Dr. Marcus Erickson is a world-renowned marine biologist, researcher, and co-founder of the Five Gyres Institute, and recently co-founded Leap Lab. He s regarded by many people as the world s expert on plastic pollution. He studies the global distribution and ecological impacts of plastic pollution, and his studies have included over 20 expeditions sailing across all five ocean basins, the Bay of Bengal, the Southern Ocean, and the inland lakes and rivers. And in 2015, he built a catamaran out of junk that looks like a boat in the pictures, but it s actually a pile of junk. And it s sinking. In this episode, Dr. Erickson tells the story of how he and his crew managed to make it across the ocean using nothing but a plane and a bunch of plastic bottles to survive a storm that threatened to sink their vessel, and how they managed to get back to shore. Plus, he tells us about a fish he caught in the middle of the ocean that could have been eaten by a shark. by a man who was caught on a fishing trip, and why he s worried about the impact of plastic on the oceans. This episode is sponsored by Leap Lab, a company that helps solve the problem of plastic in the ocean. To find a list of our sponsors and show your support, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers. Thanks to our sponsor, VaynerMedia. We'll be looking out for your amazing sponsors! and we'll see you in the next episode of Science Friday, where we'll be profiling the best places to get the best deals on the best wines, the best wine and cocktails in the best bottles and cocktails at your local bars and the best cocktails in your local resturant. and most importantly, the most amazing places to eat the most delicious food you can get the most of what you'll be drinking the best of your local scene. most of your favorite cocktails and cocktails the most affordable in the most authentic wine and most authentic Irish cuisine in your favorite places in the world. the best most authentic at the best tasting all in the rest of the best restaurants in the country most affordable and the most most authentic Irish music you can find the best in the cheapest anywhere on the prairies and the most beautiful your local Irish countryside is
00:00:02.000Marcus Erickson is research director and co-founder of the Five Gyres Institute and recently co-founded Leap Lab.
00:00:10.000He's regarded by many people as the world's number one expert on plastic pollution.
00:00:18.000I think you've been studying it for 40 years or close to that.
00:00:23.000He studies the global distribution and ecological impacts of plastic pollution.
00:00:29.000And his studies have included over 20 expeditions sailing across all five ocean basins, the Bay of Bengal, the Southern Ocean, the inland lakes and rivers, and publishing the first global estimate of all plastic of all sizes floating in the world's oceans in 2015.
00:00:47.000And I think that was the year that you built that That very strange, it looks like a catamaran in the pictures out of junk.
00:03:32.000I touched the knife onto the stomach and it burst open and 17 particles of microplastic, each one the size of a grain of rice, popped out of its gut.
00:03:42.000I was really in the middle of nowhere.
00:03:45.000And an animal that I was just looking for sustenance.
00:03:49.000And this middle of nowhere, our trash was impacting marine life.
00:03:54.000It made me really realize that, you know, the plastic pollution issue, it really is global.
00:03:59.000Every corner of the planet has our trash.
00:04:02.000And it's increasing the number of particles are getting smaller, they're fragmenting, and they're getting into everything, including you and I. I want to talk about that.
00:04:11.000I want to ask you another question about that fish, though.
00:04:14.000Because when you're out in that blue ocean going very slow, the fish actually congregate up under your craft, right?
00:04:21.000Or were you actually fishing with hand lines?
00:04:25.000We did some hand line fishing, not much.
00:04:52.000As you indicated, they do swarm under your boat.
00:04:56.000So we were always able to jump in and get mahi-mai using a spear gun, spearfishing.
00:05:00.000There were other smaller fish hanging around, but largely the ocean was empty.
00:05:04.000So that's a whole other issue besides, you know, microplastic pollution is overfishing.
00:05:10.000The exploitation of fisheries and international waters is kind of off the charts, happening everywhere and depleting fish stocks.
00:05:17.000But yeah, plastic pollution, I was really surprised to find that inside the gut of a fish, I was a thousand miles from land in all directions.
00:05:49.000It's probably the lead trending environmental article at this point in time.
