RFK Jr. The Defender - March 29, 2023


Plastics Are Poisoning Us with Marcus Eriksen

Topics
trash impact marine life endocrine disrupting chemicals reuse economy producer responsibility fossils
Hosted by
Robert F. Kennedy
Guests
Marcus Eriksen
Mentioned
Marcy Erickson Bisphenol A Balm Saul Sheikh Mohammed Charles Moore James Comer Steve McQueen Japheth Boyce Joel Paschal Anna Cummins Ed Carpenter Robert Dow A. You Older
Julian Assange and WikiLeaks with Julian's Father John Shipton Cost of War with Scott Ritter

Episode Stats


Length

40 minutes

Words per minute

170.83

Word count

6,964

Sentence count

481

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

5

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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

Transcript

Transcripts from "RFK Jr. The Defender" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody.
00:00:01.000 Today, I've got an amazing guest.
00:00:02.000 Marcus Erickson is research director and co-founder of the Five Gyres Institute and recently co-founded Leap Lab.
00:00:10.000 He's regarded by many people as the world's number one expert on plastic pollution.
00:00:18.000 I think you've been studying it for 40 years or close to that.
00:00:23.000 He studies the global distribution and ecological impacts of plastic pollution.
00:00:29.000 And 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.
00:00:47.000 And I think that was the year that you built that That very strange, it looks like a catamaran in the pictures out of junk.
00:00:58.000 It is.
00:00:59.000 It's sinking in all the pictures that I've seen of it.
00:01:02.000 It's hard to believe that you sailed it across the ocean.
00:01:05.000 And it was sinking.
00:01:07.000 It was.
00:01:08.000 On day three, we actually, I called my wife from sea on a satellite phone and said, Hey babe, we're sinking.
00:01:14.000 And she organized, not quite a rescue mission, but she rescued us by sending us more and more supplies.
00:01:20.000 I had to reinflate all the bottles and get some additional twine to hold the pontoons together.
00:01:25.000 It was really, it was a pile of junk.
00:01:27.000 And the intent was, you know how nonprofits work. 0.89
00:01:30.000 You want to get ahead of the game.
00:01:32.000 We're doing research, you know, sailed around the world, but to grab the public's attention, you're competing for attention.
00:01:38.000 We made a homemade raft, 15,000 plastic bottles, and we put an airplane on top of it, a Cessna 310 aircraft.
00:01:44.000 I think it's the first airplane to drift across the ocean from Los Angeles to Hawaii.
00:01:50.000 An unexpected three months.
00:01:52.000 I thought it would take three weeks with no motor, no support vessel.
00:01:55.000 We just had the mercy of the waves.
00:01:57.000 But we made it and it worked in terms of a PR stunt.
00:02:01.000 It really helped us, you know, capture more eyeballs and more attention to the issue of ocean plastic pollution.
00:02:07.000 And what was the airplane for?
00:02:09.000 That was your rescue craft?
00:02:12.000 That was my cabin.
00:02:14.000 It had no wings.
00:02:16.000 It was just a fuselage.
00:02:18.000 And yeah, that's what we lived in for three months.
00:02:21.000 Me and my co-navigator, Joel Paschal, the two of us lived in this thing.
00:02:24.000 And my wife, Anna Cummins, she was mission control.
00:02:27.000 She was saying, you know, here comes another hurricane.
00:02:30.000 Stay north.
00:02:31.000 Get out of the warm water.
00:02:32.000 Get in the cold water where the winds die down a bit.
00:02:34.000 It was much more than I bargained for.
00:02:36.000 But, you know, because I survived, it's a great story to tell.
00:02:40.000 It looks like it probably had a maximum of like three knots.
00:02:46.000 Let me put it this way.
00:02:48.000 It did not look either aero or hydrodynamic, but I cannot believe you sailed that thing across the ocean.
00:02:54.000 Sailing is a very kind word.
00:02:56.000 It was really just drifting.
00:02:58.000 So we averaged 1.5 knots.
00:03:00.000 I mean, I could have walked to Hawaii faster.
00:03:03.000 Really slow.
00:03:05.000 But we were able to make a bunch of little short videos.
00:03:08.000 I was making 30-second videos at half a megabyte.
00:03:11.000 But there's one video in particular that really caught everyone's attention.
00:03:14.000 And it's an image of a fish that I caught.
00:03:17.000 We were down to eating peanut butter and fish by month two.
00:03:20.000 And I caught this one little rainbow runner, about maybe 12 inches long.
00:03:25.000 And I filleted.
00:03:27.000 I was going to eat it.
00:03:28.000 I opened the stomach.
00:03:29.000 The stomach was very tight.
