4 Dawn of the Plastisphere An Experiment with Unpredictable Effects

To introduce the topic of microplastics and why the definition of a novel category and classification is crucial here, I start with an example from my fieldwork on oceanic plastics in which I accompanied marine scientists and environmentalists and other people in several countries and sites such as labs, beaches, and meetings.¹ This example is from a project on Lanzarote (Canary Islands) that combines citizen science plastics monitoring and environmental education for children. I focus on how emerging classifications (e.g., microplastics) shape and challenge representations of plastics and their “solutions” in the ocean.

But first let me introduce how the category of microplastics emerged. The term “microplastics” was introduced by Richard Thompson and colleagues in 2004 to denote plastic particles less than five millimetres in diameter (Thompson et al. 2004). Microplastics are further distinguished as primary and secondary:

1. (1) Primary microplastics are items that are manufactured at microscopic scale (e.g. microspheres or microbeads used in cosmetics and pharmaceuticals).
2. (2) Secondary microplastics are degraded from larger plastic debris due to weathering and other physical impacts (e.g. photo-degradation via ultraviolet light) (Ter Halle et al. 2017).

Recent studies underline that over 92 percent of plastics in the ocean are less than 4.75 millimetres in size and can be considered secondary microplastics (Eriksen et al. 2014). The size of microplastics ranges from still visible pieces (as monitored in the example from Lanzarote) to particles of a few micrometres.² So, as a technical term, “microplastics” might rely on the mesh size of conventional laboratory sieves of 4.75 millimetres (Eriksen et al. 2014).

From an STS perspective, it is interesting to question how this term can influence research and political agendas: “The result of the change in category … is a shifting of balances of distinctions, a change in the architectural relationships. Every newly constructed difference, or every new merger, changes the workability of the classification in the ecology of the workplace. As with all tools and all knowledge, such classification schemes are entities with consequences, to be managed, negotiated, and experienced all at once” (Bowker and Star 2000, 231). Categories “span the boundaries” (Bowker and Star 2000, 285) in communities of practice, such as marine science and its new subdiscipline, marine litter research (Ryan 2015). Consequently, if unintentionally, they can create a separation between macroplastics and microplastics that might divide citizen science and environmentalism from hard science. That is, research on microplastics often requires expensive tools, infrastructures, and techniques, from surface sampling nets (“manta trawls”) to complex and costly spectroscopic methods to identify polymer types of microplastic particles.³ Macroplastics, conversely, are easily visible and more accessible, often requiring fairly rudimentary equipment and techniques that can be used by the public with limited training. Besides this, the focus on microplastics has changed the scientific landscape. For example, in the past few years, there has been a huge growth in funding opportunities for microplastics research in Europe, financed by agencies such as the Joint Programming Initiative Healthy and Productive Seas and Oceans” (JPI Oceans) launched by the Council of the European Union or the research focus Plastic in the Environment launched by the German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF).⁴ Environmental agencies, NGOs, and local initiatives are also addressing the issue via awareness campaigns, beach cleanups, and citizen science programs like the one in Lanzarote, to which I now turn.

In December 2017, I met Manuel, who works for a local initiative against plastics pollution in the ocean, at Famara Beach in Lanzarote.⁵ He wanted to show me the situation there and demonstrate how the initiative has employed citizen science plastics monitoring as an educational model for beach surveys with schoolchildren. Arriving at the beach, I could easily spot tiny plastic particles of different sizes (mostly between 1 and 100 millimetres) and colours. On other sandy beaches on the island, I found plastic fragments mostly in the wash margin. At Famara Beach, they were spread all over the two-kilometre-long sandy beach, which, in some places, was 200 metres wide. Because of heavy winds, Famara is the hot spot for surfing on Lanzarote.

The monitoring equipment that Manuel brought along was mostly DIY stuff, such as two shovels made out of oil canisters. Following the initiative’s protocol and questionnaire, we monitored a transect of one square metre with sieves of two and five millimetres. Manuel told me that the monitoring procedure was aimed primarily toward environmental education rather than production of reliable data (process over product). We sorted out biological and mineral materials via visual perception by putting the sample in a bucket full of water: what did not sink was counted as microplastics. Finally, we weighed the samples. We found 200 grams of plastics bigger than five millimetres in diameter and 215 grams of plastics between two and five millimetres in diameter. Among them were a large quantity of transparent pearl-shaped plastic pellets. Also known as “nurdles,” they are the raw material used in the production of plastic products.

