Kim De Wolff

Tag: plastic

  • Kamilo Beach Revisited

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    Almost a year to the day since my first visit, I find myself headed back to Kamilo, the famously plastic-covered ‘junk’ beach on the Big Island, Hawaii. It’s just after 6am, and I am bleary-eyed and over caffeinated, having just arrived on a date-line crossing flight from Tokyo the day before. I’ve signed up as…

  • Plastic Nightmares (an infographic)

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    I’ve been asked if I would like to share this plastic pollution infographic from OnlineEducation.net. I’m a bit wary about posting since it seems to be part of a series designed to promote an online college resource website, rather than plastic pollution research and activism more specifically. But the graphic is kind of cute, and…

  • 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…

  • Kamilo Beach on Material World

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    For a relatively small dose of my more academic writing, check out my guest post over at Material World. Lots of great articles and announcements for material culture folks, and a really interesting short entry on attempts to care for and return photos and other items lost with the 3/11 tsunami.

  • Nurdle Hunting

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    Yesterday I walked the Long Beach shore in the late afternoon sun. As usual, I was on the lookout for plastic, but I also had a more specific mission: I was hunting for nurdles. But what, you ask, is a nurdle? Nurdle is the nickname given to pre-production plastic pellets. Not to be confused with…

  • 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…

  • Fake Grass on a Plastic Beach

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    My recent research trip to the Big Island, Hawaii included a pilgrimage to Kamilo beach, near South Point. Kamilo is not a tourist beach; it is far from towns and houses, five miles down a very rough 4-wheel drive road. And it is covered in plastic waste. Like many people involved with plastic pollution, I…

  • 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…