CHAPTER 13

Materialized Disaster: The COVID-19 Pandemic and Disposable Plastics

Hyunah Keum and Carl Zimring

Interactions with our material surroundings changed significantly in the wake of the COVID-19 public health crisis. Humans in need of protection from the coronavirus had to come up with different kinds of products in new material configurations. Among these, many included plastics. Face masks, hand sanitizers, alcohol swabs, polyethylene gloves, and coffee cups used to have different purposes before the pandemic turned them into infection prevention tools. Everyday plastic products’ new collective purpose was to ensure hygiene and safety based on disposability. Totally new kinds of plastic products, such as transparent acrylic (polymethyl methacrylic acid) sneeze guards and antivirus film, also appeared. They were quickly mass-produced and deployed in various public areas to protect people from droplet transmission. How could we have thrown away what we threw away during the COVID-19 pandemic? What kind of materials underpin discarding practices during the disaster? How we interact with our surroundings has changed significantly in the wake of an unprecedented public health crisis.

In the pandemic, South Korean public health officials actively deployed, utilized, handled, and treated plastic products and their subsequent waste in specific ways to minimize the spread of infection. As the pandemic continued, the longevity of those products also became uncertain.1 Many of the plastic products we first thought would only be used as an emergency response to COVID still remain with us today. Focusing on South Korea,2 this chapter explores the new relationship with plastic materials brought about during the “living-with-COVID” period of pandemic control. The government mobilized an existing infrastructure to increase the production and importation of disposable plastics and bolstered existing infrastructures to handle the increased amount of discarded single-use plastic products. By looking into how the social life of disposable plastics intersects with the pandemic response,3 we can better understand the sociotechnical transformation of plastics in the hands of average citizens, medical practitioners, and essential workers who struggled daily against the pandemic. In this complex disaster, material and bodily legacies were formed, both visible and invisible. We will live with the material, temporal realities of plastic waste for years to come as part of the slow disaster of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Questioning the Materiality: How Plastics Became Disposable

Paying attention to the materiality of plastic helps us understand why it can be imagined as something that can turn into waste so easily. It is also necessary to investigate the material and bodily consequences of this transformation from plastic product to plastic waste. Science and technology studies scholar Gay Hawkins attends to the materiality of plastic by focusing on how particular economic and cultural practices turn the durable and immortal materiality of plastic into objects that can be disposed of and disappear easily, seemingly without consequences. According to her, “Materials and things have a social life[;] their form and meanings are continually changing through being embedded in new relations, through aging, through being detached from one setting and located in another.”4 It is humans’ need for the convenience of disposability and their supporting infrastructures that materialize plastics into something that can be thrown away.

When the durability of plastics meets disposability, however, severe environmental consequences follow.5 Plastics do not completely disappear but only break into small pieces due to ultraviolet radiation and physical abrasion, resulting in pollution and ecosystem destruction. Plastic is light, but its pollution is heavy.6 Global accumulation of durable but disposable plastics is already beyond human control. A 2017 study, the very first attempt to analyze “the production, use, and fate of all plastics ever made around the world,” found that out of approximately 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic made globally in the history of plastic production, 76 percent has been discarded.7 Only 9 percent of plastic waste has been recycled, while 79 percent has been landfilled or remains in the environment, including in the ocean.8

What do these numbers tell us apart from teaching us that plastic spends most of its life cycle in its waste form rather than its product form? The inconvenient truth about plastic products is that they are used for a short time frame that does not take into account the impacts its waste afterlife might have on humans, nonhuman beings, and the planet.

The Birth of COVID Waste: When the Pandemic Response Met Plastics

It is easy for us to think that the materiality of plastics is a matter of science, and so is the materiality of COVID. However, since the materiality of plastics was constructed by social demands and infrastructures, the materiality of the coronavirus requires attention to the question within which particular social and political environments were functioning. In the context of South Korea, the government often emphasized science in its response to convince the public of the government’s competency in the face of an unprecedented public health emergency. Elements of the so-called K-response (K-bangyeok) stress the scientific approaches to combat the pandemic under the slogan “test, trace, treat.” The South Korean government proved itself exceptional in promoting this model to the world and branding it as the best way to respond to the pandemic.

