Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the life of plastic bottles in two villages to show how local economies, relationships, and responses to environmental crises shape circular strategies. It looks at local aspirations for connectivity and its effects on the access, use, circulation, and disposal of plastic bottles.

Paper long abstract:

The global plastic crisis is one of the most pressing environmental issues of our time. With the increasing production of disposable and single-use plastic items, the world generates millions of tons of plastic waste every year. However, many places lack the proper infrastructure and capacity to deal with it locally, and much of the discarded plastic leaks into the environment and negatively affects both natural ecologies and local communities. This paper explores the life of plastic bottles in two remote villages in Viet Nam and Papua New Guinea. While the image of an empty plastic bottle may have become the symbol of environmental pollution, the object was once (and still is) deemed a brilliant invention. The paper explores how Vietnamese and Papua New Guinean interactions with plastic bottles are shaped and what can these objects’ circulation, reuse, and disposal tell us about their local and global value and impact. In the run-up to the UN treaty on plastic, this paper offers insights into the ways in which local economies, relationships, and responses to environmental crises shape the communities’ circular strategies. It examines the different aspirations for and effects of connectivity between various people and places, and how understanding these can offer critical insights into solving the plastic challenge. It draws attention to the differentiated access, possession, and use of consumable commodities and how encounters with tourists and researchers, as well as the expansion of capitalist logics and land use restrictions, inject these into the circulation arenas of rural spaces.