00:03:31.000 It was expanded and tight.
00:03:32.000 I 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.
00:03:42.000 I was really in the middle of nowhere.
00:03:45.000 And an animal that I was just looking for sustenance.
00:03:49.000 And this middle of nowhere, our trash was impacting marine life.
00:03:54.000 It made me really realize that, you know, the plastic pollution issue, it really is global.
00:03:59.000 Every corner of the planet has our trash.
00:04:02.000 And 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.
00:04:11.000 I want to ask you another question about that fish, though.
00:04:14.000 Because when you're out in that blue ocean going very slow, the fish actually congregate up under your craft, right?
00:04:21.000 Or were you actually fishing with hand lines?
00:04:25.000 We did some hand line fishing, not much.
00:04:28.000 Honestly, we didn't see many fish.
00:04:31.000 Actually, I met one sailor who had done a similar voyage on a wooden raft back in 1958.
00:04:37.000 And he told me stories of seeing sharks every day, seeing tuna and mahi-mahi and ono, all these fish.
00:04:44.000 We didn't see any sharks, any tuna, any ono.
00:04:48.000 We caught, I think, 16 mahi-mahi. 0.99
00:04:50.000 That's it, in three months.
00:04:52.000 As you indicated, they do swarm under your boat.
00:04:56.000 So we were always able to jump in and get mahi-mai using a spear gun, spearfishing. 0.98
00:05:00.000 There were other smaller fish hanging around, but largely the ocean was empty.
00:05:04.000 So that's a whole other issue besides, you know, microplastic pollution is overfishing.
00:05:10.000 The exploitation of fisheries and international waters is kind of off the charts, happening everywhere and depleting fish stocks.
00:05:17.000 But 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.
00:05:25.000 And there it was.
00:05:26.000 Yeah, and I mean, one of the worrying things is the plastics that you can't see, the microplastic, that may also be in that fish.
00:05:35.000 You've done this peer-reviewed publication.
00:05:38.000 I think there's 11 other authors on it.
00:05:41.000 And this was published on March 8th, 2023.
00:05:47.000 And it is trending all over.
00:05:49.000 It's probably the lead trending environmental article at this point in time.
00:05:53.000 And 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.
00:06:06.000 Tell us about that.
00:06:08.000 This was the culmination of really a lifetime of work.
00:06:11.000 Over 20 years I've put into this, ever since grad school went right into this career path.
00:06:16.000 And I've met some really amazing scientists.
00:06:18.000 So on that paper, it was well crafted as a science study.
00:06:22.000 And I'm very proud of it.
00:06:23.000 We had three generations of scientists.
00:06:25.000 I was able to invite Captain Charles Moore, the person who discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
00:06:30.000 And then Ed Carpenter, the first person to publish anything on plastics back in 1972, got him on board.
00:06:37.000 And then this other fellow, Robert Day, he was publishing in the early 80s.
00:06:41.000 And I asked him, do you have any hidden data?
00:06:42.000 He had a little clipboard, a little folder of data unpublished from the 1980s.
00:06:48.000 So he added his data to the pot.
00:06:50.000 We took every published studies in the last 40 years, put that together, and took my studies from 20 expeditions.
00:06:56.000 And 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.
00:07:06.000 So 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.
00:07:18.000 I mean, it was hard to find data for every single year.
00:07:21.000 In some cases, we couldn't.
00:07:22.000 I 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.
00:07:33.000 So our data shows not much change, but we're not very confident in that data.
00:07:37.000 The middle section, though, from 1990 to 2005, much better data, but still, it's kind of staying level.
00:07:44.000 The amount of trash, it's increasing a little bit, but not at such a rapid rate as we saw recently.
00:07:51.000 So since 2005 until present, what really surprised me Was this exponential increase in the amount of microplastic on the ocean surface.
00:07:59.000 From 2005 to present, it went from no more than a few trillion particles to 170 trillion particles on average.
00:08:08.000 And I'm not talking like 170 trillion bottles or bags or large items.
00:08:13.000 We're talking microplastics, things less than the size of a grain of rice.
00:08:17.000 So what we've noticed is that the trash that's out there Older trash and the new trash going in.
00:08:24.000 It's falling apart. 0.54
00:08:25.000 It's fragmenting.