However, even though critiques of the K-response were proliferating within the first few months after the outbreak, its reliance on the usage of disposable plastics was something more than an object of simple critique or justification. COVID-19 penetrated every aspect of our lives, ranging from daily efforts to minimize transmission to frontline medical practices combating the infection. At the level of production, plastic was easy to mass-produce using existing infrastructures. At the level of consumption, disposability of plastic had become a virtue again, helping secure public safety under newly created pandemic rules and norms. At the level of disposal, plastic became the object of safe and secure management by the government while simultaneously worsening the working environment of waste handlers. By questioning the technological and political apparatus used during the pandemic and documenting its impacts, this chapter will engage with how different kinds of plastics were mobilized against COVID from what we call the material politics of plastics.

In Everyday Settings: Overturning the Value of Throwaway

Most disposable coffee cups use polystyrene lids for hot beverages, polyethylene terephtalate or low-density polyethylene cups for cold beverages, and coating materials on paper-based cups for hot beverages.9 This complexity of material composition in each coffee cup makes them hard to recycle. The revival of plasticized coffee cups is an exemplary case that shows how the South Korean government modified regulations around plastics at the outbreak of the pandemic.

Less than two years earlier in May 2018, the South Korean Ministry of Environment signed a voluntary agreement on disposable plastic cups with sixteen franchise coffee shops, five franchise fast-food restaurants, and environmental groups. The voluntary agreement prohibited the use of disposable plastic cups inside coffee shops in favor of reusable cups, unified the material used for plastic cups, restrained the use of colored plastic cups, and required the recycling of plastic cups.10 Consequential changes began taking place gradually throughout the following twenty months, up until the outbreak of the pandemic.11

On February 24, 2020, the Ministry of Environment announced that it would allow the use of disposable products in food service businesses, with the permission of local governments, until the end of the pandemic.12 On the same day, at that time mayor of Seoul, Won-soon Park, granted permission for the use of disposable products, including disposable plastic cups, in the food service industry, including coffee shops. This was a notable decision considering Koreans’ high consumption of coffee, as the material composition of coffee cups actually has a high impact in fostering public awareness around single-use and recycling.13 Hard-won measures to establish a culture that reduces disposable plastic cups were easily withdrawn from the very beginning of the pandemic.

Both South Korean and international public health experts raised concerns over whether the reintroduction of disposable materials in cafés and restaurants for the sake of public hygiene was made based on scientific knowledge. South Korean infectious disease experts pointed out that washing reusable containers with detergent kills the virus.14 Experts criticized that allowing disposable plastic cups inside cafés was hastily decided due to public fear rather than scientific knowledge. One day after the decision was announced by the Seoul city government, a Ministry of Environment official admitted that reallowing disposable plastics in cafés was done to relieve public anxiety over cross-infection.15 A few months afterward on June 22, 2020, a statement was released by Greenpeace USA and UPSTREAM, both members of the Break Free From Plastic movement, addressing “the safety of reusable bags and containers during the COVID-19 pandemic” alongside “over 115 health experts from 18 countries, including virologists, epidemiologists, emergency room doctors, and specialists in public health and food packaging safety.”16 Experts pointed out that unnecessary disposable plastics were being promoted during the pandemic and stated “that disposable products are not inherently safer than reusables, and that recent studies have shown the virus can remain active on plastic from two to six days.” This shows that not only South Korean but also international public health experts criticized the measures that unnecessarily drew back the existing regulations on disposable plastics.

The revival of disposable plastic cups was not applicable to all other places, however. Inconsistency in the decision to temporarily reallow the use of disposable plastic cups only in coffee shops stands out when compared with restaurants. In terms of risk of droplet transmission, coffee shops and restaurants do not differ much since people talk to each other while eating and drinking at both. However, not only reusable cups but also cutlery and plates have been used in restaurants all around South Korea even after the outbreak of the pandemic. Using reusable cutlery has rarely been questioned, nor were any new guidelines given to encourage the use of disposable cutlery. The contrast becomes even starker when considering that some cafés did not even allow the use of tumblers due to concerns over cross-infection. This can be understood as a decision to promote single-use coffee cups, which can be relatively easily deployed and discarded as part of the government’s political desire to promote K-response to control the materiality of COVID.

The new social norm against using disposable plastics, which had just started to be formed, made a U-turn. From around 2018 until the outbreak of the pandemic, South Koreans using single-use coffee cups could be criticized for generating environmental pollution and not caring for the ecosystem. But as the notions of disposability and the concept of “untact” emerged to minimize face-to-face interactions and contact between people and began to be associated with public safety during the pandemic,17 people could feel like they cared for themselves and others by using single-use plastics. The use of single-use plastics had reverted from a shameful act to one of virtue.

