Conclusion Where There’s a Will … Contesting Our Plastic Inheritance

Trisia Farrelly

The chapters of this book provide a series of interdisciplinary arguments, positions, provocations, and possibilities about the global plastics crisis and how to respond to it. They lay out the scientific evidence for such crises while adopting social science and humanities approaches to consider how we define and understand pollution, persistence, and a range of potential political responses. Many of the contributors to this volume have emphasized the need for a full life-cycle approach when offering solutions. This life cycle includes the extraction of fossil fuels/sourcing of alternative feedstocks, production, distribution, consumption, disposal/recycling/reuse/composting, and recovery of legacy plastics.

The new materialist chapters included in this book present plastics as a part of nature, outlining the often unpredictable ways in which human and non-human bodies, discourses, and materials become entangled and how this entanglement challenges lifeless and apolitical representations of plastics. They also illustrate the risks associated with viewing plastics as inert objects—not the least of which include the missed opportunity to see them as the lively, unpredictable materials that they really are; an important step toward recognizing how sustainable and ethical plastics economies might supplant the current situation. Plastics naturecultures are constantly on the move and in the process of forming new and unexpected ecologies with uncertain implications for humans and non-humans. Some plastics create novel ecologies where new life flourishes. Plastics can alleviate some aspects of poverty and give voice to political struggles at multiple scales. However, plastics also leach toxic additives, carry pathogens and species that can destroy ecosystems, and play a significant role in new syndemics (synergistically linked health problems). We are constantly discovering new, often unforeseen, effects of plastics. They might not be entirely good or altogether bad. However, plastics’ ontological and moral ambiguities must not hinder political action. Indeed, it is entirely because of the level of uncertainty and speculation surrounding these lively naturecultures that some of the authors here recommend a precautionary approach at every phase of the life cycle of plastics.

The chapters in this book also foreground the multiple temporal and spatial scales at which plastics are operative. Contemporary solutions offered in response to the plastics crisis treat plastics not only as relatively inert objects but also as materials with a limited and linear life span. However, as some of the authors show, the origins of contemporary plastics can be traced back millennia to the fossil fuels produced from the demise of long-extinct organisms. Plastics manifest geologically, marking the Anthropocene from the Holocene, and will continue to determine ecological, biological, and socio-political outcomes for a long time to come. Yet solutions to the plastics pollution crisis are often deployed with short-term thinking and limited spatially to local, national, or regional responses. However, as the contributors to this volume emphasize, plastics do not respect territorial boundaries and are often found thousands of kilometres from their sources at macro-, meso-, micro-, and nanoscales. They float across geopolitical territories on tides and trade winds, they are carried in the bodies of organisms, and they move with global trade flows, migration, tourism, conflict, and humanitarian aid.

Because plastics are so mobile and do not respect culturally constructed boundaries, many contributors to this volume argue that meaningful and sustainable solutions to the plastics crisis can be realized only at a global scale by radically restructuring the global economic system. This would require a shift away from GDP (gross domestic product) fetishism and toward a new global system that balances social well-being with human activity, and that does not exceed planetary boundaries. This is a plastics economy in which nothing is produced unless it is responsibly sourced and manufactured, is non-toxic, and can be safely and ethically recycled, reused, or composted. Some of the authors also emphasize the need for education with the caveat that any education will have limited impact if current systemic weaknesses are not simultaneously addressed.

The authors across the volume consider how politics and communicative action are key to implementing the types of social, cultural, and economic changes urgently needed to meaningfully address the global plastics crisis. The authors’ emphases on plastics’ tendency to transgress geopolitical boundaries and surprise scientists in proliferating studies of plastics at multiple temporal and empirical scales lead to calls for multi-level governance solutions. Some authors also highlight the importance of collective civil society action, not only to assuage feelings of guilt and sadness that can come with plastics pollution–related work, but also to exert greater influence on policy and legislative responses from high-level governance bodies.

Many of the chapters also discuss the ways in which invisibility and nomenclature influence political and communicative action. Woven throughout is an agreement that proximity and visibility enhance responsiveness and that information conveyed to the public and policy makers about the actual and potential harms of plastics is often limited to their visible and measurable impacts. However, the contributors to this volume have emphasized that the most problematic plastics are not those visible to the naked eye. The focus on the visible and known impacts of plastics at their post-consumption (or “end of life”) means that regulation of plastics pollution is usually enacted when the product is no longer of value to the consumer and defined as “litter” or “waste.” In other words, responses to the global plastics crisis are almost always “waste management” focused. Where they are visible, plastics and their impacts offer a greater potential for strong emotional responses. Conversely, the less visible impacts of plastics pollution, for example the health impacts of plastics on lugworms or plankton, receive less care and responsibility from humans despite the potential to grievously affect entire food webs.

Waste management efforts are often promoted as technical “solutions” to what all of the contributors here have shown are extremely complex problems. Although technology might alleviate some aspects of the plastics crisis, it can also introduce additional harms. Furthermore, the technofixes offered, often by entrepreneurs, the plastics and petrochemical industries, and the states politically and economically dependent on them, mask the systematic social and economic flaws at the root of the proliferation of plastics pollution: globalized consumer capitalism. In short, all waste management efforts have failed to have any significant impact on the plastics crisis. Waste management technosolutions cannot replace the need for collective political action with the potential to significantly shift the deeply entrenched political, economic, and cultural structures and behaviours predicted to see a 33 to 36 percent increase in plastics production over the next few years.

How plastics are represented is important because it changes their material, social, and discursive dimensions. This, in turn, has significant implications for potential responses to the plastics pollution crisis. For example, defining plastics as “litter,” “microplastics,” “pollutants,” “hazardous,” or “hybrid” has a profound bearing on the urgency and form of response to plastics pollution. Some of the chapters highlight how plastics communicate an array of messages, including security, identity, belonging, comfort, affluence, convenience, modernity, safety, and progress. The authors of these chapters appeal to us to learn how to listen to the messages that plastics convey to different people. If we fail to listen carefully, we also miss the opportunity to understand which forms of action might compel people to live better with plastics and to understand which plastics we can or must learn to live without if we are all to live well.

Talking about the scope and scale of plastics emphasizes the limits to which consumers can turn the ship around and why we need to stop talking about littering, as if all responsibility should fall solely on the shoulders of consumers, and start talking about plastics as hazardous pollution. In this way, the vast majority of the responsibility can be directed back onto producers that have no right to manufacture such hazardous products for profit (particularly in the absence of social licence) and onto states complicit in allowing producers to skirt responsibility for their polluting practices.

Plastic Legacies also highlights how the effects of plastics are felt unevenly by different groups of humans and non-humans in different places. In some cases, plastics extraction, production, and disposal perpetuate colonial cycles of inequity that have been sustained for centuries. In other cases, a broad range of non-human species, from hedgehogs and albatrosses to the microscopic denizens of the plastisphere, is affected by plastics. The chapters in this volume emphasize that not all plastics are considered bad by all people. Indeed, some of these chapters illustrate the cultural benefits that plastics have afforded to certain social groups. It is important that we recognize this and that we listen to what plastics are communicating to us so that our responses to the plastics crisis are empowering ones.

The contributors to this volume talk about plastics at the scope and scale of the Anthropocene, remote responsibilities, endocrine disrupting chemicals, and persistent organic pollutants. They also draw our attention to the various moralities and cares attributed to different plastics. All of this emphasizes the limits of our ability to ask all the right questions and provide all the right solutions independently. Our research collaborations and collective societal responses will need to match the complexities of what we currently know about plastics. This will demand innovative and consciously transdisciplinary work that extends far beyond what we have achieved in this volume.