00:08:26.000 It's turning into what we call in the paper a smog.
00:08:30.000 Almost like the way we look at smog over our cities, air pollution, little small particles creating clouds of pollution over our cities.
00:08:36.000 That's highly toxic.
00:08:38.000 The same thing for plastics.
00:08:39.000 We'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.
00:08:57.000 It's absorbing chemicals.
00:08:59.000 It 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.
00:09:07.000 PCBs, PAHs, industrial chemicals, they won't mix with water, but they stick to plastic.
00:09:12.000 So you get this growing smog, again, these plumes, these clouds of plastics forming in our oceans.
00:09:18.000 And our paper really got the best data available, the best modeling to come up with that big number.
00:09:25.000 But what we do in the paper, we talk about, you know, why?
00:09:29.000 Why do we think this...
00:09:30.000 This growing smog of 170 trillion particles is happening.
00:09:35.000 We think there are three reasons.
00:09:37.000 One is that what's out there is just getting smaller.
00:09:39.000 It's fragmenting and fragmenting and fragmenting.
00:09:41.000 One plastic bag can make, you know, 10,000 microplastic fragments, but then also increase production.
00:09:47.000 In the last 15 years, we produced well over 5 million tons of new plastic.
00:09:54.000 And with new plastic comes more pollution as well.
00:09:58.000 And 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?
00:10:07.000 You 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.
00:10:16.000 Many countries would take their trash offshore and dump it.
00:10:20.000 MARPOL Annex 5 was maritime law in the 80s that made that illegal worldwide.
00:10:26.000 And every country had to comply because it was legally binding.
00:10:29.000 It wasn't like a voluntary thing where, oh, maybe we'll comply or not.
00:10:33.000 Legally binding.
00:10:34.000 And it worked.
00:10:35.000 And there were several legally binding treaties.
00:10:38.000 What 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.
00:10:52.000 Voluntary policy does not work.
00:10:55.000 When 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.
00:11:06.000 So voluntary measures in the last 20 years, they haven't worked.
00:11:10.000 And I'm sure it's a combination of all three things.
00:11:12.000 It's fragmenting, more production, and really poor policy that's responsible for this exponential increase in microplastic in the world's oceans.
00:11:21.000 When you say they were legally binding, how does that work?
00:11:25.000 Was there an enforcement agency?
00:11:27.000 Were there penalties?
00:11:29.000 That's always a problem with the treaty.
00:11:31.000 How do you make it enforceable?
00:11:33.000 Yes, and I'm not totally familiar with what the enforcement measures are.
00:11:38.000 I don't know if there were tariffs or some kind of penalty associated with those policies.
00:11:42.000 With MARPO Annex V, you would get penalized and you would not be able to operate your fishing fleets.
00:11:48.000 Okay, well, that's a very, very stringent penalty and one that everybody should pay attention to.
00:11:54.000 And they worry.
00:11:55.000 There's incentive to comply if there's a penalty.
00:11:58.000 If there's no penalty, the compliance really falters.
00:12:02.000 And 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?
00:12:18.000 That's a really good question, and I often get the question, does it matter?
00:12:23.000 If there's a smog of plastic out there, is it a benign material?
00:12:26.000 And the answer is no, it's not.
00:12:28.000 So 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.
00:12:41.000 Anything that's hydrophobic, doesn't mix with water, can be lipophilic and stick to plastic.
00:12:46.000 So one little particle of plastic can become this little toxic pill.
00:12:49.000 And as organisms ingest it, you have to consider that most of the ocean is being filtered through marine life very quickly.
00:12:57.000 Within a matter of months, the first 100 feet of the ocean surface is passing through some organisms somewhere.
00:13:04.000 The trillions of organisms, the planktonic organisms, all the way to marine mammals are all ingesting and filtering out this water.
00:13:11.000 And they're taking the microplastic with it.
00:13:14.000 So 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.
00:13:29.000 We have seen that happening.
00:13:30.000 So that's the ingestions, the ingestions and toxification from plastics.
00:13:36.000 But there's also entanglement.
00:13:38.000 A 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.
00:13:50.000 I've seen those around sea lions, for example, to big fishing nets.
