Synthesis and stickiness: lives of plastics, metals and other elements

The Great Burger King Meltdown; or, starting with plastics

On 19 September 2019, the fast-food chain Burger King announced in a major press release that it would recycle children’s unused toys for free in the United Kingdom. In a series of tweets to its 48,000 UK followers, it announced that, in order to address issues of plastic waste, it would not only stop giving out free plastic toys with its meals, nor only recycle their own toys, but would take any plastic toys brought to their stores. Most toys cannot be recycled with household waste and therefore often end up in landfill - or else appear discarded in apartments or oceanic trash vortices or elsewhere (Chapter 4). Therefore, Burger King took the decision to work with a company that literally melts down the toys and turns them into other products that the restaurant chain will use. According to the manager of the plastics company, the process will not release any harmful gases into the atmosphere and will reduce energy consumption by 88% over the manufacture of ‘new’ plastics (BBC News, 2019b).

Aside from the BBC’s reporting. Burger King’s own coverage of the Meltdown on social media makes little mention of what - or rather who - instigated this move. It transpires, though, that the chain’s decision was influenced by an online petition by two British girls. Sisters Ella (9) and Caitlin (7) McEwan secured more than half a million signatures for then plea to several large fast-food companies to stop giving out free toys and to consider the effects of plastics on the environment.

However effective Burger King’s decision might be in reducing plastic waste, the Meltdown offers a window onto what - riffing on the focus on plastics - might be termed the synthetic nature of childhood. By synthetic I do not mean (or only mean) the more familiar, pejorative discourse about childhoods as somehow artificial, toxic (Palmer, 2015) or disappearing (Postman, 1985). Rather, just like plastics, childhoods and - because of then perceived or actual malleability - childr en can easily be attached to other stuff. There exist infinite chemical combmations for the synthetic polymers that make up plastics, and, perhaps more importantly, despite the commonsensical notion that nothing sticks to plastics, they nevertheless become entangled with, lodged in and attractors for a vast range of nonplastics, at scales ranging from the nano to the macro. Elsewhere in this book I have argued for a sense of the ‘pull focus’ - wherein childhoods, children and an attentiveness to them are simultaneously decentred and recentred. In a sense, the

Synthesis and stickiness 169 same is tine in the above example: the focus is on plastics, foremost, but those plastics happen to matter because they are toys, and because of their inevitable association with childhood (although at most major chains, adults can purchase ‘kids’ meals’ and receive a free toy, too). And. I would contend, the narrative of the BBC’s article is all the more powerful for the ‘big reveal’ - how the article starts with Burger King's decision but only - and apparently quite knowingly -highlights that the move was the result of a petition by two girls halfway through. This, in microcosm, is exemplary of the political and affective power of the childhood ‘pull focus’, and not least because of the ways in which plastics and childhoods are synthesised with and stuck to one another.

The figurative power of the ‘Meltdown’, though, offers up a different view. As a play on words, it offers humorous connotations of that classical expression of childhood anger: the tantrum. Indeed (and this is observation is not aimed at Burger King themselves), one of the ways in which generally conservative, climate-change-denying adults have sought to undermine the #climatestrike movement and its young leaders is to dismiss it as an insubstantial, fleeting, childish outburst. As many commentators have argued, however, this kind of anger is not insubstantial and, although it may not (at the time of writing this book) have yet offered concrete ‘solutions’, is a necessary part of an activism designed to shake the world out of its plastic-habituated apathy (on emotion and activism, see Brown and Pickerill, 2009). The ‘Meltdown’ is, then, to be understood as an appropriately measured response to the urgency and seriousness of the plastic moment in which we find ourselves. And, in this move, the coupling of plastics to childhood - that stickiest of concepts - is a powerful one. It has as much traction as, say, the classical couplings of children with fears about public space, or about (digital) technologies.

Yet these kinds of discursive attachment or stickiness only tell part of the stoiy. The idea of the Meltdown reminds us, as I intimated above, of the malleable and therefore synthetic nature of plastics (and, as I will demonstrate later, of childhoods). Crucially, and as I will be at pains to argue in this chapter, we might start with plastics - but they are not the be-all, the end-all or the after-all (see Chapter 1). Thus, this chapter is not only about plastics - indeed, it is not really about plastics at all. This is for two very good, inter-related reasons. On the one hand, plastics only represent part of the problem; for many environmental campaigners, the current fervour around plastics constitutes a distraction from other major issues such as climate change, water and air pollution (BBC, 2018a). On the other hand, plastics are, in turn, entangled with/in those issues: they are part of and may exacerbate water pollution, for instance, even if the effects of at least some plastics on the health of humans and other species may not be as serious as those of other chemical pollutants. As a sticky problem (or, following Morton [2013], a viscous one), plastics offer a way in and. both literally and metaphorically, a ‘hook’ for (re)thhiking childhoods as synthetic and sticky. But that is all; as I will show, there are many other matters, besides plastics, which are equally pressing, gelatinous, cloying and treacly. We need to stick with the trouble (compare Haraway, 2016).

Hie fust step for doing so is to start with (the ‘problems' of) plastics themselves -both in terms of their own synthetic make-up and their variable abilities to stick

(or not) to non-plastics. This step offers a reminder of OOO and the notion of the ‘interface’ that I introduced back in Chapter 5 when discussing digital media. It also offers an opportunity to introduce Bogost’s ‘alien phenomenologies’ and to link again with a range of critical race and queer scholarship around materiality and environmental (injustice, which, in combination with theoretical frames introduced throughout the book, provide an analytical framework for thinking synthetically, and stickily, after childhood. The remainder of the chapter is organised around different ‘cuts’ through the Plastic Childhoods project, in which, in anticipating the book’s final chapter, forms of silliness and trauma interface in all kinds of ways. Firstly, I start again with plastics - this time thr ough the example of some totem poles that were created during the Plastic Childhoods project, and in which the inter-relating aesthetic and material properties of different plastics were tested out. Inspired by Bogost’s work and returning to the notion of hyperobjects, the third section of the chapter moves deliberately away from plastics to account for the appearance and circulation of a range of metals and other elements in children’s lives. The final section of the chapter takes seriously a plea to stick with children and childhood - and with more traditional approaches for listening to children’s ‘voices’. However, drawing on a project that combined social science, art and environmental nanoscience, the chapter also makes and exemplifies a case for perhaps more ‘radical’ forms of interdisciplinary collaboration - what Belontz et al. (2019) term a ‘synthetic collective’ - in thinking and doing, after childhood. In doing the above, and in (as far as is possible) drawing together some of the threads developed elsewhere in this book, this chapter also functions as a kind of ante-‘conclusion’, because the final chapter articulates a still wider set of questions and concerns.