Detaching from plastic packaging: reconfiguring material responsibilities

ABSTRACT This paper considers two cases from the “unpackaged movement” as examples of market detachment: the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s campaign to develop “a new plastics economy” and Source, a chain of zero waste bulk stores in Australia. Despite their differences, both these cases depend on tacit beliefs about material responsibilities, that is: assumptions about what single use plastic packaging is responsible for, who or what is affected by it, and how to redistribute its functions through different forms of detachment. In seeking to develop an analysis of detachment as a significant market dynamic, how the disposable plastic package changes from a mundane market device into a detachment problem is a key concern. Equally significant are questions of care. When plastic packaging shifts from mundane to troubling who is invited to care about this? A key finding of the paper is that the redistribution of material responsibilities occurs in very different ways.