Baptiste Monsaingeon is a sociologist, lecturer at the University of Reims-Champagne-Ardenne, author ofHomo detritus. Criticism of the waste society (Threshold, 2017).
How did plastics come to take up so much space in our lives?
From the point of view of social imaginations, plastics are correlated with hygiene, a movement marked by the appearance of garbage cans at the end of the 19th century.e century. The idea that a used object is a potential vector of pathologies is gaining ground. What will lead to “single use” from the second half of the 20the century. If this logic has become a global standard of consumption, it did not wait for the modern era to exist. At the end of the XIXe century, we invented feminine hygiene in single-use cotton and we promoted the disposable shirt collar…
Initially, are plastics considered ephemeral?
The question of the imagination that we incorporate into these materials is fundamental. In 1955, the American magazine Life advocates eliminational consumerism by publishing a headline photo of a family throwing plastic plates, cups and cutlery into the air, to praise the liberation of women through the disappearance of household chores. The title seems surreal today: “Throwaway living”, “the disposable way of life”.
When does waste start to be seen as a problem?
Originally, plastics appeared as a means of adding value to products resulting from petroleum refining. It is interesting to note that plastics are therefore themselves the fruit of a form of waste, the geological waste resulting from putrefaction over millions of years. In public opinion, the shift took place with the media coverage of floating on the surface of the oceans and the discovery of a “plastic continent” in the Pacific by Charles Moore in 1997.
Why has this awareness not been followed by effects?
At the time, we tell ourselves that it does not matter, that we will collect this waste and treat it. This is what the Dutch ecologist Boyan Slat has been doing since the 2010s. He was then 17 years old. Presented as a genius, he collects a lot of money thanks to Instagram and finances floating barges, which he sends to fish out the plastics at sea. However, this solution is not one. The challenge is not so much to clean the surface of the oceans as to turn off the plastics production tap. Otherwise, everything will start all over again.
Where does the feeling come from that humanity will not be able to get rid of it?
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