Made to be wasted: PET and topologies of disposability

The discussion under the chapter Made to be wasted: PET and topologies of disposability of the book Accumulation: The Material Politics of Plastic by Jennifer Gabrys is a good roundup of not just PET, but plastics overall life cycle and analysis of trends across time. I am 21 and its easy for me to forget that much of the disposable culture we have now is not the default for societies. Gabrys chooses to remind us that plastics served as a centripetal force to many industries and cultures that led to mass consumption and synthetic consumerism. It all was a gradual shift across all its interaction such as when plastic molders stoped thinking in terms of re-use refrigerator jars and trinket boxes made to last a lifetime. They paint Plastic as a market device whose value comes from it being so not instantly disposable. Looking at the economics of this exchange and asking how it can be replicated at an individual level probably yields better in healing our bad relationship with plastics.

Something Gabrys mentioned that I found interesting is that the need to recycle (in terms of increasing the utility of the plastic) is there but is not coordinated. There is a space gap between those that produce and those that would have to reuse and thus the incentives are not coordinated and aligned. Glass bottles did not have this problem since the manufacturer took them back (thinking of Coca Cola for instance). In seeking to increasing the longevity of the plastic items, it points our focus to bring together elements of the plastic pathway to design a collective action plan and handoff.

Fun fact I noticed in the footnotes is that corporate had a rather silly strategy of saying the impact of plastics is beyond the market interaction and they should not be scrutinized for it.