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Science as Culture

ISSN: 0950-5431 (Print) 1470-1189 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csac20

Reflections of an Unrepentant Plastiphobe: Plasticity and the STS Life

Jody A. Roberts

To cite this article: Jody A. Roberts (2010) Reflections of an Unrepentant Plastiphobe: Plasticity and the STS Life, Science as Culture, 19:1, 101-120, DOI: 10.1080/09505430903557916

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Reflections of an Unrepentant Plastiphobe: Plasticity and the STS Life

JODY A. ROBERTS

Chemical Heritage Foundation, USA

ABSTRACT My adventures with plastic have provided a personalized tour of many of the

tools and concepts that STS scholars use to unpack the lives of others. This essay explores

my efforts to figure out how to use those tools and concepts on my own life. Examining

those efforts has required me to assess the tension between my academic investigations

into the toxicity of the plastic materials of everyday life and the ways my own life’s

possibilities—and in particular the life of my daughter—are inextricably linked to those

materials. Drawing on recent work in STS, particularly that of Donna Haraway, I

suggest that these experiences are a form of ‘becoming with’ the world. In a larger

sense, I argue that they offer an opportunity for a more politically engaged scholarship

and hope in knowing that STS interventions can matter. This essay situates my work

within current STS scholarship that examines concepts of risk, facts, and uncertainty.

Ultimately, it aims to use the plasticity of my STS life as a way to demonstrate how our

scholarly focus on the politics of risk might be incorporated into advocacy for a politics

of concern.

KEY WORDS: Plastiphobe, toxicity of plastics, STS engagement, STS intervention,

matters of concern

Introduction

I’m looking at a picture of my daughter, Helena, when she was about six weeks

old. It was finally cold enough here in Philadelphia in late October for her to

use some gifts she had been accumulating since before she was born. In the

picture, she’s wearing a red hat covered with flowers, some cotton pants, socks

that are barely hanging onto her feet, a couple of socks for her hands, and a

Science as Culture

Vol. 19, No. 1, 101 – 120, March 2010

Correspondence Address: Jody A. Roberts, Chemical Heritage Foundation, 315 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia,

PA 19106, USA. Email: [email protected]

0950-5431 Print/1470-1189 Online/10/010101-20 # 2010 Process Press DOI: 10.1080/09505430903557916

blue hooded sweatshirt with ‘FUTURE PLASTIPHOBE’ emblazoned across

the front. She also has a soft plastic tube extending out from her right nostril

(see Figure 1). The sweatshirt was conceived, designed, and received before

anyone could have known just how much plastic would be dangling from

Helena in these early weeks of life, but the irony was not lost on my wife,

Carrie, and me.

In the early hours of 22 August 2007, Helena was born. It had been a long trip.

Carrie endured three days of prodromal labor, but shortly before 4 am our daughter

emerged. It remains the most fascinating moment I’ve ever experienced. But I

don’t reflect on it much. It has been overshadowed by the moments that followed.

Forty-five minutes after she was born, Helena stopped breathing. We’re not sure

for how long, but we know what it took to get the breathing started again. The

nurse and the midwives kept air pumping into her lungs while we awaited the

arrival of the NICU doctor. Our (mostly) unmedicalized pregnancy and birth

experiences were being replaced with a hyper-medicalized post-birth. When the

doctor arrived, he immediately intubated Helena. The long plastic tube now con-

nected her lungs to the outside world, ensuring that air would continue to pass into

her lungs and preventing her body from deciding otherwise.

Figure 1. Future plastiphobe. Credit: Jody Roberts.

102 J. A. Roberts

The proceeding weeks saw plastic tubing come and go. When intubation no

longer seemed necessary, a nasal cannula carried fresh air into her nose,

helping her to maintain an adequate supply of oxygen. A variety of plastic

tubes carried a variety of fluids from a variety of plastic bags offering pharmaceu-

ticals, nourishment, and—just once—blood. In the early days it was easy to stay

distracted from the questions that occasionally crossed my mind. We were uncer-

tain about so many things that I rarely had time to think about the atmosphere, the

environment of the NICU. But eventually, I began wondering: what other chemi-

cals are entering Helena’s fragile new body along with the medications, and

electrolytes, and eventually breastmilk (lovingly and dutifully pumped through

plastic flanges into plastic bottles and bags)?

Reconfiguring our home to accommodate Helena’s cerebral palsy has meant a

continuation of many of the practices (and the presence of many of the materials

that make those practices possible) that we first encountered in the NICU.

Helena’s plastic G-tube provides an alternative portal that now connects the

outside world with the inside world of her stomach where food can be directly

deposited. Every bit of nourishment that reaches her body passes through that

plastic button and the plastic tube that connects it to syringes and feeding bags.

And now that she’s no longer receiving breastmilk, each of her meals involves

a furious blending in a sturdy polycarbonate blender.

It was different before she was born. I was still living in a world synthetically

fabricated from the miraculous molecules of the twentieth century, but things

didn’t feel quite so intimate (see Casper, 2003). And I had more control. I

wasn’t boiling plastic bottles. And I wasn’t connecting the plastic tube extending

from Helena’s stomach to a plastic bag filled with breastmilk or her blended foods.

In the days when Helena still received breastmilk exclusively, I could not help but

laugh at the irony that dominated our lives. With loving effort and care, Carrie and

I worked to make sure that what she ate, and thus entered her milk, remained as

free of potential toxins as we could possibly manage; then we placed it into a

plastic bag to be pumped through Helena’s plastic tube into her stomach.

