Pollution is a major concern of the modern world, marked by a “throwaway culture.”[1] Pollution, or “novel entitites” is one of the nine parameters identified by Johan Rockström et al.[2] for which there are “boundaries” beyond which the planet Earth risks becoming dangerously uninhabitable. In its 2023 update of the “planetary boundary theory,” the Stockholm Resilience Centre maintains that in regard to pollution, we are “above the safe level.”[3]
Not surprisingly, then, many sessions of the United Nations Environment Programme have addressed plastic pollution in particular. In March 2022, the UN Environment Assembly resolved to develop an internationally binding instrument on plastic pollution, including in the marine environment. To raise awareness of the issue, a global plastics summit was held in Bangkok in October 2023. From 25 November to 1 December 2024, the fifth session of the committee which was negotiating the terms of the proposed instrument met in Busan, Korea. Among many environmental movements, hopes had been high that this session of the committee would arrive at a treaty ready to be signed. But the result was disappointing.[4] Plastic- and oil-producing nations[5] blocked progress towards the desired binding instrument.
Clearly plastics are very useful in all sorts of applications, and not every use of plastic is “polluting.” They can be used in a circular manner, and disposed of in ways that do not damage the land, air or seas. Many health-enhancing pharmaceuticals pass into the environment and are then labelled as “persistent organic pollutants” (or POPs.) So what is meant by the term “pollution?” It is instructive to consider an early anthropological notion of pollution and ‘dirt’ taken from the seminal study of Mary Douglas. Writing within the discourse of ethnology, her ideas can be utilised as a theoretical starting point for our present study.
In her classic 1966 anthropological study on pollution and taboos in many societies, Douglas presented the seminal aphorism: Dirt is “matter out of place.”[6] Matter is not of itself ‘dirty.’ However it is understood to be dirt when it is not in the proper place assigned to it by human beings, when it disturbs patterns and creates disorder. Symbolically, dirt (in Douglas’s terms) is not about pathogens or infections. This differs from a Western idea in which dirt avoidance is about aesthetics, hygiene and avoidance of pathogens. Douglas proposes a thought experiment: If we were to go back a century before the advance of scientific knowledge about bacteria, etc., “If we can extract pathogenicity and hygiene from our notion of dirt we are left with the old definition of dirt as matter out of place.”[7] This presumes (for Douglas) that there is a system which has assigned places to materials, and that dirt “is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements.”[8]
Douglas’s work gave rise to renewed understanding of the importance of symbolism in the construction of human spaces and activity. In ritual and symbolic considerations, Douglas’s notion finds significant echoes in Africa. Traditional societies construct customs surrounding many aspects of life in which a person might be considered ritually impure. Bodily fluids like menstruation and semen, activities like marriage, childbirth and death, contact with cadavers, corpses and faeces, may all render one polluted, and ineligible to enter ritual spaces or activities, or participate in cults. There are often “counter-rituals” designed to mitigate or overcome the pollution, and permit the persons involved to resume normal activity. In this article, there is insufficient space to enter this discussion in further depth.
However, at sixty years old, Douglas’s work has been superseded. It could obviously not take account of all dirt or pollution that we are aware of in the 21st Century. Plastic pollution, POPs, and nanoparticles were not recognised as features of the mid-1960’s. However, Douglas’s symbolic understanding remains a useful tool for us to understand physical and chemical forces. Dirt and pollution have ways of spreading beyond the places assigned to them. Dust travels on the wind; chemicals leach from land and travel down rivers; plastic rides ocean currents; methane is released from landfills; ozone heads to the highest levels of the atmosphere. As long as we presume that there is an appropriate place for human-made waste, nature is bound to thwart us, and put the matter out of place.
In addition, some materials simply are pollution, for which there is no place whatsoever. For example, there is no appropriate place for nuclear waste. The principle of NIMBY applies: “Not in my backyard.” Not in anybody’s backyard, for that matter. Whether nuclear waste is shipped to a remote location, in the middle of an African desert, or encased in glass and dumped in ocean depths, or rocketed into outer space, it remains radioactive, and capable of contamination. It remains a danger for all known life forms, and should not have been manufactured in the first place.
Lassana Kone’s LLM dissertation discusses pollution as colonialism.[9] The dissertation focuses on the dumping of toxic waste, including POPs and e-waste, in Africa, by countries of the global north. This is against international law, but takes place nonetheless. Laws such as the Bamako Convention, forbid African countries from importing waste,[10] and more widely the Basel Convention applies to the transboundary movement of hazardous wastes, including e-waste. Similarly to Kone, from a Canadian First-Nations perspective, Max Liboiron also writes of pollution as colonialism. In this case, aboriginal people are victims of decisions made by powerful industrial players and governments, that legitimate dumping waste, particularly plastic waste, of the industrial and urban centres in land, rivers, and seas which are sacred to the indigenous peoples.[11]
While it may be helpful (as Douglas has done) to consider the symbolic dimensions of pollutants, their pathogenicity remains a significant aspect of their pollution. For example, microbes can hitch a ride on the small particles of plastic (microplastics and nanoplastics) which are everywhere on the land, in the sea and in the air. Transported on the plastics which enter the roots, airways and digestive systems of living organisms, these microbes enter the plants and animals and effect damage.
