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Plastic Legacies: Pollution, Persistence, and Politics Plastic Legacies PLASTIC LEGACIES Pollution, Persistence, and Politics Edited by Trisia Farrelly, Sy Taffel, and Ian Shaw Copyright © 2021 Trisia Farrelly, Sy Taffel, and Ian Shaw Published by AU Press, Athabasca University 1200, 10011 – 109 Street, Edmonton, AB T5J 3S8 https://doi.org/10.15215/aupress/9781771993272.01 Cover image: collage of images from Shutterstock (73913416, 91155179, 136314392, 193978946, 194617823, 674811316, 1203969238, 1261148134, 1420338494, 1450716176, 1450732997, 1689704221, 1718764735, 1747330817, 1791703958, 1791703961, 1791703967) Cover design by Derek Thornton, Notch Design Interior design by Sergiy Kozakov Printed and bound in Canada Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Plastic legacies : pollution, persistence, and politics / edited by Trisia Farrelly, Sy Taffel, and Ian Shaw. Names: Farrelly, Trisia, editor. | Taffel, Sy, editor. | Shaw, Ian C., editor. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210215879 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210215941 | ISBN 9781771993272 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771993289 (PDF) | ISBN 9781771993296 (EPUB) Subjects: LCSH: Plastic scrap. | LCSH: Plastic scrap—Environmental aspects. | LCSH: Plastic scrap—Social aspects. | LCSH: Plastics—Environmental aspects. | LCSH: Plastics—Social aspects. | LCSH: Plastics industry and trade—Environmental aspects. | LCSH: Plastics industry and trade—Social aspects. Classification: LCC TD798 .P53 2021 | DDC 363.72/88—dc23 We acknowledge the financial assistance provided by the Government of Alberta through the Alberta Media Fund. This publication is licensed under a Creative Commons licence, Attribution– Noncommercial–No Derivative Works 4.0 International: see www.creativecommons.org. The text may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes, provided that credit is given to the original author. To obtain permission for uses beyond those outlined in the Creative Commons licence, please contact AU Press, Athabasca University, at [email protected]. Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction: Our Plastic Inheritance 1 Trisia Farrelly, Sy Taffel, and Ian Shaw Part I Pollution 1 Marine Litter: Are There Solutions to This Global Environmental Problem? 25 Imogen E. Napper, Sabine Pahl, and Richard C. Thompson 2 Slow Violence: The Erosion of Marine Plastic Debris and of Human Health 41 Sasha Adkins 3 How Seabirds and Indigenous Science Illustrate the Legacies of Plastics Pollution 59 Stephanie B. Borrelle, Jennifer Provencher, and Tina Ngata 4 Dawn of the Plastisphere: An Experiment with Unpredictable Effects 79 Sven Bergmann Part II Persistence 5 Plastiglomerate: Plastics, Geology, and the New Materialism of the Anthropocene 103 Christina Gerhardt 6 Dressed in Plastic: The Persistence of Polyester Clothes 117 Elyse Stanes 7 Caring for the Multiple Cares of Plastics 139 Tridibesh Dey and Mike Michael 8 On Becoming a Massively Distributed Thing: Hedgehogs, Plastics, and the Bearable Lightness of Becoming 159 Laura McLauchlan Part III Politics 9 Communicative Capitalism, Technological Solutionism, and The Ocean Cleanup 181 Sy Taffel 10 Toward Large-Scale Social Change and Plastic Politics: An Anthropological Perspective on the Practices of a Danish Environmental Organization 203 Johanne Tarpgaard 11 Plastics Talk/Talking Plastics: The Communicative Power of Plasticity 225 Deirdre McKay, Padmapani Perez, and Lei Xiaoyu 12 Redressing the Faustian Bargains of Plastics Economies 245 Trisia Farrelly, Ian Shaw, and John Holland Conclusion: Where There’s a Will . Contesting Our Plastic Inheritance 265 Trisia Farrelly List of Contributors 271 Acknowledgements This volume was made possible thanks to the generous support of the Massey University College of Humanities, the Massey University School of People, Environment, and Planning, and the Massey University School of English and Media Studies. The editors also wish to thank Paul Spoonley, Glenn Banks, and Jenny Lawn for their ongoing support for Political Ecology Research Centre (PERC) initiatives and Lisa Vonk for her administrative assistance. This book emerged from PERC’s Lives and Afterlives of Plastic Conference held online in 2017. The presenta- tions offered in this conference generated a great deal of lively online discussion. We would also like to thank those who contributed to these thoughtful and thought-provoking discussions since they have undoubt- edly influenced the content of this book. vii https://doi.org/10.15215/aupress/9781771993272.01 Introduction Our Plastic Inheritance Trisia Farrelly, Sy Taffel, and Ian Shaw Plastics have revolutionized our lives. They have made possible things such as smartphones, modern cars, and LCD screens that depend on the light weight, high strength, and electrical and thermal