Plastic Ubiquity and Mut(e)abilities: The Unfolding Sociomaterialities of Plastic

Abstract

Mutability, the capacity for multiple functions and forms, is a quality associated with plastics – custom-designed synthetic materials. However, based on an ethnographic trajectory comprising practical apprenticeship, and extensive (participant) observation of processes with plastic waste in the Indian city of Ahmedabad, this thesis demonstrates that plastic’s mutability is not fixed, or given. In other words, plastic’s ontology – its plasticity – is contextual, emergent and complex. It shows that plastic mutabilities are relational; embedded within and conditional upon a nexus of heterogeneous relations, at-once social and material – sociomaterial. Furthermore, to enact plastic mutability is to also re-assemble these historical relations in significant ways.

A liminal period of regulatory implementation within solid waste management is scrutinised. Here, the Indian state partners with private waste collection and processing firms to elaborate a federal and regional infrastructure to reclaim plastic waste for incineration-based projects of profit extraction. In the process of neoliberalisation, pre-existing networks of plastic localisation and recycling self-organised among the gendered lower-caste urban poor are marginalised, and their time-tested community-based processes enacting plastic recyclability are curtailed – ‘muted’. These mutings are shown both as accretions of older legacies (caste, colonisation, etc.) of extraction and abandonment, and as differently re-enacted. In actuality, the present infrastructure remains patchy across sites and scales of practice, encountering all kinds of frictions and transpiring in complex ways that significantly betray planned patterns of incinerability. As the ‘system’ fails practically, but persists nevertheless as an extractionary arrangement, a range of hacks, alternative routines, and modes of plastic waste circulation emerge in the responses of dissatisfied urban communities and practical networks which re-combine and re-enact plastic recyclability. These often involve state representatives in collaborative localised arrangements, for instance, as consignments of incinerable plastic waste get diverted into recycling networks. However, such penumbral possibilities also enable obfuscating the failures of the neoliberal infrastructure. Networked processes of plastic mutability (recyclability and incinerability) thus entwine and emerge together in ways that engender new forms of muting and mutation. As such, socio-economic, and political possibilities open up (mutation) but also close down (muting) continually, constitutive of processes that succeed or fail to enact plastic materiality in specific ways. We map such complex cross-cutting processes and possibilities by the concept of plastic mut(e)ability.

As communities, infrastructures, and environments struggle with the ever-increasing accumulation and complexity of ubiquitous plastic waste, the thesis offers a timely intervention, contextually studying wider possibilities that emerge in the presence of plastics. Contributing to ongoing deliberations within Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies on empirical ontologies of plastic, the thesis also addresses matters of concern to policy-makers, public-facing practitioners, citizens, and activists.