In Medical Settings: Transport on the Day/Incinerate on the Day

What about plastics generated in medical settings, where containing the coronavirus is the aim of lifesaving work?18 It is important to investigate what rules were applied for handling medical waste during the pandemic. Though plastic products were used in medical settings before the pandemic, how those were categorized and regulated changed during the pandemic. The Ministry of Environment created a new category of medical waste, “COVID medical waste,” to designate waste originating in medical settings related to COVID-19 tests and treatments. South Korea has its own data-intensive, web-based Allbaro System to manage potentially infectious medical waste in a proper manner. In this system, location and weight of medical waste are tracked with RFID sensor chips attached to specialized containers from the moment of disposal. This started on January 23, 2020, months before the World Health Organization declared COVID a pandemic. Consequently, the Ministry of Environment created a new principle called “transport on the day and incinerate on the day” to manage COVID-19 medical waste, since it was considered highly hazardous. With this new rule, the South Korean government started to proudly promote “safe” and “secure” treatment of COVID-19 medical waste to the public.

The Reincarnation of COVID Waste: Where Remnants of the Pandemic End Up

Where do all these pandemic plastics go? While the deployment of single-use plastic products was visible, the infrastructure to remove the resulting waste was not. Though the government cared about the safety of the average citizen by promoting untact culture, the safety of waste handlers was not the government’s priority. This is evidenced by the deteriorated working conditions within waste treating infrastructures, such as recyclable waste screening facilities. Having visited a recyclable waste screening facility in southern Gyeonggi-do province in mid-September 2021, Hyunah Keum could observe these new working conditions.19

An underground multifloor complex houses four kinds of waste treatment facilities, one on each floor: a recyclable waste screening facility, a domestic waste incineration facility, a food waste treatment facility, and a sewage treatment system. It is the only such complex in South Korea where those facilities are completely hidden underground. Local governments regard the structure as a national model to follow, since it allows the waste-handling processes to be done out of sight and provides a “clean, pleasant, and pro-environmental image” with a nearby park that includes green lawns and an observatory tower. However, this is a fantasy because making the facilities invisible creates a poor work environment.

During the pandemic, the situation worsened as workers’ distress piled up along with the increasing plastic waste products. Workers were vulnerable to infection inside the facility, since it was enclosed in a construction without windows. According to one worker, “the facility gets disinfected twice a month by an external company contracted to CESCO,20 but I feel it is not enough. We [members of the labor union] told the local government that it is not enough, and asked for it to be done more often, like once a week,” which was not fulfilled.21 Moreover, overtime work became frequent during the pandemic. The worker added, “The number of workers is not enough even when all workers work to the maximum, which is 52 hours per week. It was not like this before the COVID-19 pandemic. . . . This is not just the story of [this city], but a national one. Especially women workers manually separating Styrofoam overwork at night almost on a daily basis.”

Unlike recyclable waste screening facilities, which are located all over the nation (though mostly in rural areas), only around a dozen medical waste treatment companies, which are all incineration facilities, were in operation in South Korea as of November 2021. With this small number of facilities throughout the nation, most of the medical waste traveled long distances for disposal. Also, working hours increased to meet the expectation of the new principle of “transport on the day, and incinerate on the day,” which demanded swift transportation and incineration despite the long travel distance.

There were also problems with not only how the medical waste is transported but also how it is packaged. Different from other types of medical waste, COVID-19 medical waste is specially packaged into hard polypropylene containers and then wrapped with an additional layer of vinyl bags. Workers raised their doubts over this way of packaging by pointing out that the risk of COVID-19 medical waste can be contained well enough with one layer of a well-sealed container, making the second layer of plastic unnecessary. In other words, there were disagreements between how the government wants to control the COVID-19 medical waste and how the actual practitioners on the ground regard the risk around COVID-19 medical waste, which leads to more usage and burning of single-use plastics.

Another form of injustice manifests across temporal and geographical scales. COVID-19 medical waste seemed to disappear after incineration, but it was only made invisible by changing its materiality from a solid form to air pollutants. Another aspect, which often gets ignored, is the carbon footprint generated through the transportation of all the medical waste for long distances, which adds another layer to the slow disaster of medical waste. What the South Korean government wanted to show as a “safe” handling of medical waste was only possible at the cost of future safety, as this begets environmental consequences that will remain for a longer periods of time.

The different forms of injustice detailed here are the coproduct of the government’s emergency responses and its desire to appear competent, built upon the disposability of plastics. Not enough discussions are happening around the risks of COVID-19 medical waste—whether it is a lack of sufficient scientific knowledge or of communication between the government and practitioners who handle waste.

