Introduction

In Romania, plastic waste is highly visible and engenders various reactions, from indifference to debate and action.

In April 2021, Mara (woman, cultural journalist, mid-thirties), posted on Facebook a photo with a riverbank covered in PET bottles. The accompanying message read as follows: ‘Every time I walk in nature, I catch a glimpse of what the future is starting to look like.’ Many shared or liked this post, while others debated what to do in these circumstances, what were the best strategies to educate people that plastics were polluting materials not to be carelessly disposed of, and who must be held responsible for plastic pollution, corporations or consumers, with many pointing at the first category of actors.

I archived this conversation while researching the perception of plastics as an environmental issue (the conversation and its cause are by no means exclusive to Romania; all over the world, people are becoming aware that plastics permeate bodies and environments, simultaneously supporting and problematising their present and future; in other parts of the world too, for different reasons, people drop plastics on the ground in public places).

Here I use the conversation as the background for an invitation to also consider the reversed perspective and ponder over how plastics themselves play a role in their transformation from the ordinary stuff of everyday life to the extraordinary stuff of environmentalism.

This invitation builds on a recent turn in social sciences and humanities toward the more-than-human. This means the acknowledgement of the existence of a diversity of agentive entities—always more than (just) human actors, from plants, animals, materials, objects to soils, waters, mountains, glaciers, ghosts, and ancestors—that together participate in the making of our world. Moreover, the invitation draws on the ever-growing scientific documentation of the vibrant, but harmful agency of plastics, from extraction from fossil fuels to decomposition into microplastics and nano-plastics, and from storage that produces leachate to incineration that releases toxicants.

To demonstrate that plastics can be seen as consequential also in ways that are socially and culturally relevant, I employ a series of ethnographic vignettes. I draw on observations I made and conversations I took part in, overheard, or read during my ongoing online and offline research.

Vignette 1: Post-consumer plastics

In the summer of 2022, Fundația9, a cultural centre in Bucharest, announced a forthcoming art installation that would portray a life that plastics exceeded and suffocated. The project aimed to raise awareness about the irresponsible consumption of plastic. The centre asked the public to get involved in its realisation, by donating their proverbial ‘bag with bags’ and helping artists to turn these bags into artwork (the ‘bag with bags’ refers to a widespread practice of storing plastic bags for subsequent uses, including the so-called ‘single use’ plastic bags). I was one of the volunteers who cut bags into the stripes that an artist used to weave a carpet and taped together half bags into the sheets with which another artist plastered walls inside the centre. Both artists (women, early forties) remarked how overwhelming the mass of plastic bags was and how it helped them visualise that plastic had engulfed us. Yet, while they were working with these bags and were learning how to handle this slippery, flimsy, or thick material, I also sensed—and they confirmed—that plastic was becoming yet another material they utilised, no different than their paints, clippings, or papers. Plastic was turning, thus, into the ordinary stuff of artistic practice, subverting the artists’ initial perception.

Vignette 2: Plastic rubbish bins

In July 2022, at a family gathering, Tudor (man, low-ranking public servant, early forties) proudly informed everyone that bins for separate waste collection were installed around the village, yellow bins for plastics and metals, blue bins for paper and green bins for glass. He also emphasised that people who did not live in the village, like most of those attending this gathering, could rest assured that their plastic bottles would be sent to recycling and transformed into new useful objects. Florică (man, retired foreman, early eighties) burst into laughter and asked Tudor, his nephew, if he thought he lived in Germany. Florică added that people could not help but notice the bins, colourful as they were, three here, three there, but that did not mean that they would automatically begin to use them. Tudor admitted that he reproduced lines from the mayor’s speech. He, personally, found the presence of plastic bins rather annoying, for one could hardly ignore them and the rubbish they contained. Waste was something to be kept out of sight and not in front of the house in colourful bins.

Vignette 3: Micro-plastics

In November 2022, the documentary „Swim to the sea” had its premiere in Bucharest, in the presence of its main protagonist and the director. This documentary followed Andreas Fath, a professor of chemistry at Furtwangen University who, in the spring of 2022, swam the entire Danube River, from the Black Forest to the Black Sea, to attract media and public attention to plastic pollution. Fath was involved in the project “cleandanube”, that AWP, a German association for wildlife protection, initiated. The project aimed to understand this type of pollution and communicate the scientific results to the public.

A Romanian NGO, More Green (Mai mult verde), organised this event in Bucharest. With the financial support of Lidl Romania, this NGO run its own programme for combating plastic pollution on the Danube River, titled „With clean waters” (Cu apele curate).

During the Q&A session, a man asked the director why he had not shown plastic waste floating on the water. The director explained that the documentary was less about what we could see, and more about what we could not see, namely the microplastics that we could hardly hope to ever retrieve from the water. After the Q&A, I overheard a conversation between the representative of the NGO and an acquaintance of hers (both in their mid-thirties). The man confessed that he too wondered why there was no plastic waste in the documentary. She explained that „in Germany, they are a bit ahead of us. We organise clean-ups, they already talk about microplastic”. The man replied: „yes, you cannot see microplastic!”.

Vignette 4: Waste colonialism

In the spring of 2022, after the premiere of „Waste” in Stuttgart, a Deutsche Welle journalist interviewed its Romanian playwright and director, Gianina Cărbunariu (woman, mid-forties), on her reasons for choosing this topic. Cărbunariu straightforwardly linked the play with the documentary “Cement’s dirty business”, a journalistic investigation into the international cement industry and the illegal imports of wastes from different EU countries, Germany included, to be burned in the waste-to-energy incinerators that fuelled their plants in Romania. The documentary prompted her to start her own documentation through visits and conversations with people living in the vicinity of cement plants where such incinerators operated and impacted negatively on them and the environment. The result was this highly appreciated play, a manifestation of her belief in the force of theatre to make people reflect and act on this European problem.

As these vignettes illustrate, plastics might play various roles in their transformation from ordinary to extraordinary stuff, both supporting and subverting it, as agents of sorts in our more-than-human world. An analysis of our changing relationship to plastics, in Romania or elsewhere, could only benefit from sensitivity to the agentic capacities of these unruly materials. This is, I argue, both an analytical and political stance.

Note to the reader: I am currently working to expand the ethnographic focus of this project. If you know of researchers with environmental agenda or are aware of plastic-focused activities in countries in Southeast Europe, do get in touch with me (magda.craciun@sas.unibuc.ro). Many thanks in advance!

Further Literature:

Bond, D. 2022. Negative Ecologies: Fossil Fuels and the Discovery of the Environment. Oakland: University of California Press.

Lorimer, J. 2017. ‘The Anthropo-scene: A Guide for the Perplexed’, Social Studies of Science 47 (1): 117–142.

Rubin, E. 2008. Synthetic Socialism: Plastics and Dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.