The Journey of Plastics
By: Ellie Newman, Cal LeDoux, and Nate Drew
Introduction
Our constellation consists of the Metropocene, Capitalocene, and Plasticene. As we thought about the relations between these three ‘cenes, we chose to follow the journey of plastic, choosing the Plasticene as the protagonist of our constellation. By Plasticene, we mean to deal with not just the geologic definition as “an era in Earth’s history, within the Anthropocene, commencing in the 1950s, marked stratigraphically in the depositional record by a new and increasing layer of plastic” (Haram et al. 2019, 2, attributed to Matt Dowling), but also a sociopolitical definition concerning the movement of plastic and its eventual relationship with the non-human natural world.
Using the object of plastic as our protagonist, we can then see that capital and, more broadly, the Capitalocene, serves as our mechanism of transport. The Capitalocene refers to the idea that capitalism is part of the world ecology (Moore 2018). Namely, capitalism moves through nature and nature moves through capitalism. Of crucial importance are the “Four Cheaps”: food, energy, raw materials, and labor-power (Moore 2018). In the Capitalocene, capital is incorporated into the world-ecology, and this new “world-ecology refuses naturalism and constructivism — not in favor of a balance between the two but in pursuit of their transcendence. It incorporates geobiophysical processes and social and economic history within a relational field. That wider field is crucial. It allows world-ecology to situate the histories of culture and knowledge production within the history of capitalism” (Moore 2018, 240). In the case of plastic, one of the Four Cheaps, raw materials, is harvested to create plastic which then flows through our capitalist world, eventually ending up back in the non-human natural world. As such, the Capitalocene serves as the transitory force in our epochal constellation.
Moreover, this narrative can be reframed and nuanced by placing the movement of plastic and capital through space. For this constellation, we saw the metropole and its connections to serve as the “where” of the journey of plastic. The Metropocene refers to the extent of urbanization and the magnetism of urban cores and embodies the metabolisms between highly urbanized areas and the hinterlands that support them (Chwałczyk 2020). This includes physical ground cover (sprawl, road infrastructure, etc.) and the social and economic magnetism of Metropolises. Plastic moves from metropole to metropole and from hinterland to metropole and vice versa.
Placing the Metropocene and Capitalocene in conversation with the Plasticene, we hope to demonstrate how the Plasticene intersects with the Metropocene and Capitalocene. Driven in part by capital, plastic flows through the urban metabolism. The presence of plastics everywhere on the planet highlights the impact of the metropolis beyond its jurisdictional boundaries and the externalization of production and waste beyond metropolitan areas. Systems of capital shape, in part, how uneven levels of the production, consumption, and disposal of plastics appear in space and across individuals.
Scenographic Map Overview
For our scenographic map, we thought of the journey of plastics as occurring in three eras: production, consumption, and “recycling”. As such, our scenographic map is broadly organized around the conditions that have shaped the way plastic is produced for consumers and then subsequently used by and viewed by consumers. The first part of the map shows the oil boom of the nineteenth century that created the infrastructure necessary for oil extraction, a necessary precondition for plastics production. The second part highlights the consumption boom of plastic commodities after World War II. The third part of the scenographic map shows the current recycling boom, including how responsibility for plastic waste is often placed on the individual consumer. We chose a hexagon shape for our collages to emphasize the idea of “booms” or trends in plastic production and use, as shown by each hexagon expanding rapidly from its starting point. The repetition of the hexagon shape also alludes to the shape of plastic polymers.
Scenographic Map Part I: Oil Boom
This part of our scenographic diagram illustrates the role that production plays in the journey of plastics. Namely, production serves as the beginning area which allows for the eventual consumerization of plastic and, ultimately, recycling campaigns. Taking inspiration from Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy and his suggestion that the progress of fossil fuel production and consumption was distinctly related to complex networks of people, politics, etc., we wanted to illustrate the network of players and relationships that impact the production of oil, and, thereby, the production of plastics. This part of the map is black and white to denote both the earlier time period of these photos and also the role of production as the beginning of the whole cycle.
In this visualization, we began by displaying the first oil well in the United States. Moving from left to right, we then have pipelines, a destructive oil explosion, and the oil production popping up all around Los Angeles.