00:05:53.000And the title of it is A Growing Plastic Smog Now Estimated to Be Over 170 Trillion Plastic Particles Afloat in the World's Oceans, Urgent Solutions Required.
00:06:50.000We took every published studies in the last 40 years, put that together, and took my studies from 20 expeditions.
00:06:56.000And we were able to put together 11,600 data points in the ocean over 40 years of time in every ocean to create this time trend.
00:07:06.000So we're looking at how has plastic pollution in the oceans changed From the early, from the 1970s, late 70s, 1979, until 2019, a 40-year time trend.
00:07:18.000I mean, it was hard to find data for every single year.
00:07:22.000I would say, looking at that 40-year time trend, those first 15 years until about, you know, the 1990s, early 1990s, we didn't have a whole lot of data.
00:07:33.000So our data shows not much change, but we're not very confident in that data.
00:07:37.000The middle section, though, from 1990 to 2005, much better data, but still, it's kind of staying level.
00:07:44.000The amount of trash, it's increasing a little bit, but not at such a rapid rate as we saw recently.
00:07:51.000So since 2005 until present, what really surprised me Was this exponential increase in the amount of microplastic on the ocean surface.
00:07:59.000From 2005 to present, it went from no more than a few trillion particles to 170 trillion particles on average.
00:08:08.000And I'm not talking like 170 trillion bottles or bags or large items.
00:08:13.000We're talking microplastics, things less than the size of a grain of rice.
00:08:17.000So what we've noticed is that the trash that's out there Older trash and the new trash going in.
00:08:39.000We've got this growing accumulation of microplastics, micro and now nano, Creating these clouds, these plumes of microplastic particles by the trillions in every water body, hovering over the centers of oceans, and each particle carries its own burden of toxicity.
00:08:59.000It might have some chemicals already attached to it from production, then it's absorbing like DDT pesticides, won't mix with water, but sticks to plastic.
00:09:07.000PCBs, PAHs, industrial chemicals, they won't mix with water, but they stick to plastic.
00:09:12.000So you get this growing smog, again, these plumes, these clouds of plastics forming in our oceans.
00:09:18.000And our paper really got the best data available, the best modeling to come up with that big number.
00:09:25.000But what we do in the paper, we talk about, you know, why?
00:09:37.000One is that what's out there is just getting smaller.
00:09:39.000It's fragmenting and fragmenting and fragmenting.
00:09:41.000One plastic bag can make, you know, 10,000 microplastic fragments, but then also increase production.
00:09:47.000In the last 15 years, we produced well over 5 million tons of new plastic.
00:09:54.000And with new plastic comes more pollution as well.
00:09:58.000And the third thing, and this is really interesting, the third thing, if you look at the policy landscape, like what were the international agreements over this 40 years?
00:10:07.000You know, back in the 1970s and 80s, during the environmental movement of that time, you saw some really good international policies, like dumping at sea.
00:10:16.000Many countries would take their trash offshore and dump it.
00:10:20.000MARPOL Annex 5 was maritime law in the 80s that made that illegal worldwide.
00:10:26.000And every country had to comply because it was legally binding.
00:10:29.000It wasn't like a voluntary thing where, oh, maybe we'll comply or not.
00:10:35.000And there were several legally binding treaties.
00:10:38.000What we saw from the 1990s, let's say towards the millennium and onward to present, the legally binding treaties begin to fall to the wayside and industry wins the argument of making them voluntary.
00:10:55.000When a company has to choose between its bottom line or a choice whether to comply or not, they'll often just go with the bottom line and not risk losing profit or competitive edge.
00:11:06.000So voluntary measures in the last 20 years, they haven't worked.
00:11:10.000And I'm sure it's a combination of all three things.
00:11:12.000It's fragmenting, more production, and really poor policy that's responsible for this exponential increase in microplastic in the world's oceans.
00:11:21.000When you say they were legally binding, how does that work?
00:11:55.000There's incentive to comply if there's a penalty.
00:11:58.000If there's no penalty, the compliance really falters.
00:12:02.000And how does this affect all of the different, you know, the food chain in the ocean, the phytoplankton, the zooplankton, and then up to the kind of the, you know, larger predators and the grazing fish and ultimately the marine mammals?
