What researching Mumbai's sea of plastic taught us about the city's economy of waste

A beach in Mumbai in 2019.
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Hemanshi Kamani/Reuters
The many forms of petrochemical-derived polymers known as plastic are everywhere. Plastics, like other materials and commodities, have what many might term – after anthropologist Arjun Appadurai – rich “social lives”. They are engineered and produced for particular purposes, part of diverse material cultures and patterns of use and consumption. Post-consumption, they are further discarded and exchanged as part of diverse economies and ecologies.
Nowhere is the ubiquity of plastics as visible or anxiety-inducing in popular representations as oceans, seas, and other settings often understood as nature separate from human activity. As plastics, oils and other materials sink, break down, float and accumulate unevenly with the rhythms of water, they can travel for long periods of time and across far distances, bringing human and non-human lives across time and space into relation.

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