[00:00:08] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find out Temperate zones and tropic climbs and merge through currents and thriving seas Winds blowing through freezing trees and strong ozone and safe sunshine.
Good planets are hard to find.
[00:00:30] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:00:36] Speaker C: Hello, Case SQUID listeners. It's every other Sunday again and you're listening to Sustainability Now, a bi weekly Case Good radio show focused on environment, sustainability and social justice in the Monterey Bay region, California and the world. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschutz. We've heard a lot about the problem of microplastic pollution.
Just how bad is it? What are its causes? What are microplastics doing to us in the world? Is anything being done to stem the accelerating production and consumption of plastics that end up in our water, our air, in animals and in human bodies? My guests today are Dr. Myra Finkelstein, adjunct professor in the microbiology and Environmental toxicology department at UC Santa Cruz, and Dr. Steven Mentor, a Santa Cruz climate activist and longtime environmentalist.
Finkelstein has been examining the health effects of plastic ingestion on seabirds to better understand the consequences for marine wildlife and human health. Mentor works on campaigns in California to regulate the plastics industry and turn the tide of plastic packaging and consumption. Well, Dr. Svenkelstein and Mentor, welcome to Sustainability Now.
[00:01:48] Speaker B: Thank you. Thank you for having us.
[00:01:49] Speaker D: Thank you. Thank you, Ronnie. Good to be here.
[00:01:52] Speaker C: So I thought that, you know, we'll. We'll have. Have more detailed introductions as we proceed. But I thought before we go into that, since we're talking about plastics, we ought to get some sense of what the scale of the problem is.
[00:02:05] Speaker D: Let me give like, two or three numbers.
Let's see, 1950, when we first start making plastics, it's about 4.4 billion pounds of rosin and synthetic fibers. Back in 1950, when this was just starting, by 2015, that number was 200 times that. So it's about 338 billion pounds of plastics, half of which is single use.
In terms of microplastics in the. In the. Globally, the number is around 3 million metric tons of microplastic released in the environment globally.
[00:02:43] Speaker C: Yeah. It'd be useful to know what that is in pounds, since you listed, you know, you talked about the input materials in pounds, right? The output in metric tons. Remember that?
[00:02:52] Speaker D: Good point.
[00:02:53] Speaker C: Yeah, about a lot of. A lot of pounds. Let's go on and get started with plastic research and ingestion. Myra, who are you and how did you get into this business? Were you. Did you encounter plastics as a child? Well, I'm sure you did. Was your interest stimulated by something then? Or something later.
[00:03:12] Speaker B: So it's actually, I guess, the first sort of moment where I realized that plastic pollution was such a big deal was when I was in my 20s and I. I spent a lot of time on a marine conservation vessel. We would go around the oceans and do different types of things to try to save whales and dolphins and sea turtles. And mostly we were focused on overfishing.
But when we were on. I remember on one specific trip, we were in the Atlantic, and it was one of those times when I was just. I loved it at sea because you could just picture, like, the sea was just like glass, just like a bathtub, and there was nobody else for horizon to horizon. We couldn't see land, anything. And I remember coming up on deck and just thinking, gosh, this is so beautiful, and I'm so happy to be out here trying to conserve these animals that live in this beautiful ocean. And then the ship crossed this really wide band of plastic trash, and we were like, everyone on deck just flipped out because we couldn't believe. Believe it. It was just so dug. Bottle caps and coolers and plastic crates. And we're all flipping out and running around the deck and telling the captain we had to do something about it. And it was a pretty huge swath of plastic. It's like a band that we crossed. So he changed course and we started following the band, and it stretched from horizon to horizon. And we're like, frantically just trying to pull up, you know, whatever we can onto the deck, thinking, this is. I just looked out and I thought, this is cr.
Like, horizon to horizon, floating plastic trash. And this is in the Atlantic. So this is before the whole garbage patch thing was discovered.
And then finally the captain's like, we're way off course. We can't do this. We have to keep going.
And I just sat there and I thought, what are we doing to our oceans in terms of pollution? You know, these are all the things that we can see that was just scattered now around the deck. What about all the things we can't see?
And at that time, I decided that I was going to go back to graduate school and study marine pollution and how it affected the environment.
Oh, I was just going to say, then I could fast forward, you know, like 15 years. And I ended up doing my PhD research on midway Atoll, which is a beautiful island in the middle of the North Pacific.
And you might have heard of it because it's the battle. The Battle of Midway from World War II happened there. But it's a very. Like, white beaches with breeding Sea turtles and, you know, hundreds of thousands of albatross breed there. And one thing that if you do work on Midway, every single albatross chick that I looked at had eaten plastic. And so it just sort of was a circle and came back to me. Even though at that time I wasn't studying plastic pollution, I was studying other kinds of contaminants, it just really hit me that this plastic is so pervasive and every single albatross chick is eating, like, bottle caps, toothbrushes. We saw. I saw a needle and syringe in one dead chick carcass.