In what follows, I draw from these experiences to demonstrate the ways in

which I have become interested in my topics, not simply as a scholarly activity,

but because I encounter them in my everyday life. For me, Science and Technol-

ogy Studies (STS) has always lived in a precarious place. We’ve stood on the

margins in order to celebrate the peripheral while criticizing the center for believ-

ing it is the center. We’ve drawn networks of interest, influence, and power, but

failed to fully engage the fact that we, too, are parts of these networks. In fighting

against the power that objectivity has given to the technoscientific enterprise, we

have perhaps inadvertently found ourselves mimicking it. Here, I write specifi-

cally and purposefully from the personal perspective. I do this as my own way

of bringing the personal (back?) into STS, though it has never really been

missing. More importantly, I’m writing this as a way of bringing together the

various threads of my life.

Reflections of an Unrepentant Plastiphobe 103

This is a story of the futility of resistance and the inevitability of accommodation

(see Pickering, 1995). It details what happens when one finally discovers just

how situated one is inside the networks that STS scholars attempt to outline,

trace, and uncover. This essay, as the others in this issue, brings these strands—

professional, personal, academic, activist—together to demonstrate how my

personal narrative situates me in a world where these plastic artifacts populate

my everyday life. Will I, will we, continue to argue about matters of fact,

playing along with the politics of uncertainty, doubt, and denial, or will I help to

translate these debates into ones that focus on ‘matters of concern’ (Latour, 2004)?

Plastiphobia—A Definition

I am a plastiphobe. At work, people taunt me with plastic stirrers sitting in their

freshly poured cups of coffee. They tell me how they just warmed up their

lunch in a plastic container. They feign horror as they sip from their plastic

water bottles. After I delivered an informal lunch presentation about some of

my research, attention shifted away from the issue of plastics generally towards

that of ‘EDs’ (endocrine disruptors) more specifically. They understood enough

of the talk to find new ways to mock me. ‘Uh-oh, Jody, are there any EDs in

this?’ (Probably, but that’s not why you’re asking.) The abuse doesn’t stop at

the office. My sister tells my brother that she is beginning to worry about phtha-

lates in cosmetics; he warns her to be careful about how much she asks me. And

while they joke, the experience of being a plastiphobe is real. It becomes manifest

in the things that I see—the visible products we confront everyday—as well as in

what I can’t see, but nonetheless know happens—the processes that make these

products possible.

Staring at an individual object, or more likely dozens of those objects lined up

together on a shelf, I can’t help but sense the entire life cycle of plastic, from

unearthed raw material to a destiny that will likely take it to landfill or ocean. I

stand staring at rows of items on store shelves wondering which might be the

least awful for me to purchase. I have a drawer in an office filing cabinet

stuffed with plastic bags because I cannot bring myself to throw them away, but

don’t know what else to do with them. When I look at a teabag steeping in a

cup of hot water, I can’t help but wonder what the bag is made of and whether

or not it is breaking down in the presence of near boiling water. When I plug in

the humidifier in the bedroom to combat the dry heat of our radiators, I wonder

what might be accompanying the steam as the water exits its polycarbonate con-

tainer. I start to wonder where all of the finely ground pieces that once constituted

my shoe sole end up after they have worn off. My concerns are not necessarily

bound to plastics, but the category serves as a convenient placeholder for the

questions and uncertainties about the chemicals of and in our modern world.

In most circles, human health and environmental health are dealt with separ-

ately. We have different regulatory agencies in the United States for addressing

104 J. A. Roberts

these problems. We have different academic departments, journals, and degrees. It

would seem as though humans live in another world, somehow altogether separate

from the world in which we actually inhabit. Synthetic chemicals, plastic or not,

bridge these worlds. What is out there is now in us. Plastic might be poisoning us

while it is also littering our landscapes, filling our landfills, and polluting our

oceans. It is not only the plastic entering us that causes me concern; it is also

the plastic that we readily discard to the ‘other’ world.

I sometimes blame my plastiphobia on my STS training. If that’s the case,

though, I’ve betrayed a key axiom of the field: its commitment to symmetry

(Bloor, 1976). At a workshop on expertise in 2006, I related the story of the pes-

ticide atrazine and the ultimate non-decision decision of the US Environmental

Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate it further (Weiss, 2004). Officials at the

EPA claimed they could not yet classify endocrine disruption as an endpoint of

concern. I wanted to point out the failure of the system of expertise to protect

me from the atrazine-laced rain that fell on me as I walked from my apartment

to my office, rain that contained enough atrazine to create a male frog with

ovaries and eggs (Hayes et al., 2002a, 2002b).

In an email exchange following the conference, another participant implied

that my personal judgment—that the system of expertise that guided legal and

regulatory protections from chemicals—was inappropriate because I was not in

a place to judge that system. Instead, as an STS scholar, my job was to investigate

and describe the system. But how could I ignore the fact that their decision led

to direct consequences for my everyday life? I realize now that while I had

intended to use the scientific controversy surrounding atrazine as a way of

highlighting the continuing process by which scientific knowledge is recon-

structed, a fairly benign STS investigation, I had clearly already accepted the

conclusions (and therefore the position) of researchers involved in pointing out

the endocrine disrupting effects of many of our most commonly used synthetic

chemicals. That is, I had sacrificed my symmetrical stance to the arguments,

clearly embracing one over the other. I had become interested in the debate

precisely because I could not ignore my own situatedness. The rain falling on

me undoubtedly contained atrazine, a fact that seemed as though it ought to

make the issue a clear concern.

