10 Toward Large-Scale Social Change and Plastic Politics An Anthropological Perspective on the Practices of a Danish Environmental Organization

When Plastic Change began its efforts to create awareness of plastics pollution and prompt social, structural, and legislative changes to mitigate it, the first project that it launched was Expedition Plastic, a two-year expedition from Denmark to Hawaii, through two of the world’s oceanic gyres. The founder of Plastic Change saw the expedition as the obvious starting project for the organization, as he saw it as a way to create a platform for talking about plastics pollution in a way that would connect Denmark to the global plastics pollution crisis and give the organization a “more powerful platform to speak from,” as the main skipper of Expedition Plastic expressed it.

At that time, Plastic Change saw its documentation of the diffusion of plastic in the ocean and its effects as a cornerstone of its work or as a stepping stone from which to engage in conversations with policy makers as well as the public. Therefore, the sampling of microplastics was central to the expedition. The organization wanted to have its own body of scientific knowledge about plastics pollution in the world’s oceans and with it contribute to the 5 Gyres Institute’s modelling of how plastics pollution develops in the oceans in terms of volume and distribution (Plastic Change 2018). Surface trawling with nets is currently the most prevalent form of sampling, and the sampling of microplastics during Expedition Plastic was conducted with a manta trawl: a metal rectangular box with an opening of fifteen centimetres by forty-five centimetres on which a long net ending in a small tube was fastened. The manta trawl is designed to scoop approximately ten centimetres of the surface water. This is where a large portion of marine microplastics is situated because plastics are less dense than water and are thus naturally buoyant (Eriksen et al. 2014).

Before I started my fieldwork, I therefore expected to find scientific knowledge production constituted predominantly by comprehensive scientific datasets and that, by building scientific knowledge, Plastic Change was communicating a deeper understanding of the issue to the Danish public. Taking samples in the eastern part of the Pacific Ocean, I was thus surprised to find that the sampling procedure was not the rigorous scientific practice that I had imagined. The levels of experience and equipment varied from leg to leg, and this part of the expedition was not highly prioritized. Some of the samples taken during my part of the expedition were affected by contaminates such as plastic fibres from the rope holding the manta trawl. Some were even characterized as bad samples by my informants because of large amounts of phytoplankton in the water, longer time in the water than calculated, and a leak in the pontoon, which affected the balance of the trawl. Additionally, shortly after arriving in Colombia, where our leg started, we came to realize that there was no money for analyzing the samples. This was not a conscious decision by the organization’s leading figures but a result of its small size and very limited funding at that time. No one had the time to apply for funding for lab equipment, lab time or to hire a biologist to analyze the good samples when we arrived back home. The process of creating scientific knowledge was thereby affected by contextual and multifaceted perspectives (Latour and Woolgar 1986, 23).

Given the many uncertainties and the fact that we were not producing any technical and scientific data on the amounts of plastic pieces in the areas in which we sailed, one of the biologists was especially frustrated, since she felt that her professional reputation as a biologist was at stake. Before volunteering for Plastic Change, she had carried out oceanographic research but had never worked with plastics and their pollution. Nonetheless, she was the most experienced person onboard during our part of the expedition. One evening, somewhere between Panama and the Galapagos Islands, she said in a mixture of frustration and despair “We are just a PR stunt!” At that time, neither of us understood that being “a PR stunt” was not as bad as we thought.

The sampling process in the eye of a scientist might look like a rather questionable data collection and a flawed scientific practice¹. Still, when we look at the translation and diversion present (Latour 1988,7), we see that also these knowledge practices are performative (Haraway 1988; Law 2019, 8). The sampling process became an effective performance and a broader project of witnessing.

In Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, professors of history and philosophy of science Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer (1985) argue, based on the debate between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes about air-pump experiments in the 1660s, that the validity of experimental findings depend on the scientific culture in which they are made. Witnessing is key in the co-production of knowledge. Central to their work is to seek answers to how and why certain scientific practices, such as the air-pump experiments in seventeenth-century science, were considered as factual and proper in their entanglements with the cultural, political, and scientific paradigms of the time (Shapin and Schaffer 1985, 14). To answer these questions, Shapin and Schaffer identify three ways to multiply scientific authority by multiplying witnesses: eyewitnessing, facilitating the replication, and virtual witnessing. Even though their framework explores processes of creating scientific knowledge in the 1660s, their theory remains useful in looking at the practices of environmental organizations since it turns our focus on processes that would often be overlooked. Using Shapin and Schaffer’s framework, I will now focus on these different modes of multiplying witnesses to the sampling of microplastics, with witnessing as the framework through which it became an effective performance.

