Rebecca Altman, PhD

🙏

Writer Rebecca Altman said she has focused on studying plastics because “some of the stuff coming off the plant where my dad had worked was implicated in suffering and childhood sickness in New Jersey. I just really wanted to understand this larger system of which it was a part.”
buff.ly/kLy9nK4

New Book - The Rough Poets: Reading Oil-Worker Poetry How does it feel to be a worker in an oil-and-gas industry and a Canadian petrostate amid the climate crisis and the early stages of a transition away from fossil fuels?

"How does it feel to be a worker in an oil-and-gas industry and a Canadian petrostate amid the climate crisis and the early stages of a transition away from fossil fuels?" - Melanie Dennis Unrau

niche-canada.org/2024/11/27/n...

#envhist #envhum #fossilfuels #labour #poetry

EPA's December website edits cap off yearlong assault on climate info Like climate change, the Trump administration’s efforts to remove climate data from government websites feels vast, intangible, and overwhelming.

Wrote for the @thebulletin.org about the EPA’s latest website removals on the human causes of climate change, the administration’s yearlong assault on climate information, and why the everyday person should care about disappearing data:
thebulletin.org/2026/01/epas...

Yeah! Would love that! 🌱

🥰

Dear @ievajusionyte.bsky.social is a Brown University anthropologist and an EMT/paramedic who has focused on gun violence for most of her career, particularly on the US-Mexico border. But what happened here at Brown this past weekend...

Read her here:

The Song of Styrene: Intimate Histories of Plastics to be pub'd March 2027 @scribnerbooks.bsky.social

Meanwhile, 3 new titles:
Consumed | Saabira Chaudhuri
The Problem with Plastics | Judith Enck @beyondplastics.bsky.social w/ @adamlmahoney.bsky.social
Plastic, Inc.| @bethgardiner.bsky.social

I feel like this is the nightmare we all dread in the US — an active shooter in your community. Brown University is still in shelter in place 3 hours in, with 2 confirmed deaths, 8 in critical condition, and no shooter(s) in custody. One of my students had to run from the scene. Horrified.

Ooooh! Bookmarking to read ASAP!!! 💥💥💥

Plastic Planet | Venus Bivar Stalled negotiations and accelerating accumulation in the global petrochemicals industry

Happy to have written about plastic for @thepolycrisis.bsky.social. Thanks to @70sbachchan.bsky.social for sourcing the excellent graphics. And thanks to @rebecca-altman.bsky.social and @anjakrieger.bsky.social for being my go-to's on all-things plastic.

www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/pla...

Future-Proofing Capitalism: The Paradox of the Circular Economy for Plastics Abstract. The marine plastics crisis sparked a wave of corporate interest in the circular economy, a sustainable business model that aims to eliminate waste in industrial systems through recycling, re...

Hi Carl — what comes to mind for me is Alice Mah’s work on circularity, this one in particular — direct.mit.edu/glep/article...

Hey #DiscardStudies folks. The European Commission has a public consultation period open until November 6 for its planned Circular Economy Act. If you have an article or post you want included, register and submit at ec.europa.eu/info/law/bet...

Enshittification of reality

To the artists, scholars, advocates, journalists, writers, historians, lawyers, entrepreneurs, policy folks, thank you for your good work. To address plastics is to work for human rights, climate stability, human health, environmental justice, global unity, & the rights of future generations. 🙏🙏🙏

Plastics have woven their way into the fabric of every ecosystem, into everything & everyone, into strata & time, but it has also woven a web of us, & introduced me to people who also work for change, whose presence in the world makes the work all the more meaningful. W/ thx #plasticstreaty #envhist

Toronto's Don River sends 500 billion microplastics into Lake Ontario each year: study | CBC News A new study of one of Canada's most urbanized rivers suggests it dumps the equivalent of about 18 cars worth of microplastics into Lake Ontario every year, a finding that shocked the lead author and u...

“A new study of one of Canada's most urbanized rivers suggests it dumps the equivalent of about 18 cars worth of microplastics into Lake Ontario every year, a finding that shocked the lead author.” — from Chelsea Rochman’s lab #plasticpollution

www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

Environmental scientists highlight role of paint in microplastic pollution Plastic waste is recognized as a major cause of environmental harm, with products like water bottles, plastic bags and clothing fibers acknowledged as major contributors to plastic pollution—but resea...

Environmental scientists highlight role of paint in microplastic pollution phys.org/news/2025-03...

Paint: a ubiquitous yet disregarded piece of the microplastics puzzle - by Zoie Diana et al. academic.oup.com/etc/article/...

She finished it! 📕

Ohhhhhhh!!!!

I feel like @katieulrich.bsky.social and @cassienewland.bsky.social would have much to talk about (if you don’t already know one another.) #environmentalhistory of bioplastics 🌱

“There was no job announcement, no search committee to identify top candidates, no interviews or reference checks.” Re: new head of the National Institutes of Environmental Health

EU aims to curb plastic pollution with new rules targeting nightmare spills of tiny pellets EU takes aim at tiny plastic pellet pollution with new regulations

Newsflash ⚡️

www.euronews.com/green/2025/1...

👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

two-panel hand-drawn cartoon Panel 1: A mole is emerging from a dirt hole, holding a sign featuring a portrait of the chemist Avogadro. The mole is looking up and exclaiming, "HAPPY MOLE DAY!" Panel 2: The mole, still holding the sign, looks surprised or corrected when a mole on it's hand says "THANKS! BUT I PREFER TO THINK OF MYSELF AS A BEAUTY SPOT!" The joke references the fact that the word "mole" in chemistry (the unit) is named after Avogadro, but a small dark spot on skin is also called a mole (or beauty mark). It's a triple whammy folks. A triple whammy!!

A bunch of moles arranged in a hexagon. It's a mole-ecule.

It's MOLE DAY. Happy mole day all. #Chemsky #chemistry #moleday #realtimechem

There are also these delightful parenthetical asides that make you chuckle while reading dense chemical names and chemical explanations of how polymers and elastomers work! Brava @cassienewland.bsky.social!

Built overtop former Union Carbide HQ — dismantled girder by girder before built anew — 60 stories for 10K employees and apparently, per reporting here, no cockroaches.

Friends in plastics-academia-land, this is a great condensed chapter to assign in plastics’ early history — 🌱

I am very much appreciating @cassienewland.bsky.social’s opening chapter on #plastics history — begins with the whole rubber-human rights mess, ace primary sources, and puts the whole celluloid spared the elephant trope in its full context. 👏👏👏👏

cc @brdemuth.bsky.social