By Bjorn Mustard1
My home is a family of four: my partner and I, my best friend, and our kitty. Our kitty is the main event, an incredibly social and involved family member, she demands her own little cup at the table (otherwise she will claim ours). When her cup gets low, she demands it be refilled. She starts pushing it around with the threat of spilling what remains in protest. We oblige, pouring from our own plastic cups until the water is high enough that she can drink without squashing her whiskers. I can remember learning about the endocrine disruptors in plastics in an environmental science class in high school and reflecting on my favorite plastic cup, the pink one from a breast cancer event with my grandmother, and thinking, how could this be harming me? It seems so innocuous, we all use plastic containers, don’t we? I put those thoughts out of my head for years but came back to them in writing this essay. When the water tastes strange after sitting out a couple of days, is that just James City County tap water tasting weird? Is that the plastic in the cups off-gassing into our beverages? As a loving parent, I want to protect my kitty from those chemicals, but then I must remember, it is the same water I am giving myself. These are the same cups that I am using. These are the same plastics that I have been using for years and will continue to use for years, these chemicals are already a part of me and my kitty.
Microplastics are everywhere: in the ice caps at the North and South Poles, in the deepest trenches of the ocean, in drinking water, in air, and found in bodies from the largest to the smallest of organisms. But the chemical/pollutive influences of plastics are not limited to their presence in bodies and the environment, their true chemical influence comes from the materials that get trapped in their synthetic bonds when they are made. These chemicals off-gas, or release into the environment due to the unstable bonds, giving plastic its signature smells. Given the explosion of plastic’s use since its invention, and the issue of plastic pollution in oceans, how is the more-than-human collective making chemical kinship with its presence?
How are ocean animals living with/in plastic?
To start, we have the phenomenon of rafting, when fish, anemones, and microscopic critters live in/on plastic as it floats around. For example, a crate full of coral reef fish found floating in open waters by volunteers (De Wolff, 2017). With the shelter plastic provides, more-than-humans can travel across seas! Though, this creates problems when human clean-up efforts go to remove the plastic. Is it right to leave the plastic there or do you kick out the hitchhikers and leave them to become invasive or devoured in nonnative waters?
More-than-human and plastic distinctions get blurry when plastic embeds itself in bodies of salps, jellyfish, and other filter feeders. Small pieces of plastic are often found in the bodies of sea critters seen in ocean clean-up efforts, challenging volunteers to train their eyes to distinguish the plastic within from the plastic around (De Wolff, 2017). When pieces of plastic cross the water-body barrier, efforts to remove plastics would require invasive surgeries. These realities push us to expand how we think about the presence of plastic in the oceans as all-encompassing and embodied.
The real problem with plastic is that there is so much of it, and it is not biodegradable, so it breaks up into microplastics suspended in water. However, there is new hope in terms of the biodegradability of plastic. More-than-human nature is adaptive and has developed organisms that can break plastic down. These are termed “plastivores,” and one of the first examples were wax worms who have developed digestive microbes that consume the carbons in plastic. Scientists are working on isolating this process to make it work at a large scale with the goal of ridding the world of plastic waste (Why scientists say ‘plastivores’ could be the solution to plastic pollution — WHYY). These dreams of mass plastic removal will take time to achieve, which gives us time to ask questions. Where will the chemicals in plastics go when they are broken down (Gabrys, 2013)? Are they released into the environment? Into the organism who consumed them? How will they become biomagnified in the bodies of the more-than-humans that consume those organisms? When considering the chemical afterlives of plastics, it is hard to imagine how they can be biodegradable and harmless. But what are the chemical afterlives of plastic?
What is in plastic? What are the effects?
