Noah Münster & Ulrike Felt

Over the past two decades, microplastics have emerged as an environmental concern, attracting increasing attention in scientific research, policy and regulation. Their ubiquity and the difficulty of controlling and confining them have made them one of the most important wicked environmental problems contemporary societies have to face. But where to go to study the complex articulations between microplastics and the environment?

Since the early 1970s, it has been clear that microplastics are ubiquitous in marine systems, and research has focused very much on this environment; much less attention has been paid to freshwater systems, which have been conceptualised mainly as transport pathways transferring plastics to the oceans. More recently, there has been an increased focus on the sources, abundance and impacts of microplastics in freshwater ecosystems. In our research, we focus on a particular part of the freshwater system, wastewater, because it is an important pathway for microplastics and therefore a privileged place to study this issue. Wastewater is often presented as a mirror of contemporary societies, promising real-time insights into chemical pollution, the spread of pathogens or patterns of illicit drug use. The EU, in its revision of the Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive, has now proposed mandatory monitoring of microplastic pollution.

Through interviews with wastewater experts, site visits in waste water treatment plants, document analysis and a review of research debates, we explore how microplastic monitoring (as required by policymakers) is being put into practice. We therefore investigate how microplastics as a matter of concern can take shape in the political realm. However, studying monitoring means, on the one hand, engaging with the classificatory work that is taking place – a key site for environmental policy making – as there is widespread agreement that it makes little sense to treat microplastics as a single pollutant but as standing for a multiplicity of very different objects. On the other hand, we need to look at how microplastics in wastewater can actually be tracked, i.e. measured and characterised, and what building such a tracking infrastructure would entail. Looking at the complex relationships between monitoring, classifying and measuring (they mutually shape each other) will also allow us to show how the making of ‘facts’ about microplastics also frames how matters of concern can take shape and how these can or cannot be turned into matters of care.

Ulrike Felt & Kaye Mathies

Small plastic debris in ocean environments have been discussed in scientific literature the first time in the early 1970s. However, they have only gained public and policy attention in the last decade. In the EU, concern about microplastics became mainstream with the European Circular Economy Action Plan published by the European Commission in December 2015. Governing microplastics is not only challenging because of the ubiquity of microplastics in the environment, but also due to diversity of materials that fall under this label, their diverse sizes, forms and chemical compositions and a lack of clear classification and standardized measurements.

We will investigate how microplastics become a matter of concern for the EU and how it is transformed into a “European policy object” with all the challenges this brings with it. This means carefully analysing the ecosystem of EC documents in an effort to see how microplastics as a key residue is framed as a matter of concern and how it is turned into a matter of care through regulation.