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Short abstract

This paper examines how ubiquitous microplastics become sensible in the laboratory. Drawing on empirical vignettes, it argues that attending to the residual not only important to studying innovation societies but is critical to understanding how microplastics come to matter as scientific knowledge.

Long abstract

Innovations in everyday life and societies at large are made possible by the proliferation of plastics. Yet in recent years, the emergence of microplastics as a matter of concern has further complicated the already contentious material politics of plastics (De Wolff, 2017; Liboiron, 2016). The ubiquitous and indeterminate quality of these residues raises critical questions around how to monitor an environmental contaminant that is imperceptible and everywhere all at once, how scientific knowledge is produced when the distinction between sample and contamination becomes ontologically blurred but also how to care for these harmful yet inextricable entanglements.

This paper examines the laboratory practices of microplastic detection and analysis. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted across two laboratories, interviews with microplastic scientists based in the UK and document analysis, it develops the notion of sensing (Gabrys, 2016, 2019) to analyse how researchers contend with the multitude of plastics that circulate through the laboratory and how embodied and algorithmic sensing regimes come together to transform microplastic matter into data. In an account that loosely follows the processes of sample extraction, material analysis and chemical characterisation, it argues that thinking with ‘left-behinds’ is not only critical to understanding processes of innovation but the very scientific practices mobilised to study this ubiquitous condition of plastic contamination. The paper tentatively concludes that the inevitability of contamination and the ‘residual-ity’ of plastics plays a constitutive and even generative role in the making of microplastic data and care.