Although production is not grounded just in the past, we decided to start where it all started in Titusville, Pennsylvania (The First Oil Well). The continuous harvesting of one of the Four Cheaps, oil, allows for the wasteful spiral of plastic production to continue. Notions of growth, progress, and bigger-is-better allowed for the increase in usage of oil, leading to the second and third primary pictures, the pipelines and the explosion, respectively. The pipelines denote the need for transportation of oil and the shift away from worker-controlled transportation (Vachon). During the era of oil and plastics, the middleman is removed so that cities, oil rigs, and other key locations can interface more directly with each other. The Metropocene begins to emerge as cities and hinterlands are connected through networks of pipes, roads, and shipping routes. Layered behind this is then the plume from an oil gusher on Mooringsport, LA which led to the at the time largest well fire in the USA along with a daily loss of about 30,000 barrels (Huge Oil Gusher). This destruction reminds the viewer of the destruction that characterizes this continuous harvesting of oil. Along with the growth in oil production and consumption came a growth in tragedies as the regulations did not catch up. As the Capitalocene suggests, we began to interface with nature; that is, capitalism became an ecology itself. Lastly, the popping up of oil rigs around Los Angeles represents a meshing of the metropolis and the act of production (Signal Hill Oil Field). Specifically, this picture depicts Signal Hill where there was an explosion of drilling. Ultimately, California at large produced a quarter of the world’s oil at one point. The booms in oil production and, therefore, plastic production in the 20th century represent a shift in which the story of the city and nation become deeply entwined with the story of oil and plastic and are oftentimes even answer the question of where this production and consumption takes place. Overall, this scenographic map represents the progress and enmeshing of the Capitalocene with the Metropocene through the lens of plastic and its increasing production.
Scenographic Map Part II: The Plastic Commodity
This collage attempts to reveal the “hidden abode” of corporate advertising that encouraged the adoption of plastic products for the home in the 1930s-1950s. It presents a narrative of how plastics entered common use by the public and how disposability developed into a stronger social norm with the increasing use of plastics. Much of the advertising centers on plastic as an essential material in the home that could make lives, particularly women’s lives, easier. The ads emphasize plastic home goods as necessary for and inevitably a part of social reproduction, “the forms of provisioning, caregiving and interaction that produce and maintain social bonds” (Fraser 2014, 61). The advertising portrays home plastic use, and consequently what a home should look like, how it should be maintained, and who should be doing this work, in a very particular way. Specifically, many of the ads feature middle-class women, often with children nearby.
In this section of the scenographic map, the 1939 New York World’s Fair serves as an important site where the Metropocene, Capitalocene, and Plasticene collide. A map showing the site of the fair serves as the background of the collage. The theme of the fair was “The World of Tomorrow,” and a section of the fair was devoted to company displays of plastic products and exhibits about plastic production. For example, images in the collage include a drawing and photograph of the Bakelite plastics exhibit. Nye writes that corporations presenting at the fair “created a vision of the achievable future that the public entered through rituals of imaginary consumption” (Nye 1990, 1). In the Bakelite exhibit, visitors could try out new products, such as the vacuum cleaner with plastic parts that is in the top right of the collage.
Advertising turned the “imaginary consumption” at the fair’s exhibits into actual consumption and profit for companies (Ibid.). The rest of the images and slogans included in the collage are examples of more traditional forms of advertising. Through their portrayal of both the physical space of the home and the process of social reproduction as transformed by plastic, these ads demonstrate “the mutually constitutive transformation of ideas, environments and organization, co-producing the relations of production and reproduction” that Moore describes as essential to the Capitalocene (Moore 2018, 240). These themes are particularly salient in the advertisements for flexible plastics (woman and girl on the left of the collage) and Tupperware (woman with man and children in the background, center of collage). The flexible plastics ad portrays a woman and girl immersed in a plastic environment; they are in front of a plastic shower curtain, which is cropped out of the collage, holding plastic items, and even wearing plastic aprons. The use of plastics in the ad is intergenerational. Similarly, the Tupperware ad portrays the intersection of a plastic-filled environment with a happy family. As Bryant aptly describes the ad, “Sleek, colorful, and modern, her Tupperware products have brought harmony to her kitchen and home. Everything is orderly; nothing is out of place” (Bryant 2021, “Conclusions” section). Advertising ultimately portrayed plastics in the home as both physical and social objects.
