V&A shows fantastic design routes out of plastic crisis

The image seems to mark a turning point in the exhibition’s story of plastic, in which the tale of wonder starts to go woefully wrong.

The V&A exhibition, Plastic: Remaking Our World, charts the substance’s early beginnings and follows its development through 1950s, as the oil and petrochemical industries strived to establish plastic as “the material of everyday life”, all the way to now.

Plastic, like climate change, is a tale of oil. It’s also a story of how capitalism, consumerism and colonialist attitudes helped make that innovation a disaster, and how a very useful substance became a global pollutant.

For this material we chose to throw away in huge quantities was one that does not biodegrade and merely breaks down into ever smaller pieces. Our “throwaways” would stay around for 100 years, and nanoplastic would find its way to the North Pole and the placenta of unborn babies.

Nevertheless, Plastic: Remaking Our World ends in a room that reminds us there is hope – in the ways we are rethinking both how we use plastic and create alternatives to it.

We can design our way out of this, it seems to be suggesting, not just through new materials, but by redesigning society and how we live.

It’s a room of inspiration. For instance, Ocean Plastic Pots is a creation of diver Ally Mitchell who was so distressed by the plastic waste he saw in our oceans that he decided to create plant pots out of ghost fishing gear, the lost and discarded plastic ropes that drift through our seas.

Designs for life

Hope is also there in the work of Still Life furniture designers Will Jenkinson and Aaron Ziggy. Seven years ago, the Glasgow-based pair were worrying about the throwaway culture in furniture and began researching how to do something more sustainable.

This took them to the Precious Plastic Project created by Dutch designer Dave Hakkens which provides open-source guides for users on how to set up their own mini-plastic recycling company.

Jenkinson and Ziggy bought an oven on Gumtree, made some machines, and started to create furniture chiefly using recycled bottle lids.

The result is a series of colourful stool seats and household objects swirling in plastic painterliness. “As we learned more and more about plastics, we were excited and terrified in equal measure,” Jenkinson recalls. “You’ve got this incredible material that can make and do many things but then that is its own curse – that it can be everywhere and do all things.”

The search for answers has led designers and scientists to experiment with waste products from food or crops, some of which are on display: cutlery made from avocado pits in South America, and carpets and hair extensions from banana fibres in Uganda.

One way of reducing our food-related plastic waste is by buying things loose or by reusing containers.

But some plastics are more difficult to replace. A certain amount of disposable wrapping, for example, is considered necessary to prevent food waste and has, in recent years, been a focus of innovation.

One UK company, Notpla, has created biodegradable wrappings and packaging from seaweed. Among its innovations has been the development of small seaweed-packaged sachets of water.

“These are being used in marathons, rather than handing out water,” Laurie Bassam, one of the exhibition’s curators, explains.

The idea of “working with nature” is at the heart of many solutions. Designer Klarenbeek & Dros has produced materials from mycelium and algal cultivations, including a chair featured in the exhibition based on an original 1960s pop design.

Also on display are jars made for the beauty industry by Shellworks from Vivomer, a bioplastic produced with the help of microbes.

Compostable

AMIR Afshar of Shellworks has described their materials as “truly compostable alternatives designed to degrade in any environment, without the need of special conditions like industrial composting or high humidity and temperature”.

“The beauty of it is that the same microbes will then break it down and they’re abundant within marine and soil environments,” says Afshar.

Another application that has been the focus of increased awareness throughout the recent pandemic has been its use in health and medicine.

It’s great to see at the heart of this show products created by a Scotsman who is leading the way by offering a solution to one of the biggest environmental burdens – plastic wipes.

Brian McCormack’s FlushAway wipes dissolve or biodegrade after use with no impact on the environment and are already used in stoma care.

Conventional wet wipes are made of synthetic and plastic fibres which take nearly 100 years to degrade, but McCormack Innovation’s wipes, created in collaboration with the universities of Dundee and Heriot-Watt, are made of polyvinyl alcohol and dissolve within five minutes. “The largest online cosmetics company in the UK, Cult Beauty, working alongside Conserving Beauty in Australia, has taken dissolving wipes and sheet face masks into the international world of cosmetics,” says McCormack. “Scotland has always been good at positioning itself in the world of innovation.”

Meanwhile, there have been strides forward in developing processes to break down plastic. John McGeehan, a Scot and professor of structural biology at the University of Portsmouth, has been developing enzymes to break down polyethylene terephthalate, the plastic used in single-use drinks bottles and food packaging. His team is looking to nature, collecting microbes “from rubbish dumps and out in the oceans, on beaches ... searching for new enzymes and then bringing them back to the laboratory”.

However, in the show’s catalogue, author and campaigner Erica Cirino points out that “innovations can be a distraction”, stating: “There are many competitions to find plastic replacements, but they often tap into the same wasteful mindset. “Disposing of something made of algae may be better, but it’s still reinforcing the colonial capitalist system that is destroying people’s lives by adding to the world’s waste burden.”

Above all, what we need to do is break our throwaway habit by making it easier for people to reuse. Catherine Bozec from Zero Waste Scotland, a contributor to the exhibition, says that there is reason for hope. “We need to use plastics more wisely and not as a throwaway item,” she says. “We need to move away from our single-use throwaway culture to a more circular, sustainable economy. We should use refill, reuse and return systems for all products wherever possible. There is also an important move to make the brand owners pay for the disposal of packaging at the end of life, a producer pays principle.”
We are, says New-York based designer, Cyrill Gutsch, in the exhibition catalogue, now “addicted to plastic”. It has brought safety, fostered innovation and “democratised comfort”. But, he says, “Our seemingly amazing technology has come with a big price.”
We know that price now, but, though the tide has turned in terms of public attitude towards plastic, there has been little slowing in its consumption and production. At the current rate, plastic production is set to quadruple by 2050. BP expects plastics to account for 95 percent of net growth in demand for oil by 2040.
Plastic: Remaking Our World is the story of how a beautiful innovation turned ugly. It’s also a warning that it’s not just a new material we must create, but a whole new way of living with each other and the natural world.

Plastic: Remaking Our World is at the V&A Dundee until February 5, 2023.