Reframing Plastic as a Health Emergency

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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 Alice Street.

The presentation examined a significant shift in global plastics governance. Plastics were once framed primarily through end-of-life pollution and inadequate waste management, but they are increasingly understood as a human-health emergency involving toxic exposures across their lifecycle.

Drawing on governance documents and discussions from six meetings of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee for a Global Plastics Treaty, Acheson and Ralston traced how this reframing emerged and why it remains contested. They also considered how different understandings of plastics support either limited technical responses or more systemic forms of action, and the importance of embodied knowledge in making plastic harms visible.