Plastics Protests: Mobilising against Plastics in the US (1980s-present)

Dr Elsa Devienne (Northumbria University)

8 December 2026, 4pm
CHSTM Seminar Room: Simon 2.57 [maps and travel]
Online Access: TBC

Abstract

Scholars and journalists often attribute the current negotiations for a global Plastic Treaty to a recent ‘plastic backlash’ fuelled by documentaries such as Blue Planet II (2017). But anti-plastics campaigning has a much longer history. My project excavates the little-known history of the grassroots movement that challenged plastics’ ubiquity, toxicity and contributions to climate change from the 1980s onwards. Focusing on the US (the largest producer of plastic waste historically), it reorients our understanding of postwar environmentalism by shifting the focus from major legislation and natural disasters to people’s everyday interactions, through plastics, with waste, chemicals and fossil fuels.

Plastics Protests will focus on key campaigns and moments in the history of the anti-plastics movement. In September 2025, I published preliminary work on the history of ocean plastic pollution and the role of citizen science cleanups in confronting plastic producers. The work came out in the form of an academic article, a two-episode series with The Plastisphere podcast, and a The Conversation article. For this presentation at CHSTM Research Seminar, I am planning on sharing the findings I’ll develop in a chapter on plastics and its consequences on human health, and how our perceptions of these have changed over time.

Elsa Devienne is Assistant Professor of History at Northumbria University. Her first book, Sand Rush: The Revival of the Beach in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles first came out in French in 2020 (Sorbonne Editions) and in 2024 in English (Oxford UP). Sand Rush won the 2021 Willi Paul Adams Award, the 2025 Arthur Miller First Book Prize, and the 2025 W. Turrentine Jackson Award given by the Western History Association. She is currently working on two new projects. The first one, funded by a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Grant, is entitled “Plastics Protests: Mobilizations against Plastics in the US from the 1980s until today”; the second one, on car dominance,  environmental justice and family mobilities, is inspired by her daily struggles cycling and walking in Manchester (UK), where she lives with her partner and two sons.

Related