the link between thermoplastic
goods and the opportunities for the good life these commodities promised.
The official market launch of vinyl took place in 1937 at the Düsseldorf
exhibition ‘Reichsausstellung Schaffendes Volk’. The event was intended
to display the regenerative effects that the Four-Year Plan was having on
the German economy (n.a. 1937a). The idea that the state could provide
access to goods and services for the many, thus finding popular resonance
and emotionally binding its citizens to the larger political and social order,
was one the National Socialist regime took seriously. With the ‘people’s
community’ (Volksgemeinschaft), it offered a racist vision of an affluent
mass society. For the purposes of persuasion and consent, National Socialists
explored and used the logics of mass consumption – even though historical
research is divided about the extent to which the regime was able to provide
for consumer capitalist climate and infrastructure (Abelshauser 1998; König
2004; Spoerer 2005; Wiesen 2011). At any rate, the Reichsausstellung was
an extraordinary publicity campaign for synthetics of every kind: the ther-
moplastics Igelit and polystyrol, acrylic glass, the half-synthetic staple fibre
‘vistra’, the synthetic rubber ‘buna’ and synthetic fuel.11 Foreign observers
were impressed with ‘the extent to which the Germans are developing the
mass production of synthetic materials, for the perfection of the finished pro-
duct and for the many uses to which they are putting them’ (Tolischius
1937: 6). Yet thermoplastics were modern everywhere. At the World Fair in
Paris, held in the same year, prizes were awarded to I.G. Farben’s vinyl.12
To summarize: in National Socialist Germany, thermoplastics’ ersatz iden-
tity complemented the ideological imperative of coping with the adversities
ensuing from a permanent state of exception. Yet the use of thermoplas-
tics had been more than a mere emergency measure. The malleability of
thermoplastics carried a surplus of meaning fuelled by older visions of sur-
rogates on the one hand and the advances of macromolecular chemistry on
the other.
Vinyl as a medium of consumer democratic integration
and communication
This surplus was activated after the war. In West Germany, vinyl’s plasticity
rapidly came to stand for the consumer citizen’s freedom to choose. Time and
again, texts and talks promoting the regime of a social market economy
asserted that ‘democracy and free economy went together naturally’ (Löffler
2002: 576). In 1956, Alfred Müller-Armack, who coined the concept ‘soziale
Marktwirtschaft’, explained that the programme combined elements of eco-
nomic and social theory, and would ‘through further expansion, raise the
standard of living of all social groups’ (Müller-Armack 1956: 392). Purchas-
ing power and consumption made almost everybody feel as if they were
‘already sharing in the abundance and luxury of the everyday’; most import-
antly, as sociologist Helmut Schelsky stated in the mid-1950s, ‘participation
is considered a civil right’ (Schelsky 1965: 340). In technical terms, the
exchange of commodities served as a vehicle of social inclusion: it tied con-
sumer citizens to a social course of action. The post-war advocates of mass
prosperity perceived this form of affiliation as a sorely needed objectification
(Versachlichung) of political belonging (König 1965a: 485; König 1965b:
468). In their view, the emerging West German consumer democracy dif-
fered – as it should – from the stridently politicized ideal of the National
Socialist Volksgemeinschaft.
The first testimony to vinyl’s role in the changed circumstances of post-war
Germany came from amidst the rubble of the bombed-out city of Berlin. As
early as 1946, architect Hans Scharoun, head of the urban planning depart-
ment in Berlin, praised the ‘light, purely chemically produced material which
has until now not been used for building purposes’.13 This material would
be able to ease the shortage of mass housing after the devastation of World
War II. In the ruins of the Berlin Royal Palace, he exhibited models of ‘mass-
produced full-plastic houses’ made entirely of vinyl (Tschanter 1946). The
Allied authorities had specified the design and the technical criteria for var-
ious house types called ‘America’, ‘England’, ‘France’ and ‘Russia’. Scharoun
himself had at least projected the fifth house type, ‘Germany’. The models
were displayed on a 1:5 scale. Different types of vinyl and vinyl compounds
were used for the walls, the roof, the windows and doorframes, the pipes
and the electrical infrastructure (Böttcher 1946; Hausen 1947). The three
functions of stone walls – support, cubature and insulation – were distributed
on three plastics elements: a frame construction, an outer skin and an insu-
lation layer. The total weight of the 65 m2 house amounted to 3 tons, which
was 40 times lighter than traditional houses.
Given the acute housing shortage Europe faced in the immediate aftermath
of the war (Diefendorf 1993), it seemed more than reasonable that the con-
struction industry should exploit the possibilities of rationalization. Yet,
although Berlin would have been an obvious site for installing the pre-
fabricated houses, Scharoun transcended the desperate situation of his home.
The thermoplastic houses promised to ‘solve the housing problem the whole
world is grappling with’. Inadvertently perhaps, the architect presented uni-
versally useful engineering work ‘made in Germany’ as political reparations.
He hoped to correct the dominant image of a destructive Germany. The
emphasis placed on design and the choice of five types of house pointed
beyond the idea of temporary emergency shelters. The post-war meaning of
vinyl’s plasticity, denoting customization and plenty, started to take shape in
the house models. Scharoun eclipsed the imperative of tackling wartime con-
straints that consumers might associate with ersatz materials by foreground-
ing the idea of a ‘peaceful reconstruction of the world’. In this view, vinyl
promised to ensure global prosperity, diversity and individual economic
recovery.14 Similarly, at the Nuremberg Trials against the managers of
I.G. Farben corporation in December 1947, the defence lawyer of the Lud-
wigshafen Director Otto Ambros gave the malleability of thermoplastics a
touch of universal humanitarianism:
It becomes evident here that, due to almost limitless possibilities in the

choice of primary materials and of methods, it is possible to give the final
product any desired quality that will best suit it to human needs.
(Trials of War Criminals 1953: 279)
The wording might have been chosen with care in a trial the indictment of
which accused the defendants ‘of major responsibility for visiting upon man-
kind the most searing and catastrophic war in human history’ (Trials of War
Criminals 1953: 99). The lawyer presented his client as a visionary protagonist
of the dawning ‘age of plastics’ (Trials of War Criminals 1953: 279). The
attractive formula, created in the United States (Meikle 1995: 73), soon
gained traction in Germany. In 1950, a plastics scientist justified the new
designation of the epoch by asserting that synthetics were ‘the material that
best suited our fast … and highly diversifying time’ (Stoeckhert 1950: 279).
Thermoplastic malleability promised a free hand in dealing with the
challenges of the present era, rapid change and individualism.
Thermoplastics complied with and furthered the strategy of consumer-
targeted diversification like no other mass-produced material before them.
They were capable of imitating virtually everything and adopting just about
every material quality. How, though, was the plastics industry to explain this
good news to industrial manufacturers and consumers? How could it explain
exactly what enabled thermoplastics’ versatility? In 1952, an educational
exhibit in Düsseldorf, extending over a surface of 800 m2, provided some
answers. It was part of the plastics trade fair K’52, the first major event
organized by the plastics industry after the Reichsausstellung in 1937.
Visited by 165,000 people, the K’52 Trade Fair was an elaborate scheme to
promote plastics and its experts (n.a. 1952). The ‘Alphabet of Plastics’ exhib-
ition was dedicated to the physical and chemical properties of thermoplastics,
the ‘matter without structure or texture as we know it’ (Saechtling 1952).15
It offered a five-step exercise in scaling down from the ‘diameter of the
earth to the atomic nucleus’ in order to attune visitors to the macromolecular
world of polymer matter. Visitors learned that the ‘manifold appearances’ of
plastic were thanks not only to the fact that different substances – such as
melamine, vinyl or polyethylene – were grouped together, but also that the
diversity of synthetics was the result of molecular manipulation. Through
combinatory methods, atoms and molecules were linked together in macro-
molecules that could yield any desired property. The exhibition was made
with some care, and did not shy away from the complexities of the subject.
Vinyl was chosen as the exemplary object of demonstration. A three-dimensional
‘calotte model’ revealed its molecular structure and explained the properties
of the material. The model consisted of spherical caps tangent to each other.
Also known as a ‘space-filling model’, it was a physicist’s contribution to
ongoing plastics research rooted in organic chemistry (Westermann 2007:
102–10).
According to its creator, Herbert Stuart from Hanover, older models
representing the atoms as whole spheres or balls gave a distorted picture of
how the macromolecules extended in space. Due to the overlapping of the
spaces taken up by the electrons in each atom of a molecule, the relative size
of the different atoms and their ‘true spatial arrangement’ could be depicted
only if the material entities representing the atoms had the shape of spherical
caps instead of whole balls or spheres (Stuart 1952: 101–2). Stuart had mar-
keted his calottes as model kits since the 1930s, as did Linus Pauling in the
United States (Francoeur 1997). In the second half of the twentieth century,
these space-filling models became standard practice in science and science
education. At K’52, industry presented thermoplastics in ways that were fas-
cinating to scientists and the public alike. The vinyl model was the first space-
filling model of polyvinyl chloride ever produced. The representational
accuracy of the exhibition highlighted the message directed at the visitors:
that the plastics industry was guided by scientific diligence and reason in
whatever it did, whether regarding economic decision-making or offering
technical solutions to other branches of industry.
West Germans quickly incorporated plastics in their everyday lives. The per
capita consumption of all plastics increased from 1.9 kg in 1950 to 15 kg in
1960. By 1962, West Germans were the leading consumers of synthetics in
Europe, ahead even of the Americans at 21.4 kg versus 18.1 kg per capita
(Reuben and Burstall 1973: 35). Three industries most conspicuously worked
towards mass prosperity and all three were involved in the growth of plastics
consumption: the construction industry, the industry of (electronic) mass
consumer goods, and the packaging industry. All of them used extruded or
moulded vinyl, and hard and soft vinyl foils, to reconstruct the materials and
spaces of daily life.
Plastic packaging, in particular, facilitated mass consumption. Vinyl allowed
for improved methods of logistics, storage, conservation and sale. The new
ways of handling and distributing commodities in retail and wholesale were
not only based on plastic containers and plastic bags, but also required an
improved stackability of goods, achieved by material innovations like shrink-
wrap.16 Shrink foils were part and parcel of palletizing, and standardized
pallets were used for efficient transport and storage; the pallets, in turn, were
only one element among others in the revolutionizing of the global value
chain (Dommann 2009; Girschik 2010). The plastics industry estimated that
360,000 tons of plastics had gone into the packaging sector in 1969; the esti-
mates for 1972 were already much higher, namely 969,000 tons (Stoeckhert
1975: 241).17
The built environment was increasingly being made of thermoplastics:
building façades, the quilted walls of cinema theatres, tablecloths, public
transport upholstery and much more (Westermann 2008). These interiors were
examples of ‘small consumption’, already affordable for many and envisioning
a full-blown prosperity yet to come (Betts 2001: 185–217; Westermann 2007:
190–201). They also represented the normalcy that found its expression in
smooth, undamaged surfaces – this was in strong contrast to the rubble and
destruction of war.
Product designers and architects took advantage of vinyl’s aesthetic flexi-
bility. Art leather made of vinyl was used prominently in urban transportation
systems, the national railways and cars. J.H. Benecke, a leatherworking com-
pany from Hanover, had been substituting vinyl for leather or fabric since
the early 1940s, and became an important manufacturer of vinyl films a
decade later. Guided by concerns about what constituted the typical feel and
texture of leather, J.H. Benecke’s chemical engineers turned to the material
sciences and developed methods of material testing in an attempt to appreci-
ate the consumer’s perspective and experience. In order to achieve technical
standards for vinyl processing and perfect their art of imitation, they aimed to
quantify people’s ideas about usefulness and their intimate knowledge of
traditional materials (Westermann 2007: 172–76). Vinyl also helped realize
and revive a sober aesthetic of functionality. In the post-war period, the non-
grandiose aesthetic of functionality soon became linked to West Germany’s
political culture. The Bonn parliament was modelled on these standards in
1949. Vinyl flooring was considered to be the adequate foundation of the
newly established parliamentary routine. Designed as a ‘space for dialogue’,
the architecture and interior design of the building sought to resonate with
‘the human voice’. The voices should neither sound cold or hard, nor be
swallowed by ‘the dusty media of representation deadening any tone with
stucco, carpet, curtain, cushion’. Materials were chosen from the ‘sober
and strict media of a technical age’ instead: ‘iron, aluminium, painted walls,
synthetic flooring’ (Schwippert 1951: Preface, 68).
However, the extensive use of plastics did provoke highbrow critique. This
opposition expressed elitist scepticism about West Germany’s political road.
Both left-leaning and conservative intellectuals aired their suspicions of the
poor power of aesthetic judgement their fellow citizens exhibited by buying
bright and colourful plastic things. What did these choices reveal about their
political preferences and the political climate? Author Hans Magnus Enzens-
berger reviewed the mail order catalogue sent to every household by the pio-
neer in this business, Neckermann, in 1960. The catalogue, he concluded, was
more than a product of commercial calculation: ‘It is the result of an invisible
plebiscite.’ Arguing with an instrument hardly provided for in West Ger-
many’s Constitutional Law, Enzensberger foregrounded the dangerous super-
iority of the sovereign. He deconstructed the plebiscite’s outcome. The
majority of West Germany had voted for ‘petty bourgeois hell’. Everywhere,
the writer detected ‘reactionary garbage, hidden behind polished polyester
surfaces’, and ‘surrogate art’. Unfailingly, the plastic products evoked tradi-
tional oppositions: dirty vs. clean, authentic vs. surrogate, surface vs. sub-
stance (Enzensberger 1962: 141, 149). Wolfgang Koeppen’s protagonist in The
Hothouse (2002), a novel about the early years of the Federal Republic of
Germany, is equally explicit in his refusal to accept the political status quo. A
member of the Bonn parliament, he fiercely rejects the contract offered by
consumer democracy: ‘Don’t take part, don’t participate, don’t sign on the
dotted line, don’t be a consumer or a subject … Ascetic Keetenheuve. Kee-
tenheuve disciple of Zen.’ The shop window family he passes in a night-time
Bonn street disgusts him because ‘the grinning father, the grinning mother
and the grinning child’ staring delightedly at their price tags seem to embody
the consumer citizens he abhors: ‘They lead a clean, cheap, ideal life. Even
the provocatively thrusting belly of the fashionable doll, the little slut, was
clean and cheap, it was synthetic: In her womb was the future’ (Koeppen
2002: 155–57).
Hazardous material: consumers redefine consumer citizenship

By the late 1960s, the optimistic vision of collective prosperity was curbed by
the scenario of a ‘landscape soon overflowing in every nook and cranny with
litter and rubbish’. Non-biodegradable synthetics were seen as responsible for
this trend. In his 1971 book Müllplanet Erde [The Earth – A Planet of Waste],
Hans Reimer declared: ‘Fighting waste amounts to either fighting the excres-
cences of plastic consumption or fighting specific characteristics of plastics’
(Reimer 1971: 62; on the West German history of plastic waste, see Wester-
mann, 2013). The piling up of plastic waste seemed to undermine the idea of
a steady flow of goods as a mechanism of social integration. In 1973, the
suspected carcinogenicity of the vinyl chloride monomer (VCM), from which
polyvinyl chloride was made, gave rise to new concerns about the impact of
plastic. The concerns were substantiated soon afterwards. Severe forms of
liver cancer (hemangiosarcoma) in workers were found to relate to the pro-
duction process of vinyl (Westermann 2007: 239–88). The discussion of plastic
waste was an expression of the crisis the West Germans were facing due to the
inadvertent consequences of their consumption-based political culture. The
news of occupational cancer in the vinyl industry only aggravated the situa-
tion. Recognition of the hitherto unacknowledged material forces of plastic
prompted consumers to reclaim their political power and speak out against
vinyl consumption. By turning vinyl into an object of political concern,
people added a new facet to vinyl’s communicative function. Consumer citi-
zens initiated a change in political culture, and, while doing so, challenged the
alleged passivity of the consumer citizen fostered by the early conceptions of
West Germany’s consumer democracy.
The hot phase of anti-plastic activism started in the small city of Troisdorf,
near Cologne. Once VCM’s carcinogenicity was confirmed, a lobby group
filed a suit on behalf of 40 out of the 130 workers directly involved with the
production of PVC at Dynamit Nobel AG in Troisdorf. Taking the hazards of
thalidomide as an example, the lobby group wanted the government and
Dynamit Nobel AG to establish a foundation that would take care of the
victims, both financially and medically. The West German VCM and PVC
industry comprised 6,500 workers in the early 1970s, 1,000 of whom were
directly exposed to the vinyl chloride monomer. Counted from the time of its
mass industrial inception in the late 1930s, around 3,600 workers had pre-
sumably been exposed to the monomer. In May 1974, 80 cases of occupa-
tional health disease were reported, with most cases found among the
employees of Dynamit Nobel AG.
Local activism continued. The health hazards were neither Dynamit
Nobel’s in-house problems nor singular cases to be dealt with by occupational
health and safety administration alone. Activists shifted the boundaries of the
workplace beyond the factory to the city council, by pointing out that the
workers of Dynamit Nobel were part of Troisdorf ’s citizenry:
You might say this is not our concern. Health and safety hazards at the
workplace are none of the city’s business. We approach the issue differ-
ently, since in our view, a city has an all-encompassing responsibility
towards its citizens, including their workplace conditions.18
In their view, the VCM health hazards added to Troisdorf ’s long-standing

conflict with the company. Complaints about Dynamit Nobel had been made
regularly since the factory had extended its production facilities in 1966. For
the immediate neighbourhood, the circumstances of production had proved to
be scandalous. Noise and phenol pollution had been a constant problem, and
the risk of explosions threatened adjacent houses.19
In Troisdorf, widening the local group of those concerned turned occupa-
tional hazards into broader environmental problems for the city. The same
strategy of generalization was applied on a national level. However, expos-
ing the VCM-related health hazards on a national platform did not depend
so much on the toxic situation in and near the PVC production plants as it
did on the plastic itself. News about the carcinogenicity of the VCM, released
in late 1973, caused the national press to look into the consequences for
everyone: ‘Will we have to renounce plastics?’ (n.a. 1974). As with plastic
waste, the public considered the dramatic success of vinyl, its omnipresence,
to have become its most problematic feature. Journalists and critics typic-
ally approached the issue by enumerating the most diverse applications of
vinyl: ‘Whoever talks of plastics, has to talk of vinyl. Almost everything
can be made out of it, for example plastic buckets, floor coverings or
bags’ (n.a. 1975); ‘Tubes and shutters, chamber pots and daily requisites,
curtains and films, trinkets and trash, nearly everything can be made out
of vinyl’ (n.a. 1973). A citizens’ initiative, addressing parliament, feared that
‘the cancer risk extends to the whole population because PVC products
like bottles, cans, boxes etc., are widely used. Safety factors and protec-
tion measures should be far-reaching enough to encompass vinyl’s entire
consumership’.20
The threat of cancer, latently existent in older critiques of synthetics and
their ‘chemicalizing’ of the modern everyday, became firmly attached to vinyl
and, by implication, other thermoplastics (Westermann 2007: 293–301).
Accumulating and metabolized in the human body, the chemical agent
VCM did not need any particular sociological framing in order to become
apparent as a biological force. Vinyl also developed social force because the
plastic’s properties and toxic presence made people reconsider the very foun-
dations of consumer democracy. Citizens put forward their critique in terms
of highest values or the ‘common good’ (for a very useful sociology of cri-
tique, see Boltanski and Thévenot 1991). To the common goods of shared
prosperity and freedom of choice, as defined by the social market economy,
they added the value of physical integrity. Letter writers insisted that health
was the most important common good that the federal state must guaran-
tee. Drawing on paragraph 2 of the Federal Republic’s Constitutional Law,
they defended and reclaimed their right to health. Fearing that this right
was being trampled on, a ‘Working Committee for the Environmental Pro-
tection of East Frisia’ wrote in response to the TV documentary PVC – a
Danger and its Downplaying, ‘What will you do to ensure that the consumer’s
fundamental right to personal physical integrity is protected against the
risks of dealing with materials containing vinyl?’21 In another line of argu-
ment, consumers wanted to be given information about dealing with plastics.
They contended that the lack of plastic product information undermined
the idea of electoral freedom. In their opinion, only those who were well
informed would be able to exercise the consumer citizen’s right to choose and
thus be the all-decisive market force envisioned by the social market econo-
mists. Ministry officials dealing with consumer protection acknowledged
that, as a rule, ‘the average consumer’ lacked technical information about
science-based products like thermoplastics, and thus agreed with the analysis
of many consumers. As one official put it, while generalizing the problem
created by plastics: ‘It seems to me, that this is the actual weak point in our
social market economy.’22
Conclusion
Does vinyl have material politics? The question recalls Langdon Winner’s
essay of 1980, ‘Do Artifacts Have Politics?’ in which he argues that artefacts –
in particular, large technical systems – are made and established to settle
political issues in a community. Describing how technologies work towards
historical change or to preserve continuity, Winner’s essay has become a
blueprint for understanding how political processes are embodied in materials
and artefacts. Once put in place, artefacts transform both the built environ-
ment and the social order according to certain political preferences. Due
to their materiality, artefacts and infrastructure tend to cement the power
relations that led to their implementation. Winner advocates a soft version of
technological determinism. The material form and built-in logics of a certain
technology shape organizational logics, as well as the thinking and routines of
individual users.
Materials are artefacts of a special kind. I have suggested in this chapter
that the social impact of materials might best be captured by studying their
properties and changing meanings attached to these properties. Vinyl makes
for a striking example of soft technological determinism because it embo-
dies a deliberately engineered flexibility. Vinyl made people interpret both its
versatility and the chemical causes of its versatility in discursive ways, by
simple use or by way of engineering and design. In a pragmatic approach,
I have explored people’s dealings with vinyl because the material politics of
vinyl are not self-imposing. I have asked whether and how we can show that
some explicit or implicit ideas of social order are at work in using or not
using this plastic.
In a pragmatic approach, I have explored people’s dealings with vinyl
because the material politics of vinyl are not self-evident. I have asked whe-
ther and how we can show that some explicit or implicit ideas of social order
are at work in using, not using or prohibiting this plastic. Materials do not
simply vanish once they have ‘congealed into objects’ but ‘continue to mingle
and react’ (Ingold 2007, 9). Not only do they threaten ‘the things they com-
prise with dissolution’, as Ingold warns. They can also pose a threat to con-
sumers of these materials due to hazardous emissions or form a serious
challenge to waste management due to their toxicity or non-biodegradability.
Such forces may only unfold over time – which is why historians need to
engage in charting the flows of plastic and many other materials.
The material politics of vinyl have proven powerful throughout the twen-
tieth century. Vinyl was indispensable in bringing about West Germany’s
consumer democracy, but vinyl’s material properties became implicated in the
political legitimation of very different political regimes. Whether in National
Socialist Germany or during the regime of the German Democratic Republic,
twentieth-century German governments delivered or began to deliver their
promise of abundance by filling shelves, furnishing homes and designing
public spaces with vinyl and other plastics (Stokes 2000a).
Notes
1 The material and arguments presented here are based on my book Plastik und
politische Kultur in Westdeutschland (2007); as for vinyl in the National Socialist
economy of war, the chapter re-evaluates the material gathered in the book.
2 The changes in West German political culture were not brought about by vinyl
alone. See Westermann, 2013.
3 Hoechst Company Archives UA BASF D 03.4/1 Kuko Wissenschaftliche Referate
Bitterfeld, Düneberg, Eilenburg etc, 2. Sitzung, Referat Dr. Klatte-Rheinfelden,
Über Vinylchlorid, no date, 1 and 6.
4 The road had been taken earlier: see Petzina (1968: 250) for the ‘fuel contract’ of 1933.
5 Federal Archives BA Freiburg RW 19/2484, GEHEIM, An Wa A, Sicherstellung
des Rohstoffbedarfs für Kunstwerkstoffe, 1936.
6 BA Berlin R 3112/172, fig. 5 Produktion der thermoplastischen Kunststoffe 1936–42,
16.4.1940.
7 BA Berlin R8 VIII/245 Akten betr. Erzeugung, Rohstoffzuteilung und Verteilung
von Kunststoffen, besonders von Polyvinylchlorid, Igelit, Weichmacher und Mipolam.
8 BA Berlin R 8 VIII/238 Deutsche Linoleumwerke AG Werk Delmenhorst,
20.11.44, betr. Igelit: 1.
9 UA BASF D 03.4/1 Kuko Wissenschaftliche Referate Bitterfeld, Düneberg, Eilenburg
etc., 12. Sitzung, Referat Pungs, Troisdorf, 8.6.1934, Praktische Aussichtsmöglichkeiten
für die neu entwickelten Kunststoffe: 4–5.
10 BA Berlin R 3112/172, Aufgaben und Ziele der weiteren Entwicklung der Kunststoffe,
Prof. Kramer 25.4.40.
11 ‘“Schaffendes Volk”. Große Reichsausstellung in Düsseldorf ’ 1937: 200. The
‘Plastics Exhibit Hall’ was covered with vinyl flooring, see Kaufman 1969: 173.
12 Trials of War Criminals 1953: 279. In Paris, the US company B.F. Goodrich also
featured vinyl as a material of the future; see Blackford and Kerr 1996: 182.
13 State Archives LA Berlin Sign. 06930, Berlin plant. Ein Erster Bericht. Professor
Hans Scharoun, in: Ausblick. Aufbaunachrichten der ‘Berliner Ausstellungen’.
Berlin im Aufbau. Schau der Arbeit und Planung für das NEUE BERLIN, 1946: 7.
14 LA Berlin Sign. 06930, Berlin plant: 7.
15 BA Koblenz B 102/9301, Vermerk 23.9.1952 Lehrschau, Anhang: Die Lehrschau
Kunststoffe auf der Fachmesse und Leistungsschau Deutsche Kunststoffe v. 11. bis
19.10.1952: 1.
16 BA Koblenz B 106/25191, VKE Frankfurt, 12.1.1971 an BMI Hösel: 3; B 106/
12853, Statement RG Verpackung für die Anhörung am 13.10.77 vom 10.10.1977,
1; BA Koblenz B 106/25131 Niederschrift über die Besprechung am 2. Juli 1969 im
BM für Gesundheitswesen in Bad Godesberg, statement of the chemical industry: 4.
17 BA Koblenz B 106/25131 Niederschrift über die Besprechung am 2. Juli 1969 im
BM für Gesundheitswesen in Bad Godesberg, statement of the chemical industry,
Anlage 1. According to an industry newsletter quoted in Schmidt-Bachem (2001:
240, note 1), every West German used 20 plastic bags in 1971. On the history of
plastic packaging from an environmental and cultural history perspective, see Nast
(1997); Teuteberg (1995); Hawkins (2010).
18 BA Koblenz B 149/27871, Dr. Wilhelm Nöbel am 21.1.1974 im Rat der Stadt.
19 City Archives Troisdorf W.I.G. 2.3.II Dynamit Nobel AG 1972–74, Gerhard E. an
Minister Deneke, 27.12.1973.
20 BA Koblenz B 149/27872, Hannah S., Gesellschaft für menschliche Lebensordnung e.
V. Leer 18.10.1976.
21 BA Koblenz B 149/27872 Arbeitskreis für Umweltschutz Norden/Ostfriesland,
14.10.1976.
22 BA Koblenz B 102/9293a, Dr. Schaller 5.11.59, Kunststoffe, hier: Unterrichtung
der Verbraucher über Kunststoffe und deren Eigenschaften.
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Gesellschaften, Hamburg: Hans Christians, 21–53.
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5 Paying with plastic
The enduring presence of the credit card
Joe Deville
Reflecting on VISA’s early years, its founder, Dee Hock, draws attention away
from the material composition of the credit card and towards what he sees as
its real function:
The [credit] card was no more than a device bearing symbols for the
exchange of monetary value. That it took the form of a piece of plastic
was nothing but an accident of time and circumstance. We were really in
the business of the exchange of monetary value.
(Hock 2005: 143)
Hock’s marginalization of the role of plastic is to be expected, given the way

in which monetary objects are thought about – both popularly and in social
scientific discourse – as things that come to matter because of their ability to
negate their materiality and act as passive mediators of value. This chapter,
however, opens up for examination this simple ‘accident of time and circum-
stance’, and explores how the plastic in the plastic card can indeed matter to
the composition of the consumer credit market assemblage, in both moments
of borrowing and default.1
All monetary objects – credit cards as much as bank notes and coins – are
material things that can be considered as ‘economic devices’ or ‘economic
agencements’ (Muniesa et al. 2007; Mcfall 2009).2 At its simplest, this means
that a monetary object – like many objects and processes – ‘renders things,
behaviors and processes economic’ (Muniesa et al. 2007: 3).3 They do not do
so alone, however. The success of the particular object inserted between the
economic exchange of an ideal typical buyer and seller is dependent on
the security and predictability of its relationship with a diverse and complex
range of associated actors, both human and non-human.
Yet it is not simply the transactional device’s insertion into a broader net-
work of processes that matters.4 For, as the recent material turn in economic
sociology has shown, and drawing on a longer interrogation of materiality in
science and technology studies (STS), devices themselves can shape the course
of economic action.5 Martha Poon’s work provides a relevant example: she
88 Joe Deville
shows how the credit score, as it has moved into the related but distinct arena
of mortgage underwriting, is a device that has had specific impacts on the
conditions of economic possibility, generating ‘novel pathways of micro-
economic market participation which have gradually become amplified …
into macroeconomic circuits of capital flow’ (Poon 2009: 669).
The objects at the centre of this chapter do not need to be brought into
view from behind the scenes of consumer credit; the cards that smooth so
many people’s passages through consumer spaces are a recognizable part of
our everyday lives. These are the devices that are at the ‘frontline’ of many
forms of consumer credit-enabled economic exchange (not all – for instance,
unsecured bank loans are also a form of consumer credit). Returning to
Michel Callon’s classic account of economic ‘framing’ (Callon 1998: 199),
they are objects that enable the stabilization of transactional frames, allowing
an ideal typical buyer and seller to enter an economic space and, via the
handover and acceptance of the card, be ‘detached’, able to leave each other
without any unwanted connections or ‘attachments’ (also described in terms
of movements of ‘entanglement’ and ‘disentanglement’) (Callon 1998; Callon
et al. 2002; Callon and Muniesa 2005; Muniesa et al. 2007; Mcfall 2009;
Muniesa 2009).6
Such moments of stabilization are also necessarily provisional, inherently
involving concomitant processes of exclusion and externalization. Processes of
detachment are thus always dependent on the ‘outside’ of the moment of
exchange which can, depending on circumstance, re-intrude. Viviana Zelizer
(1997, 2002) has shown how this can apply to monetary objects as much
as any other, tracking the way they can be imbued with social understand-
ings and, as a corollary, become implicated in generating social consequences
that are quite unrelated to the economic value associated with them. It is thus
not only the value of monetary media that matters, but also the socially
derived ‘values’ that come to be attached to them.7
Yet Zelizer, like Hock, misses the fact that the material composition of the
monetary medium might also be important in shaping social and economic
life. Specifically, hers is an understanding in which the social acts through, or
becomes attached to, forms of money, with the materiality of money assumed
to be the a priori condition for the expression of cultural values. This is not a
general critique: in many situations, the materiality of the monetary object
may not obviously matter, for the very reason that powerful, performative
socio-technical assemblies exist to render their material properties often of
little relevance to everyday users. However, as this chapter argues, this is –
depending on the actor or historical moment – not always either relevant or
successful or desired. In these cases, the sociomaterial composition of monies
may indeed matter. This is thus an argument for considering monetary objects
as continually processual entities, the material presence of which should never
be assumed to be an irrelevance. That is to say, monetary objects always
retain the capacity, under certain conditions, to become directly implicated in
causal effects that are generated co-constitutively with their users.
Paying with plastic: The credit card 89
The remainder of the chapter is divided into two sections. The first focuses
on the United States, given its status as the historical test bed for consumer
credit, the experimentation of which paved the way for technologies that
would subsequently be adopted and adapted worldwide. It opens up the way
in which plastic and its specific sociomaterial affordances have, in different
and changing ways, mattered in the history of the payment card and in
creditors’ engagements with users. The initial focus is on how the material
presence of the payment card emerged as a problem for card issuers and
manufacturers looking to expand the scope of the consumer credit market, and
on the role different materials played in solving this problem. It then proceeds
to examine how the mass market issue of the plastic card itself played a key
role in accelerating the first major credit card boom. The second part moves
to the United Kingdom, exploring the role of the card not in moments of
borrowing, but at times of default – that is, when consumer credit borrowers,
for whatever reason, are unable (or unwilling) to meet their obligations to
repay.
A history of the early credit card: the changing monetary

affordances of plastic
The origins of the mid- to late twentieth-century consumer credit boom can
be traced back far beyond the introduction of the credit card (see Calder
1999; Hyman 2011). However, as this section will show, focusing on a period
running from the early 1950s until around 1970, it was the plastic card
around which earlier developing tendencies crystallized. The card not only
responded to the needs of a market that was rapidly expanding, but also
played an active role in enlisting a vast untapped reserve of American bor-
rowers. The credit card and the consumer credit market therefore need to be
seen as very much co-emergent, with the former solving many of the problems
posed by the latter.
At the same time, it is worth noting that, after an initial period of experi-
mentation and innovation, credit cards quickly became relatively stable
monetary objects. Especially in their form, credit cards now still very much
resemble credit cards then; by contrast, the sophisticated behind-the-scenes
technologies of credit scoring and profiling have become almost unrecogniz-
able from their rudimentary antecedents. In this sense, the formal endurance
and stability of this particular object needs to be explained. Is this simply a
case of material ‘lock-in’? Or is there something about this particular socio-
material solution to the problems posed by the credit market that is as
relevant now as it was then?
The continuity between past and present is made clear by looking at one
of the first plastic credit cards, issued by American Express in 1959 (see
Figure 5.1).8 A number of features are instantly recognizable: the card bears a
distinctive printed design; it also includes, as its principal security feature,
90 Joe
Jo e Deville
D eville
H C R E D I T C A R D v-
A U T H O R IZ E D S IG N A T U R E NOT TRANSFERABLE
018 02b
S S i b
JOHN SMITI
EXPIRES
ACME C O MP A N Y o n la st d a y of
123 MAIN S T R E E T IC M ONTH
CENTERVILLE USA BP YEAR
SEE REVERSE SIDE ©A.l.CO
Figure 5.1 Example of the first plastic American Express credit card
Source: (Image used courtesy of American Express Company)
space for a signature; and finally, the card also displays key identifying infor-
mation, including name, expiry date and a unique numerical ID. This number
is printed in a machine-readable font, to enable semi-automated processing of
the sales invoices onto which the number would be transferred via an
imprinting device. However, why plastic? Here we have to go back a little
further, into the pre-history of credit cards, to explore what plastic, as a
particular monetary material, offered that other materials did not.
Early American consumer credit was merchant or industry specific, initially
centred around individual department stores but soon being extended to a
network of merchants owned by oil companies and telegram providers
(see Calder 1999; Hyman 2011; Marron 2009; Stearns 2011). From a rela-
tively early stage, the card (in many cases, a term that accurately described the
material) – or a similar wallet-sized object (I will return to this) – emerged as
essential to these forms of consumer credit. These objects, bearing the name
of the merchant alongside details of the account holder, enabled the carrier
‘to identify one’s account to a centralized credit system that was available at
multiple locations, or multiple merchants within an industry-specific network’
(Stearns 2011: 6). As with many forms of early US consumer credit, these
were ‘charge cards’, which meant that they enabled the extension of credit on
a limited basis, with the account expected to be repaid in full at the end of the
month.
However, one problem with these cards was that information had to be
hand-copied from the card to the sales draft, inevitably leading to errors. An
early solution was the ‘Charga-plate’ system, which was introduced into select
Boston department stores in 1928 and continued to play an important role in
America’s credit market well into the 1950s (Hyman 2011). It combined a
system of embossed, roughly credit card-sized metal plates with an accom-
panying ‘imprinter’, which would transfer the customer’s details, via carbon
paper, on to the sales draft (Stearns 2011: 8–9). Quite aside from the add-
itional robustness of these metal devices, their key benefit was that the infor-
mation they contained was more reliably transferable. For example, in a pilot
project run by Standard Oil of California in 1952 using a later version of
these metal fobs, errors of identification were cut by 94 per cent, while the
time spent writing out sales slips was cut in half (Mandell 1990: 23). These
metal cards were thus able to carry individualized information in (effectively)
three dimensions – and, crucially, this information became transferable when
inserted into an accompanying technological infrastructure. In this context,
the particular problem that the metal used in these cards moved towards
solving was – in a very Latourian sense – a problem of translation.
Early experiments with plastic attempted something similar: an ultimately
unsuccessful example was the Simplan system. It combined a wallet-sized
plastic card, perforated with small rectangular holes (effectively a unique
customer number), with the customer’s name and address embossed onto
the card. The card would be inserted into a reader that would transfer
this embossed and punched information on to the resulting invoice, tying it
to the customer and producing a carbon copy. This was then processed,
part mechanically, at a district processing office (Gregory 1955: 57–58;
National Petroleum News 1955). The accompanying marketing literature
promises ‘prompt billing’, ‘fewer errors in transcription’ and a ‘less costly’
process, as well as indicating a customer preference for this new material,
with ‘[c]ustomer surveys show[ing] that the one-piece plastic card will be
preferred over check-book or metal plate styles of customer’s name and
account number’ (National Petroleum News 1955). The Simplan system,
aided by plastic, thus claimed (but, in not securing widespread adoption,
ultimately failed) further to remedy the translation problems that surrounded
consumer credit-based market exchange at the time.9 Later plastic cards, such
as the embossed American Express card in Figure 5.1, can be seen as refine-
ments of the ambition expressed here. American Express also similarly drew
on the promise of progress and modernity that seemed to accompany the
spread of these new plastic devices: ‘Soon … a plastic card’, proclaimed a
heading in one of its advertisements (The New York Times 1958: emphasis in
original).
However, the success of the plastic card did not just lie in its ability to
transfer information more accurately, or in the potential associations plastic
had with a modern, forward-moving age. While for much of the 1950s metal
fobs were the principal material for the semi-automated passage of consumer
credit information, it has to be recognized that for most of the decade it was
(by comparison) an unsophisticated, far cheaper and far lighter cardboard
card that transmitted the bulk of American consumer credit transactions. For
92 Joe Deville
it was Diners Club – enabling travellers to enjoy the convenience of being able
to pay at participating restaurants without the need for cash – and not the
merchant-centred metal cards that provided the business model for the later
boom in consumer credit.
While also a charge card, to be repaid in full monthly, Diners Club was
different because, while being tied to a type of business, it was not tied to any
one business. This changed the market dynamics of credit considerably. Sud-
denly, consumer credit became focused not on the extension of credit to
existing customers around a circumscribed set of locations, but rather on the
attraction of new customers around an autonomous credit product, in which it
was not the specific locations that mattered but rather the size of both a cus-
tomer base and a merchant network. What Diners Club realized was that, in
order to build the latter, you needed the former: a large customer base made
it more attractive for restaurants to take the card; more participating
restaurants, in turn, made Diners Club more attractive for potential card-
holders.10 This hunt for users translated into the hitherto unprecedented con-
version of mass marketing tactics into the world of consumer credit. Notably,
this included direct mail tactics to attempt to convince potential users to
make applications, helping membership climb from around 150,000 in 1952
to around 1 million by 1960 (Simmons 1995: 34–37).
Yet, while a trailblazer, Diners Club did not become the model for the
credit card as we recognize it today. It failed in part because it did not com-
bine this distribution model with a card that could offer revolving credit –
repayable, with interest, over a potentially indefinite period – as later credit
cards did. Diners Club also failed to recognize the promise of automation
that plastic opened up. As Matty Simmons – then head of sales marketing at
Diners Club – admits, reflecting on the later success of American Express,
‘[t]he plastic card, like computerized billing, was something we all knew
would come, but it had to come with imprinters, and Amex simply moved
more quickly with all these new facets of the business than did Diners Club’
(Simmons 1995: 83). What Simmons doesn’t mention – and neither Diners
Club nor American Express understood – is that the plastic card was itself a
device that could be used to boost customer numbers. In the history of the
payment card, it is thus not American Express but Bank of America, in the
development and launch of its BankAmericard (a precursor of VISA), that
provides the more significant historical model for the later expansion of the
consumer credit industry.
The plastic BankAmericard was launched more or less at the same time as
American Express’s first plastic card. While the two cards were formally very
similar, Bank of America realized that plastic offered an additional afford-
ance that would go on to be exploited again and again in the following
decade. With the combination of The Databosser – a high-speed embossing
machine able to read customer information fed in via IBM punch-cards – and
a new type of plastic that fitted into these embossing machines previously
used to produce metal cards, Bank of America had access to the most
efficient, most cost-effective way of mass producing payment cards at the time
(Dashew and Klus 2010: 159–69).11
This efficiency and ability to produce lightweight cards in volume was
to prove crucial, as Bank of America demonstrated in the experiments
surrounding the launch of the BankAmericard in California in September
1958 (e.g. see Guseva 2005; Nocera 1994; Wolters 2000). Bank of America
selected the city of Fresno, population 130,000, for a trial of a new marketing
strategy, following ideas stemming from in-house innovator Joe Williams.
After convincing a base of over 300 businesses to take part, and accom-
panied by an advertising blitz, they mailed a plastic BankAmericard, unsoli-
cited, to every Bank of America customer in the city. As Joseph Nocera
writes, this ‘drop’ was Joe Williams’s solution to the chicken and egg of
problem of how to create both customers and participating merchants
(Nocera 1994: 26). In this respect, it worked. In the months following,
another 800 retailers in the area joined the BankAmericard scheme (Wol-
ters 2000: 332). The direct mailing strategy was then rolled out statewide,
in part to pre-empt similar tactics from competitors, with 1959 seeing Bank
of America placing one of the largest orders for printing machines and
credit cards in the history of the industry (Dashew and Klus 2010: 168).
By the end of the year, the bank’s annual report was proudly proclaiming
that 2 million of its customers were holding BankAmericards (Wolters
2000: 333), all made of plastic and all embossed with individual customer
information.12 For the first time, the core elements were in place for a new
consumer credit market model: this involved a ruthless focus on increasing
a customer base by doing more or less whatever it took to get into a custo-
mer’s hands a card that gave access to revolving credit, a card that could also
be inserted into a semi-automated payment processing system, and a card
that could be manufactured and individualized quickly and dispatched
cheaply en masse.
It took some years for this model to be perfected, but, once it was, it
provided the basis for an approach that would define the period of rapid
expansion of the US credit market in the late 1960s. It was only after the
United States had been saturated with credit cards that the next important
set of innovations – the widespread adoption of customer-profiling technolo-
gies such as credit scores – began to shape the consumer credit industry.13
Before this could occur, the sociomaterial payment infrastructure and custo-
mer/merchant base had to be in place. The consequence was that in a period
from around 1966 to 1970 – until the practice was eventually made illegal –
around 100 million plastic credit cards were mailed, unsolicited, to potential
users, in what the president of the Bank of America, Rudolph Peterson,
called ‘the great credit-card race’ (Nichols 1967; see also O’Neil 1970; Nocera
1994: 54; Stearns 2011: 33). One contemporary report, drawing on an American
Bankers Association survey, suggests that, at least in the earlier years, only
around half of these new credit card offerings were accompanied by credit
checks (Furness 1968: 65). Some events in the period became infamous.
94 Joe Deville
In Chicago in 1967, for example, a series of competing regional banks mailed
5 million cards to the city’s residents, with some families in the more attrac-
tive suburbs claiming to have received up to 15 cards, including – if reports
are to be believed – toddlers and convicted criminals (Jordan 1967; Nocera
1994: 54).
There is, however, more to this unsolicited mass mailing than just securing
market share. This can be illustrated via another credit card experiment, this
time presented to a 1968 government hearing on the practice by a spokes-
person from the American Bankers Association. In the experiment, New
York-based Marine Midland Bank sent 33,357 promotional credit card
application forms to potential users. They received responses from only 221,
or 0.7 per cent. However, when cards were sent directly to 731 recipients,
19 per cent were actively using them within 60 to 90 days (Bailey 1968: 24).
The spokesperson expanded on this theme:
At the time of the receipt of the application [the recipient] may not have
any use for it, and at that point doesn’t think he wants to have a card.
However, if he has a card in his pocket, he knows his credit has been
established … I am sure he will welcome the opportunity to use it when
the time comes.
(Bailey 1968: 27)
Having arrived, as another witness put it, ‘like a gift from heaven’ (Jackson
1968: 32), physically present, ready to be used as and when required, with no
application needed and no need to assess at the moment of receipt whether or
not it would be needed in future, the card was not just slightly more attractive
to borrowers, it was significantly so. Indeed, the data from this experiment
were provided as unashamed evidence of the very need for the practice of
unsolicited credit card mailings, being seen as an essential part of the
armoury for banks seeking to challenge the competition. However, at the
hearing this effect was also seized upon by critics, who provided numerous
case studies of individuals who, by virtue of having received an unsolicited
card, had been encouraged into borrowing at levels they would not, it was
asserted, have entered into otherwise.
Something similar is also captured in a Life magazine article from 1970 on
‘the great plastic rush’ (O’Neil 1970: 55). The article is accompanied by a
large double-page cartoon (Figure 5.2) showing the US population being
physically smothered by an avalanche of plastic cards, fired on them from a
giant canon by banks, with bankers on computers and in their offices trying
to understand and control, after the fact, ‘the new plastic society’ they have
unleashed.14 The piece imagines a typical conversion of a person (here pre-
sumed to be male even though women were also targeted) from a ‘sorehead’,
actively annoyed by and resistant to the solicitations of the creditor, to a
borrower:
Figure 5.2 Understanding the new plastic society: ‘In a rush to “get their plastic on the
air,” banks randomly fired off credit cards. Computers – key to controlling
them – are still trying to catch up’
Source: (O Neil 1970: 48–49; illustration by John Huehnergarth)
The average man, his senses dulled by an endless reception of junk mail,
simply chucks his card into a desk or cupboard or dresser drawer if he is
among those who are not instantly galvanized by their bank’s sudden new
interest in their well-being. He may eventually betray reactions char-
acteristic of the sorehead group: when the bank send him a follow-up
statement … he may poke holes in it or punch it full of staples and send
it back to confuse the bank’s computer. But as long as the card stays in
his dresser he is subject, though he is not aware of it, to a curious and
sort of subconscious temptation. Bank records indicate he will eventually
dig it out and give it a try and will thereafter tend to use it again … and
again …
(O’Neil 1970: 50)
Both the experimental and anecdotal evidence points towards these new
plastic credit cards acting as ‘lures for feeling’ (Whitehead 1978: 88; see also
Fraser 2009; Halewood 2003; Stengers 2008). By virtue of their very material
presence in the homes and lives of so many Americans, they exerted a pull on
them – a nagging draw towards the possibilities that credit, with its ability to
shift economic value forward in time, promises. They thus became, to return
to the terms outlined at the start of this chapter, indispensable devices for
market attachment. These cards were, and continue to be, lively entities of
their own, reaching out to the user as the user might reach out to them. As we
96 Joe Deville
now know, this small, mutually constitutive reaching out, between hand and
card, happened on countless occasions, providing part of the fuel for the
increasingly global, diverse credit explosion the consequences of which were
arguably only beginning to be fully realized at the beginning of the twenty-first
century.
It is to this quite different historical moment that this chapter now
moves. This also means moving from a moment in which political debate on
credit turns around questions of the expansion of lending, to one in which it
turns around the expansion of default. Drawing in part on conversations and
letter evidence posted on the most prominent British online consumer dis-
cussion forum, it examines how the card can play a role not only in the pro-
liferation of credit borrowing, but also in processes designed to retrieve some
of that borrowed money from those who are unable or unwilling to repay.
As we will see, here the card becomes a site for contestations over power and
ownership.
Cut up your card: the credit card becomes collections device

