Rebecca Altman

Plastics have always been global—even before science began tracking the peregrinations of microplastics across meridians, into rain, through the human pla​​centa. At the industry’s outset, Civil War–era rubber goods were fashioned with latex extracted from the Amazon and later through Belgium’s brutal regime in the Democratic Republic of Congo. England imported gutta-percha from Southeast Asia for undersea telegraphy wires.

This is hardly the time to talk about plastics is what I think when Dad, hovering over the waste bin at a post-funeral potluck, waves me over, his gesture discrete but emphatic. He has retrieved from the trash a crystalline plastic cup, with fluted, rigid sides. “Polystyrene,” he grins, inverting the cup to reveal its resin code (a 6 stamped inside the recycling symbol). “But not my kind.