Front and Back Covers, Volume 37, Number 3. June 2021

Abstract

Front and back cover caption, volume 37 issue 3Front coverPLASTIC POSSIBILITIESThe front cover depicts an art installation by South Korean artist Choi Jeong Hwa, also known as ‘the plastic alchemist’, at the ‘Your Bright Future’ exhibition in Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), 2009. For Hwa, plastic is the most artificial material that is at the same time the most common element in today's landscape.Hailed as the quintessential material for design, invention and relentless production, plastic is often associated with post‐WWII industrial growth in the Western world. And yet, wading through the ‘plastic islands’ of our oceans, standing knee‐deep in landfills, choking on incinerated plastic fumes, the spectacular ‘utopia’ of plastic is beginning to register differently.In this issue, Tridibesh Dey and Mike Michael present the everyday ‘alchemies’, the lived realities assembled with plastic and plastic waste in India. They take us into the household of Dey's parents in Kolkata and familiarize us with the creative repurposing techniques performed on everyday plastic items like bottles, containers, carrier bags, etc., which are supposed to be thrown away after ‘single use’. Like the recycled baskets in Hwa's art installation, the inventive deployment of used plastics here point to the emerging socio‐materialities of plastics, which might, in turn, inform and inspire different futures, leading us into collaborative kinship and more‐than‐human living with plastics.These emergent plastic relations are embedded within more extensive socio‐economic, political and ecological relations configured in contemporary India around plastic's production, consumption and waste management. The delicate plastic economies of the poorer urban households are at risk under the recent government reforms in waste management, the neo‐liberalization of waste work and the ‘toxic’ externalities produced by large‐scale extractive infrastructures.Back coverCONTAINER SHIPPINGAbove: satellite image of the containership Ever Given from the Evergreen Marine shipping line stuck in the Suez Canal, Egypt, 24 March 2021. Below: the same ship safely moored in the port of Rotterdam, 9 March 2020.The Ever Given, an ultra‐large containership, obstructed the Suez Canal for six days in March 2021, thereby accruing an estimated loss to the world economy of US $400 million per hour. Getting stuck in the canal on its way from Asia to Rotterdam, the ship not only brought the seemingly smooth flow of maritime transportation via this central waterway to a hold, but also sparked great public interest in the role of the maritime industry – and its ever‐growing container vessels – in the functioning of global capitalism today.In ‘Politics of scale’ in this issue, Hege H⊘yer Leivestad and Elisabeth Schober remind us that the Ever Given is only one of many ultra‐large ‘box ships’ sailing the world's oceans today. These vessels have, over recent years, undergone a spectacular growth in size. The reasons for this expansion are no longer primarily located in economies of scale, the authors argue, but rather, are enmeshed with complex political processes in far‐flung places across the world.Featuring the story of the HMM Algeciras, currently the largest containership in the world in terms of container‐carrying capacity, the article takes us from a ship christening at a South Korean shipyard, past the Suez Canal, to the Spanish port town that the ship is named after. Tracing the complex public‐private partnership that brought the HMM Algeciras into being, attention is also paid to the mounting social costs of ultra‐large container vessels like these, which require massive (and often public) investments in infrastructures at the land‐sea interface.Bigger is not always better. In the containership industry, have we arrived at a point where unsustainable false economies of scale are setting in?