After decades of familiarization with credit cards, it is not surprising that
their material composition does not bother those for whom these devices have
become a stable, unremarkable component of their movement through spaces
of consumption. They are, for many, simply ‘there’, in purses, pockets and
wallets, alongside a range of other objects. However, the payment card can
assume an explicitly agential role for those users of transactional forms of
consumer credit who find themselves unable to repay their debts.
Here, it is important to understand that consumer credit payment cards
are monetary objects that are delivered accompanied by explicitly laid-out
conditions of use, usually outlined in a credit agreement. These range from
detailing how the card’s attachment to the user should be secured – by being
signed and the PIN memorized – to limits as to the card’s transferability
(e.g. ‘by the named individual alone’). There is one particular condition
designed to follow both user and card around: the continued ownership of the
card by the creditor. This is a residual legal claim that, in some cases, is made
explicit on the card itself, or in a credit agreement. This retention of the card’s
ownership appears to be in part connected to the demands that the creditor
makes on the borrower’s conduct, of the kind just outlined. Yet there are
instances where the ownership of the card can matter in a quite different way.
For credit agreements can also contain the provision to revoke the user’s right
to the card and to demand its destruction. One situation in which this can
come into play is in the management of default.
Consumer debt collection, undertaken by the creditor or an external col-
lector working on their behalf, involves the routine deployment of letters and
phone calls, in ways that seek to generate the debtor’s calculative attention.
In the specific case of letter design, collectors use a range of strategies to grab
the attention of the defaulting debtor. One of these, used by some in the
earlier stages of default, centres around the payment card itself. Take the
following extracts from the collections letters of major UK creditors:15
All credit cards are the property of American Express Services Limited
and we prohibit their further use. The cards must be cut up and immediately
returned to us at our above address.
(American Express)
If you have not already returned or destroyed your card(s), we request

that you do so immediately, cut in half for security reasons.
(HSBC)
In terms of the journey of these creditors’ plastic cards alongside the

respective borrowers, these letters are therefore envisaged as denoting an end
point. On one hand, such demands need to be seen as one of the many
detachment devices that are integral to the collections process – and to the
consumer credit market more widely. The user who was previously extended
both a borrowing facility and an obligation to repay becomes reconstituted
more firmly in relation to their obligations, while the creditor seeks to prevent
the debt escalating further. On the other, demanding that the card be cut
up and returned might seem somewhat peculiar, given: (i) the often large
sums of money owed by defaulting debtors to creditors; (ii) the (by compar-
ison) relatively tiny value of the card device; (iii) the usual willingness of
creditors to replace lost or damaged cards at no cost; and (iv) the ability of
contemporary card issuers to block electronically most unauthorized uses
of contemporary payment cards.
Among defaulting debtors themselves, it is a demand that is often read with
some suspicion and/or confusion, as the following posts on the Consumer
Action Group online debt advice forum show:
… as well as a separate letter asking me to cut up the card and send it

back to them along with any cheques! They know very well that even if
I wanted to use the infamous card it wouldn’t be accepted so what’s the
point?16
If a credit card company writes and asks you to cut up the card and
return it, can it be assumed that they have terminated the account?17
the letter they sent to me asks me to cut up and return my card back to
them, but when i called the manager [he] told me to keep hold of it,
which do you think i am best to do?18
i did call them as soon as i [received] the letter telling me to return my
credit card cut up … cos i thought to myself ‘what the bloody hell they
playin at?’19
The first poster expresses incredulity that they are being asked to return a
card that is now technologically incapacitated. The second wonders whether
98 Joe Deville
the demand marks the passing of a particular threshold. The third suggests a
discrepancy within the lending organization itself as to whether it in fact
wants the card back at all.
You could respond to these queries by exploring the risks that continually
circulating cards – electronically blocked or not – still pose to the creditor, or
whether or not the blocking of the credit card does in fact mark the passing
of a definitive threshold (it does not). However, I suggest that the third and
fourth posts point towards perhaps the most valuable function served by a
creditor’s demand for ‘their’ credit card: that the questions generated by this
demand might prompt the borrower to contact the creditor – as, in fact, both
these borrowers did (even if, as in the third post, the question in fact remains
unresolved).
More particularly, collections communications frequently play with the
opacities that characterize many of our journeys through modern social
life. These include the difficulty of understanding the language and func-
tioning of legal processes – as is the case here. Unless the reader has the
expertise to do the work of reading against the demand by the creditor
for their cards, their choices are to live with this indeterminacy, seek recourse
to outside expertise – as these posters are trying to do – or to contact the
creditor.
By asserting its continuing claim over the device – demanding back redun-
dant, effectively worthless pieces of plastic and electronics, cut into pieces –
the creditor attaches its collections activities to the affordances of the pay-
ment card. The creditor draws attention to the device that, more than any
other, stands as the material embodiment of the relationship between the
creditor and the borrower. By demanding its destruction and return, the
creditor hopes that it can both symbolically mark the end of the relationship
as it was previously constituted, and prompt the borrower into remedial
action. Here, by drawing attention to its materiality – and hence its fragility –
the collector transforms this plastic borrowing device into a small but
potentially potent collections device.
On this particular forum, the responses by other contributors to such
prompts are manifold, but there is one theme of particular interest, which
focuses attention not just on the way in which ‘meaning’ may be attached to
these objects but also on how their material composition can matter. This can
be summed up by an image posted by one debtor, Davey, in response to a
demand for their card made by American Express. It shows a close-up of a
thumb and forefinger holding an American Express card, which is being held
over a candle flame, which is melting one corner of the card. Above the card
is the caption, ‘Let them ask for the card back now’, with ‘Get stuffed Amex!’
scrawled on to the card in marker pen.20 This user echoes the tone of others
on the site who variously imagine shredding cards into fine strips before
sending them back,21 or talk gleefully about cutting cards into tiny pieces and
burying them in the garden.22 Or there are those who respond warmly to
Davey’s picture posted on the forum:
Quality … we should make a huge credit card bonfire and film it.
(Talbot)
I have two nice platinum colored cards to add (they’ve sent me a nice
brand spanking new [one] even though I’ve told them [I’m] in financial
difficulty … nothing like responsible lending [smiley face icon].
(the_shadow)
Here, in a refrain with echoes of those that were heard in America in the late
1960s, the_shadow claims to have been sent cards – understood as entice-
ments to borrow – against his wishes. However, now these cards become – or
are imagined as becoming – the target of a form of micro-political protest.
Both the perceived absence of any value inherent in the apparently worthless
plastic object and the very possibility of their easy destruction – as the cred-
itor’s initial demand indeed points towards – allows the card to become a
vector for a very material retribution enacted on the otherwise largely dema-
terial figure of the creditor. The creditor, meanwhile, is held to be culpable not
simply for providing a borrowing facility, but also for providing the borrowing
device.
Conclusion
An archaeologist unearthing a pre-modern coin on a dig will have no trouble
placing it in a direct analogical relationship to the ostensibly similar-looking
coins in their pocket. Here, the idea of money demonstrates a certain endur-
ance over time, even as the engagements between the user and monetary
object vary.23 However, as Isabelle Stengers writes, ‘endurance is never an
attribute, always an achievement: throughout its adventures, something …
succeeds in maintaining some thread of conformity between past and present’
(Stengers 2005: 44). Stengers is drawing attention to the way in which entities
of all sorts always exist in dialogue with the processes and entities around
them. This includes the very ‘idea’ of money itself, which – despite its
apparent stability – is an abstraction with no inherent guarantee of historical
continuity. It includes the processual materialities of money’s transactional
objects. For the unearthed coin’s second achievement is to have stubbornly
and materially endured.
In the case of plastic payment cards, this chapter has opened up some of
the reasons behind their emergence and endurance from a period starting in
the late 1950s to the present. It has also shown how their own processual
materiality can also, in important and changing ways, matter. In the 1950s
and 1960s, the development of new forms of plastic cards first promised, then
offered, a solution to the problem of how to deliver, in a cost-effective way, a
lightweight, individualized, three-dimensional information carrier into the
hands of borrowers which, when inserted into the accompanying socio-
technical infrastructure, would convey this information faster and more
100 Joe Deville
accurately across time and space. In part, it is thus the reliable reproducibility
of the consumer credit transaction that becomes one of plastic’s achievements,
providing the crucial foundations for the subsequent rapid expansion and
stabilization of the consumer credit market.
At the same time, these new plastic cards were to become enrolled as vital
actors in the expansion of the US consumer credit customer base. Like many
other plastic objects, the combination of a material that was cheap, robust
and just the right kind of malleable meant that millions of cards could be sent
out to US citizens, with the cost of production and distribution insignificant
in light of the potential profit and market share at stake. Again, like other
plastic objects, these unsolicited cards were clearly coded as disposable; they
could be thrown away by the recipient. However, the issuer was not only
hoping, but, banking on the fact, that in many cases they would not. The
expectation was that, after their arrival through the letterbox, these millions
of cards would materially endure in US citizens’ drawers and homes, until a
moment came when their promise of being able to move future value into the
present became relevant enough to prompt their use.
In the case of consumer credit default, this routine material co-presence
with the borrower offers a different opportunity. Here, the card becomes an
affordance not for securing new market attachments, but for re-securing the
economic value associated with an existing attachment between consumer
and creditor. It does so by seeking to draw attention to the relations of obli-
gation and ownership implied by the user’s use of the particular credit prod-
uct, with the card coming to stand as the material embodiment of this
otherwise dematerialized market relationship. One unintended effect, however,
is to provide debtors with an ostensibly fragile, destructible object upon which
they can enact small but very physical retributions against the creditor. In
these minute protests, the socioeconomic politics surrounding the prolifera-
tion of consumer credit borrowing are, for a brief instant, brought to bear on
the usually unnoticed credit card itself. In so doing, they direct attention
towards what usually goes unremarked: that the accumulation of billions of
dollars of consumer credit debt not only depends on, but also has been sti-
mulated by, the accumulation in so many everyday lives of millions of super-
ficially unremarkable plastic cards.
Notes
1 Credit cards are now not simply plastic, but ever more sophisticated plastic-
electronic composites. Yet it should be recognized that these objects are popularly
understood as plastic, as the title of this chapter and a number of popular and
academic books suggest. For instance, see Brown and Plache (2006); Essig (2010);
Evans and Schmalensee (1999); Rowlingson and Kempson (1994).
2 See also Fabian Muniesa’s account of money as an ‘attachment device’, also
drawing on Zelizer (Muniesa 2009).
3 The distinction between ‘economic’ and ‘market’ here refers to the often-neglected
observation that not all economic processes are necessarily market processes. This
is particularly relevant given the long history of monetary objects being used in a
range of settings.
4 See Çalışkan and Callon’s (2009) detailed exploration of the opportunities
and limits of, for instance, the ‘embeddedness’ approach characteristic of much
so-called ‘new economic sociology’.
5 See, for instance, Noortje Marres and Javier Lezaun’s (2011) exposition of the his-
tory of the device, considered as an object involved in enacting forms of material
participation.
6 On the potential complexity and variability of what factors are brought inside
particular transactional frames, see Daniel Miller’s (2002) critique of Callon.
7 See David Stark (2009) on the long-standing separation of research into questions
of value (the domain of economics) from that into questions of values (the domain
of economic sociology).
8 Credit card issue date confirmed by correspondence with American Express. Oil
companies issued the very first plastic charge cards in the mid-1950s (Simmons
1995: 91; see also Marron 2009: 81).
9 The degree of sociomaterial investment that is still going into trying to solve this
problem can be illustrated by reference to the central place of testing in card
manufacturing industry (Turner 2009; Rolfe 2010).
10 Drawing on Simmons (1995: 15–38) and Grossman (1987: 261–77).
11 American Express at the time was using a system operated by a competitor of
Dashew Business Machines, presumed to be the slower Addressograph-Multigraph
embosser. American Express, however, switched to Dashew machines in 1961
(Dashew and Klus 2010).
12 There is not scope here to go into the details of the problems that Bank of America
subsequently ran into with their particular strategy; this has been extensively
detailed elsewhere (Guseva 2005; Nocera 1994: 328–33; Wolters 2000: 333). How-
ever, as both Guseva (2005) and Wolters (2000) argue, in the long run the strategy
proved a commercial success for the bank.
13 A process documented in relation to the case of Fair, Isaac and Company, creators
of the FICO score, by Poon (2007).
14 Many thanks to John Huehnergarth for allowing this image to be used. I am also
grateful to Nils Huehnergarth for his assistance.
15 These are drawn from letters uploaded by defaulters onto the Consumer Action
Group ‘Debt Collection Industry’ sub-forum to be discussed shortly; for the sake of
brevity, only two examples are shown.
16 www.consumeractiongroup.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?253822-flowerchild-V-MB
NA-PPI-Charges-reclaim.
17 www.consumeractiongroup.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?214861-Cut-up-card.
18 www.consumeractiongroup.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?136848-Termination-of-Egg-
credit-card-agreement&p=1927121& viewfull = 1.
19 www.consumeractiongroup.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?153426-hsbc-have-cancelled-
my-credit-card-without-any-warning.
20 www.consumeractiongroup.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?184309-Davey-vs-Amex.
21 www.consumeractiongroup.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?179236-Tragic-case-of-Judge
ment-because-a-cut-up-card-was-produced-by-MBNA-at-hearing.&p=1938126&vie
wfull=1#post1938126.
22 www.consumeractiongroup.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?179236-Tragic-case-of-Judge
ment-because-a-cut-up-card-was-produced-by-MBNA-at-hearing.&p=2027669&vie
wfull=1#post2027669.
23 This argument has a history: notably, it was Georg Simmel (2004) who argued that
money, as an abstract ideal, sits in a dialectical relationship to its somewhat para-
doxical, necessarily incomplete, empirical realization (see also Gilbert 2005:
362–63).
102 Joe Deville
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Part III
Plastic bodies
6 The death and life of plastic surfaces
Mobile phones
Tom Fisher
This chapter discusses moments when our engagements with plastic objects
‘touch’ us and elicit feelings that influence the actions we take with them.
Noting that these feelings seem to be associated with the quality of plastic
surfaces as they age and wear, it focuses on touch-screen mobile phones and
their accoutrements. These new manifestations of plastic surfaces draw on
well-embedded narratives about materials and at the same time introduce new
inflections on our embodied relationship with them. These new actions are
motivated both by efforts to protect the surfaces of phones from damage, and
by what the phone is – a device that ‘extends’ our bodies through its function
in communication. They are generated both by economic rationales – phones
are expensive – as well as the affective dimension of the practices of which
phones are part (Reckwitz 2002; Shove and Pantzar 2005). They include a
repertoire of small habitual body movements – such as rubbing the phone to
keep it clean – as well as decisions to use other plastic devices, like screen
protectors and cases, to preserve them.
To attend to the feelings just mentioned, the chapter develops the idea that
changes in the surfaces of plastics that accompany their ageing produce feel-
ings of disgust in us (Fisher 2004). While these feelings are relatively mild,
they can make us pay attention to the plastic surfaces of our possessions, and
may lead us to rid ourselves of them. It proposes that the ageing plastics of
touch-screen phones and their accoutrements may stimulate embodied dis-
quiet because of the relatively close physical contact we have with them. In
exploring this relationship, I introduce the results of preliminary interview
and survey work with touch-screen phone owners. There is a strong relation-
ship between feelings of disgust and evidence of our death (Falk 1994: 86;
Rozin 1999: 24), and a link is proposed between this embodied emotion and
our efforts to forestall the ‘death’ of plastic objects; we mark our relationship
with these objects at a visceral level, and this affects our actions.
Plastics’ death is implicit in the relationships between plastic objects’ phys-
ical properties and the cultural narratives that have grown up around them in
the 150 years since they first appeared. Plastic operates simultaneously at
both ends of various extremes – ‘gross and hygienic’, as Barthes (1987: 54)
famously put it. Plastic objects can be ephemeral and too persistent – think of
108 Tom Fisher
plastic carrier bags fluttering in the breeze. Their physical properties give
them the propensity to attract us and to disappoint us, to acquire disquieting
qualities and sometimes disgust us. Some objects are ‘cool’ because they
are made of plastic; others are ‘tacky’ for the same reason. Plastic can con-
note utter technological advancement and barely adequate performance. The
material can be hyper-palpable (in the various objects called ‘rubbers’) or pass
us by entirely in everyday life (in paint, for instance). This chapter con-
centrates on the former, considering examples of ‘palpable’ plastics – things
we can easily tell are plastic.1
All of these types of object are part of the personal environments that
people manage in everyday life, part of our ‘extended self ’ (Belk 2001). They
are us extended into objects, elements of the material culture that forms us as
social beings through the dialectical process that Daniel Miller (1987) terms
‘objectification’. The chapter concentrates on ways in which the materiality of
plastic objects means they are more than matter to us – they matter to us; we
mind about them – picking up on a discussion between Tim Ingold and
Daniel Miller (2007) about the significance of what can be thought of as the
physical ‘essence’ of materials. The extent and nature of our ‘minding’ about
plastics is quite difficult to pin down because plastics are so ubiquitous, but it
is possible to see it in the processes whereby plastic objects turn from being
useful extensions of our selves into the world to being things we want to void
from our spatial bodies, to get rid of. This process entails both physical
changes in the objects – plastics surfaces degrade in distinctive ways – and
consequent changes in our estimation of them. It is a process that is especially
distinctive because plastics fall so far. They promise so much when new that
when they have aged we are perhaps especially affronted by them, and in the
process of this change their plastic-ness can become briefly illuminated by
the attention we then pay to them.
It seems that the closer a plastic object comes to our body, the more acutely
we evaluate it. Along with its potential to elicit visceral disquiet, plastic’s
characteristic way of degrading has effects that we reason through – it raises
questions of hygiene. We often associate it with disposable, ‘one-trip’ items,
which we accept for their convenience and sterility (Freinkel 2011: 120–21),
but, although many plastic items have short lives that give us little opportu-
nity to make strong relationships with them or much cause to reflect on them,
many do not. We live with many plastic objects for some time, living with the
processes that transform them from pristine to unacceptable. We are familiar
with the characteristic softness and absorbency of plastic – it dirties, but is not
clean-able. As an interviewee put it when talking about plastic food storage
containers:
[My partner] likes tomato soup. But it actually stains the plastic. It stains
it … If it’s going that way then it must be going the other way mustn’t it,
and it kind of bothers you a bit. It bothers me.
(Fisher 2003: 162)
The death and life of plastic surfaces 109
She indicates here that, in the process of ageing, plastics both acquire and
give up matter – they absorb substances, so they may therefore exude dubious
substances with potential consequences for health.
The chapter extends from this everyday learning about the relation between
ageing plastics and our bodies using some initial findings from studying the
ways in which people use sacrificial plastic surfaces to preserve their touch-
screen phones. These are quite a new type of object, and their design requires
a higher degree of physical interaction than previous types of phone: you have
to touch them constantly, stroke them, caress them in order to use them. This
has led the user-interface design community to re-evaluate the well-embedded
hierarchy of the senses that prioritizes sight, to develop an understanding of
the ‘aesthetics of touch’ (Motamedi 2007), retrieving a discussion that can be
traced back to Herder’s aesthetics (Benjamin 2011). Because phones are so
salient to everyday practices of communication, display and adornment, the
consequences of physical changes in their plastic surfaces that are appraised
by both sight and touch are therefore both distinctive and relatively access-
ible – their owners are very ready to talk about them. Further, they have
generated a variety of plastic accessories, cases and screen protectors that are
intended to forestall the degradation of the phone by acting as relatively
ephemeral sacrificial plastic surfaces.
The ‘physicality’ of plastics: cleaning, damage and texture

Plastic surfaces exhibit repertoires of degradation that we come to recognize
as we live with plastic objects. There seem to be three ways in which they
become degraded: by contamination with dirt; through mechanical damage;
and by ‘weathering’ – stuff sticks to them, they get scuffed and they ‘perish’.
Although other materials share these processes of degradation, focusing on
them tells us something about plastics’ contradictory material nature. When
the often peerless and perfect surfaces of plastics are penetrated by mechan-
ical damage, we get to see that they are the same all the way through, like
metal or ceramic, but softer. When stuff sticks to plastic, we can sometimes
clean it off effectively (as long as we take care not to scratch the surface in the
process), but often this is not possible. Plastics stain – polyethylene kitchen-
ware takes on the colour of the tomato soup we store in it. Plastics also dis-
colour as their structure is affected by light. As these processes take place,
plastics both acquire dirt, and in distinctive ways themselves become ‘matter
out of place’ (Douglas 1966).
In the process of caring for our ‘spatial body’ by physically engaging with
the ways plastics degrade, we build our awareness of their structure. Grant
McCracken (1988: 86) notes the degree to which the meaning of goods
attaches to the goods themselves, and is sometimes ‘supercharged’ by the
rituals that grow up round them and through which we maintain our rela-
tionships with them. He identifies maintenance among these rituals and we
get to know about the properties of materials particularly by the attempts we
110 Tom Fisher
make to forestall their degradation by cleaning them. There is advice available
online about how to clean plastic items, which indicates that we need assis-
tance in these maintenance rituals; it also illustrates the linkage between
attempts to maintain plastic possessions, the understanding of their physical
properties that results and the decision to get rid of them. One such website
gives this guidance on cleaning melamine tableware:
While cleaning melamine tableware is not tough, once it gets discoloured

with frequent use and washing, it loses its appeal. Since scratches and
burn marks cannot be removed from it, perhaps the best solution is to
throw out the damaged pieces.
(Banerjee 2002)
Clearly, cleaning plastics is not always possible. However, if it is important to

an individual that they attempt to maintain their plastic possessions, they may
seek techniques to clean them. The interviewee quoted above indicates that it
is this type of direct everyday experience of plastics that provides the most
compelling personal knowledge of their qualities – their relative hardness,
softness and porosity – as we see them degrade. Through this direct bodily
experience, we know we can clean glass, ceramic and bare metal effectively,
because they are hard and ‘fused’ – we can use detergents and mild abrasives
and the surfaces will stand up to some scrubbing. Other porous materials
generate their own maintenance repertoires that may involve a sacrificial layer
of (non-palpable) plastic. We know we can revive the interior of our houses by
repainting them, using a plastic ‘sacrificial’ layer. We apply the same principle
to wood and leather. Bare wood absorbs dirt that we can’t get off without
cleaning it so vigorously as to remove the surface of the wood – though the
resultant damage can be valuable as ‘patina’ (Green 2006: 33). Wooden sur-
faces are usually sealed with a sacrificial layer of plastic varnish that will soak
in and then set.
Our attempts to clean plastic items are often problematic because there is
no ‘underneath’ to the surface that can be ‘restored’. The porous surface
formed from the tool against which they were moulded is all there is – it can’t
be replaced by a surface beneath, and can only sometimes be protected with a
sacrificial layer. Phones, car interiors, kitchenware and children’s toys do not
have the fused surfaces of ceramic, glass and metal, and cannot be revived by
being painted or polished. If their surfaces are worn, they tend not to respond
well to being washed because the texture that wear produces on their surface
is very good at holding on to the dirt they accumulate. Plastics’ subtle
absorbency,2 combined with the wear and scratches that plastic surfaces all
too easily acquire, are tell-tale signs of their objective material reality.
Plastics can degrade in more spectacular ways, too. An early widespread
use for cellulose nitrate plastics was for film stock, which becomes potentially
explosive as its chemistry alters through time, as well as becoming brittle.
Museum curators who have plastic objects in their collections tell horror
stories about the ways in which plastics alter over time (Keneghan 2009). In
his early work, the modernist sculptor Naum Gabo was fond of using the
most advanced plastic materials, and some of these pieces have been com-
pletely lost to catastrophic degradation (Rankin 1988). Of course, newer
plastics are more stable – so stable in fact that when they appear in our sur-
roundings they persist longer than we would like. However, none of them is
completely stable, and all the thermoplastics have the same porous micro-
structure. This is significant to us in our everyday interactions with plastic
objects because it locks together the disgust that their dirty surfaces can elicit
with concerns for cleanliness and the pollution of our bodies by the chemicals
that thermoplastics can exude (Freinkel 2011).
Plastics’ materiality: from peerless perfection to ‘hard and ugly’

Our embodied understanding of plastics’ degradation is invoked in our
everyday judgements about plastic objects. The negative associations with the
materials that result from that degradation persist in the face of the plastics
industry’s efforts to promote a range of positive qualities of plastics (Meikle
1995: 28): lightness, flexibility, ‘plasticity’, modernity.3 These are relatively
abstract attributes, which relate to the specifiability of plastics and are
prominent in discourses close to design, production and purchase. More rele-
vant to this discussion are the features of plastics that characterize the mate-
rials as we experience and physically interact with them over time, their
colours and smells included. For Cecilia Fredriksson, it was the smell of
plastic that encapsulated the excitement of modern consumption in her
account of a Swedish low-cost department store (Fredriksson 1997). The
smell summed up the ‘new world of things’ that the store represented: positive
values attached to the smell of plastic. However, the physical reality of what
is being smelled might not denote the promise of a modern future, but
rather quite the reverse. In the case of thermoplastics like polyvinyl chloride
(PVC), the smell comes from the volatile elements of the material evaporating
from it;4 a key result of this volatility is the death of the material as it
becomes less ‘plastic’. One of Fredriksson’s interviewees remembers one of
her first purchases: ‘a plastic make-up bag, purple and blue. Through time it
got hard and ugly’ (Fredriksson 1997: 124–25). Once it was hard, ugly and no
longer desirable, it is safe to assume that it was thrown away. The object died
along with its material.
The characteristic way that death overtakes plastic objects is informed by a
recent debate between Tim Ingold and Daniel Miller about the ‘materiality’
of materials. In 2007, Miller contributed to a dialogue about the relationship
between the physical qualities of materials and the very concept of ‘mater-
iality’. He was responding to a paper in which Ingold proposed that the
properties of stone as it interacts with the other elements of the environment –
air, water, etc. – are as telling of its materiality as the abstract ideas we might
have of it, its meaning. In his critique of Ingold, titled ‘Stone Age or Plastic
112 Tom Fisher
Age?’ Miller (2007) suggests that plastic artefacts are more likely to be objects
of concern in contemporary life than stone ones, and he offers mobile phones
as an obvious example. Criticizing Ingold for a primitivist appeal to essential
material properties as the ground of human experience of the environment,
while acknowledging the validity of his ‘sensitivity to the flow of material
qualities’ (Miller 2007: 27), Miller proposes that we encounter technologies,
not materials. These he calls ‘bundles of material propensities’ rather than
‘natural bundles of innocent properties’ (Miller 2007: 26). While this is a cri-
tique of Ingold’s radically material-centred view, Miller keeps with the agenda
of material culture studies as a corrective to an over-emphasis on the
symbolic register that he sketched out in the early 1990s (e.g. see Miller 1994).
Quite naturally, the many studies of mobile phones that have appeared over
the last decade figure them as a means of communication, and as symptoms
of shifts in the way we communicate and socialize. However, the material
objects with which we physically interact to do this communicating and
socializing receive rather less attention than the communication that they
enable. Their ‘material propensities’ remain obscure. As Webb puts it, ‘the
mobile becomes a portal and the networks become data pipes that enable the
basic connectivity’ (Webb 2010: 65). However, Webb acknowledges that,
alongside its communication function, a mobile phone has some similarities
to clothing and jewellery, being ‘an object of beauty and fascination’. Miller
has himself contributed to the literature on phones (Horst and Miller 2006),
and, to take up Miller’s challenge to Ingold, I want to bring together some of
the strands of my discussion of plastic by thinking about mobile phones not
as elements in a complex web of communication but as objects with which
many of us physically interact very frequently, objects that we carry close to
our bodies, which begin to show their age, and which die.
In this, I address Horst and Miller’s (2006: 7) injunction to study ‘not
things or people, but processes’, concentrating on processes of physical
interaction with phones, in particular the way their materials become
compromised and the steps people sometimes take to forestall this.5 Like
Webb’s characterization of phones as jewellery, this goes against a tendency
to promote the immaterial aspects of communication technologies. However,
the relative dematerialization characteristic of the consumption of commu-
nication technologies does not mean that its material manifestations are any
less important. Every website requires a computer or a smartphone through
which to access it. We are not ‘jacked into’ the network, as William Gibson
(1984) suggested we would be – we handle things, to get glimpses of what
some argue to be a disembodied humanity. Focusing on things in this way
counters the suggestion that new technologies imply a disembodied humanity
(Moravec 1995, and quoted in Pepperell 2005: 30), instead acknowledging
what Pepperell (2005) argues is an extended/distributed embodiment. This
‘extensionist’ view seems to acknowledge the relevance of both human and
technological ‘bodies’ – as Pepperell puts it, ‘technology is embodied
humanity’.
Phones, for instance, not only have the theatrical, performative presence
implied by a ‘portal’, but are also like telescopes or peepholes. We engage
physically and materially with the technological body of the phone to extend
ourselves into the immaterial spaces to which they provide access. All bodies
die, and, as portals/telescopes/peepholes for communication, phones die from
the inside out; their innards stop working. As things, they die for us from the
outside in, as they acquire traces of our physical interaction with them and in
that process they demonstrate the qualities characteristic of their materials.
I concentrate here on newer touch-screen phones rather than those with but-
tons, because the more tactile nature of their interface makes the qualities of
their material salient to the process of using them, as indicated by the
attempts that people make to forestall their material death by putting them in
a case and by using a clear plastic film to protect the screen. ‘Screen protect-
ors’ mean that physical interaction with the material of the screen is sub-
stituted by interaction with a plastic surface that has the same function as a
clear sacrificial layer as in other familiar uses – in packaging, for instance
(Fisher and Shipton 2009).6
The salience of the materials of touch-screen phones is confirmed by the
fact that, although it is generally difficult to get interview participants to talk
about plastics in the abstract, and it is necessary to go to specialist groups to
get direct accounts of experiences of the material (Fisher 2004), preliminary
work on touch-screen phones suggests that their owners are relatively forth-
coming about their materials. Interviewees can speak lucidly about them as
objects, how they show signs of wear, how they degrade over time and the
steps they may take to forestall this. The shiny, immaculate surface of a new
phone is perhaps the strongest signifier of its new-ness, and from interviews7
with touch-screen phone owners it seems that many take active steps to pre-
serve these qualities by using screen protectors that are available for phones
and other touch-screen devices. Alongside preserving an ‘as new’ surface,
there is a clear functional rationale behind screen protectors: to preserve the
screen so it is possible to see clearly what it shows.8 This suggests that the
screen protector protects the phone both as a ‘portal’, in Webb’s terms, and as
an object of ‘beauty and fascination’. However, phones are the object of a
particular sort of fascination, one that has a strong physical dimension,
alongside their likely status as objects of contemplation and imagination
(Campbell 1987), which derives from their being designed to be handled
constantly. This sacrificial plastic layer shares the protective function of the
cases and covers, but it is different in that it becomes the surface through
which the user interacts with the phone, as well as protecting it. It is ephem-
eral, and normally invisible in use – a screen usually looks the same with or
without a screen protector – which implies that the motivation for using them
is to know, rather than to see, that the phone is protected.
In contrast, the rubbery texture of some cases, which is emphasized in the
way they are retailed, clearly aligns with the tactility necessary to touch-
screen phones. Cases are designed to be visible: some have considerable
114 Tom Fisher
material ‘presence’, and their design clearly draws from the visual vocabu-
laries associated with their materials – they may be made of leather, knitted
fabric or of diverse formulations of plastic. Whereas screen protectors are
barely visible, a case may completely cover the phone, making it impossible
for others to easily appreciate what brand it is except when it is being used.
When they are made of ‘palpable’ plastic, the formulations used for phone
cases offer a playful repertoire of textures and patterns based in the material
character of the cases and the sensual effects that are played out through
them. This playfulness is emphasized in the way the cases are packaged and
displayed in phone shops, sometimes with a hole in the packaging so pro-
spective purchasers can sample the tactile experience on offer by feeling the
surface of the case through the hole – a ploy borrowed from the design of
packaging for children’s toys. Like screen protectors, cases are relatively dis-
posable, and some plastic ones emphasize the mechanical protection they
provide by using the rubberiness of silicone polymers9 to suggest that the
phone will keep working even if you drop it because the case has sacrificed
itself to save the phone. It is surfaces like these that can be touched in the
shop through the hole in the packaging, and which presumably offer sensorial
experiences that substitute for the material of the phone itself when they are
used, confirming by proxy the importance of the tactility of the phone’s
materials.
Motivations for protection

