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In this Matters Arising, we respond to a recent article by Bachmann et al.1 We argue that dealing with plastics pollution as a novel entity within the planetary boundaries framework needs to consider the entirety of the plastics life cycle, from resource extraction to impacts on earth system processes. Singling out LCA quantifications to set a boundary for recycling plastics is not only an unviable myth but may be a dangerous approach. Bachmann et al.1 argue that it is possible to maintain business as usual and move the economy ‘towards circular plastics’ while staying within planetary boundaries. The authors’ solutions rest on poorly operationalized terms and unrealistic estimates, which over-state what technological solutions can achieve and risk locking the world into an even more plastic-intensive future. We see major flaws in their baseline assumptions and aim to better define and contextualize plastics pollution within Earth systems.

Events like the COVID-19 pandemic can become what Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey have called ‘binding crises’: ‘events with the clarity and immediacy of a terrifying threat’ (2018: 12), impacting the rich and the poor, the powerful and the powerless – though unevenly. Binding crises of the past (like the 1842 Great Fire of Hamburg, the 1858 Great Stink in London and the 1896 Bombay plague) have led to ubiquitous reforms in sanitation and waste management practices, most notably landmark innovations in modern sewerage systems. In what follows, I draw on ethnographic research, conducted discontinuously over five years (2015–2019), around municipal solid waste management (MSWM), and the political ecology of informal plastic recycling in the city of Ahmedabad, India.1 I argue that the current pandemic may constitute such a binding event as freelance waste-collection networks are paralysed by the lockdown and ‘authorised’ modes of waste collection are prioritised, leading to a novel ‘infrastructuring’ of emerging relations between human bodies and wasted things.

This article draws on examples of inventive plastic reuse from India and personal anecdotes of elders as an anthropological reflection on possible plastic futures. It sketches the large‐scale governmental reforms in the domain of municipal solid waste management, or MSWM (which, by legal definition in India, includes plastic waste). In this regard, it draws out some of the problematic socio‐political and environmental implications of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ‘Clean India’ campaign, whose technocratic policy orientations towards standardized centralized MSWM echo his cultural nationalist agenda. These reforms contrast with home‐based re‐engineering methods and the redeploying of plastic discards (thereby making them notuner moton (‘like new again’), and their localized circulation through relatively local but uneven reputational and economic networks. Clean India sequesters and processes vast quantities of plastics through the wide‐ranging adoption of a waste‐to‐energy techno‐fix (in which plastics are incinerated). In contrast, the authors illustrate routine practices and relations whereby people reuse, repurpose and recycle plastics. While Clean India can detract from and disrupt these mundane practices and everyday relations, these are suggestive of alternative plastic futures – both socio‐material and environmental.