Plastic Amnesias at Carbon Bodies

Body

In September 2026, Jeremy Greene presented the paper 'Plastic Amnesias' as part of Carbon Bodies, a project based at Northumbria University uncovering how the pursuit of warmth and everyday health became increasingly dependent on fossil fuels in twentieth-century Britain. This was not a universal experience: bodily and health vulnerabilities were exacerbated by uneven access to heat, and Carbon Bodies traces how this energy inequality was managed through policy and across the welfare state. 

Greene's paper turned to a parallel story of material dependency on plastic. 

It was April of 1965, and Earl Meyers, head of the Manufacturing Controls Branch of the United States Food & Drug Administration, had a plastics problem. Ductile, mouldable, lightweight, transparent, sterilisable, and allegedly inert, the mid-century explosion of plastic polymers promised boundless horizons for biomedical ingenuity. But as Meyers reckoned, the original promise — "that plastics were quite inert and no serious problems could develop" in switching from glass, steel, or rubber to these novel polymers — was not holding up. As plastic use increased exponentially, so did reports of unanticipated synthetic hazards. 

Syringes and pill bottles became discoloured and occasionally dissolved when certain drugs were inserted, and patients described inflammatory and allergic reactions to plastic tubing, contact lenses, and blood bags, while physicians, pharmacists, and nurses worried that plasticizers, stabilizers, and lubricants might leach toxins into patients' bodies. 

In the context of negotiations for the Global Plastics Treaty over the past 15 years or so (once inevitable, but now inevitably stalled), an emerging science of microplastics has helped reframe the global plastic burden as an acute human health hazard rather than a more chronic ecological crisis. The Lancet Countdown on Plastics and Health, launched in 2025, situates the exponential increase in single-use healthcare plastics in relation to the energy transition, on the one hand, and the inability to relate the ephemerality of disposable plastic materials to the longer durée of harms involved in their production, consumption, disposal, and ultimate discard. 

This talk is a prologue of sorts to that project: I'd like to ask us to think how we stopped thinking of the medical applications of petrochemical products as a human health hazard in the first place. If we look back at the inflection point of the exponential rise of plastic devices in healthcare in the 1950s and 1960s, using records from the American Hospital Association, the United States Pharmacopoeia, the Plastics Society of America, and the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers of America, many voices inside and outside of medicine were very concerned that plastics were, indeed, toxic agents before, during, and after the single use.