Along with the desirable tactility of touch-screen phones that is indicated by
the playful character of some of the cases and the spontaneous gestural
character of the interfaces themselves come several negative consequences.
Physical contact between body and phone leaves traces, as does contact
between body and clothing, or spectacles, or cutlery. Whereas the latter are
routinely cleaned,10 this is not such a simple matter with a rather delicate
electronic device. Everyday observation suggests that a new repertoire of
bodily comportment (Michael 2006: 58) has grown up round touch-screen
phones to cope with the risk of damage and contamination. Observations
have included an individual putting their phone down on a paper napkin in a
café, as well as frequent sidelong appraising glances at the screen that result
in careful wiping, on sleeve, tissue or trouser leg. These protective strategies
are to an extent delegated to phone cases and screen protectors, but these
objects then themselves become subject to the same tendency to damage and
contamination through use.
Various factors are likely to influence the adoption of cases and protectors,
and a recent survey11 suggested that motivations for their use are indeed rather
complex. The survey showed a relationship between gender and the rationales
given for cases and screen protectors, with more females than males basing
their use of cases on ‘personalization’ or the appearance of the phone (though
this might be misleading, given possible variation in readiness to admit to this
motivation between males and females). For one interviewee, a phone shop
employee, it was clear that using a case and screen protectors was driven by
her need to maintain a good impression to customers by having a pristine
phone. It would be reasonable to expect that wanting to keep the phone clean
is a widespread motivation to adopt cases and screen protectors, and the
survey did suggest that the rationale for having them may often be to protect
them from damage and keep them ‘as new’. This line of thinking has an
economic basis, with a strong correlation evident between using a case and an
expressed intention to sell the phone when it is replaced.
There was an indication of a positive relationship between the degree to
which respondents were concerned about the cleanliness of their surroundings
in everyday life and their adoption of screen protectors, but also suggestions
of a negative relationship between such a concern and using a case. This may
indicate that, while it helps give a sense of security against damage, a case
compounds the problem of keeping the phone clean because it traps the
matter of dubious origin that collects on the phone’s surface in its nooks and
crannies. It is this matter which the rubbing of a touch-screen phone on the
sleeve is attempting to remove – what one interviewee12 identified as ‘ear-
prints’. The special way that phones pick up unwanted matter, and its effect
on our feelings about them, points towards qualities shared with other plastic
objects that either come into intimate contact with the body or imply the
body’s boundaries. In both cases, there is a potential to invoke feelings of
disgust (see Fisher 2004).
The same interviewee described her way of avoiding ear-prints when using
her touch-screen phone. She holds it in the usual relationship to her head, but
a little way away, to avoid touching it with her ear. This individual has a
particularly strong commitment to preserving her devices ‘as new’, describing
this as a trait evident in her care for her childhood toys, and distinguishing it
from tidiness. Many of her habits of care for her possessions employ plastics
as a sacrificial layer, including her use of screen protectors on all her touch-
screen devices and plastic bags to keep dust off the computers that she no
longer uses, but keeps in the attic. This individual’s desire to preserve her
possessions seems to determine many of her actions with them, and the way
she preserves her touch-screen devices builds on her established routines. She
suggested that her use of screen protectors and cases was not driven by a need
for cleanliness, which might be activated by these devices’ close relationship
to her body – despite her avoidance of ear-prints, she has never used the
screen cleaner that came with her iPad. Instead, she seems motivated by a
wish to preserve the coherence of the object’s body, to stop it being compro-
mised. As she puts it, the screen protector is about ‘protecting it from scrat-
ches, from having lots of dirty marks on it, this isn’t the same as having marks
on … the actual thing itself. This is fine, but if I hadn’t got this on I’d be
really quite worried about doing that.’
She admitted to taking her iPad out of its case sometimes, just to hold it
and look at its pristine surfaces and form. Her concern to preserve her iPad,
116 Tom Fisher
and all her similar possessions – phone, MP3 player, computer – by using
plastic as a sacrificial layer is driven by a concern for their surfaces. She was
not especially interested in the screen protectors she uses – they are ‘some sort
of plastic’ – but spoke clearly about their function to protect another plastic
surface ‘from scratches, from having lots of dirty marks on the actual thing
itself ’. The screen protector is clearly an inconsequential sacrificial plastic
layer that can somehow absorb or filter out the dubious evidence of her
physical interaction with the surface, indexed in finger- and ear-prints: ‘I don’t
mind the prints being there but I’d rather them be on the filter, on the
protector rather than on the thing.’
This relatively intense concern to save the plastic surfaces that matter to her
from signs of deterioration extends to the habits of others. She admitted to
being bothered by her hairdresser keeping her ‘naked’ iPod Nano in her
handbag. This interviewee clearly distinguishes between her relationship with
the surfaces of her possessions and her relationship with the sacrificial plastic
layer; one matters, the other does not. Speculatively, it can be suggested that
to the extent that the physical contact with these surfaces denotes an ‘exten-
sion’ into them – a ‘distributed embodiment’ – then to protect those surfaces
implies that there is a desire to take special care of that extended body, to
postpone its death.
Another interviewee, a student user-interface designer, also gave clear
justifications for her use of a case and screen protector on her phone. She
spent £500 on the phone because she is designing for its interface and she
has a screen protector on its glass front and keeps it in a rather beautiful
white leather case, which obscures the surfaces of the sides and back.
She rationalized this in terms of its monetary value: it cost a lot and she
wants to protect it. She also identified another reason why it was important to
keep her phone pristine. She explained that, when she was six years old, she
had a strong yearning for that classic plastic toy, a Barbie doll – all her
friends had one. She was given one as a present and really liked the ensemble
of doll, shoes, clothes, accessories – just as it had come to her out of the box.
Then one day she realized that one of the little plastic shoes was missing, and
this fundamentally changed her relationship to the toy. She was no longer
able to get the same pleasure from it. It no longer delivered on its much
anticipated promise. It was spoilt. She feels the same way about her phone – if
it were damaged, this would remove the possibility of a significant aspect of
her ‘user experience’, her delight in the object, her joy in the potential for
embodied extension into it. Because she knows that the inevitable signs of
age – those tiny accretions of dirt and damage – are all too likely, she tries to
forestall them to preserve the feelings of delight that she gets from her phone,
even though doing so makes it impossible for her any longer to see or touch
the surfaces she is protecting.
These seem relatively extreme cases, both of which probably fit Campbell’s
(1992) ‘pristinian’ type of consumer,13 and they point to the degree to which
the plastic surfaces of phone, case and screen protector that are in play in this
new setting of the touch-screen device bring with them the qualities of the
material with which we are familiar. The diffuse but powerful ‘promise’14 of
pristine plastic surfaces is all too fugitive, and it may be necessary even to
obscure it in order to preserve it, to have a valued object retain its value for
us. It seems that the intimate relationship between touch-screen phone and
body may raise concern for this loss of promise to a new pitch. Traces of this
are evident even in the experience of individuals with less highly developed
routines of preservation than the two people discussed above. Another inter-
viewee explained that her rubbery phone case had got rather ‘manky’, and she
had decided it was no longer acceptable and stopped using it, but she was
conscious of the fragility of her iPhone, explaining that a friend had found a
piece of glass in his mouth after his screen shattered. Touch-screen phones
and their accoutrements therefore seem to share some of the repertoires of
degradation that characterize other plastic objects, but these are activated in
particular ways by the necessarily intimate way in which they are used. This
may make plastics’ palpable contribution to this new type of object rather
different from its more familiar applications.
It would be possible to extend the principle of disgust (Fisher 2004) to
cover this difference – certainly the propensity for the ‘leakiness’ of the body
to elicit disgust is present in these new applications of plastics (Rozin 1999).
However, there are aspects of these applications of plastic which have a sig-
nificant bearing on individuals’ attachment to their portable devices, influen-
cing such issues as how and for how long they are kept – aspects that may not
be covered adequately by a concept of disgust that emphasizes embodiment.
Thus, the fact that phones and tablets are a portal to a network of commu-
nication – they function analogously as ‘telescopes’ as well as ‘jewellery’ –
affords them a sense of agency that is not present in objects that are not
‘wired’; after all, they talk back to us. They are entities that some of us take
steps to protect despite the tendency of their surfaces to collect scratches,
mould, chips, fragments of skin, hair and grease. These protective measures –
entailing both bodily comportment and protective devices – point up the fact
that these technologies are invested with a degree of ‘life’ akin to that which
the interviewees may have found in their childhood toys. The implication
is that what is being extended through such protective measures is not just
a distributed body, but also an other, non-human agent the ‘integrity’ or
‘untarnished identity’ of which sustains our own.
Conclusion
As plastics break down, they betray the promises that they seem able to make
when they are new and pristine. When new, plastics flatter our desire to
remain in control of the material world, promising a sheer perfect surface for
the world (to plasticize it). They appear to deliver this in the absolutely con-
trolled engineered surfaces of consumer goods – forms facilitated by physical
properties designed into the material, which can be specified to any task.
118 Tom Fisher
However, as this promise is betrayed, the magic is broken, the material can
unsettle us and, in the process, we learn about its structure. The materials that
make up touch-screen devices and the protective devices used to protect their
surfaces bear traces of use in distinctive ways that highlight the physical
interface of these portals to a networked environment. The margin between
skin and plastic/metal/paint seems especially charged by being the point of
contact between the material and the non-material aspects of communication
technology. Because the examples discussed above concentrate on efforts to
forestall this breakdown, they point towards moments when the positive feel-
ings we may have about these elements of our ‘extended selves’ and our sense
of self-and-other are destabilized, exposing the fragility of their material
dimensions.
Notes
1 This seems a reasonable course, since many objects have only been widely available
in plastic versions: ping-pong balls, hula hoops, beach balls, mobile phones, ball-
point pens, CDs, telephones, condoms. To put ‘plastic’ in front of any of these
creates a tautology because they are plastic objects by definition. While this chapter
concentrates on encounters with palpable plastics in the present and moments
when we might wish to discard individual objects, some classes of plastic objects
have come and gone: cassette tapes, celluloid collars, cigarette holders and many
others have suffered what amounts to ‘species death’.
2 Thermoplastics absorb organic pollutions in the oceans – see Chapter 11 by
Takada in this volume.
3 As the Society for the Plastics Industry puts it on its website: ‘Plastics are respon-
sible for countless facets of the modern life we enjoy today. From health and well-
being, nutrition, shelter and transportation to safety and security, communication,
sports, leisure activities and innovations of industry – plastics deliver bountiful
benefits to you and your world. The men and women of the plastics industry make
it all possible. In the United States, the plastics industry accounts for more than
$374 billion dollars in annual shipments and directly employs nearly 1 million
people.’ www.plasticsindustry.org/aboutplastics/?navItemNumber=1008 (accessed
24 August 2012).
4 The presence in the environment and human bodies of plasticizing chemicals is
linked to endocrine disruption, including birth defects in animals and humans.
Concern centres on the Phthalates used to plasticize PVC and Bisphenol-A, which
is a component of Polycarbonate (Freinkel 2011: 81ff; Vogel 2009).
5 Horst and Miller (2006: 61ff) researched the use of cell phones in Jamaica, and
delineate the various ways in which they were worn on the body. Their work predates
the introduction of touch-screen phones.
6 Another application of plastic films in this way, besides packaging, includes its use
to protect dry-cleaning and car seats, and most recently to wrap luggage in air
travel. In this use, sealing the suitcase in plastic ameliorates passengers’ fear for the
security of possessions that disappear into the baggage handling system. The visual
effect of wrapping a suitcase in many layers of plastic film may also be relevant, as
the film projects its characteristically soft but glassy sparkle to other passengers
and, presumably, to baggage handling staff.
7 Seven exploratory interviews were conducted with touch-screen phone owners in
2011–12, with the participants selected for their strong level of engagement with
phones in respect of the subject of this chapter. Four were phone shop employees
(two female, two male), three were female phone owners. These interviews were
supplemented by some auto-ethnographic observation by the author (as a new
touch-screen phone owner) and opportunistic informal enquiry with phone owners.
8 They are available even for phones that employ glass for the screen, which is very
resistant to being scratched (though it is quite easy to shatter it) and they are
manufactured to match both the front and the back of the phone, both of which
may be made of glass.
9 The most complex of these has a double skin filled with the same polymer that is
marketed as ‘silly putty’. This is a non-Newtonian ‘dilatant’ fluid, because its
viscosity increases with the force applied to it; here it is used as a shock absorber.
10 With the exception of cutlery that is disposable, which is often made of plastic.
11 This was an Internet survey of 28 males and 27 females. Of this self-selected
sample, 31 were 44 years old or under and 24 were 45 or over. From this work, it is
not possible to say whether the motivations for protecting phones are more likely
to be economic or to do with the disquiet engendered by the degradation of the
object’s surfaces, but in combination with the interview this work shows that both
motivations are in play.
12 This individual is a middle-aged female who works as an academic. Her commit-
ment to preserving her possessions is likely to be stronger than most, but for this
reason she was able to speak lucidly about the rationale for these care routines. She
therefore constitutes an ‘extreme’ sample, useful because of the clarity with which
she was able to speak about her habits in protecting her possessions.
13 Campbell’s other types – the neophile and the technophile – would likely have a
different relationship to the physical ageing of their possessions, possibly leading
them to be less concerned about the signs of wear and degradation, since they
represent motivations to acquire new goods on the basis that they are new, or more
advanced, rather than because they are no longer pristine. Further work would be
necessary to establish this.
14 Here, ‘promise’ is meant in the more restricted sense than Alison Clarke uses it in
the title of her work on the history of Tupperware (Clarke 2001), to indicate the
promise inherent in the qualities of plastic surfaces.
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7 Reflections of an unrepentant
plastiphobe
An essay on plasticity and the STS life
Jody A. Roberts
I’m looking at a picture of my daughter Helena when she was about six weeks
old. It had finally become cold enough here in Philadelphia in late October
for her to use some gifts she had been accumulating since before she was
born. She’s wearing a red hat covered with flowers, some cotton pants, socks
that are barely hanging on to her feet, a couple of socks for her hands, and a
blue hooded sweatshirt with the words ‘FUTURE PLASTIPHOBE’ embla-
zoned across the front. She also has a soft plastic tube extending out from her
right nostril.
The sweatshirt referenced an inside joke. I had already earned a reputation
among close friends as a ‘plastiphobe’ – a word we coined to describe my
growing visceral reaction to anything plastic. When we received the gift, no
one could have anticipated just how much plastic would be dangling from
Helena in these early weeks of her life. The irony was not lost on my wife,
Carrie, or me.
When Helena stopped breathing shortly after birth, our attempts to
minimize contact with the synthetically produced and medicalized world – to
live strictly in the world of the ‘natural’ – came to an abrupt halt. After she
was intubated, the long plastic tube that ensured that air would continue to
pass into her lungs symbolized our transition between these two different
worlds. The proceeding weeks saw plastic tubing come and go. When intu-
bation no longer seemed necessary, a nasal cannula carried fresh air into her
nose, helping her to maintain an adequate supply of oxygen. Plastic tubes
carried fluids flowing from plastic bags. In the early days, it was easy to stay
distracted from the questions that occasionally crossed my mind. We were
uncertain about so many things that I rarely had time to think about the
environment of the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), but, eventually,
I began wondering: what other chemicals were entering Helena’s fragile
new body?
Reconfiguring our home to accommodate Helena’s cerebral palsy has
meant a continuation of many of the practices (and the presence of many of
the materials that make those practices possible) that we first encountered in
the NICU. Helena’s plastic G-tube provides an alternative portal directly to
her stomach. Every bit of nourishment that reaches her body passes through
122 Jody A. Roberts
that plastic button and the plastic tube that connects it to syringes and enteral
feeding bags. Now that she’s no longer receiving breast milk (itself made
possible by pumping through plastic flanges into plastic bottles and placed
into plastic bags), each of her meals involves furious blending in a sturdy
plastic blender.
My sense of place in this plasticized world was different before Helena
was born. I was still living in a world synthetically fabricated from the
miraculous molecules of the twentieth century, but things didn’t feel quite
so intimate. I had more control – or so I thought – to create boundaries
between ‘that’ world and ‘my’ world. I didn’t need to boil plastic bottles.
No plastic tubing was required for eating. The days when Helena still recei-
ved breast milk exclusively provided the perfect example of the shifting
nature of the world I now inhabited: with loving and purposeful effort,
Carrie and I worked to make sure that what she ate, and thus what entered
her milk, remained as free of potential toxins as we could possibly manage,
which meant (in part) avoiding plastic as often as possible; then we placed
it into a plastic bag to be pumped through Helena’s plastic tube into her
stomach. This was the beginning of the end of my own techno-minimalist
fantasies.
Up to now, I had been using my training in Science and Technology
Studies (STS) to make better sense of the world around me; now I was turn-
ing these tools of inspection into tools of introspection, and in the process
demonstrating the interconnections between the two. My theoretical approach
is most heavily informed by three schools of thought: the social construction
of technology (SCOT) programme; actor network theory (ANT) and related
inquiries; and the so-called risk society.1 My hope is that, in uniting these
three frames of reference through the perspective of our own personal
encounters, we might get closer to the discussions that lie beyond the facts
and begin a conversation more deeply enmeshed in a politics of participa-
tion.2 Drawing on this rich STS literature related to the construction of
modern technologies, I hope this chapter helps to unite these various threads
of scholarship in a way that highlights the roles we ourselves play in our
everyday lives in the ongoing construction of society, and therefore our ability
to take part in its reconstruction.
Becoming a plastiphobe
I am a plastiphobe – or at least I thought I was. At work, people would taunt
me with plastic stirrers sitting in their freshly poured cups of hot coffee.
They’d tell me how they just warmed up their lunch in a plastic container.
They’d feign horror as they sipped from their plastic water bottles. After
I delivered an informal lunch presentation about some of my research on
emerging toxicological concerns related to chemicals, attention shifted away
from the issue of plastics generally towards that of EDCs (endocrine
Reflections of an unrepentant plastiphobe 123
disrupting chemicals) more specifically. They’d understood enough of the talk
to find new ways to mock me. ‘Uh-oh, Jody, are there any EDCs in this?’
(Probably, but that’s not why you’re asking.) While they joke, the experience
of being a plastiphobe is real. It becomes manifest in the things I see – the
visible products I confront every day – as well as in what I can’t see, but that I
nonetheless know happens – the synthetic processes that make these products
possible.
Staring at an individual object – or more likely dozens of those objects
lined up together on a shelf – I can’t help but sense the entire life-cycle of
plastic, from extracted raw material (most likely petroleum or natural gas)
to a destiny that will take it to landfill, incinerator or ocean. I stand staring
at rows of items on store shelves, wondering which might be the least awful
for me to purchase. I have a drawer in an office filing cabinet stuffed with
plastic bags because I cannot bring myself to throw them away, but don’t
know what else to do with them because I can’t be sure they are recyclable,
or even if I try to recycle them whether or not they will indeed be recycled.
When I look at a teabag steeping in a cup of hot water, I can’t help but
wonder what the bag is made of and whether or not it is breaking down in
the presence of near-boiling water. When I plug in the humidifier in the
bedroom to combat the dry heat of our radiators, I wonder what might be
accompanying the steam as the water exits its polycarbonate container. I
start to wonder where all of the finely ground pieces that once constituted the
sole of my shoe end up after they have worn away. My concerns are not
necessarily bound to plastics, but the category serves as a convenient place-
holder for the questions and uncertainties about the chemicals of and in our
modern world.
Human health and environmental health are typically dealt with separately.
We have different regulatory agencies in the United States for addressing these
problems. We have different academic departments, journals and degrees.
It would seem as though humans live in another world, somehow altogether
separate from the world that we actually inhabit. Synthetic chemicals – plastic
or not – bridge these worlds. What is out there is now in us. Plastics might be
poisoning us while they are also littering our landscapes, filling our landfills
and polluting our oceans.
When academics get involved, these topics quickly become couched within
a framework of uncertainty, risk and the politics implicit in both (Proctor
and Schiebinger 2009). At stake is more than just a scholarly debate about
epistemology. These are the elements of a lived reality (Callon et al. 2009).
The debate for me is about more than plastic or pesticides; it involves navi-
gating a way through a world made of plastic and made plastic by the arte-
facts of our technoscientific infrastructure. In our era of reflexive modernity,
we must come to grips with a technoscientific world run amok (Beck 1992;
Giddens 1991). Or, perhaps more appropriately, we must realize that we
might be facing a runaway reaction. Unlike Beck or Giddens, though, I’m
wrestling with my own participation in this system. I struggle to remake
124 Jody A. Roberts
things before it is too late, even though I feel more enmeshed in the things to
be remade than I ever have in the past.3
The emergence of plastics

The twentieth century bears the marks of a host of technoscientific triumphs
over nature. Physicists, with the help of chemists, learned to smash atoms
together, threatening both the built environment of human societies and the
natural world. The emergence of modern genetics likewise provided new tools
for technoscientists to construct new organisms with heightened precision
and frightening amounts of unknown consequences. The century was also
one in which the molecular make-up of the world was irrevocably altered
in a multitude of ways. The growth of the organic chemicals industry, devel-
oped in the nineteenth century to create new synthetic dyes and fertilizers,
changed gear; as nations went to war, so did chemists. Pesticides and poi-
sons (one and the same, really) became mainstays of the chemical research
lab (Russell 2001). While chemists in labs were creating new molecular
substances, chemical engineers were developing more efficient ways of mass
producing them (Ndiaye 2007). With the war machine consuming nature’s
bounty, and with U-boats blocking the global trade so vital to wartime
production, chemists expanded their research into the production of synth-
etic molecules for the replacement of nature’s goods. New plastics, which
had familial relations to the early compounds that went by the names of cel-
luloid and Bakelite, were of a different sort. They came in infinite varieties,
could be put to use in a multitude of situations, and most importantly could
be created cheaply in tremendous quantities. The flow of plastics did not
abate after the war; it simply entered new markets. People produced more
polymers, and the plastics kept piling up. That’s the world we live in now: a
plastic paradise.4
Plastics, or any of the molecular markers of the modern chemical industry,
don’t stay put. They are unruly technologies. Recent advances in human bio-
monitoring studies conducted by the US Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC) have sought to quantify, in some statistically probable kind
of way, the level of exposure to synthetic chemicals faced by everyday
Americans. As new techniques are developed, the list increases of chemicals
sought out, and found, in our blood, urine, fat, breast milk, and other organic
tissues and fluids (CDC 2009).5 As more data become available, the CDC has
begun supplementing previously published reports with new results, including
one for Bisphenol-A (BPA). Over the last few years, BPA has become the
favourite battleground for industry, health and regulatory wrangling because
of its pervasiveness in the marketplace and its specific uses in products
designed for children (such as baby bottles). The results of these new tests,
conducted between 2003 and 2004, found BPA in 92.6 per cent of all people
tested (Calafat et al. 2008). Given the uses of the chemical, this finding was
perhaps not terribly surprising.
The debates about BPA, however, are just a microcosm of the larger land-
scape that includes the molecular reconstruction of our environments, the
implications this may have for our bodies and those of the organisms around
us and in us, and how best to govern these processes. Hundreds of industrial
chemicals – from plasticizers and pesticides to flame retardants and solvents –
are now reliably located in the bodies of every resident of the United States.
However, this fact has been difficult to translate into other contexts, particu-
larly regulatory ones.6 The CDC (2005) keeps quiet about possible links
between its biomonitoring data and possible health consequences because, by
and large, no one has ever looked for any connections. Industry advocates
emphasize the same lack of correlative evidence.7 However, while the CDC
has been careful not to overstate the case, and industry advocates have sys-
temically understated it, environmental and health-focused organizations have
used the data (from the CDC as well as self-generated) to raise a host of
concerns.8
Another way of putting it is to say that, while the CDC and industry
activists may argue that proof of presence does not equal proof of harm,
proof of non-harm (such that it is possible) has also been elusive.9 At this
point, it may even be difficult to understand what that harm will look like.
Will it come in the form of cancer, obesity or infertility? When will these
effects become manifest: late in life, in my children, in my children’s chil-
dren?10 While we may not know, the fact that we are asking these questions is
an indication in itself that some knowledge has emerged and that the politics
of plastic are changing. The molecular transformation of the earth’s ecosys-
tems that is currently taking place should at the very least be a matter of
concern for all of us, especially when it comes to protecting the most
vulnerable populations – like my daughter.
I don’t know much about developmental embryology, but I do know that
it is complicated, a carefully integrated process of cell growth, expansion
and specialization. At the root of much of this process is the constant
chemical wash the foetus experiences: hormones flowing in from the mother
and soon from its own developing endocrine system. BPA, phthalates,
organo-phosphate and organo-chlorine pesticides, polybrominated diphenyl
ether (PBDE) and other flame retardants, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs),
dioxins and other chemicals encountered on a daily basis have all been shown
to disrupt this delicate and absolutely crucial process to varying degrees.
However, understanding what this means for my – our – lives is much less
clear. How should I change my daily routine? Would it matter? What would it
take to extract myself from the fabric of our society? Perhaps more simply,
how are we to live? It is this last articulation that is most important, since it
highlights the complexity of the dilemma. This is not only or merely a scien-
tific issue, one of uncertainty about data related to health. These questions
uncover with deep intimacy the relations between the ethical structure – or
perhaps grammar – of the technological system that produces these artefacts.
My choice to participate or not (or to what extent) is precisely the sort of
126 Jody A. Roberts
ethical wrangling that is at work in, say, Peter Singer’s (1995) musings on the
same question.
A plastic pregnancy
If friends and colleagues had found me a little unstable for my reactions to all
things plastic already, the experience of Carrie’s pregnancy only intensified the
situation. Items and actions that previously had been acceptable were sud-
denly excluded. Polycarbonate bottle? Off limits. It was replaced with an
unlined stainless steel container. Strawberries? Out. They’re nothing but con-
gealed pesticides. Navigating our way through a plastic-laden world had
always been difficult, but now – with even more at stake – the task became
all-consuming.
The peak of frustration came roughly seven months into the pregnancy.
Carrie, exhausted from sleepless nights and back pain, determined one
Saturday morning finally to purchase a new mattress. With literally one foot
out of the door, I froze: what about the flame retardants – the PBDEs (one
of a class of widely used flame retardants)? Study after study found them
to be potent endocrine disruptors. Here in the United States, all furniture
(especially mattresses) must meet strict fire-code regulations that result in
the dousing of the lining and stuffing within with flame retardants such
as PBDE. Why? It would seem that there are fears that I might light the
house on fire if I fall asleep smoking in bed, but my fear had nothing to
do with smoking in bed or dying in an inferno as a result of something so
far removed from my everyday life. Instead, I pictured my head, Carrie’s
head and the yet-to-be-seen head of our baby lying comfortably together on
this new bed, rhythmically inhaling the flame retardants off-gassing into our
bedroom. I couldn’t go. I couldn’t even bring myself to walk out the door.
Carrie, now nearly in tears from disappointment and frustration, left it to me
to find a way through this tangled mess of knowing and unknowing. Knowl-
edge (or uncertainty, or un-knowing) was not enough; an action needed to be
taken to resolve a real, not hypothetical or probabilistic, issue. I had to
decide.
I spent the day searching for alternatives, trying to balance what I thought
would keep us safe with what I could realistically afford to spend, all enmeshed
in the fabric of a cultural and legal network of codes that sought to protect
me. Yet I was in pursuit of the same thing: safety, but with constant aggra-
vation at the ways the approaches constrained one another. It was precisely
this network of laws, regulations, codes and material substances that prevented
me from doing what I thought to be safest.
I was, admittedly, attempting to shop my way to safety (Szasz 2009).
I understood that, but what alternative did I have? I could write to my con-
gressional representatives asking for reforms to be made to the federal
statutes governing my exposure to these chemicals. I could write an op-ed
about the persistence of outdated regulations and the unforeseen public health
problems they had created. I could attempt to research and write the history
of fire codes in the United States. I could trace the parallel developments in
organic chemistry that allowed those codes to be met. I could look for ways
to link the ways in which the persistence of those chemicals and those prac-
tices had now potentially created a problem far more pervasive than the ori-
ginal problem. Or I could try my best to buy my way out of the problem. So
I did. I ordered a wool-filled mattress topper (wool is by nature flame retardant,
and so meets US fire codes) that would temporarily relieve us of the uncom-
fortable nights without having to purchase something doused in synthetic
flame retardants, which would simply have substituted Carrie’s sleeplessness
for my own.11
After navigating 40-plus weeks of pregnancy, we found ourselves at the
threshold of two converging worlds. What had been inside was now ready to
be outside. What had been unseen for so long, but sensed nonetheless, would
soon become visible. The skills we carefully honed during the pregnancy
would have to persist across this divide. We would need to protect the milk
from the same substances that we tried to keep from passing through the
placenta. We would take the same care working in the outside world as we’d
taken when dealing with the inside one. We’d been so careful, so vigilant, so
exhaustive that we were sure that we’d done everything we could to protect
this fragile developing life from the toxic world it was about to enter. When
Helena finally emerged, crying and groping for food and warmth, we thought
we had succeeded – until she stopped breathing.
The NICU is an otherworldly place (Layne 1996). Given the seriousness of
many of the situations that characterize that space, it is remarkably quiet and
dark (light becoming a sign that something might be wrong and that greater
observation is required). Two things, however, were omnipresent in this new
environment: noise (the various beeps associated with a sundry of monitoring
equipment) and plastic.
It took about 10 days for me finally to acknowledge that I was living in
a plastic nightmare. The majority of the babies there were in incubators,
like those seen in an American Chemistry Council ‘Essential2’ ad camp-
aign. Luckily, Helena was not, but she was covered in soft, flexible medical
tubing – the kind infamously full of phthalates. Nearly everything that came
into contact with her passed through this tubing. Plastic is the preferred
material in that environment. Plastic held her growing supply of breast milk,
collected with the hope that she’d soon be able to ingest it; plastic bladder
bags held the variety of liquids that were slowly pumped into her; plastic
comprised the walls of the bed upon which she lay motionless in those first
few weeks.
Manifestations of my plastiphobia took two forms. Most immediately,
I found myself wondering what was in the particular plastics that were
attached to or literally in Helena. Which phthalates did they use to make that
tubing so pliable? How likely were they to leach when liquids were passed
128 Jody A. Roberts
through them? As Helena moved from IV to nasal tube for eating, I tried to
imagine the soft tubing dangling down her throat, precisely placed just inside
the opening of her stomach. How resistant would this tubing be to the acidity
of the stomach? Would her body attempt to digest the tube – this foreign but
essential device that helped to keep her alive?
I tried to talk to some of the nurses about my concerns, but only casually.
From my previous experiences, I knew that most people would not welcome
this line of questioning. Emotionally, I was not in a place to take the gentle
ribbing to which I had grown accustomed at work or at home. I succeeded
with them about as much as I did with my co-workers: they knew just enough
to take part in some slight mocking of my concerns, but without any real
concerns of their own.
However, it wasn’t just the plastic (potentially) accumulating in Helena’s
body that bothered me; it was all of the plastic flowing into the world –
accumulating in large heaps in the trash cans that were emptied several times
a day. These mounds of plastic that each day and night filled the trash cans in
our one tiny corner of suburban hospital-land left me feeling strangely defla-
ted and defeated. It was as if that assault on the earth was just another injury
being perpetrated on Helena. Plastic syringes, bladder bags, pre-measured
and mixed formula, tubing and all the other plastic miscellanea all headed to
another location where the accumulated matter would likely be incinerated,
which itself would lead to the production and accumulation of new com-
pounds in that environment before molecules of dioxin and other persistent
organic pollutants would ride the currents of water and wind to the coldest
locations on earth to be deposited, consumed and deposited again in the fat
of a seal, polar bear or human being.
Becoming plastic
In his essay ‘Plastic’, Roland Barthes (1972) gets at the fundamental problem
of trying to deal with these mysterious substances. As a substitute for all
things, plastic is everything. As raw matter that can become anything, is it
really anything itself ? Plastic is troubling precisely because it lays old cat-
egories to waste. In the half-century since 1957, when Barthes originally wrote
his essay, we’ve witnessed plastic’s emergence in nearly every aspect of our
everyday lives. From transportation, to food, to clothing, to shelter, we live in
a thoroughly plasticized world – even if this real world is not quite the one
envisioned by the ‘plastic pioneers’ of the past (see Morris 1986; Meikle
1995). The spread of plastic has been more subtle, and it is perhaps for that
reason that experts of all stripes missed it slipping into unintended places,
travelling near and far such that nearly every cup of water from the ocean is
likely to contain some plastic in some form of degradation and nearly every
human subject found anywhere on the globe will likely bear the marks of a
plastic modernity. What, though, are these plastics doing to us?
Twenty-seven days after Helena was born, we were discharged from the
NICU. The car was packed with little more than Carrie, Helena and me, but
the reconstruction of our apartment into a mini-NICU had already taken
place. Waiting for us at home were apnoea and pulse/oxygen monitors, two
tanks of oxygen, an air pump, an oxygen concentrator and a month’s supply
of plastic tubes and syringes for feedings. Our one-bedroom apartment was
suddenly filled with boxes, bottles and beeping. This was worse than the
NICU, where at least the stimuli could be isolated and more easily ignored.
Now, with every beep, we went running, tripping over cords and tubes,
trying not to spill the precious breast milk.
When we had previously inhabited our home, nearly everything was
designed to minimize our, and even more so Carrie’s, contact with plastic –
especially when it came to food. Part of this was for the pregnancy – for
Carrie’s health and the health of the developing foetus – but it was also, in
part, a preparation for life after the birth. With Carrie nursing (at least that
was the plan), we wanted to eliminate as much as possible our contact with
potential contaminants. However, for the past four weeks we’d been eating
almost nothing that didn’t come from a plastic container: #5 containers filled
with goodness from my father-in-law’s café in Annapolis, cookies wrapped in
plastic wrap, prepared salads in plastic clamshells, paper cups, plastic juice
bottles – the list goes on. The very network I had been working to decon-
struct, or perhaps more accurately reposition us outside, was now the network
within which I subsisted. It sustained us just as it had sustained Helena
during those crucial hours and days, and would continue to do so in the time
yet to be defined.
While I had hoped to avoid the excesses of a plastic modernity when we
left the hospital behind, I instead found myself recreating many of the hab-
its and rituals learned in those early days in my home, albeit now moul-
ded and modified (like a new plastic) to reflect my own rituals adopted from
our lives before and made as fitting as possible for our new experiences. I find
myself flushing the brand-new ‘sterile’ bladder bag and tube with water before
filling it, the aroma of fresh plastic (typically a result of phthalate mono-
mers off-gassing) filling my nose. With that smell, I recall a story from a
recent environmental endocrine disruptor conference I had attended. I was
sharing stories with a couple – recent parents themselves – and the mother
had told me how she had her partner flush the tubes in the hospital before she
was hooked up to an IV prior to her delivery. In that moment, with that
smell, I had suddenly assumed that I should be doing the same thing – that
I should always have been doing the same thing – but what difference would
it really make?
For better or for worse, our lives are dominated and made possible in a
tangible and real way by the very plastic that I’ve tried so hard to avoid. It’s
the bottle that held the breast milk; the tubes and flanges that made pumping
possible; the bladder bag that held the milk to be delivered; the tube that
130 Jody A. Roberts
connects the bag to Helena; and of course the G-tube (and previously the
NG-tube) that provides access to Helena’s stomach.
I’m not only concerned about the plastic that sustains our lives, but also
about the quantities that daily I’m asked to dispose of in no particularly good
way. Opening the trash can, I can’t help but think of that strange phenom-
enon variously known as the Pacific Trash Vortex, Great Pacific Garbage
Patch, the Eastern Garbage Patch or simply the Plastic Soup.12 At the spot in
the Pacific Ocean where the currents merge and begin to swirl in on them-
selves, Charles Moore (founder of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation)
has found an island of trash that currently stands at roughly twice the size of
Texas (though every time I research the phenomenon, the size seems to have
grown). The ‘island’ is mostly a soupy mixture of all things plastic – the
indestructible element of our lives.
Plastics are not static molecules. They are not easily tamed and do not
stay put. They are, as I noted earlier, unruly. Molecules lost during produc-
tion or simply broken away become mobile. Some plastics travel thousands
of miles through earth, wind and water, slowly breaking down, polymer
dissolving ever so slowly towards monomer and spreading through the
food chain; some have simply ridden the currents to this trash dump at sea.
The trash that collects here serves as a dumping ground for our culture,
and as a feeding pit for the locals. Seabirds, turtles and fish fill their bellies
with the waste. Those not overwhelmed and taken over by the sheer quan-
tity of the plastic they consume will instead become part of the plasticized
food chain. Staring at the images of this dump, I realize that I’m sitting in
the centre of it, resting not so comfortably amid the shopping bags, diapers,
toys, and all of the other plastic miscellanea that are our culture’s gift to the
world.
The plastics that populate my everyday life and that fill me with such
anxiety also help to make Helena’s life possible, but we resist the simple
dichotomies imposed on us. The plastics are not simply life saving or a
threat: they are both. At the same time, my lack of knowledge is not a sign
of deficit, but a sign of the shifting relationships of my life and world.
More importantly, we can shape the direction the plastics take. We can
redesign them to be more benign. We can protect vulnerable populations
from exposure. We can decide how and when and why we use these materials.
Their future is as much unwritten as our own. Together, we are becoming
plastic.
Acknowledgements
A previous version of this essay was published in Science as Culture as part of
a special issue, ‘Embodying STS: Identity, Narrative, and the Interdisciplinary
Body’ (2010, 19(1): 101–20). The author thanks Taylor & Francis for per-
mission to print this adapted version. The author also wishes to express his
thanks to the editors of the present volume for allowing him the opportunity
to expand on and refine some of those ideas for this collection.
Notes
1 For foundational works in the social construction of technology, see Bijker, Hughes
and Pinch (1987). Exemplary (and relevant) works in the tradition of actor net-
work theory include Latour (1987, 2004), Mol (2002) and Callon (1987), which is
also an interesting example of when SCOT almost met ANT. The foundational
work in STS for thinking about the risk society is Beck (1992).
2 See Cohen and Galusky (2010) for a discussion of STS as a participatory activity.
3 For insight on Beck’s take on life in this reflexive modernity, listen to his interview
on ‘Ideas: How to Think About Science’, www.cbc.ca/ideas/episodes/2009/01/02/
how-to-think-about-science-part-1—24-listen/#episode5 (accessed 13 July 2012).
4 For this brief overview of the history of plastics, I’ve drawn on Meikle (1995).
5 The 2009 report is the most recent complete report, but the CDC has continued to
release updates (including in 2012), demonstrating expanded surveillance of specific
chemicals and new human sources, all of which can be found on the CDC website:
www.cdc.gov/exposurereport (accessed 13 July 2012).
6 For an overview of some of the difficulties of implementing these data, see NRC
(2006) and Roberts (2008a). For the difficulties of fitting this work into legal and
regulatory frameworks, see Cranor (2008) and Roberts (2008b).
7 See the American Chemistry Council’s page on biomonitoring: www.american
chemistry.com/Policy/Chemical-Safety/Biomonitoring (accessed 13 July 2012).
8 See, for example, the Environmental Working Group’s ‘Human Toxome Project’: www.
ewg.org/sites/humantoxome (accessed 13 July 2012). See also Lang et al. (2008).
9 There are two ways of dealing with this situation. In the first instance, we might
broadly classify this as an example of ‘agnotology’ – a case of things we simply
don’t know (Proctor and Schiebinger 2009). However, why don’t we know? Is this
unknowable (and therefore ignorance is unavoidable), or is it a case of undone
science (with all of the politics that implies)? See Frickel et al. (2010) for a discussion
of the latter proposition.
10 These are just some of the questions with which researchers working in these areas
are grappling, and also just a small sample of a growing list of possible exposure
endpoints. The case around BPA serves as the quintessential case.
11 We repeated much of this same ritual a year later when we moved, in search of a
larger bed to accommodate two adults, a toddler and two cats (one of which
insisted on keeping his place at my feet despite the altered sleeping conditions).
The problems persist nearly as much as the chemicals themselves.
12 See, for example, the Greenpeace website: www.greenpeace.org/international/cam
paigns/oceans/pollution/trash-vortex (accessed 13 July 2012); and Marks and
Howden (2008).
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8 Plasticizers
A twenty-first-century miasma
Max Liboiron
Some Greenland natives have such high quantities of industrial chemicals in

their bodies – including those used in plastics – that they can be classified as
toxic waste when they die (Cone 2005: 32). Scientists have found that every
person tested in the United States and Canada, and many other countries,
carries plastic chemicals in his or her body (CDCP 2009; Bushnik et al. 2010).
These plastic chemicals have complex and largely uncharted effects. Plastic
pollution is unique not only because of its ubiquity and persistence, but also
because most efforts to solve or mitigate its effects are failing. Typical pro-
posed solutions to bodily chemical burdens include banning bisphenol-A
(BPA) in baby bottles, avoiding plastic food containers and increasing recy-
cling. Yet, if all plastics were recycled, all plastic food containers were elimi-
nated and all demonstrably harmful chemicals were banned, bodies would
still not be free of plastic pollution.
In this chapter, I argue that miasmas can be useful for thinking through
plastic pollution because the miasma theory shares several characteristics with
the behaviours of plastic chemicals. Miasmas may appear to be an unscientific
and folksy concept, but they were the first and longest-running scientific the-
ories of disease that did not attribute illness to spiritual causes. They were
also logical models used to explain dispersed, unspecific influences within the
wider environment that caused bodily harm and illness. I suggest that these
characteristics have acquired new relevance for examining plastics and their
behaviours.
Before the late nineteenth century, disease was perceived to be caused by
‘bad air’, or miasmas. By the turn of the twentieth century, the miasmic
model of harm had been replaced by germ theory. Within 40 years, a model
of pollution developed that privileged linear causal links between a discrete
pollutant and its pollution, and the quantification of harm.
Miasmas exemplify what I call the influence model of harm, in contrast to
the particle model of harm used today that describes the actions of discrete
pollutants. Models, as Mary Morgan and Margaret Morrison (1999) explain
in Models as Mediators, ‘provide us with a tool for investigation, giving the
user the potential to learn about the world or about theories or both because
of their characteristics of autonomy and representational power, and their
Plasticizers: A twenty-first-century miasma 135
ability to effect a relation between scientific theories and the world’ (Morgan
and Morrison 1999: 35). Models hold together disparate facts to describe how
different parts of the world relate to each other. Their representational power
proposes not only how the world works, but also how particular solutions
follow from specific representations; they both explain and enact the world
around them. Miasma and the influence model ‘effect a relation’ between
environments, bodies and ill-health that describes plastic body burdens better
than current particle models of harm, which consistently fail to describe or
control plastic pollution.
This chapter first outlines the miasma theory of disease, the influence model
of harm and our current model of pollution, focusing on each model’s
internal architecture and physical form; its agency, or mechanism of harm;
and its geography, or the spatial relations within bodies and the spaces out-
side of them. It then compares the two models with the phenomenon of
plastic body burdens. Each model generates modes and points of intervention,
and I argue that the miasma theory provides better representations, and
thereby more appropriate interventions for mitigating the effects of bodily
plastic pollution, than current dominant models and solutions.
Miasmic logic
Between the sixth and early twentieth centuries, the miasma theory of disease
posited that diseases, and particularly epidemic illness, were caused by ‘an ill-
defined but universally recognized corruption and infection of the air’
(Cipolla 1992: 4). This infection of the air originated from such diverse
sources as extreme weather, decaying organic matter, corpses, marshes, cess-
pools, depressions in the earth, volcanic eruptions, human exhalations and
the conjunction of the stars. External causes of illness, such as miasmas, were
called the exciting or immediate cause of disease – they were not the disease
itself, but could cause an imbalance of humours within a body, which in turn
could result in illness. Both plastic chemicals and miasmas operate through
what I call the influence model because the architecture of miasmas – parti-
cularly their inextricability from the surrounding environment, their mechan-
isms for ‘causing’ illness and even the definition of illness they helped to
explain – pivots on a certain mode of effect, an ‘action or fact of flowing in’
of something amorphous but forceful, through a ‘secret power or principle’.
Influence is the ‘exertion of action of which the operation is unseen or insen-
sible’ (Oxford English Dictionary 2012), and as such is appropriate to miasma
and its form and agency.
Miasmas were inextricable from the landscape, urban architecture and
the human population. Their mechanism of harm was not direct, but additive
and somewhat mysterious: weather, personal histories, architecture, diet, the
alignment of stars, the location of cesspools, plumbing and employment con-
ditions all had to be counted by physicians trying to cure the sick, and by
sanitarians aiming to reduce the presence of miasmas in their locales. As
136 Max Liboiron
such, miasma’s epistemological structure was one of accumulation, where
everything was taken into account and nothing could be dismissed or over-
looked (Latour 1988). Moreover, miasmas were not lone agents of illness.
They coexisted with other theories of disease, such as contagion or infection.
Some present-day authors have argued that ‘early nineteenth-century phys-
icians who explained disease by too many causes (miasma, tainted water,
contaminated soil, poor living, sleeping while intoxicated, etc.) actually had
no causal theory at all’ (Kern 2004: 74). This view is suited to the ways in
which we think of causality today, rather than how causality operated via
influence in earlier centuries. It was not that the hygienists and miasmaists
failed to locate and correlate causes for specific diseases; rather, it was the
nature of miasma to be multidirectional, variegated and indiscriminating, and
to work in concert with other mechanisms of illness. Experts thus had to
account for an ill-defined, radically irreducible phenomenon.
The first 100 pages of The Uses and Abuses of Air, a treatise written by
John H. Griscom (1854), an American miasmaist and leader of the sanitation
movement in the mid-nineteenth century, compares breathing to food, cloth-
ing and other basic human needs. The treatise goes on to describe how ‘pure’
and ‘bad’ air interacts with digestion, blood circulation, the liver, heart, lungs,
skin, ears and eyes. Griscom explains ties between air, vice and occupational
setting. Whether he is discussing ‘the amount of water thrown off from the
lungs’ or how ‘vitiated air produces quarrelsomeness and encourages intem-
perance and other vices’, bad air and harm are never studied in isolation.
They are not separate from the body, the wider atmosphere, buildings or
moral behaviours, and they potentially affect all bodily systems. In short, ill-
ness and its causes were systemic rather than discrete, holistic rather than
piecemeal.
The logic of influence and layers of causality explained how individuals
could resist certain diseases, why overworked and exhausted people became ill
more often and with more dire results, and why one member of a household
could resist disease or recover from disease while the rest fell ill or died. In his
treatise on miasmic air, Griscom (1854) tells the story of three men sharing a
sofa in a crowded room. It is winter, the windows are shut and the room
becomes impure with exhalations:
The first-mentioned [gentleman] complained of the great heat of the

room, and wished the fire might be extinguished; the second said he felt
very cold, even in that high temperature, and actually rose and put on his
greatcoat; while the third, as if mysteriously influenced by the two
extremes by which he was flanked, complained of alternating feverishness
and chilliness, and expressed himself unable to account for the singular
sensations. Thus we are given an exhibition of the manner in which dif-
ferent temperaments are affected by one cause [the density of carbon
dioxide in crowded rooms].
(Griscom 1854: 57–58, emphasis in original)
There is no linear or guaranteed relationship between the presence of a
potential harm and the harm it produces. Instead, countless variables, pre-
supposing causes and unique contexts both within and outside of bodies join
to produce a specific effect. Just because a condition of harm is present – in
Griscom’s case, elevated levels of carbon dioxide and reduced levels of
oxygen – illness does not necessarily follow, nor is the manifestation or type
of harm the same for all people exposed.
This is not to say models of influence produce random phenomena. Sani-
tarians such as Griscom noticed that certain predisposing conditions, such as
poverty and habitation in tenements, consistently led to illness and epidemics.
Griscom revolutionized public health because he advocated that it was the
surrounding conditions of poverty, rather than people living in poverty, that
led to epidemics and chronic illness – that is, poverty was an immediate cause,
rather than the more popular theory that predisposing causes such as
immorality made tenement dwellers both poor and ill. At the time, this was a
radical reorganization of causality. His brand of environmental health was an
early form of environmental justice, though such a term would not exist for
more than a century.
The autonomous pollutant