That day we monitored only one square metre. Usually, the children analyze more samples to achieve a more accurate estimation of the number of plastic particles on the whole beach. They convert the number of particles to determine the approximate number of half-litre PET bottles that might have generated the fragments. Although the particles were from a variety of polymer types,⁶ meaning that the plastics obviously came from different sources, a PET bottle was used as a tool for visualization because it is one of the most ubiquitous plastic objects on the island. In Lanzarote, nearly all potable water is imported and shipped to the island in PET bottles and plastic canisters. They supply 140,000 inhabitants and 2.4 million tourists annually.

Extrapolating from the sample that we collected that day to the whole Famara Beach (5,000 square metres), we counted an equivalent of 137,000 half-litre PET bottles. Participants are instructed to display their results by colouring in isotope pictorial diagrams, each of which represents 1,000 PET bottles.⁷ The resulting accumulation of PET bottles serves as a powerful visual device for projecting an environmental problem from a small sample to a larger scale. Because microplastic particles are very small in the millimetre scale and nearly invisible in the micrometre scale, the initiative in Lanzarote translates results into estimates of macroplastics, easier to comprehend. A huge accumulation of PET bottles is easier to imagine (because they form a part of daily lives) than a large amount of microplastics because they are often too abstract to imagine even though the participants on Famara Beach have experienced microplastics everywhere there during monitoring. Although posters from environmental organizations scandalize the slowness of the degradation of plastics in the ocean, in marine litter research the rapid degradation into micro- and nanoplastics itself is regarded as part of the problem. During a conference on microplastics that I attended in Capri, Italy, in September 2017, British ecotoxicologist Tamara Galloway stated that “the smaller the net size, the more particles we see.” And this might be one of the pivotal points in the construction of the term “microplastics.”

At the same time, metaphors such as “plastic islands” or “garbage carpets” in the ocean continue to circulate in public perception and reporting because they are supposedly simple representations of the problem. Kim de Wolff characterizes this phenomenon as “The Materiality of Things that Aren’t There” (2014, 65). Based on participant observations during an expedition to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, de Wolff shows how the high concentrations of plastics in this accumulation zone can be produced and determined only by taking water samples and analyzing them in the laboratory. There is a lot of plastic in the ocean, not in the form of “carpets” or “islands” but in dispersed and fragmented form, mostly as tiny particles (see also Liboiron 2016). In contrast to these projections, science is increasingly concerned with microplastics, which have to be made into reliable data via monitoring, sampling, and classification through microscopy and spectroscopy. Therefore, the definition of microplastics challenges common perceptions of plastic’s materiality and disposability. Nevertheless, mainstream representations shape the problematization of plastics pollution and the politics of solutionism. If plastic in the ocean is continually understood as something large enough to be removed from the water, then it promotes ideas for solutions that “cleanse| the ocean. It is easier to clean or remove something clearly visible—and macroplastics are visible. They can be perceived as waste objects, as something that does not belong, as “matter out of place” (Douglas 1966, 36).

Macroplastic items such as a PET bottle or a pair of flip-flops that float in the ocean or get washed up on the shore are identified as symbols of consumption. Although these things were discarded, they can still be recognized as consumer products with a specific purpose: if one can recognize a story in them, then they are less abstract visual objects than microplastics. If these objects have not fallen from a container ship, then they have probably played a role in a human life from consumption to the intentional or unintentional end of their use. Sometimes these things even reveal their origins or manufacturing sites. However, when these items degrade into tinier fragments, their identification becomes more difficult. Scientists are able to distinguish microplastics as polyethylene or polypropylene using infrared spectroscopy, but they cannot be tracked back to their sources (production sites).

In addition, the classification into macroplastics and microplastics has triggered new differentiations, both at the level of representation and at the level of material effects. The impact of macroplastics on sea life is typically illustrated using photographs of sea animals such as seals or turtles that have been entangled in fishing nets or six-pack rings. The presentation of the effects of microplastics, many of which are invisible to the human eye, is more difficult because there are less impressive illustrations and research is still in its infancy. Although the “ingestion of MPs [microplastics] by aquatic organisms has been demonstrated, … the long-term effects of continuous exposures are less well understood” (Lambert and Wagner 2018, 1). Thus, the effects of microplastics have a different temporal dimension than some of the more spectacular effects of macroplastics. Rob Nixon (2011) calls the slow manifestation of pollution and toxicity “slow violence,” and the relatively unexplored effects of a phenomenon contribute to this uncertain condition. Furthermore, monitoring reveals the significant presence of plastics not only in the sea but also in freshwater systems, in the soil, and in aerial emissions. A research team recently investigated the aerial dispersal of textile fibres in Paris and detected air pollution from synthetic fabric (Dris et al. 2016). Whereas plastic is not easy to control in its macroscopic form, in its microscopic form it has proven to be almost impossible to control. Synthetic microfibres and microplastic particles are found almost everywhere: in the most remote regions of the ocean, in animals, in the air, and in the bodies of living beings. Microplastics as a novel category affect the perception of and the proposed solutions to the phenomenon. The invention of the term “microplastics” in the marine sciences confronts concepts of plastic management and waste disposal.