The collage is organized around skewed lines for two reasons. First, the diverging lines visually show the growth of consumption of plastics and of plastic companies’ profits. Second, the two sets of lines form a zig-zag pattern that visitors may have taken to see all of the plastic exhibits at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. This alludes to the initial novelty of plastics, which contrasts with plastic’s current ubiquity and connection to waste.
This polyethylene pitcher and creamer set demonstrates how plastics became an important part of household goods by the mid-20th century. This image also shows how plastics were incorporated into a particular modernist aesthetic.
Scenographic Map Part III: Re-Purchase (and Recycle)
This section carries the narrative into the present day and addresses the ways in which the recycling “boom” portrays recycling as a zero-waste reproductive process in order to maintain high levels of plastic consumption. With a patchwork background of recycling waste packed into blocks that mimic a city grid, the rest of the section is emblazoned with logos for large-scale recycling movements. Coca-Cola’s Belgian ad campaign, “Don’t Buy Coca Cola If You Won’t Help Us Recycle” illustrates how responsibility for the waste produced by consumer products is forced onto the consumer while blame is shifted away from large companies.
Similarly, the collaged yogurt cup, bottle, and soda can all come from a New York City campaign to promote consumer recycling habits, which uses various slogans to this end. The slogan “Empty. Recycle. Repeat.,” however, best shows the angle at which big cities and companies approach the problem of plastic waste. Recycling is seen as a secondary process beneath an irreplaceable cycle of consumption, in which the consumer is expected to maintain their consumption habits, but change their behavior to reduce waste post-purchase. Rather than targeting the production of plastics and other single-use materials and reducing waste from the source, this campaign focuses on the notion that items can be directly recycled into another of the same item, with other slogans including “Recycled as a Can. Reborn as a Can.” and “There is Still a Great Future in Plastics.” (PRNewswire).
The optimistic advertisement at the right end of the previous section takes on a second meaning as it fades into the next. An originally optimistic display title for the products of the future, “How Flexible Plastics are coming into your life” merges quickly with Coca-Cola Belgium’s campaign logo as it reaches into the field of recycling waste that dominates the section. Rather than simply coming into the consumer’s life as a helpful and permanent product, the cycle of purchase, use, and disposal creates an unending cycle of accumulation, both of wealth for companies like Coca-Cola and of waste for the whole world. The repeated and altered Coca-Cola slogan indicates first a punitive statement from the corporation to the individual (“you don’t help us recycle”), then one warning of impending disaster (“if you don’t help us[…]”). Finally, “you don’t help” breaks from the corporate campaign to reflect the perceived helplessness of the consumer’s actions amid a global environmental crisis. New York City’s “Empty. Recycle. Repeat” then pours out of the end of the scenographic map, flipping upside down and winding its way back through the sections until it appears at the top of the first oil well in the United States. This winding connecting thread reinforces the impacts that each of the booms depicted in the scenographic map has on each other, and indicates a cyclicality that is inspired both by the recycling process and by the reproduction of the production and consumption processes under the capitalist system and within the urban framework.
The story of this celluloid comb factory shows the collision of the Plasticene and the Capitalocene in the early twentieth century. As the highly flammable celluloid caught fire, workers began trying to escape, but the factory had no fire escapes and all of the windows were barred. The factory owner’s son intentionally stayed in the blaze, but not in a heroic attempt to save the lives of the trapped factory workers. Instead, he died attempting to secure the safe in his father’s office. In a major metropole itself, this New York City factory’s history is one of poor working conditions and a misaligned moral standing in the face of disaster.
Systems Diagram
As one of our first modes of visualization, we aimed to look at the flow of plastic through the natural world, urban-land nexus, and, more broadly, capitalist society. To do this, we produced a Systems of Life diagram. While making this diagram, we observed that the story of the Capitalocene, Plasticene, and Metropocene is the story of “the relationship between urbanization, changing practices of food production, and alterations in human diet [that drive] a series of epidemiological developments that lie beyond the analytical nexus of the industrial (or even postindustrial) metropolis” (Gandy 5). As a progression from the midterm project, we took inspiration from the AI systems diagram’s symbology to urge the viewer to think about the ramifications of each step in the journey of plastics.
