Paper short abstract:

As a pervasive, material element of the global, plastics raise potent questions. More than merely the 'stuff' of potential global prosperity, plastics are inscribed with varied cultural meanings. Here, I trace how plastics frame people as sharing responsibility for a particular global world.

Paper long abstract:

As a pervasive, material element of the global, plastics raise potent social and environmental questions. More than merely the 'stuff' of potential global prosperity, plastics are inscribed with varied cultural meanings. Here, I explore how global plastics frame an emergent socioecological crisis, tracing how plastics shape the ways people feel and think about themselves as sharing responsibility for a global world.

Plastics tend to be considered cheap and disposable, almost already the garbage they will likely become, following particular chains of production, use, and disposal that bring the global into being. In doing so, their production, exchange and disposal map people's inequitable global obligations to each other. Given the unanticipated effects plastics produce, the crisis needs not only technical fixes - new and better polymers, improved recycling systems, fewer mixed materials, and increased demand for recycled goods - but to reduce overall global reliance on plastics. Rejecting these materials requires people to not only undo the petroleum-based commodity chains that produce them, but reconsider their global social lives (Appadurai, 1996). Reviewing the new scholarship rethinking the broader meanings attached to plastics as foundational materials, I find that, rather than rejecting the global, the most promising social science solutions lie in enhancing its inherent plasticity. What emerges from the interdisciplinary global research on plastics are practices that reclaim globalism for ecology by developing an ethics of reciprocal global care founded on a new, affective material politics.