Untact consumption, which generates a tremendous amount of plastic waste, is an attempt to solve one public health problem while generating an additional set of pollution and labor problems. With the help of plastic materials and the laborers who dispose of them into invisibility, this type of consumption was possible. The materiality of plastics and COVID-19 functioned in specific ways, where scientific knowledge about the virus, knowledge of waste and waste handlers, and policy guidelines to handle wastes were not in sync. Though invisible it may be, its consequences clearly remained in the bodies of workers and our surroundings—the land, air, and water.

NOT Just COVID, NOT Just Plastic

The consequences of the encounter between plastics and the pandemic followed in different forms. Since June 22, 2022, the South Korean government has started to discuss how to treat the COVID-19 prevention items, such as transparent sneeze guards and hand sanitizers, during an official meeting under COVID-19 Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasure Headquarters.22 The government set fundamental principles to store or recycle prevention items in case of a resurge of COVID-19 in the future; however, disposal guidelines were decided by considering cases in which those items cannot avoid disposal. Systematic collection and recycling plans have been established for transparent sneeze guards. Measures to monitor the amount of ethanol release from wastewater facilities have been also prepared to prevent (minimize) water and soil pollution in the case of hand sanitizer containers, which contain large amounts of ethanol.

On the other hand, it took a while to return to encouraging the use of reusable containers in coffee shops. Food and delivery services, which became part of untact culture, have gained a foothold. In the meantime, different types of infrastructures to treat single-use plastics are still working restlessly at the cost of workers’ labor and longer-term impact on the ecosystem. We can never study stories of COVID-19 in South Korea without studying the journey of disposable plastics.

What policy decisions in the future would avoid or reduce the slow disaster of disposable plastics? How can scholars in disaster studies and discard studies better intervene with different groups of people concerned with or involved in waste issues—scientists who produce knowledge on materiality of wastes, decision-makers who set the rules to handle wastes, and waste treatment facility laborers who deal with materiality of wastes on-site? What future policy decisions could avoid or reduce the slow disaster of disposable plastics?

Policymakers should be able to articulate the detailed process of producing, consuming, and discarding the artifacts they plan to deploy in advance. Already, we have come to know the environmental impacts of multiple plastic products other than coffee cups. Polyethylene gloves threaten marine animals because the gloves are mistaken as jellyfish and also turn into noxious gasses (e.g., dioxins) when incinerated. Acrylic sneeze guards have a big hurdle in regard to being recycled due to economic viability, so they might end up being landfilled or incinerated. And used hand sanitizer containers might end up not being recycled because they consist of complex materials. To make producers take responsibility for designing recyclable or easy-to-recycle products, South Korea has put into effect Extended Producer Responsibility regulations. Based on already existing legislative systems such as Extended Producer Responsibility regulations, we should be able to inform experts and policymakers not to rely on the existing infrastructure to produce disposable plastics for new purposes and instead have a “just transition” toward detaching from the existing infrastructure.

There will be a time when people want to resort to disposable items again, just like decision-makers in South Korea did during the COVID-19 pandemic. It might not be plastics. It could be (so-called) biodegradable materials. Regardless of the material, if we are to produce, consume, and discard a product to combat an unknown disaster that will come for sure, what should we learn from the pandemic this time? The COVID-19 pandemic can be a means to access alternative imaginaries and different knowledge for policymakers, where disaster at one scale (public health) does not obscure disaster at other scales, such as environmental pollution and sanitary workers’ working conditions. The pandemic will be remembered as a crucial period when people realized that we cannot prioritize one disaster over another. Public health disasters are often sudden and visible, while the disaster of waste has been slow and invisible, accumulating over a long time. Only when we discuss the specific materials and temporal dimensions of disposable materials starting at the production level can we live through the compound and slow disaster of plastics.