Drawing on many of our datasets, this systems of life diagram aims to track plastic from before it was even plastic to its ultimately destructive return to nature. As mentioned before, the AI systems diagram discussed in class was one of the major inspirations. In this new iteration, we decided to utilize a variation from Marx’s dialectic to provide a reading of the flow of plastics in which there are labour products, waste products, and methods of production. In a more complex diagram, we would also include labour power; however, this would make the readability quite a bit worse in our current version. In making the diagram we began by looking at the origin of plastic as one of the most materials within the Four Cheaps, oil. The oil, after undergoing many different processes, is finally ready for circulation through the Metropocene. As one reads through, they are encouraged to look at the broader network effects derived from the system of plastic creation and usage.
Taken together, the visualization of the life cycle of plastic suggests a generalized cycle through which plastic is derived from raw material, cycled extensively throughout capitalist society and metropoles, and then regurgitated back into non-human nature. As further emphasis on the Capitalocene aspect of plastic circulation, one can look at Gabriel Orozco’s OROXXO. OROXXO transplants a popular convenience store in Mexico City into the art gallery to remove the store from the system it lies within and its plastic-heavy existence and relation to capital.
Since the scope of our system is so large, we decided to include a picture of the Anacortes Refinery that depicts the city-like nature of the refinery along with the monstrous, natural role that the refinery plays. Each step on this systems map is infinitely complex, so it was difficult to balance the micro and macro interactions within this diagram.
While this is a broad diagram, we did have specific datasets and papers in mind for certain parts of the diagram. For example, we drew inspiration from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management datasets on pipelines and platforms when discussing the harvesting of oil, and we had the FRED producer price index for recyclable plastics in mind when discussing recycling in the realm of our constellation. Additionally, we thought of the metropole through the lens of functional urban areas, the fate of plastic through the lens of a paper by Geyer et al., waste in rivers through a dataset from the Intergovernmental Hydrological Programme, and waste in the oceans through research done by Isobe et al.
Beneath optimistic recycling campaigns lie the realities of the recycling process. Even ignoring the fact that recycling cannot reclaim 100% of the recycled item, a lot of waste is simply lost en route to the recycling facility or even within the facility itself, as seen by the paper products strewn across the ground. This is the same recycling plant shown in the background of scenographic map part III.
Maps
Metropocene as a grounding spatial framework: (Edited from midterm)
This map shows the magnetism of cities as the central nodes of metropolitan areas through a three-part visualization of urbanization. Many of the highly urbanized areas (CIESIN) are much larger than their central cities (500 Cities: City Boundaries), and these areas have a strong magnetism that can be seen in the concentration of built area (GHSL_Built-Up) and the progressive dispersal that occurs as the distance from the central node increases. New York City’s vast metropolitan area, part of the larger megalopolitan region known as BosWash, highlights the city’s status as an influential urban core in one of the most culturally and economically significant regions of the world, which made it a prime location for the 1939 world’s fair that contributed to the massive plastic commodity boom of the mid-twentieth century.
The magnetism shown in this map is reminiscent of Doxiadis’s prediction for 2000 of a fused Megalopolis, pictured above, that connects the Great Lakes region with the Bos-Wash megalopolitan region. His depiction contains a similar understanding of the dense cores that stand at the beginnings of metropolitan expansion.
Into the Capitalocene: A Hinterland Pipeline Network
Despite the influence that Chicago has as the urban core of a large metropolitan area, the city is heavily reliant on its surrounding hinterland and the networks that provide Chicagoans with necessary resources. This visualization of the US pipeline network (National Energy Technology Laboratory) maps the processes shown in the production phase of the Systems Diagram and the first section of the Scenographic Map, showing the ways in which the raw materials needed to create plastics and run machinery are transported across the United States and around the world. Despite the dense network of pipelines surrounding Chicago, almost none enter the city boundaries. Instead, a clear funneling of pipelines into Hammond, Gary, and East Chicago, Indiana shows those cities’ role in industry and production, while the urban core of Chicago is overwhelmingly residential and must consume the products produced in neighboring areas.
