Ep 003: The poet working nights in an Irish plastic factory

Cover art for Episode 003 on Belfast’s factory worker turned poet.

A decade on the factory floor, a book-length poem stamped like a night-shift clock, and the waste that never makes the ledger.

Every night, while the rest of us sleep, plastic injection molding machines keep running — and somebody has to run them. For a decade, that somebody was Matthew Rice: a poet from Belfast working 12-hour night shifts in the factories that make the plastic parts inside almost everything you own.

His new book, plastic: A Poem (Fitzcarraldo Editions / Soft Skull Press), compresses those years into a single shift, clock-in to clock-out — a night of urban legends, skull-and-crossbones warnings on bags of molding material, a hidden copy of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the strange things that happen to the mind at 3 a.m.

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Not a "worthy" subject for poetry

When Matthew went looking for poets who had written from inside a factory, he found an American tradition — Philip Levine, Fred Voss, and to an extent Bukowski and Carver — but, at home in the north of Ireland, almost nothing. Irish poetry had the farms and fields of poets like Seamus Heaney. "Maybe they think that poetry needs to be a grander subject," he muses in the episode — an assumption he once shared, and one reason he spent years refusing to write about the place where he spent most of his waking hours. His book is the counter-argument: "The everyday working human condition is an essential part of life. And it's often overlooked... I wanted to bring some of that out of the shadows, into the contemporary poetry light... Factory workers can also be art critics."

The psychic toll of the night shift

Why do night shifts exist at all? Because once a molding machine is hot and running, the cheapest thing to do is keep it going — so the machines never sleep, and the workers can't either. Matthew spent a year on nights, eight to eight, and fought to keep his life intact around it. The episode traces what that costs:

  • The exhaustion that everyone else can see. He kept up football training, hit the gym after twelve-hour shifts, ate breakfast that was really his dinner — and still: "I always felt tired... My girlfriend said she could just see it in me."

  • The strange hours."People get weird," he says of the 2 and 3 a.m. points of the late night — inappropriate jokes, minds wandering loose, then the sun coming up and everyone feeling "a bit more human again."

  • The shadow. The book's first hour holds a suicide and a heart attack — drawn from factory urban legends — woven in, Matthew says, to honor the real toll of low-paid labor on workers' minds, including his own struggles with anxiety and depression in a culture that said suck it up.

Waste in the factory

This is Talking Trash, so we follow the waste — and while reading with waste in mind, Matthew’s book is full of it: purge scrap swirling out of machines when an order changes colors (the marbled mess that, as it happens, looks exactly like the book's cover), swarf shoveled into bins, rubbish spiraling out of the skip in a storm. Zoom out and the factory's waste footprint gets bigger: the colored pellets that feed the hoppers — nurdles — ship by the billions, and researchers estimate hundreds of thousands of tons escape into waterways every year before they're molded into anything at all. The parts that do get made outlive us, shedding into the microplastics now found everywhere scientists look.

Physical risks of the work

The factory waste threatened the workers, too. Matthew describes slicing open bags of molding material and noticing the skull and crossbones printed on the back — thinking "this can't be legal" — and dust so fine it was visible only in a shaft of sunlight. In a decade on factory floors, he was never provided a proper respirator; instead, he got a dust mask, if that, and sometimes just an open window at the back of the building. "That was definitely a worry I used to have all the time," he says. "Always worried about my lungs."


The episode follows the way out, too: the Open University degree his low factory wages made free, the PhD at the Seamus Heaney Centre where he finally found the distance to write about the factory. Along the way, there’s a famous poet who became his first reader — and the moment at 30,000 feet when Matthew realized he was sitting on his own handiwork.

Additional resources

Start with Matthew's book — everything else here orbits it. Then meet the tradition he joined (Levine, Heaney, Piercy, Morrison) and the industry he worked in, from the birth of celluloid to the observed effects that night shifts have on the human body. And if the nurdle numbers stuck with you, help scout for pellet pollution in your own area, supporting citizen beach surveys that feed real data into real supply-chain rules.

READ

WATCH

  • Matthew Rice speaking on the intangible, organic and mysterious element to writing verse — via the Seamus Heaney Centre.

  • Injection molding, explained in under 10 minutes, with technical but simplified diagrams, visuals, and sample objects – via Bill Hammack.

ACT

  • Join a nurdle hunt. The Great Nurdle Hunt and Nurdle Patrol run citizen-science beach surveys that map pellet pollution worldwide — data that's been used to push for tighter supply-chain rules.

  • Support Voicing the Void, the Belfast organization where Matthew now works with marginalized communities, refugees, and survivors of abuse, helping them tell their stories.

Episode 2 designs for Talking Trash | Art Director: Frances Miller

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Ep 002: How Argentinian workers took over an abandoned luxury hotel