As crew members, we were eyewitnesses of the sampling, just like previous crew members. Because the sampling was considered an acceptable method of knowledge production about microplastics in the ocean and thereby a proper practice, even with the errors and uncertainties, we as crew members attested to and confirmed the sampling. In the social space of the other crew members, we saw that microplastics were collected and that visible pieces were found in every sample even though the samples were not analyzed onboard. For this reason, we believed that there were microplastics floating in the surface waters. Shapin and Schaffer (1985, 56–58) draw attention to the credibility of witnesses and how the profession of the eyewitness has great importance for his or her reliability. During the part of the expedition in which I participated, the marine biologist was in charge of the sampling. She was considered a reliable witness due to her expertise. Through different Danish media, Plastic Change portrayed her as an expert, and having her as a reliable eyewitness contributed to the validation of the multiplication of witnessing.

Additionally, Expedition Plastic was replicating the sampling procedure. Central to this way of witnessing is how protocols of a given procedure enable people to perform the practice themselves (Shapin and Schaffer 1985, 59). Protocols for the sampling procedure by the 5 Gyres Institute (2017) in California, a recognized organization working with plastics pollution, were followed. Thereby, Plastic Change was replicating a sampling method that had been used since 2007 (Eriksen et al. 2014). Even though the sampling was carried out with errors and uncertainties, most elements of the protocol were followed. The crew was directed to do the best with what was available at that time and on that leg. To replicate the sampling process further, Plastic Change made a smaller expedition around Denmark in June 2016 in which the crown prince of Denmark and the environment minister at the time took part (Plastic Change 2016). From this short expedition, Plastic Change replicated the sampling protocol once again, thereby ensuring direct witnessing (Shapin and Schaffer 1985, 59) and strengthening the trustworthiness of Expedition Plastic and its own credibility as an organization.

The most important practice of witnessing that Shapin and Schaffer identify is virtual witnessing, which “involves the production in a reader’s mind of such an image of an experimental scene as obviates the necessity for either direct witness or replication” (1985 60). Plastic Change ensured virtual witnessing through many different platforms. During the expedition, it uploaded pictures, videos, and stories on its Facebook page. While we were away, various press releases about the expedition were published in different Danish media (see, e.g., DR 2016), and when we arrived home the biologist was interviewed by Danish radio and television about the expedition. This ensured that Expedition Plastic and the sampling process produced a strong image of plastics pollution in the ocean and meant that Plastic Change gained acceptance as a reliable witness of the amounts and effects of marine plastics pollution.

At present the “good” samples have been analyzed, but as the case highlights it was not the quality of the samples that made the activism good at the time. The processes and practices used to gather the samples were complicated and messy, but when we pay attention to them they show us how social movements can contribute toward wider structural and legislative changes in Denmark and Europe.

Besides taking samples, Expedition Plastic was a platform for telling stories about the effects of plastics pollution that crew members encountered, and, as one of them stated one day, the voyage was indeed one big process of storytelling. The other crew members shared her point of view. “In some ways, it becomes more personal when we are on this little sailing ship rather than a big research vessel,” one stated. They all agreed that being on a sailing ship was important for the forms and kinds of stories that could be told about plastics pollution. The S/Y Christianshavn was Plastic Change’s platform and starting point for telling stories;not its office—which at that time was located in a basement.

Aligned with STS scholars such as Law and Haraway, in terms of his attention to materiality and practice, environmental humanity scholar Thom van Dooren argues that storytelling is one of the great arts and key forms of witnessing (Van Dooren 2014; Van Dooren and Rose 2016, 91). Focusing on environmental ethics and understandings of care in his work on extinction, he highlights how stories can give rise to proximity, ethical encounters and entanglements, care, and concern (Van Dooren 2016). Looking empirically at how Plastic Change does the work of storytelling as an explicit form of witnessing, I focus here on the sometimes troubling structures of caring, by which the effectiveness of Danish witnessing reduces the distance to the effects of plastics pollution, thereby creating a stronger sense of responsibility than if it were a non-Danish witness.

As sociologist John Hannigan (2006, 70) reminds us, visual images, then, are important to underline the central imagery. To underline the central imagery of plastics pollution in the world’s oceans, according to Plastic Change’s communications consultant, it was important to post images of the crews’ first-hand experiences on Facebook and other social media. In addition, for her, telling stories had to involve a tangible element that could spark an emotional response and engage people. The following was, in her eyes, a good example of such a story.

