# Transcript

HEATHER MONTGOMERY
Hello, I'm here today with Peter Kraftl from the University of Birmingham. And in particular, we're going to talk about what sounds like an absolutely fascinating project that Peter's involved in at the moment or leading on at the moment called Plastic Childhoods. Peter, could you start just by telling us what the phrase "plastic childhoods" means?
PETER KRAFTL
I'd been wanting, for some years, to put together a project about children and plastics and to do so in a way that wasn't necessarily just focusing on the negative. So it was also focusing on, for instance, the ways in which for some children, some plastics are vital parts of their lives, even though childhoods are often seen as quite artificial and plastic, especially in the Western world. So I was interested, for instance, are there toys that children think are really actually very, really quite crucial to their identities or are there prosthetic limbs or their use in glasses or hearing aids or other things that we, in our modern world, couldn't do without.
HEATHER MONTGOMERY
And I know the project isn't finished yet, but can you tell me something about your findings so far on it?
PETER KRAFTL
Yes, I think it's probably helpful first just to talk a little bit about the methods that I've used in the project and then to say something about the findings. So the project is split into two. The first is a social media analysis, where we looked at Twitter and eBay. And in both cases, we used an API, which is a programming interface, which enabled us to harvest hundreds of thousands, if not millions of tweets.
And then secondly, there was a programme of work in a local school in Birmingham, which involved a number of workshops. Those were interactive workshops which were partly about learning around issues related to plastics, but also enabled us to undertake a novel programme of testing, of bio sampling, whereby we tested children, young people, both for the presence of plastics and other materials in their breath and urine and worked with them to train them to take soil and tap water samples to look at the content of those samples.
In the latter, we fortunately didn't find any plastics in children's breath and urine. Had we done so that would have indicated a problem particularly with their kidneys. So that was a relief. But we did find plastics in some of the soil and also in the water. And those are mainly what we call macro plastics, visible plastics, and that really kind of conforms with what we already know about the presence of plastics in tap water and elsewhere. But just as interestingly, I was interested in the entanglement of plastics and other materials. So, for instance, we found levels of titanium and aluminium and other elements and metals, not necessarily at dangerous levels, but certainly indicating that they've been produced either by industry, by local industries, including power generation and brick works. But also these are materials that are present in the microscopic or nanoscopic form in suncream, in a range of clothing, and other places, and in products directly targeted at children and young people.
HEATHER MONTGOMERY
And have you been able to ask children and young people, themselves, about the impacts of plastics on their lives?
PETER KRAFTL
Yes. So the workshops enabled us to do that as well as interviews that we did after we use the app with the young people. I think the first thing to say is that the people who took part opted in to the research at the school that they were attending. And surprisingly, for that reason, were acutely aware of many issues around plastics. And it's in some cases, far more knowledgeable than we were about both the effects of plastics and the material properties of different kinds of plastics. But we actually spent a long time sort of talking through those and talking through their perceptions of those plastics. And interestingly, given the aims of the project, they were generally very anti-plastics. So some of what we did was actually asking them to critically consider some of their preconceived opinions about plastics and their usefulness.
And one of the fun ways we did that was to create what we called a plastic totem poles where we worked with some local artists who had sourced all kinds of plastic stuff from skips and secondhand stores and so on and actually made some totem poles and got the children to think in a different way about how they related to plastics, their use value, their aesthetics, and so on. The other thing that we did after the app was to create a kind of map and then put out some photographs that the children had taken through the mobile phone app. And we ask them to talk in a lot more detail about their use of certain plastics, whether it's packaging, whether it was plastics that they'd used in making slime or in other toys, or whether it was the kind of plastics they just relied on or came across in their everyday environments. So we've got a wealth of really detailed information both about how they were using plastics and where they use those plastics.