Plastics: they surround us, they shape us, they are us. At first sight, such a conclusion might seem far-fetched and grotesque, yet plastics have long since shed their identity as pure chemical chains and transformed into much more substantial, ubiquitous, political and cultural objects.

Cheap but durable, plastics are some of the most widely produced materials in today’s world. The invention and improvement of plastic to the form that is known today—light and stable, among other characteristics—dramatically transformed human lives in the twentieth century. Plastics as such do nothing without human agency. People make them, use them, dispose of them, proliferate them, and ponder their significance. In Science and Technology Studies (STS), plastics are materials that one can work with, whose accumulation on the planet one can assess and control, and whose polluting effects one can measure. One of the most prolific researchers in discard studies, Max Liboiron, emphasizes the scale of the problem that humanity has to address through the sheer amount of plastic on the planet; she claims, “Plastics and their chemicals are challenging regulatory models of pollution, research methods and modes of action because of their ubiquity, longevity, and scale of production.” Plastic’s widespread integration into human lives has transformed its meaning; through its omnipresence, plastic has become one of the most distinct, defining elements of today’s petrocultures. This book emphasizes the utility of plastic as the frame of reference for cultural analysis. Going back to the time when plastics were first created and introduced to Western lives as an early product of petrocapitalism, and finishing with the current moment, when humanity faces plastic-related environmental and health crises, the contributors to this edited collection ponder the cultural meanings of plastics that have both sustained and revealed the proliferation of plastics in petromodern times.

Plastics were an integral component in the formation of the petrocapitalist world, and they remain so. Western societies, where plastics were first introduced, have largely privileged the illusion of convenience that plastic creates and spread this idea throughout the globe, further colonizing non-Western nations. In this process, the impending problem of plastic accumulation had not been considered.