This essay offers a new approach for conceptualizing the environmental impact of chemicals production, consumption, disposal, and regulation. Environmental protection regimes tend to be highly segmented according to place, media, substance, and effect. Existing scholarship often reflects this same segmentation, by focusing on a locality, specific chemical, social movement, or regulatory body. In turn, as new environmental measures are introduced to deal with pollution and toxicity, they tend to focus on controlling future effects rather than dealing with the accumulated contamination from past industrial activity and waste. In chemical substances we encounter phenomena that are at the same time voluminous and miniscule, regulated yet unruly. Inspired by recent work on materiality and infrastructures, we focus on the concept of residues as both material and political entities. Following residues, we argue, helps us see how the past has been built into our chemical environments and regulatory systems, and why contaminants seem to always evade control.

中文翻译：

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残留物：重新思考化学环境

本文为概念化化学品生产，消费，处置和监管的环境影响提供了一种新方法。环境保护制度往往根据地点，媒体，物质和效果进行细分。现有的奖学金通常通过关注地区，特定的化学，社会运动或监管机构来反映同样的细分。反过来，随着采用新的环境措施来处理污染和毒性，它们往往将重点放在控制未来影响上，而不是处理过去的工业活动和废物造成的累积污染。在化学物质中，我们遇到的现象同时又庞大又微不足道，受到监管却不守规矩。受近期关于重要性和基础架构的研究的启发，我们关注作为实体和政治实体的残留物的概念。我们认为，残留物可以帮助我们了解过去如何融入我们的化学环境和法规体系，以及为什么污染物似乎总是逃避控制。