00:13:54.000 There'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.
00:14:04.000 So its entanglement and ingestion are some of the harms.
00:14:08.000 But we're also seeing this on land.
00:14:10.000 So while my work has been oceans-focused, the issue isn't.
00:14:15.000 The issue is really looking at every single biome.
00:14:18.000 I have colleagues have found microfibers on top of Everest in the Alps.
00:14:24.000 I have colleagues have found plastic pollution in the deepest trenches of the ocean.
00:14:28.000 In fact, James Cameron, in his deep sea vessel, he was able to document plastic trash down the bottom of the Marianas Trench.
00:14:37.000 I recently, a few years ago, I went to Dubai.
00:14:42.000 I was there doing work.
00:14:43.000 I was going to work in the Persian Gulf in that water body and survey for microplastics.
00:14:48.000 We're finding lots of pre-production pellets, the raw feedstock for plastics.
00:14:52.000 And I'm in Dubai and I meet this veterinarian, really interesting man.
00:14:56.000 He had been given, I think, 50 million bucks from Sheikh Mohammed to build the best camel hospital on the planet. 0.82
00:15:01.000 And he looked at me and he said, if you want to see the impact of plastics, You got to come with me.
00:15:06.000 So we drove about 60 miles into the desert.
00:15:10.000 We were going over these rolling hills.
00:15:12.000 There's acacia trees all over the place.
00:15:14.000 Beautiful landscape.
00:15:15.000 There are a few fences I saw covered with plastic trash blowing across the desert.
00:15:19.000 Get to one ridge, look over the edge, and there are a few little piles of white bones here and there.
00:15:25.000 And he said, that's normal.
00:15:26.000 You know, animals will come out here.
00:15:28.000 The herd passes through.
00:15:30.000 One gets left behind and dies.
00:15:31.000 The bones stay.
00:15:32.000 We went down to one, and he said, let's dig.
00:15:35.000 I said, what do you mean, let's dig?
00:15:36.000 He begins digging inside the ribcage.
00:15:39.000 You can imagine, like, this skeleton.
00:15:42.000 It's belly up.
00:15:43.000 The ribs are sticking out of the ground like in little rows.
00:15:46.000 So inside the chest cavity, we're digging right there, and we start seeing plastic trash.
00:15:52.000 And I began to wonder, you know, What is this?
00:15:55.000 How did this get here?
00:15:56.000 How much is going to be here?
00:15:57.000 We kept digging and digging.
00:15:58.000 We pulled out a mass that was roughly, I'd say, 50 kilograms.
00:16:03.000 This huge thing, about 80 pounds.
00:16:05.000 This big, massive wad of plastic bags.
00:16:09.000 And we went to five skeletons, pulled out five of these things.
00:16:13.000 I've got them here in my garage because we published on it.
00:16:15.000 He had observed in his career over 300 camels died in his hospital due to ingesting plastics.
00:16:23.000 We published this paper about the plight of plastics of camels eating plastic waste.
00:16:29.000 And it was kind of a horror story, the way these animals suffer from this.
00:16:33.000 You 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.
00:16:42.000 The suffering, the stress on your esophagus and your stomach lining...
00:16:47.000 Sepsis from bacteria in there, and the false sense of satiation.
00:16:51.000 You feel you're full when you're not, and you malnourish, you dehydrate.
00:16:55.000 So he saw this happen to hundreds of camels.
00:16:57.000 We 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.
00:17:09.000 Again, the issue, it's really global.
00:17:10.000 It's impacting a lot of organisms from the middle of the desert to the bottom of the ocean and everywhere in between.
00:17:16.000 One 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.
00:17:44.000 And a lot of that, I mean, it's clearly coming from endocrine disruptors.
00:17:49.000 The most common vector of exposure is, you know, are these different plastics?
00:17:55.000 And 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.
00:18:20.000 Is that something that you look at at all?
00:18:22.000 You know, they're just the exposure, the human exposures.
00:18:26.000 I was on a paper probably 15 years or earlier in my career with a fellow, last name Balm Saul.
00:18:32.000 And 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.
00:18:45.000 He 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.
00:18:55.000 He didn't know where they're coming from until they realized, oh, it's the plastic.
00:18:59.000 So I'm really glad that you brought this up.
00:19:01.000 It really is an issue.
00:19:02.000 In addition to, you know, plastic pollution, we have a lot of issues with the kind of chemicals that are on plastics.
