When I think about plastics, something doesn’t add up. Once imagined as a responsible substitute for natural materials, their reality speaks of disconnection from materials, labour and responsibility.
Petrochemical plastics, the materials we instinctively associate with the word “plastic,” were first created as agents of conservation. In 1869, celluloid emerged as an industrial solution to a biological crisis, replacing ivory in billiard balls, piano keys, and luxury goods to curb the slaughter of elephants. These early synthetic materials offered a kind of technological idealism: to chemically replicate nature’s rarest substances and relieve pressure on fragile ecosystems.
But in addressing one form of extraction, we accelerated another. From this point, plastics rapidly evolved into engines of mass production and mass disposability. Today, they are among the most pervasive pollutants on earth,…
