Single-use Plastics Research (SUPR)

 


DESIS Emily Carr is questioning our relationship with single-use plastics. We speculate that deep inquiry into our personal relationship(s) with single-use plastics would lead to insights about how social innovation could support the cultural shift from dependency on single-use plastics.

SUPR Team

The SUPR team is a group of faculty members and graduate student researchers that meet regularly to guide the activities of the research lab. This team is complemented by expertise from Zero Waste Canada and Nada Grocery, Vancouver’s first no-packaging grocery store.

Actions

ACTIONS are different methods for inquiring into everyday relationships with single use plastics. These can include caring, belonging, presencing, conversation, everyday life and journaling. Each SUPR team member has their own method to explore their relationship with plastic.

Caring

We commit as a community to an ongoing caring relationship with these single-use-plastic artifacts. Keeping them close to us, we nurture them. We are encouraging an ethos of care that can generate both a situated and relational response. Caring in this context is about being attuned and having the foresight to intervene as needed.

Belonging

By repositioning single-use-plastics as our belongings we are questioning typical behaviours and seeking new actions. A belonging is not so easily tossed off or disregarded. New actions can include care, repair, preserving and keeping. And if we do discard plastic belongings, might there be affect?

Saying Goodbye

Saying goodbye points out the brevity of our relationship with single use plastics. By bringing awareness to the act of disposal, we become more mindful of where we part ways with the ones we inevitably encounter. We began to document how the plastic became our belonging, why they became our belonging and where we said goodbye, along with a quick drawing of the item.

Presencing

The Buddhist approach embraces plastic as a presence with which we are interdependent (we inter-are). Breathing mindfully and remembering to be non-judgmental about the material provides new observations and insights.

Journaling

Being mindful of our everyday plastics, we started engaging in an intimate conversation with them through our daily journal. This includes educating ourselves about what actions these plastics play in our daily life and how is our response to those. Every day a letter to one of our plastics provides a time for self-reflective moments.

Conversational

Public conversations around avoiding single use plastic (such as asking for a product that is not packaged in plastic) can lead to “social frictions”, which are a normal part of social change. This in turn leads to inspiration for how social innovation can support change in the way that members of a household, the public, service staff and members of a community rely on single-use-plastics.

SUPR Network