On the trip from the Galapagos Islands to Baja, California, some of the crew members saw something faintly in the distance. When they got closer, they could see that it was a sea turtle entangled in rope, fishing line, and plastic bottles. The pictures and story of how they encountered and freed the sea turtle were uploaded on Facebook, and within a few days shared by more than 200 people and viewed by a few thousand in total. At that time, in April 2016, Plastic Change’s Facebook page had about 15,000 followers, and the viewing of the pictures and sharing of the story were therefore overwhelming, according to Plastic Change.

Internationally, the imagery of species affected by entanglement and ingestion of plastics has been very popular and especially strong in the United States. Photographer Chris Jordan’s photo series Midway: Message from the Gyre (2009), showing the skeletons of dead Laysan albatrosses at Midway Atoll in the middle of the North Pacific plastic gyre, is one example of imagery that has travelled the world. Trying to draw emotional reactions from those who see the images, Jordan wanted to create a bridge between the global and the personal and make the invisible visible (Bennett 2013). Pictures and videos of entangled sea turtles and other marine animals have also been shared widely online in recent years (Butterworth, Clegg, and Bass 2012; NOAA 2014; Ruiz-Grossman and Dahlen 2017). One example is the picture of the sea turtle named “Peanut” found in 1993 in the St. Louis area of Missouri. Since her early years, she had had a plastic six-pack ring around her body, which meant that she had grown into an abnormal shape, hence her name (Zarlenga 2012).

Given this existing online international trend, it was easy for Plastic Change to tell the story of the entangled sea turtle that crew members freed; the organization had an international narrative into which it could tap, thereby making use of visual images and existing stories seen in international media. According to the communications consultant, images and stories of entangled animals such as seabirds, sea turtles, and sea mammals are popular because these animals are “likable.” As a former employee at DanChurchAid, she knew that it was easy for people to relate to animals and children. “They are vulnerable since they cannot help themselves in the same way as adults,” she explained in an interview. They catalyze a powerful set of emotive responses such as grief, loss, and love.

Even though a part of the Danish population had already seen images such as Jordan’s albatrosses or Peanut, I argue that a desensitization did not take place. Instead, a new story was added to the body of stories about plastics pollution entanglements with marine animals and seabirds and created an echo between the different stories and pictures. Since the story dealt with an entangled animal, the imagery of the entangled sea turtle was already familiar to people interested in the problem of plastics pollution. However, the sensational impact of the images of Peanut, the albatrosses, and Plastic Change’s entangled sea turtle was not enough in itself to create responsibility; it had to be made personal and close through a witness to be able to foster a sense of familiarity and intimacy.

As Laura McLauchlan argues in Chapter 8 of this volume, questions of care become complicated by the multiplicity of spatial and temporal scales at which plastic operates. Even though the object of love and grief was thousands of kilometres away in Jordan’s images or Plastic Change’s image, the scale of connection to the Danish population was different. The narrative of the entangled sea turtle was presented shortly after it was freed, and it was told by a Danish witness. In that way, plastics pollution in the world’s oceans became very close, and the effectiveness of the Danish witnesses eliminated the great distance between the Danish viewers and the entangled sea turtle. For a moment, the Danes who saw the picture and heard the story became emotionally and ethically entangled in stories of entangled animals. In Van Dooren’s words, “to care for another, to care for a possible world, is to become emotionally and ethically entangled” (2016, 13).

Around the world, we see that many environmental organizations that work with plastics pollution have expedition ships (see By the Ocean We Unite 2019; Exxpedition 2019), for they all want to be close to plastics pollution in the ocean so that they and their crew members can tell intimate and relatable stories. This highlights the troubling structures of caring in which the feeling of intimacy—of caring about something thousands of kilometres away—sometimes has to be cultivated by kin and kind to be able to reduce the distance and create a stronger sense of responsibility (Haraway 2008, 88). But are stories and pictures together with processes of witnessing enough to change larger structural and legislative matters regarding plastics pollution and make people use less plastic in their everyday lives?

Even though neoliberal approaches frequently manifest as individual consumer responsibility, of which this book forms a substantial critique, I will in this last section present a slightly different argument: That we should not discount the roles of things that appear to reinscribe liberal market-based logics, for they might actually have an important effect on large-scale social change. To support this argument, I will present the Danish dishcloth made of plastic fibres.