At stake is more than just a scholarly debate about epistemology. These are the

elements of a lived reality. The debate for me is about more than plastic or pesti-

cides, but about navigating a way through a world made of plastic and made

plastic by the artifacts of our technoscientific infrastructure. In our era of reflexive

modernity we must come to grips with a technoscientific world run amok (Beck,

1992; Giddens, 1991). Or, perhaps more appropriately, we must realize that we

might be facing a runaway reaction. Unlike Beck or Giddens, though, I’m wres-

tling with my own participation in this system. I struggle to remake things

before it’s too late, even though I feel more enmeshed in the things to be

remade than I ever have in the past. 1

Reflections of an Unrepentant Plastiphobe 105

Becoming a Plastiphobe

The twentieth century bears the marks of a host of technoscientific triumphs

over nature. Physicists, with the help of chemists, learned to smash atoms

together, threatening both the built environment of human societies and the

natural world as well. The emergence of modern genetics likewise provided

new tools for technoscientists to construct new organisms with heightened pre-

cision and frightening amounts of unknown consequences. The century was also

one in which the molecular make-up of the world was irrevocably altered in a

multitude of ways. The growth of the organic chemicals industry, birthed in the

nineteenth century building dyes and fertilizers, changed gears; as nations went

to war, so did chemists. Pesticides and poisons (one in the same, really) became

mainstays of the chemical research lab (Russell, 2001). While chemists in labs

were creating new molecular substances, chemical engineers were developing

more efficient ways of mass producing them (Ndiaye, 2007). With the war

machine consuming nature’s bounty, and with U-boats blocking the global

trade so vital to wartime production, chemists expanded their research into

the production of synthetic molecules for the replacement of nature’s goods.

New plastics, which had familial relations to the early compounds that went

by the names of celluloid and Bakelite, were of a different sort. They came

in infinite varieties, could be put to use in a variety of situations, and most

importantly could be created in tremendous quantities. The flow of plastics

didn’t abate after the war, they just entered new markets. People produced

more polymers, and the plastics kept piling up. That’s the world we live in

now: a plastic paradise. 2

The Place of Plastics

Plastics, or any of the molecular markers of the modern chemical industry, don’t

stay put. They are unruly technologies. Recent advances in human biomonitor-

ing studies conducted by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

(CDC) have sought to quantify, in some fractional way, the level of exposure

by everyday Americans to synthetic chemicals. As new techniques are devel-

oped, the list of chemicals sought out, and found, in our blood, urine, fat, breast-

milk, and other organic tissues and fluids increases (CDC, 2005). 3

As new

techniques have become available, the CDC has begun supplementing pre-

viously published reports with their new results, including one for bisphenol-

A (BPA).

BPA has become, in the last several years, the favorite battleground for indus-

try, health, and regulatory wrangling because of its pervasiveness in the market-

place and its specific uses in products designed for children (such as baby

bottles). The results of these new tests, conducted between 2003 and 2004,

found BPA in 92.6% of all people tested (see Calafat et al., 2008). Given the

106 J. A. Roberts

uses of the chemical, this finding was perhaps not terribly surprising. But if the

number of us carrying BPA in our bodies isn’t terribly surprising, then its concen-

tration in us has been somewhat startling. BPA is hydrophilic, so it doesn’t bond to

our fat cells. It therefore finds its way out of our systems relatively quickly (so we

think), on the order of about 24 hours. New results from meta-studies of the

exposure data seem inconsistent with these understandings, leading at least one

research team to suggest that either BPA stays in us much longer than we think

or we’re being exposed in more ways than we can currently account for in our

exposure models (see Stahlhut et al., 2009).

The debates about BPA are just a microcosm of the larger landscape. Hundreds

of industrial chemicals—from plasticizers and pesticides to flame retardants and

solvents—are now reliably located in the bodies of every resident of the US.

This fact, however, has been difficult to translate into other contexts, particularly

regulatory ones. 4

The CDC (2005) keeps mum on possible links between its bio-

monitoring data and possible health consequences because by and large no one has

ever looked for any connections. Industry activists emphasize the same lack of

correlative evidence, 5

but while the CDC has been careful not to overstate the

case and industry activists have systemically understated it, environmental and

health-focused organizations have used the data (from the CDC as well as self-

generated) to raise a host of concerns. 6

Another way of putting it is to say that while the CDC and industry activists

may argue that proof of presence does not equal proof of harm, proof of non-

harm (such that it is possible) has also been elusive. 7

At this point, it may even

be difficult to understand what that harm will look like. Will it come in the

form of cancer, obesity, infertility? And when will these effects become manifest:

late in life, in my children, in my children’s children? 8

While we may not know,

the fact that we are asking these questions is an indication itself that some knowl-

edge has emerged and that the politics are changing. The molecular transformation

of the Earth’s ecosystems currently taking place should, at the very least, be a

matter of concern for all of us, especially when it comes to protecting members

of vulnerable populations—like my child.

I don’t know much about developmental embryology, but I do know that it’s

complicated, a carefully integrated process of cell growth, expansion, and special-

ization. At the root of much of this process is the constant chemical wash the fetus

experiences, hormones flowing in from the mother and soon from its own devel-

oping endocrine system. BPA, phthalates, organo-phosphate and -chlorine pesti-

cides, polybrominated diphenylether (PBDE) and other flame retardants,

polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), dioxins, and other chemicals encountered on

a daily basis have all been shown, to varying degrees, to disrupt this delicate

and absolutely crucial process. But understanding what this meant for my—

our—lives was much less clear. How should I change my daily routine? Would

it matter? What would it take to extract myself from the fabric of our society?

Perhaps more simply, how are we to live? 9

Reflections of an Unrepentant Plastiphobe 107

A Plastic Pregnancy

If people found me a little unstable for my reactions to all things plastic, the

experience of Carrie’s pregnancy only intensified the situation. Items and

actions that had previously been acceptable were suddenly excluded. Nalgene

bottle? Off limits. It got replaced with an unlined stainless steel container. Straw-

berries? Out. They’re nothing but congealed pesticides. Navigating our way

through a plastic-laden world had always been difficult, but now with even

more at stake, the task became maddening.

