Detaching from plastic packaging: reconfiguring material responsibilities

ABSTRACT

This paper considers two cases from the “unpackaged movement” as examples of market detachment: the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s campaign to develop “a new plastics economy” and Source, a chain of zero waste bulk stores in Australia. Despite their differences, both these cases depend on tacit beliefs about material responsibilities, that is: assumptions about what single use plastic packaging is responsible for, who or what is affected by it, and how to redistribute its functions through different forms of detachment. In seeking to develop an analysis of detachment as a significant market dynamic, how the disposable plastic package changes from a mundane market device into a detachment problem is a key concern. Equally significant are questions of care. When plastic packaging shifts from mundane to troubling who is invited to care about this? A key finding of the paper is that the redistribution of material responsibilities occurs in very different ways.

KEYWORDS:

• Plastics
• unpackaged movement
• material responsibilities
• detachment
• political materials
• care

Acknowledgements

This paper was part of a special workshop on Economies of Detachment organised by Professor Franck Cochoy at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès. Enormous thanks to Franck for all his work organising this seminar and for his incisive comments on this paper. Thanks also to the workshop participants for their wonderful contributions to new thinking on detachment as a market process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For good accounts of the dynamics of market attachments see Deville (2012) and Cochoy, Deville, and McFall (2017).

2 See Muniesa (2014) for an analysis of markets as an effect of and affected by various provocations. This argument very productively extends the performativity thesis within economic sociology.

3 Most of the key histories of packaging focus on how the growth of this critical market device reconfigured market arrangements and helped consumers attach to goods (cf Cochoy 2002; Cochoy and Grandclément 2005; Strasser 1989; Twede 2012; Simms 2015). Hine’s (1997) definitive account “The Total Package”, for example, is subtitled “The Secret History and Hidden Meaning of Boxes, Bottles, Cans and Other Persuasive Containers” highlighting the affective potential of the package to capture and captivate consumers by generating material and emotional connections. However, while there is no question as to the attachment effects of packaging and its role in agencing markets in distinct ways, detachment is also at work. As Callon (1998) has argued, detachment is at the heart of all markets as things are disentangled from one context and re-entangled in market framings and packaging plays a key role in realising this general market “law” (Hawkins, Emily, and Race 2015; Hawkins 2019). This alternative history makes it possible to see packages as detachment devices.

4 Disch 2016 offers an excellent analysis of the co-participation of things in political processes and the significance of this line of thinking for political theory. See also Lemke 2015 for a review of how STS analyses of materiality connect with and extend theories of governmentality, especially the idea of governing through things.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council.

Notes on contributors

Gay Hawkins

Gay Hawkins researches in the areas of materiality, STS and markets with a focus on plastics.