Besides showing the distant impact of our waste, Plastic Change wanted to get people to relate to plastics pollution in their everyday lives. Therefore, the organization told other stories in an attempt to generate changes in behaviour and to encourage people to use less plastic. One of these stories was about how most people in Denmark for a long time have been using plastic-based disposable dishcloths without being aware that they release plastic fibres. The disposable dishcloth is one of the most common household cleaning items in Denmark and is known by Danes for its pastel colours. The average Dane uses it several times a day, and it is therefore an item to which most Danes can easily relate.

In the spring of 2015, the founder of Plastic Change was in the majority of the Danish media showing and describing how Danes release microplastics into the environment by using those dishcloths over and over (see, e.g., Sommer 2015). When we use dishcloths, they eventually wear out and release microfibres down kitchen sinks and into wastewater systems and rivers until they find their way into marine ecosystems. The story spread like ripples in a pond, followed by the story that it was easy to knit your own dishcloths or buy cotton cloths instead of microplastic ones (Tuxen 2016). At that time, in 2015, it was not easy to buy natural fibre dishcloths since they were not a standard item in supermarkets. Elderly women who volunteered in second-hand shops started to knit and sell cotton dishcloths, and in the largest cities in Denmark environmental organizations invited the public to attend knitting events in 2015 and 2016. A “Knit the Microplastic Out of the Ocean with the Danish Society for Nature Conservation’s Youth Group” event, hosted in Aalborg in April 2016, was just one example of an event that brought attention to ocean plastics pollution while at the same time knitting a material, small-scale solution.

What we see with the dishcloth is how stories are not only verbal and visual but can also be inscribed in the materialities and practices of things. Drawing on Law’s notion of a material semiotic, both the disposable plastic dishcloth and the knitted cotton dishcloth have material and semiotic elements (Law 2008, 2019). Through its materiality, the dishcloth comes to bear semiotics (signs and symbols). The dishcloth, earlier just a dishcloth, became a story for the people who used it or, more importantly, for the people who changed their dishcloths to home-knitted ones. The dishcloth story caught their attention and made people feel responsible and believe that they could actually do something. Today the story of the dishcloth is known by a large part of the Danish population, the media still refer to it, and it is considered by many to be the main story by which Danes became aware of plastics pollution (Frese 2017). But is changing your dishcloth an adequate solution to the scale of the global plastics crisis?

An important perspective raised by one of the crew members was whether the dishcloth story would be the only story and not one of many and thereby overshadow other sources of plastics pollution. In 2017, this problem was discussed in debate pieces in a Danish newspaper (Engbo 2017; Frese 2017). The head of environment at Coop, a large Danish retail business, stated that, instead of sharing knitting patterns, knitters should make demands for real change in our consumption of plastics within the political realm and the plastics industry. The response from Plastic Change was that the world cannot be saved from plastics pollution by knitting dishcloths alone but that people who become aware of such pollution from dishcloths have a heightened awareness of the problem, and that awareness is spread one dishcloth at a time (Engbo 2017).

Today you can buy alternative dishcloths without plastic fibres in all supermarkets in Denmark, and a few retail businesses have stopped selling the original plastic-based dishcloths. The same is true for other household cleaning items. Recent research from the Danish Environmental Protection Agency states that 99.7 percent of the microplastics that make their way into sewage systems are caught by Danish wastewater treatment plants (Vollertsen and Hansen 2017). The report thereby highlights that changing your dishcloth does not significantly change the emission of microplastics.

The dishcloth by itself neither shows the scale of the crisis nor gives a deep understanding of the effects of plastics pollution, but it has connected people with the unintended consequences of their daily lives, thereby widening their attention to such pollution. The dishcloth was a simple item to start with, for it was easy for most people to change and paved the way for talking about other sources of plastics pollution, such as the use of single-use plastic items, plastic fibres in clothes, the release of plastic pellets from the plastics industry, and so on. Issues that today are being taken seriously by the industry. When we look at the dishcloth with a material-semiotic approach, we see the weaving of materiality and narrative and thereby the web and the practices that carry them (Law 2008, 2019). We find that the practices that look like neoliberal solutions manifested as individual consumer responsibility might actually be the practices that will carry the wider structural and legislative changes for which we are calling.