The peak of frustration came roughly seven months into the pregnancy. Carrie,

exhausted from sleepless nights and back pain, determined one Saturday morning

to finally purchase a new mattress. With literally one foot out of the door, I froze:

what about the flame retardants—the PBDEs? Study after study found them to be

potent endocrine disruptors. Here in the US all furniture (especially mattresses)

must meet strict fire code regulations that result in the dousing of the lining and

stuffing in flame retardants such as PBDE. Why? It would seem that there are

fears that I might light the house on fire if I fall asleep smoking in bed. But my

fear had nothing to do with smoking in bed or dying in an inferno as a result of

something so far removed from my everyday life. Instead, I pictured my head,

Carrie’s head, and the yet to be seen head of our baby lying comfortably together

on this new bed, rhythmically inhaling the flame retardants off-gassing into our

bedroom. I couldn’t go. I couldn’t even bring myself to get out of the door.

Carrie, now nearly in tears from disappointment and frustration, left it to me to

find a way through this tangled mess of knowing and unknowing.

I spent the day searching for alternatives, trying to balance what I thought would

keep us safe with what I could realistically afford to spend, all enmeshed in the

fabric of a cultural and legal network of codes that sought to protect me. It was

the very goal I myself pursued, but with constant aggravation at the ways the

approaches constrained one another (or, more accurately, the ways in which I

was constrained by the system within which I operate). I was, admittedly, attempt-

ing to shop my way to safety [as Andrew Szasz (2009) might put it]. I understood

that. But what alternative did I have? I could write to my congressional represen-

tatives. I could write an op-ed about the persistence of out-dated regulations and the

unforeseen public health problems they had created. I could attempt to research and

write the history of fire codes in the United States. I would trace the parallel devel-

opments in organic chemistry that allowed those codes to be met. And I would look

to find ways to link how the persistence of those chemicals and those practices had

now potentially created a problem far more pervasive than the original problem. Or

I could try my best to buy my way out of the problem. And so I did. I ordered a

wool-filled mattress topper (wool is by nature flame-retardant and therefore

meets US fire codes) that would temporarily relieve us of the uncomfortable

nights without having to purchase something doused in synthetic flame retardants,

which would have simply substituted my sleeplessness for Carrie’s. 10

108 J. A. Roberts

After navigating 40þ weeks of pregnancy, and enduring nearly three days of

‘pre-labor’, we found ourselves at the threshold of two converging worlds.

What had been inside was now ready to be outside. What had been unseen for

so long, but sensed nonetheless, would soon become visible. The skills we care-

fully honed during the pregnancy would have to persist across this divide. We

would need to protect the milk from the same substances that we tried to keep

from passing through the placenta. We would take the same care working in the

outside world as we’d taken when dealing with the inside one. And we’d been

so careful, so vigilant, so exhaustive that we were sure that we’d done everything

we could to protect this fragile developing life from the toxic world it was about to

enter. And when she finally emerged, crying and groping for food and warmth, we

thought we had succeeded—until she stopped breathing.

Enter the NICU

The NICU (neonatal intensive care unit) is an otherworldly place full of signs,

gestures, and rituals that mark the passage between the outside and inside and

that govern the actions of the populations of both sides of the boundary. 11

Our

initial experiences there remain difficult to recall. Given the seriousness of

many of the situations that characterize that space, the place is remarkably

quiet and dark (light becoming a sign that something might be wrong and

that greater observation is required). There is, however, a constant presence

of beeping. It takes a couple of days to fully distinguish between which ones

indicate what and which ones to associate with your child; but while the first

few days were filled with haze, the air soon cleared and we began to see the

place with new eyes.

Carrie and I each had our hang-ups—the baggage that we brought with us from

our other lives that had characterized both how we moved through the pregnancy

and how we’d hoped to raise our child. Carrie was committed to attachment par-

enting. Having spent the previous two years as a social worker for children in

foster care in Philadelphia, she had become acutely aware of the problems that

children face when they are prevented from having an opportunity to bond to a

caregiver. Previous and ongoing studies related to childhood development,

cross-cultural comparisons of parenting practices, and developmental psychology

had only reinforced what she was seeing in her everyday life: kids who do not

form attachments are susceptible to any number of physiological and psychologi-

cal ills immediately and down the road (see, for example, Bowlby, 1958; Cassidy

& Shaver, 1999; Salter Ainsworth et al., 1978; Siegel, 2001).

While attachment parenting involves a variety of different practices, the most

essential are thought to be breastfeeding, babywearing, and co-sleeping. All of

these activities are particularly crucial in the first moments and days of life in

the outside world. Sitting there in the NICU—with Helena attached to three IVs

and a respirator—we were being denied each of these (it was nearly a week

Reflections of an Unrepentant Plastiphobe 109

before we were able to hold her). As IVs came out and attempts to initiate oral

feedings took place, we began to face the prospect that we might be denied

these practices indefinitely.

It took about 10 days for me to finally acknowledge that I was living in a plastic

nightmare. The majority of the babies there were in incubators, like those seen in

an American Chemistry Council’s ‘Essential2’ ad campaign. Luckily, Helena was

not. But she was covered in soft, flexible medical tubing, the kind infamously full

of phthalates. Nearly everything that came in or out of her passed through this

tubing. Of course, it wasn’t only Helena. Plastic is the preferred material in that

environment. Whether formula or breastmilk, everything was stored in polycarbo-

nate—though interestingly the brand being used was supposedly BPA-free, more

an accident we were sure than an intentional move by the hospital. Plastic held her

growing supply of breast milk, collected with the hope that she’d soon be able to

ingest it; plastic bladder bags held the variety of liquids that were slowly pumped

into her; plastic comprised the walls of the bed she lay motionless upon.

