Author: Elizabeth Dragus
In our world today, it is easy to imagine a material like plastic will be around forever. Plastic waste is one of the top reasons for the ongoing pollution crisis affecting our environment worldwide. We all know that plastics are slow to decompose and often cause long-term ecological problems, but that doesn’t mean that the material is stable and unchanging. In the context of managing a museum collection, conservators and preparators are becoming increasingly aware of the problems that plastic storage poses for the preservation of objects.
At the offsite storage facility of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History (CMNH), I worked with Collection Manager Kristina Gaugler across a wide variety of collection management, storage supports, and catalogue access tasks. Much of the museum’s collection is stored in steel cabinets lined with sliding drawers that each contain a wide selection of objects from a single culture. My main priority was to audit a selection of collection cabinets to cross-reference the existing catalog to the current system, ensuring the objects were still in their marked spaces, and flagging any potential condition issues with objects. One of the critical issues Kristina wanted me to help survey was the presence of “problem plastics” that might be harmful to collection objects. Though these were once the approved conservation materials, soft plastics like cellulose nitrate, cellulose acetate, polyurethane, polyvinyl chloride, and rubber are prone to faster deterioration. The effects of degrading plastic leave residue and damage from flaking materials produce harmful gases to the objects stored within its vicinity. This off-gassing is not preventable but something that can only be slowed, such that current practices seek to isolate or remove plastic material and artifacts from collection storage.
Methods of storage and conservation are in a constant state of change. Polyurethane storage bags were commonly used as a dust cover to protect objects in cabinets and keep smaller fragments grouped together. Within the CMNH, removing old and potentially harmful plastics is an ongoing effort, and my work included the task of flagging and replacing soft plastic materials. One of the highlights of my work was the opportunity to fix these old support structures by making new ones. Using currently approved materials, including blue board and Tyvek, I measured and created new boxes and supports for the collection. It has been interesting to learn the ways the preservation and handling of objects are constantly changing in museum collections and be able to help the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in their effort to keep their collections preserved.
Elizabeth Dragus, Museum studies intern at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Spring 2023