Reframing plastic as a health emergency
Photo by Health Care Without Harm.
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At HSS 2026, Cat Acheson and Rob Ralston presented ‘Reframing Plastic as a Health Emergency: Embodied Knowledges in Global Plastic Governance, 2015-2025’ as part of Plastic Amnesias I, chaired by Anne Kveim Lie.
Over the past ten years, there has been a significant transformation in how plastics are framed and conceptualised in the global governance arena. Although plastics have long been known to be leaky and potentially toxic across their lifecycle, this knowledge has largely failed to cut through to the realm of global plastics governance. However, as negotiations to establish a Global Plastics Treaty unfold, a different way of “knowing” plastic has come to the fore.
This presentation examined how plastic has gone from being known solely as a problem of end-of-life pollution, resulting from inadequate waste management and primarily affecting marine environments, to a human health emergency, resulting from toxic exposures across the plastic lifecycle. Each of these framings has been used to argue for a diverging set of interventions: either techno-managerial, or systemic. As the conflict between these two divergent framings ramps up in the global governance arena, the presentation traced the lineage of how plastic has come to be known as a toxic health threat, and how this way of knowing plastic continues to be contested. The presentation analysed key global plastics governance documents dating back to 2015 and undertakes critical discourse analysis from plenary sessions at six meetings of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee to develop a Global Plastics Treaty (2022-2025). It argued that the reframing of plastic as a health emergency, and the often-overlooked embodied knowledges upon which this framing depends, are crucial for securing effective and meaningful global action to tackle plastic’s harms.
Read more on the double panel at HSS: here.
