Several times each year, especially during the ever-warmer summer months, there are reports of spontaneous combustion at the landfill site in Vinča. Vinča is the largest landfill in Serbia, located near Belgrade, the capital city. The site was created in 1977, during the era of the Socialist Federal Republic (SFR) of Yugoslavia. The commonest form of waste in Serbia is packaging waste, such as plastic bottles and bags, some 300,000 to 500,000 tons per year. In considering plastic waste in general, one should also count other plastic objects in everyday use, given the ubiquity of plastic in the production of appliances and disposable domestic items. Given that recycling is almost non-existent in Serbia—according to some sources, 95 percent, 97 percent or even 99 percent of waste ends up in legal and illegal landfills or is dumped directly into rivers, lakes, or fields—the short agential non-organic life of plastic objects requires further theoretical attention.

The creation of the Vinča landfill is inextricably linked to the so-called socialist consumerism of twentieth-century Yugoslavia, and today’s Belgrade citizens drink, breathe in, and otherwise engage with the consequences of Yugoslav and Serbian production forms and consumer habits. In 2019 the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) approved 72.25 million euros’ credit for a waste-to-energy incinerator plant that will heat apartment buildings and produce electricity. Behind this ostensibly innocuous and positive news there lies a discourse of financialization of both natural resources and waste, revealing environmental management techniques based on the free-market economy. This amalgam of the post-Yugoslav transitional state and market liberalization—with its implications for environmental issues—I call postsocialist realism. Moreover, I will show that the ontology of plastics needs to be critically rethought in order to properly understand such an anthropogenic substance and the ways in which it interacts and intra-acts with humans and nonhumans alike. Plastics need to be thought of as a pluritemporal and multimaterial hyperobject, as a hyperplastic object.

The title of this text hangs on a wordplay. Jugoplastika was a factory in Split, Croatia, built in 1952 during the era of SFR Yugoslavia; it produced plastic consumer goods.