Notes

1. 1.  The head of the United Nations World Health Organization declared an end to COVID-19 as a global health emergency as of April 30, 2023. “WHO Chief Declares End to COVID-19 as a Global Health Emergency,” United Nations, May 5, 2023, https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/05/1136367.
2. 2.  This chapter is based on empirical data collected by Hyunah Keum for her master’s thesis. Additional data was collected while working on this chapter from mid-2022 until the end of 2023. Hyunah Keum, “Making Waste Acceptable and Invisible: The COVID-19 Pandemic and Material Politics of Plastic Waste in South Korea” (master’s thesis, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, 2022), https://koasas.kaist.ac.kr/handle/10203/307570.
3. 3.  The terms “single-use” and “disposable” are often used interchangeably. This chapter, however, intentionally prefers to use the term “disposable” and “disposability” rather than “single-use” to highlight the nuance of “dispose-able—being able to dispose of.” Plastics are too durable to be disposed of after single use, but a lot of modern plastic products are designed to be disposable.
4. 4.  Gay Hawkins, “Plastic and Presentism: The Time of Disposability,” Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 5, no. 1 (2018): 93, https://doi.org/10.1558/jca.33291.
5. 5.  Environmental consequences of plastic also occur during the manufacturing process of plastic products when flame retardants, plasticizers, and coloring agents are added. Those chemicals are exposed after disposal and pollute soil, water, and air. Roland Geyer, Jenna R. Jambeck, and Kara Lavender Law, “Production, Use, and Fate of All Plastics Ever Made,” Science Advances 3, no. 7 (2017): 1–5, https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1700782.
6. 6.  Keum, “Making Waste Acceptable and Invisible,” 10.
7. 7.  Geyer et al., “Production, Use, and Fate,” 1.
8. 8.  Keum, “Making Waste Acceptable and Invisible,” 10.
9. 9.  This subsection is written based on Section 2 of Hyunah Keum’s master’s thesis. Keum, “Making Waste Acceptable and Invisible,” 38–58.
10. 10.  “커피전문점, 패스트푸드점, 1회용품 줄이기와 재활용 촉진에 앞선다” (Coffee Shops and Fast-Food Restaurants Take the Initiative in Reducing Single-use Plastics and Promoting Recycling), Ministry of Environment, May 24, 2018, https://www.me.go.kr/home/web/board/read.do?boardMasterId=1&boardId=865680&menuId=286.
11. 11.  In a press release, the Ministry of Environment reported that the number of disposable cups used per each coffee shop and fast-food restaurant decreased 14.4 percent, from the total number of 76,376 to 65,376 during one year. “커피전문점, 패스트푸드점, 매장 내에선 1회용 컵 안 써요” (We Do Not Use Single-Use Cups Inside Coffee Shops and Fast-Food Restaurants), Ministry of Environment, June 4, 2019, http://me.go.kr/home/web/board/read.do;jsessionid=GZLUmxsnGDN5pahbtiIlVduM.mehome1?pagerOffset=60&maxPageItems=10&maxIndexPages=10&searchKey=&searchValue=&menuId=&orgCd=&boardId=993005&boardMasterId=1&boardCategoryId=&decorator=.
12. 12.  Chan-ho Kim, “서울시, 카페 등 업소 일회용품 사용 코로나19 상황 종료 때까지 허용” (Seoul City Allows the Usage of Single-Use Products in Businesses Such as Café until the End of the COVID-19), Kyunghyang Shinmun, February 24, 2020, https://news.khan.co.kr/kh_news/khan_art_view.html?artid=202002241815001.
13. 13.  Yoon-seo Lee, “Work Culture, Pandemic Fuel Koreans’ Craving for Caffeine,” Korean Herald, March 14, 2023, https://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20230314000601.
14. 14.  Han-sol Kim, “일회용품 사용, 코로나19 감염 예방 글쎄?” (Doubts on the Effectiveness of Preventing the Infection by Using Single-Use Products), Hankyoreh, February 25, 2020, http://news.khan.co.kr/kh_news/khan_art_view.html?artid=202002252211005&code=610103.
15. 15.  Kim, “Doubts on the Effectiveness of Preventing the Infection.”
16. 16.  Perry Wheeler, “Over 115 Health Experts Sign Statement Addressing Safety or Reusables during COVID-19,” news release, Greenpeace USA, June 22, 2020, https://upstreamsolutions.org/blog/health-expert-statement.
17. 17.  The term “untact” was recently coined to refer to contactless social behaviors under social distancing.
18. 18.  This subsection is written based on Section 3 of Hyunah Keum’s master’s thesis. Keum, “Making Waste Acceptable and Invisible,” 59–75.
19. 19.  This site-visit experience is reformulated based on Section 2.4 of Hyunah Keum’s master’s thesis. Keum, “Making Waste Acceptable and Invisible,” 54–58.
20. 20.  CESCO is a widely known South Korean private company that specializes in pest management and environmental safety.
21. 21.  Keum, “Making Waste Acceptable and Invisible,” 56–57.
22. 22.  Yeon-ju Kang, “‘COVID-19’ Prevention Items Turn into a Burden as Government Grapples with Mass Disposal Dilemma,” Kyunghyang Shinmun, June 30, 2022, https://m.khan.co.kr/national/national-general/article/202206301634011/amp.