A countermovement arose almost concurrently with the euphoria for the new material. Artists recognized the problem of the effortlessly mass producible objects early on: “Yes, it is a neutral material, but its production is dirty. Dirty in terms of its harmful effects (…)” or so Arman, co-founder of Nouveau Réalisme, warned. And only a few years later US researcher Ed Carpenter did indeed find a great deal of plastic residue in marine animals and wrote an appeal to the plastics industry – that fell on deaf ears.