That's kind of how I came to it. Yeah.
[00:06:24] Speaker C: Were these dead chicks that you were doing autopsies on, you didn't open, live ones?
[00:06:30] Speaker B: No, no, no. I would never do that. So almost half a million chicks are born there. So you can look around and they do die. And so when they die, you can look in the carcass. And people that have maybe been familiar with this issue have seen some of those pictures of those bird carcasses full of plastic. A lot of that are these Laysan albatross chicks on Midway. So when you walk around, you can do that. But also albatross chicks, near the end of the nesting season, when they get big enough, they regurgitate material that they can't digest. You know, before plastic, that would be like volcanic rock or squid beaks. But now you can look in these, like, bowls of regurgitated material we call boluses, and I cannot find one without plastic. Like, they all have some kind of plastic fishing line, bottle caps, sharp pieces of whatever types of plastic.
[00:07:23] Speaker C: So you've been doing research on. On birds, right, lately? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so what. What does that entail?
What are you looking for? What are you looking at?
[00:07:33] Speaker B: Yeah, so I. And it just sort of came to it, and I think because I. I started my PhDs in Ocean Sciences and seabirds are just a really good way to understand what's happening in terms of the health of the marine environment.
And then, you know, fast forward again in, like, another 20 years. I've been working on different types of ways that contaminants affect birds. I've also worked for terrestrial birds, on condors and eagles. But for. For my plastic work, I focused on seabirds. Something that I've worked on that's relevant to what we're talking about today is microplastic. So microplastic pieces. I didn't see those in the albatross so easily. It's not like you walk up to the carcass and you're like, whoa, that's a lot of microplastic. Instead you'd walk up and you'd say, look at all those bottle caps in there, or lighters or things like that.
But one project we did with a graduate student of mine was looking at microplastic pollution in the Monterey Bay. Here we looked at microplastic prevalence in seawater samples, in northern anchovy samples, and in common mers that eat anchovies. Just looking at the prevalence of microplastics, seawater fish, and common Mars anchovies, Alarmingly, we saw microplastic in everything.
In all of it. We saw, in 100% of the common mer samples, we saw microplastic pieces.
And that was disheartening. And I think the one thing that was more disheartening is that we found that those microplastic pieces in those mers, some of those pieces were able to, we call it leach, but basically release toxic chemicals that could disrupt their hormone function.
[00:09:20] Speaker C: When you talk about microplastics, how big are these? Are these bits?
[00:09:24] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:09:25] Speaker C: So what did you find when you're looking at, you know, these different places?
[00:09:29] Speaker B: Yeah, microplastics. And they're a little bit harder to, to find because they're smaller. So they're kind of broadly defined as something smaller than 5 millimeters in size. And so if you think about that in terms of just every day, if you like, we collected mers that had been, that died and washed up on the beach. So beach cast mers. So you have to look in their digestive tract and try to find these microplastic pieces. But you can't see them very easily with your naked eye. That's why they're called micro. So you need to look at it under a microscope to be able to see is it a piece of plastic or is it just a little piece of rock, or is it just a piece of tissue?
Typically, microplastic pieces really need to be examined under a microscope. And then to verify that they're plastic, you actually have to do more testing on them.
[00:10:21] Speaker C: What else could they be?
[00:10:23] Speaker B: Fiber. So the majority of types of microplastic compounds that we found in the water, fish and seabirds of the Monterey Bay were synthetic fibers from, like, your clothes. And that's something that other studies have found as well. But we needed to use specialized kind of microscopy to determine that the fiber was synthetic and not cotton or natural fiber.
[00:10:47] Speaker C: Did you find much in the way of natural fibers?
[00:10:51] Speaker B: Some, yeah, but the majority were synthetic. But we did find some cotton and
[00:10:55] Speaker C: natural fibers Yeah, I presume the natural fibers are digestible.
[00:11:00] Speaker B: Well, and they, they probably, they don't leach these very toxic compounds that the plastic does as well.
[00:11:06] Speaker C: So does the plastic get into the flesh of these birds or is it the toxic chemicals that are, you know, having the impacts? And what kind of impacts have you seen?
[00:11:18] Speaker B: Like, that's such a great question. And I think it's one of the things that we don't quite understand with microplastic research yet. How is it really harming us?
And so for the birds, they're ingesting it and so what, we're seeing it in their GI tract. We didn't look in their lung tissue. Like for humans, microplastics have been found in lungs and in your stomachs. For the birds, we just looked in their stomachs and we didn't look at this. But other studies have shown that the actual physical like presence of the microplastic particle in your stomach can create problems. It is abrasive, it causes inflammation and just cell disruption and it can just cause lesions and it can cause problems. Our focus of our research was to look at the ability of those compound, of those plastic pieces to release these toxic compounds that then disrupt your hormone function. So then that causes, we call it systemic, that causes this sort of whole body widespread effect on your hormones that can last for a very long time. It can actually disrupt your developmental stage if you're a growing bird or child or something like that. And the long term consequences of that, we just don't know what they are, but we know they're not good.
