Plastic, a.k.a modern domination
Exploring the democratization of plastic, its role in expanding the societal benefits of lower SE (Andrady and Neal, 2009) which account for its popularity as a material. Plastics represent a low-cost, easily formable, high-modulus, hydrophobic, bio-inert material that finds use in a bewildering range of consumer products. Plastic, however, is a mirage of equity across social classes, once which jumps off the American dream, as it plays an important role in advertising a world where we can all be equal and gift ourselves with shiny coated plastic objects which facilitate, commodify and glamourise our day to day.
Someone dreamt up the idea of selling the plastic dream as a path to economic gain, and the call was so successful and the need of the people to improve their lives so strong it has been the most successful advertising campaign in the world.
To begin with, it’s an agent in a system flawed from conception, as an economic model based on extraction, manufacture and disposal of resources (i.e. take, make, use and dispose), creates waste and toxic flows at each stage of the process. At the scale at which plastic began, nobody envisioned the breadth of the consequences we see today, in fact, the general mindset of western society in the past centuries has aligned to the aforementioned linear economic model, and our awareness of consequences was somewhat mitigated by the scarcity or rather the ignorance of their effects on larger scales of quantity and time.
If all waste goes to the trash – multiply it by 7.125 billion people on earth – that's 31.2 billion pounds of waste in landfills every single day. The impact of not recycling for one day will be most noticeable on the planet as a whole because our natural resources are finite, but the first and most affected by this will be those for whom plastic was sold to as the answer to resolving their poverty.
Globalisation has been mentioned before as a modern tool for domination (Peter d’Errico) and plastic’s role it is that of toxic substance dependence, without which the world does not function. It is so integrated into our lives that we cannot deny its control and our subjugation to its power, one that has spun out of control and affects every single person on the planet.
Travelling to Senegal was important because it made us wonder, where are these deserts of plastic in Europe, America? The vastness of these places, of plastic eroding away under the sun and into the sand, the rivers and forests of the African continent cannot elude the thought that maybe we have been fooled yet again.
Because dominance just evolves and hides in aggressive marketing, in fake promises of progress and an ultimate in the disengagement of the actions and motions it sets in place, refusing to take responsibility for them and destabilising and diminishing those who it aims to dominate.
In Senegal, we visited Proplast, a local Senegalese plastic recycling plant which is competing head to head with leading European plastic recycling projects, which allowed us to learn and see the extent and reach of the problem, the difficulties it presents to extra-occidental nations to develop solutions and the zealousness and net worth of the recycling industry as a whole.
About 80-90% of the production of recycled plastic is sold back to manufacturers in Senegal in a logic of circular economy. The problem is, this is only about 4% of the plastic in Senegal, not to mention an infinitesimal fraction of the plastic of the world. This solution appears to be a necessary measure for a problem which requires larger and more dramatic changes, but how permanent is it? If we look at another example of the circular economy of plastic, such as China, it becomes evident that as their economy and level of life grows, the interest to nurture the recycling industry falls. The China which once took waste shipments from first world countries to their own countryside and other less economically developed areas, for small business to profit, today looks to place a ban of certain waste imports, amongst one of the reasons the intense pollution their air has suffered from being the main recycling plant of the world since the 80s.
And so the problem is continuously changing hands, not from the countries or entities with far more responsibility towards their own waste, but rather to the countries who are at a level of development meagre enough for this to represent progress, education and a semblance of parity.