Cushing: The Hinterland Network Behind the Metropocene
Within the jumbled mess of pipelines across Oklahoma, one location stands out as a central node. Cushing, Oklahoma is dwarfed between Oklahoma City and Tulsa, and yet the mass of pipelines radiating from this small town makes it clear that there is a story behind it.
Nicknamed “The Pipeline Crossroads of the World,” Cushing made use of its brief spell as one of the major producers of crude oil to stake its claim in the storage and transportation of crude oil across the world. Having once produced three percent of daily global crude oil production in the early twentieth century, Cushing made the transition to a storage and transportation hub as its oil fields began to dry and its many storage facilities needed to be put to use (Wertz).
The maps of Chicagoland and Cushing connect a thread through the Capitalocene, Plasticene, and Metropocene, showing how the three ‘cenes interact to create our constellation. While the Metropocene map shows a concentration of people around central urban cores, the network shown does not represent all of the systems that are required to support large populations. The locations of fossil fuel industry facilities, for example, are largely based on the natural placement of oil fields, while refineries are often in industrial areas like Gary, Indiana. This network of raw material production and refinement is crucial to the current structuring of urban life, and the development of plastic commodities helped define the suburban boom that led to the sprawling metropolitan regions seen across the world today. Because oil and plastic production networks do not inherently match the network of the urban built environment, the economic magnetism of major cities creates the network of consumption that feeds off of these hidden networks, no matter where they exist. An urban core like Chicago then no longer needs to produce as much for itself and becomes a dense space for consumption, fed by outside networks whose products are sent to facilities whose locations are dictated by the nearest metropole.
Point of Life Diagram (Shortened from midterm)
The Point of Life diagram entitled “Plastic Cycle through the Nets and Networks of the Metropocene and Capitalocene” represents the entanglement of plastic as a tangible substance with social and political processes. The spiral shape of the diagram is intended to emphasize the cyclical nature of how plastic moves through the Metropocene and Capitalocene, as a small amount of plastic is ostensibly repurposed or recycled in some cases. The plastic cycle is also linked to the cyclical urban metabolism of the Metropocene and cycles of production, consumption, and disposal in the Capitalocene. The spiral shape of the diagram further emphasizes that the plastic cycle and its interactions with the Metropocene and Capitalocene do not have fixed start and end points. Plastic exists for a long time and can reappear over and over, in recycled material or washed up on a beach.
The point of life diagram begins with a map of oil platforms and pipelines in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of the United States (data source: Bureau of Ocean Energy Management 2022). This represents raw material extraction for the production of plastics, which are composed of oil-derived synthetic polymers (Issifu et al. 2021, 1). The oil extraction points off the coast demonstrate that the plastic cycle extends beyond the areas where most consumers of plastic live. In the terms of the constellation, this highlights the broader reach of urban areas beyond metropolitan jurisdiction boundaries and the reliance on areas beyond the metropolis to support activity within urban areas. According to Moore, oil extraction is one example of the appropriation of nature as Earth’s geological processes created fossil fuels (Moore 2018, 247).
Moving inwards toward the center of the diagram, the next image is a collage of the plastic polymer polyethylene terephthalate, also known as PETE (image source: Science History Institute). This is a common type of plastic often used to make clear drinking bottles. This image was intended to represent the production of plastics.
Representing the consumption of plastics, the next ring in the spiral is an image of plastic, likely PETE, bottles in a plastic net overlaid with a colored filter. The image, taken by Matthew Gollop, is similar to many images of plastic waste that can be found on the Internet (image source: Gollop 2014). The ubiquity of such images highlights the ubiquity of plastic waste and disposal in daily life in many parts of the world, including in the United States.
The center of the spiral is a map of the Gulf of Mexico and the coastlines of North and Central America. The circles on the map represent the amount of plastic per year released into the Gulf by rivers as estimated by Meijer et al. 2021. The inclusion of this dataset is meant to serve as a critique of how this dataset represents plastic disposal. Focusing on river output to the ocean can be misleading when it comes to analyzing the source of plastic waste, as river plastic could have come from anywhere within that river’s catchment area. This map is, however, an excellent representation of how plastic waste is externalized from urban and populated areas. As with oil extraction, metropolitan areas once again rely on supposedly external areas to dispose of their waste; however, only this externalization of waste is visible in the point of life diagram’s central map.
