Enroll in my Plastic Pollution Class!
Open to all learners, everywhere!
Hello readers,
I wanted to let you know that you can now register for my summer class! Longtime readers will remember that in 2023 I taught a 3-credit class about plastic pollution, recycling, and environmental justice. This year, it’s a whole lot better.
“Plastics In Society” is now a 4-credit Gen Ed course with an SI distinction. This means that Five College students can use the course to satisfy their Social World requirement! The summer is a great time to catch up on required classes like Gen Eds, and this course is 100% virtual with no specific meeting time, so you can do all the required work on your own schedule.
Of course, you don’t have to be a current college student to enroll. In 2023, I had adult professionals in the recycling industry take the class and they really loved it! You don’t even have to be knowledgeable in STEM; the course has no prerequisites and is designed for everyone, including non-STEM students and those who aren’t even college students at all.
I write about plastic on here from time to time, but I truly believe that my class is the best way to learn about it. We’ll be covering questions like…
How is plastic made, and how did it become to prevalent?
Is recycling really as effective as Big Oil wants us to believe?
Are “biodegradable plastics” better for the environment, or worse?
What is the extent of the harm of plastic pollution?
What can our relationship to plastic tell us about our society?
What does modern science have to do with colonialism?
What needs to change about society for us to ditch plastics? Is totally ditching plastics even a good idea?
Can we find ways to co-exist with plastics?
…and so many more!
Check out these testimonials from prior year’s students…
Dr. LaChance has very engaging lecture materials and it was very easy to stay focused while still learning.
I feel that I have learned a great deal about plastics and how they impact society, and how society has impacted the plastic industry.
I had never considered the ableism topic that we discussed in class in terms of plastic product bans. I also had been using single use plastic as a blanket term before when now I use more specificity in my arguments. Similar to thinking about sustainability, I am more conscious of how recyclable (or not recyclable) different plastics are and how they must be discarded. I also think it is incredible how we have been able to design the infrastructure to mass produce plastics in different ways like compression, extrusion, etc. I also understand bioplastics much better and can discern between degradable and non-degradable bioplastics.
Dr. LaChance is easily approachable for questions, discussions, and any concerns with the class. She makes her lectures easily understandable but effective for teaching the chosen content.
The lectures were informative, clearly a labor of love, and the course was well-paced.
I feel confident that I could demonstrate the knowledge I gained in this course in a future career. That being said, my future career will feature biological contamination, so in lab settings, it will be tough to reduce large amounts of waste from products like gloves that often become biohazards. I am interested in a career that focuses on sustainability, though, so maybe I will get to build materials and products for lab spaces with sustainability in mind. No matter where I end up, however, I know there are always be at least little changes I can implement that will have greater impacts over time. In the meantime, I intend to discuss changes to my current lab with my PI with regards to reducing plastic use.
The main class activities will include watching some of my own lecture videos (which are basically longform video essays) and reading books and articles by disabled, Indigenous, and gender-diverse scientists and activists, all hand-curated by me! At the end of the term, you’ll write a ten-page paper about a plastic object of your choice; how it came to be made of plastic, what benefits and harms are associated with it, and how it might be made more sustainably in the future. Trust me, it’ll be lots of fun!
TL;DR- If you like my TikToks and this newsletter, and you want to watch hours of Anna Marie content about the intersection of science and social justice, take this class!!
Register for the class through the University+ website: https://www.umass.edu/universityplus/class/summer-2025/58556/plastics-in-society
If the tuition is too steep for you, feel free to watch last year’s video lectures here. You can also learn about scholarships and other forms of financial assistance here. I’ll be offering this course every summer from now on, so there’s always next year!
Thanks for reading! I hope to see you in the class! :)
In community,
-Anna
Too many people continue throwing non-biodegradable garbage down a dark chute or flush pollutants down toilet/sink drainage pipes as though they’re inconsequentially dispensing that waste into a black-hole singularity where it’s compressed into nothing.
This was especially reflected in the astonishingly entitled and short-sighted selfishness I observed about eight years ago when a TV news reporter randomly asked a young urbanite wearing sunglasses what he thought of government restrictions on disposable plastic straws. He retorted with a snort that it is like he’s “living in a nanny state that’s always telling me what I can and cannot do”.
His carelessly entitled mentality revealed why so much gratuitous animal-life-destroying plastic waste eventually finds its way into the natural environment, where there are few, if any, caring souls to immediately see it. Sadly, he’s far from being alone.
Also, increasingly problematic is the very large and growing populace who are too overworked, worried and even rightfully angry about food and housing unaffordability for themselves or their family — all while on insufficient income — to criticize various industries for the environmental damage they cause, particularly when it's not immediately observable to the masses.
Indeed, obstacles to environmental progress were quite formidable pre-pandemic. But Covid-19 not only stalled most projects being undertaken, it added greatly to the already busy landfills and burning centers with disposed masks and other non-degradable biohazard-protective single-use materials.