00:12:18.000That's a really good question, and I often get the question, does it matter?
00:12:23.000If there's a smog of plastic out there, is it a benign material?
00:12:28.000So what we know is that microplastics, they act like sponges, and they accumulate, as I mentioned before, pesticides, other industrial chemicals, PAHs, PFAS, all these things will stick to plastic.
00:12:41.000Anything that's hydrophobic, doesn't mix with water, can be lipophilic and stick to plastic.
00:12:46.000So one little particle of plastic can become this little toxic pill.
00:12:49.000And as organisms ingest it, you have to consider that most of the ocean is being filtered through marine life very quickly.
00:12:57.000Within a matter of months, the first 100 feet of the ocean surface is passing through some organisms somewhere.
00:13:04.000The trillions of organisms, the planktonic organisms, all the way to marine mammals are all ingesting and filtering out this water.
00:13:11.000And they're taking the microplastic with it.
00:13:14.000So what we're seeing in some cases is that as animals ingest plastic, their body chemistry, the soup in their stomach of enzymes and so forth, can sometimes pull those chemicals off of plastic, and then those get ingested into the animal's body.
00:13:38.000A lot of entanglement happens from organisms eating trash or getting tangled in everything from the plastic bands around boxes that remain this little circle that can trap animals.
00:13:50.000I've seen those around sea lions, for example, to big fishing nets.
00:13:54.000There's no shortage of images on the web of whales with their tails wrapped in plastics or sea turtles with their limbs amputated by having fish in line around them.
00:14:04.000So its entanglement and ingestion are some of the harms.
00:16:05.000This big, massive wad of plastic bags.
00:16:09.000And we went to five skeletons, pulled out five of these things.
00:16:13.000I've got them here in my garage because we published on it.
00:16:15.000He had observed in his career over 300 camels died in his hospital due to ingesting plastics.
00:16:23.000We published this paper about the plight of plastics of camels eating plastic waste.
00:16:29.000And it was kind of a horror story, the way these animals suffer from this.
00:16:33.000You can imagine, like right now, if you had 20 bottle caps and 30 plastic bags in your stomach, you couldn't pass it, couldn't regurgitate it.
00:16:42.000The suffering, the stress on your esophagus and your stomach lining...
00:16:47.000Sepsis from bacteria in there, and the false sense of satiation.
00:16:51.000You feel you're full when you're not, and you malnourish, you dehydrate.
00:16:55.000So he saw this happen to hundreds of camels.
00:16:57.000We published this paper, and I'm proud to say within a couple years, less than two years, Dubai banned plastic bags and found a reasonable alternative in a different material.
00:17:10.000It's impacting a lot of organisms from the middle of the desert to the bottom of the ocean and everywhere in between.
00:17:16.000One of the concerns that, you know, that I've worked on for many years and that we have in the United States, because I've been focused a lot on endocrine disruptors and the phthalates and BPAs and plastics, we're seeing these anomalies, which are no longer anomalies, but in sexual development in boys and girls, but particularly girls getting, you know, nowadays commonplace for nine and 10 year olds to get their periods.
00:17:44.000And a lot of that, I mean, it's clearly coming from endocrine disruptors.
00:17:49.000The most common vector of exposure is, you know, are these different plastics?
00:17:55.000And I, you know, whether it's from plastic water bottles or all of the things that we eat that are packed in plastic that absorb a lot of those chemicals from the plastic wrapping, you Even organic food that is stamped, the food that's stamped that the, you know, BPAs travel from the ink, travel into the, you know, through the plastic they leach through, they get into the organic food.
00:18:20.000Is that something that you look at at all?
00:18:22.000You know, they're just the exposure, the human exposures.
00:18:26.000I was on a paper probably 15 years or earlier in my career with a fellow, last name Balm Saul.
00:18:32.000And Balm Saul was a scientist who kind of blew the lid off of BPA. I mean, he got a lot of pushback from industry about BPA, bisphenol A. And he had seen, you know, some endocrine disrupting features in the mice he was studying.
