Knowledge traditions and sociotechnical networks

scenes from the history of bioplastics made in Argentina

Abstract

The current ecological crisis calls for considering solutions that reverse or at least mitigate successive human actions that worsen the environmental and climatic situation. One such solution can be found in the substitution of products or goods that produce pollution, such as plastic objects. For some decades now, actors in the scientific-industrial field have been engaged in the search for such alternatives and are in the process of research and development of the so-called bioplastics, materials derived from biomass, of rapid environmental degradation and similar in their physical-chemical and mechanical properties to plastics of synthetic origin and slow degradation. As a result of field work carried out in a socio-technical network formed by a university laboratory and another lab from a cassava starch producing cooperative, in this paper we will contextualize the recent history of the development of bioplastics in Argentina, from a perspective that focuses on techniques and material developments from a processual and non-essentialist point of view. We try to demonstrate that techno-scientific practices and activities in formal spaces such as laboratories can be considered in themselves ecological phenomena, composed of certain interactions between humans and non-humans rooted in different traditions of knowledge.