An equally significant dimension of pollutions is how they block the cycling of ingredients necessary for life. Oil on water, plastics in a landfill or in a creature’s digestive system, chemicals in rivers, all interfere with the cycles of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and water, which are vital for all known life. Significantly, in Laudato Si’ Pope Francis does not restrict the understanding of pollution to its symbolism or to pathogenic organisms, but considers the damage that it does to human thriving. His concern about pollution surfaces in more than thirty paragraphs of the encyclical.
In a jarring statement he writes that “[t]he earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth.”[12] This is a cause of distress to elderly people who remember the former beauty of the landscapes. The toxicity of industrial waste and chemical production can accumulate in people, even when they are present in low levels in the areas in which people live. But “[f]requently no measures are taken until after people’s health has been irreversibly affected.”[13] It is most frequently people who are already marginalised, living off what has been discarded by the wealthy, who suffer most from pollution. The dominant consumerist culture treats them as ‘the disposable of society.’ In addition to pollution in the form of noise, and visual overload of advertising, etc. poor transportation and chaos add to the stresses of urban life.[14] In a major study published three years after Laudato Si’, Landrigan et al. affirm Pope Francis’ connection between poverty and suffering from pollution: “Pollution disproportionately kills the poor and the vulnerable. Nearly 92% of pollution-related deaths occur in low-income and middle-income countries, and, in countries at every income level, disease caused by pollution is most prevalent among minorities and the marginalised.”[15]
Pope Francis invites us all to an ‘ecological conversion.’ The challenge is to become more mindful consumers. We need to check our tendencies to buy, buy, buy: Do we really need the newest, latest phone, or so much food in the fridge? We need to avoid plastic packaging whenever possible, despite its obvious convenience. We need to become more informed about the full life-cycle of everything we consume: Is it linear or circular? Where is “away” when we throw things away? Who is affected by my consumptive lifestyle, however modest it might be?
As Pope Francis published Laudate Deum, an apostolic exhortation to all people of good will on the climate crisis,[16] is it time for him to publish a similar dedicated exhortation on pollution? Ten years after the appearance of Laudato Si’, the issue of pollution is getting more urgent. Changes are needed at every level.
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[1] Pope Francis introduces and expands on this term in paragraph 22 of his 2015 encyclical on care for our common home, Laudato Si’.
[2] cf. Rockström, Johan, et al. “Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity.” Ecology and Society 14, no. 2 (2009): 32.
[3] cf. Stockholm Resilience Centre, “Planetary Boundaries” 2023, https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html
[4] See Worldwide Fund for Nature, “UN Plastic Pollution Summit Fails to Reach Agreement despite Majority Supporting Ambitious Measures.” (1 December 2024). https://wwf.panda.org/wwf_news/?12987441/UN-plastic-pollution-summit-fails-to-reach-agreement-despite-majority-supporting-ambitious-measures .
[5] Most plastics are derived from fossil fuels. International pressure is mounting to phase out the use of fossil fuels, because of global climate change directly attributable to the combustion these products. The countries producing oil do not want to see their revenues further reduced by a heavy curtailment of the production of plastics.
[6] Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 36.
[7] Ibid. It is not clear to this reader whether Douglas is here referring to more than organisms that had been discovered to transmit disease, or also to a wider range of chemicals and substances that prove injurious to life.
[8] Ibid.
[9] cf. Kone Lassana, “Pollution in Africa: A New Toxic Waste Colonialism? An Assessment of Compliance of the Bamako Convention in Cote D’ivoire” (University of Pretoria, 2009).
[10] The Bamako Convention adopted on 30 January 1991 bans the import into Africa, and controls the transboundary movement and management of hazardous waste. cf. African Union, “OAU/AU Treaties, Conventions, Protocols & Charters,” accessed 5 February 2025, https://au.int/en/treaties/1160 .
[11] Max Liboiron, Pollution Is Colonialism (London and Durham: Duke University Press, 2021).
[12] Francis, Laudato Si’, 21.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid, 44.
[15] Landrigan, Philip J., Richard Fuller and 45 others. “The Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health.” The Lancet Commissions 391, no. 10119 (19 October 2017): 462-512. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(17)32345-0
[16] cf. Francis, Laudate Deum, Apostolic Exhortation on the Climate Crisis. (Vatican; Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 4 October 2023).