Plastic Unlimited. Alice Mah

Pollution: Environmental Justice in the Mississippi River Chemical Corridor’, in Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal World, eds Julian Agyeman, Robert D. Bullard, and Bob Evans (MIT Press, 2003), pp. 125–45.

      18 18 Elisabeth Mendenhall, ‘Oceans of Plastic: A Research Agenda to Propel Policy Development’, Marine Policy, 96 (2018): 291–8.

      19 19 Karen McVeigh, ‘Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Nestlé Named Top Plastic Polluters for Third Year in a Row’, Guardian, 7 December 2020, at https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/07/coca-cola-pepsi-and-nestle-named-top-plastic-polluters-for-third-year-in-a-row.

      20 20 Charles et al., The Plastic Waste Makers Index.

      21 21 Anja Krieger, ‘Nobody Knows How Much Plastic and Fish Will Swim in the Ocean by 2050’, 20 March 2019, at https://www.riffreporter.de/de/umwelt/faktencheck-plastik-fisch; Leo Hornak, ‘Will There Be More Fish or Plastic in the Sea in 2050?’ BBC News Magazine, 15 February 2016, at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35562253.

      22 22 See chapter 2.

      23 23 See chapter 4.

      24 24 Prachi Patel, ‘Stemming the Plastic Tide: 10 Rivers Contribute Most of the Plastic in the Oceans’, Scientific American, 1 February 2018, at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plastic-tide-10-rivers-contribute-most-of-the-plastic-in-the-oceans. The ten rivers finding was overturned by another study in 2021, which showed that 1,000 small and medium-sized rivers, rather than large rivers, accounted for 80% of the plastic waste flowing into oceans, all from five countries in Asia, but the basic point about geography remained. See Lourens J. J. Meijer, Tim van Emmerik, Ruud van der Ent, Christian Schmidt, and Laurent Lebreton, ‘More than 1000 Rivers Account for 80% of Global Riverine Plastic Emissions into the Ocean’, Science Advances, 7(18), 30 April 2021, at https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/18/eaaz5803.

      25 25 Alliance to End Plastic Waste, ‘Launching the Alliance to End Plastic Waste’, London, 16 January 2019, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOfF6SUT0nY.

      26 26 Kate O’Neill, ‘Can the World Win the War on Plastic?’ World Politics Review, 10 March 2020, at https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/28590/having-polluted-the-oceans-plastics-are-now-facing-a-popular-backlash.

      27 27 Aarushi Jain, ‘Trash Trade Wars: Southeast Asia’s Problem with the World’s Waste’, Council on Foreign Relations 100, 8 May 2020, at https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/trash-trade-wars-southeast-asias-problem-worlds-waste; Yen Nee Lee, ‘Malaysia, Following in China’s Footsteps, Bans Plastic Waste Imports’, CNBC, 25 January 2019, at https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/25/climate-change-malaysia-following-china-bans-plastic-waste-imports.html.

      28 28 The concept of ‘waste colonialism’ will be discussed in further detail in the next chapter. See also David Naguib Pellow, Resisting Global Toxics: Transnational Movements for Environmental Justice (MIT Press, 2007); Max Liboiron, ‘Waste Colonialism’, Discard Studies, 1 November 2018, at https://discardstudies.com/2018/11/01/waste-colonialism/.

      29 29 Lucy Siegle, Turning the Tide on Plastic: How Humanity (And You) Can Make Our Globe Clean Again (Orion Publishing, 2018); Will McCallum, How to Give Up Plastic: A Guide to Changing the World, One Plastic Bottle at a Time (Penguin, 2018); Martin Dorey, No. More. Plastic.: What You Can Do to Make a Difference – the #2minutesolution (Penguin, 2018); The F Team, F**k Plastic: 101 Ways to Free Yourself from Plastic and Save the World (Seven Dials, 2018).

      30 30 Alice Delemare Tangpuori, George Harding-Rolls, Nusa Urbancic, and Ximena Purita Banegas Zallio, Talking Trash: The Corporate Playbook of False Solutions to the Plastics Crisis (Changing Markets Foundation, 2021); Greenpeace, Throwing Away the Future: How Companies Still Have It Wrong on Plastic Pollution ‘Solutions’, 30 September 2019, at https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/research/how-companies-still-have-it-wrong-on-plastic-pollution-solutions; Break Free From Plastic, ‘Missing the Mark: Unveiling Corporate False Solutions to the Plastic Pollution Crisis’, 21 June 2021, at https://www.breakfreefromplastic.org/missing-the-mark-unveiling-corporate-false-solutions-to-the-plastic-crisis/.

      31 31 Author’s field notes, petrochemical markets workshop, London, 25–7 September 2018.

      32 32 Jeffrey Meikle, American Plastic (Rutgers University Press, 1995), p. 3.

      33 33 Lloyd Stouffer, ‘Plastics Packaging: Today and Tomorrow’, Report presented to the National Plastics Conference, The Society of the Plastics Industry, 1963.

      34 34 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (Hill and Wang, 1972), p. 111.

      35 35 The plastics executive is quoted in Susan Freinkel, Plastic: A Toxic Love Story (Dreamscape Media, 2011), p. 6.

      36 36 Plastics Europe, Plastics – the Facts 2020: An Analysis of European Plastics Production, Demand and Waste Data, accessed online on 27 April 2021 but no longer available.

      37 37 See Freinkel, Plastic; Siegle, Turning the Tide on Plastic.

      38 38 Rebecca Altman, ‘The Myth of Historical Bio-based Plastics’, Science, 373 (2021): 47–9 (p. 48).

      39 39 Altman, ‘The Myth of Historical Bio-based Plastics’; see also John Tully, The Devil’s Milk: A Social History of Rubber (NYU Press, 2011).

      40 40 Paul David Blanc, Fake Silk: The Lethal History of Viscose Rayon (Yale University Press, 2016), p. ix.

      41 41 Author’s field notes, petrochemical markets workshop, London, 25–7 September 2018.

      42 42 Alfred D. Chandler, Shaping the Industrial Century: The Remarkable Story of the Modern Chemical and Pharmaceutical Industries (Harvard University Press, 2005); Michael Reubold, Sean Milmo, and Martin Todd, Petrochemicals and EPCA: A Passionate Journey (European Petrochemical Association, 2016).

      43 43 For the role of the Second World War in shaping the petrochemical and plastics industry, see Chandler, Shaping the Industrial Century; Freinkel, Plastic; and Gerald E. Markowitz and David Rosner, Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution (University of California Press, 2002).

      44 44 Rebecca Altman, ‘Time-Bombing the Future’, Aeon, 2 January 2019, at https://aeon.co/essays/how-20th-century-synthetics-altered-the-very-fabric-of-us-all; see also Freinkel, Plastic, p. 25.

      45 45 Markowitz and Rosner, Deceit and Denial, p. 140.

      46 46 Florian Jessberger, ‘On the Origins of Individual Criminal Responsibility under International Law for Business Activity: IG Farben on Trial’, Journal of International Criminal Justice, 8 (2010): 783–802. See also Werner Abelshauser, Wolfgang von Hippel, Jeffrey Allan Johnson, and Raymond G. Stokes, German Industry and Global Enterprise: BASF: The History of a Company (Cambridge University Press, 2003); Diarmuid Jeffreys, Hell’s Cartel: IG Farben and the Making of Hitler’s