[00:12:35] Speaker C: Just to follow up on the toxic chemicals, are these petroleum products that are getting in or are they other kinds of chemicals? I mean, plastics are, I gather, fairly nasty in terms of chemical composition. And there's so many different kinds. Right. And they're all made up of these long hydrocarbon chains which are, which because they're so difficult to disrupt.
That's what makes plastics durable.
[00:13:01] Speaker B: Yes. So the majority of plastic is that they're made from fossil fuel products derived from chemicals from fossil fuels which are toxic. But depending on the type of plastic, other things are added to make them more malleable or different color or, you know, heat resistant. So they can have lots and lots of different types of chemicals. And we know a lot of them are very toxic because the manufacturing of specific products, a lot of that is proprietary.
So we, we don't know. So for example, when we found the small piece of microplastic in the myrrh, we had no idea to know what chemicals were Actually inside that piece of plastic. So what we did was we basically said, well, what, what kind of chemicals can release and can those chemicals disrupt hormone function?
And we found that they could.
So I think for toxic chemicals for plastic, I think the most famous one is bisphenol A or bpa. A lot of people have heard of bpa.
BPA has been really well studied. So when we. The reason we know these compounds that are in plastic, these chemicals are toxic is because researchers have picked out a specific one and done a lot of research on that particular one like BPA and found, gosh, this is terrible. It really disrupts hormone function and it can have lots and lots of problems. And you definitely don't want it in your plastic baby bottle that's basically potentially leaching this compound into milk. And so because of that, there's a lot of information we know about these, like individual chemicals, but much less on the suite of chemicals that can go into these products.
[00:14:50] Speaker C: And you mentioned that hormone disruption, what is that about? What does it lead to? What does it entail?
And this is the other thing is that of course you were also, you were looking at chicks, but what does it do in mature animals and presumably mature humans?
[00:15:07] Speaker B: Yeah, so for the common words, we, we did look at adults and again, we don't really know what the long term effects could be. We know from other studies that if you're given these compounds that we know disrupt hormone function and a lot of chemicals that you can find in plastic are something that we call xenoestrogens or estrogen mimics. So they look like estrogen. So once they're released into your body, they basically mimic estrogen in a bad way and go and bind to all these sites that basically are estrogen receptors and they activate the sites or they, you know, mess up the site. So estrogen can't bond or they prohibit the site, but they just create havoc amongst your hormone system.
And so that is one way that it can do that, can reduce reproductive success, it can cause reproductive abnormalities.
Some of these are also considered obesogens. So they disrupt your metabolic rate. Your hormone function is very tightly regulated and to have any kind of this disruption is a bad thing across like multiple physiological processes.
[00:16:25] Speaker C: Do we know anything at all about the impacts of microplastics on human health?
[00:16:30] Speaker B: Well, not enough, I don't think, honestly. I mean, like I said, we do know a little bit about, there's been some studies that have looked at tissues so seeing how tissue will react to a microplastic piece being there. And we Also have quite a bit of studies on these specific chemicals that we have found or that we know are put into plastics, such as, I'll go back to B. Epa, but we don't know enough about how just the whole exposure regime that we have is affecting us in terms of leaching these chemicals, in terms of just disrupting, you know, your, you know, in terms of physically causing abrasions either in your lung tissue or your stomach lining. We don't know enough. And the other thing I want to say is that scientists are just always playing catch up.
It had been sort of well established that BPA was so bad. And people were saying, we don't want it. You know, we want BPA free products.
Industry said, okay, we'll change. And so. But what they did is a common replacement for BPA is something called bps. And basically it's like bpa, but they've just switched out a few little kind of chemical parts of it. Now it's called, so it's called bps.
And some work that we've done in our lab, plus other studies have shown that BPs might be worse than BPA in terms of acting as this estrogen mimic and disrupting hormone function.
Now a bunch of scientists are putting out papers and saying how bad BPS is. But it's like this regrettable substitution.
These products get made, people get exposed, animals get exposed, researchers are like, wait, wait, wait, this is bad. And then something gets replaced and then we're back again.
And a lot of these studies, they take years and years, sometimes decades, to establish these sort of health effects, especially long term health effects. Very difficult to understand.
[00:18:33] Speaker C: Yeah, well, I guess I'm from the plastics generation since I was born just after 1950. You're listening to Sustainability now. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. My guests today are Drs. Myra Finkelstein and Stephen Mentor, and we're talking about microplastics. And Myra has just been regaling us with all of the toxins and terrible contents of these little bits of plastic and where they're going and what they're doing to disrupt animal and human metabolisms. Let's turn to Steve now.