00:19:09.000 They're plasticizers and additives.
00:19:11.000 Things like As you mentioned, bisphenol A and phthalates.
00:19:14.000 Phthalates are common in children's toys.
00:19:16.000 Like what makes a rubber ducky a flexible rubber are phthalates.
00:19:20.000 It can be up to 50% by volume can be this chemical phthalates.
00:19:25.000 Phthalates is an endocrine disruptor.
00:19:27.000 If you're giving your kid a soft chew toy with phthalates, you're giving them an endocrine disrupting popsicle to chew on.
00:19:34.000 Bisphenol A is another one.
00:19:36.000 Bisphenol A, as you know, is an endocrine disruptor.
00:19:38.000 It's inside the lining of all of our metal cans.
00:19:43.000 The 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.
00:19:54.000 When it's packaged in plastic, can we still call it organic?
00:19:57.000 Why do we not have these kinds of labels for our packaging as well?
00:20:02.000 When 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.
00:20:12.000 So 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.
00:20:22.000 It would take away that designation because of the volume of endocrine disrupting chemicals on that packaging.
00:20:28.000 Yeah, 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.
00:20:53.000 It is a strange thing.
00:20:55.000 You know, I often talk about, you know, we had to be trained to be throwaway consumers.
00:21:01.000 If you think of how our American culture was during the Great Depression, you know, my grandparents wouldn't throw a thing away.
00:21:09.000 They even washed their plastic bags in the 70s.
00:21:12.000 And also World War II, we were a culture of conservation for the war effort.
00:21:16.000 We recycled everything.
00:21:17.000 There were paper drives, there were metal drives, there were victory gardens.
00:21:21.000 So 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.
00:21:33.000 That changed.
00:21:34.000 So yeah, I love that you observed that part of American culture.
00:21:39.000 But 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.
00:21:47.000 But, you know, I think there is an opportunity and what makes me optimistic is that I see The change happening.
00:21:56.000 Not 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.
00:22:11.000 There's so much innovation and entrepreneurship out there that it leaves me somewhat optimistic, cautiously optimistic.
00:22:17.000 And what do you think the solutions are?
00:22:20.000 What are you targeting?
00:22:22.000 I mean, what's your dream for legislation or other solutions?
00:22:27.000 Well, I think it's a few things.
00:22:29.000 I think, first of all, we have to realize that there's going to be no silver bullet solution.
00:22:34.000 So one thing we've been communicating lately is we want to solve this issue, you know, one industry at a time.
00:22:40.000 I'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.
00:22:49.000 One person focused on e-waste.
00:22:50.000 One person is focused on medical ways.
00:22:52.000 Another person on car tires.
00:22:54.000 I'm on oceans and single-use plastics.
00:22:56.000 And it's almost like a Tower of Babel. 0.78
00:22:58.000 So I think first thing is to look at our individual sector, because each sector, it's a different chemistry, different polymer, different additives.
00:23:07.000 It's a different societal use of that product, different ways it gets in the environment, different impacts it might have.
00:23:14.000 So the solutions are going to be very different per sector.
00:23:18.000 I'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.
00:23:30.000 I'd love to talk about that.
00:23:31.000 More preventative measures.
00:23:34.000 we'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.
00:23:47.000 So 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.
00:24:01.000 So we're looking at better systems for how we move materials to consumers about the legacy of waste.
00:24:08.000 We're seeing some better waste management.
00:24:10.000 Then we're seeing something else I like, and that is the reuse economy.
00:24:14.000 Every 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.
00:24:21.000 And like you had mentioned, you got goods in bulk.
00:24:24.000 You bring your own packaging, you get five pounds of beans.
00:24:26.000 I actually did that yesterday.
00:24:28.000 I was getting cashews and almonds in a bulk store.
00:24:31.000 So we're seeing these business models in the reuse economy, as well as smarter packaging and better systems of waste management in cities.
00:24:39.000 And that's where I think we're seeing examples that are beginning to spread around the country.
00:24:44.000 On an international stage, there's the UN Global Treaty that's being discussed right now.