00:18:45.000He was studying mice for a different reason, but it was the Lexan PANS Where he had the mice living and the water dishes that had BPA that were causing these effects.
00:18:55.000He didn't know where they're coming from until they realized, oh, it's the plastic.
00:18:59.000So I'm really glad that you brought this up.
00:19:36.000Bisphenol A, as you know, is an endocrine disruptor.
00:19:38.000It's inside the lining of all of our metal cans.
00:19:43.000The reason why metal cans don't rust from the inside is a thin layer of plastic on the inside, and very often that is bisphenol A. You mentioned, you know, organic food is packaged in plastic.
00:19:54.000When it's packaged in plastic, can we still call it organic?
00:19:57.000Why do we not have these kinds of labels for our packaging as well?
00:20:02.000When we're consuming foods that are adjacent to this packaging for sometimes months or years on the shelf, they become, they absorb what leaches out of that packaging.
00:20:12.000So I think there's a need, and I'm so glad you pointed this out, that some of these endocrine disrupting chemicals, they render our organic produce, in some cases, inorganic.
00:20:22.000It would take away that designation because of the volume of endocrine disrupting chemicals on that packaging.
00:20:28.000Yeah, and, you know, we've been trained to accept that packaging and to desire it so that, you know, it's unusual for an American to go into a grocery store, even to a Whole Foods, and pick carrots out of the bin, or unwrapped food that is mainly, maybe oddly shaped, that is not uniform, and that is not wrapped doesn't really seem like real food to us anymore.
00:21:17.000There were paper drives, there were metal drives, there were victory gardens.
00:21:21.000So post-World War II in the 50s, we had to be taught planned obsolescence and to buy and then wait a few years until it's dysfunctional or unfashionable and then buy again.
00:21:34.000So yeah, I love that you observed that part of American culture.
00:21:39.000But it's only the last hundred years that we flipped from a culture of conservation to a culture of planned obsolescence and throwing things away.
00:21:47.000But, you know, I think there is an opportunity and what makes me optimistic is that I see The change happening.
00:21:56.000Not going back to any semblance of inconvenience, but thinking, getting smarter about our packaging and our materials and our delivery systems, the business models for delivering goods to customers.
00:22:11.000There's so much innovation and entrepreneurship out there that it leaves me somewhat optimistic, cautiously optimistic.
00:22:17.000And what do you think the solutions are?
00:22:29.000I think, first of all, we have to realize that there's going to be no silver bullet solution.
00:22:34.000So one thing we've been communicating lately is we want to solve this issue, you know, one industry at a time.
00:22:40.000I've been to so many conferences where there's one person sitting at the same table as me that's really focused on just fishing gear, plastics and fishing gear.
00:22:54.000I'm on oceans and single-use plastics.
00:22:56.000And it's almost like a Tower of Babel.
00:22:58.000So I think first thing is to look at our individual sector, because each sector, it's a different chemistry, different polymer, different additives.
00:23:07.000It's a different societal use of that product, different ways it gets in the environment, different impacts it might have.
00:23:14.000So the solutions are going to be very different per sector.
00:23:18.000I'm also seeing there are folks looking at each sector, but then looking upstream, rather than the downstream, let's just clean it up and let's just recycle more, which is, unfortunately, that fails.
00:23:34.000we're seeing cities eliminating from their communities the kinds of plastics that are the most costly to those cities in terms of cleanup and waste management and pollution leaving those cities.
00:23:47.000So a lot of cities are, for example, eliminating things like straws and bags and utensils and cups and cup lids, and are favoring things that are a little more benign by design, a little more environmentally friendly, easier to compost.
00:24:01.000So we're looking at better systems for how we move materials to consumers about the legacy of waste.
00:24:08.000We're seeing some better waste management.
00:24:10.000Then we're seeing something else I like, and that is the reuse economy.
00:24:14.000Every time I go to a city now when I travel, It's not difficult to find a reuse station where you can bring your own packaging.
00:24:21.000And like you had mentioned, you got goods in bulk.
00:24:24.000You bring your own packaging, you get five pounds of beans.