The last component of the Point of Life Diagram is an inverted bar chart overlay that shows the monthly producer price index for recyclable plastics from December 2011 through March 2022, normalized to 100 in December 2011 (data source: St. Louis Fed 2022). Combining the price index with the other images and maps allows us to consider how prices and profits, key metrics in the Capitalocene, shape the Metropocene and Plasticene. This juxtaposition allows us to consider narratives about how the price of recyclable plastics may influence how much plastic is recycled and how much is disposed of in landfills or as litter that may end up in rivers and oceans. For the descriptive narratives, I relied on Evans 2022 and Frandsen 2016. Furthermore, as Issifu et al. note in their recent study, “with tumbling oil prices and the fact that the cost of recycling hinges on the price of oil, it is likely that potential producers of recycled plastics would not invest sufficiently in sorting and recycling capacities because of the limited profitability in the sector; potential manufacturers have limited incentives to use recovered plastics as inputs because of the lower cost of virgin plastics” (Issifu et al. 2021, 9). This suggests that the price of recyclable plastics has an impact on all other parts of the plastic cycle and is impacted by other parts of the plastic cycle, including oil extraction and prices.
Lastly, the Point of Life diagram also includes two small legends. The one in the top right labels each phase of the plastic cycle and how it is represented visually. The legend on the bottom right explains how to read the bar chart overlay showing the producer price index for recyclable plastics. These legends were added to simplify the main diagram and to provide more clear instruction for reading the diagram.
Conclusion
Through these different visualizations, we have shown that the journey of plastics depicts a journey between ‘cenes. A piece of plastic will travel from the geological realm, up to the hinterlands, all the way to the metropole, and then back again and again. With the journey so clearly painted as a spiral of production, consumption, and waste, the question is then whether or not this cycle will ever end.
POL Citations
Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. 2022. “Pipelines.” U.S. Department of the Interior. Dataset. https://www.data.boem.gov/Main/Mapping.aspx.
Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. 2022. “Platforms.” U.S. Department of the Interior. Dataset. https://www.data.boem.gov/Main/Mapping.aspx.
Evans, Judith. “Recycled Plastic Prices Double as Drink Makers Battle for Supplies.” Financial Times. January 16, 2022. https://www.ft.com/content/122e7584-c837-44bc-9965-9fd37d7c03ca.
Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. “Producer Price Index by Commodity: Rubber and Plastic Products: Recyclable Plastics.” FRED Economic Data. Last Accessed May 1, 2022. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WPU072C.
Frandsen, Jon. “The Money in Recycling has Vanished; What do States, Cities do Now?” The Pew Charitable Trusts. March 29, 2016. https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2016/03/29/the-money-in-recycling-has-vanished-what-do-states-cities-do-now.
Gollop, Matthew. 2014. “Plastic Bottles.” Pixabay. https://pixabay.com/photos/plastic-bottles-fishing-net-netting-388679/.
Issifu, Ibrahim, Eric W. Deffor, and Ussif R. Sumaila. 2021. “How COVID-19 Could Change the Economics of the Plastic Recycling Sector” Recycling 6, no. 4: 64. https://doi.org/10.3390/recycling6040064.
Meijer, Lourens; van Emmerik, Tim; Ent, Ruud van der; Schmidt, Christian; Lebreton, Laurent. 2021. Supplementary data for ‘More than 1000 rivers account for 80% of global riverine plastic emissions into the ocean’. Figshare. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.14515590.v1
Moore, Jason W. 2018. “The Capitalocene Part II: Accumulation by Appropriation and the Centrality of Unpaid Work/Energy.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 45 (2): 237–79. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2016.1272587.
Science History Institute. “Science of Plastics.” n.d. Last Accessed May 6, 2022. https://www.sciencehistory.org/science-of-plastics.
UNESCO Intergovernmental Hydrological Programme. 2017. “World Rivers.” UNESCO. http://ihp-wins.unesco.org/layers/geonode:world_rivers.
Scenographic Map Part I Citations
Hugh oil gusher at Mooringsport, La. A monstrous column of roaring flame, Star Oil Co. Loucke no. 3, on fire since Aug. 7. Louisiana Mooringsport, ca. 1913. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/97514401/.
