Crispin Thurlow*
A familiar picture
Plastic bottles on a beach. Volunteers cleaning up litter with a smile. A lone bottle drifting on the ocean floor. These images are powerful because they feel immediate and understandable. They show pollution in a way that’s easy to grasp – and maybe easier to respond to. But they also create a very particular version of reality. These images are not neutral; they are part of a broader visual rhetoric of sustainability.
When we see the same kinds of images again and again, they start to define what we think the problem is. Waste becomes something visible and manageable. Something we can fix with the right habits and enough effort. This is surely part of the story, but only part of it.
Beyond plastic bottles
The strength of these images lies in their simplicity. A plastic bottle stands in for a much larger issue. It becomes a symbol of environmental harm. Yet this simplicity comes at a cost. By focusing so heavily on a narrow set of objects, these images make other forms of waste harder to see – not because they don’t exist, but because they don’t fit the picture. What disappears from view and what is effectively rendered unknown includes things like:
- Microplastics moving through oceans and our bodies
- Chemical and industrial waste
- Agricultural runoff and sewage
- Toxic materials that persist for decades or centuries
In other words, the clearer the image, the more it risks simplifying the problem. This is how sustainability can feel both meaningful and empty at the same time. It points us in the right direction, but without showing the full landscape.
The limits of what we can see
Part of the problem is that not all waste is equally visible. Beaches are easy to photograph. Deep oceans are not. Plastic bottles are familiar objects. Toxic particles and radioactive materials much less so. Our understanding of environmental problems is therefore shaped mostly by what can be easily shown. We end up knowing something is wrong, but without fully understanding its scale, its complexity, or its causes. And this really matters because how we see a problem shapes how we try to solve it.
An inconvenient example
Consider a case that rarely features in public discussions of sustainability. Between 1969 and 1982, Switzerland dumped nuclear waste in the North Atlantic. In fact, it accounted for around 5% of all oceanic nuclear dumping worldwide. This is a very different kind of waste – materially, temporally, and politically. It’s not visible on beaches, it can’t be collected in a clean-up campaign, and it remains hazardous for extremely long periods of time.
To make this uncomfortable history more tangible, I created a simple Google map showing where these dumping sites are located: Switzerland's nuclear waste sites in the North Atlantic. Looking at these locations, our view of waste begins to shift. It becomes less about isolated objects – like plastic bottles – and more about invisible infrastructures, long time scales, and some political decisions.
What sustainability leaves unsaid
None of this means that plastic pollution is unimportant. It’s definitely a serious and urgent issue. But when it becomes the dominant image of environmental harm, it can distract from other, less visible problems. It offers a way of knowing waste that is also a way of not knowing it. In this sense, sustainability does not just describe the world – it also frames it, shaping what becomes visible and what remains obscured. It highlights certain issues while leaving others in the background. And because the term itself is so flexible, it can easily absorb these simplifications without being questioned.
Seeing through the facade
If “sustainability” sometimes feels unclear, it may be because it’s doing two things at once: helping us see while simultaneously preventing us from seeing more. The challenge, then, is not to abandon the concept, but to look through it more carefully. What lies beyond the familiar images? What remains hidden? And what kinds of problems do we overlook because they are harder to represent?
Plastic bottles on a beach are easy to recognize. Nuclear waste on the ocean floor is not. Yet both are part of the same story. Seeing that bigger picture doesn’t make sustainability simpler. But it might make it more honest and more real.
* Crispin Thurlow is Professor of Language and Communication at the University of Bern. Since 2023, he has been leading an SNSF-funded research project about the language of waste (see this UniAktuell “Let’s Talk Rubbish”). This blog post is based on a previously published open-access book chapter (PDF).
