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Introduction: Histories of the Dust Heap Elizabeth Mazzolini and Stephanie Foote I In 2007, a flotilla of what are commonly called rubber duckies arrived on Britain’s beaches. Like most mass-produced cheap toys, they were not rubber but rather plastic. They, along with their plastic frog, turtle, and beaver companions (approximately twenty-nine thousand toys all told) were produced by the same manufacturer, and had been adrift for fifteen years after a container on the ship carrying them overturned in 1992. Over the years the ducks and their friends visited Hawaii, floated along the coast of Alaska to the Bering Strait, and made their way through the Arctic Ocean to Iceland and New England. Along their journey, the plastic toys aided oceanographers and other researchers studying surface ocean currents and global weather patterns; they were easy to spot, and more likely to be reported than official floats specifically designed for the task of studying currents. In the scheme of things, the toys’ unintended voyage is scarcely more unlikely than the trip they were intended to make from factories in China to toy stores in the United States. Their prolonged ocean voyage was, on the face of it, more “natural” than their originally planned route because it followed ocean currents instead of the socially constructed paths of global commerce. But in some sense, it was precisely this strange palimpsest of natural and unnatural that seemed to draw the attention of the media. The incongruous pairing of the artificial with the organic was part of the toys’ fascination for journalists and newspaper readers; the chubby little ducks with their painted smiles navigating the brutal waters of the Arctic were, on the one hand, charming, and on the other hand, appalling. No matter how homey and familiar they appeared, no matter how comically juxtaposed the image of a plastic duck in an endless expanse of water seemed, no matter how amusing the color photographs or intricate maps in the Daily Mail, the toys were, after all, just garbage. 2 Introduction This fact was not lost on the reporters who found in the ducks a plethora of stories that seemed perfectly suited to account in any number of ways for ocean currents, pollution, beachcombing, and even the durability of the plastic toys themselves. The mainstream media coverage was thus rather eccentric: stories drew attention to the toys’ strangeness or cuteness along with the financial rewards offered for finding one of the ducks, even as they also discussed big-picture issues like the common phenomenon of container ships losing cargo in the ocean or the effect of plastic on the ocean’s food chain. Indeed, it seems that the more that the images of battered plastic toys were circulated, the more they inspired a surfeit of stories that, like the iconic plastic ducks themselves, seemed both familiar and unexpected. Their ghoulish charm appeared intimately tied to the fact that they were nonbiodegradable lumps of plastic, shedding bisphenol A and pthalates as they traveled the world. Similarly, their visibility suggested even more upsetting questions: How many other objects have been dumped into the sea and gone unreported because they lack a hook, a cutesy angle that disguises the grim conditions of the role of global trade in planetary degradation? What about all the other unpublicized substances that get dumped, either by accident or on purpose, into waterways all the time? And where do all the millions of plastic toys that we buy every day end up when we throw them away? The rubber ducks’ embodiment of polar opposites—at once commodities and trash, toys and junk, nature and artifice—made them interesting to reporters, but it also made them a sign of the role of garbage in embodying large- and small-scale problems of environmental crisis. As Curt Ebbesmeyer, a retired oceanographer who charted the ducks for over a decade, told the media with some ironic understatement, “You can learn a lot from a duck on a beach” (quoted in Clerkin 2007)1 The uncanny nature of these toys—the coordination of their domestic charm with their grim embodiment of global traffic and pollution—almost perfectly encapsulates what interests us most about garbage and waste. A deep concern with garbage, we discovered as we researched and organized this collection, is among the few environmental issues that seems to unite people who otherwise share very different vocabularies to express their environmental commitments. Studying garbage is as important to academics as it is to activists, as productive...

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