Indigestible plastic
But, as Doeland emphasises, it is a dream for a reason. ‘A perfectly closed loop does not exist. There are always leftovers, and the question is: are they digestible? Modern waste is piling up: on land, in the sea and in the air.’ Doeland cites plastic as the very embodiment of waste’s indigestibility.
‘There are a few micro-organisms that can break down plastic, but generally speaking, plastic is pretty much indigestible and large pieces remain inside animals such as dolphins, orcas and birds.’ Doeland refers to the film Albatross (2017) by the American artist Chris Jordan. ‘He filmed albatross chicks during the breeding season, a period that many chicks do not survive. Whilst the feathers and bones of the dead albatrosses have already decayed, the plastic that once occupied their stomachs is the last thing to remain.’
Whereas at the start of her PhD research Doeland focused primarily on large pieces of plastic, she later turned her attention inwards. ‘When I was pregnant with my son, I became more aware of the effects of PFAS and microplastics. There are already quite a few studies demonstrating a link between microplastics and male infertility. The idea that what I ate, drank and breathed might already be determining his fertility haunted me.’
The spectre of waste haunts us
Because it is there, yet often cannot be perceived or is barely perceptible, Doeland, drawing on the ‘spectrology’ of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, speaks of a ‘waste spectre’. Derrida published the work Specters of Marx in 1993 in response to The End of History and the Last Man (1992) by political scientist Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama argued that, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, Marxism had been rendered obsolete, Western liberal democracy was the only remaining form of government, and that this marked the end of the history of ideological progress.
‘Fukuyama tried to conjure up and banish Marxism, but Derrida explained that it doesn’t work like that and that the Marxist past still permeates the present in all sorts of ways. That’s why the comparison with ghosts is so apt. Ghosts symbolise unfinished business, something from the past that hasn’t quite been resolved.’ Just as this applied to Marxism in the early 1990s, it also applies to waste, explains Doeland.
That same Marx, with his critique of capitalism, also contributed to Doeland’s thinking. ‘Our thinking is steeped in the idea that the world consists of raw materials that you can appropriate and put to productive use.’ This mindset has certainly existed since the colonisation of the Americas, which philosopher John Locke once described as a wasteland waiting to be cultivated. ‘You still see that today: if there’s a mountain where you can go for a walk and where goats graze, we’d rather see the potential raw materials and decide to extract all the minerals anyway.’
That attitude has turned capitalism into a digestive machine, argues Doeland. ‘A glutton that devours ever-larger parts of the world and excretes them as indigestible waste.’ And however appealing a zero-waste economy may sound, that logic continues to feed the capitalist devourer.
Is it worth eating?
‘Capitalism is very good at internalising criticism of the system. Every multinational now has sustainability departments tasked with contributing to the energy transition, but something like a transition does not exist at all, as the French historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz illustrates. There is merely an accumulation of energy sources that are mutually dependent. The transition sounds like an alternative, but it is still part of a system that excavates mountains for raw materials.’
According to Doeland, we would be better off adopting a ‘digestive’ logic, in which we reflect on how our environment enters our system – both intentionally and accidentally – and to what extent that still makes for somewhat palatable fare. ‘That means, at the very least, that we must not feed that world-devourer, but rather keep it in check. Wouldn’t it be lovely if someone at, say, Tata Steel read my thesis and thought: this can’t go on any longer; we’re poisoning the immediate surroundings here with our emissions and the rest of the country with our ‘steel slag’ – which is just waste, of course – by selling it as a raw material; we’re putting ourselves out of business.’ Laughing: ‘As far as that goes, a person is allowed to dream!’
Photo: The village Ruigoord in 2017. Source: Alf van Beem via Wikimedia Commons
