Izzy Laws offers the rubber duck, a bath toy that symbolises post-war consumerism and childhood innocence. Mimicking living creatures with artificial versions represents both our disconnection from and attachment to the natural world, while a container ship spill of 29,000 ‘friendly floatees’ has become an icon of global plastic pollution.
Museum of the Anthropocene: Rubber Duck
The rubber duck symbolised the Anthropocene because it represents human-made materials, global trade, pollution and the increasingly blurred line between nature and industry.
The rubber duck was created in the late 1800s, with the first floating duck created in the 1940s. In a strictly practical sense, it is useless for everyday life. Instead, it is used as a bath toy, a collectable, or a decorative item. It is a symbol of post-war consumerism and childhood innocence.
They are often made from polyvinyl chloride or PVC. This is done by melting down the plastic into the mould, leaving it to cool and then hand-painting it. Most of the production happens in China, Turkey and Thailand. All three of these countries face issues of modern slavery and exploitation from other countries. This is representative of the global inequalities which characterise and drive the Anthropocene. Both people and the environment are exploited to meet largely Western demands.
In 1992, a container ship spilt 29,000 ‘friendly floatees’ (a bath toy brand including rubber ducks) into the northern Pacific Ocean. An environmental disaster, but also one that helped scientists develop new understandings of ocean currents as the friendly floatees sloshed around the world. There are still sightings of the rubber ducks happening to this day. This is indicative of the highly negative effects of plastic pollution on the ocean system. It is estimated that the oceans now contain 171 trillion bits of plastic. The spilling of the friendly floatees, an accident of global trade, has thus become a symbol of globalisation, of pollution and of how the human presence is detectable everywhere on earth.
The rapid increase of microplastics in the ocean has coincided with the ‘Great Acceleration’ — the period since World War II in which economic production and consumption has exploded, with concomitant increases in the amount of stuff which goes to waste. The more products we make, the more waste we create. There is a real issue of over-consumption in the highly developed countries. Items like the rubber duck, once used, are discarded and left to pollute. This reflects the Anthropocene’s material legacy, how our waste is woven into natural systems. This small, joyful toy reveals the tragedy of a world where even playthings become part of the planet’s geological record.
These blurring boundaries are reflected in the rubber duck itself — it is a fake version of the real animal but bright, smooth, simplified and sanitised. By mimicking real creatures with manageable artificial versions, it presents how disconnected we are from the natural World. Perhaps also the desire that we have to tame and control it. By bringing a version of ‘nature’ into bathtime, the rubber duck can also inspire us to seek out the real thing, and to love and care for that too.
Rubber Duck was contributed by Izzy Laws.
Izzy says: “I really enjoyed this module, it challenged my thinking skills. At the start of the module, I would never have been able to link a rubber duck and the Anthropocene together, and now I’ve written about it. It has taught me how to connect information across different fields, which I hope to use post-graduation.”