Page - 24 - in Critical Issues in Science, Technology and Society Studies - Conference Proceedings of the 17th STS Conference Graz 2018

(neo)liberal stance, that is directed towards the proactive citizen and consumer. Therefore, it regularly implements a moral and normative regime regarding notions of pollution, (im)purity and toxicity that are too individualized to bear any attraction for queer-feminist and antiracist politics. Feminist technoscience and feminist anthropology have shown how the question of the envi- ronment and the ecological is intoxicated in several ways. On the one hand, it is hard to relate to older ecofeminist standpoints that work within a clear nature/culture divide (MacCormack and Strathern 1980). On the other hand, some queer and cultural studies approaches that celebrate that environments and species might become contaminated with endocrine disruptors like Bisphenol A (a common monomer additive) find themselves squarely in the comfort zone of discourse theory and do not engage with issues like environmental injustice. The problem of modern solutions Microplastics are dispersed, become part or aggregate with natural environments. Plastics in the ocean do not stay “outside of nature”, but become new hybrid components. In contrast, ideas of cleaning the ocean from plastic seem to ignore the diffusion and the amalgamation of microplastics. They are guided by an idea of purification and they adhere to large scales. Nevertheless, projects like the “Ocean Cleanup” have become media hypes although nearly all marine scientists I met during my research were sceptical of the project. Moreover, they empha- sized the potential harmful effects of such large-scale projects for marine ecosystems. Max Liboiron (2015) criticises this kind of “technological fix” that “refuses to recognize the inherent wickedness of the problem”. Technological fixes often are end-of-pipe solutions that “attempt at combating the symptoms but not the cause of the social, political and ecological crises of the times”, as Arturo Escobar (2004, 209) writes. And he further argues that “modernity's ability to provide solutions to modern problems has been increasingly compromised. In fact, it can be argued that there are no modern solutions to many of today's problems. that there are no modern solutions to many of today's problems” (ibid.). However, this modern logic of solutions and technological fixes is still omnipresent and also environmental activists are often pervaded by such ideas. As already stated, some kind of solutions can be more problematic than the actual problem. Reliance on technological fixes shifts the focus away from questions of responsibility for the contamination with microplastics.1 In light of the dispersal of microplastics in even remote regions of the world, questions of environmental justice and care should be put on the political agenda. Inspired by ongoing de- bates in STS about the politics of care, Sebastian Ureta employs the concept “caring for waste” in his research about the handling of tailings in Chilean copper mines. He underlines that „caring for waste necessarily recognizes that waste is not going to go away, no matter how much we wanted it or planned it” (Ureta 2016, 5). From this vantage point, it might be interesting to dis- play the ambivalent qualities of plastic litter and to recognize the specific scalability of 1 Some kind of environmental campaigns, such as plastic bag bans, can even be misleading when they are not seen as a mere starting point. As a result, the focus might shift away from other significant input sources, such as fibres from synthetic fabric or the wear and tear of car tires (Wagner et al. 2018). In these examples plastics already enters the environment in form of microscopic particles (microfibers or fine dust particles). 24