00:24:49.000 A year and a half ago, the UN decided to take up this challenge.
00:24:53.000 There are going to be three negotiations, and then they'll vote on the treaty in 2024.
00:24:57.000 So I'm one of the scientific advisors to that treaty.
00:25:01.000 There are about 80 of us.
00:25:03.000 And it's inspiring.
00:25:04.000 As 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.
00:25:12.000 It's got to be preventative and legally binding.
00:25:15.000 You mentioned kind of the upstream issues.
00:25:18.000 One 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.
00:25:33.000 I think last year was the biggest year for carbon production.
00:25:37.000 And 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.
00:25:53.000 And 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.
00:26:05.000 And 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.
00:26:16.000 And that train was carrying vinyl chloride, which is, of course, one of the primary ingredients in the production of plastics.
00:26:24.000 And those trains are going all day long.
00:26:27.000 These communities across Ohio, and they're all involved, they're all connected.
00:26:32.000 The 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.
00:26:45.000 Yes, exactly.
00:26:46.000 That train was carrying vinyl chloride.
00:26:48.000 That'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.
00:26:55.000 And some of those drivers, we understand, there's a rising middle class worldwide that wants an increased quality of life that comes highly packaged.
00:27:05.000 A lot of products are plastic.
00:27:07.000 Also, a lot of industries and technology are lightweighting their vehicles, lightweighting their products with plastic.
00:27:14.000 So there are some key drivers, as well as a rising global population.
00:27:17.000 By 2050, we could reach 9 to 10 billion people.
00:27:21.000 And many of those, as they approach middle class, that's a big, big increase in demand for those materials.
00:27:29.000 What about recycling?
00:27:31.000 Does it work?
00:27:32.000 It can if it's set up for success.
00:27:36.000 And I can't tell you how many times I've been in conversations about recycling.
00:27:39.000 And when I talk with folks that are producers, every stakeholder has a different perspective.
00:27:45.000 The folks who make plastic, they really focus the conversation on the technology that's available.
00:27:51.000 And they also have these advanced recycling techniques, things called pyrolysis, Waste to energy.
00:27:57.000 They have all these technologies.
00:27:59.000 And I often say, if you throw enough money at it, you can recycle anything.
00:28:04.000 You can recycle anything if you...
00:28:06.000 We have the technology to do that.
00:28:08.000 But to make it successful, the economics have to be there.
00:28:11.000 And that's where the conversation almost always falls short.
00:28:14.000 If you're going to recycle plastics, which is actually pretty efficient for PET, you've got to have the infrastructure set up.
00:28:21.000 But then to recycle it, you've got to first...
00:28:24.000 Collect it from the end of the road, from the consumer, back to a recycling hub, where then it gets washed, repelletized.
00:28:32.000 Those pellets can go back into the market and get distributed.
00:28:35.000 There's a lot of transportation costs as well.
00:28:37.000 That 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.
00:28:47.000 So it can't compete economically unless you set it up to compete.
00:28:52.000 Therefore, 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?
00:29:10.000 You got to give it some market share, otherwise it can't compete.
00:29:13.000 That's why recycling rates in the US are less than 10%.
00:29:18.000 The other thing I would also add is design.
00:29:21.000 We don't have any standards for designing to make recycling easy.
00:29:26.000 If 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.
00:29:35.000 You could fix, repair your own goods.
00:29:38.000 Nowadays you have a blender, one button breaks and the whole thing becomes trash.
00:29:43.000 One 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.
00:30:01.000 So 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.
00:30:11.000 So the producer of the product actually pays for the packaging disposal.
00:30:17.000 Oh, 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.
00:30:32.000 And it works very well in Europe compared to what we have.
00:30:35.000 What we do is we...
00:30:37.000 Have the taxpayers subsidize that cost?
00:30:40.000 It's not free market capitalism.
00:30:42.000 It's an externality.
00:30:44.000 And that's why we have landfills in all these communities. 0.99
