Plastic Waste and the Environmental Crisis Industry

Our relationship with plastic is complex. While the societal benefits of plastic are undeniable, plastic has also come to occupy a central role within a culture of waste and disposable living that constitutes a significant problem for health and the natural environment. Public awareness of the harms asociated with plastic is high, thanks, in part, to a range of sustained media exposure. This, however, has so far failed to materialize in any significant global reduction in plastic pollution. Meaningful regulatory change that adressess the harms of plastic at the point of production is curiously absent, while some apparent gains have been rolled back—against a backdrop of a global pandemic and a rehabilitation of plastic. This article highlights the assemblage of media, government and corporate interests that performs the role of what we identify as the “Environmental Crisis Industry” (“ECI”), which perpetuates stasis in the face of environmental catastrphe. The ECI manages our anxieties through media discourses of precarity and danger, while at the same time, offering us attainable “solutions” that exist well within the logic of consumer capitalism—in effect, compelling us (at least morally) to become eco-consumers. In this way, the political energy of grassroots climate resistance is “pre-corporated,” so to speak, into the product design of major corporations, dissipating the chance of real progressive change in favor of a new green spirit of capitalism.