My plastiphobia had two different components. Most immediately, I found

myself wondering what was in the particular plastics that were in and attached

to Helena. Which phthalates did they use? How likely were they to leach when

liquids were passed through them? And as Helena moved from IV to nasal

tube, I wondered about this soft tubing dangling down her throat, precisely

placed just inside the opening of her stomach. How resistant would this tubing

be to the acidity of the stomach? Would her body attempt to digest the tube—

this foreign device that would not leave and could not leave?

I tried to talk to some of the nurses about my concerns, but only casually. From

my previous experiences, I knew that most people would not welcome this line of

questioning. Emotionally, I was not in a place to take the gentle ribbing that I had

grown accustomed to at work or at home. And after witnessing their ‘progressive’

views towards breastfeeding, I didn’t trust them to be overly helpful in this area. I

succeeded with them about as much as I did with my co-workers: they knew just

enough to take part in some slight-mocking of my concerns, but without any real

concerns of their own. This became increasingly an issue as we attempted to coax

Helena off the tube. Despite the ‘breast is best’ chant that routinely greeted each

newcomer to the NICU, nurses, doctors, and therapists alike were nearly unani-

mous in their push for bottle feeding (‘it’s just easier for the babies’) and consist-

ently confused Carrie’s milk with formula (also see McCaughey, 2010, this issue).

When we added into this mix concerns that we didn’t want Helena suckling from

plastic nipples, we had for all intents and purposes numbered our days in the

NICU.

But it wasn’t just the plastic flowing in and out of Helena that occupied my

attention. The mounds of plastic that each day and night filled the trash cans in

our one tiny corner of suburban hospital-land left me feeling strangely deflated

and defeated. It was as if that assault on the Earth was just another injury being

perpetrated on Helena. Plastic syringes, bladder bags, pre-measured and mixed

110 J. A. Roberts

formula, tubing, and all the other plastic miscellanea all headed for—I don’t know

where. Somewhere. Somewhere else. Someplace where the Laws of Science no

longer apply (maybe matter can be created and destroyed).

Becoming Plastic

In his essay, ‘Plastic’, Roland Barthes (1957) gets at the fundamental problem in

trying to deal with these mysterious substances. As a substitute for all things,

plastic is everything. As raw matter that can become anything, is it really anything

itself? Plastic is troubling precisely because it lays old categories to waste. In the

half century since Barthes wrote his essay, we’ve witnessed plastic’s emergence in

nearly every aspect of our everyday lives. From transportation to food to clothing

to shelter, we live in a thoroughly plasticized world. This, even if it’s not quite the

one imagined by the plastic pioneers of Barthes’ time (see Morris, 1986; Meikel,

1995). The spread of plastic has been more subtle, and it is for that reason,

perhaps, that experts of all stripes missed it slipping into unintended places, travel-

ing near and far such that nearly every cup of water from the ocean is likely to

contain some plastic in some form of degradation and nearly every human

subject found anywhere on the globe will likely bear the marks of a plastic

modernity. But what are these plastics doing to us? The question, again, is both

the topic of my own research and one I grapple with in my life every day.

Twenty-seven days after Helena was born, and we entered the NICU, we were

discharged. The car was packed with little more than Carrie, Helena, and me, but

the reconstruction of our apartment into a mini-NICU had already taken place.

Waiting for us at home were apnea and pulse/ox meters, two tanks of oxygen, an air pump, an oxygen concentrator, and a month’s supply of plastic tubes and

syringes for feedings. Our one bedroom apartment was suddenly filled with

boxes, bottles, and beeping. This was worse than the NICU where at least the

stimuli could be isolated and more easily ignored. Now, with every beep, we

went running, tripping over cords and tubes, trying not to spill the precious

milk that was so carefully pumped as we placed it into the syringes searching

for precisely the right height that would allow for an even flow through the

nasal tube.

When we had previously inhabited our home, nearly everything was designed to

minimize our, and even more so Carrie’s, contact with plastic—especially when it

came to food. Part of this was for the pregnancy, for Carrie’s health, and the health

of the developing fetus. But it was also, in part, a preparation for life after the birth.

With Carrie nursing, or so we’d planned, we wanted to eliminate as much as poss-

ible our contact with possible contaminants. But for the past four weeks we’d been

eating almost nothing that didn’t come from a plastic container: #5 containers

filled with goodness from my father-in-law’s café in Annapolis; cookies

wrapped in plastic wrap; prepared salads in plastic clamshells; paper cups;

plastic juice bottles; the list goes on. The very network I had been working to

Reflections of an Unrepentant Plastiphobe 111

deconstruct, or perhaps more accurately reposition us outside of, was now the

network within which I subsisted. It sustained us just as it had sustained Helena

during those crucial hours and days and would continue to do so in the time yet

to be defined.

While I had hoped to avoid the excesses of a plastic modernity when we left the

hospital behind, I’ve instead found myself re-creating many of the habits and

rituals learned in those early days in my home, albeit now molded to reflect my

own rituals adopted from our lives before and made as fitting as possible for

our new experiences. Recently I found myself flushing the brand-new ‘sterile’

bladder bag and tube with water before filling it with milk. Carrie asked me

what I was doing. I wasn’t sure, but for a moment when I took out the new bag

I relapsed, sniffed it, and smelled the aroma of fresh plastic (usually the smell

of phthalates, despite the fact that our ‘kit’ is labeled phthalate free 12

). With

that smell, I recalled a story from a recent environmental endocrine disruptor

conference I had attended. I was sharing stories with a couple, recent parents

themselves, and the mother had told me how she had her partner rinse the tubes

in the hospital before she was hooked up for an IV prior to her delivery. In that

moment, with that smell, I had suddenly assumed that I should be doing the

same thing—that I should have always been doing the same thing. But what differ-

ence would it really make? How do I avoid something that is so intimately present

and at the same time invisible?