00:30:48.000 And it's because of a market failure.
00:30:50.000 failure.
00:30:51.000 It's because the people who are causing the problem are not being forced to pay to clean it up.
00:30:58.000 If 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.
00:31:13.000 But 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.
00:31:29.000 You know, those extended producer responsibility bills, they're so difficult to get through.
00:31:34.000 I think the industry recognizes that that is a threat to their bottom line.
00:31:39.000 If the polluter has to pay, it can cost them potentially billions in having to be responsible for the end of life of their stuff.
00:31:47.000 I mean, who captures those negative externalities?
00:31:49.000 You know, as you know, as you just said, it's a consumer.
00:31:52.000 It's a taxpayer.
00:31:53.000 And 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.
00:32:06.000 It's not something that we should have to pay.
00:32:08.000 I think the producer of the packaging, the products, should have skin in the game.
00:32:13.000 But they've been very successful, as you know, deflecting those externalities that cost money.
00:32:18.000 I'd be curious to know, how do we get a good EPR bill through?
00:32:22.000 Well, there's going to be tremendous resistance from the industry.
00:32:26.000 We 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.
00:32:42.000 But they tried to get some of the other industry groups on board.
00:32:45.000 But it's really the plastic producers that We're good to go.
00:33:09.000 I completely agree.
00:33:11.000 And 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?
00:33:28.000 Because right now it doesn't exist.
00:33:29.000 That's why it fails.
00:33:31.000 The technology is there, but economic failure, unfortunately, is still present.
00:33:35.000 I wonder if Nestle, if the other big beverage bottling companies, we can get them on the hook to at least buy back.
00:33:42.000 If they're going to message recycling, they've got to set up for economic success.
00:33:47.000 I mean, that'd be great, but it's responsibility to be willing to buy back your product and put it back in new bottles.
00:33:53.000 By law, so it levels the playing field across all companies making beverages out of plastics.
00:33:58.000 I think that would go a long way to solving this.
00:34:01.000 What are some simple things that people can do to avoid ingesting plastic materials in their daily life?
00:34:09.000 Well, one thing is for an individual to not ingest plastic particles in their food and their drink, it's kind of hard to avoid.
00:34:15.000 We have found microplastics in a lot of different bottled water.
00:34:18.000 We found it in beer, in salt, in a lot of consumer products.
00:34:23.000 You touch it and it perhaps makes this cloud of dust, like lint in your dryer.
00:34:27.000 Those microfibers, we found those in human lungs.
00:34:30.000 I think what you could do is just live a healthier lifestyle.
00:34:33.000 You're eating organic.
00:34:34.000 You're buying in bulk.
00:34:35.000 You're going to a farmer's markets, bringing your own cloth bags, you know, avoiding some of that plastic packaging.
00:34:41.000 But I often tell people when they say, what can the individual do?
00:34:44.000 I usually respond with, get organized.
00:34:46.000 If this issue is something that you can get passionate about, there are others like you in your community.
00:34:51.000 And I have seen so many small groups that go to city councils and demand change.
00:34:56.000 And if you get students with you, young kids, I've never seen a council member tell a young kid to sit down.
00:35:01.000 They will listen.
00:35:02.000 So get organized and get your, what you believe, what you love in front of policymakers to make your local change.
00:35:09.000 At the same time, decrease the amount of packaging in and around your home, around your family.
00:35:15.000 Thank you very much.
00:35:16.000 It was really fun talking to you.
00:35:18.000 Likewise.
00:35:19.000 My pleasure.
00:35:19.000 Thanks for the time.
00:35:20.000 Is your lab open or your farm up there open to the public?
00:35:24.000 It is.
00:35:25.000 It is.
00:35:26.000 We have 15 acres.
00:35:27.000 This farm, it was actually owned by Steve McQueen back in the late 80s.
00:35:31.000 And he built a 4,000 square foot metal barn to house his car collection.
00:35:37.000 I've now got it full of fossils and exhibits.
00:35:40.000 We're building a small science center here in Ventura County where there isn't one.
00:35:45.000 That's a side.
00:35:46.000 Half my career is classics, the other half is informal science learning.