Microplastics or even nanoplastics inform us about the importance of classification in dealing with materiality. According to Bowker and Star (2000), changes in classification also have effects on architectural relationships (perspectives and scales). Depending on the context, these perspectives might turn a physical problem—or sometimes a symbolic problem (waste as “matter out of place”)—into a chemical (or ecotoxicological) problem. The focus shifts from the harmful potentials of macroscopic materials to unstable and more uncertain conditions of pollution and toxicity related to the limits of scientific knowledge. Beyond that, polymers never act alone. As explained in the introduction to this volume, they are produced with hazardous materials (e.g., bisphenol-A), additives such as plasticizers, or flame retardants. In addition, in water they adsorb (attract) other hydrophobic (oil-loving, water-resistant) substances such as heavy metals (mercury, cadmium, or lead) or persistent organic pollutants such as DDT and PCBs. The use of POPs was restricted through the Stockholm Declaration in 2001. Nonetheless, because of their persistence, these toxicants remain in the ocean.

In 2013, a team of marine biologists from Woods Hole, Massachusetts, found a huge presence of eukaryotic and bacterial life on samples of microplastics from the Sargasso Sea. The microbial communities on these plastic surfaces differed considerably from the communities in the surrounding seawater. Microbes had gathered in pits on the surface and created habitats in the form of bacterial biofilms, which the researchers termed the “plastisphere” (Zettler, Mincer, and Amaral-Zettler 2013).

When I met Tracy Mincer, a plastisphere researcher in the Woods Hole lab in September 2016, he remarked ironically that plastics are like “nirvana” for bacteria. Tracy explained that, in extreme and competitive environments such as the Sargasso Sea, microbes scavenge for elements such as phosphorus. There are only a few available surfaces in the open sea. Microbes usually attach to algae. However, these surfaces are not as long-lasting as plastics. Therefore, tiny plastic fragments become novel habitats for microbial life. Tracy and his colleagues assumed that they would see the same variety of bacteria as on algae, but instead they were astonished to find different compositions of microbial communities.

I had the opportunity to interview Tracy together with his colleagues Linda Amaral-Zettler and Erik Zettler, who told me that they were surprised no one had ever carried out electron microscopy on microplastics, though it was already known since the 1970s that micro-organisms stick to plastics in the ocean. Indeed, in the first known article about plastics in the ocean, the authors mentioned that they found diatoms and hydrozoa on tiny particles of plastic in the Sargasso Sea (Carpenter and Smith 1972). Linda indicated that in the literature there had been the “dogma” that “plastic is a very smooth surface” that would be too challenging for microbes to attach to. Erik then remarked that “this is a little surprising” because “any microbial ecologist will tell you all microbes grow on anything.” Linda further explained that the initial point of their research had been the question of where all the plastic in the ocean is going and how it is modifying the ocean. Therefore, they were especially interested in low nutrient areas of the ocean and what role microbes play in the biodegradation of plastics. Linda indicated that

there are so many forces in the ocean that help to shape what happens to a piece of plastic in the ocean which you cannot separate easily. Is this biodegradation? Well, it is physical, it is chemical, it is biological. It’s all three, it’s not one. To separate those is very challenging because it is not what is natural, it is not what happens in nature. So the fate of plastic is complicated. It is not an easy experiment, so to speak. It is a natural experiment going on in the ocean. … It is an unexplored part of the ocean. And it is so interesting because we created it, we are responsible for it. … We are introducing chemicals that do not naturally occur in the ocean. … Bacteria can metabolize all different types of compounds in materials, but these materials [plastic] do not occur everywhere in the ocean, so they have never seen them before. So we are selecting for very rare organisms that can potentially survive or take advantage of those substrates.

