One Word: Plastics!

In the famous scene in The Graduate, Mr. McGuire, a family friend, earnestly takes Dustin Hoffman’s character Ben aside and offers him one word of advice “plastics.” Oddly enough, this scene is not mentioned in sweeping recent article by Estelle Praet, John Schofield, and Raveena M. Tamoria, on the archaeology of plastics in Cambridge Prisms: Plastics, which is evidently a new journal focused on “science and policy topics that underpin the nexus between plastics, human and environmental health, environmental justice, and human rights.”

Of course, Christmastime is also an orgy of plastic! As a kid, I can remember the excitement of opening plastic toys, usually encased in plastic packaging, and designed, if I was lucky, to interact with other plastic toys or devices. Plastic upon plastic!

As an adult, witnessing the excavation of landfill, I remember how vivid paper and even grass clippings were three decades after they were dumped there. I was less surprised by the state of plastics which were often very well preserved. It didn’t occur to me at the time the ubiquity of well-preserved plastics was an archaeological condition that required comment as much as the anaerobic conditions preserved paper and organic material.

All that aside, this article is a great place to start for any research on the archaeology of plastics and fantastically useful 11-page survey of topics treated in much greater depth in the Routledge Handbook of Archaeology and Plastics edited by the authors of this article. I was fortunate enough to be invited to contribute a chapter on the archaeology of oil production to this volume, but more on that in a bit.

The article surveys the connection between plastics and the Anthropocene, the links between plastics and waste regimes, the role that plastics play in environmental degradation at the non-geological level (e.g. the the oceans, as microplastics, and so on), and how the uses of plastics not only define, but also have transformed human society on a global scale. As the 20th century comes increasingly under the archaeologists lens, attention to plastics seems the equivalent of the interest of earlier archaeologists in ceramic or lithic objects. As archaeologists of the contemporary world, we are scholars of and in the plastic age. 

I have to admit that I struggled a bit with my contribution to this volume. This is partly because the connection between the production of plastics, their circulation, and their discard is tremendously opaque. Even basic information such as a general sense what percentage of fossil fuels are used to make plastics was impossible to find. Moreover, the sites that produce the various kinds of raw plastic are so closely bound up in the sensitive infrastructure of petroleum production, it was difficult to get a sense for their scale and apparatus. In other words, tracing a through line from the extraction of oil to the manufacturing of plastic — an infrastructure at the core of our modern world — was nearly impossible. 

This challenge continues to lurk in the background of this article. On the one hand, the authors foreground the distinct materiality of plastic in a useful way. I won’t be able to see a landfill and take the plastics for granted again. What is harder, it seems to me, is understanding how this distinctive materiality of plastic shapes the structure of society that surrounds it.

To be clear, this is not something that I’ve figured out, but I have the lingering feeling that the systems that produce plastics — from the extractive industries central to the petrochemical industry to their manufacture, distribution, circulation, and discard — has started to exert a a profound influence over our world today. This might be as a kind of banal platitude, but it seems to me this is more than just another manifestation of petro-culture or industrialization or whatever. Instead one wonders whether we life in the plastiocene (which I know isn’t a thing and, yeah, I also get that I’m using this concept wrong). In other words, whether a clever scholar could make the argument that much the same was as archaeologists thought we lived in the Bronze Age, Iron Age, Stone Age or whatever, we could argue that today we live in the “plastic age.” Without plastic, it is possible that our society would not exist at all.

Of course, such claims go well beyond what is possible in a 11-page article or even a 500+ page Routledge Handbook. Moreover, anyone would make such a claim would immediately pilloried by “whataboutist” crowd (and lambasted on this blog for writing a book that is too long for any polite scholar to read seriously).