Today the global plastics crisis is a central and highly visible environmental issue. It is now an important topic not only within environmental organizations but also within political and industrial institutions in Denmark. Although not widely discussed as a catalyst of this emerging concern, Plastic Change has nonetheless played a key role in terms of the structural and legislative changes that we see today toward mitigating plastics pollution. Its work drew fresh attention to plastics, and the movement that its work generated continues to grow.

By carefully tracing some of Plastic Change’s work during the first three years of its advocacy efforts, with a specific focus on Expedition Plastic, I have highlighted that successful social movements are not necessarily perfect or uncompromised endeavours. I agree with Napper and colleagues in Chapter 1 of this volume that public education alone is unlikely to achieve the substantial change required to address the plastics pollution crisis. However, the cases in my chapter illustrate that raising awareness among the public is indeed a crucial part of movements toward larger structural and legislative changes.

In only a few years, Plastic Change managed to turn plastics pollution from an unknown topic into one of widespread interest. In other words, it went from an environmental problem known and discussed primarily by scientists to one debated by members of the public, politicians, and industry representatives. In an interview in 2016, one of the skippers of Expedition Plastic explained how Plastic Change aimed to accomplish something that scientific researchers could not do. As he had discussed with their main allied researcher from Roskilde University,

those who already know the issue are the only ones who read his research articles, and then it becomes a scientific problem and an analytical problem more than a real environmental problem that has to be dealt with. What is important is that someone takes [a scientist’s] research and argues that it is not just statistics and data. That it is a real problem! It is a real environmental issue that has far-reaching consequences for nature and ultimately ourselves.

This quotation highlights that the work of organizations such as Plastic Change is not the dissemination of established scientific facts. Instead, it is a creative practice of generating concern by scaling and weaving stories. Often these stories do not offer a comprehensive understanding of the scientific details of plastics pollution. Instead, organizations such as Plastic Change engage in different kinds of practices and processes, telling stories that work together to create broader conversations. Equally important, they bind stories to everyday life such that they must be iteratively engaged and retold. This significant practice is at the heart of Plastic Change’s dishcloth initiatives, which tend to be read as trivial at first glance.

Plastic Change is no longer a small, marginal, environmental organization (Engbo 2019; Tuborgfondet 2017). During the past number of years, the organization has worked with a range of projects, from the development of teaching materials for primary school and high school levels to collaborations with local citizens, municipalities, and industries. Plastic Change was nominated for The Nordic Council Environment Prize 2018; and it won the national Energy Globe Award 2018 and the Danish Svend Auken prize given to people or organizations that have made an extraordinary environmental effort (Altinget 2018; Engbo 2018; The Nordic Council 2018). In November 2018, Plastic Change achieved accreditation by the United Nations Environment Programme, which means, among other things, that Plastic Change has observer status at the United Nations Environment Assembly (Plastic Change 2019).

Plastic Change has also helped to amplify additional NGO engagement with plastics pollution (see e.g., DN 2019; WWF 2021. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in Denmark has, in the past few years, similarly made a significant effort to address plastics pollution. In 2018, it employed a full-time plastics-focused staff member. This means that it now has a range of initiatives, partnerships, and advisory services. For example, in the fall of 2018, based on counselling from Plastic Change and the WWF, the beer giant Carlsberg decided to eliminate its use of plastic six-pack rings of the kind that entrapped Peanut, the sea turtle. Instead, a re-think of the six-pack ring has been launched in which the six beer cans are glued together—an initiative which, according to the company, reduces plastic use by 150 metric tons per annum (Knudsen 2018). It is one of many signs that industries in Denmark are beginning to become responsive to calls to reduce plastics use and waste.

As this case study shows, highly successful social movements often work through practices and tropes that are compromised, reifying, and problematic. But Plastic Change alerts and reminds scholars that practices of which we are highly critical might also be tools for projects about which we care. Plastic Change’s actions, which initially appear to have been flawed scientific practices or neoliberal solutions, might actually be the very practices that can help us to move toward the systematic and legislative changes that we know are needed. This chapter thus constitutes a call for academics to pay closer analytical attention to the pragmatic challenges of action and direct more scholarly attention to the role of messy, complicated, and compromised practices as essential components of larger efforts to confront the plastics pollution crisis rather than as sites for simple critique.

1. 1. In her analysis of the travels of creatures through attempts to disentangle them from plastics in the pursuit of scientific knowledge, De Wolff (2017, 44n3) brings forward an interesting perspective in a footnote: University-based marine debris researchers have described the famous environmental organization Algalita’s work as ‘citizen science’ or even as ‘not science.’

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