Who are you and how are you involved in this microplastics issue?
[00:19:09] Speaker D: Well, it's great to be here, Ronnie. Thanks for having us.
So I was involved in environmentalism since about 1977 and was actually part of one of the very first recycling centers in the United States, started at Palo Alto.
So I've been always interested in trash, actually, and in where things go and then I have a PhD from the University of Washington in English and technology studies, so got interested in technology transfer and shift. So obviously the oil and gas industry cross over with that. And then finally taught for 29 years at a local community college in San Jose.
And for the bulk of that time I taught critical thinking. And one of the things I taught to my students and we talked about a lot was water.
So water led to pollution, pollution led to plastics. And so for the last 10 or 15 years, we've been looking at what, microplastics and plastics as one of the main problems in, in our water supply. So that's kind of where I'm coming from. I'm not an expert, I'm not a scientist, but I have done a lot of thinking about technology, science and environmental pollution.
[00:20:27] Speaker C: Well, you, as you said at the beginning of the show, right, there's been a lot of this stuff produced.
What's the trajectory in the future look like, especially as, as we presumably reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and more become available for other purposes?
[00:20:44] Speaker D: Yeah, it's a great question.
Well, and again, I'll say it generally, but there's a lot of research and sources to back it up.
What's happening, obviously, is that countries are realizing that from climate change we have to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels for energy and for transportation. So many, many countries, including United States, are seeing that being about to be phased out or it's going to be a very, very difficult process. It's a little bit like getting off an addiction, only it's harder.
So where's that going to leave us? If you were the oil and gas industry and they're pivoting towards plastic, the acceleration of oil and gas production to plastics is happening as we speak. And that number by 2030 and 2050 is an extremely scary one. One of the, one of the things I'll talk about later is the plastic packaging. You'll notice it's everywhere in your life. Go and even go into Whole Foods. The whole Foods are natural and it's just just tons of plastic. So it's accelerating to the point where the fight against plastic production upstream is going to be maybe more important in some ways than the fight to go over to an alternative form of energy and transportation fuels.
[00:22:02] Speaker C: Well, I mean, are there any efforts underway to regulate production?
[00:22:06] Speaker D: Yeah, well, you know, it's interesting. Meyer and I were talking about this. We're kind of lucky to live where we do, although it would be better to live in the EU in some ways. But California is the sort of leader for the United States in this. And there's a lot of legislation that California has done. The first part, 2014-18, we started looking at things like, you know, plastic bags and straws and looking at the major visible things.
2018-2022, was California laws aimed at tightening those things up and changing consumer patterns in education.
Then, since 2022, we've had two really important bits of legislation. One is, and some of you may have heard of it out there, SB54, which is a revolutionary bill because it begins to address the larger plastic economy and the what's called extended producer responsibility.
So it shifts it from let's not have any plastic bags, which is good, to let's start asking the polluters to pay and bringing the people who produce these things into the legislature legislative purview. So briefly, companies that make or sell plastic packaging must, by law, pay for the collection, recycling, cleanup, and there has to be redesigned so that there's less waste. So by 2032, the benchmarks for that are 25% reduction in single use plastic packaging. Wish it was higher. 65% recycling rate for single use.
I love it, but it's unlikely. And 100% recyclable or compostable packaging, again, that's a good one. And I think we could get there if there was the political will.
And if you think about the cost of this, they're going to ask the plastic producers to pay around 5 billion over 10 years starting in 2027 into a fund that would then go to mitigate the effects of the plastic pollution so far.
[00:24:08] Speaker C: So this is in California.
[00:24:10] Speaker D: This is California. So SB54 is the first one in the country, and it's very ambitious. It's got a large arc, and we're right at the point now where the rubber meets the road, if I can use a plastics metaphor, to see whether the state has the political will to really make sure that these plastic producers do these things. One of the problems with the bill is that it's complicated, but there's a group of industries and sort of like industry is supposed to be talking to itself to see how they're going to do this, because that's the quote, unquote, cooperation. So in a little bit, a little bit of this is the fox guarding the henhouse, if you know what I mean. So we'll see whether that's going to be real and whether they'll be able to make sure that these benchmarks are made.
One of the problems with this, and we could talk about this later as well, is that it's very unlikely that recycling is going to fix any of these problems. And so focusing on plastic recycling right now seems to me to be a poor way to do this and that really we need to be looking upstream at stopping the production of so much plastic and not what do we do with the 10,000 different kinds of plastic that flow downstream and now show up as bottles and packages and so on?
[00:25:30] Speaker C: You know, over the years I've been doing this show, I've had a number of different people on talking about plastics, about the chemistry, about the issue of recycling. And recycling is a problem because until a few years ago, we could ship a lot of this stuff over to China in particular, and then China decided it wasn't going to take it anymore. And so I'm sort of curious. This is an aside. I want to come back to this, but where is all of this collected plastic going these days?