The germ inspired a radical new model of harm starting in the 1880s that
would develop over the course of the twentieth century. With the germ theory,
illness and health changed from a confluence of environment, body and
morality to a single, discrete pathogenic agent. This affected both the form
and mechanisms of disease. In 1882, Robert Koch, one of the founders of
germ theory, wrote:
Only a few decades ago the real nature of tuberculosis was unknown to
us; it was regarded as a consequence … of social misery, and as this
supposed cause could not be got rid of by simple means people relied on
the probably gradual improvement of social conditions and did nothing.
All this is altered now. We know … the real cause of the disease is a
parasite – that is, a visible and palpable enemy with which we can pursue
and annihilate, just as we can pursue and annihilate other parasitic
enemies of mankind.
(Koch 1961: 461)
Koch’s experiments are characterized by an ethos of isolation. Pathogens were

separated from the body and the environment on Petri dishes in laboratories.
These ‘visible and palpable’ enemies were things-in-themselves, separate from
the symptoms they caused in bodies. The isolation of causality to one variable
is a radical departure from the systemic influence model of disease based on
disruptions and balance (Nash 2006). The autonomy of germs allowed a
138 Max Liboiron
simultaneous segregation of bodies, environments and disease, reducing or
eliminating the former system of co-dependence and influence.
Doctors could now focus their attention on germs rather than an endless
plethora of influences. In 1916, Hibbert Winslow Hill, director of the Institute
of Public Health in Minnesota, wrote: ‘The old public health was concerned
with the environment; the new is concerned with the individual. The old
sought the sources of infectious disease in the surroundings of man; the new
finds them in man himself ’ (Hill 1916: 8). The germ changed concepts of
disease and health. Health came to denote the absence of pathogens rather
than an imbalance of forces. The environment, together with other ‘action[s]
of which the operation is unseen or insensible’, was no longer central to the
disease equation.
The term ‘pollutant’ was not documented until the end of the nineteenth
century, seven centuries after the word ‘pollution’ appeared (Oxford English
Dictionary 2012). There is no entry for pollutant in Griscom’s The Uses and
Abuses of Air, or any text prior to 1892 (n.a. 1892). Its emergence coincides
with the acceptance of the germ theory of disease and the model of isolated,
harmful agents. Pollutants and germs were not and are not synonymous, but
pollutants and germs did evolve concurrently and share an overall model of
discreteness and segregated architecture, as well as linear causality. I will call
this the particle model of harm.
Within the particle model, the relationship between a disease – now a par-
ticular disease rather than disease writ large – and its cause are linear. One of
the primary tasks that Koch and the new generation of microbiologists pur-
sued was discovering a microorganism’s law-like rules of behaviour and
pathways of movement. Germs did not reappear and disappear like miasmas.
Rather, they moved dependably from point A to point B to point C. Instead
of correlating countless everyday sources of decay, from exhalations to pud-
dles, weather, life events and astronomy, these new microorganisms allowed
scientists to ‘follow the thread’ of locomotion that emerged from the essential
character of each individual disease (Latour 1988: 46). Now causes of illness
had ‘essential’ characters, not amorphous natures.
While the germ and miasma theories coexisted for nearly 20 years at the
turn of the twentieth century, there was debate over the advantages and dis-
advantages of each model. The separation of the larger environment, occu-
pational and living arrangements, poverty and vice from disease were the
main sources of conflict between miasmaists and germ theorists. The new
form, agency and geography of germs led to a new type of disease interven-
tion. Rather than making changes in the environment, inoculations and other
disease-prevention measures focused exclusively on the microbe. According to
miasmaists, the germ theory did not adequately explain why the poor and
those employed in the hardest conditions of living and labour were dis-
proportionately affected by disease (Elliot 1870: 488–89). Nevertheless, the
germ theory has become the dominant model of harm used in disease pre-
vention and pollution control in the twenty-first century. However, while this
particle model has served us well for the last century, and has met with great
success, it fails to account for some types of disease and chemical harm, such
as those associated with plastic pollution.
Plastic pollution
In 1941, as the mass production of plastics was just beginning, V.E. Yarsley, a
chemist, and E.G. Couzens, a research manager for B.X. Plastics Ltd,
extolled the virtues of a new plastic world:
‘Plastic Man,’ will come into a world of colour and bring shining sur-
faces … he is surrounded on every side by this tough, safe, clean material
which human thought has created … [W]e shall see growing up around
us a new, brighter cleaner and more beautiful world, an environment not
subject to the haphazard distribution of nations’ resources but built to
order, the perfect expression of the new spirit of planned scientific
control, the Plastics Age.
(Yarsley and Couzens 1941: 149–52)
If you look up from this page, you will be surrounded by plastic. From the
latex paint on the walls, to the carpeting, tiling or varnish on the floor, the
chair you sit in, your shoes, watch and cell phone, right down to the elastic in
your underpants, you are a Plastic (Wo)Man. Today, over 310 million tonnes
of plastic are produced each year, accounting for around 8 per cent of the
world’s annual oil production (Andrady and Neal 2009: 1977; Thompson
et al. 2009: 1973). Both figures are increasing annually.
The main difference between Yarsley and Couzens’ futurist imaginings and
the current state of plastics is that the Plastics Age is not occurring within a
‘spirit of planned scientific control’. A generation into the Plastics Age, the
longevity, durability and promiscuity of plastic chemicals has led to a new,
poorly understood genre of pollution. The latest report from the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States found that
American bodies contained BPA, flame retardants, phthalates and poly-
brominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) – all chemicals that leach from plastics
(CDCP 2009). In one form or another, and in startlingly high quantities,
plastics can be found throughout numerous environments and bodies. Like
miasmas, plastics are pervasive and their dangers are latent in everyday
landscapes and objects.
Plastics are rarely just made of ‘plastic’ or polymers. Pure polyvinyl chlor-
ide (PVC) – the plastic used in most shower curtains, for example – is a white,
brittle solid that does not possess the supple, mould-resistant, flower-patterned
qualities of a shower curtain. To make many plastics more versatile, flexible,
flame retardant, purple or countless other qualities, chemicals called plastici-
zers or plastic additives such as bis(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP), BPA or
polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB), must be included. Plasticizers are not
140 Max Liboiron
Figure 8.1 Long polymer strands make up plastics, while plasticizers nestle among the
polymer strands, unbound, and can leave their host through off-gassing or
leaching
chemically bound to the polymer chains, and thus can leave their hosts rela-
tively easily (see Figure 8.1). A recent study found that ‘Almost all commer-
cially available plastic products … sampled, independent of the type of resin,
product, or retail source, leached chemicals’ (Yang et al. 2011). This ubiquity
of plastics and promiscuity of plasticizers are the reasons why plastic
chemicals accumulate in our bodies in such high quantities.
Plasticizers have a unique architecture that accounts for their mode of
pollution. They are shaped like hormones. As such, they are classified as
endocrine disruptors because they participate in the body’s endocrine, or
hormone, system rather than acting like foreign trespassers. Hormones and
endocrine disruptors travel through the body until they encounter a receptor
on a cell with a shape that complements their own. The hormone and recep-
tor fit together like a lock and key (see Figure 8.2). When the two bind, the
Plasticizers: A twenty-first-century
P lasticizers: A tw enty-first-century miasma
m ia sm a 141
141
Hormone
EndocrinelDisruptor
Hormone
Receptor
Signal activated
Figure 8.2 Endocrine receptors accept cells that complement their shape. Both hor-
hor
mones and endocrine disruptors can have similar shapes. On the right, a
hormone and receptor have bound together and activated the receptor to
DNA to begin work
signal DNA
activated receptor signals the DNA in the cell to get to work. Some of this
work includes expressing genes, developing tissue and making proteins. This
may result in nothing notable – a gene that expresses itself out of turn may
just create extra or malformed, harmless proteins. On the other hand, various
plasticizers have been correlated with infertility, recurrent miscarriages, fem-
inization of male foetuses, early-onset puberty, obesity, diabetes, reduced
brain development, cancer and neurological disorders such as early onset
senility in adults and reduced brain development in children (Grun and
Blumberg 2007: 8; Halden 2010: 179–94; Thompson et al. 2009).
The lock and key model of the endocrine system is not straightforward.
There are several keys for each lock, each key can open several locks, each
142 Max Liboiron
receptor has several locks and when a lock opens it can do several things.
To continue with the metaphor, the sorts of things that unlocked locks can
do – such as change the shape of sperm or influence the development of
breasts – are also caused by completely different sets of locks and keys in
other neighbourhoods. Some plasticizers mimic keys, some block locks, and
some stop or increase the production of keys. The exponential complexity of
these systems is not amenable to models based on the isolated pathways of
discrete germs, but is better described as a web of influence. Sorting out sin-
gular effects and influences is exceedingly difficult, especially when the body’s
own hormonal effects are not distinguishable from what endocrine disruptors
do. A body is never free of hormones, so testing the effects of an endocrine
disruptor is always tied up with the effects of hormones that are already pre-
sent. Moreover, since every body has multiple plasticizers in it at all times,
they create what is called ‘the cocktail effect’. Chemicals (and hormones) ‘can
react additively, multiplicatively or antagonistically’ with one another. Disen-
tangling what chemical caused which reaction becomes impossible because
the chemicals influence one another (Meeker et al. 2009: 2108; Rider et al.
2008). Thus, a plasticizer under a microscope in a laboratory is something
completely different from an endocrine disruptor in a body. The way in which
they operate and their harmful effects are not separate from their
environment.
Like Griscom’s study of ‘bad air’, plasticizers affect every sub-system in the
body, from the heart and its vascular system to the lungs and the respiratory
system. For example, oestrogens and the endocrine disruptors that mimic
them play a role in the development of sexual organs in women, the matur-
ation of sperm and fertility in men, the maintenance of the skeletal system in
both sexes, regulation of the menstrual cycle and pregnancy in women and
the sex drive in both sexes. They help maintain memory functions, influence
fat stores, support lung and heart function and promote mental health, and
they influence the regulation of metabolism, protein synthesis, blood coagu-
lation and the immune system, as well as salt and water retention. Oestrogens
do all this in collaboration with other hormones (Nelson and Bulun 2001:
S116–24). The effects of endocrine disruptors are not discrete; they operate
more as non-specific influences.
Like Griscom’s chilly and overheated gentlemen, different people respond
to the same plasticizers in different ways. Endocrine disruptors have the
greatest effects at the lowest doses, breaking the age-old toxicological rule that
‘the danger is in the dose’ (Vandenberg et al. 2009). The timing of the dose,
the gender and age of the person, and the overall sensitivity and state of the
ever-shifting endocrine system determine such relationships more than the
dose itself. A specific dose of BPA to a female foetus will influence her dif-
ferently than the same dose to an adult male, or even a male foetus twin
(Hunt et al. 2003; Vandenberg et al. 2009). Furthermore, the effects of a dose
may manifest in the person as a child, or during puberty, pregnancy or even
menopause. If a female foetus is exposed, endocrine disruptors may influence
her own gametes and thereby her future offspring, making effects inter-
generational (Hunt et al. 2003: 555). This acute latency between the timing
of exposure and its potential effect, compounded by the gender and state of
the endocrine system at the time, make a direct relationship between exposure
and effect impossible – perhaps even inadvisable – to isolate. Thus, due to the
complexity of the system and the way plasticizers participate in it, the rela-
tionship between pollutant and body might best be described as a complex of
influences and systems of causality.
Linear causality is not the only problem endocrine disruptors pose for the
particle model: they also make it difficult to define harm. Some of the corre-
lated effects of endocrine disruptors – such as cancer, delayed brain develop-
ment and early onset dementia – readily fit into categories of harm. Yet
others – such as obesity, the feminization of male foetuses and sexual differ-
entiation – are challenging to categorize. Environmental historian Nancy
Langston has undertaken work on diethylstilbestrol (DES), a synthetic endo-
crine disruptor given to many pregnant women in the 1930s, which has effects
similar to many plasticizers. In her study, she cautions that:
Understanding the potential for synthetic chemicals to cause birth defects

requires more than medical research alone, for defining ‘normal’ and
‘abnormal’ is a social decision, not just a medical decision. When devel-
opmental changes in sexual characteristics have been linked to pollutants,
distinguishing normal from abnormal is even more problematic.
(Langston 2010: 140)
Is feminization of male foetuses abnormal, or even pathological? Is it a form

of harm? The lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) com-
munity has argued that it is not. So, too, has the chemical industry. After
research in 1995 found that low doses of BPA altered foetal brain tissue, ‘a
representative from the American Plastics Council pointed out that it was not
possible to say whether this was a good or a bad thing for fetal brains’
(Langston 2010: 146). Changes in gene expression and their effects can be
difficult to define as harm. This does not necessarily mean endocrine dis-
ruptors fit neatly into miasmic categories of disease and health along lines of
balance or imbalance, but nor do they fit rubrics of disease based on the
presence or absence of pathogens or pollutants – especially given that
plasticizers are always already present in all bodies.
The geography of plasticizers is both like and unlike miasma. Locally – that
is, bodily – they are omnipresent. In an experiment where families ate food
that was not processed or wrapped in plastic, individuals reduced their BPA
burden by 60 per cent. This seems like a large amount until you consider that
BPA is water soluble, and leaves the body in six to twelve hours, meaning the
families were being continuously exposed to plasticizers through unknown
pathways (Staples et al. 1998; Rudel et al. 2011). Plastics off-gas in homes,
offices, manufacturing sites and outdoors. This lurking ubiquity is miasmic.
144 Max Liboiron
Yet in other aspects – such as their constant presence both inside and outside
of bodies – plasticizers that act as endocrine disruptors are not like miasmas.
Miasma is local, while plastic pollution is global. Every winter, a high-
pressure air system sweeps from the east coast of North America across the
Atlantic Ocean and into Greenland. At the same time, air originating in
mainland Europe is pushed into the High Arctic:
In a matter of days or weeks, chemicals that originated in the cities of

North America and Europe are contaminating the Arctic’s air. When
they reach the cold air, they condense and drop into the ocean or onto
the frozen ground, where they are absorbed by plants, then animals [then
people].
(Cone 2005: 165)
This is one reason why indigenous Greenlanders are some of the most con-
taminated people on the planet. Moreover, some plasticizers – such as those
used in our PVC shower curtain, mentioned earlier – are persistent organic
pollutants (POPs), which are classified by their lack of discernible half-life,
their ability to bioaccumulate, high levels of toxicity and the tendency to
travel long distances. Over the next few thousand years, POPs will concentrate
in the North, and many will stay there. This longevity also sets plasticizers
apart from miasmas.
The influence model and action

The everyday, everywhere, miasmic geography of plasticizers is why avoiding
plastic containers or banning BPA in baby bottles does not solve the problem
of body burdens. As the experiment with families who avoided plastic con-
tainers attests, plasticizers are everywhere, inside and outside of plastics,
inside and outside of bodies, and they are being produced in increasing
quantities (Thompson et al. 2009). If BPA is not in the baby bottle, it is on
the shopping receipt (Liao and Kannan 2011). Even if phthalates are banned
outright, they do not degrade, and thus continue to circulate in the environ-
ment and in bodies. These mistaken expectations for successful intervention –
avoidance and piecemeal bans for a pollutant that is omnipresent – is why
turning to the influence model can shed new light on how to deal with and
intervene in bodily plastic pollution. The way a problem is defined also
defines the types of solutions that are considered viable and effective.
I am not the only researcher to find miasmas and the influence model
useful for describing present-day ill health. In addition to its current use in
some forms of homeopathy, in 1965 Bernard Bloom, an employee of the
National Institute of Public Health, wrote an article calling for practitioners
in mental health to consider the miasma model of disease over the ‘medical
model’, a variation on what I have been calling the particle model (Bloom
1965; Tesh 1995). Both Bloom and I frame our arguments in terms of
miasma because of the potential such a model has for action. Bloom argues
that: ‘The biological model contends that etiology and treatment are disease-
specific. Accordingly, the establishment of a diagnosis is generally necessary
before appropriate treatment can be instituted.’ The miasma model, however,
is ‘a theory aimed at the prevention of disease’, and thus allows for a wider
and more immediate range of treatments and actions (Bloom 1965: 335). For
Bloom, the miasma theory describes the dispersed causes of disease, and
focuses on prevention and ‘arranging optimal conditions for the patient to
help himself ’ within a community, a solution he finds more effective than
isolating diagnoses and assigning treatments (Bloom 1965: 335). His article
ends with an extensive list of how nineteenth-century sanitarians reduced
illness and mortality through preventative and community interventions.
Thinking of endocrine distributors through the logic of miasmas is useful
for similar reasons: even while the mechanisms of action and harm of plastic
pollution remain mysterious, mitigation is possible. This is not to say that we
should import the interventions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sani-
tarians (which included dumping sewage into waterways), but that we should
use an influence model to apprehend plastic pollution as matters of concern –
entities with ‘no clear boundaries, no well-defined essences, no sharp separ-
ation between their own hard kernel and their environment’ – rather than
attempting to define them as uncertain matters of fact, ‘with their improbable
cortege of incontestable knowledge, invisible scientists, predictable impacts,
calculated risks, and unanticipated consequences’ (Latour 2004: 24, 27). The
influence model is particularly appropriate for policy makers, activists and
those working to prevent bodily harm from plastics – particularly in the
United States, where state and federal agencies consistently cite a lack of
certainty, by which they mean clear linear causal data, as a reason to allow
BPA and other plasticizers to remain listed as ‘safe’ substances (FDA 2012).
An influence model prioritizes the amorphous, contingent architecture and
agency of plastic pollution as well as its pervasive geography, and judges
proposed solutions to plastic pollution accordingly. For example, instead of
targeting individual chemicals for bans such as the recent Canadian and
American bans of BPA in baby bottles, all plasticizers – indeed, all chemicals
used in consumer products – that act as endocrine disruptors should be
heavily regulated or banned. This is the approach that the European Union
(EU) has taken with its Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation, and Restric-
tion of Chemicals (REACH) programme since 2007, where all chemicals and
goods made with chemicals in the EU have to be registered and evaluated as
‘safe’ before they are permitted for use (Warhurst 2005). The legislation is so
far-reaching that it has to specify that water is exempt (Warhurst 2005: 4).
If plastics are everywhere – and some of them are permanent – these large-
scale interventions make more sense than avoidance tactics. Broad-brush
universal frameworks are better for regulating miasmas rather than piecemeal
legislation that focuses on discrete chemicals one at a time.
146 Max Liboiron
Another advantage of using the influence model is that it reintroduces
patterns within populations as a primary form of evidence. This has ramifi-
cations for findings that Northern indigenous populations are the most pol-
luted people on the planet, and that, because of the condition of their
endocrine systems, foetuses, children and women are the most vulnerable to
endocrine disruptors. Though miasmas and plasticizers are ubiquitous, they
have uneven concentrations and burdens of harm. Rather than focusing on
presence alone, we can turn our attention to sources and topographies of
harm and the types of interventions they demand. As in Griscom’s time, the
politics of concentration and where these concentrations originate can be
reintroduced as part of the logic of pollution and its mitigation. So far,
environmental justice has been under-utilized to describe the plastic pollution
problem.
The influence model and its mysterious mechanics also legitimize the pre-
cautionary principle (e.g. see Marchant 2003). While there are various mani-
festations and interpretations of the precautionary principle, its main precept
is that, if an action, policy or material may cause harm to the public or
environment, but these consequences are uncertain or lack scientific con-
sensus, either the action, policy or material should be abandoned or, in some
formulations, the burden of proof that harm will not result falls on those
taking the action or creating the substance (Marchant 2003; Luján and Todt
2012). REACH, mentioned above, uses the precautionary approach. It is a
system that regulates ‘mysterious’ miasmic influences.
Finally, one of the greatest boons of the miasma model is that the precau-
tionary approach privileges actions that produce results over those that do
not, regardless of whether the mechanics of how and why they work are
known. In 1854, John Snow convinced the Board of Guardians of St James’
parish to remove the Broad Street pump handle during a cholera epidemic.
Following this action, the epidemic died out (Johnson 2006). Snow’s work is
often cited as an early insight into germ theory, but it was carried out within
an influence model of harm, where various interventions were attempted in
the face of large-scale health crises, regardless of whether the mechanism for
harm was known. Though the Board of Guardians rejected Snow’s theory of
water-borne illness, they still removed the pump handle. This historical
moment, so often retrospectively appropriated by germ theorists, serves as a
symbol of what a model of harm open to uncertainty, myriad influences and
precaution can do for actions against miasmic phenomenon such as global
plastic pollution.
This is not to say that miasmas and plastic pollution are synonymous.
Miasmas are local, while plastic pollution is global. Miasmas often came
from ‘natural’ sources such as swamps and manure, while plastic pollution is
a synthetic chemical tied into an industrial economy dominated by multi-
national corporations. The influence model does not address the power
dynamics, the extreme longevity or the industrial-consumer sources char-
acteristic of plastic pollution that must be taken into account when
attempting to mitigate the effects of plastic pollution. Instead, miasma pro-
vides a material framework for understanding how plastic pollution works in
the environments and bodies of which it has become an everyday part.
Miasmas provide a model, ‘a tool for investigation, giving the user the
potential to learn about the world’ (Morgan and Morrison 1999) of plas-
tic pollution in material terms so that solutions can reflect our increasingly
plastic planet.
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9 Plastics, environment and health
Richard C. Thompson
Many current applications of plastics and their associated benefits follow

those outlined in the 1940s by Yarsley and Couzens (1945). Their account of
the benefits that plastics would bring to a person born 70 years ago, at the
beginning of our ‘plastic age’, contained much optimism:
It’s a world free from moth and rust and full of colour, a world largely
built up of synthetic materials made from the most universally distributed
substances, a world in which nations are more and more independent of
localised naturalised resources, a world in which man, like a magician,
makes what he wants for almost every need out of what is beneath and
around him.
(Yarsley and Couzens 1945: 158)
The durability of plastics and their potential for diverse applications, includ-
ing their widespread use in disposable items, was anticipated; however, the
problems associated with waste management and accumulation of debris in
the environment were not. In fact, the predictions were ‘how much brighter
and cleaner a world [it would be] than that which preceded this plastic age’
(Yarsley and Couzens 1945: 58).
This chapter synthesizes current understandings of the benefits and con-
cerns surrounding the use of plastics and addresses challenges, opportunities
and priorities for the future. Central to this challenge will be finding ways to
maximize the benefits that plastics can bring to society and the environment
while at the same time minimizing any associated impacts. Many of the issues
summarized here are discussed in more detail in the Royal Society’s special
theme issue, ‘Plastics, the Environment and Human Health’ (Thompson et al.
2009a, and summary papers 2009b and 2009c therein), and some of the
solutions outlined are based around those described in a recent publication
from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Marine Debris
as a Global Environmental Problem: Introducing a Solutions Based Framework
Focused on Plastic (GEF–STAP 2011).
Plastics are inexpensive, strong, lightweight and durable materials with high
thermal and electrical insulation properties. The diversity of polymers and the
Plastics, environment and health 151
versatility of their properties are utilized to make products with a wide variety
of medical and technological advances, energy savings and numerous other
societal benefits (Andrady and Neal 2009). On a global scale, plastic items are
an essential part of daily life: in transport, telecommunications, clothing,
footwear and as packaging materials, facilitating the distribution of a wide
range of food, drink and other goods. There is considerable potential for new
applications of plastics in the future – for example, as novel medical applica-
tions, in the generation of renewable energy and by reducing energy used in
transport (Andrady and Neal 2009). As a consequence, the production of
plastics has increased dramatically over the last 60 years, from around
0.5 million tonnes in 1950 to over 265 million tonnes today (PlasticsEurope
2011). Plastic production continues to grow by about 9 per cent annually, and
the developed countries of Europe, Northern America and Japan account for
about 60 per cent of global production and have the highest plastics con-
sumption per capita of about 100–130 kg each year (PlasticsEurope 2008).
The demand and consumption of plastics in developing countries on all con-
tinents is growing rapidly, driving a shift in production and conversion of
plastics from developed to developing countries. The highest potential for
growth is in the rapidly developing countries of Asia. Current consumption of
plastic – like production – shows an exponential increase.
Environmental consequences of plastic debris

The majority of work describing the environmental consequences of plastic
debris is based on marine settings. Plastic debris causes aesthetic problems,
and also presents a hazard to maritime activities, including fishing and tour-
ism (Gregory 2009; Moore 2008). In terms of larger debris, a particular con-
cern is the accumulation of abandoned, lost or otherwise discarded fishing
gear (ALDFG) from at-sea disposal, including fishing nets that continue to
catch fish long after they have become marine debris. Plastics-based ALDFG
can threaten marine habitats and fish stocks, and is also a concern for human
health (Macfadyen et al. 2009). Floating plastic debris can rapidly become
colonized by marine organisms, and, since it can persist at the sea surface, it
may facilitate the transport of non-native or ‘alien’ species (Barnes 2002;
Barnes et al. 2009; Gregory 2009). However, the problems attracting the most
public and media attention are those resulting in ingestion and entanglement
by wildlife. A recent review identified 373 reports of encounters between
organisms and marine debris. Most of these reports related to entanglement
in or ingestion of items of plastic debris (SCBD–STAP–GEF 2012), repre-
senting a 40 per cent increase on that reported in a previous review (Laist
1997). When considering the types of debris reported in relation to the cat-
egories of impact being addressed, it was clear that plastic items were by far
most frequently documented, representing 76.5 per cent of all reports.
The most visible types of plastic debris are large derelict fishing gear, bot-
tles, bags and other consumer products; however, much of the debris collected
152 Richard C. Thompson
on shorelines and during survey trawls now consists of tiny particles, or
‘microplastic’ (Browne et al. 2011; Claessens et al. 2011; Collignon et al.
2012; Goldstein et al. 2012; Hidalgo-Ruz et al. 2012; Martins and Sobral
2011; Thompson et al. 2004). The term ‘microplastic’ was first used by
Thompson and colleagues in 2004 to describe truly microscopic fragments,
some of which were around 20 micrometres in diameter. Since then, the
definition has been broadened to include small pieces or fragments less
than 5 mm in diameter (Arthur et al. 2009). A horizon scan of global con-
servation issues recently identified microplastic as one of the top global
emerging issues (Sutherland et al. 2010). Microplastic is formed by the phy-
sical, chemical and biological fragmentation of larger items, or from the
direct release of small pieces of plastic, such as industrial spillage of pre-
production pellets and powders, together with microscopic plastic particles
that are used as abrasive scrubbers in domestic cleaning products (e.g. Fendall
and Sewell 2009; Gouin et al. 2011) and industrial cleaning applications
such as shot-blasting of ships and aircraft, and even fibres from domestic
washing machines (Barnes et al. 2009; Browne et al. 2011). Plastic items
fragment in the environment because of exposure to ultraviolet light and
abrasion, causing smaller and smaller particles to form. Some plastic items
are even designed to fragment into small particles, presumably so they are less
conspicuous, but the resulting material does not necessarily biodegrade
(Roy et al. 2011). Microplastics have accumulated in the water column, on
the shoreline and in sub-tidal sediments (Browne et al. 2010; Thompson
et al. 2004). Pieces as small as 2 micrometres have been identified (Ng
and Obbard 2006), but due to limitations in sampling and analytical
methods, the extent to which this type of debris has fragmented into nano-
particle-size pieces is unknown. Microplastics are widely reported in trawls
used to survey the abundance of plastic (Law et al. 2010; Thompson et al.
2004).
Laboratory experiments have shown that small pieces such as these can be
ingested by a range of small marine organisms, including filter feeders,
deposit feeders and detritivores (Thompson et al. 2004), while mussels were
shown to retain plastic for over 48 days (Browne et al. 2008). A recent review
indicates that around 8 per cent of all reported encounters in natural habitats
between organisms and marine debris were with microplastics (SCBD–STAP–
GEF 2012). Limited data exist on population-level exposure or consequences,
but many of the birds surveyed by van Franeker et al. (2011) contain micro-
plastic fragments, as do populations of the commercially important crust-
acean Nephrops norvegicus, where 83 per cent of individuals in the Clyde Sea
contained microplastics. There is evidence that the abundance of microplastics
is increasing (Thompson et al. 2004; Goldstein et al. 2012), and it is expected
to increase further (Andrady 2011; Thompson et al. 2009b). Therefore, a
number of important issues need to be investigated regarding the emissions,
transport and fate, and physical and chemical effects of microplastics (Zarfl
et al. 2011).
In addition to the physical problems associated with plastic debris, there is
potential for plastic to transfer toxic substances to organisms if it is ingested.
This concern has been raised with respect to microplastics because, due to
their size, they are available to a wide range of organisms with various feeding
strategies. Virgin plastic polymers are rarely used by themselves, and typically
the polymer resins are mixed with additives to improve performance. These
include inorganic fillers such as carbon and silica that reinforce the material,
plasticizers to render the material pliable, thermal and ultraviolet stabilizers,
flame retardants and colourings (see Meeker et al. 2009). Some additive
chemicals are potentially toxic (Lithner et al. 2011), but there is controversy
about the extent to which additives released from plastic products – such as
phthalates and Bisphenol-A (BPA) – have adverse effects in animal or human
populations. Additives of particular concern are phthalate plasticizers, BPA,
brominated flame retardants and anti-microbial agents. BPA and phthalates
are found in many mass-produced products including medical devices, food
packaging, perfumes, cosmetics, toys, flooring materials, computers and CDs,
and can represent a significant content of the plastic. For instance, phthalates
can constitute 50 per cent of the total weight of polyvinyl chloride (PVC)
(Oehlmann et al. 2009). There is evidence of the potential for these chemicals
to be released to humans from plastic containers used for food and drink,
plastic in medical applications and toys (Koch and Calafat 2009; Lang et al.
2008; Meeker et al. 2009; Talsness et al. 2009), and this has led to the intro-
duction of legislation on human usage of items containing additives in some
countries. Hence, these substances might potentially also be released if plas-
tics containing them are ingested by marine organisms (Oehlmann et al. 2009;
Teuten et al. 2009). While exposure pathways have not been determined,
chemicals used in plastics – such as phthalates and flame retardants – have
been found in fish, sea mammals, molluscs and other forms of marine life.
This raises concerns about a potential for toxic effects. For example, there is
evidence from laboratory studies about the adverse effects of BPA on a variety
of aquatic organisms (Oehlmann et al. 2009; Talsness et al. 2009), and
phthalates have also been shown to have adverse effects on aquatic organisms
(Oehlmann et al. 2009). While a direct link between plastic debris and adverse
effects on populations of marine organisms would be very difficult to
demonstrate experimentally, if such effects were to occur there would be no
simple way of reversing or remediating them due to the nature of debris
accumulation in the environment (GESAMP 2010; Thompson et al. 2009b).
More work will be needed to establish the full environmental relevance of
plastics in the transport of contaminants to organisms living in the natural
environment, and the extent to which these chemicals could then be trans-
ported along food chains. However, there is already clear evidence that
chemicals associated with plastic are potentially harmful to wildlife. Data
collected using laboratory exposures show that phthalates and BPA affect
reproduction in all studied animal groups, and impair development in crust-
aceans and amphibians (Oehlmann et al. 2009). Molluscs and amphibians
appear to be particularly sensitive to these compounds, and biological effects
have been observed at very low concentrations; in contrast, most effects in fish
tend to occur at higher concentrations. Effects observed in the laboratory
coincide with measured environmental concentrations, so there is a very real
probability that these chemicals are affecting natural populations (Oehlmann
et al. 2009). Chemicals such as phthalates and BPA can bioaccumulate in
organisms, but there is much variability between species and individuals
according to the type of plasticizer and experimental protocol. While these
chemicals have adverse effects at environmentally relevant concentrations in
laboratory studies, there is a need for further research to establish population-
level effects in the natural environment, to establish the long-term effects of
exposures (particularly due to exposure of embryos), to determine effects of
exposure to contaminant mixtures, and to establish the role of plastics as
sources (albeit not exclusive sources) of these contaminants (see Meeker et al.
2009 for discussion of sources and routes of exposure).
Concerns for human health

