Le continent oublié. Lumières et zones d'ombre des recherches sur la dissémination des plastiques

In about ten years, global contamination by plastics has become a worldwide issue involving many categories of stakeholders and particularly the scientific community. Over this period, the number and production of these scientific teams has grown exponentially, giving scientific and media notoriety to many researchers. This surprising growth raises, however, many questions for number of actors involved in this research. In this article, a multidisciplinary group of researchers from the human and social sciences (socio-anthropology) and the natural sciences (chemistry, Earth sciences, environmental sciences) offers its analysis of this phenomenon through its experience. The article successively explores the reasons why a) most of the work ever done is focusing on the ocean environment, while the contamination is mainly land-based, b) work is increasingly focusing on micro- and nano-plastics, while the masses discharged are mostly in the form of macro-litter, c) there is a need to highlight ecotoxicological or toxicological hazards as though the global contamination by artificial compounds was not in itself a major issue, and last d) the NGOs contribute so much in research on plastics. It also points out the major methodological difficulties when studying plastic leakage into the environment from their sources to pathways and sinks. The almost absence of the human sciences from this debate is discussed. The article concludes on the need for a much more systemic approach to better organize plastics research.