For better or worse, our lives are dominated, and in a tangible and real way

made possible, by the very plastic that I’ve tried so hard to avoid and protect

us from in our daily lives. It’s the bottle that holds milk; the tubes and flanges

that make pumping possible; the bladder bag that holds the milk to be delivered;

the tube that connects the bag to Helena; and of course the g-tube crossing

the space between the outside world and the inside of Helena’s stomach

(or, previously, the NG-tube that once dangled down her throat and into her

stomach).

But as was the case in the hospital, I’m not only concerned about the plastic that

sustains our lives, but also the quantities that daily I’m asked to dispose of in no

particularly good way. Opening the trash can, I can’t help but think of that strange

phenomenon variously known as the Pacific Trash Vortex, Great Pacific Garbage

Patch, the Eastern Garbage Patch or simply the Plastic Soup. 13

At the spot in the

Pacific Ocean where the currents merge and begin to swirl in on themselves,

Charles Moore (founder of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation) has found

an island of trash that currently stands at roughly twice the size of Texas

(though every time I research the phenomenon the size seems to have grown).

The ‘island’ is mostly a soupy mixture of all things plastic—the indestructible

element of our lives.

Plastics are not static molecules. They are not easily tamed and do not stay put.

They are, as I noted earlier, unruly. Molecules lost during production or simply

broken away become mobile. While some plastics travel thousands of miles

112 J. A. Roberts

through earth, wind, and water slowly breaking down, polymer dissolving ever so

slowly towards monomer and spreading through the food chain, some have simply

ridden the currents to this trash dump at sea. The trash that collects there serves as

a dumping ground for our culture, and as a feeding pit for the locals. Sea-birds,

turtles, and fish fill their bellies with the waste. Those not overwhelmed and

taken over by the sheer quantity of the plastic they consume will instead

become part of the plasticized food chain. Staring at the images of this dump, I

realize that I’m sitting in the center of it, resting not so comfortably amid the shop-

ping bags, diapers, toys, and all of the other plastic miscellanea that is our culture’s

gift to the world.

Becoming with Helena

In the opening pages of When Species Meet, Donna Haraway (2008) asks: ‘whom

and what do I touch when I touch my dog?’ (p. 3). Without meaning to imply a

dog – child equivalence, I can’t help but feel a resonance with this question

when I’m with Helena. Under more ‘normal’ circumstances, I suppose the

answer would be very different, but perhaps no less complex. Through the inter-

ventions that kept Helena alive, and those that continue to sustain her, she has been

touched by ‘others’—other people, other things, other places. When I hold her, I

come into contact with medical interventions that kept her breathing. I encounter

the various experiences of the doctors and nurses who gazed at Helena. More to

the present point: I touch the tube that now protrudes from her stomach; the

materials that form it; the fluids that flow through it. All of these, in another

context, would become objects of study, instances of the ways in which plastics

and their possible toxicity have complicated the oaths of medical practitioners.

What does it mean to do no harm if the tools of the trade may possibly be

harmful? 14

In other contexts, I could wonder about the phthalates in the tubing

and the possible problems of constant intimate contact, but I don’t have the

luxury of this distance. I must wonder about these questions while caring for

Helena. I have to measure my actions within the uncertainty that surrounds

these practices because I know for certain the alternative.

Holding Helena takes me beyond the local because these artifacts themselves

are global in nature. They connect vast networks of peoples, machines, and

‘natural resources’. These networks are made largely invisible by both their

great expanse and the tremendous transformations that make this tubing from

something so seemingly unrelated: petroleum or natural gas. These objects

become connections into conflict. I touch the oil or natural gas that was refined

to create the raw materials for the polymers and the places where those materials

were forced to surface. We come into contact with the policies governing

that extraction, the disparity that characterizes those policies and economies,

the tensions involved in shipping those materials from one place in the world to

a new destination where they will be transformed from liquid to solid. We are

Reflections of an Unrepentant Plastiphobe 113

there with the residents living along the fencelines of these refineries wondering

why so many of their neighbors keep getting sick.

It is not only the substance of the tubes that connect us to conflict, but also the

substances that flow through it. Carrie became what’s known as an EPer—

exclusive pumper. Helena wouldn’t/couldn’t nurse, but at the very least we could still give her the benefits of the breastmilk itself even if it came without

the additional benefits of actually nursing. This decision took us into the midst

of conflicts we had not anticipated beforehand but were not to be unexpected.

Consultations with doctors and nurses focused on nutrition and weight gain, and

many professionals were far more encouraging of formula than breastmilk

(again, see McCaughey, 2010, this issue). There were many reasons to avoid

formula in favor of Carrie’s milk, not the least of which was the purchasing of syn-

thetic formula that’s been sitting in a can or bottle on shelves for who knows how

long. But in that respect, the milk was no respite. If Helena had been nursing, we

would have continued to monitor and control her exposures via Carrie. But now

everything went into plastic bottles; bottles that needed to be scrubbed, stored,

boiled. We couldn’t escape. The situation only became more obvious as Carrie

ceased pumping after 14 months. The preferred option for kids with feeding

tubes is Pediasure or some other enteral nutrition formula. But again, we were

determined to thwart that advancement. Instead, we began offering Helena a

blended diet—fresh foods transformed into liquid in a polycarbonate pitcher

(so intensely that the food actually steams when the lid comes off) and then

poured into a soft plastic bladder bag.

‘Becoming with’ Helena, as Haraway might put it, places me in the midst of a

tangled mess that I have been sorting through for years. It is a mess largely

because we fail to understand how we got here, what is at stake, and what

options exist. The problem of uncertainty plays a key role in current debates

where science, policy, and politics collide. While the invocation of uncertainty is

quite often a red herring, thrown into debates to distract and postpone action, it

finds traction because it speaks to the fundamental formula of our risk society as

currently configured. We are, as Beck points out, not simply obsessed with risk

as a concept; rather, risk constitutes us. But with this focus on risk comes an obses-

sion with knowledge—on certain knowledge—with which to better calculate, dis-

tribute, or avoid risk. It’s a futile task, because in a world where the molecular traces

of harmful agents come from everywhere, there is no avoiding risk. The world—

material, epistemic, and ontological—is in flux.