Turning to the adverse effects of plastic on the human population, there is a
growing body of literature on potential health risks. A range of chemicals that
are used in the manufacture of plastics are known to be toxic. Measuring
concentrations of environmental contaminants in human tissue, or biomoni-
toring, has shown that chemicals used in the manufacture of plastics are
present in the human population. Interpreting biomonitoring data is complex,
and a key task is to put information in perspective with dose levels that are
considered toxic, on the basis of experimental studies in laboratory animals
(e.g. see Myers et al. 2009; Talsness et al. 2009). The biomonitoring infor-
mation we have demonstrates that phthalates and BPA, as well as other
additives in plastics and their metabolites, are present in the human popula-
tion. There are differences according to geographic location and age, with
greater concentrations of some of these chemicals in young children. Koch
and Calafat (2009) show that, while mean/median exposures for the general
population were below levels determined to be safe for daily exposure (USA,
EPA reference dose, RfD; and European Union (EU) tolerable daily intake,
TDI), the upper percentiles of Dibutyl phthalate (DBP) and di-2-ethylhexyl
phthalate (DEHP) urinary metabolite concentrations show that for some
people daily intake might be substantially higher than previously assumed,
and could exceed estimated safe daily exposure levels. The toxicological con-
sequences of such exposures – especially for susceptible sub-populations such
as children and pregnant women – remain unclear, and warrant further
investigation. However, there is evidence of associations between urinary
concentrations of some phthalate metabolites and biological outcomes (Swan
2008). For example, an inverse relationship has been reported between the
concentrations of DEHP metabolites in the mother’s urine and anogenital
distance, penile width and testicular descent in male offspring (Swan 2008). In
adults, there is some evidence of a negative association between phthalate
metabolites and semen quality, and between high exposures to phthalates
(workers producing PVC flooring) and free testosterone levels. Moreover,
recent work (Lang et al. 2008) has shown a significant relationship between
urine levels of BPA and cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes and abnor-
malities in liver enzymes. These data indicate that detrimental effects in the
general population may be caused by chronic low-dose exposures (separately
or in combination) and acute exposure to higher doses, but the full extent to
which chemicals are transported to the human population by plastics is yet to
be confirmed.
Despite the environmental concerns about some of the chemicals used in
plastic manufacture, it is important to emphasize that evidence for effects in
humans is limited, and there is a need for further research – particularly for
longitudinal studies to examine temporal relationships with chemicals that
leach out of plastics (Adibi et al. 2008). In addition, the traditional approach
to studying toxicity of chemicals has been to focus only on exposure to indi-
vidual chemicals in relation to disease or abnormalities. However, because of
the complex integrated nature of the endocrine system, it is critical that future
studies focus on mixtures of chemicals to which people are exposed when they
use common household products. For example, 80 per cent of babies in a
study conducted in the United States were exposed to measurable levels of at
least nine different phthalate metabolites (Sathyanarayana et al. 2008), and
the health impacts of the cumulative exposure to these chemicals need to be
determined. An initial attempt at examining more than one phthalate as a
contributor to abnormal genital development in babies has shown the
importance of this approach (Swan 2008).
Examining the relationship between plastics additives and adverse human
effects presents a number of challenges. In particular, the changing patterns of
production and use of both plastics and the additives they contain, as well as
the confidential nature of industrial specifications, make exposure assessment
particularly difficult. Evolving technology, methodology and statistical
approaches should help to disentangle these relationships. However, with
most of the statistically significant hormone alterations that have been
attributed to environmental and occupational exposures, the actual degree of
hormone alteration has been considered sub-clinical, and more information is
required on the biological mechanisms that may be affected by low-dose
chronic exposures. Meanwhile, we should consider strategies to reduce the use
of these chemicals in plastic manufacture and/or develop and test alternatives.
This is the goal of the new field of green chemistry, which is based on the
premise that development of chemicals for use in commerce should involve an
interaction between biologists and chemists. Had this approach been in place
50 years ago, it would probably have prevented the development of chemicals
that are recognized as likely endocrine disruptors (Anastas and Beach 2007;
Thompson et al. 2009c).
Solutions: maximizing the benefits and reducing impacts
There is a considerable volume of scientific literature, together with publica-
tions from governments, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), academia
and industry, outlining our understanding of issues relating to plastics, the
environment and human health (Thompson et al. 2009a). It is clear from this
literature that there are unresolved knowledge gaps, uncertainties, and areas
of disagreement and debate. A summary of existing knowledge and current
uncertainty is given in Thompson et al. (2009c: table 1), in Zarfl et al. (2011)
and in GEF–STAP (2011). While resolving uncertainties will clearly help us
to refine solutions and prioritize, the author considers that there is broad
agreement from all quarters – industry, policy, public, academia and NGOs –
that a reduction in marine debris, particularly plastic debris, is a priority that
requires action as a matter of urgency.
Some of the major sources of marine debris are well described, and include
sewage- and run-off-related debris, materials from recreational/beach users,
and materials lost or disposed of at sea from fishing activities (such as
ALDFG) or shipping (Derraik 2002; OSPAR 2007; Thompson et al. 2009c;
UNEP 2009). Debris originating from the land is either transported by
storm water, via drains and rivers, towards the sea, or is blown into the sea
(Macfadyen et al. 2009; Ryan et al. 2009). Extreme weather events, such as
hurricanes and floods, are important point sources of marine debris from/to
the sea (Thompson et al. 2005). Sea-based sources of debris represent addi-
tional, and in some regions substantial, sources of debris. The dumping of
waste at sea is regulated by many agreements and conventions, and, while
there are problems with enforcement, reductions in the amount of debris from
ship-based activities have been reported in some regions. Two commonly used
tools in reducing ship-based sources of marine debris are the availability of
appropriate and convenient port reception facilities for waste from ships
(Mouat et al. 2010; Thompson et al. 2009c) and educational materials (such
as multi-language posters and video footage).
ALDFG has been recognized internationally as a major problem, and
proposals for addressing it have been made at the level of the UN General
Assembly (UNGA) and its specialized agencies and programmes, including
the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO), the UNEP and the
International Maritime Organization (IMO). There have also been regional
calls to address ALDFG. Initiatives to reduce ALDFG are crucial, and
implementation principles are generally similar to measures addressing land-
based sources of marine debris, such as discarded consumer goods and
packaging (prevention, mitigation, removal and awareness-raising), but there
are many important sector-specific issues.
There are, however, much broader causes and responsibilities, spanning
production, use and disposal of the items that become marine debris. Fur-
thermore, the origins of the problems and their solutions lie not only in
coastal communities, but also far inland. They are rooted in production and
consumption patterns – including the design and marketing of products
without appropriate consideration for their environmental fate or their ability
to be recycled in the locations where sold – as well as within inadequate
waste-management practices and irresponsible behaviour. In addition, there
can be considerable geographical separation between production, which is
often centred in relatively developed economies, and consumption/disposal,
which is global. Hence, the widely accepted proposition that the problem of
marine debris is associated predominantly with poor management practices
on land (Andrady and Neal 2009; PlasticsEurope 2010; UNEP 2005) needs to
be expanded considerably. A broader approach, such as that summarized
recently by UNEP (GEF–STAP 2011), is now gaining momentum among
governments, NGOs and some industries (EU Director-General Environment
2011a, 2011b; Kershaw et al. 2011; UNEP 2009; US Commission on Ocean
Policy 2004).
An essential part of this discussion is to recognize the advantages that
plastic products bring to society and to the environment, both currently and
in the future. Plastics have undoubted benefits in medical, educational and
transport applications; they also have a key role to play in helping reduce
humankind’s footprint on the environment (PlasticsEurope 2008). Use of
plastic components in automobiles and aircraft results in significant weight
savings compared with metals. The new Boeing 787 aircraft will, for example,
have a skin that is 100 per cent composite and an interior that is 50 per cent
plastic, resulting in combined fuel savings of around 20 per cent (Andrady
and Neal 2009). Single-use plastic packaging items are among the most
common components of marine litter; however, such packaging has a key role
in reducing wastage since even a relatively small use of packaging can extend
the shelf life of perishable products, hence contributing to food safety. Since
plastic packaging is lightweight, it can also achieve significant reductions in
fuel usage (packaging in PET can achieve a 52 per cent saving over glass, for
example) during transportation (Andrady and Neal 2009). It is this combined
success that has led to global production of plastics, accounting for around
4 per cent of world oil production in the products themselves and a further
4 per cent in the energy required for this production. However, this success
also results in the accumulation of end-of-life plastics that is being examined
here. In order to generate solutions, an holistic framework is required, which
aspires to optimize benefits and reduce impacts in order to harness the
greatest potential that plastic products can offer humanity.
A key challenge in addressing the problems associated with plastic debris is
broadening the range of available management measures beyond improve-
ment in waste-management practices (EU Director-General Environment
2011b; UNEP 2009). At present, these are predominantly ‘end-of-pipe’
responses, rather than preventative measures. The most commonly used
approaches vary regionally, but include educational notices about the prob-
lems of dumping and littering, improved reuse, recycling and recovery (under
strictly controlled conditions), provision of litter bins on beaches, port
reception for waste from ships, and extensive clean-up campaigns on shore-
lines and at sea. The plastics industry has supported end-of-life consumer
education and recycling programmes as a solution (e.g. see Marine Debris
Solutions n.d.), but such measures are more relevant to highly developed
nations with economic resources and economies of scale to make the pro-
grammes cost-effective. In relation to ever-increasing global and regional
trends in the quantity of plastics waste being produced, it becomes clear that
a paradigm shift is required in the way we address this global problem.
From a life-cycle perspective, linear use of resource from production – and,
in the case of single-use packaging, through a short-lived usage stage –
to disposal is a central underlying cause of the accumulation of waste
(Thompson et al. 2009c; WRAP 2006). Much of the current production and
consumption lacks long-term sustainability because the amount of raw mate-
rials and our capacity to deal with waste are finite (Barnes et al. 2009;
Thompson et al. 2009c). If there are manufactured products and associated
packaging, there is a potential source of debris. Put simply, if we can reduce
the quantity of plastic waste we produce at the same time as improving waste
management options – for example, via recycling – we will maximize our
potential to tackle the problems associated with accumulation of waste in the
environment and in landfills. While trends in the quantity of debris parallel
economic growth, the pathways that cause plastic debris to enter the envir-
onment are trans-boundary and global in nature, and it is this disconnect that
necessitates new approaches.
Recognizing that marine debris is not merely a waste-management issue is
fundamental to addressing the underlying causes of this debris. Solving the
marine plastics debris problem through a life-cycle approach is therefore one
of the potential testing grounds for the green economy concept: this will
involve using fewer resources per unit of economic output, and reducing the
environmental impact of any resources that are used or economic activities
that are undertaken without compromising growth. Applied to plastics,
this means promoting structural economic changes that would reduce plastics
consumption, increase production of environmentally friendlier materials,
increase recycling and reuse, promote investments in alternative conversion
technologies and new materials and products, and support an enabling envir-
onment including capacity building, and new regulations and standards
(Thompson et al. 2009c). Such benefits can only be realized by working in
partnership with industry: the benefits of collaboration are recognized by both
policy – for example, the Congressionally mandated US Commission on
Ocean Policy (2004) – and industry (APR 2011), and acknowledged within
the EU (EU Director-General Environment 2011b).
While the problems of plastic debris have both trans-boundary and global
sources and causes, the types and quantities of this debris, and their impacts,
have strong regional components. Numerous relatively generic approaches
have been identified to reduce the amount of debris produced, better to
manage the waste that is produced and to remove from aquatic habitats the
waste that has accumulated. Since packaging comprises a substantial pro-
portion of the plastic items produced, and also makes up one of the major
categories of plastics within marine debris, the following examples will focus
on the production, use and disposal of single-use packaging. The three Rs –
reduce, reuse, recycle – are widely advocated to reduce the quantities of waste,
particularly the plastics packaging waste we generate. To be effective, we need
to consider the interconnectivity between these three Rs in combination with
each other and together with a fourth ‘R’ – redesign – including both
molecular redesign via green chemistry approaches and product redesign
with greater resource efficiency and environmental sustainability in mind as
an emerging and potentially very important strategy. For items that cannot be
designed for reuse or recycling, a fifth ‘R’ – energy recovery – can be con-
sidered. Hence, the three Rs become five: reduce, reuse, recycle, redesign and
recover.
There are opportunities to reduce usage of raw material by product rede-
sign and opportunities to reuse plastics – for example, in the transport of
goods at an industrial (pallets, crates) and a domestic (reusable carrier bags)
scale. However, there is often limited potential for wide-scale reuse of pack-
aging because of the substantial back-haul distances and logistics involved in
returning empty cartons to suppliers, especially in communities or regions
with an under-developed infrastructure. Perhaps most importantly, there is
now a strong evidence base to indicate the significant potential that lies in
increasing our ability to effectively recycle end-of-life plastic products.
Although thermoplastics have been recycled since the 1970s, the proportion of
material recycled has increased substantially in some countries in recent years
(APR 2011; PlasticsEurope 2008; WRAP 2006). Plastics can be designed to
be inherently very recyclable, and there is considerable potential to turn end-
of-life items back into new items. There is now strong evidence that sig-
nificant potential lies in increasing our capacity to recycle end-of-life plastics;
recycling can be economically attractive, and can reduce carbon dioxide
emissions compared with use of new polymer (DEFRA 2007; WRAP 2006,
2008). However, it may be advantageous to introduce further economic
incentives to encourage the redesign of plastic items to be both more reusable
and recyclable, and to increase local and regional opportunities for recycling,
in order to achieve broader geographic spread. Recognizing the potential
value of end-of-life plastics as a raw material for new production not only
reduces waste in the environment, but also incentivizes careful disposal as
opposed to littering, reduces reliance on non-renewable oil and gas resources,
and as a whole is likely to generate global environmental and economic ben-
efits (Thompson et al. 2009c). While this indicates the potential, there is still
much more that can be done to increase the spatial extent and increase the
proportion of plastic items that are recycled. The recycling message is simple:
both industry and society need to view end-of-life plastic as a raw material
rather than waste. Greatest energy efficiency is achieved where recycling
diverts the need for use of fossil fuels as raw materials – a good example is the
recycling of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles into new ones (closed-
loop recycling) (Hopewell et al. 2009).
Historically, the main considerations for the design of plastic packaging
have been getting goods safely to market and product marketing. These are,
of course, important for food safety and for industry; however, there is an
increasing urgency also to design plastic products – especially packaging – for
material reduction, reuse and high end-of-life recyclability. Public support for
recycling is high in some countries (57 per cent in the United Kingdom and
80 per cent in Australia), and consumers are keen to recycle (Hopewell et al.
2009); however, the small size and diversity of different symbols to describe a
product’s potential recyclability, together with uncertainties about whether a
product will actually be recycled if collected, have the potential to hinder
engagement (Hopewell et al. 2009; Thompson et al. 2009c). In addition,
recycling requires significant investment in infrastructure for collection,
transport, sorting and management of the recyclable items. While such infra-
structure can be economically feasible in developed nations, it may not be
feasible or cost-effective for developing countries. Hence, the need exists for a
regionally centred framework (GEF–STAP 2011). From an industry perspec-
tive, molecular redesign of plastics (the fourth ‘R’) has become an emerging
issue in green chemistry. In this context, green chemists aspire to design
chemical products that are: (i) fully effective; (ii) yet have little or no toxicity
or endocrine-disrupting activity; (iii) break down into innocuous substances if
released into the environment after use; and/or (iv) are based upon renewable
feedstocks, such as agricultural wastes. Such approaches should be considered
within the design and life-cycle analysis of plastics – for example, to maximize
the proportion of plastic products that are recycled (EU Director-General
Environment 2011a, 2011b).
One of the fundamental factors limiting progress on the original three Rs
(reduce, reuse and recycle) is that the design criteria used to develop new
polymers and products seldom include specifications to enhance reusability,
recyclability or recovery of plastic once it has been used. Typically, such
assessments have only been made after products have entered the market-
place and been recognized as having unintended consequences, but such sen-
timents are also being echoed by the recycling sector, the trade association of
which considers that ‘the guiding principle of any packaging design must be
fitness of purpose. Beyond this, designing to enhance recyclability should be
in the forefront of design considerations’ (APR 2011).
While industry and policy makers concur on the need to seek innovative
solutions that go beyond end-of-pipe recycling (e.g. EU Director-General
Environment 2011b; PlasticsEurope 2008), it is essential that this is achieved
in collaboration. The dangers of working in isolation are already apparent
from industry-centred responses such as the development of ‘oxo-degradable’
plastic products, which merely fragment at the end of their lifetime into
numerous small but essentially non-degradable pieces, the environmental
impact of which is not yet known (Roy et al. 2011). Degradable materials
such as these also compromise recycling, and there are concerns about their
efficacy (DEFRA 2010). From a different perspective, working in isolation
can also lead to policy-centred responses, such as a blanket ban on plastic
bags, rather than promoting the use of reusable bags, including those made of
plastic.
After proper consideration of the preceding Rs, for plastic products that
cannot be redesigned and plastic waste that cannot be reused or recycled,
some of the energy content can be ‘recovered’ by incineration, and through
approaches such as co-fuelling of kilns. This can be reasonably energy-
efficient, but multiple tradeoffs have to be accounted for before such a deci-
sion is made (Thompson et al. 2009c), and, unless appropriate regulations are
in place, combustion of plastics may result in release of chlorinated dioxins,
furans and other persistent toxic compounds such as brominated dioxins. Due
to these negative impacts, combustion of plastic debris could be a serious
environmental issue in developing countries if end-of-life energy recovery is
not considered by the plastic manufacturer when designing the plastic or
product, or if the energy-recovery system is inadequately regulated. While
energy recovery for certain types of plastic waste has benefits compared with
disposal to landfill, energy recovery does not reduce the demand for raw
material used in production. Hence, it is considered much less desirable and
less energy-efficient than reuse or product recovery via recycling.
Specific examples of the Rs will only succeed if they are based on regional
priorities, and oriented towards the needs and perspectives of the consumers/
users in particular regions and nations. Solutions should then be identified
through cooperation between industry, government and consumer, and con-
sider all five Rs in a regionally relevant context. Potential actions to consider
in this context encompass any or all parts of the supply and value chain, and
the full life-cycle of the product, including: (i) educating users; (ii) collecting
and removing debris from the environment; (iii) measures to reduce the pro-
duction of waste or improve the design of the product itself; and (iv) con-
sidering extended producer responsibility (EPR) to achieve these goals. EPR
is crucial, as it will help redistribute the burden of handling end-of-life plastic
from governments and individuals who may be impacted by the waste, despite
having no say in the product, to producers with interests that would then be
more closely aligned with the problems encountered in product disposal.
Biopolymers, degradable and biodegradable polymer solutions

Degradable polymers have been advocated as an alternative to conventional
oil-based plastics, and their production has increased considerably in recent
decades. Before concluding our discussion of solutions to the problem of
plastics waste and pollution, a brief consideration of the applications and
limitations of these novel materials is worthwhile. Biopolymers – degradable
and biodegradable polymers with comparable functionality to conventional
plastics – can now be produced on an industrial scale; however, they are more
expensive than conventional polymers and account for less than 1 per cent of
plastics production (Song et al. 2009). Biopolymers differ from conventional
polymers in that their feedstock is from renewable biomass rather than being
oil based. They may be natural polymers (e.g. cellulose) or synthetic polymers
made from biomass monomers (e.g. polylactic acid – PLA), or they could be
synthetic polymers made from synthetic monomers derived from biomass
(e.g. polythene derived from bioethanol) (WRAP 2009). They are often descri-
bed as renewable polymers since the original biomass – for example, corn
grown in agriculture – can be reproduced. The net carbon dioxide emissions
may be less than that with conventional polymers, but they are not zero, since
farming and pesticide production have carbon dioxide outputs (WRAP 2009).
In addition, as a consequence of our rapidly increasing human population, it
seems unlikely that there will be sufficient land to grow crops for food, let
alone for substantial quantities of packaging to wrap it in. One solution is to
recycle waste food into biopolymers; this has merit, but ultimately will be
limited by the amount of waste food available.
Biopolymers that are designed to break down in an industrial composter
are described as ‘biodegradables’, while those that are intended to degrade in
a domestic composter are known as ‘compostables’. These biodegradable
materials are of benefit in specific applications – for example, the packaging
of highly perishable goods where, regrettably, it can be necessary to dispose of
perished unopened and unused products together with their packaging. Song
et al. (2009) show experimentally that degradation of biodegradable, as
opposed to compostable, polymers can be very slow in home composters
(typically less than 5 per cent loss of biomass in 90 days). Degradation of
these polymers in landfills is also likely to be slow, and may create unwanted
methane emissions. Hence, the benefits of biopolymers are only realized if
they are disposed of using an appropriate waste management system that
utilizes their biodegradable features. Typically, this is achieved via industrial
composting at 50°C for around 12 weeks to produce compost as a useful
product.
Some biopolymers, such as PLA, are biodegradable but others, such as
polythene derived from bioethanol, are not. In addition, degradable polymers
(also called ‘oxo-biodegradable’, ‘oxy-degradable’ or ‘UV-degradable’) can be
made from oil-based sources, and as a consequence are not biopolymers.
These degradable materials are typically polyethylene, together with additives
to accelerate the degradation. They are used in a range of applications, and
are designed to break down under UV (ultraviolet) exposure and/or dry heat
and mechanical stress, leaving small particles of plastic behind. They do not
degrade effectively in landfill, and little is known about the timescale, extent
or consequences of their degradation in the natural environment (Barnes et al.
2009; Teuten et al. 2009). Degradable polymers may also compromise the
quality of recycled plastics if they enter the recycling scheme. As a con-
sequence, use of degradable polymers is not advocated for primary retail
packaging (WRAP 2009).
There is a popular misconception that degradable and biodegradable poly-
mers offer solutions to the problems of plastic debris and the associated
environmental hazards that result from littering. However, most of these
materials are unlikely to degrade quickly in natural habitats, and there is
concern that degradable, oil-based polymers could merely disintegrate into
small pieces that are not in themselves any more degradable than conven-
tional plastic (Barnes et al. 2009). So while biodegradable polymers offer
some waste-management solutions, there are limitations to their use, as well
as considerable misunderstanding among the general public about their
application (WRAP 2007). To gain the maximum benefit from degradable,
biodegradable and compostable materials, it is therefore essential to identify
specific uses that offer clear advantages and to refine national and inter-
national standards (e.g. EN 13432, ASTM D6400-499) and associated
product labelling to indicate appropriate usage and disposal methods.
Conclusion
Looking ahead, we are clearly not approaching the end of the ‘plastic age’
described by Yarsley and Couzens (1945) almost 70 years ago, and there is
much that plastics can contribute to society. Andrady and Neal (2009) con-
sider that the speed of technological change is increasing exponentially,
such that life in 2030 will be unrecognizable compared with life today; plas-
tics will play a significant role in this change, and have the potential to bring
scientific and medical advances, alleviate suffering and help reduce human-
kind’s environmental footprint on the planet (Andrady and Neal 2009).
However, it is evident that our current approaches to the production, use
and disposal of plastics are not sustainable, and present concerns for both
wildlife and human health. We have considerable knowledge about many
of the environmental hazards, and information on human health effects
is growing; however, many concerns and uncertainties remain. There are
solutions, but these can only be achieved by combined actions. There is a role
for individuals, via appropriate use and disposal – particularly recycling;
for industry, by adopting green chemistry and material reduction, and
designing products for reuse and/or end-of-life recyclability; and for govern-
ments and policy makers by setting standards and targets, defining appro-
priate product labelling to inform and incentivize change, and funding
relevant academic research and technological developments. These actions
are overdue, and now need to be implemented with urgent effect; there are
diverse environmental hazards associated with the accumulation of plastic
waste and there are growing concerns about plastic’s effects on human
health, yet plastic production continues to grow at around 9 per cent per
annum (PlasticsEurope 2008). As a consequence, the quantity of plastics
produced in the first 10 years of the current century will approach the
total that was produced in the entire twentieth century (Thompson et al.
2009b).
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Part IV
New articulations
10 Where does this stuff come from?
Oil, plastic and the distribution of violence
James Marriott and Mika Minio-Paluello
Preamble
This chapter originally was presented as a paper to approximately 75
attendees at the Accumulation conference at Goldsmiths, University of
London. The events took place in a lecture theatre on the Goldsmiths campus
in New Cross, within the borough of Lewisham in South London. The
specific location resonates in the story that this chapter narrates.
In the intermission before the formal paper, the presenter, James Marriott,
carefully gave out Askey’s cornet wafer cones filled with either Choco-
late Inspiration or Light Vanilla Carte D’Or ice cream to each member of
the audience. Once the ice cream had been consumed, the presentation
began – with the two, now empty, ice cream tubs holding a prominent position
on stage.
The chapter is structured in such a way as to retain as much as possible of
the immediacy of the original presentation in which the narrative was fore-
grounded. It should be noted that much that is presented here is a compressed
version of the fuller analysis presented in our recent book, The Oil Road
(Marriott and Minio-Paluello 2012).
Introduction
Ice cream – which most of us clearly enjoy – epitomizes luxury food. It meets
desires, it is not about satisfying a need for sustenance. At the same time, ice
cream is a ‘high-energy food’ of a particular type, as it depends on a constant
chain of refrigeration from cow to consumer. That refrigeration at the dairy,
at the factory, in the delivery truck, in the supermarket and in the home
consumes a substantial amount of electricity, the vast majority of which is gas
or coal powered.
The make of ice cream that you have just eaten, Carte D’Or, is a standard
brand. It is manufactured by the British-Dutch corporation Unilever, the
world’s second largest food company,1 listed on the London Stock Exchange
and headquartered in London. Unilever also produces ‘ethical’ ice cream
172 James Marriott and Mika Minio-Paluello
under the Ben & Jerry’s brand; it is ‘ethical’ because care is taken to deter-
mine the origins of the ingredients of the ice cream, to reduce the damage
caused to the environment and workers, and to communicate these practices
to the consumer.
Yet ice cream cannot exist without its containers any more than it can
without refrigeration. Take it out of its box and it becomes a runny, fairly
inedible and unsatisfying mess within minutes. Nowadays, the plastic con-
tainer has become the delivery vehicle for the satisfaction of desire; it is now a
necessary ingredient in the experience. This chapter seeks to examine the
‘origin geography’ of this plastic box by telling the story of its travels from
source; of state and corporate attempts to control the space through which it
passes; and of the differentiated violence that ensues.
Platform has been tracking these issues since the mid-1990s, examining
a particular energy route since 1998, effectively unpacking ‘the oil road’ that
lies behind the ice cream carton. The long journey of packaging from
oil-bearing geology to incinerator or landfill is not just an abstracted mat-
ter of raw materials and technological transformation. We also need to
examine the social and ecological processes, geopolitical interactions and
economic incentives that both enable and result from this journey. While there
is a literature of ‘where things come from’ (e.g. Böge 1993; Molotch 2003),
there is relatively little research that explores the specificities of the political
circumstances of the origin of a ubiquitous object such as these ice cream
containers.
The practice of considering plastic objects ‘as they are’, rather than as
the products of a non-plastic substance, is deeply ingrained in us. When
looking at a wooden table, it is easy enough to perceive and comprehend
the trees from which it was constructed. Yet, when we gaze at food pack-
aging, few of us will visualize the crude oil and gas within it. The fact that
oil and gas are drivers and motivators within global politics is widely
accepted, and has been explored in a plethora of books (e.g. Friedwald
1941; Yergin 1991). Nevertheless, there has been a tendency for this
understood reality to ‘float’ apart from the ‘everyday object’, and for
these geopolitical dynamics to be packaged up in such generalized notions
as ‘addiction to oil’ or ‘dependency on the Middle East’. The average
citizen does not have ready access to the geopolitics within these plastic
boxes.2
Hawkins and Thompson (both in this volume) demonstrate the ‘destruc-
tive after-life of plastics’. By comparison, our work traces the destructive
‘pre-life’ of plastics, exploring the relationships and processes of which they
are a part before we come to acquire them as ‘plastics’. As such, we track
the life of the material of plastic objects before they are formed. We follow
the passage of that material from oil-bearing rocks, through drilling rigs,
pipelines, terminals, depots, refineries, factories, distribution centres and
shops, to homes. We examine the impacts – both ecological and social – of
that passage.
Where does this stuff come from? 173
East of Eden
Our narrative today – one of many that could be told – begins at the
Absheron Sill oil formation in the offshore marine territory controlled by
Azerbaijan, 130 km east of Baku. Formed between 3.4 and 5.3 million years
ago, 5 km under the Caspian Sea, the oil is pumped up to the Central Azeri
platform, one of seven massive rigs in this part of the Caspian. The platform
runs day and night, 365 days a year, pausing only for accidents, such as the
September 2008 blowout that shut down the rig and forced the immediate
evacuation of 212 staff.
This platform, part of a web of platforms that comprises an offshore oil
infrastructure the size of a small town, is not visible on Google Earth. Per-
ceived as offering a ‘complete’ satellite map of the world, there are in reality
many such regions that remain blank. These platforms lie within ‘the Azeri–
Guneshli–Chirag PSA area’, the portion of Azeri marine territory delineated
by the 1994 Production Sharing Agreement signed between the Azeri state
and a consortium of foreign oil companies, the Azerbaijan International
Operating Company (AIOC). According to the contract terms of this agree-
ment, the 330 km2 of this zone are effectively controlled by the AIOC for 30
years. For citizens and non-citizens alike, this is in practice a ‘forbidden zone’,
run by the operator of AIOC – BP, the world’s fifth largest private oil cor-
poration, listed on the London Stock Exchange and headquartered in
London.3
This is a marine zone outside the law of Azerbaijan. Naval vessels patrol
these waters, but Azeri sovereignty and laws are not fully enforced, and a
powerful non-state actor exercises political power beyond control of the Azeri
state. It is important to understand how power is exerted over bodies in these
biopolitical zones. Individual and collective rights appear to become irrele-
vant, as laws and legal standards are, it would seem, perpetually suspended.
A combination of the PSA regime and the improvised spatial exercise of
power has created a zone where BP is ostensibly able to act with impunity,
outside of the legal standards set down in Azerbaijan’s constitution and leg-
islation. Pollution can take place not only without sanction, but also without
BP informing even its corporate partners, as revealed in the WikiLeaks cables
(n.a. 2010).
Most of the onward journey and transformation from Caspian underwater
geology to plastic container is similarly hidden from view in a number of
differently created and circumscribed ‘forbidden zones’. Each has evolved and
been crafted to suit BP’s interests; this has been accomplished by prioritizing
corporate demands – under the guise of ‘security’ – over rights frameworks,
and by placing certain geographies beyond the inspection of even the most
curious citizen.
From the Central Azeri oil platform, the crude is pumped through an
undersea pipeline to the Sangachal oil and gas terminal, the largest such
terminal in the world outside the Middle East. Before its gates stands a huge
three-sided billboard bearing the image of Heydar Aliyev, the former pre-
sident of Azerbaijan and father to the current President Ilham Aliyev. The
project of building the offshore platforms and extracting the deep crude has
relied on, and benefited from, the stability offered by the authoritarian regime
of the Aliyev family, which has ruled Azerbaijan since 1993. Bayulgen (2005)
describes how:
success in attracting foreign capital has a ‘reinforcing effect’ on the pol-

itical regime. Authoritarian leaders solidify their hold on power by allying
themselves with foreign investors … In Azerbaijan, the holdover elites
from the communist era acquired the right to set the rules of the game for
international oil contracts, and in that way attracted the active support of
foreign capital in further concentrating their power.
(Bayulgen 2005: 29)
The regime routinely imprisons dissidents and uses police to break up

demonstrations. For example, a protest far from, but coinciding with, the
opening of the Sangachal Terminal in May 2005 was baton-charged and
many people were injured (Azerweb 2005).
After Sangachal, the crude oil is pumped through the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan
pipeline (BTC) across the mountains and plains of Azerbaijan, Georgia and
Turkey to the Eastern Mediterranean. This pipeline runs within a geographic
zone defined by policy makers in Washington, Brussels and London as an
‘energy corridor’. The 1,768 km-long BTC is itself buried beneath a metre of
rock and soil, and is largely invisible.
Yet, although largely unmarked, nearby areas – including whole villages –
are deemed special military zones, under the control of Ministry of Interior
troops (Azerbaijan and Georgia) or the militarized Jandarma police force
(Turkey). Increased surveillance, restrictions on access to community land
and enforced censorship of local concerns has resulted. On each of Platform’s
seven field visits to the area around the pipeline and to Baku itself, under-
taken between 1998 and 2009, we were detained or arrested at least once.
Communities and ethnic groups defined as oppositional are targeted with
increased repression.
These security practices are not merely improvised behaviour on the part of
local troops. Plans drawn up and decisions made in Houston, Washington
and London created legal frameworks that exempted the project from any
legislation stricter than the oil contract itself. BP drafted international treaties
called Host Government Agreements for each country through which the
pipeline passes, effectively excluding this space from the local legal regimes
(Hildyard and Muttitt 2006; see also Muttitt 2011). This 1,700 km-long strip
of land, including the lands and villages around it, is subject to yet another
exclusion.
A short passage from our recent book The Oil Road serves to illustrate the
experience on the ground:
Figure 10.1 Villagers in Tetriskaro in Georgia meet in the construction corridor of the
Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan oil pipeline and its sister South Caucasus Gas Pipe-
line, to complain about how the heavy use of dynamite to shatter rock had
also shattered their walls
Source: (Photo © Platform)
We want to verify the existence of a military checkpoint that is said to
hinder the villagers (of Tsikhisdvari) from walking up the hill to the
higher pastures and the hot-sulphur springs, as they have done for gen-
erations. The passage up this track is now described by BTC as ‘crossing
the pipeline corridor’, and therefore apparently requires an ID card and
checks by troops from the Ministry of Interior. Bumping along the dirt
road, we soon see the concrete wall of another oil spill catchment dam.
Further up the hillside, we can see the familiar pipeline markers. Absor-
bed in trying to read the route of BTC across the bright green of the
distant pasture, we fail to notice a sandbagged wooden hut just on our
right. Suddenly we are surrounded by several angry soldiers levelling
their guns at us and shouting that we must turn back. Ramazi spins the
car around, and we are heading fast downhill again. Clearly the pipeline
corridor is militarized here, as at other places … The government troops
working to protect BP’s infrastructure have control over access not just to
the route itself, but also to the meadows, forests and mountains above it.
This is the outcome of the work of George Goolsby’s, the lawyer at Baker
Botts who oversaw the writing of Host Government Agreements
concerning the state’s obligations on security.
(Marriott and Minio-Paluello 2012: 179)
The pipeline not only had a ‘chilling effect’ on human rights in its first five
years of operation, but was also the cause of repression during its construc-
tion (Amnesty International 2003). In many villages on the steppe and in the
hills, in the mountains and forests, communities protested against the army of
machines and men that descended upon their land. In Krtsanisi in Georgia,
residents blocked roads and resisted the construction work until Spetznaz
special forces attacked them (Marriott and Minio-Paluello 2012).
In part, the opposition arose because communities were afraid of what
would happen in the event of an accident. Could the pipeline, passing through
volatile areas with latent conflict, explode if attacked?4 Could oil leak from
the pipes and pollute their soil and water? The fear of contamination of
springs was particularly acute in the Borjomi National Nature Reserve, where
fresh mineral water is bottled in plastic PET bottles. The distinctive-tasting
Borjomi water is one of Georgia’s main exports, and the forested mountains
that surround the town are the Caucasus equivalent of Evian or Buxton.
Opposition to the pipeline reached a crescendo in autumn 2003, with the
Georgian Minister for the Environment Nino Chkhobadze refusing to issue
permits, stating that BP representatives were requesting the Georgian gov-
ernment to violate its own environmental legislation. Later she explained:
‘The pressure came above all from the company, and it was pressure not only
directed toward me, but also toward the president’ (Khatchadourian 2003).
This geopolitical pressure exerted by the US State Department, the World
Bank and BP was enough to drive the pipeline through the objections raised
and browbeat Chkhobadze into submission.
Where
W here does this stuff
s tu f f come from?
com e fro m? 177
177
Iw sA m aa
I^ G in u
Figure 10.2 Nearby

N earby residents m
march
arch to Burnaz beach in south-eastern Turkey in 2009,
opposing further industrialization of their coastline alongside the existing
existing
oil terminals
The US policy framework and momentum behind this particular export

pipeline were created by the Clinton Administration through the national
security advisor’s office in the 1990s. By the time it was constructed, BTC had
been defined as a key strategic asset by both the European Union and the
United States. Thus, the pipeline carries a motivating value both within
domestic national politics and on the international stage. The following inci-
dent illustrates this prominence. During the August 2008 war between Russia
and Georgia, Russian planes dropped bombs across BP’s Baku–Supsa pipe-
line, sister to BTC. The Georgian government immediately claimed that the
BTC pipeline itself had been attacked, trying to generate greater Western
military support.
Because of its strategic importance BTC has also become a spectacular
target in regional liberation struggles. Since the 1990s, the Kurdistan Workers
Party (PKK) has been using military means to assert Kurdish autonomy and
rights, and in August 2008 it blew up the pipeline at Refahiye, creating a
fireball that burnt for six days.
All quiet on the western front?

Descending through Turkey’s Taurus mountains, the oil reaches the Medi-
terranean coast at Iskenderun Bay. The oil companies have carved out a
‘restricted marine zone’ around the terminal and tanker pier which is
forbidden to local residents. As a result, the fisherfolk of Golovesi and
Yumurtalik are losing their livelihoods. Attempts to continue fishing have
been met with fines and prison sentences – the fishing boats are easily chased
down by the coastguard vessels based out of BP’s marine terminal.
From this terminal, tankers take oil to all corners of the globe, including
Chile, Singapore and England. However, Platform’s tracking of tankers and
data collation has revealed that a significant number of vessels collecting
Azeri crude from Ceyhan then follow a particular route to the Italian port of
Trieste.5 One such tanker, the Dugi Otok, plies back and forth time after time.
This constant movement of crude across the planet’s oceans and along
shipping lanes is largely outside our everyday conceptual world. Apart from
docking at select terminals and bunkering while waiting for the oil price to
rise, these shy and awkward vessels remain elusive, largely hidden to the
naked eye. However, when something goes wrong, such as a hijacking or
sinking, this segment of the oil road drops its invisibility cloak. The Brae, the
Sea Empress, the Amoco Cadiz, the Torrey Canyon, the Exxon Valdez: the
names of these tankers are iconic because oil intended to remain invisible was
dramatically unleashed, coming to be seen as a poisonous reality.
Figure 10.3 Turkish fisherfolk set out into the Gulf of Iskenderun, dwarfed by the Dugi
Otok super-tanker collecting crude from the BTC Terminal near Ceyhan.
The Dugi Otok will carry its load of oil across the Mediterranean to
Muggia near Trieste in Italy
The ecological fallout of these disasters is the vivid counterpoint to the
quiet, chronic environmental and health impacts that result should the oil
reach its destination safely: it is a tacit reminder of the plastics that end
up in the oceans, as described by Gabrys in Chapter 12 and Thompson in
Chapter 9. On top of this, there is a nexus of other negative products in the
wake of its safe arrival, not least the emission of large volumes of carbon
dioxide that inevitably will arise from its use, from its burning in refineries,
power stations, car engines, jet turbines and so on. Dugi Otok or any of its
sister ships can be seen as a climatic ‘bomb’, delivering up to 250,000 tonnes
of carbon dioxide to be released into the atmosphere.6
The crude is delivered from the tanker to a terminal near Trieste, stored
and then pumped into the Transalpine Pipeline (TAL), passing through
north-eastern Italy, across the Austrian Alps and into southern Germany. The
social disruption that accompanied the construction of the BTC pipeline in
the Caucasus in the early 2000s echoed the conflicts that arose around the
building of this pipeline 40 years earlier, in the mid-1960s. An energy project
then on the front line of the Cold War, the construction of TAL was utilized
by the Italian state as a means to expropriate land from Slovenian farmers
living within Italy (Marriott and Minio-Paluello 2012: 277–81).
In contrast to the examples in Turkey, Azerbaijan and Georgia, the western
section of this continuous oil road is largely unmilitarized. Walking the route
of the pipeline as it passes through villages in Friuli, the Tyrol or Bavaria,
there is no sign of troops patrolling the route. Today there is an unequal dis-
tribution of violence along the ‘energy corridor’. The plastic that packages
our ‘comfort food’ creates highly variegated ‘discomfort’ on its journey to us.
The apparent calm rule of law in fossil fuel-dependent social democracies at
home is built upon exported ‘forbidden zones’, with the ever-present
possibility of violence elsewhere.
Northern lights
The vision of a consumer society, built around the calm comforts of domestic
life, was central to the creation of post-war Germany. It was this vision –
proclaiming to reject the social experimentation of the past 30 years – that lay
at the heart of the development of cities such as Ingolstadt, just north of
Munich. Here, five refineries were constructed – mostly fed by the Transalpine
Pipeline – alongside power stations, plastics factories, arms manufacturers
and the automobile industry. Ingolstadt is the home of Audi, with its famous
strapline ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’.
Among the plastics factories is the plant at Munchmunster, now owned by
LyondellBasell but originally built by BP in the 1970s. LyondellBasell is today
one of the world’s largest chemicals companies, listed on the New York Stock
Exchange and headquartered in Houston.
The Transalpine Pipeline delivers its Azeri crude to the refinery of Neustadt
just east of Ingolstadt, where the oil is broken down into a number of
products, including feedstock for the Munchmunster factory, to which it tra-
vels by pipeline. The factory runs day and night, like the Neustadt refinery
and the Central Azeri oil platform, only disrupted by accidents such as an
explosion in December 2005 in which one fireman was killed and three
workers were injured.7
This plastics plant produces a number of resins, including high-density
polyethylenes, which are used in the stiff material for Ariel bleach bottles and,
indeed, coatings for industrial pipelines. Another product manufactured by
LyondellBasell is the polypropylene resin Clyrell EC340R, marketed as ideal
for high-impact, low temperature-resistant food containers. It is materials
such as this that are ideal for moulding into Carte D’Or ice cream boxes.
Clyrell EC340R, manufactured in Munchmunster, passes from there to
moulding factories. Plastic containers manufactured there are transported to
the ice cream plant in Gloucester, where they are filled with Unilever’s Carte
D’Or Chocolate Inspiration and Light Vanilla. From there, they are trucked
to retail outlets across England, including the Sainsbury’s here at New Cross.
These two tubs of ice cream were purchased at the Sainsbury’s supermarket
near the station and carried up the hill to here. However, the exact passage
of Clyrell EC340R to Sainsbury’s in New Cross is relatively opaque to us.
We cannot be 100 per cent sure that there is Azeri oil in these specific boxes –
once again, the journey has entered a ‘forbidden zone’, though this time it is
the globalized processes of manufacture and distribution, rather than forms of
exclusion and violence, that are obscured.
Conclusion: southern comfort?

