Оглавление
Alice Mah. Plastic Unlimited
Table of Contents
Guide
Pages
Praise for Plastic Unlimited
Plastic Unlimited. How Corporations Are Fuelling the Ecological Crisis and What We Can Do About It
Copyright Page
Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
1 Plastic Unlimited
The Plastic Facts
Origin Stories
Unlimited Plastics
Corporations Across the Plastics Value Chain
Confronting Crisis
Notes
2 Manufacturing Toxic Wants and Needs
Overcoming Limits
Creating Markets
Protecting Markets
Expanding Markets
Corporate Responsibility and ‘Wishcycling’
Notes
3 The Corporate Alliance to (Never) End Plastic Waste
The Marine Plastics Crisis
The Circular Economy Solution
The Promise and Peril of Chemical Recycling
Plastics and Waste Colonialism
The Trials of the Alliance
The Real Value of Plastic Waste
Notes
4 Hedging Against Climate Risk
Is Plastic Pollution a Global Heating Problem?
Degrees of Denial
The Plastics Exception
The Reluctant Race to Net Zero
Poised for a Downturn?
Notes
5 Plastics in the Pandemic
Weathering the Storm
Ballooning Plastic Facts
Top Polluters
The Regulatory Front of Green Recoveries
Notes
6 How Can We Curb the Plastics Crisis?
A Paris Agreement for Plastics
Holding Corporations Accountable
Challenging the Enablers
The Trouble with Growth
Rethinking Systems
Halfway Optimism
Notes
Selected Readings. The History and Politics of Plastics – General
Corporations and Sustainability – General
Plastics Industry and Corporate Power
Plastics and Health
Plastics, Fossil Fuels, and Climate
Plastics and the Circular Economy
Marine Plastics Crisis
Plastics, Waste, and Recycling
Environmental Justice and Plastic Pollution
Plastics and the Pandemic
Plastic-Free Lifestyles
Degrowth and the Limits to Growth
Index
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‘Timely, engaging, comprehensive. Mah delivers the book I’ve been waiting for – a power-and-geopolitics analysis of the multifaceted plastics crisis, past and present.’
Rebecca Altman, writer and environmental sociologist
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In the aftermath of the Second World War, the petrochemical cartels dissolved. In 1951, IG Farben was broken up into different companies, including BASF, Bayer, and Hoechst, which each gained their own legal identities. However, tacit cooperation continued between the leading American and European petrochemical companies.49 This laid the historical foundations of industrial collaboration and collusion that continued in the toxic scandals of later years. The exponential growth of plastics in the post-war period was not an inevitable outcome of material innovation, as it is often framed, but a legacy of war.
The European plastics industry celebrated ‘100 Years of Plastics’ in December 2020 with the launch of a website about how plastics make life better and more sustainable. The tagline: ‘Unlimited Possibilities for the Future’.50 The hallmark achievement in 1920 was the publication of a ground-breaking research article by the German scientist and Nobel Prize winner Hermann Staudinger, which formed the basis for modern polymer science. A collaboration between the Macromolecular Chemistry Division of the Association of German Chemists and Plastics Europe Deutschland (the German branch of the Plastics Europe industry association), the website features monthly articles that showcase ways that plastics help society. The first article, ‘Plastics During the Pandemic’, singles out five plastics applications as making material contributions to COVID-19: protective clothing; plastics machinery (for making masks and other equipment); protective walls (transparent partition walls); medical sector materials; and the transport of vaccines (in insulated frozen boxes).51 Notably absent from this list are plastic bags and disposable food and beverage containers, which the industry had so actively promoted as the ‘sanitary choice’ at the beginning of the pandemic.52 Despite its centennial theme, the ‘100 Years of Plastic’ website avoids any mention of the wartime origins of modern plastics. Instead of reflecting on the past, it speculates on the future, using the occasion to capture the celebratory mood of the plastics revival of the pandemic. The unlimited possibilities for the future of plastics, naturally, are all about perpetual growth.
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