Plastic Unlimited. Alice Mah

and set of interests within the plastics value chain. For example, the bioplastics industry (which uses bio-based feedstocks such as sugar and corn flour to make plastics) favours the substitution of virgin feedstocks with renewable resources, as contrasted with the mainstream plastics industry, but both oppose single-use plastics bans.⁶⁸ Furthermore, corporations across the plastics value chain are heterogeneous, both within and across industry segments, with different cultures, traditions, and ambitions. Many state-owned enterprises, while competing in global capital markets, are driven by national and regional interests, such as China’s goal of energy self-sufficiency and the quest for diversification in oil-producing countries. Some corporations have been leaders in their voluntary sustainability commitments, at least in relative terms, for example through disclosing their plastic packaging footprints, while others have been laggards.

When it comes to the business of limits, though, corporations across the global plastics value chain do have some common interests. First, they each benefit from the problem of societal dependence. Unlimited plastics growth is inherently destructive and unsustainable, but modern societies have become too dependent on plastics to phase them out easily. Plastics are cheap, durable, and incredibly versatile, enmeshed in almost every aspect of modern life, from buildings to agriculture, healthcare, transport, clothing, and electronic devices. Second, in material terms, plastics represent seemingly unlimited possibilities for growth into new uses and markets, allowing corporations to constantly create the conditions for future plastics dependence. Third, given their reliance on fossil fuels, most corporations across the plastics value chain have vested interests in maintaining ‘business as usual’, enabled by powerful financial actors including investors, banks, insurance companies, and governments. Despite international regulations to address plastic pollution and the climate crisis, petrochemical and plastics companies have received extensive government subsidies, keeping artificially low costs of virgin feedstocks.⁶⁹ On an existential level, corporations are wilfully ignorant about the problem of unlimited plastics growth, which is not only delusional but also self-destructive. Plastics growth will inevitably reach limits, imposed by the end of fossil fuels and biofuels, or by the mass extinctions that come with toxic pollution, climate disruptions, and biodiversity loss – whichever comes first. This means that unless there are serious political interventions, by the time plastics reach material limits, it will be too late.

      For decades, corporations across the plastics value chain have developed powerful tools for protecting their interests through a combination of expertise and wilful ignorance. On the one hand, the leading corporations maintain market dominance through advanced scientific, technological, and economic expertise, from cutting-edge polymer science and chemical engineering to detailed knowledge of international and national laws, geopolitical and environmental risks, and market forecasts. They use their multiscalar expertise to their economic advantage, anticipating regulations, denying toxic hazards, and promoting risky new technologies.⁷⁰ On the other hand, corporations are wilfully ignorant about their responsibility for social and environmental harms. Wilful ignorance is where people recognize that they are part of the problem but avoid confronting it, often through seeking forms of justification. We all do this, but as the sociologists Linsey McGoey and Hannah Jones argue, sometimes the act of looking away is strategic, to avoid legal liability, or violent, whether intentional or not.⁷¹ Through their wilful ignorance, corporations across the value chain avoid taking responsibility for environment injustice: the disproportionate exposure of communities of colour and poor communities to toxic pollution and waste.⁷²

This book focuses on corporations within powerful industries, rather than on the individuals who run them per se. Joel Bakan writes that it is crucial ‘to stay focused on the corporation as an institution, on how its legal structure compels the people who run companies to do what they do. … Some may personally believe in the corporate values that frame their work, while others may not.’⁷³ I agree that the people who run corporations are often guided by business imperatives to put the interests of profit over the interests of the public, regardless of their personal values. However, the narrative of ‘bad’ corporations versus ‘good’ individuals misses another important issue: the extent to which destructive worldviews and wilful ignorance have been normalized to the point of appearing benign. Even the most well-intentioned corporative executives find ways of passing the blame and reframing their own motivations as irreproachable. In The Value of Everything, economist Mariana Mazzucato makes a critical intervention into this problem, arguing that policymakers have lost the ability to distinguish between value creation and value destruction, due to a false narrative about corporate wealth creators, risk taking, and entrepreneurship which has become entrenched within political and public discourse. The consequence is that ‘those who claim to be wealth creators have monopolized the attention of governments with the now well-worn mantra of: give us less tax, less regulation, less state and more market’, which has ‘made it easier for some to call themselves value creators and in the process extract value’.⁷⁴ This is what needs to change.

Confronting Crisis

The adage ‘never let a good crisis go to waste’ has been widely attributed to Winston Churchill, who is said to have made this comment during the Yalta Conference with Stalin and Roosevelt near the end of the Second World War.⁷⁵ During the financial crisis of 2008, Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s Chief of Staff, also used this expression, and it has since become popular among business and political leaders.⁷⁶ In February 2020, Bernard Looney, the newly appointed CEO of British Petroleum (BP), quoted the ‘great Winston Churchill phrase’ in his keynote address at International Petroleum (IP) Week in London, talking about the climate crisis ‘as an opportunity for the industry to significantly reshape how it works’.⁷⁷ Not surprisingly, the phrase has also invited more critical interpretations. In Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, historian Philip Mirowski argues that neoliberals survived the 2008 Great Recession by using the opportunity of the crisis to consolidate power.⁷⁸ Naomi Klein makes a related argument in The Shock Doctrine, detailing how political and economic elites have exploited the upheavals of national disasters to push forward controversial neoliberal free market policies.⁷⁹

      The idea that capitalism is well equipped to accommodate crisis is very familiar among social scientists. It is such a common trope that many scholars avoid the term ‘crisis’ altogether. For example, the anthropologist Joe Masco argues that ‘“crisis” has become a counterrevolutionary idiom in the twenty-first century, a means of stabilizing an existing condition rather than minimizing forms of violence across militarism, economy, and the environment’.⁸⁰ In Pollution Is Colonialism, interdisciplinary plastic pollution scholar Max Liboiron characterizes ‘crisis as a relational model that puts certain things beyond dispute in the imperative to act at all costs’.⁸¹ In a similar vein, environmental scholar-activists Matt Hern and Am Johal caution that ‘[c]risis invokes an emergency where debate is suspended, reflection limited, and objections marginalized. The implications of invoking a climate crisis are all too vivid: it is into this breach where hegemonic states and capital step so easily and so reassuringly.’⁸² Other scholars suggest that the plastic waste crisis, in particular, suffers from inaction due to the ‘environmental crisis industry’, which ‘perpetuates stasis in the face of environmental catastrophe’.⁸³

Indeed, political and economic elites are constantly poised to seize the opportunities of crisis to gain power and wealth. But why should we relinquish talk of crisis to elites? I am not convinced that the imperative to act on the ecological crisis requires suspending debate or limiting reflection. On the contrary, it requires deeper debate and reflection, even if the timescales are tight.

      I am also worried about a related trend: the normalization of crisis. In May 2019, the Guardian wrote that they were changing their house style for referring to the climate: ‘Instead of “climate change” the preferred terms are “climate emergency, crisis or breakdown” and “global heating” is favoured over “global warming”.’⁸⁴ This was part of a broader shift towards perpetual talk of crisis in the media and public culture. However, the way that the media both sensationalizes and normalizes crisis has the danger of desensitizing us, robbing