[00:25:58] Speaker D: Well, great question. Like one, one problem is it's going into the ocean.
And I think the number is that by 2050, there'll be more plastic per pounds than fish in the ocean. So some of it's just flowing back out.
[00:26:12] Speaker C: Do you mean to say that, for example, when the city collects plastics and it goes on somewhere that the, the handler actually dumps them into the ocean? Or is this just the stuff that's not getting picked up into landfill? Right. Yeah, sort of.
[00:26:30] Speaker D: And landfill near oceans are a huge problem because you've got storm runoff. But. But another piece is that when you get, first of all, 6% of plastic is recycled. So it's a joke in some ways to think all this plastic is getting taken out. It's. It's hardly any of it. Most of it is getting landfilled or burned.
And then, as you, as some of you probably know, a lot of it was being shipped overseas to China, where people were supposedly using cheap labor to separate it into value. And then I believe it was the Olympics, and China decided, wait a minute, we shouldn't be taking all this. And also it became very clear that it was an incredibly polluted recycling stream. And as all of us recyclers know, it's. It's the pure stream is what you want. If it's, if it's polluted, then it's no good. So they were burning giant chunks of it, which is partly what created China's horizons. Horrible skies. So when they stopped food scraps and things like that, polluted with all sorts of things like we sent some of it was paper recycling that had plastic in it. This is the problem in the Philippines right now. So anyway, what ended up happening was they said no, and then we moved it to Malaysia and then Malaysia said no. Because every country that takes this realizes later that the people that took it on are making a profit. But the people that are the victims of it are people who are breathing the smoke in of the burning first world plastic burning and third world villages. And it's Malaysia and it's Vietnam and there's a number of other countries that kind of go down that list. So we keep going to the next one. But right now, when China didn't take it, it backed up a lot of. You're right, it backed up a lot of plastics back up into the United States and places like Canada and Germany and so on. So there's no good answer because it's not. Most of this plastic is not good for recycling. The other piece about recycling that you should. And I may, I may have. I have a strong feeling because I used to be a recycling guy, right? So I was very pro recycling. It's a World War II kind of effort. We're all going to be in this and, and create a market.
Recycling from the start doesn't make sense with plastics the way we do it.
One, because the kinds of plastics are too complicated. There's too many kinds of plastic that don't recycle well. So we have all these different kinds. If you've ever gone, you've gone right to something like a festival or a show and you're trying to figure out where the different plastic goes and which ones go in, the answer is they're confusing because it's not clear even to people who recycle all the time. Clamshells, yes or no? Which city?
So one is that the plastic isn't made for recycling, but two is initially recycling was driven by the plastics industry to put the onus of responsibility from producers onto the consumers. And it's never really changed off of that. The last piece is that if you look at where plastic comes from, as long as you subsidize oil and gas refining, the byproducts of oil and gas are used to make plastic, it's incredibly cheap compared to the cost of recycling. So there's never really been a market for plastics in the sense that we're making it again and turning it into benches. And the last piece I'll say about recycling is that unlike glass or some other things, plastics decompose and degenerate really quickly. So you can't circle them. There's not a circle once you've recycled them once, they really are no good anymore. Most plastic recycling is a one off. So for all those reasons, even though I still think we potentially could have a good plastics recycling right now, that is a PR campaign by the, by the companies to pretend like that's the solution when it's not.
[00:30:32] Speaker C: Well, you mentioned that this California law has producer responsibility in it. But, but that entails just putting money into a fund. You know, I, in the eu, my recollection is that producer responsibility meant taking back the old cars and the old computers and that they hadn't had to do something with it. That's the first thing. The second thing is where does that start? I mean it doesn't start with the producers of the resin, right?
[00:31:01] Speaker D: No, it's, it's, it's. So, so can I, I wonder if I could tell my story because it's, it's really, I think this is the way I try to understand it. It's the story of the three women by the river and it's attempt to try to understand who's responsible. Anyway, the short version of this, I heard this from an activist maybe 20 years ago, a couple decades. So there's three women sitting by a stream and they see a baby floating down the river. And the first woman comes in and saves the baby, takes the baby out. Oh my God. Then they see another baby coming and so she goes in and gets the baby.
By the time the third baby comes down the river, the second woman says we got to do something about this. And she starts building a net, you know, across the river to catch the babies so that we can save them. And then the third woman is heads upstream and the other two women go, where are you going? And she's like, I'm going to find the MFers who were throwing babies into the river.
So the point of this story is that the real problem starts with the hyper production of plastic. Like you were saying, Ronnie, at the very top of the stream by Dow and ExxonMobil and the very large petrochemical companies that then gets made into all the other stuff.
So nobody is saying really let's put a limit on that production in the United States, I believe they are in Europe, but in the United States there's, there's no attempt to cap that. Where they're going then is, it's already made now downstream. We're going to ask Pepsi and Coca Cola and Walmart and Amazon to pay into these.