insulation of plastics. They have enabled the production of disposable surgical equipment that ensures sterility, thereby minimizing inter-patient disease transfer. Count- less lives have been saved, and the use of antibiotics has been reduced, as a result of lower levels of post-operative infection. Plastics allow the minimization of food contamination by harmful bacteria and reduce food-borne illnesses. With COVID-19, health or frontline workers and the vulnerable population rely on Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) made of plastic. On the face of it, plastics are good . Despite the wonderful advances that plastics have enabled, however, thousands of unnecessary uses have developed simply because plastics are cheap and disposable. Drink containers, bags, straws, cutlery, and other single-use disposable plastics bring few tangible benefits to the vast major- ity of people who use them for their convenience.1 A lot of single-use PPE equipment ends up in the environment. This could be avoided if they were swapped for reusables for those not working on the frontline and for those not immune compromised. Many plastic items—including toys and other items meant for recreation, entertainment, or aesthetics—often last little longer than plastics specifically designated for single use. When plastics are deemed disposed of “responsibly,” this often involves the export of “recyclable” material from higher-GDP to lower-GDP countries. Whether 1 https://doi.org/10.15215/aupress/9781771993272.01 responsibly or irresponsibly managed, all plastics will eventually find their way into the biosphere. Plastics are polymers: molecules composed of repeating mono- mer units strongly bonded together. The adjectiveplastic refers to the capacity of these malleable materials to be moulded and set. Historic- ally, a range of natural malleable materials such as rubber, ivory, and amber were employed (Bensaude-Vincent 2013). However, by the late nineteenth century, the industrial demand for these pliable materi- als exceeded their supply. Subsequent to the invention of Bakelite in 1907, the first petrochemical-derived synthetic plastic, there has been a meteoric growth in the production of synthetic polymers, to the point that they are now synonymous with the word plastic itself; when other plastics are mentioned, they tend to be prefixed as natural or bioplastics. Although no synthetic polymers were produced prior to 1907, and less than half a million tonnes were produced annually by 1950, by 2016, global plastics production reached 335 million tonnes per annum (Plas- ticsEurope 2017). That figure is set to go higher with continued activity in the petrochemical sector. In 2015, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation estimated that by 2050 the world’s oceans will contain more plastics by weight than fish (MacArthur, Waughray, and Stuchtey 2016). Then, in 2017, a report predicted a 33–36 percent increase in plastics production by 2025 and illustrated how the fossil fuel industry is driving that pro- duction, with no sign of slowing down (CIEL 2017). For example, Exxon Mobile and Shell Chemical have poured almost $200 billion into new “cracking” plants since 2010 to produce everyday consumer plastics in the United States. There is virtually nowhere on Earth today that remains untouched by plastics. They are found in the Arctic Ocean (Obbard et al. 2014), 83 percent of global tap water samples, air, honey, beer, soil, and sea salt (Kosuth, Mason, and Wattenberg 2018). One hundred percent of animals tested at the bottom of the ten-kilometre-deep Mariana Trench, one of the most remote places on the planet, had ingested plastic ( Jamieson et al. 2017). Because of the chemical nature of plastics, bacteria and other living members of the biosphere cannot readily degrade them, so they persist in the environment. During their afterlife, they are buffeted and pulverized 2 Introduction https://doi.org/10.15215/aupress/9781771993272.01 by the physical environment and broken down by marine fauna such as Antarctic krill (Dawson et al. 2018). These processes eventually lead to the formation of microplastics and nanoplastics small enough to pene- trate cell membranes. Plastics fill the stomachs of animals when they are mistaken for food, making them feel full while providing no nutri- tional value and damaging their digestive tracts. Some of the monomers used to produce plastics, such as bisphenol A (BPA) and styrene, are toxicants, as are many of the plasticizers, colourants, flame retardants, and UV stabilizers added to those monomers. In marine and freshwater environments, plastics tend to adsorb (attract) persistent organic pol- lutants (POPs) such as pesticides and other toxic substances. When ingested, plastics leach these toxicants into tissues and organs, where they bioaccumulate. When these creatures are eaten
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