Looking Beyond PLASTIC TRASH for “Hope & Resilience”

Plastic trash has a life of its own, becoming microplastics

From a Preview Article of the Allegheny Front, Pittsburgh, December 20, 2021

A new novel envisions a future after life-altering floods and fires that happen as a result of climate change. Appalachia is now known as “Scrappalachia,” where people try to squeeze an existence out of the plastic scraps that remain from our modern way of life. The central character, Coral, struggles to keep her family together and make sense out of this dystopian reality.

The Allegheny Front’s Kara Holsopple talked with author Alison Stine, who says her novel is really about hope and resilience.

Alison Stone said “I think some people have dismissed my book because they’re worried it’s going to be dark, you know? And actually, I think the opposite is true. I think that in a book about the end of the world, we need to think about what world would be next, right? How would we make the new world? Maybe we can make the new world center on women, and maybe we can make the new world be more environmentally conscious and be more aware of the exploitation that happened before.”

Listen now to the full interview here.

And a new study out of the University of Pittsburgh says the global plastics trade has the carbon footprint of a mid-sized European country. By 2050, it will account for 15% of the world’s greenhouse gases.