So in some ways it's a good law, I support it. But we're never Going to really get there until we go far enough upstream and stop the massive overproduction in Cancer Alley, which is where all this stuff gets made in Louisiana. All those nurdles polluting all those poor neighborhoods and then ending up in their water supply. So that's the highest rates of cancer in the developed world.
That's where the true upstream starts. But California is doing what it can to catch that next. They're at the net level. They're catching the babies. They're going to try to catch the babies, but ultimately we're going to have to stop throwing babies in the river.
[00:33:19] Speaker C: I mean, I don't imagine that Coca Cola or Walmart actually produce their own plastic plastics.
They contract with manufacturers. Right?
[00:33:28] Speaker D: That's right.
[00:33:28] Speaker C: Track with, you know, people upstream who take the, the, the, the ros. The resin, the pellets and turn them into all of these varieties. Right. For further processing. So again, it's not actually affecting the producers of the, the, not even the virgin materials, but the, the plastics, the very variety of plastics. Is that correct?
[00:33:53] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:33:53] Speaker D: And that's because of climate change. Like, because of the pressures of climate change and global warming and carbon in the air, these companies are shifting to hyperproduction of plastics as opposed to, let's say, imagining that they're going to sell the same amount of gasoline in 2050. Because they're not the oil companies. Yes. And really, if you look at ExxonMobil, if you want a villain in this, the other piece, I want to notice as a teacher, my students could figure this out in 14 weeks. They knew. All of these companies know. They know. And it's interesting because many, when we talked about it, my students would say, well, it's what companies do. They just want to make money. This is what they do. And I was thinking we have to change that attitude towards these companies that it's like the tobacco companies on steroids they're doing, producing horrifically polluting things, not caring, dumping it downstream and then pretending that they're. We don't do that. That's, that's Peps. Pepsi makes the bottles. Yeah. So we can, we can look at Pepsi, but really it's Dow and Exxon.
[00:34:56] Speaker C: Anyway, bring up one other thing that you mentioned that we had once.
We had a couple of shows on it, and that's the whole issue of biodegradation of plastics. And I just want to point out that there are, around the world, I think there are a lot of companies trying to produce plastics from biological materials. Right. Like bamboo and, and I don't know what else? I mean, we've, we've heard about a lot of these things. The, the difficulty is that the American plastics processing and manufacturing industry is all developed for certain kinds of plastic. And to actually use these new forms, they would have to be retooled, which would absolutely cost, an enormous cost. And so, yeah, you know, the fact that something is out there does not mean that it will somehow make it into the, the product life cycle.
[00:35:53] Speaker D: Very true, Ronnie.
[00:35:54] Speaker C: Yeah, well, what can people do?
You're listening to Sustainability now. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. My guests today are Dr. Myra Finkelstein and Dr. Steven Mentor. Dr. Finkelstein works on the, the impacts of microplastics, particularly on marine birds, seabirds, and Dr. Mentor is a climate and plastics activist.
We've been talking mostly about the, the contradictions of the industry and, you know, where this stuff goes. But Steve, maybe you can tell us, you know, given that recycling is such a problematic solution to dealing with plastics, what are people to do?
[00:36:42] Speaker D: As we were preparing for this, Myra and I, we had these long conversations and, you know, that's the $64,000 question, although maybe we should raise that number since of inflation. But so there's a couple things, and I want to think of it as both. And we can do things individually and we're going to have to do things collectively as a society. So to remember both of those things, I think sometimes we have an either or, you know, you can either stop buying plastic or you can, you know, be involved in, you know, like litigation or support. We need both. So I want to kind of start with the things that I found in the home. And I wanted to cite two sources. One is A Poison like no Other by Matt Simon, which is a great book, highly recommended.
[00:37:25] Speaker C: And.
[00:37:25] Speaker D: And the other one is the, is the Netflix movie Plastic Detox, which has a kind of a shaky premise in some ways about fertility, but is a great primer on household stuff. And in the show, as you work through these couples with fertility issues and they're trying to like, get rid of the plastics in their house, you see how many of these products shed particles in our homes. It's kind of mind boggling. So it's good TV and I think the science is good. There's a baby crawling on a synthetic rug and you see all of the particles coming up and the baby is inhaling those things and the mother's inhaling them and they're going into the breast milk. So lots and lots of exposure in the home. So I looked at what are the most impactful things we could do at our homes. And here they are. One is the most important one. Oh, go ahead. Sorry.
[00:38:18] Speaker C: I was going to say are with respect to exposure.
[00:38:24] Speaker D: Yeah. If you're trying to reduce the exposure to fibers in your home and reduce the amount of plastics that go somewhere those two pieces, the most important one is clothing, at least as far as I can read on this piece. So wearing natural fibers which doesn't always isn't perfect because a lot of natural fibers now or have plastics added to them for certain things, but they're better than fully synthetic clothes. So avoiding fleece, avoiding polyester and avoiding what's called performance synthetics.
