Recording of a seminar given by Professor Trisia Farrelly as part of the Environmental Futures seminar series.
This presentation covered some key moments in the evolution of the political ecologies of plastic pollution since the 2017 Political Ecology Research Centre Conference, The Lives and Afterlives of Plastic and the edited volume that emerged out of that conference, Plastic legacies: Pollution persistence and politics. Drawing on her research and her national, regional, and international roles, Trisia presented some examples of the politics of plastics and plastic pollution including mis- and disinformation, the plastics producer playbook, conflicts of interest mitigation, interdisciplinarity, the democratisation of science, science diplomacy, and science-policy interfaces. She also touched on some of the multiple identities of plastics including as a novel entity in the planetary boundaries framework, a vibrant political material, and a driver and ongoing product of waste colonialism.
Trisia Farrelly was a previous PERC co-Director with Sy Taffel and is an Honorary Fellow at Massey University. Currently, she is coordinator of a 450-strong international body of independent scientists and Senior Scientist, Transdisciplinary Research Group, Cawthron Institute. She is former UN Plastics Scientific Advisory Committee member and Pacific Islands technical advisor. Trisia is a Royal Geographic Society Fellow and a Senior Editor of Cambridge Prisms Plastics. Her edited volume is Plastic Legacies: Pollution, Persistence, and Politics with Sy Taffel and Ian Shaw. Trisia received two Massey University and two national awards and was recently invested Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for ‘services to ecology’