Let’s start with how plastic is made: fossil fuels are extracted and refined to remove ethane and propane, then high pressure or temperatures are applied to transform those into ethylene and propylene, finally through polymerization the individual monomers are linked to form polyethylene and polypropylene, the two major types of plastic (How is Plastic Made? A Step-by-Step Explanation (thomasnet.com)). Throughout this process, plastic is known to absorb potentially harmful chemicals and can carry and spread additives, plasticizers, flame retardants, Bisphenol-A (BPA) and phthalates. It also continues to absorb and concentrate chemicals, including those in seawater, throughout its existence, making the true chemical burdens of microplastics in oceans practically unknowable (Gabrys, 2013:212). These chemicals leak out of plastic into air and water in a process called off-gassing, which is what gives plastics their smells (Tracing Chemical Intimacies – Engagement (wordpress.com)). This makes the physical impact of plastic in more-than-human bodies two-fold: physical blockages and the chemical disruption of endocrine systems (Gabrys 2013:212). Thinking about plastics as more than their physical form, but also the chemicals held within and released from them pushes our understanding of the oceans as a soup of both plastic bits and plastic chemicals.
Making Kin and Chemical Kinship
Kinship, and the idea of making kin, is often limited to the biological family, but many people form kinship bonds untraditionally, like my home. Kinship anthropology studies these familial relationships and the affective processes of care and kin making through cultural practices. Multi-species kinship pushes our thinking about how we make kin with more-than-humans. Like how the routine of placing and filling a cup for our cat shows our care and connects her to us. Care is a primary way these bonds are formed and expressed, which involves affective engagement in space, an ethics of care, and an understanding of interdependency (Lau, 2022). We can further push our thinking with the idea of chemical kinship which asks us to think about chemicals we are exposed to, not as harmful pollutants but as a part of us and our world that is owed responsibility and care (Balayannis and Garnett, 2020). Chemicals from plastics may be harmful, but this lens pushes us to care for and think with them as they are in and around us and the more-than-human environment. We can apply these concepts to the examples of how more-than-humans are living with/in plastic soup. They have all made chemical kinship with plastic and its chemicals, as have we, and interdependency connects us with more-than-humans in a universal chemical kinship with plastic.
Works Cited
Balayannis, Angeliki, and Emma Garnett. (2020). “Chemical Kinship: Interdisciplinary Experiments with Pollution.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 6(1): 1-10.
De Wolff, Kim. (2017). “Plastic Naturecultures: Multispecies Ethnography and the Dangers of Separating Living from Nonliving Bodies.” Body and Society, 23(3): 23-47.
Gabrys, Jennifer. (2013). “Plastic and the Work of the Biodegradable.” In Accumulation: The Material Politics of Plastic. Jennifer Gabrys, Gay Hawkins, and Mike Michael, eds. 208-227. New York: Routledge.
Jaworski, Sophia. (2017). “Tracing Chemical Intimacies.” Engagement: A Blog Published by the Anthropology and Environment Society. Tracing Chemical Intimacies – Engagement (wordpress.com)
Lau, Justin Chun-Him. (2022). “Towards a Care Perspective on Waste: A New Direction in Discard Studies.” Politics and Space, 1-17.
Nikolovska, Gracija. (2023). “How is Plastic Made? A Step-by-Step Explanation.” Thomas. How is Plastic Made? A Step-by-Step Explanation (thomasnet.com)
Tung, Liz. (2021). “Why Scientists Say ‘Plastivores’ Could be the Solution to Plastic Pollution.” WHYY. https://whyy.org/segments/why-scientists-say-plastivores-could-be-the-solution-to-plastic-pollution/
Bjorn is a recent graduate from William & Mary with a BA in Sociology. His environmental interest in waste and its effects is inspired by experiences with the Campania Waste Crisis in and around Naples, Italy. Further academic interests include LGBT and Disability Studies. Recent work includes: Mustard, Bjorn, “Gay and Gray with Something to Say: Internalizing Gender and Internalized Homophobia in Lesbians and Gay Men 60 and Over” (2023). Undergraduate Honors Theses. William & Mary. Paper 2071. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses/2071
Afternatures 
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