What the marine scientists discussed here is an environmental experiment between a synthetic material and biological life. It is not manipulable like experiments in the laboratory or outdoor experimental systems (mesocosms) often used to bridge the gap between lab and field. The impact of the interaction between synthetic material and microbial life remains unexplored. What is evident is that plastic does not remain unescorted in the ocean; it serves as a habitat for emergent life forms. I started this chapter by drawing on reflections from Gabrys about plastic as an experiment with unforeseen effects. Gabrys highlights the “speculative aspect of organisms …, their capacity to not just eke out a living, but to transform environments and to become different organisms in the process” (2014, 57). Either way, as Linda Amaral-Zettler remarked, the experiment with plastics was created by human agency, which involves responsibility for its present and future effects. Hence, the production and consumption of plastics and their unplanned afterlives have effects on remote marine environments. The novel ecologies of the plastisphere challenge Eurocentric scientific understandings of nature and culture. Material culture and the environment are more intertwined and amalgamated than scientists ever imagined. Even the plastisphere researchers who observed the emergence of these hybrid life forms were surprised that remote regions of the ocean previously considered virtually untouched by anthropogenic markers are no longer as pristine as they had imagined.

For this reason, plastics cannot be conceptualized as merely debris or “matter out of place” because that would disregard the ocean’s adaptability to changes and disturbances. Terms such as “parasite” might come closer to capturing plastics’ entanglements and relationships with marine life, and Michel Serres (2007, 16) reconsiders the concept of the parasite following the ambiguous meaning of the French word hôte, which means both guest and host. Plastic in the ocean complies with this parasitic role: it is an alien intruder in the ocean but offers a promising surface and habitat for microbial life. Plastics do not exist in isolation in the sea or in freshwater systems; they are rapidly colonized by microbes that form a bacterial biofilm. “There is no virgin plastic in the ocean; it is all covered with microbes,” remarked Linda.⁸ The researchers also emphasized the relational aspects of the plastisphere. Most ongoing research on microplastics concentrates on the ingestion of plastics by marine species but does not take into account the role of the bacterial biofilm in ingestion. Tracy and Erik specified that bacterial biofilms and their particular scents might be an underexplored reason for ingestion by other species, such as turtles and seabirds.⁹ Addressing these relational aspects of microplastics is important. Through the process of relating, nothing remains unchanged. Like the notion of “relatedness” in the anthropology of kinship (Carsten 2000; Strathern 2005), relating (the creation and emergence of relations) is an active and complex process, a “doing” of relations. To place the relationship in the centre asks for the in-between, for the association. However, this does not imply ascribing agency to plastics (alone); rather, it reflects on processes and networks with distributed agency: only what is in relationship can act, and agency emerges not from individual actors or elements but “through the number of connections [that they] command” (Latour 1996, 372). In a critical discussion of studies of the “new” materialism that overstate the agency of things, Abrahamsson and colleagues write that, “if matters act, they never act alone” (2015). The authors plead for a sensitivity to a “relational materialism” that shifts from cause and agency to complex doings, responses, and affordances. The ambiguous (parasitic) role of plastic as both guest and host in the ocean, and its role between risk and potential, refer to that picture.

Besides the well-known physical hazards of larger plastic items, the chemical risks of marine plastics are complex. This is because toxicological analyses of plastics involve the specific chemical compositions of synthetic polymers, their additives, and the capacity for plastics to adsorb other pollutants (see also Chapters 1, 2, and 12 in this volume). The adsorbance of metals and pollutants starts in contaminated rivers and basins that transport plastics into the ocean. Beyond the chemical hazards associated with plastics are biological attachment and formation of new habitats on plastics such as the plastisphere. For some marine species, ingestion of microplastics might be rather harmless, but ingestion will definitely alter the composition of the bacterial community in the gut. Accordingly, fish or other species that ingest microplastics with a bacterial biofilm will later excrete these plastics with a modified biofilm, which might contain harmful bacteria such as pathogens from the Vibrio family (Kirstein et al. 2016). Furthermore, plastic particles might play a role as a vector for the transportation of species and the change in biodiversity (see Chapter 1 of this volume). Again, it is not just the erratic materiality of plastic that might become problematic but also its relational aspects, such as absorbing and interacting with other chemical and biological agents. For example, recent studies address novel biological interactions with phytoplankton (Long et al. 2017), marine snow (Summers, Henry, and Gutierrez 2018), and dune plants (Poeta et al. 2017). These studies show further amalgamations of ecosystems in the sea and on the land with micro- and nanoplastics. However, biological life in the plastisphere is limited to microplastics, for microbes cannot find a sufficient place to create a bacterial biofilm on nanoplastics. During a conference on microplastics in Italy, I learned from researchers in nanobiology that viruses can attach to nanoplastics. Microplastics and nanoplastics can also enter through cell membranes, making them interesting new objects of study in ecotoxicology.