Now that these tubs have served their purpose and have successfully delivered
a luxury food to us, they will be placed in the bins here in the lobby of this
lecture theatre, from where they will be carried by a cleaner to the wheeled
rubbish containers on the street outside and picked up by a Veolia refuse
truck contracted by Lewisham Council. The lorry will take them down the hill
to the South East London Combined Heat & Power waste station, where they
will be incinerated to generate electricity. Azeri lithosphere will float off into
London air, carrying its carbon load into the atmosphere. However, unlike the
water cycle, there is no simple process to return released carbon to Caspian
geology.
We could imagine an alternative afterlife for our container, in which one of
us might take a tub of this ice cream to a beach on the south coast, where we
might leave it by one of the rubbish bins unaware the wind would pick it up
and send it tumbling across the shingle. The container would be blown into
the English Channel and float off to join other plastic detritus in the North
Atlantic Gyre. As Thompson describes in Chapter 9, it might sink to the
ocean floor and remain there for 100, 1,000, perhaps 10,000 years. We can
thus recognize a remarkable lifespan: crude oil formed 3.4 million years ago
in rocks under the Caspian comes to rest on the bed of the Atlantic for the
next 10,000 years. Between these two stretches is a tiny window of
transformation. It might take just 22 days for Azeri oil to be transported from
beneath the Caspian to the Munchmunster plastics factory. Then the con-
tainer could be moulded, filled, sold and discarded in the span of the follow-
ing 40 days. In the space of only two months, this oil is extracted,
transported, traded, transformed and transformed again before it is sold and
ultimately trashed.
At each stage of plastic’s ‘pre-life’ before consumption, one or more cor-
porations generate a profit, driving the process onwards. During this brief
moment, it participates in numerous processes that entail, at minimum,
interactions with local communities, the complexities of geopolitics and the
dynamics of ecological systems – each of which is marked by violence of one
sort or another.
Yet the disruptive and violent effects of these processes are largely invi-
sible. Although these social and environmental impacts are inherent within
its constitution, the plastic product in its uniformity is seemingly wiped
clean of all that violence and disruption. Whether this is an ‘ethical’ prod-
uct is not factored into composition of the plastic container. Having noted
this, the aim of this chapter is not to present a demand that the pre-life of
plastic be ‘ethicized’ in some way or other. After all, as Mazar and Zhong
(2010), for instance, discuss, there are major limitations attached to ethical
products.8 Moreover, in light of the histories and trajectories narrated here,
there does not seem to be much potential for an honestly ‘ethical oil’, despite
corporate-backed attempts to claim that there is (e.g. Levant 2010).
To echo the concerns over ‘the tragedy of the commons’, it seems to us that
this ice cream box illustrates ‘the tragedy of our personal desires’. Clausewitz
claimed that the hardest military manoeuvre was retreat. We need to retreat
from our violence towards the global climate, and indeed the trade structures
that systemically involve violence to the rights of others. We need to explore
those ‘ridding strategies’ that Fisher examines in Chapter 6 of this volume.
These strategies could be employed not to rid ourselves of consumer products
that no longer hold an allure, but rather to rid ourselves of the production of
consumer goods from oil.
Notes
1 FT Global 500, June 2011: 16, www.ft.com/cms/s/2/1516dd24-29d3a-11e0-997d-
00144feabdc0.html#axzz1xr86Tcqc (accessed 20 July 2012).
2 Unravelling the global conditions out of which objects emerge has been an
analytical strategy within sociology. The work of Henri Lefebvre (1968, 1974) is
notable in this respect.
3 FT Global 500, June 2011: 15, www.ft.com/cms/s/2/1516dd24-29d3a-11e0-997d-
00144feabdc0.html#axzz1xr86Tcqc (accessed 20 July 2012).
4 The BTC pipeline passes within 40 km of the ‘frozen conflict’ of Nagorno–
Karabagk (between Azerbaijan and Armenia); within 60 km of the ‘frozen conflict’
of South Ossetia (between Georgia and Russia); and through north-eastern Turkey,
which is an area of ongoing conflict between the Turkish state and Kurdish forces.
5 Data collated by Platform from www.marinetraffic.com/ais (accessed 20 July 2012).
6 A conservatively low estimate, based on one barrel of crude being refined into
various fuels that when burned emit 317 kg of carbon dioxide. See Bliss (2008).
7 See www.icis.com/Articles/2005/12/12/1027764/basell-munchmunster-pe-shut-after-
blast.html (accessed 12 December 2005). Basell Munchmunster PE shut after the
blast.
8 The dangers of particular forms of ‘ethicalization’ are also crystallized in the fol-
lowing statement: ‘Every time a non-governmental organization attempts to
motivate change by appealing to individuals’ self-interested concerns for money
and status, to businesses’ desire to maximize profit, or to governments’ felt man-
date to increase economic growth, it has subtly privileged and encouraged the
portion of people’s value systems that stands in opposition to positive social (and
ecological) attitudes and behaviours’ (Tim Kasser, quoted in Darnton and Kirk
2011: 40).
References
Amnesty International (2003) Human Rights on the Line: The Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan
(BTC) Pipeline Project, London: Amnesty International, www.amnesty.org.uk/
uploads/documents/doc_14538.pdf (accessed 20 June 2012).
Azerweb (2005) Report on Monitoring Carried Out by Monitoring Group of Human
Rights Organizations During the Protest Rally Held by Opposition Parties on May
21, 2005, www.azerweb.com/ngos/417/reports/609/index.pdf (accessed 20 July 2012).
Bayulgen, O. (2005) ‘Foreign Investment, Oil Curse, and Democratization: A Com-
parison of Azerbaijan and Russia’, Business and Politics, intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/
eBooks/Articles/Azerbaijan%20Oil%20Curse%20Baylugen.pdf (accessed 27 June 2012).
Bliss, J. (2008) ‘Carbon Dioxide Emissions Per Barrel of Crude’, 20 March, numero57.
net (accessed 20 July 2012).
Böge, S. (1993) The Well-travelled Yoghurt Pot: Lessons for New Freight Transport
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Darnton, A. and Kirk, M. (2011) Finding Frames: New Ways to Engage the UK Public
in Global Poverty, London: Bond, findingframes.org/Finding%20Frames%20New%
20ways%20to%20engage%20the%20UK%20public%20in%20global%20poverty%20Bo
nd%202011.pdf (accessed 20 July 2012).
Friedwald, E.M. (1941) Oil and the War, London: Heinemann.
Hildyard, N. and Muttitt, G. (2006) ‘Turbo-charging Investor Sovereignty: Investor
Agreements and Corporate Colonialism’, in Focus on Global South (ed.) Destroy
and Profit: Wars, Disasters and Corporations, Bangkok: Focus on Global South,
www.focusweb.org/pdf/Reconstruction-Dossier.pdf (accessed 22 July 2012).
Khatchadourian, R. (2003) ‘The Price of Progress: Oil Execs Muscle US-backed
Pipeline through Environmental Treasure’, The Village Voice, 22 April, www.village
voice.com/2003-4-22/news/the-price-of-progress (accessed 20 July 2012).
Lefebvre, H. (1968) Everyday Life in the Modern World, London: Allen Lane.
——(1974) The Production of Space, Oxford: Blackwell.
Levant, E. (2010) Ethical Oil: The Case for Canada’s Oil Sands, Toronto: McClelland
& Stewart.
Marriott, J. and Minio-Paluello, M. (2012) The Oil Road: Travels from the Caspian to
the City, London: Verso.
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Molotch, H. (2003) Where Stuff Comes From: How Toasters, Toilets, Cars, Computers
and Many Other Things Came To Be As They Are, New York: Routledge.
Muttitt, G. (2011) Fuel on the Fire: Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq, London: Bodley
Head.
n.a. (2010) ‘US Embassy Cables: BP Under Fire Over Handling of Gas Leak Inci-
dent’, The Guardian, 15 December, www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-
documents/171633 (accessed 20 July 2012).
Yergin, D. (1991) The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power, New York:
Simon & Schuster.
11 International Pellet Watch
Studies of the magnitude and spatial
variation of chemical risks associated
with environmental plastics
Shige Takada
On any visit to the beach, it is inevitable that various stranded and discarded
materials will be encountered. Along the high-tide line will be seaweed,
branches, trash, plastic bags, cigarette butts and more. Among this beach
detritus will be plastic resin pellets (see Figure 11.1). These are small granules,
generally in the shape of a cylinder or a disk with a diameter of a few milli-
metres. These plastic particles are the industrial feedstock of plastic products.
They are produced from petroleum in chemical plants and transported to
manufacturing sites, where ‘user plastics’ are made by re-melting and mould-
ing. During processes of both manufacture and transport, resin pellets can be
spilled unintentionally into the environment. They are then washed into
aquatic environments (streams and rivers) by surface run-off during rain.
Some plastics (such as polyethylene and polypropylene) are lighter than water,
and therefore are not deposited but actually float on water and are carried
along in streams and eventually to the ocean. In addition, pellets can be
spilled directly into the ocean by the accidental dropping of batches of pellets
at harbours and ports during handling or shipment. Because of the increasing
global production of plastics and their environmental persistence – that is,
their resistance to degradation – they are being distributed widely in oceans
and are washing up on beaches and on water surfaces all over the world. The
result of this increase in plastics production is that pellets are now ubiquitous.
Large numbers are observed on urban beaches all around the world, from
Tokyo to Los Angeles to Sydney. Pellets are also appearing on the beaches of
remote islands in the open ocean in locations such as the Cocos Islands,
Canary Islands, St Helens and Henderson Island. This rapid and extensive
spread of plastic pellets via oceans and waterways is now a major
environmental problem.
One of the main concerns with plastic resin pellets is that they carry per-
sistent organic pollutants (POPs). POPs are human-made chemicals used in a
variety of anthropogenic activities, including industry, agriculture and daily
life. POPs include polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), different sorts of
organochlorine pesticides (e.g. DDTs and HCHs) and brominated flame
retardants (polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs). Because of their very
slow rate of degradation, POPs are persistent in the environment. POPs are
International Pellet Watch 185
Figure 11.1 Plastic resin pellets
hydrophobic or lipophilic. ‘Hydrophobic’ is a term to express the repellence

of the compound to water. Because water and oil repel each other, ‘hydro-
phobic’ and ‘lipophilic’ are synonyms, and both terms are used to express the
affinity of the compounds to oil or oily materials. Hydrophobic compounds
rarely dissolve in water, but are soluble to oil and fat. Although ‘lipophilic’
might be more understandable, environmental chemists prefer to use ‘hydro-
phobic’. Though POPs are present at trace concentrations in seawater, they
are much more concentrated in the fatty tissue of marine organisms such as
fish and crustaceans due to their hydrophobic nature. This phenomenon is
known as bioconcentration. Animals at the higher levels of the food chain are
particularly vulnerable to this process, and are found to have more con-
centrated levels of POPs – that is, the concentrations of POPs are magnified
through the food chain. Another major concern with POPs is that con-
centrations are biomagnified and can reach critical levels, to the point where
they exhibit adverse effects on the biota. Some POPs react with DNA and
damage it, causing malformation and cancer. The crossbill is an example of
this malformation in wildlife. Finally, some POPs disrupt the internal system
(e.g. the endocrine system) of humans and wildlife, and cause disorders of the
reproductive system. This impacts on the ability to reproduce and may lead to
decreased population and extinction of some species of wildlife. Some POPs
affect the immune system to lower the immunity of wildlife and humans,
186 Shige Takada
leading to greater susceptibility to infection. For example, the mass deaths of
seals that occurred in the North Sea in 1988 were ascribed to high POPs
levels in the seals, which lowered their immunity and made them vulnerable
to viral infection, which led to their deaths. In this case, the direct cause was
viral infection, but POPs acted as the basic and indirect cause through
impairment of immunity. Furthermore, effects on a wider range of internal
systems (e.g. the thyroid system and brain-neurological system), and their
connection with abnormalities in the behaviour of humans and wildlife, have
also been suggested in recent studies (Eriksson et al. 2006; Schuur et al.
1998). In addition, POPs are transported for long distances, and in many
cases cross boundaries via various routes (e.g. atmospheric transport), as dis-
cussed below. Therefore, no one government acting alone can protect its
citizens or the environment from POPs; international regulation is essential.
Because of the persistent bioaccumulative nature of POPs, as well as their
adverse effects and long-range transport, their production and usage have
been strictly regulated by international treaty. In 2001, the Stockholm Con-
vention was adapted in response to the global problem of POPs. As of early
2013, 185 countries and the European Union (EU) were signatories and/or
had ratified the convention, which requires parties to take measures to elim-
inate or reduce the release of POPs into the environment. However, before
these regulations were implemented, POPs were extensively released, and are
now widely distributed throughout the globe. In this situation, the global
monitoring of POPs is necessary to identify hotspots of contamination and to
target where regulatory and remediation efforts should be concentrated.
Monitoring is also important to assess the regulatory or remediation efforts.
The Stockholm Convention emphasizes the importance of global monitoring,
particularly in the oceans.
International Pellet Watch and persistent organic pollutants

In 1998, a colleague introduced me to plastic resin pellets and asked me to
analyse the pellets for organic micropollutants. She was working in a govern-
mental institution to gather global information on synthetic chemicals and
their potential effects on the ecosystem, and became aware that marine plas-
tics and their interactions with chemicals would become a global issue. The
reason for her request was my academic background in the analytical chem-
istry of trace organic compounds in environmental samples. Students in my
laboratory analysed the resin pellets, and we detected surprising high con-
centrations of organic pollutants in them. We then began studying chemicals
in marine plastics, and have been conducting various studies on chemicals
associated with plastics, including the identification of chemicals in marine
plastics, toxic chemicals in plastic food containers, the transfer of chemicals
from plastics to organisms, and the release of plastic-derived chemicals to
landfill leachate. This chapter introduces International Pellet Watch and rela-
ted studies on environmental plastics.
International Pellet Watch (IPW) utilizes plastic resin pellets as a tool to
monitor global contamination by POPs. It developed from our finding that
plastic resin pellets accumulate POPs from surrounding seawater (Mato et al.
2001). Plastic resin pellets are produced from crude oil, and the basic chemi-
cal structure of petroleum is retained in plastic; therefore, plastic resin pellets
can be considered ‘solid oil’. Plastic resin pellets have a high affinity with
POPs because they easily dissolve into oil. For example, concentrations of
PCBs in pellets are 1 million times higher than those in the surrounding sea-
water (i.e. with a concentration factor of 1 million). Another way of saying
this is that five pellets correspond to 100 litres of seawater. This concentration
process means that plastic resin pellets are a very useful way to investigate
wider problems of serious ocean pollution, not just in terms of pollution from
the pellets, but also because the pellets are carriers or transporters of other
pollutants. Methodologically, collecting 100 litres of seawater and transporting it
to an analytical laboratory is logistically very difficult. It is much easier to pick
up five samples of pellets from beaches and harbours. Because the resin pellets
are distributed on world beaches, and collection and shipping of the pellets
is easy, we developed International Pellet Watch in 2005 (Takada 2006).
As part of the establishment of the International Pellet Watch project, we
asked citizens across the globe to collect plastic resin pellets from nearby
beaches and send them to our laboratory via air mail (see Figure 11.2). No
cooling or freezing is necessary – people just have to put the pellets into an
Figure 11.2 Pellets from all over the world

188 Shige Takada
envelope, indicate where they have been collected and post them to us. POPs
in the pellets are then analysed in our laboratory and, based on the analytical
results, the global distribution of POPs is mapped. The results are then sent to
the participants via email and released on the web. The advantage of Pellet
Watch is the extremely low cost of sampling and shipping compared with
conventional monitoring using water, sediment and biological samples. We
have been able to draw a global POPs pollution map at very low cost. We
have also been able to engage non-specialists in the process of sample collec-
tion, and to give them follow-up information that makes them feel involved
and connected to research on oceans and their protection. Many nongovern-
mental organizations (NGOs) that conduct beach clean-ups have also become
involved in the project and in sample collection.
We conducted basic studies on characteristics of POPs accumulation in
plastic resin pellets, and ran a pilot monitoring of POPs by using pellets on
Japanese beaches with the cooperation of the Japanese NGO for beach clean-
up (JEAN) in 2002 and 2003 (Endo et al. 2005). Based on the results, I made
the first proposal for the establishment of International Pellet Watch in my
presentation at the ‘2005 Plastic Debris, River to Sea’ conference, which was
held in California in September 2005. When IPW first began, only a few
samples of pellets arrived. A few months after the conference, we received a
couple of pellet samples from a few researchers and an NGO that had atten-
ded the conference. We took several approaches to spreading the news about
the IPW project. In 2006, the editor-in-chief of the Marine Pollution Bulletin,
Professor Charles Sheppard, provided a valuable opportunity to write an
article, ‘Call for Pellets’, in the journal. I also gave ‘Call for Pellets’ pre-
sentations at several international conferences in the United States, Europe,
South-East Asia and Japan. A private Japanese funding body for environ-
mental research (the Mitsui & Co. Ltd Environment Fund), which has sup-
ported our project financially since 2008, provided the resources for me to
visit South America and Africa to give talks to non-scientists calling for pel-
lets. In all, I made the call more than 20 times in different parts of the world.
Some individuals and NGOs responded to the call and sent pellets to us. We
also established the International Pellet Watch website at www.pelletwatch.
org in collaboration with a web company (STUDIO FLEX). Many more
NGOs and individuals saw the website and sent pellets to us. Some NGOs
also kindly forwarded ‘calls for pellets’ through their international networks.
Furthermore, when we fed the analytical data back to the collectors, they
were reminded of the problem of marine plastics and POPs, and forwarded
the information to their friends. As a result of this activity, approximately 100
individuals from 50 countries have now joined International Pellet Watch.
After six years, we now have pellets from more than 200 locations in 50
countries. Participants include researchers and governmental officers working
on marine plastics, NGOs for beach clean-ups, artists who utilize marine litter
to make their articles, school teachers and their students, and individuals who
are simply concerned about marine environments.
Based on the analytical results of the pellet samples from beaches all over
the world, we have been able to draw a global pollution map of POPs (Ogata
et al. 2009). As an example, a map of PCBs is shown in Figure 11.3. This
figure highlights various aspects of the global and local problems of POPs.
PCBs were detected in all pellet samples, including those from remote islands
such as the Canary Islands, Saint Helena, the Cocos Islands, the island of
Hawaii, the island of Oahu and Barbados (Heskett et al. 2012). This indicates
the wide global dispersion of POPs.
One of the most worrying features of POPs is their long-distance move-
ment. For example, some PCBs are present in the air as vapour, and are
transported by the movement of air mass from industrialized zones where the
PCBs were used, to remote areas. Some portions of the aerially transported
PCBs are then washed away by rain and deposited onto land and sea surfaces
in remote areas in cooler periods. In warmer periods, some of these deposited
PCBs evaporate, and are thus atmospherically transported further. These
processes of evaporation, aerial transport and redeposition occur repeatedly,
and consequently PCBs are transported far from their sources and globally
dispersed. This atmospheric transport is called ‘global distillation’, or grass-
hopping; the process is active enough to distribute PCBs globally. In addition,
marine plastics may contribute to the global dispersion of POPs, as discussed
below. The pellets from the remote islands tell us about the complex processes
of global pollution of POPs.
In Figure 11.3, we can easily recognize hot spots of PCB pollution with
much higher concentrations of PCBs in the pellets. PCB concentrations are
two to three orders of magnitude higher in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston,
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Figure 11.3 Concentration of PCBs* in beached plastic resin pellet (ng/g-pellet)

Note: * Sum of concentrations of CB#66, 101, 110, 149, 118, 105, 153, 138, 128, 187,
180, 170, 206.
190 Shige Takada
Santos (Brazil), Sydney, Tokyo, Athens, the Netherlands and Normandy than
in the remote areas. All of these areas are highly industrialized, and large
amounts of PCBs were used in the 1960s and 1970s; some were also dis-
charged into coastal zones and oceans. Because of their persistent and
hydrophobic nature, PCBs are accumulated in the bottom sediments in the
coastal zones. Usage of PCBs was banned in these countries in the 1970s, and
basically there are no current inputs of PCBs to coastal waters. However, the
bottom sediments containing PCBs can easily be re-suspended and remobil-
ized by physical processes (wind, waves, currents), biological processes and
anthropogenic activities such as dredging and underwater construction.
Through re-suspension and remobilization, together with desorption, PCBs
continue to contaminate coastal waters. These industrialized waters still suffer
the legacy of PCB pollution, which is why we observe higher concentrations
of PCBs in the industrialized coastal zones such as Los Angeles, Tokyo Bay,
Sydney and Normandy.
On the other hand, minimal amounts of PCBs have been observed in pel-
lets from South-East Asian countries (except for the Philippines) and from
Caribbean countries. The levels of PCBs from these regions were almost the
same as background levels. This is reasonable because no PCBs were used in
these countries during their period of rapid economic growth in the 1980s,
since PCBs were globally banned in the 1970s. However, alarming signs of
new pollution are being detected in some industrially developing countries.
For example, significantly higher concentrations of PCBs were detected in
pellets from Ghana in comparison to global background levels. Ghana had
no opportunity to utilize PCBs for industrialization because the usage of
PCBs had already ceased. One plausible explanation for this anomaly is the
release of PCBs from e-wastes (electronic and electric waste). Significant
amounts of used electronic and electric products and waste products are
imported to the industrially developing countries from industrialized coun-
tries. Some contain PCBs, which can be released into aquatic environments
through the dumping and demounting or recycling of e-wastes. International
Pellet Watch needs to analyse pellets from other locations in Ghana and from
other countries to test this hypothesis.
Fragments of user plastics

International Pellet Watch tells us not only about the pollution status of
various POPs and their global distribution, but also about risks associated
with chemicals in marine plastics. Because pellets contain POPs, they act as
carriers to various species of seabirds, which mistake them for food. However,
plastic resin pellets are a minor component of marine plastics debris. The
majority of plastics in beach debris are fragments of user plastics, as shown in
Figure 11.4 and discussed elsewhere in this book. This plastic debris is also
observed floating on the sea surface (Law et al. 2010), and can be ingested by
seabirds (Yamashita et al. 2011). These plastic fragments also contain POPs.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 J Q 1
Figure 11.4 Plastic fragments from a beach on Easter Island
IPW-related study detected the same sorts of POPs in marine fragments as in

plastic resin pellets (Hirai et al. 2011). Sorption and accumulation occur for
both plastic fragments and plastic resin pellets because both consist of the
same chemical components (e.g. polyethylene, polypropylene), and therefore
have a similar hydrophobic nature that attracts POPs. All marine plastics –
that is, plastic resin pellets and plastic fragments – contain various POPs and
similar pollutants, including PCBs, organochlorine pesticides, brominated
flame retardants, petroleum hydrocarbons and polycyclic aromatic hydro-
carbons. In addition to seabirds, various other marine organisms ingest
marine plastics. Teuten et al. (2009) have documented more than 180 species
of animals that have ingested plastic debris, including birds, fish, turtles and
marine mammals. Small plastic pieces floating on the ocean surface are mis-
taken for food by both fish and birds, while turtles eat suspended plastic bags,
which they may mistake for jellyfish. This shows how marine plastics operate
as accumulators and carriers of POPs to marine organisms.
Marine plastics: a new vehicle for transporting POPs

in marine environments
This process of transporting POPs in plastic has been a key finding of the
International Pellet Watch research. However, the movement of POPs by
192 Shige Takada
marine plastics – which are defined as plastics with a size ranging from 1 mm
to 10 cm, and a density lighter than water – is a new concept. Traditionally,
it was thought that POPs were carried in aquatic environments by natural
particles, including soil particles, soot, phytoplankton, faecal materials and
the debris of marine organisms. These particles are deposited onto bottom
sediments, and it was assumed that they did not carry POPs over a long dis-
tance. Traditionally, POPs have accumulated in sediments in the vicinity of
their source of production or spillage. However, the steady growth of the
variety and amount of marine plastics that are non-degradable and floating
has shown that they have unique characteristics as carriers of POPs. Some
researchers have shown that marine plastics travel long distances (Moore
et al. 2001; Law et al. 2010). For example, plastic fragments discharged from
Japan were found on a beach in Midway Atoll, indicating that marine plastics
can be transported over 4,000 km. Marine plastics can carry POPs for longer
distances than natural particles.
In the case of this movement, the question then emerges as to whether the
sorption of POPs into marine plastics is evidence of an equilibrium process
and whether POPs might be desorbed from plastics during transport in the
open ocean. This is true: POPs that have accumulated in marine plastics can
be released from plastic during transport in cases where POPs concentrations
in the ambient seawater are lower. The accumulation of POPs in plastics is
not a one-way process, but rather bidirectional. POPs are also released from
plastics into open ocean water, where POPs concentrations in seawater are
lower than in the industrial coastal zone. This process is called desorption.
However, it is quite a slow process in marine plastics and can take from sev-
eral months to years. A recent study has confirmed the ‘slow’ desorption in
our latest field experiments (Rochman et al., 2013). One plausible mechanism
behind the slow desorption is migration (or movement) of POPs in a plastic
particle matrix. Sorption and desorption of POPs into plastic is not a surface
phenomenon, but is controlled by the migration of POPs into the particle
matrix (Karapanagioti et al. 2010). That is, POPs penetrate into the inside of
plastic particles on sorption, whereas POPs should be moved from the inner
part of a plastic particle to the surface on desorption. On sorption/desorp-
tion, POPs have to move within the plastic matrix. The speed of movement is
slow, and therefore it would take time for POPs to be released from plastic
particles to ambient seawater because a plastic particle has a relatively longer
diameter (a few millimetres) compared with natural particles, the diameter of
which is around a few micrometres. In the case of natural particles, migration
of POPs into the particle matrix takes a shorter time (hours) because of the
shorter diameters. As a result, desorption of POPs from marine plastics takes
months to years, while desorption from natural particles takes only a few
hours. The detailed mechanism of slow desorption is still under investigation;
the main finding so far is that the process is very slow, and some POPs can be
carried for a long distance before they are completely leached out from plas-
tics. As a result of this issue of size and speed of desorption, we have observed
some plastic pieces that contain higher concentrations of POPs than the
other plastics found on remote islands. In the International Pellet Watch
project, we always analyse five plastic samples from each location and have
found some plastic samples with sporadically high concentrations of POPs in
even the remote areas. For example, PCB concentration in a sample from a
remote beach in Uruguay exhibited 24 nanograms per gram (ng/g), whereas
the other four samples had much lower PCB concentrations of less than 0.07
ng/g (see Figure 11.5). In International Pellet Watch, we measure median
concentration to exclude sporadic high concentrations and to get a repre-
sentative pollution status for individual locations. Therefore, PCB concentra-
tion at this location in Uruguay was 0.01 ng/g. This is reasonable because it is
a remote area without nearby industrial activities. However, marine organisms
cannot take median doses – they take everything! Thus the plastic sample
with sporadically high concentration of PCBs (i.e. 24 ng/g) poses a serious
threat to marine organisms. In remote areas, wild animals are exposed to
minimal amounts of POPs through natural media (water, air and the food
web). Wildlife are also vulnerable to the threat of POPs through sporadic high
concentrations. The existence of sporadic high concentrations of POPs is a
unique but hazardous aspect of marine plastics. Some scientists indicate that
the transport of POPs by marine plastics is less important than natural par-
ticles. Their model for this calculation is based on homogeneous distribution
of POPs among marine plastics. However, the real world is heterogeneous and
far more complex. Sporadic high concentrations of POPs in pellets have been
30
Max = 24 ng/g
0 25
0
Q.
1
O)
20
cz
c
o 0.3
CO
cz
a>
o
c
o Median = 0.01 ng/g
o
CD
O
CL
0
SPL1 SPL2 SPL3 SPL4 SPL5
Figure 11.5 PCB concentrations in five samples from a remote beach in Uruguay
194 Shige Takada
observed at many other locations beyond Uruguay. International Pellet Watch
provides real-world data to assess the risk of plastic-mediated exposure of
chemicals to marine organisms.
The transfer of POPs to seabird tissue

As discussed above, marine plastics can carry POPs to marine organisms. In
IPW-related studies, we were also interested in finding out whether POPs were
transferred to the tissue of marine organisms. We got weak but significant
evidence of the plastic-mediated transfer of PCBs to seabirds. One reason why
our evidence is ambiguous is because marine organisms are exposed to POPs
through their natural prey, and POPs in prey normally are magnified in their
concentration through the food web. That is, POPs are brought to marine
organisms both through their natural prey and through marine plastics
(see Figure 11.6). When we focused on the POPs with lower concentrations in
natural prey and higher concentrations in marine plastics, we found evidence
of a transfer of POPs from marine plastics to marine biota. We measured
concentrations of a kind of PCB (CB#8; 2,4’-dichlorobiphenyl) in the fatty
tissue of one kind of seabird, the Short-tailed Shearwater. These bird samples
were collected by catch in the north Pacific. They were accidentally trapped in
fishing nets and killed during experimental fishing. All 12 seabird samples
contained plastics in their stomachs to differing degrees. Significant correl-
ation was observed between the amounts of plastics in the birds’ stomachs
and concentrations of the PCB (CB#8) in the fatty tissue of the seabird
(Yamashita et al. 2011). This shows that the seabirds that ingested more
PCB#8 BDE#209
Plastic-mediated Plastic-mediated
exposure exposure
Exposure from
Exposure from
Food-web J
Food-web
No detection
I biomagnified in pelagic fish
Br Br Br Br
Figure 11.6 Models of chemical exposure on seabird via food-web and ingested plastics
plastics had more PCBs in their fatty tissue. It also suggests that there is a
transfer of PCBs from ingested plastics. Similar evidence was obtained for a
different species of seabird in a different area by Ryan, Connel and Gardner
(1988). In our research, we also found other evidence of the transfer of PCBs
(Teuten et al. 2009). We conducted a feeding experiment where another spe-
cies of seabird, the Streaked Shearwater, was fed with plastic resin pellets
from Tokyo Bay that were contaminated with PCBs. Concentrations of PCBs
in oil excreted from the preen gland of the seabird (preen gland oil) were
measured every week during the experiment. Concentrations of sorts of PCBs
(lower chlorinated congeners) in preen gland oil increased through Day 7 for
the plastic-feeding setting, whereas no such increase was observed for the
control group. The increase was slight but significant. This is due to the fact
that marine organisms are exposed to PCBs not only through plastics but also
through the food web (Figure 11.6). When we focus on other compounds that
are not contained in natural prey, we can get clearer evidence.
Recently, we obtained evidence that one sort of plastic additive, poly-
brominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), is transferred to the tissue of seabirds
that ingest marine plastics (Tanaka et al. n.d., 2013). PBDEs are compounded
to some plastics as flame retardants, and they have the potential to disrupt the
thyroid systems of biota. PBDEs were measured in the abdominal adipose
tissue of the same Short-tailed Shearwater individuals that were studied for
PCBs. Ingestion of plastics by this species of seabird is frequently observed.
Plastic fragments were detected in the digestive tracts of all 12 individuals
examined. Our analysis of the plastic fragments from the Short-tailed Shear-
water demonstrated that plastic fragments from two individuals contained a
sort of PBDE – BDE#209, which is a major component of currently used
flame retardants. Sporadic detection (i.e. 2 from 12 samples) reflects the
nature of additives – that is, some plastic products contain the flame retar-
dants for specific use of the products but the others do not contain them.
BDE#209 was also detected sporadically from plastic fragments collected
from the sea surface in open ocean (Hirai et al. 2011). On the other hand,
BDE#209 is normally not detected in pelagic fish. Exposure of seabirds to
BDE#209 through the food web (e.g. fish) is unlikely; however, BDE#209
was actually detected in the tissue (abdominal adipose) of two seabird indivi-
duals, meaning it must come from the ingested plastics. Interestingly, the
two individuals bore BDE#209 in both ingested plastic and the internal
tissue. These findings suggest evidence of transfer of chemicals from ingested
plastics to the organisms, though more observations are needed. We also have
to address the question of whether these degrees of exposure of plastic-
derived chemicals (e.g. BDE#209) may cause adverse effects in the organisms
(e.g. seabirds).
These are the issues with which we are currently involved. In this section,
I’ve talked about one kind of plastic additive: flame retardants in marine
organisms. However, plastic additives can also sometimes cause problems
directly for humans, as discussed in the next section.
196 Shige Takada
Plastic-derived nonylphenols: here, there and everywhere
To maintain the performance of plastics, various additives such as plasti-
cizers, antioxidants, anti-static agents and flame retardants are compounded
into plastic products. Some of these plastic additives are leached from plastic
product waste, and may threaten humans and wildlife. An example is the
release of nonylphenols, or endocrine-disrupting chemicals, from plastic tubes
that are employed for scientific research. This is described in a chapter
entitled ‘Here, There, and Everywhere’ in a well-known book on endocrine
disruption, Our Stolen Future, by Colborn, Dumanoski and Meyers (1996).
Drs Anna Soto and Carlos Sonnenschein at the Tafuts Medical School in
Boston studied the multiplication of cells. One day they incidentally encoun-
tered disruption of their experiments by nonylphenols leached from a plas-
tic lab tube. Nonylphenols are a kind of organic chemical that consists of
a benzene ring, a hydroxyl functional group and a branched alkylchain
containing nine carbons. They are added to lab tubes as antioxidants to give
a more stable and less breakable nature to these plastics. Drs Soto and
Sonnenschein observed that the nonylphenols leaching out of the plastic tube
caused rampant proliferation of breast cancer cells. Their observation showed
that the chemicals leaching out of plastic mimicked oestrogen and resulted in
the crazy multiplication of the breast cancer cell. This is a clear example
demonstrating that additives released from plastics potentially disrupt the
endocrine system of humans. Many follow-up studies have demonstrated
that nonylphenols are endocrine-disrupting chemicals. In the normal endo-
crine system, oestrogen is secreted at appropriate time points in appropriate
individuals. It binds with oestrogen receptors and activates DNA in the
nucleus to produce appropriate biological responses. However, a range of
human-made chemicals can bind with oestrogen receptors when they enter the
cells of humans and wildlife. The association of chemicals with oestrogen
receptors gives inappropriate signals at inappropriate times to induce inap-
propriate biological responses. This initiates abnormal behaviours in the
endocrine system and can cause disorders in the reproductive system and
lower the effectiveness of reproduction. This leads to diseases caused by
imbalance in oestrogen, such as vaginal clear cell adenocarcinoma, as well as
a decreased ability to reproduce. These phenomena are referred to as ‘endo-
crine disruption’. Nonylphenols are typical endocrine-disrupting chemicals.
Some other endocrine-disrupting chemicals, such as Bisphenol-A, are also
derived from plastics and are explored below.
Based on concerns derived from this study, we analysed various objects
made of plastic and found nonylphenols in various items. Even in ultra-pure
water, we detected nonylphenols when we stored it in a polyethylene tank.
A more serious concern, however, was the exposure of humans, and especially
babies, to endocrine-disrupting nonylphenols derived from plastics. When
I read the findings of Drs Soto and Sonnenschein, my twin nephew and niece
were seven months old and had just started to use plastic teethers. I found
that the teethers were made of silicon (a kind of polymer), and was concerned
about the potential of endocrine-disrupting chemicals leaching out. In ana-
lysing the teethers, I did detect nonylphenol, so I advised my sister-in-law not
to use the teethers. I also called the company and advised it not to sell the
teether. It did not know that the product contained the endocrine-disrupting
chemicals and said it would stop the import and sale of the product.
Another concern that we investigated in IPW-related studies was whether
nonylphenols were detected in a wider range of consumer plastics. We ana-
lysed 50 plastic products available on the Japanese market, including food
containers, cups and dishes. Again, high levels of nonylphenols were detected
in several items, including disposable transparent plastic cups (Isobe et al.
2002). Other research detected nonylphenols in plastic wraps (Kawanaka
et al. 2000; Funayama et al. 2001). These researchers detected nonylphenols
in rice balls that were wrapped with the plastic wrap, indicating the transfer
of nonylphenols to the rice ball (Funayama et al. 2001). Nonylphenol was
also detected in the plastic containers of snacks and sweets, and transfer to ice
cream was confirmed. As Colborn, Dumanoski and Meyers (1996) argue,
plastic-derived endocrine-disrupting chemicals are literally here, there and
everywhere. Based on these findings, and public concern about endocrine-
disrupting chemicals, some governmental sectors in Japan recommended that
plastic industries not use nonylphenol-based additives in their consumer
plastics. This official recommendation appears to have been effective, and only
trace amounts of nonylphenol were detected in the plastic products made in
Japan in 2010.
Despite this regulation of and reduction in use in Japan, the problem is
international. Because of acceleration of trading, many low-priced plastic
products are imported to Japan from China and South-East Asian countries.
We surveyed 100 imported and domestic (i.e. Japanese) plastic food contain-
ers, bags and related items in 2010. Nonylphenols were detected in some
plastic products from China and Thailand, though there was almost no
detection for Japanese products. It is our feeling that international regulations
or guidelines should be established regarding the addition of nonylphenols
and related compounds to all food and drink containers.
One of the most popular plastic containers for water and other bever-
ages is polyethylene terephthalate, or the PET bottle. PET does not contain
nonylphenols. However, we were suspicious about the caps of these plastic
bottles. They are normally made of polyethylene, though some are made of
polypropylene. We analysed 93 caps of mineral water bottles purchased in
various countries, including Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam, Indonesia,
Malaysia, Germany, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), South Africa, Kenya
and Ghana. Nonylphenols were detected in 44 of the 93 caps. Again, no or
only trace amounts of nonylphenols were detected in Japanese caps, whereas
higher and significant concentrations of nonylphenols were detected in caps
from China, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, the UAE, Germany, France, USA
and Kenya (see Figure 11.7). Concentrations were up to 200 ng/g. Though we
198 Shige Takada
JPN 1I
JP N 2-
Japan JP N 3-
JP N 4”
K O R O I'
KO R02
KO R03
KOR04
KO R05
KO R O 6
Korea KO R07
KO R O 8
KO R 09!
K O R IO .
KO R11 _
KO R 12.
KO R 13.
K O R 14_
C H N1”
CHN2
China C H N 3"
C H N 4"
CHN5
idni
ID N 2 _
ID N 3 _
ID N 4
IDN5I
ID N 6
ID N 7 _
ID N 9 _
ID N jO l
ID N 0 2 _
Indonesia ID N j0 3 _
ID N 0 4 _
ID N 0 5 _
IDNj06_
ID N r0 1 _
D N r0 2 _
D N r0 3 _
D N r0 4 -
D N r0 5 _
D N r0 6 -
D N r0 7 _
Malaysia M YS1 _ I
M VS2_ I
U A E1'
UAE U A E2'
Ghana GHA1_
DEU 1'
Germany DEU 2'
0 50 100 150 200 250

Nonylphenol concentration (ng/g)
Figure 11.7 World Cap project: nonylphenol concentrations in plastic caps of bottles of
o:
mineral water purchased in various countries
have not examined the leaching of nonylphenol from the caps to the con-
tents, several reports have detected nonylphenols in bottled water (Toyooka
and Oshige 2000; Amiridou and Voutsa 2011). Bottled water is becoming
increasingly important as a source of drinking water in those countries where
a safe water supply system is not established. However, while bottled water
might be microbiologically safe, it is not always chemically safe.
Mobile sources of endocrine-disrupting chemicals

in marine environments
Plastic bottle caps containing nonylphenols are a potential threat not only to
humans but also to wildlife. Plastic caps are some of the most frequently
detected debris on beaches. They are as ubiquitous as resin pellets. Inter-
national Pellet Watch analysed 58 plastic caps collected from several Japanese
beaches (see Figure 11.8a). Among seven caps collected on a beach in Tokyo
Bay, only one sample contained nonylphenols. This is reasonable because
Tokyo Bay is a semi-enclosed bay and it is mostly Japanese plastic caps,
which contain trace amounts of nonylphenol as indicated above, that are
found on the beaches. On the other hand, nonylphenols were more frequently
detected in plastic caps collected on beaches in the western islands of Japan,
which are more exposed to ocean currents from China (see Figure 11.8b). A
total of 28 caps among 45 samples on the western islands contained
I \ Utsuntftk
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Mudanpan \ # Tuihifo
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Shanyang
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KOREA
A w a Is.
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r Pyongyang wansan
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. /f JA P/
PA N
, ~ ♦ . S KO KbA r
Inchon A f
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Tokyo
.* j (
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Kwangju puw> / Nagc Bay
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5 K S ttu ri
CHINA
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v
Hangzhou
Naha^
MOT Ube- /
Ishigaki Is.
P “ T a r . a n JA|W A N
G a o o o o g^W i r \ i v v n ',<
Figure 11.8a Sampling locations of beached plastic caps

200 Shige Takada
Beached Caps
r ji *
J2 ‘
Tokvo Bav J3*
U
_ U'
U“
K2“
C6“
Awa Is. K2"
C6_
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H a n s n n M a rk p t
CHN1 -
C HN 2-
C H N 3I
CHN4
CH N 5~
0 50 100 150
Nonylphenol concentration (ng/g)
Figure 11.8b Nonylphenol concentrations in plastic caps from markets and beaches
nonylphenols. Because some species of biota, such as the Albatross, ingest

this sort of plastic debris, these plastic caps could be a source of internal
exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals. In addition, these caps are often
fragmented by environmental weathering into smaller pieces, which can be
ingested by a wider variety of marine species. The western islands of Japan
accumulate a lot of Chinese plastic debris because they are located
downstream of the Kuroshio ocean current. We observed larger quantities of
Chinese plastic debris, including plastic caps from bottled water, on the bea-
ches in the western islands. How did we distinguish Chinese debris from
Japanese debris? Chinese characters imprinted on the plastic caps made the
caps originating from China easy to recognize. We also used specific imprin-
ted characters on the caps from specific brands in identification. Through
imprinted characters, products on the market and debris on the beaches were
interconnected. Figure 11.8b compares commercial products on the market
and beached plastic caps regarding the same brand of plastic caps. Though
significant concentrations of nonylphenols were detected in all the beached
plastic caps, their concentrations were two orders of magnitude lower than
those in the commercial products purchased on the market. This can be
explained by the fact that the nonylphenols were leached out into seawater
during their journey across the East China Sea. In other words, plastic caps
release nonylphenols to seawater while floating. Plastic caps, like resin pellets
and other plastic debris, act as mobile sources of the endocrine-disrupting
chemicals to marine environments.
Though plastic caps for water bottles are most frequently observed on
beaches, they are still just a minor amount of all beached plastic debris. The
majority of fragments are from a wide range of user plastics. These other
plastic fragments collected from marine environments, including the open
ocean and remote islands, also contain nonylphenols (Hirai et al. 2011). In
the beached plastic fragments, other additives – such as Bisphenol-A and
polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) – were detected. These also have
endocrine-disrupting effects. Marine plastics are mobile sources of a wide
spectrum of endocrine-disrupting chemicals.
Scavenging plastic-derived chemicals in landfills: problems

with plastics in terrestrial environments
So far, we have focused on plastics in marine environments and the issues
surrounding them. However, problems associated with plastics occur not only
in marine environments but also on land. Considerable and growing amounts
of plastics are disposed of in municipal landfills. Rainwater washes over
the dumped plastics, and certain additives and monomers are released from
them, thus adding to the chemicals that are found in landfill leachate (see
Figure 11.9). A key sign of economic growth and industrialization is larger
amounts of plastics in society, with consequent increases in the amount of
plastics waste.
To investigate the effect of industrialization on the presence of endocrine-
disrupting chemicals in landfill leachates, we measured plastic-derived chemi-
cals in leachates from tropical Asian countries, including Malaysia, Thailand,
the Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, India and Japan at different stages
202 Shige Takada
T akada
‘ w -
v J K
•t r
y
HO'
fM
v
4<
Ch ,
— Oh
Leachate
Figure 11.9 Leaching plastic-derived chemicals in landfill

landfill
of economic growth (Teuten et al. 2009). Though high concentrations of

nonylphenol were detected, Bisphenol-A showed the highest concentrations
in the leachate from tropical Asian countries, ranging from 0.18 to 4,300
micrograms per litre (μg/L) (see Figure 11.10). Bisphenol-A concentrations
were one to five orders of magnitude higher than those in sewage effluents.
Bisphenol-A in leachate could be derived from unreacted monomers in dis-
posed polymers (polycarbonates and epoxy-resins), and degradation of the
polymers and additives. In many landfill sites in industrialized countries,
treatment facilities are installed and the environmental burden of these
endocrine-disrupting chemicals is reduced. High removal efficiency (95–99.7
per cent) of BPA has been reported. However, because of high concentrations
of Bisphenol-A in raw leachates, even treated leachates showed higher BPA
concentrations (0.11–30 μg/L; see Asakura et al. 2004; Wintgens et al. 2003)
than the no-effect concentration of Bisphenol-A for endocrine disruption in
freshwater organisms. For example, Bisphenol-A at 0.008 μg/L was reported
to induce malformations in the female organs of the freshwater snail, Marisa
cornuarietis (Schulte-Oehlmann et al. 2001). Bisphenol-A is more problematic
in developing Asian countries’ landfill sites because they have no or poorly
functioning leachate treatment facilities. Consequently, high concentrations of
Bisphenol-A are discharged into the surrounding environment, such as rivers
and groundwater. For example, Bisphenol-A concentrations in water samples
10000
Laos
Cambodia
1000 - * ----- Vietnam
x
India
—I X x Thailand
O) 100
3 A Philippines
c
X
u *om
9 Malaysia
o 10 Japan
75 !x 0 V
n O X
c
d> 1
o
c
o
O 0.1
X
0.01
0.001
Nonylphenol Bisphenol-A PBDEs
Figure 11.10 Concentrations of plastic additives: nonylphenols, Bisphenol-A and

polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) in leachate from landfills of
Asian countries
from a Malaysian pond, into which the leachate from the dump flowed, were
an order of magnitude higher (i.e. ~11 μg/L) than in the upstream inflow-
ing river (0.45 μg/L) (Teuten et al. 2009). This clearly demonstrates that
plastic waste-derived chemicals significantly increase the concentrations of
endocrine-disrupting chemicals in the environment.
Among the countries investigated, the more industrialized countries – for
example, Malaysia and Thailand – had higher Bisphenol-A concentrations
in landfill leachate than less industrialized countries, such as Laos and
Cambodia. Bisphenol-A concentrations in the leachate showed a significant
positive correlation with the per capita gross domestic products (GDP) of
tropical Asian countries (r2 = 0.66, n = 26, P < 0.0001). The most probable
reason is that more industrialized countries use larger quantities of plastics,
resulting in the generation of more plastic waste. This suggests that economic
growth in developing countries may increase the environmental prevalence of
endocrine-disrupting chemicals unless the leachate is collected and properly
treated.
Another kind of plastic additive, brominated flame retardants (i.e. PBDEs),
was detected in high concentrations of up to 133 μg/L in the landfill leachate
from tropical Asian countries (Kwan et al. n.d., forthcoming). Again, this is
evidence that high concentrations of PBDEs are found in the more indus-
trialized and populated tropical Asian countries like Thailand, the Philippines
and Malaysia. These concentrations were higher than those normally
observed in water and sediments from rivers, canals and sewage, indicating
204 Shige Takada
that leachates are a serious potential source of PBDE contamination in
the environment. Our detailed examination of the composition of PBDEs
demonstrated that less toxic types of PBDEs are transformed to more toxic
types of PBDEs in anaerobic conditions in the landfills. The garbage dumping
sites act as an amplifier of the toxicity of plastic additives through anaerobic
transformation, and as emitters of the toxic chemicals to the environment.
Conclusions
This chapter has demonstrated that plastics can act as exposure sources of
potentially toxic chemicals to humans, environments and wildlife through
various routes. The research conducted for the International Pellet Watch
study is ongoing. The key findings so far are that marine plastics (i.e. resin
pellets and fragments) act as transporters of POPs and have fundamentally
been involved in making these serious pollutants mobile and dispersing them
far and wide. We have also suggested the ways in which various plastic addi-
tives such as nonylphenols, which are contained in some plastic caps, can be
released into bottled water. More seriously, plastic caps act as mobile sources
of the endocrine-disrupting chemicals to enter seawater through desorption.
Plastic debris can also function as an internal exposure source for a spectrum
of chemicals such as Bisphenol-A and brominated flame retardants when
these plastics are ingested by marine organisms. When plastics are dumped in
landfill sites, these additives are released into leachate, which contaminates
groundwater, rivers and coastal waters. We also found some evidence of the
transfer and accumulation of the plastic-derived chemicals in the tissues of
organisms that ingest the plastics, though more concrete evidence is necessary.
We hope to investigate and assess the magnitude of plastic-mediated exposure
and its adverse effects on marine ecosystems in future studies. Plastic is
necessary in modern society; however, International Pellet Watch and the
related studies show that its afterlife is complex and often very hazardous
to both humans and the environment. To reduce the burden of endocrine-
disrupting chemicals, more regulations and international coordination are
needed. The Stockholm Convention was a major breakthrough, and had a very
positive effect on stopping the production of POPs. We need more conventions
such as this, as well as a significant reduction in the unnecessary use of plastic
in order to protect the world from the toxicological dangers of plastic debris.
To reduce the environmental burden of plastics and associated chemicals,
growing public awareness of the problems associated with plastics is an
important key. Awareness of the problems changes behaviour of individuals to
reduce the usage of single-use plastics such as plastic bags for shopping and
plastic bottles for drinking water. Increased public awareness also pushes
national and international policies forward. International Pellet Watch could
help to increase understanding of the problems of chemicals associated with
plastics. The global pollution maps clearly demonstrate that plastic debris
carries toxic chemicals. Furthermore, close examination of the data of
International Pellet Watch (see Figure 11.5) shows that marine plastics can
carry pollutants even to remote areas. Some NGOs are utilizing the infor-
mation on the IPW website to increase public awareness of the plastic issue.
Most recently, as a part of such activity, we organized an international sym-
posium on marine plastics pollution in Tokyo. International Pellet Watch has
given a message of no single-use plastic to the participants.
Reflecting IPW in policies would be somehow indirect. Over the past few
years, some governmental (e.g. the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, or NOAA, in the United States) and international agencies,
such as the Joint Group of Experts on the Scientific Aspects of Marine
Environmental Protection (GESAMP), have held workshops on marine plas-
tics to discuss the magnitude of the problems of marine plastics and the pos-
sible solutions. Results from International Pellet Watch have been referred to
and discussed in the workshops and published in their official reports
(e.g. GESAMP 2010). In addition, the United Nations Environment Pro-
gramme (UNEP) features some key topics and publishes them in the UNEP
Yearbook each year. In the 2011 Yearbook, UNEP featured marine plastics
and IPW, and a global pollution map. These agencies are still discussing
how they will incorporate the problems of marine plastics into their policies.
I believe that the results of IPW will be properly reflected in future policies.
Acknowledgements
The author expresses sincere appreciation to all the participants of Inter-
national Pellet Watch. The author thanks Dr Rei Yamashita, Mr Masaki
Yuyama, Ms Bee Geok Yeo, Ms Maki Ito, Ms Yuko Ogata, Mr Satoru Iwasa,
Mr Kosuke Tanaka, Mr Hisashi Hirai, Ms Chikako Aoki, Ms. Kaoruko
Ichikawa, Dr Satoshi Endo and Ms Charita Kwan for providing unpublished
data; Dr Kaoruko Mizukawa for providing toxicological information on
POPs; Drs Yutaka Watanuki and Atsuhiko Isobe for providing precious
samples and comments; Dr Takao Katase for providing instrument for non-
ylphenol analyses; the Mitsui & Co. Ltd Environment Fund and Thermo
Fisher Scientific for their continuous financial support. The author greatly
appreciates Dr Gay Hawkins’s work in editing the draft.
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12 Plastic and the work
of the biodegradable
Jennifer Gabrys
The seas and oceans have become a slurry of plastic. There are now estimated
to be up to 100 million tons of debris in the five gyres where plastic debris
collects in still ocean currents from the Pacific to the North Atlantic.1 How-
ever, the plastic found in these gyres and suspended throughout the seas is not
exclusively composed of identifiable objects in the form of water bottles, toy
ducks or sandwich bags, but also consists of microplastics. These small-scale
pellets, or nurdles, and other plastic fragments are residues from the break-
down of plastic products or fallout from manufacturing sites where tiny
plastic feedstock drifts in considerable quantities from factory lots to the seas.
Plastics are materials in process; they fragment and break down, while also
generating new material arrangements. In what ways do the plastics that are
accumulating in oceans give rise to new environmental processes? Who or
what are the agents involved in working through the new materialities and
effects of plastics as they accumulate and break down in the earth’s oceans?
Material processes of accumulation and biodegradability have become evi-
dent in many different modes of working through plastics. For example, the
amassing of plastics in seas and oceans has given rise to new ways of working
through plastics, such as the recent European Union (EU) Maritime Affairs
and Fisheries initiative to pay fishermen in the Mediterranean to catch plastic
rather than fish (Damanaki 2011). On the one hand, this initiative addresses
the problem of over-fishing and disposal of less desirable fish for market, but,
on the other hand, it demonstrates that the seas and oceans are now a shift-
ing, if distinctly plastic, material matrix of chemical-biotic-economic pro-
cesses. Fishing for plastics, it may turn out, could be an economic alternative
to fishing for fish, since plastics may be retrieved year round, and the demand
for (recycled) plastics feedstock continues to rise.
Fishing for plastics also seems to address the pollution of the seas, which
not only affects water quality but also impairs the lives of many marine
organisms. Images of dead seabirds that have starved from a stomach full
of plastic, together with tales of fish and turtles who ‘mistake’ plastic for
food, and through ingesting this debris eventually die, are regular features of
scientific and public concern (Moore et al. 2001; Barnes et al. 2009). At the
same time, newly identified forms of microbial life appear to be emerging
Plastic and the work of the biodegradable 209
that ingest plastic in the seas – although to what effect is yet to be deter-
mined, since it is likely that these bacterial forms of ingesting and decom-
posing plastics also release chemicals for distribution in the seas and
concentration in food chains (Zaikab 2011). Yet these labouring bacteria seem
to offer an ideal image of how the seas might be cleaned of our offending
debris, in the ever-elusive search to eliminate the negative effects of plastics.
In each of these examples, new encounters, practices and natures emerge
through material entanglements with plastics. Accumulation in this sense
points less towards an exclusive emphasis on environmental contamination
and more towards processes of environmental modification in which we are
situated with multiple more-than-human entities. It may seem that one way
to deal with plastics accumulating in oceans is to fish them out and remove
them from the seas. Yet plastics are accumulating in many different ways,
as they break down, enter food chains as plasticizers and generate altera-
tions in the eating patterns of diverse organisms. How might a material
politics of plastics that is less inclined toward, a purifying discourse of envir-
onments and that is more invested in attending to the emergence of
new material arrangements make possible a greater engagement with the
new natures and practices to which we are committing ourselves – and more-
than-humans? How do the new entities and processes that emerge in plasti-
cized oceans shift our understandings and approaches to the material-political
ecologies of these spaces?
Accumulation here refers not just to the literal accretion of residual matter
in the seas, but also to the build-up of plastics within environmental processes
and corporealities. Such ‘natures-in-the-making’ as well as ‘bodies-in-the-
making’, as Harvey and Haraway (1995: 514) suggest, are junctures where
political possibilities may emerge in relation to new material processes and
arrangements. Material politics, in this sense, describes the ways in which
the materialities we are involved in making are sites not just of responsibi-
lity and concern, but also of ongoing – if often problematic – invention. As
Thompson’s and Takada’s chapters in this collection demonstrate, there are
numerous new effects and entities emerging with the ongoing presence of
plastics in environments. From marine organisms that ingest plastics with
concentrated levels of persistent organic pollutants (POPs), to bacteria and
algae that colonize plastic, and marine organisms that incorporate plastic
debris as habitat or flotation medium, plastics are having considerable
effects on organisms and environments. This chapter then discusses how
the accumulation of plastics in oceans gives rise to new natures and bodies
in the making, as well as new modes of working through these material
arrangements.
In order to take up these multiple and different ways in which plastics are
accumulating across environments and bodies, I mobilize a notion of material
politics that attends to how plastics are entangled with and generative of
specific forms of more-than-human work. The notion of work is important for
this investigation because it allows for an approach to plastics that accounts
210 Jennifer Gabrys
for the complex creaturely and environmental processes that coalesce in rela-
tion to these materials, as well as the political possibilities that might emerge
through these natures and bodies in the making. The making of bodies and
natures involves the relational ‘work’ of bodies as they ‘hold sites together’
(Woodward et al. 2010: 274). But the processes whereby sites hold together
also change, and so a shifting range of heterogeneous entities undertake
material practices that specifically concresce in the actual occasions of plastics
as they degrade in the oceans. Drawing on Whitehead (1929) in this under-
standing of material processes, I suggest here that the ways in which plastics
are encountered and worked through as historical forms sedimented in the
present also inform the future potential processes that may be undertaken in
relation to plastics.
The concept and practice of work and working materialities points to ways
in which it may further be possible to reconceptualize the notion of ‘carbon
workers’, a term that refers to the diverse – if at times problematic – ways
in which any number of humans and more-than-humans are enrolled in the
work of mitigating climate change.2 Here, I extend and translate this notion
of carbon workers towards plastics. Plastics are composites of carbon, both in
their physical form as petrochemical hydrocarbons and in the carbon energy
used to manufacture them. Eight per cent of world oil production contributes
to the substance and energy required to manufacture plastics (Thompson
et al. 2009b). As composites of carbon, plastics are participants in and mobilize
distinct types of carbon work, particularly at end-of-life. Plastics accumulate,
break down and degrade, but these processes also enrol humans and more-
than-humans in different forms of carbon work. Upon disposal, plastics travel
to those carbon sinks of oceans and landfills. In these zones, they further
degrade and, depending upon chemical composition, may release carbon
dioxide or lodge in the bodies of ocean organisms, thereby diversely influencing
the material composition of the ocean as a carbon sink (or source).
I focus on biodegradability as a specific form of carbon work that involves
processes of transformation, deformation and generation of materials and
bodies. Biodegradability has at times been a sought-after quality for plastics,
as it signals the seamless elimination of this highly disposable material. Most
plastics do not actually biodegrade, but instead degrade into smaller particles
through chemical processes and physical weathering. Numerous environ-
mental, chemical and biological impacts occur along with these degradation
processes across organisms. The actual and typically problematic ways in
which plastics do break down – by adsorbing chemicals, entering food chains,
and altering biological and reproductive processes through increased levels of
toxicity – indicate how degradation and biodegradation are as much political
as ecological processes that inform the possibilities of natures and bodies in
the making. Biodegradation may be the sought-after quality for plastics, but
degradation is the concrete way in which plastics dematerialize and remater-
ialize to generate new environmental conditions. Even when plastics do bio-
degrade, they often do not completely disappear but instead fragment into
smaller invisible pieces. The bio-of degradation then has as much to do with
the forms of life – the organisms, processes and environments – that are
drawn into the ongoing breakdown of plastics, whether by inadvertently
ingesting microplastics or undergoing increased exposure to pollutants that
are concentrated on plastic debris surfaces.
The material-political dimensions of biodegradation become more evident
through the notion of carbon workers, which is a way to capture the active,
material, productive and participative ways in which humans and more-than-
humans work through and remake plastics and plastic environments. How
might the multiple ways in which plastics are worked through begin to give
rise to a material politics of plastics that accounts for these more-than-human
modes of carbon work? What types of carbon work become identifiable in
relation to plastics as they biodegrade, and what potential types of work
might emerge to generate new material political practices?
Accumulation
The plastics accumulating in seas have been storing up and breaking down
since the post-World War II rise in plastic consumer goods (Ryan et al. 2009).
Plastics in the seas are now present in considerable densities, a record of
accumulation that is due in many ways to the increasing quantities of plastics,
since as Richard Thompson and colleagues (Thompson et al. 2009b: 2154)
write ‘the production of plastic has increased substantially over the last 60
years, from around [half a] million tons in 1950 to over 260 million tons
today’. Plastics also collect and sediment over time in cumulative quantities.
All plastics ever manufactured since the rise of the Plastic Age are still likely
to be present in the environment and oceans in some form, as they will not
have completely broken down yet (Lebwohl 2010; Andrady 2003).
While the oceans were relatively free of plastics prior to the post-war Plas-
tic Age, now they are a pervasive substance circulating through oceans, and
could even be considered a common entity within ocean ecologies. Oceans are
becoming new material compositions, as literary scholar Patricia Yaeger sug-
gests, since with plastic accumulation ‘we’ve reconstituted the physical ocean
in a mere fifty years’ (Yaeger 2010: 538). In this era of the Anthropocene, not
just atmospheres but also oceans are part of ongoing environmental alter-
ations. The reconstitution of the oceans refers less to an essential originary
nature, rather indicating how the new natures now emerging are spatial and
temporal accumulations of lived materialities. In this plasticization of the
ocean, our present and future material politics are then necessarily committed
to responding to these natures-in-the-making.
Just as plastic accumulation is taking place in oceanic sinks, these sinks
then become spaces where complex biochemical and environmental ‘intra-
actions’ occur across microbial, vegetable and animal corporealities (Barad
2003: 810). Intra-action, as Karen Barad explains, describes processes where
entities can be seen to emerge through – rather than prior to – relations.
212 Jennifer Gabrys
Bodies and natures form in and through shared contexts. In the space of
plastic accumulation, both humans and more-than-humans take part in
material and relational exchanges filtered through plastics and their residues.
Such intra-actions take many forms. Plastic debris is now a frequent trans-
port medium for organisms that travel ocean currents. By ‘hitchhiking’ on
fishing gear and disposable takeaway containers, typically invasive species are
able to make far-flung journeys on this readily available debris. While in
transit, these species are able to reshape places, as they circulate on plastic
media to settle into – or ‘colonize’ – new environments (Gregory 2009). At
the same time, plastics have been shown to be an adsorption medium for
potentially harmful chemicals, carrying and dispersing additives and plasti-
cizers such as flame retardants, Bisphenol-A (BPA) and phthalates, as well as
drawing in and concentrating chemicals from seawater (Song et al. 2009;
Takada 2013; Thomas et al. 2010). When ingested, these plastics then poten-
tially pass on chemical loads to other types of marine life, which regularly
make a meal of plastic particles, thereby amplifying chemical effects in the
food chain. The intra-actions that occur through plastics are typically perni-
cious exchanges, where bodies exposed to plastics and plasticizers accumulate
plastic effects, and undergo endocrine disruption or physical blockage, as
discussed by Thompson and Takada in Chapters 9 and 11, respectively, of
this collection.
While accumulation is often read primarily as a Marxian term that
describes strategies of property and capital acquisition – and indeed the ocean
can be seen as a space of capital accumulation, as the artist Alan Sekula
(1995) makes clear in his work – the accumulation of plastics in the oceans
demonstrates the more residual effects of these political economic practices.
Here, accumulation extends to bodies and environments as sites of ‘produc-
tion’ that require working through the residual materialities of plastics.
Harvey and Haraway, together and individually, suggest the ways in which
bodies and economies that are jointly formed might be called ‘corporealiza-
tion’ (Harvey and Haraway 1995: 510; see also Haraway 2007; Harvey 1998),
where the body also constitutes an ‘accumulation strategy’ along with eco-
nomic modes of accumulation (Harvey 1998). However, with residual plastics,
the ways in which political economies materialize may occur long after cycles
of production and consumption are complete. Within these residual mater-
ialities, multiple participants are involved in distinct and often intra-active
practices of working through the accumulation and degradation of plastics.
Plastics do not simply break down in ocean environments; rather, they enrol
humans and more-than-humans in new processes and practices of working
through and with these natures in the making.
Carbon workers
To say that the oceans are polluted with plastics is an approach to environ-
ments through contamination that may not fully account for the more-than-
human ways of working through plastics that are already taking place.
Instead, from the perspective of natures and bodies in the making, accumu-
lating plastics generate specific material conditions within and through which
humans and more-than-humans participate, whether through changing the
composition of food chains or increasing levels of toxicity in environments.
The accumulations and biodegradations of plastics are events that signal the
need to open up approaches to plastics through a more-than-human material
politics, since the multiple entities affected – and emerging – through these
plastic processes involve numerous other actants.
The material politics under consideration here draws on questions recently
raised in relation to ‘political matter’ – namely, how do politics change when
more-than-humans enter into these deliberations (Braun and Whatmore
2010)? How do more-than-humans, as integral to material processes, alter
practices and understandings of politics (Haraway 2007; Stengers 2010)? Even
more than attending to the ways in which more-than-human entities partici-
pate in politics, I am interested in specifying how particular material entities
and practices emerge as newly relevant contributors to the politics of chan-
ging environments. In this respect, I adapt the term ‘carbon workers’, which
has emerged within specific policies to address the human (and more-than-
human) contributions to mitigating climate change, to describe the ways in
which plastics are worked through, and the material politics that emerge
within these specific processes of degradation and biodegradation.
Within climate change discourse, the concept of carbon workers has gained
traction to describe the long list of ‘tree planters and tenders, measurement
technicians, landscape deforestation modellers, carbon accountants, carbon
certifiers and verifiers and others’ who have emerged to take care of trees
and forests that have been identified as key sites of biotic carbon sequestra-
tion through the Kyoto Protocol (Fogel 2002: 182; Lövbrand and Stripple
2006: 235). Carbon workers within climate change discourses primarily
describe the various roles that humans play in relation to carbon sink policy
instruments, and the often problematic matrix of relations that occurs when
developed countries seek to offset carbon emissions – where, for instance,
indigenous forest dwellers in developing countries are enrolled in performing
carbon work in designated biotic sinks (since many of these sinks are tropical
forests). Trees – and the many other more-than-humans that inhabit forests –
are also implicitly included as carbon workers in this context, since their
participation is gauged in relation to the project of reducing carbon. More-
than-humans might then be more explicitly included as workers in the carbon
project – entities the participation of which becomes identified as relevant in
relation to reducing (or contributing to) carbon emissions.
Oceans are another, less recognized carbon sink, since most carbon work
has been configured in relation to terrestrial and atmospheric spaces. Yet
oceans are also sites of considerable carbon work, and are now beginning to
be addressed not just for their absorption of carbon dioxide, but also for the
ways in which the biotic–chemical exchanges that take place there are now of
214 Jennifer Gabrys
interest for ‘managing’ this other carbon sink (Stone 2010). The accumulation
of plastics and plastic additives is one aspect of this project of attending to
the oceans, and gives rise to new forms of possible carbon work.
Carbon work is a way to specify particular types of exchanges and practices
that take place in relation to plastics accumulating in oceans. By specifying
practices – or ‘arrangements of practices’, as Haraway suggests – ‘hetero-
geneously complex’ modes of agency may become more readily apparent as
being interwoven with and generative of concrete political occasions and
effects (Harvey and Haraway 1995: 520). Carbon work, as discussed here,
could be one way to begin to develop a precise attention to the connections
and processes within oceanic sinks. Carbon work is also a way to specify the
intra-actions that take place in relation to biodegrading plastics in oceans.
The examples of the different modes of working through plastics with which
I began this chapter signal types of carbon work that variously ‘clean up’ or
break down plastic hydrocarbons. From EU fishers paid to fish for plastic, to
marine researchers focused on documenting the effects of degradable plastics,
to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) focused on raising public aware-
ness around plastic pollution, to animals and birds that ingest plastic debris,
to bacteria that may biodegrade these materials, a whole range of carbon
workers, relations and practices begin to materialize in distinct ways in
relation to plastic oceans.
In these processes of accumulating plastic hydrocarbons, the carbon work
of humans and more-than-humans articulates distinct material-political rela-
tions to the seas. These material intra-actions within plastic oceans are part of
what enables processes of materialization to even turn up as carbon work:
plastic fragments turn up by accumulating over time in oceans, bodies and
seas, and then become the object of clean-up campaigns or toxicity studies.
Dead animals turn up: their inability to process plastic through ingestion
makes them a visible remainder and reminder of the intractable accumulation
of plastic debris and its ongoing effect on biodiversity. Plastic-loving bacteria
turn up, inhabiting and apparently decomposing plastic: are they new, or have
they been here all along, and could they clean the oceans of excess debris?
New types of carbon work then emerge as possible strategies for dealing
with these fragments. Describing these material processes as carbon work
draws attention to the complex transformations and exchanges within plastic
production, consumption and disposal, which involve more-than-humans in
our material lives. The material politics of oceans as sinks, and their role
within environmental change, make these processes more evident as forms of
work, and demonstrate how our material lives are forceful conjugations and
sites of material-political engagement, responsibility and invention.
More-than-humans working
It would be possible here to make a long list of all the working animals to be
found in more-than-human research, from the research labour of laboratory
animals to military dolphins searching for mines and the industrial labour
of aquaculture. However, my interest in attending to the work of more-than-
humans is less about the direct servicing of animals or other more-than-
humans to economic processes, and more about the ways in which new
material collectives emerge to do key carbon work in relation to breaking
down plastics in oceans. In this sense, the carbon work of plastic-related
activity could be seen to be more comparable to what anthropologist
Stefan Helmreich (2009) describes in his study, Alien Ocean, where ‘methane-
metabolizing’ bacteria at vents in extreme ocean environments consume
and exchange methane through a process of chemosynthesis, thereby pre-
venting additional greenhouse gases from entering the atmosphere (Helmreich
2009: 36–37).
Here is an exchange that could be described as a form of work that con-
tributes to attempts to reduce greenhouse gases, which are articulated and
monitored across spaces of policy and everyday practice. These bacteria are
not immediately a resource, but they do turn up as a more-than-human con-
tribution in the material politics of climate change. The natures that are in the
making in this context involve not just changing climates and distributions of
greenhouse gases, but also pertain to the ways in which more-than-human
processes emerge as relevant or as contributing to specific environmental
concerns and actions.
In his metabolic theory of labour and value, Marx excluded the non-human
from his definition of human labour. For Marx, labour was an expression of
‘man’s’ metabolic relation with and conversion of ‘nature’. Yet this labour is
notable not just for its assumed conversion of nature into resource, but also
for what it is not. Non-human work does not constitute labour, Marx argues,
since ‘nature’s work’ – whether the web of the spider or the hive of the bee –
has not undergone a prior mental conception that would, for instance, char-
acterize the labour of an architect conceptualizing a building (Marx 1990:
283–84).3 The exclusion of non-human work from theories of labour informs
the types of material politics that are possible, since non-humans may not
then be recognized as participants in our material lives.
If we trouble Marx’s assertion of where work might be situated or identi-
fied, we can instead consider how a post-Marxian concept of work might not
consist of ‘man’ labouring to transform ‘nature’ through metabolic relation,
but rather occur through intra-actions and processes of materialization that
direct new possibilities for material politics. Instead of human-driven meta-
bolic transformations, here we might consider something closer to Michel
Serres’s metabolas as ongoing processes of transformation, where material
and environmental exchanges are characterized by all manner of conversions
that take place not just in human bodies, but also in ‘animals and plants’, as
well as ‘air crystals … cells and atoms’ (Serres 1982: 72–73).
Numerous humans and more-than-humans are involved in the process of
converting plastics in one way or another, whether it is bacteria breaking
down microplastics, seabirds ingesting bottle-tops, or fisherman fishing for
216 Jennifer Gabrys
plastics. One of the ways in which these carbon works and exchanges might
be characterized further is through processes of degradation and biodegrad-
ation. Carbon workers are involved in and producers of material exchanges
and arrangements that are not so much metabolic and resource driven, but
instead necessarily oriented towards realizing new material dynamics and
relations in the ongoing attempts to process and break down plastic hydro-
carbons. Through these modes of work, new entities emerge, which contribute
to a processual reshaping of what counts as material politics.
The work of the biodegradable

The degradation of plastics in oceans and terrestrial environments is part of
the contradictory way in which plastics accumulate: not primarily as identifi-
able objects but mostly in the form of microplastics, chemical migration and
bodily accumulation (Guthman 2011; Thompson et al. 2009a). As mentioned
in the introduction to this chapter, most plastics are not considered biode-
gradable, but rather degrade only in relation to forms of physical weathering
(American Chemistry Society 2010), in some cases through exposure to light
or oxygen (Thomas et al. 2010), or in other cases through the addition of
specific ‘transition metals’ such as iron or cobalt (Cressey 2011; Roy et al.
2011). At the same time, these degradable forms of plastics often break down
into fragments that last indefinitely in the environment. Even though these
plastic fragments are no longer present in an identifiable form, they still
persist as debris with toxic effect.
The persistence of plastics for potentially several hundred years (since
degradation depends in part upon context) has often served as one of their
least redeeming features. Biodegradable plastics, or bioplastics, have been
developed in an attempt to find a remedy for the material persistence and
recalcitrance of plastics.4 Rather than having crude oil as their primary sub-
strate, biodegradable plastics are usually made from starch and cellulose –
what otherwise are referred to as ‘renewable’ materials. Since these materials
are derived from plants, and may be composted or degraded through anaerobic
digestion rather than put into landfill, they are seen as a possible way to
address the accumulation of plastics in environments (Song et al. 2009: 2127).
When biodegradable plastics break down, they decompose into ‘carbon
dioxide, methane, water, inorganic compounds, or biomass in which the pre-
dominant mechanism is the enzymatic action of microorganisms’ (Song et al.
2009: 2127–28). In order to meet the terms of biodegradability, micro-
organisms must also completely use up plastic fragments within a set period
of time.
Biodegradation presents an ideal vision of matter, lapsing back into
‘nature’ without leaving a visible residue. To be biodegradable is to be eco-
friendly, to embody the promise to disappear into the earth without a trace.
Biodegradability – even if this process involves fragmenting into toxic par-
ticles – may be seen to be preferable to being confronted with the visual
evidence of enduring plastic remains. Biodegradation could be described as a
form of biomimesis, where materials ‘mimic’ the assumed ‘natural’ tendency
of materials towards reintegration into trophic cycles. Yet biomimesis, as
Bensaude Vincent articulates, often involves mapping a teleological agenda
on to so-called natural processes in order to realize ‘economical rationality’ in
relation to ‘natural systems’ (Bensaude Vincent 2007, 2011). Biodegradation
could then be seen as a way to attempt to naturalize plastic materials so that
they seem to spring easily from and return to nature. Yet this also could be
seen as a way to elide, if not idealize, the material politics and processes of
which plastics are constitutive.
Within the work of biodegradability, moreover, microorganisms provoke
alternative conceptions of what material transformations involve – not as a
process of becoming invisible, but rather as an articulation of new collectives
brought into the space of material politics. What counts as carbon work here
does not then reduce down to a singular entity labouring away at a piece of
plastic, but instead requires collective environmental conditions and entities –
from light and oxygen to microbial life – to come together in the process of
plastic degradation.
Bacteria redux
The microplastics that are present in increasing numbers in oceans are often
described as having transformed oceans into a ‘plastic soup’ (de Vrees 2010).
Plastic soup indicates not identifiable items for retrieval but more of a turbid
medium of plastic deformation. Perhaps in contrast to an image of garbage
patches or marine litter as a thick surface layer of bottles and trash bags
choking the upper ocean, here instead is an extensive suspended medium of
plastic debris and pellets, which variously pass through the bodies of marine
life and undergo bacterial transformation. This plastic soup is a site of con-
tinual metamorphosis and intra-actions, so that new or previously unrecog-
nized corporeal relations emerge in the newly constituted spaces of the
oceans.
In these spaces, biodegradable as well as petroleum-based plastics have
been found to undergo the work of ‘plastic munchers’, or bacteria that are
colonizing and may potentially be digesting plastic. The ‘discovery’ of bac-
teria that may be consuming plastic has led to the further proposal to find
ways to deploy specific microbes on plastic patches in an attempt to clear
these spaces of their accumulated residue. Yet the effects of these carbon-
working bacteria are yet to be fully understood: to what extent do the bac-
teria recirculate the chemical effects of plasticizers into the water and through
the food chain? How does this process of ‘bioremediation’ unfold, which
other organisms might be affected, and what time spans and resources might
it require? One researcher likened the scale of the bacteria’s task in consuming
garbage patches to one person having to eat the whole of Canary Wharf
(BBC News 2010).
218 Jennifer Gabrys
While the scale comparison between bacterial decomposition and dense
urban districts might appear daunting, a 1970s science-fiction novel, Mutant
59: The Plastic Eater (Pedler and Davis 1971), imagines a scene where bac-
teria capable of biodegrading plastic run amok in London. Due to their
reproductive success, the plastic-loving bacteria are able to multiply, chew
through and dissolve entire plastic urban infrastructures. From the failure of
electrical wires and cables that are insulated with plastic, to the explosion
of water pipes that are similarly made of plastic, the indiscriminate appetites
of these bacteria are a force that reshapes and shuts down entire cities. As the
Introduction and numerous contributions to this edited collection demon-
strate, our material lives increasingly are composed of plastics. Because of the
extent of plastic materialities, plastic-digesting bacteria could become archi-
tectural agents, remaking the pervasive plastic fabric of our environments.
In Mutant 59, the urban environment becomes an apocalyptic experiment
in degradation, where these new bacterial forms develop evolving appetites
and capacities for material transformation as they eat and alter plastic scenes.
Biodegradability and ‘eating well’

The work of plastics biodegradation is thus less about making the effects of
ongoing disposal-oriented consumerism disappear, since even degradation
and biodegradation generate new intra-actions and material politics. Instead,
biodegradability points to how the residual materialities of plastics activate a
more collective understanding of material processes. As sociologist Myra
Hird (2010) suggests, material processes may be indicative of ‘eating well’,
since bacteria are the fixers or producers that make available the elements on
which so many heterotrophs, or organisms that require external nourishment,
depend. Eating well, she suggests, drawing on Jacques Derrida (1991), is a
way to encounter bacteria (and processes such as decomposition) as part of
the material collectives in which we all participate. These exchanges and
relations might also give rise to indigestion, as Haraway (2007) suggests, or to
modes of exchange and incorporation that instead unsettle or disrupt
relations.
As I have previously argued in my work on electronic waste and carbon
sinks (Gabrys 2009, 2011), in a waste-based materiality, ‘things’ are rarely
present as discrete entities, since materiality involves processes of breaking
down, transforming, dispersing and reworking. Hird addresses this lack of
discreteness through bacteria in order to articulate how the edges of more-
than-humans are not distinct, and how our material processes and politics are
always undertaken in collectives. These collectives are sites of ethical relation
and obligation. Eating well is about recognizing connections and inter-
dependencies, as well as acknowledging that many more-than-human pro-
cesses fall outside the scope of our usual sites of recognition. Material
collectives are not just sites of eating together, but also of transforming,
making possible and available different versions of shared as well as
differently inhabited materialities.
Derrida has given us his thoughts on ‘eating well’, as well as ‘biodegrad-
ability’, which together perhaps offer a revised metabolic imaginary beyond
that linear sequence articulated through a more Marxian political (and
material) economy. Through the ‘figure of the word “biodegradable”’, which
Derrida transposes to ‘cultural uses’, he asks: ‘What is a thing? What
remains? What, after all, of the remains …?’ (Derrida 1989: 812).5 Biode-
gradability draws attention to the ways in which things become ‘non-things’.
Derrida’s analysis deals primarily with cultural investigations, but the ways in
which things become non-things in the plastic oceans involve multiple mate-
rial collectives that are undertaking these transformations. In the shifting
composition of oceans, bacteria, marine life and fishermen working through
EU directives, the carbon work of processing residual plastics in oceans gives
rise to newly emerging collective material politics.
Conclusion: material collectives

What types of material politics and material collectives emerge through
speculative, expanded and more-than-human modes of carbon work? What
might this work consist of, specifically as reconfigured through degradability?
Such an approach could be seen to open into all kinds of directions, but
I would like to end by discussing how this view of carbon workers and bio-
degradability as a material-political engagement might open up new types
of material thinking. The notion of the ‘life-cycle’ is a typical device used
in the eco-design of products and buildings. It articulates ways for materials
to loop back through cycles of production and consumption without material
loss or waste. However, from the view of biodegrading and degrading plas-
tics, a life-cycle becomes a very different type of process, far from a closed
loop, since the site of recovery might even become a new site of manufacture
and material process encompassing the carbon work of multiple material
collectives.
Following on from the examples of accumulating, degrading and working
through plastics with which I began this chapter in the form of fishers fishing
for plastics and bacteria emerging to decompose it, I would like to end with a
discussion of one speculative creative practice project, The Sea Chair Project,
which has been developed to address the increasing amounts of plastics in
oceans, and which offers an alternative to life-cycle thinking (Groves et al.
2011). The creators of The Sea Chair Project, Alexander Groves, Azusa
Murakami and Kieren Jones, develop their project as a response to the
increasing amounts of plastic found in the seas and at the littoral margins.
The project participants have developed a ‘nurdler’ device, a ‘sluice-like con-
traption’ for collecting and sorting plastic debris and microplastic pellets
from the ocean. Working in the first instance at the strandline of Porthtowan
beach in Cornwall, Grove, Murakami and Jones salvaged plastics for reuse at
220 Jennifer Gabrys
this site where a particularly large amount of plastic debris and pellets
collects. Salvaged plastics were separated by density (and colour) through
a floatation-tank technique. The material was then heated in a ‘sea press’, a
furnace and hydraulic press that may be transported on small fishing vessels.
The mouldable plastic material was then shaped into a chair – or, more
precisely, a three-legged stool (see Figures 12.1–12.5).
In this speculative materials-reclamation proposal, the project creators are
specifically interested in addressing the EU initiative to have fishers catch
plastic (mentioned throughout this chapter). Here, they have taken this pro-
posal further by developing plans for a sort of ‘floating factory ship’ that
salvages plastic for the production of sea chairs. Rather than work towards an
ideal closed-loop life-cycle product, The Sea Chair Project works with those
historical remains of our lived plastic materialities to begin to generate new
approaches to how plastics orient material practices and politics in the
present. The reclamation of plastics from oceans is not a straightforward
solution to increasing amounts of plastics in oceans, since any project that
collects plastics, particularly microplastics, must also attend to the numerous
marine (micro)organisms that may be caught up with any collection effort.
However, the shifting material arrangements of plastics in oceans here give
rise to speculative practices for salvaging degrading plastics as a resource for
renewed production. New rounds of production turn from sourcing raw or
even recycled materials made raw again, towards the ongoing – if problem-
atic – accumulations of plastics in oceans. Far from a closed loop, the site of
Figure 12.1 ‘The Nurdler’ (2011), The Sea Chair Project

Source: (Groves, Murakami and Jones 2011)
Figure 12.2 ‘Nurdle Collection’ (2011), The Sea Chair Project

recovery becomes a new site of manufacture and material process. The carbon
work that emerges does not consist of closed loops of original material recy-
cled again; instead, it generates transformed practices, intra-actions, economies,
ecologies and material politics in relation to plastic oceans.
On the one hand, it is sensible – as many researchers have suggested – to
deal with the problem of plastics contaminating oceans at the source, to strive
either for a policy of minimal waste through redesign or to ensure that plas-
tics do not travel, whether through wayward manufacturing or disposal, to
seas. On the other hand, though, the current permeation of oceans and
environments with plastics and their chemical residues suggests additional
approaches to plastic waste as it already exists are also relevant. Large
quantities of plastics continue to be generated and disposed of across estab-
lished and emerging economies. Many of these economies currently lack
waste-handling infrastructures and manufacturing practices that would cap-
ture plastic waste before it enters the environment. Hawkins (2010) suggests
that it is useful to attend to the ways in which particular materialities may
become manifest through environmental practices.6 Specific materialities
may be activated in the actions of banning bags, for instance, or through
the uncanny reuse of these same items. These specific materialities are also
the sites where ‘political capabilities’ emerge (Hawkins 2010: 46). By attend-
ing to the ways in which materialities are constituted, sustained and pro-
duced, it is also possible to consider what practices might prompt alternative
forms of material politics. By rethinking the material collectives and material
222 Jennifer Gabrys
Figure 12.3 ‘Plastic Sample: Black’ (2011), The Sea Chair Project
Figure 12.4 ‘The Sea Chair Tools’ (2011), The Sea Chair Project
Figure 12.5 ‘The Sea Chair’ (2011), The Sea Chair Project
224 Jennifer Gabrys
politics that are emerging in relation to plastics in oceans, and the new carbon work
to be undertaken there, it may be possible to attend more effectively and more
creatively to the material entanglements within which we are now situated.
Such forms of material engagement and material politics perhaps direct us
towards what Barad (2010: 266) calls ‘an ethics of entanglement’, which
‘entails possibilities and obligations for reworking the material effects of the
past and the future’. Reworking is also a way of working, and carbon
reworking engages with and transforms the sedimented effects of environ-
mental and bodily pasts as they turn up in the present and future. Toward
what forms of entanglement are we working, and to which natures and bodies in
the making are we committed? Which material collectives are brought together,
and how do these material relations articulate and make possible different modes of
material politics that work through and with these multiple connections?
Materialities and material collectives inform politics, but they are also
part of the becoming possible of politics. These possibilities of politics are
located within forms of work that transform and concretize everyday prac-
tices. Bacteria are now establishing their factories in the seas; marine organ-
isms are building highways on polystyrene; and plastic trash is mobilizing
human and non-human bodies to work through these oceanic discards in any
number of ways. However, these material residues also provide fodder for
rethinking the trajectory of our material politics, outside the closed loop of
renewed capital, to a more extensive understanding of and speculative
approach to the complex and collective carbon work that emerges from our
lived plastic materialities.
Notes
1 Numerous reports and organizations document the increasing amounts of plastics
in oceans, including the United Nations Environment Programme (2005); and
Allsopp et al. (2006). The UN report suggests the estimates of plastics per square
kilometre should be read with caution, as it is very difficult to gauge exactly how
much plastic is in oceans, given how ‘vast and varied’ they are. For more infor-
mation on the ocean gyres where plastics collect, see 5 Gyres (n.d.); and US
Environmental Protection Agency (2011).
2 The term ‘carbon workers’ is used across climate-change literature to refer to spe-
cific forms of work that emerge in relation to carbon sinks (via their designation in
the Kyoto Protocol). Cathleen Fogel (2002, 2004) has addressed this topic briefly in
her work on the Kyoto Protocol. Eva Lövbrand and Johannes Stripple (2006) draw
on Fogel’s work, and briefly deploy the term in relation to understanding the
territories of carbon sinks and possibilities for mitigating climate change.
3 In Marx’s analysis, transformations of nature are the basis for human labour – but
‘nature’ also transforms through these processes, and so generates new conditions
in which to work.
4 An early report on this varied phenomenon tends towards the science fictional, as
in BBC News (1999). For a current industry perspective and overview on bioplastics,
see en.european-bioplastics.org (accessed 20 August 2012).
5 While Derrida’s text is largely oriented towards a debate on Paul de Man and
several academics’ interpretations of his work, he deploys the material and
metaphoric language of waste to undertake an analysis of the persistence or dis-
solution of scholarly work. The use of biodegradables via Derrida is a lateral
interpretation, yet his suggestion of how things become non-things is instructive for
this study on plastics. As Derrida writes, ‘On the one hand, this thing is not a
thing, not – as one ordinarily believes things to be – a natural thing: in fact, “bio-
degradable,” on the contrary, is generally said of an artificial product, most often
an industrial product, whenever it lets itself be decomposed by microorganisms. On
the other hand, the “biodegradable” is hardly a thing since it remains a thing that
does not remain, an essentially decomposable thing, destined to pass away, to lose
its identity as a thing and to become again a non-thing’ (Derrida 1989: 813).
6 Hawkins asks: ‘How would the politics of plastic bags be understood if the focus
shifted from questions of effects to questions of practice?’ (Hawkins 2010: 43).
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Index
3D printer 9, 30–31, 33, 38–39, 40–42, Andrady, Anthony L. 163