Signal Hill oil field, aerial. Photograph. TESSA Digital Collections of the Los Angeles Public Library. 1930. https://tessa.lapl.org/cdm/ref/collection/photos/id/12029.
The First Oil Well, ca. 1890. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2010649522/.
Mitchell, Timothy. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. Verso, 2011.
Vachon, John, photographer. Oil tanks and pipes, Grundy County, Iowa. United States Iowa
Grundy County, 1940. Apr. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2017719677/.
Scenographic Map Part II Citations
Australian Women’s Weekly. 1947. “1947 Advertisement for Nylex Flexible Plastic.” Internet
Archive. https://archive.org/details/1947-advertisement-for-nylex-flexible-plastic.
Dolph Map Corporation. 1939. General plan of New York World’s Fair. David Rumsey Map
Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries. https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~306128~90076520:Text--General-plan-of-New-York-Worl?sort=Pub_List_No_InitialSort%2CPub_Date%2CPub_List_No%2CSeries_No&qvq=q:1939%20worlds%20fair;sort:Pub_List_No_InitialSort%2CPub_Date%2CPub_List_No%2CSeries_No;lc:RUMSEY~8~1&mi=0&trs=6.
Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. “Bakelite Plastics Exhibit — Sketch of building exterior” New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed May 19, 2022. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/5e66b3e8-79cf-d471-e040-e00a180654d7.
Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. “Bakelite Plastics Exhibit — Woman at display on household appliances” New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed May 19, 2022. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/5e66b3e8-6f5b-d471-e040-e00a180654d7.
Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. “Bakelite Plastics Exhibit — Entrance hall” New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed May 19, 2022. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/5e66b3e9-1099-d471-e040-e00a180654d7.
Steinmetz, Joseph Janney. “Tupperware advertisement featuring a Joe Steinmetz photograph”.
1958 (circa). State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory. https://www.floridamemory.com/items/show/252516.
Scenographic Map Part III Citations
“5 Packaging Trends for 2020: How Your Brand Can Get Ahead.” Fresh, 17 Feb. 2022. Accessed May 25, 2022. https://fresh-lock.com/blog/2020-packaging-industry-trends-for-innovation-and-design.
Grey. “Mayor Bloomberg Launches ‘Recycle Everything’ Ad Campaign.” Mayor Bloomberg Launches “Recycle Everything” Ad Campaign, 29 June 2018. Accessed May 25, 2022. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mayor-bloomberg-launches-recycle-everything-ad-campaign-217426671.html.
Vergara, Camilo J, photographer. National Recycling Co., 14th St. and Poplar, Oakland. United States Oakland California, 2005. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2020698075/.
Map Citations
Bureau, US Census. “Tiger/Line Shapefiles.” Census.gov, 24 Feb. 2022, https://www.census.gov/geographies/mapping-files/2020/geo/tiger-line-file.html.
Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), Columbia University; International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI); the World Bank; and Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical (CIAT). 2011. Global Rural-Urban Mapping Project, Version 1 (GRUMPv1): Urban Extents Grid.
Palisades, NY: Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC), Columbia University. Available at http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/dataset/grump-v1-urban-extents. (4/29/2022)
GHSL_Built-Up. Class repository
National Energy Technology Laboratory. “Global Oil & Gas Features Database — gogi_v10_3shp.Zip.” EDX, 12 Apr. 2022, https://edx.netl.doe.gov/dataset/27625d9b-4a28-4bdf-bc5c-09834f7a9dfb/resource/51493aa6-a3c1-4f32-8ca0-f1efa64f8b49.
“Ne_10m_lakes.shp.” Class Data Repository.
US City Boundaries: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “500 Cities: City Boundaries.” 500 Cities: City Boundaries — CKAN. 16 July 2021, https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/500-cities-city-boundaries.
Text Citations
Bryant, Marsha. 2021. “Polymers: Fantastic Plastics in Postwar America.” Chapter in Impact of Materials on Society. University of Florida Library Press. https://ufl.pb.unizin.org/imos/chapter/polymers/.
Chwałczyk, Franciszek. 2020. “Around the Anthropocene in Eighty Names — Considering the Urbanocene Proposition” Sustainability 12, no. 11: 4458. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12114458.
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