On Risk and Uncertainty, Facts and Concerns

Risk cannot adequately characterize my everyday experiences with Helena.

Despite the manifold ways in which the term risk has been developed and

deployed to explain (adequately in many places) our cultural experiences, the

results of our hyper-modern society, or the ways in which we govern, it fails to

114 J. A. Roberts

help me explain my own experiences. 15

I feel a resonance with Deborah Lupton

(1999b) when she points out that these theories have tended to work from the

macro-level, failing to take account of life experiences of risk. But it’s not

simply the lack of attention to the empirical that makes this concept unhelpful

in this situation. Rather, it is the association of risk with other problematic

terms like uncertainty and precaution that gives me pause.

Uncertainty speaks boldly, marking a territory ‘unknown’ while hinting that

with some effort it might just be known. This focus on knowledge, or the lack

there of, fails on two accounts. The first has to do with the politics of uncertainty;

or, perhaps more simply, being uncertain encourages us to ask why that’s the case.

It seems obvious, and yet as two schools of emerging scholarship indicate, few of

us (STSers) have bothered to ask why uncertainty exists when and where it does.

The historians and philosophers in our ranks have dubbed this search agnotology,

the study of ignorance (Proctor & Schiebinger, 2009). The social scientists,

working on a parallel course it would seem, have taken an approach claiming

this area as simply ‘undone science’ (see, for example, Frickel et al., forthcom-

ing). Both routes get us near the same point: asking questions about the politics

of knowledge and ignorance. Uncertainty as a concept fails to take account of

the politics behind this knowledge/ignorance, a fact that I cannot ignore in my own experiences.

But even in this account, uncertainty is assumed to be strictly epistemological

in nature. Uncertainty is not a flaw, a gap in our knowledge, but instead the result

of the changing relationship between things. Plastic is scary not because I don’t

know what level is toxic but because I’m unsure how I’m being remade through

the inclusion of it in my body, in Helena’s body, and in the Earth’s body.

Practically, there is still an epistemological question to be answered; I still

need to know what problems might result from the presence of this new body

in and with mine. But by seeing uncertainty as both an ontological and epistemo-

logical issue, I recreate the space by which that knowledge is generated. Old

models of scientific knowledge making won’t work because those old models

emerged from a different ontology. These new relations of being demand new

ways of knowing.

Shifting the focus away from knowledge and ignorance, or risk and uncertainty,

helps us to make the transition from matters of fact to matters of concern (see

Latour, 2004). Facts, as Latour and Woolgar helped demonstrate long ago, have

histories and contingencies (Latour & Woolgar, 1986; Latour, 1987). To speak

of facts, especially in the popular sense, is to strip these objects of those contin-

gencies, or perhaps to engage in an act of collective amnesia where we all

agree to ignore the mobilization of power that was (and still is) necessary to

make that fact stable.

Thus, when one argues that we are uncertain, that we do not have a fact yet, we

are actually at an opportune time. This is not a moment for fear and trepidation,

of risk associated with unknowing. Rather, it is an opportunity for action, for

Reflections of an Unrepentant Plastiphobe 115

the politics of the object to continue to be negotiated. It is the moment of democ-

racy in science because judgment has not been set.

To speak then, as Latour suggests, of matters of concern, is to highlight

precisely this process of negotiation, of politics, or perhaps of becoming.

Matters of concern attract resources and attention because they are open. Thus,

because BPA’s mechanism of action as an endocrine disruptor has not become

a fact, we ought to be concerned and mobilize resources towards this topic, not

ignore it.

The Plastic Life

My adventures with plastic have provided me with a personalized tour of many of

the tools and concepts that we as STS scholars use to unpack the lives of others.

But I’m still struggling to figure out how to use them on my own life. Or, as Halfon

notes in this issue, I knew these things, but I had to make them true. In their intro-

duction to an issue in this journal on ‘intervention’ in STS, Zuiderent-Jerak and

Jensen note that as social scientists, we, are particularly prone to these existential,

or as I’d suggest ontological, crises because of the very ways in which we are

asked to enact our research. Sometimes we are asked to be journalists, sometimes

objective researchers, sometimes absolute relativists. As Zuiderent-Jerak and

Jensen (2007) put it, ‘the identity of the researcher often appears shifting and

multiple or even fragmented and schizophrenic. But it always remains situated’

(p. 229). Situated, surely. Yet, somehow, in the narratives crafted during this

research, the researchers disappear. That is, while we happily acknowledge our

limited perspective, not often enough do we embrace ourselves as subject

matter within our own discursive exercises. But now my own plastic scholarship

is coming home to roost.

In every situation I encountered—professional life, office life, and personal

life—I was the threat, not the chemicals in the plastics, cosmetics, drinking

water, disposable plates, microwavable lunch, or that old fake Christmas tree

from three decades ago. Professionally, the imposition of my personal experiences

seemed to threaten the fragile space academics carve out for themselves that

places them outside of their own research. Thus was my observation about atra-

zine and rain rebuffed. Inside and outside of the office, people had no interest

in these ideas other than as a target for jokes. Thus the all-caps ‘FUTURE

PLASTIPHOBE’ sweatshirt Helena was given before her birth.