And remember these come out in the wash and they go right through the machines down into the, you know, the water treatment plant right by down there on off a bay.
And most of that goes through and guess what happens? It goes into the ocean where it hits Myra's Fish and Wildlife or it gets sequestered in sludge. So your polyester fibers get are now in sludge. And guess where that goes on to your food in the form of fertilizers.
So both bad we don't want to do that. So the shift away. 60% of our clothing is plastic.
So shifting away from that, making consumer decisions to no longer buy that is maybe one of the most important pieces.
Definitely don't microwave stuff in plastic and don't buy single use plastic when you can help it. Use glass and stainless steel. Filter your water and this is going to sound funny, but remove your shoes at the door because when you come in from the outside, you're bringing in dust and dirt. That is now we pretty sure has a fairly large amount of plastics in it. One of the main causes of that are your car tires.
Car tires throw up a huge amount. It's one of the biggest. Some people think it's actually bigger.
It's first or second in most states in terms of microplastics in the air. Then the other piece I thought was interesting was I have a very dusty office. You can't see it vacuuming with HEPA filters, getting the dust out because dust microplastic likes dust. Microplastic to dust, dust to inhale.
Lastly, wash less frequently and use full loads and wash very gently and air dry when you can. So all those are ways to clothing. So all those are ways to reduce. Yeah, sorry. And then in my house we reduced all of the plastic cutting boards. We took them, took them away and we're using wood now.
And you know, think about all the plastic Things you clean with.
And then the last one is there is a ton of plastics and personal care products. So start being smart about what personal care products you're putting on your face and your eyes and start, start buying things that are, that are plastics free. So those are the, those were the house ones that I thought were interesting.
They have some on driving like, you know, don't drive as fast. Go ahead.
[00:41:29] Speaker C: Let me, let me, let me raise a conundrum which is that basically, and while I don't disagree with all of these steps, basically these are available to people with higher incomes, right?
[00:41:42] Speaker D: I mean, absolutely.
[00:41:43] Speaker C: Same as so many other things. Right. With junk food and, and right this, the plastics are cheap and you know, and I, I don't, when I go buy something, I don't necessarily consciously think about that. Of course you can't get a metal computer anymore. And I noticed that our new car, you know, doesn't hold a magnetic strip with the radio station logo on it.
[00:42:10] Speaker D: You're very right about that. There's a, there's a, there's a privilege and a class issue here that is non trivial also, as everybody knows, but probably in the listenership, poor people bear the brunt of most pollution in this country, including microplastic pollution. So on the other hand, these are still good, good things to think about whether or not one can afford them or not.
I think buying fewer things and having them be safer for us.
One of the things that was on there was about fast fashion and how in some ways fast fashion was one of the things that generated this because it's meant to fall apart and it's quick and then they make it uncool in the next 10 years or five years or three years. So you're constantly buying and throwing away clothing. I think we have enough clothing on the planet now to clothe every single person till 2070.
[00:43:04] Speaker C: Myra, do you have anything additional to recommend in terms of reducing exposure or to particular things?
I know that may not be within your baliwick but.
[00:43:17] Speaker B: Well, I, I guess I just wanted to say that it can be daunting and overwhelming. And what I like to think is don't think about saying that I'm not going to use any plastic or I won't buy anything with plastic. But just think about when you have a choice and you are able to bring your own takeout container and not, not use one or something like that, that's one less piece that you've then used yourself. So thinking of it that way, like don't, don't become too overwhelmed but just think about how can I personally not, you know, consume as much plastic this week as I, you know, as I normally do, so more in that way. And definitely, definitely do not microwave your food in plastic, please.
[00:44:01] Speaker C: Yeah, okay. How about. How about the. The social. Socialized.
[00:44:07] Speaker D: No, it's really. And so I think if I'm a broken record, but upstream, it matters. So how do we begin to address the upstream problem with plastic production and the oil and gas, the petrochemical companies?
One is being aware of what laws exist now. So supporting SB54, California is a microplastics master plan that's also an advisory plan to that.
So being aware of the people in our state who are moving on this and supporting them, voting for them, letting people know that our state's moving the right direction and paying attention to when we hit pinch points. So, for example, this is an important year as our eyes are going to be on whether this law really does force these companies to pay into that fund, whether we're going to get, you know, whether we're going to have teeth.
Another one is I part of a group or. I've worked in with a group called Food and Water Watch. They're a very important piece. They've done a lot of good work on national microplastics. And one of the things about that's going on right now, you may have seen Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Talk about microplastics. It's the MAHA movement. Make America healthy again.
There's a list for the epa. I had it in my notes, but I don't see it right now. There's a list in the apa.