00:25:04.000As long as we can keep the conversation about prevention, it's got to be legally binding about prevention, and it can't be voluntary and focused on just cleanup and recycling.
00:25:12.000It's got to be preventative and legally binding.
00:25:15.000You mentioned kind of the upstream issues.
00:25:18.000One of the things that I see in my work is something that seems sometimes just insurmountable because there's a strong link between the use of fossil fuels, which is actually increasing now.
00:25:33.000I think last year was the biggest year for carbon production.
00:25:37.000And the production of plastics, and particularly fracking, which a lot of the byproducts of the fracking industry are used in plastic production, and that is kind of an economic driver for plastics production.
00:25:53.000And there's now all these cracking plants up and down the Ohio Valley and all over the country that are part of the food stream for The supply stream for plastics.
00:26:05.000And in fact, that train, you know, I'm representing a lot of the people in East Palestine whose lives were upended by a Norfolk Southern train accident, the derailment.
00:26:16.000And that train was carrying vinyl chloride, which is, of course, one of the primary ingredients in the production of plastics.
00:26:24.000And those trains are going all day long.
00:26:27.000These communities across Ohio, and they're all involved, they're all connected.
00:26:32.000The fracking is connected to the vinyl chloride, which is linked to plastics production, and they're all part of this feed stream, you know, for the industry that is driving more and more plastic production.
00:26:46.000That train was carrying vinyl chloride.
00:26:48.000That's the building block of PVC. And those chemicals, as you said, they're moving around the country, moving around the world, everywhere we go.
00:26:55.000And some of those drivers, we understand, there's a rising middle class worldwide that wants an increased quality of life that comes highly packaged.
00:28:08.000But to make it successful, the economics have to be there.
00:28:11.000And that's where the conversation almost always falls short.
00:28:14.000If you're going to recycle plastics, which is actually pretty efficient for PET, you've got to have the infrastructure set up.
00:28:21.000But then to recycle it, you've got to first...
00:28:24.000Collect it from the end of the road, from the consumer, back to a recycling hub, where then it gets washed, repelletized.
00:28:32.000Those pellets can go back into the market and get distributed.
00:28:35.000There's a lot of transportation costs as well.
00:28:37.000That is so much more expensive of a process than just getting the raw material, the raw feedstock from brand new petroleum, brand new ethylene coming from fracking stations.
00:28:47.000So it can't compete economically unless you set it up to compete.
00:28:52.000Therefore, I often tell industry folks, I say, well, if we're going to talk about recycling and how great the technology is, are you willing to support policy that's going to ensure that 75% or better of new products are containing at least 75% or more recycled plastics?
00:29:10.000You got to give it some market share, otherwise it can't compete.
00:29:13.000That's why recycling rates in the US are less than 10%.
00:29:18.000The other thing I would also add is design.
00:29:21.000We don't have any standards for designing to make recycling easy.
00:29:26.000If you look at products that were made a century ago, you could take apart any piece that broke And find that part and fix it.
00:29:38.000Nowadays you have a blender, one button breaks and the whole thing becomes trash.
00:29:43.000One of the things that you talked about is making the economics work, and I just want to suggest methodology for that, which is in many of the jurisdictions in Europe, the producer of products pays for the packaging and pays for the recovery of that packaging.
00:30:01.000So if you send packaging out into the stream of commerce, you have to show that you've either reclaimed it, that you've recovered it, Or you have to pay for its disposal.
00:30:11.000So the producer of the product actually pays for the packaging disposal.
00:30:17.000Oh, in Europe, you don't get a credit card that's tiny inside a shoebox filled with plastic peanuts or styrofoam peanuts because whoever sent you that credit card is now going to have to pay for the disposal of all that packaging.
00:30:32.000And it works very well in Europe compared to what we have.
00:30:51.000It's because the people who are causing the problem are not being forced to pay to clean it up.
00:30:58.000If you really want to have free market capitalism, actors in the marketplace should be paying for all of the costs of bringing their product to market, including the cost of cleaning up after themselves, which was a lesson we were all supposed to learn in kindergarten.