It’s understandable, really. To think that something in your everyday life is

threatening you in a way that is totally imperceptible and perhaps won’t mani-

fest for decades or even generations is just silly. To ask someone to reorder their

life because something might be risky seemed a lot to ask. I was a threat

because I disrupted the everyday order of things in the same way I saw this

emerging field disrupting the flow of normal science and the same way

Barthes saw plastic disrupting the natural order of things. Indeed, all of this

116 J. A. Roberts

was (is) a broader struggle in the politics of uncertainty. Plastics and synthetic

chemicals writ large have troubled the distinctions between what we know, what

we don’t know, and the uncertainty that connects the two. We moderns are

using these new objects to remake the world and we have yet to distinguish

between what can be known and what we must accept as unknowable.

Drawing attention to this reordering and the resulting ontological and epistemo-

logical mess means our current configurations are out of date, don’t fit, and

won’t protect us.

In the end, I’m not looking for answers about the toxicity of plastic. I don’t want

to know which chemical is the DEHP replacement in Helena’s feeding bag. I don’t

want to know how many parts per billion of flame retardant are off-gassing from

her car seat. My search for answers to these questions, and my frustration in

dealing with what I know and don’t know, is bound up in the larger, but more

fundamental, question of how to live. How do I best care for Helena? How do I

make sure that the insults she’s already endured are not multiplied by additional

insults that could be prevented?

And beyond my life, and my every day, how are my actions shaping the world

that Helena and her fellow travelers will inherit? I look at the trash that I take out

and I am back in the NICU where I watched as pounds of plastic were piled up and

carted away to the great somewhere else. I think of the persistence of plastics, and

pesticides, the mobility of these chemicals moving through the great global still

that places our molecular experiments at the top of the world where they can

touch those not touched by their more useful instantiations. I wonder along with

Hans Jonas whether we really do need a new ethics for this new technological

age (1984). Maybe we just need to finally leave the cave, as Latour suggests

(2004). Or maybe, as Singer suggests, we just need to recall that there is only

one world within which to live (2004).

The plastics that populate my everyday life and that fill me with such anxiety

also help to make Helena’s life possible. But we resist the simply dichotomies

imposed on us. The plastics are not simply life saving or a threat. They are

both. At the same time, my lack of knowledge is not a sign of deficit, but a sign

of the shifting relationships of my life and world. More importantly, we can

shape the direction the plastics take. We can redesign them to be more benign.

We can protect vulnerable populations from exposure. We can decide how and

when and why we use these materials. Their future is as much unwritten as our

own. Galusky (2010, this issue) finds that we humans are playing chicken in

our technoscientific lifeworlds. I see that, together, we are becoming plastic.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to express his many thanks to the editors for their tremendous

help in working through many drafts of this paper, and to the other authors for

sharing their ideas and their own stories. He also gratefully acknowledges the

Reflections of an Unrepentant Plastiphobe 117

ideas and suggestions offered by Sarah Vogel and an anonymous reviewer.

Special thanks go to Carrie Sewell Roberts for help with everything from

editing to tolerating life with a plastiphobe.

Notes

1 For insight on Beck’s take on life in this reflexive modernity, listen to his interview on ‘Ideas:

How to Think about Science’, available at: http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/features/science/index. html#episode5.

2 For this brief overview of the history of plastics, I’ve drawn from Meikel (1995).

3 The 2005 report is the most recent complete report, but the CDC has continued to release

updates demonstrating expanded surveillance of specific chemicals and new human sources,

all of which can be found on their website: http://www.cdc.gov/exposurereport/ 4 For an overview of some of the difficulties of implementing these data, see NRC (2006) and

Roberts (2008a). For the difficulties of fitting this work into legal and regulatory frameworks,

see Cranor (2008) and Roberts (2008b). 5 See the American Chemistry Councils’ page on biomonitoring, available at: http://www. americanchemistry.com/s_acc/sec_policyissues.asp?SID¼1&VID¼123&CID¼257& DID¼629&RTID¼0&CIDQS¼&Taxonomy¼&specialSearch.

6 See, for example, Environmental Working Groups’ ‘Human Toxome Project’, available at:

http://www.ewg.org/sites/humantoxome/. See also Lang et al. (2008). 7 There are two ways of dealing with this situation. In the first instance, we might broadly clas-

sify this as an example of ‘agnotology’—a case of things we simply don’t know (Proctor &

Schiebinger, 2009). But why don’t we know? Is this unknowable (and therefore ignorance

is unavoidable) or is it a case of undone science (with all of the politics that implies)?

See Frickel et al. (forthcoming) for a discussion of the latter proposition. I’ll discuss these

two positions more towards the end of the essay. 8 These are just some of the questions researchers working in these areas are grappling with, and

also just a small sampling of a growing list of possible exposure endpoints. The case around

BPA serves as the quintessential case. 9 It is this last articulation that is most important since it highlights the complexity of the

dilemma. This is not only or merely a scientific issue, one of uncertainty about data related

to health. These questions uncover with deep intimacy the relations between the ethical struc-

ture, or perhaps grammar, of the technological system that produces these artifacts. My choice

to participate or not (or to what extent) is precisely the sort of ethical wrangling that is at work

in, say, Peter Singer’s (1995) musings on the same question. I return to this problem of living

with risk and uncertainty at the end of this paper. 10

We repeated much of this same ritual a year later when we moved, in search of a larger bed to

accommodate two adults, a toddler, and two cats (one of whom insisted on keeping his place at

my feet despite the altered sleeping conditions). The problems persist nearly as much as the

chemicals themselves. 11

See the wonderful description offered by Layne (1996); also see Halfon (2010, this issue). 12

It’s not really phthalate free as it is free of a particular phthalate that got a lot of attention—

DEHP, or di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate. 13

See, for example, the Greenpeace website: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/ campaigns/oceans/pollution/trash-vortex; and Marks and Howden (2008).

14 The non-profit Healthcare without Harm formed precisely because of this tension; see: http:// www.noharm.org/

15 For discussions of the ways in which risk has developed as a tool for social and cultural theory,

see Lupton (1999a, 1999b).

118 J. A. Roberts

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