00:35:50.000 So yeah, if you're past Ventura County, come on by.
00:35:54.000 Yeah, I will.
00:35:55.000 And 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.
00:36:07.000 I do take my kids fossil hunting out there.
00:36:11.000 It's fantastic.
00:36:12.000 And I've also gone up to Alberta and found some amazing stuff.
00:36:16.000 My son found a full saber-toothed head in South Carolina.
00:36:24.000 We go with a paleontologist called Japheth Boyce, who's right on the Wyoming border.
00:36:32.000 Up north, the border of Wyoming and South Dakota or Wyoming and Montana?
00:36:37.000 Wyoming and South Dakota.
00:36:39.000 That's not too far from where I am.
00:36:41.000 I've been digging in eastern Wyoming for about 30 years every summer.
00:36:45.000 I had a career diversion.
00:36:47.000 Either I work on plastics or paleontology.
00:36:51.000 So I chose not to be a paleontologist.
00:36:53.000 You don't get a job until you wait until some professor dies.
00:36:55.000 Then you can fill their shoes and get a job.
00:36:57.000 But I chose to do this work, environmental work.
00:36:59.000 But I've got in my garage, I've got 10 Triceratops skeletons.
00:37:02.000 And we're going back the first two weeks in July.
00:37:05.000 And if you're interested, we invite anyone to come out for one week at a time.
00:37:09.000 I've got a Triceratops, a partial skeleton in the ground.
00:37:12.000 And...
00:37:14.000 We're building a small science center here in Ventura County.
00:37:16.000 I'm building another one in Lusk, Wyoming.
00:37:19.000 I just bought an old car dealership, turned into a really funky roadside museum.
00:37:24.000 It's about probably two hours from Mount Rushmore on the Wyoming side, of course.
00:37:30.000 At 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.
00:37:47.000 They have Pleistocene, you know, mega mammals all the way back.
00:37:52.000 You have different kind of geological formations out there.
00:37:57.000 And, 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.
00:38:08.000 And it's just, it's like wealth that's just rotting on the ground every time it rains.
00:38:14.000 I saw that market change.
00:38:15.000 I began doing this in the early 90s before Jurassic Park.
00:38:18.000 And there I could trade with cowboys, ranchers out there.
00:38:21.000 I could trade.
00:38:22.000 I'd fix fence.
00:38:23.000 I'd trail cattle.
00:38:24.000 I'd dock sheep in exchange for collecting fossils.
00:38:27.000 Now, they want you to fix fence and give them, you know, money per bone.
00:38:31.000 Which is fine because of the EcoTour.
00:38:33.000 I did get some grant money to invite some kids here in Ventura County.
00:38:37.000 I'm looking for, you know, science, exceptionally science students that the only barrier is economics.
00:38:44.000 I can pay their way.
00:38:45.000 But I've got some extra funding.
00:38:46.000 If you know any students there in South Dakota on the reservation that want to come dig dinosaurs.
00:38:51.000 You know what?
00:38:51.000 I'm going to look into that.
00:38:53.000 I'm going to look into that.
00:38:54.000 Thank you.
00:38:55.000 Yeah.
00:38:55.000 I'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.
00:39:05.000 We've got a 7,000-acre ranch.
00:39:07.000 Had about 25 people last summer.
00:39:09.000 Last summer was great.
00:39:10.000 I found a beautiful triceratops upper arm bone, a beautiful turtle, and a T-Rex tooth.
00:39:16.000 My second best T-Rex tooth ever was last summer.
00:39:19.000 Fantastic.
00:39:20.000 It would be a pleasure to talk to you, Marcus.
00:39:23.000 Hey Marcus, quick question.
00:39:24.000 What kind of water do you drink?
00:39:26.000 Do you filter it?
00:39:27.000 What's that?
00:39:27.000 Reverse osmosis.
00:39:29.000 What do you do for your drinking water?
00:39:31.000 I've got a Brita filter I'm looking at, and I have my stainless steel bottles.
00:39:35.000 On 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.
00:39:44.000 For the next two hours, put it to my mouth and fill my body for two hours.
00:39:49.000 That was every day for three months in the middle of the ocean.
00:39:55.000 Marcus Erickson, where can people, how can people support you and how can they, you know, follow you?
00:40:01.000 To 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. 1.00
00:40:09.000 We'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?
00:40:21.000 Now I'd offer one quick, quick antidote.
00:40:23.000 We'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.
00:40:33.000 So I like to see research translate into real solutions, and that's what we're about.
00:40:39.000 And again, it's 5gyres.org.
00:40:42.000 Marcus Erickson, thank you very much for joining us.
00:40:45.000 My pleasure.