44, 45; CAD system 40–41; Aristotle 19
customization 37, 40, 44; domestic
plastics production 40–42, 43–44, 45; bacteria: biodegradation 208–9, 214,
easy-ness 40, 42, 43, 44; 217–18, 219, 224; E-coli bacteria 26;
environmental impact 43, 45; ‘methane-metabolizing’ bacteria 215;
eventuation 36, 39, 42; everything- Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater 218
ness 39, 40, 42, 43, 44; a household Bakelite 2, 124
item 40; IPR 43; MakerBot Ball, Philip 17
Replicator 39, 40; plastic’s limited Barad, Karen 211, 224
plasticity 35; plasticity 33; production/ Barker, Mandy xi
consumption merging boundary 31, Barry, Andrew 32, 53, 54–55, 56
37–38, 43, 45; replicator 38–40; skills Barthes, Roland 2, 23, 107, 128
required for 39–42, 43; sociomaterial Baudrillard, Jean 24
respatialization 30–31, 42–43, 44–45; Beck, Ulrich 123
utility 31, 44; see also plastics benefits of plastics 150–51, 157, 160,
production; rapid prototyping 163; see also values of plastics
3 Rs (reduce, reuse, recycle) 159–60, 163 Bensaude Vincent, Bernadette 9, 17–29,
4 Rs (reduce, reuse, recycle, redesign) 33, 38, 42, 217
159, 160–61, 163 Bergson, Henri-Louis 24
5 Rs (reduce, reuse, recycle, redesign, biodegradation 3, 161–63, 210–11,
energy recovery) 159, 161, 180 216–17; bacteria 208–9, 214, 217–18,
219, 224; the bio-of degradation 211;
ABS (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene) biodegradability and ‘eating well’ 210,
37 216, 218–19, 224; biomimesis 217;
Accumulation 1, 13, 171 carbon work 13, 211, 217; Derrida,
accumulation of plastic 50, 208, 212; Jacques 218, 219, 224–25; material
chemicals bodily accumulation 122– politics 211, 213, 217, 219, 221;
23, 124–25, 134, 139, 140, 143, 144, plastics’ life cycle 219; see also
154–55, 216; paradox of plastics 18, biopolymers; carbon work; non-
24; plastic debris accumulation 150, biodegradability; seas and oceans
208; POPs, bioaccumulative nature of biopolymers 161–63, 216; biodegradable
185, 186, 191; seas and oceans 208, polymers 162; biopolymers/
209, 211–12, 214; see also plastic conventional polymers difference 162;
debris; plastics waste compostable polymers 162; PLA 162;
aesthetics 34, 37, 109, 151 renewable polymers 162, 216; waste
agnotology 27, 131 management 162, 163; see also
Allison, Craig 37–38 biodegradation; polymers
aluminium 17, 18, 52–53, 60, 61, 77 Bloom, Bernard 144–45
Index 229
Bockner, G. 61–62 craft 31; plastics production 32, 34, 35,
BPA (bisphenol-A) 12, 124–25, 131, 139, 43; production/craft/consumption
143, 145, 196; banning of 134, 144, interaction 34, 35; skills required in
145; BPA bodily accumulation 143, 3D printing 39–42, 43
154; harmful effects 153–54, 155, 196, credit card 2, 3, 10–11, 87–104;
202–3; landfill 202–3; marine settings American Express 89–90, 91, 92, 97,
153–54, 201, 204, 212; POPs 196, 201, 98, 101; Bank of America 92–93, 101
202; see also endocrine disruptors; (BankAmericard 92–93; Peterson,
POPs Rudolph 93); borrowing 10, 87, 89,
94, 100; consumer credit 87, 89, 90–
CAD (computer-aided design) systems 93, 96, 97, 100; credit card boom 89,
37, 39, 40–41; see also 3D printer 92, 93; cutting up the card and debt
Callon, Michel 49–50, 54, 57, 58, 88, 131 collection 96–99; default 10, 87, 89,
Campbell, Colin 116, 119 96–99, 100; Diners Club 92
carbon work 210, 213–14, 215, 217, 219, (Simmons, Matty 92); disposability
221, 222, 224; carbon workers 13, 100; economic device/economic
210, 212–14, 224; climate change 210, agencement 87–88, 95, 96; endurance
213, 215, 224; more-than-humans and stability 89, 96, 99; history of the
work 209, 211, 213, 214–16; ‘work/ payment card 89–96, 99 (‘Charga-
labour’ 209–10, 215, 224; see also plate’ system 90–91; Simplan system
biodegradation; seas and oceans 91); mass mailing of unsolicited cards
causality 5, 65; disease 135, 136–37, 138, 93–95, 100; metal card 90–92; money
143, 148 88, 99, 101; ownership 96, 100;
CDC (Centers for Disease Control and plasticity of 10–11, 87, 90, 91–93,
Prevention) 124, 125, 131, 139 99–100 (plastic-electronic composite
celluloid 19, 20 69, 118, 124 96, 100); United Kingdom 89, 96–99,
children 40, 41; baby bottles 124, 134, 100; United States 89–96, 99–100;
144, 145; endocrine disruptors 141, VISA: Hock, Dee 87, 88
146, 154, 155; teethers 196–97; toys cultural aspects: culture/materials
110, 114 interaction 9, 18, 19, 20, 23–24, 26;
civil activism 10, 70, 79–80, 125, 176, cultural values associated with plastics
177; see also NGO mass consumption 18, 23, 25; shift on
Clarke, Alison 119 negative/positive plastic connotations
clothing 1, 22, 116; artificial fabrics 24, 9, 25
72; vinyl 72 customization 37, 40, 44, 75
Colborn, Theo 196, 197 cutlery 32, 114, 119
composite 21–23, 25, 100, 157
consumption 4, 24; consumer credit 87, DBP (dibutyl phthalate) 154
89, 90–93, 96, 97, 100; consumer degradation 3, 11, 107, 108, 109–11,
democracy 9, 10, 68, 69, 70, 74–78, 210; absorbency 108, 110, 118;
81; consumer education 158, 161, affective modes of embodiment 11,
204–5, 214; environmental issues 27, 107, 111; ‘ageing plastics/our bodies’
157; Extended Consumer relationship 107, 108–9, 117; changes
Responsibility Schemes 66; ignorance in the object’s estimation 108, 111;
27; mass consumption 2, 18, 23, 25, cleaning 109–10, 111; hygiene 108,
27, 49, 151, 197 (vinyl 10, 68, 69, 72, 111; ‘materiality’ of materials 111–12;
73, 76); ‘plastics waste/plastics mobile phone 112, 113, 114, 117;
production and consumption’ plastic surfaces 11, 107, 109–11;
topological relation 10, 51–52, 62, 65, plastics’ death 107–8, 111, 117, 118;
201, 203; production/consumption pollution 109, 111, 118; POPs 184;
merging boundary 31, 37–38, 43, 45; seas and oceans 212, 216, 217, 218;
types of consumer 116, 119; see also see also mobile phone
plastics production DEHP (di-2-ethylhexyl phthalate) 139,
Couzens, Gordon 139, 150, 163 154
230 Index
DeLanda, Manuel 8–9, 56–57, 65 relationship 201, 203; ‘economic’/
Deleuze, Gilles 35, 36 ’market’ distinction 87, 100; economy
democracy 19; ‘democratization of of abundance 3, 23, 69; petrochemical
production’ of plastic objects 9, 30; industry 9, 10; plastic as economic
West Germany, consumer democracy agent 49; plastic’s economic values/
10, 68, 69, 70, 74–78, 81; see also capacities 49; plastics waste 50, 201,
politics of plastics 203; see also credit card; market;
Derrida, Jacques 218, 219, 224–25 PET; vinyl/PVC
DES (diethylstilbestrol) 143 enactment 5, 6, 51, 52, 63, 64, 65
designing 27; 3D printer 40–43; built-in endocrine disruptors 3, 11, 118, 122–23,
intelligence 22–23; designing materials 146, 154–55, 212; banning of 145;
27; imitation of nature 25–26; children 141, 146, 154, 155; DES 143;
redesign 159, 160, 163, 221 (green greatest effects at the lowest doses
chemistry 160); technological design 142; harm, categories of 143; harmful
17, 18, 21–23, 25, 27; vinyl 77, 81 effects 153–54, 155, 196; lock and key
Deville, Joe 10–11, 87–104 model of the endocrine system 140–
disease: causality 135, 136–37, 138, 143, 42; nonylphenols 196–97; Our Stolen
148; disease-prevention measures 138, Future 196; POPs 185, 199–201, 204;
145–46; environment, role of 136, 137, see also BPA; health issues; PCBs;
138, 145; environmental health 137; plasticizer; POPs
germ theory 134, 137–39, 146; Koch, environmental issues 2, 3, 11–12, 123,
Robert 137, 138; particle model of 125, 130, 163, 204; 3D printer 43, 45;
harm 134, 135, 138–39, 143, 144; consumption 27, 157; disease and
pollutant 138, 143; public health 137, environment 136, 137, 138, 145;
138, 144, 145; Snow, John 146; see environmental health 123, 137;
also health issues; miasma theory environmental ‘intra-actions’ 211–12,
disposability 3, 17, 27, 50–51, 57, 150; 214, 217, 221; environmental justice
credit card 100; an event 51; mass 12, 137, 146; environmental
manufacture 24; mobile phone 11, modification 209–10, 211, 213, 215;
108; mobile phone case 114; a environmental responsibility 4; plastic
negative calculation 50; PET 10, debris 3, 8, 151–54; plastics used for
50–51, 52, 55, 57, 60, 61, 62–65 the conservation of nature 25; ‘pre-
(literal enactment of 52, 62); a life’ of plastics, ecological impact 172,
positive calculation/source of 175, 176, 178–79, 181; see also health
economic gain 50; rise of disposable issues; plastic debris; plastic resin
plastic objects 50–51; waste effects of pellets; pollution; seas and oceans;
50, 66, 158; see also plastics waste solutions to plastics’ associated
domestic plastics production 9, 40–42, problems; STS
43–44, 45; re-spatialization of Enzensberger, Hans Magnus 78
domestic/workplace spheres 30–31, ephemeral nature of plastics 23, 51;
42–43, 44–45; see also 3D printer delusion 24, 27; durable waste 24,
Dumanoski, Dianne 196, 197 107–8; from being durable to
DuPont lab 53, 55, 58; Wyeth, Daniel 53 becoming ephemeral 55; PET 59, 61
durability 3, 4, 57, 150; PET 57, 60, 63, epistemology 7–8, 123
64; see also persistence; recalcitrance EPR (extended producer responsibility)
161
The Economist 37, 38, 39 Erhard, Ludwig 69
economy 8, 9–11; accumulation 10, 49, ethical issues 3, 125, 181, 182, 224
212; character of calculability 49–50; EU (European Union) 145, 154, 157,
circulation of value 11; 158, 177, 186; fishing for plastics 208,
‘corporealization’ 212; credit card as 209, 214, 215–16, 219, 220
economic device 87–88, 95, 96; Evans, Richard 68
‘economic growth and everything-ness 39, 40, 42, 43, 44, 128;
industrialization/amounts of plastics’ vinyl 72–73, 75, 80
Index 231
Fisher, Tom 11, 107–20, 181 industry 49, 118; co-evolution 54;
Fogel, Cathleen 224 industrial character of plastics 31, 32;
Fredriksson, Cecilia 111 Society for the Plastics Industry 118;
Freinkel, Susan 2, 53, 61 vinyl 71, 73, 74–77, 79
Friedel, Robert 19 informed material 54; economically
informed material 51, 55, 56;
Gabrys, Jennifer 1–14, 179, 208–27; emergence of new materials
recycling 63 54–55; everything-ness 39, 40, 42, 43,
Garfinkel, Harold 40 44; PET 51, 55, 56; plastics as 32,
GESAMP (Joint Group of Experts on 42
the Scientific Aspects of Marine Ingold, Tim 81, 108, 111–12
Environmental Protection) 205 innovation 22, 34, 53, 89; emergence of
Gibbs, David 30 new materials 54; plastics production
Gibson, William 112 34, 35, 73; see also invention
Giddens, Anthony 123 interdisciplinarity 7–8, 12
Giles, Geoff 61–62 invention 4, 5, 12, 209, 214; ‘inventive
glass 18, 19, 59; acrylic glass 73; glass problem making’ 6–8, 12; new forms
fibres 20, 21; recycling 60; substitution of material thinking 4, 12; PET 51,
by plastics 9, 50, 52, 53, 55, 60, 61, 52–57, 60, 62; topological approach
72, 157 55; see also innovation
green chemistry 12, 155, 163; redesign of IPR (intellectual property rights) 43
products 160 IPW (International Pellet Watch) 12–13,
Griscom, John H. 136–37, 138, 142, 146 186–207; establishment of 187–88;
Guattari, Pierre-Félix 36 NGO 188, 205; participants 188;
POPs 186–91; see also landfill;
Hale, William J. 18 nonylphenols; PCBs; plastic resin
Haraway, Donna 209, 212, 214, 218 pellets; POPs
Harman, Graham 66
Harvey, David 209, 212, 214 Kant, Immanuel 27
Hawkins, Gay 1–14, 49–67, 172, 221 Kyoto Protocol 213, 224
Haynes, Williams 25
health issues 11–12, 123, 125, 128, 130, landfill 123, 158, 161, 162, 201–4; BPA
154–55, 163; cancer 17, 78–80, 185, 202–3; landfill leachate 186, 201, 204;
196; chemicals bodily accumulation PBDE 203–4; plastic-derived
122–23, 124–25, 134, 139, 140, 143, chemicals in 201–4; nonylphenols 203;
144, 154–55, 216; foetuses 141, 143, see also plastic waste
146; normal/abnormal distinction Langston, Nancy 143
143; packaging 109; plasticizer, Latour, Bruno 34, 41, 66, 131
harmful effects 3, 12, 141, 143, 153, law and regulation 80; BPA, banning of
154–55; prosthesis 23; public health 134, 144, 145; endocrine disruptors,
137, 138, 144, 145; VCM’s banning of 145; oil 173, 176, 179;
carcinogenicity 78–80; see also PCBs, banning of 190; POPs 186, 197,
children; disease; endocrine 204; solutions to plastics’
disruptors; environmental issues; associated problems 158, 161, 163,
Griscom, John H.; miasma theory; 221; Stockholm Convention 186,
pesticides; pollution; solutions to 204
plastics’ associated problems; STS; Law, John 63
toxicity; women Lefebvre, Henri 181
Heidegger, Martin 59 Leigh Star, Susan 33
Helmreich, Stefan 215 Liboiron, Max 11–12, 134–49
Hillman, David 30 litter/littering 3, 61, 123, 157, 159,
Hird, Myra 218 163
Horst, Heather 112, 118 Lövbrand, Eva 224
Hyatt, Isaiah 19 Lury, Celia 59
232 Index
Manzini, Ezio 2 mobile phone 3, 11, 107, 109, 112–20;
market 9–10, 19, 26, 49; ‘economic’/ adornment and display 109, 112, 117;
’market’ distinction 87, 100; market case 113–14, 115; cleanliness and
device 57; PET as market device pristine integrity 115–17;
51–52, 57–62; vinyl and social market communication function 107, 109,
economy 68, 69, 74, 80; see also 112, 117; degradation and damage
economy 112, 113, 114, 117; disposability 11,
marketing campaigns: disposability 66; 108; physical interaction with 112–13,
success of plastics-as-plastics 19; vinyl 115, 117, 118; protection 112, 113,
73, 75–76 114–17, 118, 119; tactility 113, 114;
Marriott, James 12, 171–83 touch-screen device 11, 113–17,
Marx, Karl 212, 215, 224 118–19 (plastic screen protectors 109,
material politics see politics of 110, 113–17, 118 119); see also
plastics degradation
material thinking 4, 5, 6–8, 9–10, 22, Morgan, Mary 134–35
219, 221–22; invention 4, 12; Morrison, Margaret 134–35
‘inventive problem making’ 6–8, 12; moulding 53, 70, 180; blow-moulding
social science 22; technological design 53, 55, 56; simultaneous
18, 22 polymerization and moulding 20,
materiality 8, 17–29, 108, 111–12; 26
materials do matter 17–18, 108; see Müller-Armack, Alfred 74
also plastic materialities; plasticity; Muniesa, Fabian 49–50, 54
values of plastics
materiality as process 3, 4, 5, 20, 208; nature 26–27; back-to-nature movement
material politics 4; petroleum 12; 25; degradable/recyclable character
plastic event 35–37; plasticity 3, 9, 12, 25; molecular self-assembly 26; ‘the
30–47; plastics, named after its natural/the artificial’ relation 9, 18,
properties 9, 18, 35, 118; process 19, 25–26, 33, 69; plastic nature 18,
philosophy 35; shifting properties of 24–27; reconfiguring the
plastics 3; simultaneous contemporary vision of nature 18,
polymerization and moulding 20, 26 24–27; traditional view of nature 19
Mazar, Nina 181 Neal, Mike A. 163
McCracken, Grant 109 new articulations 8, 12–13, 171–227; see
Meikle, Jeffrey 2, 23; disposability of also oil; IPW; seas and oceans
plastics 50–51, 55; ephemeral nature NGO (non-governmental organization)
55 156, 157, 182, 214; IPW 188, 205; see
Meyers, John Peterson 196, 197 also civil activism; Platform
miasma theory 134, 135–37, 143–45, NOAA (National Oceanic and
146–47; accumulation 136; cause of Atmospheric Administration) 205
disease 135; Griscom, John H. Nocera, Joseph 93
136–37, 138, 142, 146; influence non-biodegradability: plastic debris 152,
model of harm 134, 135, 136, 142, 160, 163, 184; plastic resin pellets 184;
144–47; local character 144, 146; vinyl 69–70, 78, 81; see also
plasticizer 142, 143, 144; pollution biodegradation; plastics waste
134, 135, 139–44, 145, 146–47; nonylphenols 196–97, 199, 200, 201,
precautionary principle 146; see also 203, 204; bottle cap 197–201, 204;
disease; pollution endocrine disruptor 196–97
Michael, Mike 1–14, 30–46, 51
the military 215; military applications of oceans see seas and oceans
plastics 20, 21, 71, 72; oil industry oil 3, 24, 91, 101, 171–83; Absheron Sill
173–79 oil formation 173; accidents 178, 180;
Miller, Daniel 108, 111–12 Accumulation conference 171; AIOC
Millo, Yuval 57 173; Azerbaijan 12, 173–74, 179, 181;
Minio-Paluello, Mika 12, 171–83 Baku–Supsa pipeline 177; BP 173–74,
Index 233
176–79; BTC pipeline 174–77, 181; 190–95; see also endocrine disruptors;
Central Azeri platform 173; civil plasticizer; POPs
activism 8, 176, 177; dwindling of 3, Pepperell, Robert 112
24; ‘energy corridor’ 174, 175, 179; persistence 4, 24, 107–8, 127, 134, 146,
Host Government Agreements 174, 184, 216, 224; see also durability;
176; human rights 173, 176, 181; recalcitrance
Iskenderun Bay 177–78; laws/legal pesticides 123, 124, 125, 126, 184, 191
standards, violation of 173, 176; PET (polyethylene terephthalate) 2–3,
militarization 173–79; ‘the oil road’ 10, 49–67, 204; bottle 10, 50, 197 (cap
172, 173–81; The Oil Road 174, 176; 197–201, 204); character of
packaging 172, 180; PKK 177; plastic calculability 49–50, 51, 55, 63;
resin pellets 187; plastics factories disposability 10, 50–51, 52, 55, 57, 60,
179–80; politics of plastics 172, 174, 61, 62–65; durability 57, 60, 63, 64;
177, 179, 181; ‘pre-life’ of plastics dynamics of material substitution 50,
172–80, 181 (ecological impact 172, 52–53, 55, 58, 59–61; economically
175, 176, 178–79, 181; social impact informed material 51, 55, 56;
172, 175, 176, 178, 179, 181); raw emergent causation 52, 58, 59, 60, 61,
material for plastics 24, 31, 61, 139, 65, 66; ephemerality 59, 61; an event
157, 162, 210; Sangachal oil and gas 51, 54, 56; invention 51, 52–57, 60,
terminal 173–74; surveillance 174, 62; a market device 51–52, 57–62; a
176; TAL pipeline 179–80; tankers mass material 58, 59, 62; non-
178; United States 176–77; violence disposable plastic 52, 64; plastics
172, 176, 181; see also packaging; waste 58, 59, 60–61 (massive increase
petroleum in plastics waste 10, 50, 65); ‘plastics
waste/plastics production and
packaging 1, 8, 10, 55, 118, 129, 172, consumption’ topological relation 10,
180; afterlife 180–81; benefits of 51–52, 62, 65; qualification trials 58,
plastics 157, 160; Container Deposit 59; recycling 51, 60–61, 62–65, 160;
Schemes 66; degradable polymers 162; topology 10, 51, 58, 59, 62, 65
geopolitics 172; life cycle 172–81; petroleum 3, 12, 123, 184, 187, 191; see
mobile phone case 114; Modern also oil
Packaging 55, 57; packaging industry phthalates 12, 118, 125, 127, 139, 144,
59; plastic debris 158, 159; plastic 153–54, 155, 212
food containers 108, 134, 143, 144, PLA (polylactic acid/polylactide) 37, 43,
157, 180, 186, 197; plastics waste 50, 162
55, 157; politics of plastics 172; ‘pre- plastic additives 20, 139, 153–54, 155,
life’ of plastics 172–80, 181; recycling 195, 196–99, 203, 204; see also BPA;
160; thermoplastics 55, 57; vinyl nonylphenols; PBDE; phthalates;
76–77, 82; see also PET; plasticizer plasticizer
Parkes, Alexander 19 ‘Plastic Age’ 3, 9, 17, 27, 75, 111, 139,
Parkesine 19 150; accumulation of plastic 18, 211;
PBDE (polybrominated diphenyl ether) beginnings 18, 31; culmination 24;
125, 126; landfill 203–4; POPs 184, paradox of plastics 18, 24; ‘Silico-
195, 201, 203–4; see also POPs Plastic Age’ 18
PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) 125, plastic bodies 8, 11–12, 107–68; plastic
139, 184, 187, 206; banning of 190; surfaces 11, 107; see also
bottom sediments 190, 192; electronic environmental issues; health issues;
waste 190; endocrine disruptors 126; mobile phone; plasticizer; STS
flame retardants 125–26, 127, 139, plastic debris 151–54, 181, 190, 209,
153, 184, 191, 195, 196, 203, 204, 212; 212, 214, 216; accumulation in the
long-range transport 186, 189; map of environment 151, 153; aesthetic
PCBs 189–90; PCB concentration problems 151; ALDFG 151; bacterial
193, 195; PCB in seabirds 194–95; transformation 217; bottle cap
plastic resin pellets 187; POPs 184, 199–201; fragments of user plastics
234 Index
190–91, 201, 204; ingestion and (plasticity vs. locationalism 33);
entanglement by wildlife 151, 153–54, plastic’s limited plasticity 9, 32–33,
190, 191, 194–99, 200–201, 208, 210, 35; plastics production 33, 35, 38;
211, 212, 214, 217, 220; microplastics ubiquity 23; see also materiality; STS
152, 160, 163, 208, 211, 215, 216, 217, plasticizer 3, 11–12, 20, 139–40, 196;
220; non-biodegradability 152, 160, chemicals bodily accumulation 143,
163, 184; packaging 158, 159; plastic 144; ‘cocktail effect’ 142; DEHP 139,
resin pellets 184, 185, 186–88, 190, 154; harmful effects 3, 12, 141, 143,
191, 195, 201, 204; POPs 186, 188, 153, 154–55; influence model of harm
189, 191–94, 199–201, 204, 211; 142, 143, 144; miasma theory 142,
reduction of 156–58, 161, 219–23; The 143, 144; pollution 140; POPs 144;
Sea Chair Project 219–23; sources of ubiquity 134, 139, 140, 143–44, 146;
156, 190; toxicity 153, 212, 216; types see also BPA; endocrine disruptors;
151–52; waste management 150, 157, PCBs; plastic additives; pollution;
158; see also BPA; IPW; phthalates; POPs
plastic resin pellets; plasticizer; plastics’ afterlife 51, 61, 157, 158–61,
pollution; POPs; seas and oceans 180–81, 204; plastics’ life cycle 219;
plastic films 113, 118 see also biodegradation; disposability;
plastic materialities 8–9, 17–29, 111, environmental issues; non-
118; anthropological dimensions 18, biodegradability; plastic debris;
26–27; colour 20, 24, 78, 109, 111, plastic resin pellets; plastics waste;
139; composite and materials by pollution; POPs; seas and oceans
design 21–22; ‘composition’ 32; plastics production 9, 30–46, 155, 156;
culture/materials interaction 9, 18, 19, craft 32, 34, 35, 43; ‘democratization
20, 23–24, 26; dematerialization 17, of production’ of plastic objects 9, 30;
18; emergence of 18–19, 124–26; industrial character 31, 32; innovation
enhancing the performances of 34, 35, 73; mass production 24, 33,
plastics 20, 21–22, 25; functionality 37, 59, 69, 73, 74, 139, 151, 163, 184,
34; material force of plastics 2, 4; 211, 221; material politics 30; plastic
mutability 5; oil as raw material for event/eventuation 35–37, 39, 42, 43;
plastics 24, 31, 61, 123, 139, 157, 162, plasticity 33, 35, 38; plastic’s limited
210; paradoxes 24, 129, 130; plastic plasticity 9, 32–33, 35; plastics as
nature 24–27; plastics’ death 107–8, informed material 32, 42; ‘pre-life’ of
111, 117, 118; plastics’ life cycle plastics 172–80, 181; production/
172–81, 219; plastics, named after its consumption merging boundary 31,
properties 9, 18, 35, 118; smell 111, 37–38, 43, 45; production/craft/
129; standardization 34, 58–59; consumption interaction 34, 35;
ubiquity 1, 4, 8, 17, 24, 30, 108, 118, sociomaterial re-spatialization 30–31,
121–33, 134; utopian nature 18, 23, 34, 35, 42–43, 44–45; see also 3D
27; see also 3D printer; plasticity; printer; oil
plastics production; values of plastics plastics waste 123, 128, 130, 221;
plastic resin pellets 184, 185, 186–88, durable waste 24; electronic waste
190, 191, 195, 201, 204, 208; non- 190, 218; an externality 50; immanent
biodegradability 184; PCB 187; POPs to economic actions 50, 201, 203;
184, 187–88, 190, 193–94; The Sea increase in plastics waste 10, 124, 201,
Chair Project 219–20; solid oil 187; 203; Pacific Trash Vortex/Plastic Soup
ubiquity 184; see also plastic debris 130; packaging 50, 55, 157; PET 10,
plasticity 2–3, 9, 12, 108, 118; composite 50, 58, 59, 60–61, 65; ‘plastics waste/
22; concept 2, 33, 38, 42; credit card plastics production and consumption’
10–11, 87, 90, 91–93, 99–100 (plastic- topological relation 10, 51–52, 62, 65,
electronic composite 96, 100); cultural 201, 203; recycling as waste-creating
meaning 18; highly praised 27; process 63, 65; vinyl 69–70; see also
materiality as process 3, 9, 12, 30–47; disposability; landfill; non-
neurophysiology and plasticity 33 biodegradability; waste management
Index 235
Platform 12, 172, 174 201, 204, 205, 212, 224; organic
Plato 22, 27 pollutants 186; PBDE 184, 195, 201,
politics of plastics 4–6, 12, 30, 81, 122, 203, 204; PCB 184, 190–95;
123, 125, 131; biodegradation 211, persistence 186; pesticides 184; plastic
213, 217, 219, 221; carbon workers debris/marine plastics 186, 188, 189,
13, 211; geopolitics 172, 181; 191–94, 199–201, 204, 211 (fragments
invention 209, 214; materiality 3–4; of user plastics 190–91, 201, 204;
more-than-human material politics plastic resin pellets 184, 187–88, 190,
213, 214; oil 172, 174, 177, 179, 181; 201, 204); plasticizer 144; regulations
packaging 172; PKK 177; provoking 186, 197, 204; sorption/desorption
political actions 8, 13; seas and 190, 191, 192, 204; sporadic high
oceans 209–10, 213, 214, 216, 221–22, concentration of 193–94; Stockholm
224; vinyl 10, 68, 69, 70, 74, 78, 81; Convention 186, 204; transfer of
see also vinyl/PVC POPs to seabird tissue 194–95, 204,
pollution 2, 11–12, 118, 128, 130; 209, 213; ubiquity 186, 189; see also
carbon dioxide emission 152, 159, nonylphenols; plasticizers; pollution
162, 179, 180, 210, 213; chemical Powers, Richard: Gain 17
leaching 139, 140, 155, 186, 192, 196, PVC see vinyl/PVC
197, 199, 200, 201, 204; chemical off-
gassing 81, 109, 111, 123, 129, 140, rapid prototyping 3, 30, 35, 37–40; see
143; chemicals bodily accumulation also 3D printer
122–23, 124–25, 134, 139, 140, 143, R&D (research and development) 51,
144, 154–55, 216; global character 54, 70, 71
144, 146; indigenous Greenlanders REACH (Registration, Evaluation,
134, 144; linear point-source Authorisation, and Restriction of
understanding of 11; miasma theory Chemicals) programme 145, 146
11–12, 134, 135, 139–44, 145, 146–47; recalcitrance 3, 4, 52, 65, 216; see also
persistence 134, 146; phenol pollution durability; persistence
79; plasticizer 140; pollutant 138, 143; recycling 123, 158, 159–61, 163, 208;
recycling 64, 65; synthetic pollution 3; aluminium 60; benefits 159–60; China
ubiquity 134, 143, 144; see also 64; designing to enhance recyclability
environmental issues; health issues; 160; education 158; glass 60; informal
pesticides; plastic debris; POPs; STS household business 64, 65; a labour-
polymer 140, 150–51; degradable intensive practice 63–64; labourers 64;
polymers 161, 162–63 (packaging non-disposable plastic 52, 64;
162); polymerization 20, 26; ‘silly packaging 160; PET 51, 60–61, 62–65,
putty’ 119; thermosetting polymers 9, 160; plastics remanufacture 63;
20; types 4; see also biopolymers; polluting process 64, 65; reusing
plastic additives; plasticizers; plastics 32–33; topology 62; toxicity
thermoplastics 65; Vietnam: Hanoi’s ‘plastic villages’
Poon, Martha 87–88 52, 62–63; waste-creating process 63,
POPs (persistent organic pollutants) 11, 65; see also solutions to plastics’
12, 144, 184, 186–90, 204, 212; associated problems
bioaccumulative nature of 185, 186, Reimer, Hans 78
191; bioconcentration 185; BPA 196, reinforced plastics 18, 20, 21
201, 202; degradation, slow rate of resins 18, 153, 180
184; endocrine disruptors 185, responsibility 4, 5, 66, 79, 214; EPR 161
199–201, 204, 212; environmental Roberts, Jody A. 11, 121–33
effects 185–86; fatty tissue, Rosengarten, Marsha 36, 51
concentration in 128, 185, 194; global
monitoring 186, 187–88, 189; global Schelsky, Helmut 74
pollution map of POPs 189–90, 204; seas and oceans 13, 208–27;
hydrophobic/lipophilic 185; long- accumulation of plastic 208, 209,
range transport 186, 189, 191–94, 211–12, 214; bacteria 208–9, 214, 215,
236 Index
217–18, 219, 224; biodegradation 210, STS (Science and Technology Studies) 3,
216–17, 218–19, 224; carbon work/ 54, 87, 121–33; ANT 122; becoming
carbon workers 13, 210, 212–14, 215, plastic 128–30; BPA 12, 124–25, 131;
217, 219, 221, 222, 224; degradation CDC 124, 125, 131; chemicals bodily
210, 212, 216, 217, 218; accumulation 122–23, 124–25;
environmental ‘intra-actions’ 211–12, emergence of plastics 124–26;
214, 217, 221; environmental environmental issues 123, 125, 130;
modification 209–10, 211, 213, 215; ethical structure of the technological
EU, fishing for plastics 208, 209, 214, system 125; health issues 123, 125,
215–16, 219, 220; food chain 130, 128; NICU 121, 127, 129; a plastic
153, 185, 193, 194, 195, 208, 209, 210, pregnancy 126–28, 129; plastics waste
212, 213; microplastics 152, 160, 163, 128, 130; a plastiphobe 121, 122–24,
208, 211, 215, 216, 217, 220; more- 127–28; politics 122, 123, 125, 131;
than-humans work 209, 211, 213, pollution 123, 128, 130; risk society
214–16; natures and bodies in the 122; SCOT programme 122
making 210, 212, 213, 215; ocean substitution by plastics 9, 18–19, 20, 21,
gyres 3, 8, 208, 224; plastic debris 128; aluminium 17, 60, 61; cheap
209, 211, 212, 214, 216, 217, 219–20 substitution 9, 19, 69, 78; glass 9, 50,
(ingestion by wildlife 151, 153–54, 52, 53, 55, 60, 61, 72, 157; leather 72,
190, 191, 194–99, 200–201, 208, 210, 77; PET 50, 52–53, 55, 58, 59–61;
211, 212, 214, 217, 220); politics of vinyl 72, 75, 77; wood 9, 18
plastics 209–10, 213, 214, 216,
221–22, 224; The Sea Chair Project Takada, Shige 12–13, 184–207, 209, 212
219–23; transfer of POPs to seabird technology: biomimicry 26; CAD
tissue 194–95, 204, 209, 213; see also systems 37, 39, 40, 41; composite
carbon work; IPW; plastic debris; 21–23, 25, 157; enhancing the
plastic resin pellets; POPs performances of plastics 20, 21–22,
Sekula, Alan 212 25; ethical structure of the
Serres, Michel 215 technological system 125; material
Shove, Elizabeth 54 thinking 18, 22; molecular self-
Singer, Peter 126 assembly 26; nanotechnology 25, 26;
solutions to plastics’ associated plastics, process of production 20;
problems 156–61, 163, 204–5; 3 Rs/4 solutions to plastics’ associated
Rs/5 Rs 159–61, 163; consumer problems 158, 163; technological
education/public awareness of plastics design 17, 18, 21–23, 25, 27;
associated problems 158, 161, 204–5, technological determinism 81;
214; EPR 161; new regulations and ‘technology is embodied humanity’
standards 158, 161, 163, 221; plastic 112; see also STS
debris reduction 156–58, 221 Teuten, Emma L. 191
(collecting/removing debris from thermoplastics 20, 52, 70; durable waste 24;
environment 161); plastics negative connotation 69; packaging 55;
consumption reduction 158; phenol-formaldehyde 27; pollution
preventative measures 157, 158; absorption 118; polyester 20, 50, 53;
production of environmentally polyethylene 20, 27, 76, 109, 162, 180,
friendlier materials 158; recycling 158, 184, 191, 196, 197; polypropylene 20, 27,
159–60, 163; redesign 159, 160, 163, 180, 184, 191, 197 (Clyrell EC340R
221; technology 158, 163; waste 180); polystyrene 27; polystyrol 71; West
management 157, 158, 163 Germany 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 76,
Sonnenschein, Carlos 196 77, 80; see also PET; polymer; vinyl/PVC
Soto, Anna 196 Thompson, Richard C. 12, 150–68, 172,
sports 22, 118 179, 181, 209, 211, 212
Stengers, Isabelle 7, 54, 99; see also Thwaites, Thomas 30
informed material topology: PET 10, 51, 58, 59, 62, 65;
Stripple, Johannes 224 ‘plastics waste/plastics production and
Index 237
consumption’ topological relation 10, malleability and synthetic origins 69,
51–52, 62, 65 73, 75; marketing campaign 73,
toxicity 2, 122, 154–55, 204; amplifier of 75–76; mass consumption 10, 68, 69,
toxicity through anaerobic 72, 73, 76; material politics 10, 68, 69,
transformation 204; food chain 70, 74, 78, 81; material substitution
194–95, 204, 209, 213; occupational 72, 75, 77; military applications 71,
exposure 78–80, 155; plastic debris 72; non-biodegradability 69–70, 78,
153, 212, 216; recycling 65; toxic 81; packaging 76–77, 82; Pauling,
waste 134; vinyl 10, 70, 78–80, 81, Linus 76; plastics waste 69–70;
118; see also POPs properties 69, 72, 77, 81; smell 111;
social market economy 68, 69, 74, 80;
ubiquity: molecular self-assembly 26; Stuart, Herbert 76; technological
plastic resin pellets 184; plasticizer determinism 81; toxicity 10, 70,
134, 139, 140, 143–44, 146; plastics 1, 78–80, 81 (endocrine disruption 118;
4, 8, 17, 24, 30, 108, 118, 121–33, 134; phenol pollution 79; VCM’s
POPs 186, 189; see also STS carcinogenicity 78–80); vinyl space-
UN (United Nations): UN FAO 156; filling model 76; see also West Germany
UN General Assembly 156; UN IMO
156; UNEP 150, 156, 157, 205, 224 Warhol, Andy 24–25
United Kingdom 89, 96–99, 100; BP waste management 150, 157, 158, 163, 221;
173–74, 176–79 biopolymers 162, 163; plastic debris 150,
United States 19, 23, 59, 134, 176–77; 157, 158; see also plastics waste
American civilization/plastic Webb, William 112, 113
interaction 2, 18, 23–24, 118; CDC Wesley, John 19
124; credit card 89–96, 99–100; West Germany 10, 68–86; after World
plastics industry 118; see also STS War II 68, 70, 74–78; before World
UV (ultraviolet) 20, 27, 162 War II 68, 69, 70–73; consumer
democracy 10, 68, 69, 70, 74–78, 81;
values of plastics 23, 25, 139, 150; cheap ersatz materials 10, 70–73, 75;
cost 23, 25, 150; cheap substitution 9, German Democratic Republic 74–80;
19, 69, 78; economic values/capacities Hitler’s Four-Year Plan 70–71, 73; I.
49; flexibility 55, 81, 111; G. Farben 70–71, 72, 73, 75; Igelite
impermanence 18, 24; inauthentic 9, 72, 73; mass consumption 10, 68, 69,
19, 24, 69, 78; lightness 18, 19, 20, 23, 72, 73, 76; National Socialism 70, 73,
61, 74, 111, 150; malleability 18, 20, 74, 81 (economy of autarky and war
22, 27, 69, 73, 75; mass accessibility 9, 68, 69, 70–73); Nuremberg Trials 75;
23; modernity 111, 118; negative Scharoun, Hans 74–75; social
values 2, 9, 27, 19, 69, 78; positive inclusion 69, 74; social market
values 9, 10, 19, 20, 23; ‘protean economy 68, 69, 74, 80;
adaptability’ 9, 19; sign of inferiority thermoplastics 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73,
9, 19; superficiality 18, 24, 69, 78; 75, 76, 77, 80; US European Recovery
versatility 18, 19, 23, 75, 81, 150–51; Program 68; see also vinyl/PVC
see also benefits of plastics Westermann, Andrea 10, 68–86
Velcro 30, 34 Whitehead, Alfred North 6, 32, 35, 56,
Victoria Mitrovic’s ‘Kideville’ activity 57, 210
40–41 Winner, Langdon 81
vinyl/PVC (polyvinyl chloride) 10, 20, women 142, 143, 146, 154
68–86, 139; building use 74–75, 77, wood 9, 18, 20, 25, 110
81; civil activism 10, 70, 79–80;
consumer democracy 10, 68, 69, 70, Yaeger, Patricia 211
74–78; customization 75; designing Yarsley, Victor 139, 150, 163
77, 81; everything-ness 72–73, 75, 80;
Igelite 72, 73; industry 71, 74–77, 79 Zelizer, Viviana 88
(K’52 75–76; Reichsausstellung 73); Zhong, Chen-Bo 181

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Accumulation

Jennifer Gabrys is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of

Gay Hawkins is a Professorial Research Fellow in social and cultural theory

Mike Michael is Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of

Editorial Advisory Board

The Culture, Economy and the Social series is committed to innovative

Material Powers (2010) Shanghai Expo: An international

The Social after Gabriel Tarde: Diasporas and Diplomacy:

ISBN: 978-0-415-62582-1 (hbk)

Typeset in Times New Roman

Introduction: From materiality to plasticity 1

1 Plastics, materials and dreams of dematerialization 17

2 Process and plasticity: Printing, prototyping and the prospects

3 Made to be wasted: PET and topologies of disposability 49

5 Paying with plastic: The enduring presence of the credit card 87

6 The death and life of plastic surfaces: Mobile phones 107

8 Plasticizers: A twenty-ﬁrst-century miasma 134

9 Plastics, environment and health 150

11 International Pellet Watch: Studies of the magnitude and spatial

12 Plastic and the work of the biodegradable 208

Mandy Barker is a photographic artist working in the United Kingdom. Since

Figure I.1 Academics and plastic at work

Material politics and the event of plastics

Material thinking as inventive problem making

‘Plastics happen; that is all we need to know on earth.’ This remark is

Expanding technological capabilities

The stuﬀ that dreams are made of

So little plasticity in plastic?

[Plastics] companies do not produce bare molecules … isolated from their

In the case of plastic, this informedness partially manifests itself through

From plasticity to plastic event

there are knots of arborescence (rootishness) in rhizomes, and rhizomic

The rapid rise of rapid prototyping

is starting to be used to produce the ﬁnished items themselves … It is

Here we have a re-viviﬁed realization of post-Fordist production (e.g. Lash

Nothing really has changed in the last 20 years – it is still a niche as

OK – making progress toward replicators. How’s it going with

Home is where the 3D printer is …

What does plastic do in terms of generating economic value? What is the

material structure becomes richer and richer in information. Accom-

Barry (2005) extends this concept of informed materials very productively. In

The biggest thing that’s ever happened in molded plastics so far as

We are beginning to recover a certain philosophical respect for the

Enacting disposability: PET as a market device

Disposing of the disposable

Remainder acquires a duration and delay, circulates through spaces, and

The disassembly of PET bottles involves an enormous variety of sequenced

Yet the positive relationship between economic prosperity and democratic

The ‘better’ ersatz materials: thermoplastics in an economy

It becomes evident here that, due to almost limitless possibilities in the

Hazardous material: consumers redeﬁne consumer citizenship

In their view, the VCM health hazards added to Troisdorf ’s long-standing

Hock’s marginalization of the role of plastic is to be expected, given the way

A history of the early credit card: the changing monetary

123 MAIN S T R E E T IC M ONTH

CENTERVILLE USA BP YEAR

SEE REVERSE SIDE ©A.l.CO

Cut up your card: the credit card becomes collections device

If you have not already returned or destroyed your card(s), we request

In terms of the journey of these creditors’ plastic cards alongside the

… as well as a separate letter asking me to cut up the card and send it

The ‘physicality’ of plastics: cleaning, damage and texture

While cleaning melamine tableware is not tough, once it gets discoloured