Plastic Ocean: Class, Inequality and the Circulation of Ocean Waste in Lima, Peru

• In Event: Socio-environmental conflicts

Abstract

This paper analyzes the small bits of plastic garbage that are quickly filling waves and beaches throughout Lima, Peru, and the world. Public campaigns against single use plastics, especially plastic bags, have raised the profile of this issue in Lima. Through an ethnographic and media analysis of these campaigns, this paper shows that in their focus on individual behavior, such education programs frame plastic use as a moral choice and draw on historically-rooted discourses of poverty and hygiene in their characterization of the issue as a problem fueled by the poor choices of a multitude of lower-class consumers. Anti-pollution campaigns have invoked enduring notions of class difference while obscuring municipal governments’ standing use of the ocean as a free sink for the disposal of waste and effluent. The result is a continuation of such pollution, the impacts of which are felt most powerfully by impoverished beachgoers and fishers, working-class surfers and others who have no other option but to use highly-contaminated urban waters in Lima for their work and recreation. The issue of ocean waste in Peru provides an important opportunity for exploring how class inequalities are bound up with the production of marine nature and how such inequalities are made material through ecological relationships.

Author

• Maximilian Viatori, Iowa State University