[00:45:27] Speaker C: Yeah. The EPA has said it's going to regulate microplastics in water. Right, Right.
[00:45:33] Speaker D: They're going to put it on the list that then supposedly gets monitored.
I don't think anybody in the environmental movement thinks that's likely to happen, but it's. It's a. It's an important move. Food and Water Watch was pushing to get five governors to petition the epa. That's kind of why that happened, I think. So there's going to be some kinds of, I think, hearings. And so Food and Water Watch is a good place to start. Also, beyond plastics, both of those are groups that are worthy of support.
I work with Indivisible on the Climate Committee. And there's some great local people doing some legislative work, doing some activism.
I personally would love us to start doing tours of local groceries with lots of us going through and just noting and then asking our local grocery producers to push Upstream about wanting less plastic. Our customers don't want it. And so there's lots of activism and education that we can begin doing. I think doing something personal and something political leads us to see that when we have enough of us that are doing this, things change. They really do. I mean, I think about, you know, how long ago was it that we had the divine right of kings. So people change that and people can change this, but it's going to take a lot of lifting and also it's going to take political pressure on our representatives to be active around SB54 and also the next steps of holding polluters responsible. You may have seen those flyers around town, make polluters pay. There's a number of people in town who are working on those kinds of bills in the legislature. So those are some things I think that people can. And I do think it's a two step. It's a personal. Connect with it and then talk to your friends. Educate yourself. Watch, watch the plastic detox. It's educational. But then finally, beyond voting, I think we're going to have to have movements that intervene in some ways so that the politicians have political coverage for making it harder for these companies to flood us with plastics and kill not just, you know, humans, but giant chunks of biota. And remember, it's connected to climate change. So those are some groups I think are worthy of joining.
[00:47:53] Speaker C: I want to quibble with you on two things. First of all, the thing about the divine right of kings, which I don't think we're past, but the second, campaign contributions that, that, that, you know, politicians, yes, respond, absolutely respond to that. And, and I suspect that's a, that's a major obstacle. I wanted to ask you. We're, we're getting close to the end of our time together. I wanted to just ask you whether there is any research into the impacts, the health impacts of microplastics on, on babies and young children because, you know, there's nothing that, that energizes parents, you know, like prob. Threats to their children.
Is there anything?
[00:48:41] Speaker B: So. Not that I know of. And it comes back to that, the same thing where there's certain chemicals that are being researched and that, and showing that they could have problems for like if they're in a baby bottle or something like that.
But understanding more about the suite of kind of toxic compounds our kids could be exposed to. No, there was something that we had thought about thinking about because when my kids were young, you know, there's all kinds of plastic package, this filmy plastic that has, you know, different candies and things that they suck on and stuff like that that are very scary looking if you think about the types of chemicals that could be in there. And we actually found that some of those were able to disrupt hormone function as well. And they're just things that kids put in their mouths.
I don't know of a lot of active work in that area right now in terms of, again, looking at the. The suite of packaging that could be doing it. But I, I do think it's really concerning, and I think that as parents, we should be careful about what our kids are chewing on.
[00:49:51] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:49:52] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:49:53] Speaker C: Well, do either of you have any last thoughts or comments you want to make, or are we all worn out by this?
[00:50:02] Speaker B: I just. I guess I just want to say that I know this is like, out of different projects that I work on, I think this is the one that people get very.
It just seems daunting, you know, it's just such a big problem. But again, I just like to think that we can still do something, and it's better to do something than nothing.
So, again, even if you just get your friends in together and you, you know, bring your own takeout, when you're eating at a restaurant that serves big portions, that's something. And something counts.
So just wanted to leave it there.
[00:50:37] Speaker C: Okay. Well, thank you, Myra and Steve, for being my guests on Sustainability Now.
[00:50:42] Speaker D: Thank you, Ronnie, for this.
[00:50:44] Speaker B: Thank you so much. It's great to be here.
[00:50:47] Speaker C: You've been listening to a Sustainability now interview about microplastics with Dr. Meyer Finkelstein, adjunct Professor, Microbiology and Environmental toxicology department at UC Santa Cruz, and Dr. Steven Mentor, a Santa Cruz climate activist and longtime environmentalist. Finkelstein been examining the health effects of plastic ingestion on seabirds to better understand the consequences for marine wildlife and human health.
Mentor works on campaigns in California to regulate the plastics industry and turn the tide of plastic packaging and consumption.
If you'd like to listen to previous shows, you can find
[email protected] sustainability now and Spotify, YouTube and Pocket Casts, among other podcast sites. So thanks for listening and thanks to all the staff and volunteers who make K Squid your community radio station and keep it going. And so, until next every other Sunday, sustainability now.
[00:51:52] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find now.
Temperate zones and tropic climbs, not through currents and thriving seas.
Winds blowing through freezing trees, strong ozone and safe sunshine.
Good planets are hard to find. Yeah.