When biological life becomes entangled with the non-living, these emerging entities and arrangements should be studied thoroughly, also regarding different logics of care in dealing with them (de Wolff 2017; see also Chapters 7 and 8 of this volume). At the beginning of this chapter, I discussed how the construction of the term “microplastics” generated a new field of research. Here mostly quantitative studies display a perspective on plastics pollution that might signify change and disturbance in marine ecosystems. Beyond that, studies of microbial life in the plastisphere introduce another perspective on biological adaptation and on the emergence of new life forms between the biological and the synthetic. In his study of the production of nuclear natures, Joe Masco characterizes the connections among nature, politics, space, and possible futures as a “mutant ecology” that generates “biosocial transformations over time” (2004, 518). Through the lens of plastics as an (unintended) experiment, we can see possible mutations “in both natural and social orders”—ranging from new hybrid life forms in water bodies to persistent organic pollutants in the food web via ingestion of plastics that need different conceptualizations of how to problematize, how to care for, and how to deal with them politically (Masco 2004, 533). Precisely for this reason, the conceptual divide between nature and culture as a legacy of the modernism and structuralism of Eurocentric knowledge systems is no longer appropriate for understanding contemporary phenomena from global warming to ocean plastics. A perspective on natureculture could serve methodologically as a “sensitizing concept” (Blumer 1954) to perceive and understand new entanglements of humans with other species and the environment, when nature and society have become “networks of interwoven processes” (Swyngedouw 2004, 129). Thus, the plastisphere changes ways of viewing the world: no more pristine nature but an ocean filled with plastic “confetti” colonized by microbes and part of an ever-emerging ecosystem of new relations and connections.

Emphasizing the diffusion of microplastics and the emergence of hybrid relations foregrounds a topological scale different from the conventional representation of the problem. Here plastics are not represented as something outside nature. Rather, they are considered as components of emerging habitats. Synthetic materials such as plastics have already become part of the environment. They take part in the reassembling of environments and ecosystems by forming novel aggregates, habitats, and interactions with other species. These new habitats and life forms between the spheres of the natural and the synthetic challenge scientific knowledge production and complicate issues of environmental politics. From this perspective, modernist projects to clean the natural environment of alien species and other “impure objects” are contested. However, fascination with the erosion of categories and the alignment and orientation of hybrid objects should not blind us to the social and political implications. For example, we have to live with the disasters that modernity and capitalism have created (Fortun 2014). Caring for naturecultures has to deal with that problematic. In my theoretical and methodological framework, natureculture serves as a tool that sensitizes us to and might warn us about technological fixes whose epistemologies rely on the separation of nature and society. For example, proposed solutions such as The Ocean Cleanup gain media exposure because they claim that removing plastics from the oceans is possible (see Chapter 9 of this volume). These projects operate with great visions and on grand scales, but they neglect the existent microcosms of the ocean and can harm marine ecosystems. Furthermore, they can be characterized as end-of-pipe solutions that shift attention away from the economic and social dimensions of the problem (Liboiron 2015). From a post-developmental perspective, Arturo Escobar (2004, 209) critiques the kinds of technological fixes that attempt to combat “the symptoms but not the cause[s] of the social, political and ecological crises of the times. … In short, the modern crisis is a crisis in models of thought; modern solutions, at least under neoliberal globalisation (NLG), only deepen the problems.”

Not only state or economic stakeholders are prone to this prevailing logic of modern “solutioneering”; environmental activism is also pervaded by such ideas. From a postcolonial and feminist STS point of view, modern solutions and technological fixes can be criticized as sticking with the problem instead of stepping outside it. Technological fixes, on the one hand, enforce end-of-pipe solutions that treat effects rather than sources; concentration on the individual consumer, on the other hand, shifts the focus away from production- and growth-oriented economies. Like Escobar, the editors of this volume, in their introduction, have therefore characterized these ways of managing oceanic plastics as a neoliberal approach because it favours market-oriented interventions such as ethical consumerism and technological solutionism. Furthermore, some solutions might be more problematic than the original problems or even misleading. For example, there is a hypothesis about how bacteria that dwell on plastic might metabolize the synthetic material (Zettler, Mincer, and Amaral-Zettler 2013), and people try to capitalize on that knowledge. Although bacteria might biodegrade microscopic pits in microplastics, it is ridiculous to expect to dispose of large amounts of plastic on land via microbial biodegradation. Plastisphere researchers have underlined that the slow degradation of plastics by bacteria cannot match the increasing rates and volumes of global plastics production.