00:31:13.000But they're able to evade that cause and escape the discipline of the free market and force the public to pay their production costs by putting all this crap out into the marketplace and knowing that the taxpayer is going to have to pay to recover it.
00:31:29.000You know, those extended producer responsibility bills, they're so difficult to get through.
00:31:34.000I think the industry recognizes that that is a threat to their bottom line.
00:31:39.000If the polluter has to pay, it can cost them potentially billions in having to be responsible for the end of life of their stuff.
00:31:47.000I mean, who captures those negative externalities?
00:31:49.000You know, as you know, as you just said, it's a consumer.
00:31:53.000And I can tell you, myself and other middle-class Americans, we're tired of paying for landfills, tired of paying for roadside cleanup, for putting nets and rivers to capture trash or beach cleanups.
00:32:06.000It's not something that we should have to pay.
00:32:08.000I think the producer of the packaging, the products, should have skin in the game.
00:32:13.000But they've been very successful, as you know, deflecting those externalities that cost money.
00:32:18.000I'd be curious to know, how do we get a good EPR bill through?
00:32:22.000Well, there's going to be tremendous resistance from the industry.
00:32:26.000We tried to do it a few years ago, and we got a couple of people from the industry who were willing to support it, including, strangely, Nestle, which, you know, produces all these, you know, Arrowhead water and Poland Springs water and local spring waters all over the country.
00:32:42.000But they tried to get some of the other industry groups on board.
00:32:45.000But it's really the plastic producers that We're good to go.
00:33:11.000And that's why I come back to the point, you know, if Nestle, being convinced Nestle to say, would you be willing to help pass legislation that all new water bottles that you make need to contain at least 75% recycled plastics, create that market for recycling?
00:35:55.000And I saw that you collect fossils, and I go out periodically to South Dakota to the Heinrich Reservation, and And I have some paleontologist friends out there.
00:36:07.000I do take my kids fossil hunting out there.
00:37:14.000We're building a small science center here in Ventura County.
00:37:16.000I'm building another one in Lusk, Wyoming.
00:37:19.000I just bought an old car dealership, turned into a really funky roadside museum.
00:37:24.000It's about probably two hours from Mount Rushmore on the Wyoming side, of course.
00:37:30.000At one point, I was kind of researching about starting a program with the Sioux because Pine Ridge, it's just like every time there's a range in it, Rain and Pine Ridge, you have all these fossils just popping out of the ground and they have everything.
00:37:47.000They have Pleistocene, you know, mega mammals all the way back.
00:37:52.000You have different kind of geological formations out there.
00:37:57.000And, you know, to try to train some of the, you know, the young people on that reservation about how to find them because, you know, now they're selling them and there's, you know, there's money in them now.
00:38:08.000And it's just, it's like wealth that's just rotting on the ground every time it rains.
00:38:55.000I'll send you a flyer on this year's expedition, and if you've got students that are hungry for science, just ignore the fee on the flyer, and I'll take them out to the field.
00:39:29.000What do you do for your drinking water?
00:39:31.000I've got a Brita filter I'm looking at, and I have my stainless steel bottles.
00:39:35.000On the junk raft, when I was floating across the ocean, I had a reverse osmosis pump, and I would spend the first two hours in the morning filling a two liter bottle with this pump for two hours to fill the bottle.
00:39:44.000For the next two hours, put it to my mouth and fill my body for two hours.
00:39:49.000That was every day for three months in the middle of the ocean.
00:39:55.000Marcus Erickson, where can people, how can people support you and how can they, you know, follow you?
00:40:01.000To go to our website, the Five Gyres Institute, that's the number five, G-Y-R-E-S. We're doing a lot of work.
00:40:09.000We're an organization, we do the research, we publish the papers in peer-reviewed journals and bring that to the public, to policymakers, to industry, to say, look, here are the facts, What can we do?
00:40:21.000Now I'd offer one quick, quick antidote.
00:40:23.000We're studying biomaterials now and finding so many innovative companies across the United States who are ready to replace plastics with biodegradable materials for thin film packaging.
00:40:33.000So I like to see research translate into real solutions, and that's what we're about.