Kim De Wolff

Tag: consumption

  • Bling Berries

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    Because nothing says ‘I love you’ like a $120 box of individually styrofoam-packed strawberries. As Captain Moore says, “Plastic, like diamonds, is forever.”

  • How to Live Responsibly with Plastic

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    We are obsessed with absolutes. Ban bottles. Zero waste. BPA free. A world with good and bad neatly slotted on either side. You are with us or against us. At the same time, we can’t do everything, so we applaud ourselves for tiny efforts. Refill a bottle. Bring a bag. Doing something is better than…

  • My Day, In Plastic

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    I’ve always been an environmentally minded person. When my father cut down the acre of forest in our backyard, I felt so bad for the trees that I vowed not to speak with him again (I caved sometime after dinner, several hours close enough to eternity for a 10 year old). I stopped eating meat…

  • Plastic Culture & Consumption

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    It’s summer teaching time! A selection of books inspiring my senior seminar (COGN 150) on the role of plastic and plastic things in everyday life. I’m super excited about the class and can’t wait to see my students’ final projects. The details: Plastic Culture & Consumption Syllabus

  • Kamilo beach lost & found

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    Google sleuths and polyglots! I need your help solving a collection of (s)pacific mysteries. Instincts honed in the 80s served me well in identifying the green lump of plastic above as a battlecat saddle from He-Man (Panthor’s actually based on the colour), but do you have any ideas about the rest of these objects found…

  • A Spoonful of Absurdity

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                                              Last weekend I was fortunate to accompany an Algalita member giving a talk for a local women’s group. It was a great presentation, covering all kinds of marine plastic problems and Algalita’s efforts to…

  • Dangerous Species

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    This nature-culture crossing poster comes to me from Hanie (thanks lady!).  I like it because it offers, if only in jest, the possibility of waste ‘acting’ like other dangerous creatures of the sea. Roaming free, bottles, bags and batteries threaten not humans (as goes the usual understanding of ‘dangerous’), but the wellbeing of the ocean:…

  • The Last Straw

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    Plastic is so entangled with everything we do, that is seems pretty much impossible to stop using it cold turkey. My computer is plastic, my contacts, even my toilet seat. The last time I purchased eyeglasses I was told that getting my prescription filled with actual glass lenses would leave me with spectacles so heavy…

  • Packaging

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    In preparation for the expedition I’ve been ordering electronic bits and pieces off the internet. While rarely pleased with the amount of packaging that accompanies my purchases, I was especially dismayed to have a single, tiny camera battery arrive nested among plastic pillows in a giant box: As it turns out, Amazon has a packaging…