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Accepted Paper:
Scattered showers of plastic and sensing toxicity
Ian Simpson
(Leiden University)
This paper examines the impact of new methods in sensing and addressing plastic pollution. It discusses interdisciplinary approaches like 'plastic fall' forecasts and the concept of toxic heritage, with a focus on fieldwork in the Randstad region, Netherlands.
Paper Abstract:
This paper scrutinizes the relationship between new ways of sensing and grasping plastic materiality on the one hand and the limitations of initiatives to foster a sense of care, responsibility and curbs to plastic pollution. The sheer extent and ubiquity of micro and nano plastics in the atmosphere and ecosystems constitute a hyperobject with which disciplines are now grappling. Interdisciplinary efforts to measure and grasp synthetic plastic and its inhaling and ingesting, such as ‘plastic fall’ weather forecasts, have recently been introduced. This paper considers the forsaking of toxic materialities that normally happens by promoting tradition as heritage over and above modern waste as non-heritage, as modernity’s marginalised toxic heritage, and how recent methods and approaches attuning to this condition make us aware of a petrochemical colonisation of the body and foster an ethics of care regarding the plastic materiality we inhabit. It draws on local responses to plastic materiality in the Randstad region of the Netherlands and develops a fieldwork approach in this context addressing the need for community collaboration and an interdisciplinary and multi-level ecological sensing of synthetic plastics in contemporary life.