Read an excerpt here:

Plastic is all around us: our electronics, our furniture, our clothes, our shoes—and even our food. It’s hard to imagine a world without plastic. So what do we do with all of it?

On today’s show, we take a closer look at plastic through the lens of culture, health, and the environment with scholar and artist Katie Schaag, who taught a class on plastic at UW–Madison last year, and David Pinsky with Greenpeace USA. They discuss the ethics of global plastic production and pollution, microplastics and health, the growing movement to ditch plastic straws, and much more.

Katie Schaag is a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. She is currently working on a book project, American Plasticity,which draws upon eco-criticism, queer theory, and neuroscience to theorize synthetic plastic aesthetics in contemporary performance art, visual art, and pop culture.

Listen to the full episode here. 

The School of Literature, Media, and Communication is a unit of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.