This is an absolutely groundbreaking documentary about plastic and petrochemicals as the very material of today’s capitalism and the primary contributor to the worldwide microplastics catastrophe. Plastic is both a hyperobject in Timothy Morton’s sense of ecology after the End of the World, but also a result of synthetic and alchemical worldbuilding and the role of nature, organic and inorganic in Western aesthetics.
In Eastern Europe, we were till recently quite lucky to not have access to disposable plastics, but this history extends back to the WWII, the ramping up of plastics for US military production and then the re-diverting all that huge productivity and growth into consumer products and the new buying power of the middle classess. Everyone wanted cheap plastics, but the untold story is how, at each tur,n the petrochemical bloc (Exxon Mobile, DuPont, and others) promoted a “disposable future”, the ideal of eliberating the domestic space by inducing a throwaway plastics culture.
The documentary combines biomedical research, cancer research, and environmental activism, at many scales, from the lab into the field, from the great patch of plastics in the Pacific to the presence of plastic-related components in brain tumors and human placenta to the plasticization of all the Earth’s trophic food chains. But it also highlights plastic-free communities and the struggling countries of the Global South in their bid (especially Rwanda) to outlaw plastic production and curtail waste colonialism (the way unrecyclable, toxic spewing plastic waste is being dumped in Turkey, Romania, the Philippines from rich countries). No one is left untouched by this.
Also a must-read in relation to this documentary, the rarely discussed role of petrochemical families like the DuPont’s in the making of today’s plutocracy.
TimeSpace Warps 