ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book presents how children and young people’s experiences are synthesised with and stuck to the plastic social-materialities. Just like plastics, childhoods and – because of their perceived or actual malleability – children can easily be attached to other stuff. There exist infinite chemical combinations for the synthetic polymers that make up plastics, and, perhaps more importantly, despite the commonsensical notion that nothing sticks to plastics, they nevertheless become entangled with, lodged in and attractors for a vast range of non-plastics, at scales ranging from the nano to the macro. Although Bakelite – the earliest form of plastic – was invented at the turn of the twentieth century, it was only from the 1940s that the production and consumption of plastics began to escalate.