In this chapter, I have shown that the definition of microplastics has changed the material, social, and discursive dimensions of plastics in the oceans. With Bowker and Star (2000), I have pointed out that categories and classifications have impacts on these spheres. The definition of microplastics has changed perspectives on pollution, persistence, and politics, such as criticizing solutionist approaches to oceanic plastics that still do not take microplastics into account. In contrast, the prospect of more complexity has led to the production of knowledge about the plastics crisis, and there is now a stronger distinction between science and other actors. But that has led to tension and mediation between scientific hesitance in interpreting research findings and immediate calls to action from activists. Consequently, can we neglect microplastics in suggesting approaches to and solutions for marine pollution just because their impacts have not been fully studied?¹⁰ On the one hand, it is helpful to understand the dispersed and complicated conditions and the rather speculative dimension of how microplastics alter or harm the environment, as my argument has supported. On the other hand, the concept of microplastics in the ocean has not yet been translated concisely into the use of plastics in everyday life (see Chapter 7 of this volume). In the public debate, plastics in the oceans are discussed mostly as a result of inadequate waste management and less often as a problem of the materiality of plastics. But in everyday life most people are confronted with the abrasion of plastic, for example when using a plastic cutting board for vegetables. In such cases, the emergence of microplastics occurs not far out in the ocean but in the kitchen, bathroom, or garage. But plastics in the ocean and plastics in social life still seem to represent two different spheres. The fear of eating microplastics in fish seems to have no relation to wrapping food in plastic film or drinking water from PET bottles. Finding microplastics in food can have an emotive impact on consumers. Thus, they see themselves as part of the experiment with plastics, which has taken place for decades without risk assessments. Even though much more hazardous substances (e.g., DDT, TNT, or radioactive substances) have contributed to the pollution of the ocean in addition to plastics, the attention paid to plastic waste is an excellent entry point for creating a better understanding of oceanic ecologies. In addition, the plastics crisis, like global warming, offers a good way to reflect on the excesses of capitalist accumulation from a natureculture perspective. This could lead to new and unexplored alliances and collectives among natural and social sciences, the environmental movement, and other social actors.

1. 1. My research was funded by a grant from the Volkswagen Foundation (2016–17) and within the research project Knowing the Seas as Naturecultures by the University of Bremen (2017–18).
2. 2. So far there is no strict division between micro- and nanoplastics; typically, nanomaterials are defined as below 100 micrometres (Koelmans, Besseling, and Shim 2015).
3. 3. Therefore, the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR) in Newfoundland is working against the grain of conventional science by implementing cheaper citizen science and DIY techniques from feminist and postcolonial perspectives (see https://civiclaboratory.nl/).
4. 4. For JPI Oceans, see http://www.jpi-oceans.eu/calls/proposals/microplastics-marine-environment; for BMBF, see https://bmbf-plastik.de/en.
5. 5. Names are changed to pseudonyms with the exception of more established scientists (postdoctoral or higher) whom I met in the field and whose papers are cited in this chapter.
6. 6. According to Hidalgo-Ruz and Thiel (2013), particles greater than one millimetre can be identified as synthetic polymers and distinguished from glass or minerals by citizen science actors with adequate guidance and illustrative material.
7. 7. See examples at https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Isotype-neurath.jpg.
8. 8. The term “virginity” or “originality,” often used in discussions about “pure” nature (here ironized by the example of sculpture), contains a specific symbolism of gender and sexuality, which I do not pursue further here, but it could be the subject of further analysis.
9. 9. Every piece of plastic in the ocean is colonized rapidly by microbes. Therefore, biofilms lead to biofouling processes that might generate dimethyl sulphide. This process might act as an olfactory trap for seabirds when they get attracted to the sulphurous smell. See Dell’Ariccia and colleages (2017) and Savoca and colleagues (2016) for the controversial debate about “infochemicals” in marine sciences.
10. 10. Indeed, Napper, Pahl, and Thompson state clearly in Chapter 1 of this volume that there is “enough evidence for us to take action.”

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