Plastic Unlimited. Alice Mah

      57 57 Peter Dauvergne, Will Big Business Destroy Our Planet? (Polity, 2018). Several other social scientists have written about the business of corporate environmental responsibility and private-led sustainability initiatives. For example, see Stefano Ponte, Business, Power and Sustainability in a World of Global Value Chains (Zed Books, 2019); David L. Levy and Peter Newell, The Business of Global Environmental Governance (MIT Press, 2005).

      58 58 Tangpuori et al., Talking Trash; Greenpeace, Throwing Away the Future.

      59 59 Tangpuori et al., Talking Trash.

      60 60 Diana Barrowclough and Carolyn Deere Birkbeck, Transforming the Global Plastics Economy: The Political Economy and Governance of Plastics Production and Pollution (GEG Working Paper No. 142, 2020), at https://www.econstor.eu/handle/10419/224117; Charles et al., The Plastic Waste Makers Index.

      61 61 Chandler, Shaping the Industrial Century.

      62 62 Plastics Europe, Plastics – the Facts 2020; Plastics Industry Association, Size and Impact Report 2020, at https://www.plasticsindustry.org/sizeandimpact.

      63 63 Chandler, Shaping the Industrial Century.

      64 64 Chemical and Engineering News, Global Top 50 for 2020, https://cen.acs.org/business/finance/CENs-Global-Top-50-2020/98/i29.

      65 65 Charles et al., Plastic Waste Makers Index, p. 13.

      66 66 GlobalData, ‘China to Contribute 28% of Global Petrochemical Capacity Additions by 2030’, 30 October 2020, at https://www.globaldata.com/china-contribute-28-global-petrochemical-capacity-additions-2030-says-globaldata.

      67 67 International Energy Agency, The Future of Petrochemicals.

      68 68 Sandra Eckert, ‘Varieties of Framing the Circular Economy and the Bioeconomy: Unpacking Business Interests in European Policymaking’, Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, 23(2) (2021): 181–93.

      69 69 Barrowclough and Deere Birkbeck. Transforming the Global Plastics Economy, p. 31.

      70 70 See chapter 3.

      71 71 Linsey McGoey, The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World (Zed Books, 2019); Hannah Jones, Violent Ignorance: Confronting Racism and Migration Control (Zed Books, 2020).

      72 72 Robert D. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (Routledge, 2018); Brendan Coolsaet, ed., Environmental Justice: Key Issues (Routledge, 2020).

      73 73 Bakan, The New Corporation, p. 34.

      74 74 Mariana Mazzucato, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy (Hachette UK, 2018), p. 271.

      75 75 See Alex Serpo, ‘Don’t Let this Recycling Crisis Go to Waste’, Waste Review, 3 April 2018, at https://wastemanagementreview.com.au/five-programs-nwric/; Guillaume Gruère, ‘Never Let a Good Water Crisis Go to Waste’, OECD, 21 March 2019, at https://www.oecd.org/agriculture/never-waste-a-good-water-crisis.

      76 76 Rahm Emanuel, ‘Opinion: Let’s Make Sure This Crisis Doesn’t Go to Waste’, Washington Post, 25 March 2020, at https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/25/lets-make-sure-this-crisis-doesnt-go-waste.

      77 77 Bernard Looney, Keynote Address, IP Week, 22 February 2020, at https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/business-sites/en/global/corporate/pdfs/news-and-insights/speeches/bernard-looney-keynote-address-ip-week.pdf.

      78 78 Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (Verso, 2013).

      79 79 Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Macmillan, 2007).

      80 80 Joseph Masco, ‘The Crisis in Crisis’, Current Anthropology, 58(S15) (2017): S65–76 (p. S65).

      81 81 Max Liboiron, Pollution Is Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2021), p. 12.

      82 82 Matt Hern and Am Johal, Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life: A Tar Sands Tale (MIT Press, 2019), p. 23.

      83 83 Oliver Smith and Avi Brisman. ‘Plastic Waste and the Environmental Crisis Industry’, Critical Criminology, 29 (2021): 289–309 (p. 289).

      84 84 Damian Carrington, ‘Why the Guardian Is Changing the Language It Uses About the Environment’, Guardian, 17 May 2019, at https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/17/why-the-guardian-is-changing-the-language-it-uses-about-the-environment.

      85 85 Michelle Langrand, ‘A New Global Treaty to Tackle Plastic Pollution?’ Geneva Solutions, 1 March 2021, at https://genevasolutions.news/sustainable-business-finance/a-new-global-treaty-to-tackle-plastic-pollution.

      86 86 Publicly available materials include corporate documents, speeches, magazines, blogs, websites, interviews, videos, media and NGO reports, and secondary sources. The observations at industry events and related interviews with corporate representatives were conducted between 2016 and 2021 as part of two research projects on environmental justice and the petrochemical industry, funded by the European Research Council (grant no. 639583) and the Leverhulme Trust (Philip Leverhulme Prize). All interviews were conducted with prior and informed consent, and names of interviewees have been anonymized. Observations from events anonymize corporate statements, unless (as many are) these are also publicly available in corporate conference reports, in magazines, and on websites.