It has been found at the top of Mount Everest, the bottom of the ocean, and even inside the human body: plastic, once revered as a modern miracle, is now a global threat. Minimally recycled, it never fully disappears; instead, it simply breaks down into tiny particles called microplastics, which contaminate the air we breathe and the water we drink. In “A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies,” science journalist Matt Simon exposes the far-reaching consequences of this omnipresent material on both our environment and our health. Simon, formerly a staff writer at “WIRED” and now a senior staff writer at Grist, a non-profit media organization focused on climate solutions, joins host Alec Baldwin to discuss the alarming impact of plastic pollution, ways to reduce personal exposure, and the urgent solution he believes is needed to tackle this environmental crisis.
This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio. It is found everywhere on Earth, from the peak of Mount Everest to the bottom of the ocean. It's in our drinking water and even inside our own bodies. What is this omnipressent substance? Plastic? Plastic has infiltrated our lives to such a degree that it's almost impossible to live a day without encountering it. My guest today is an expert on this topic. Matt Simon is a science journalist and author of A Poison Like no Other, How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies. Matt Simon previously worked as a staff writer for Wired and currently serves as senior writer at Grist, a nonprofit media organization focused on climate solutions. In his book, Simon estimates that humans have produced more than eighteen trillion pounds of plastic, twice the weight of all the animals on Earth. He believes we are in a plastic crisis. I wanted Simon to begin by distinguishing some terms that had been floating around, including the difference between a microplastic and a nanoplastic.
Well, we could actually start at macroplastics, the big stuff bottles and bags that we know of that are floating around on the ocean. We're all aware. Microplastics are defined as bits that are smaller than five millimeters, which is about the width of a pencil eraser. It's a good way to think of us. You can see some microplastics just by the naked eye, but these do get down to the nanoscale as you mentioned here, which is there's some debate in the scientific community as to the threshold there, but usually around a microns, which is a millionth of a meter. These things are imperceptibly obviously tiny to the human eye, but scientists are getting much better at detecting them in the environment, and they're finding truly astonishing numbers of nanoplastics, far more than actually microplastics. It's just that it's very difficult and expensive to test for an inmplan.
To nanoplastics, are they another stage of microplastics to macroplastics become nanoplastics and degrade down to that smaller level.
Yep, any bottle or bag that you see out there is it's pre microplastic and pre nanoplastic, which is a good way to think of it is it's going to break down over time into these smaller bits microplastics and over time into smaller, smaller bits than nanoplastics, but it never ever goes away. It probably actually reaches this sort of equilibrium at some size in that nanoscale where it's no longer subjected to the forces of inbrasion. So it just kind of exists like that for eternity. Maybe we don't know, But that's the really scary thing here is that we have a lot of that out there and the environment, and it could be permanent.
Right for those to the extent that you can speak about this the history of plastic. Very often a product will be developed because of a failed or a born other product. So viagra comes from tests with like artificial sweetener or something, and they noticed that all the mice are really very very amorous, and they decide that they have a product as a result of that. That's kind of insane. But in terms of plastic, the roots of us are in the petroleum industry, correct, correct, right, And what were the beginnings of that plastic was meant to be what to be used where.
It's actually a very fascinating story. So Back in the late eighteen hundreds, billiards was becoming increasingly popular in America. Unfortunately, those balls were made out of ivory elephant tusks, obviously in short supply if you keep killing elephants to play billiards. There was a very famous billiards player who put out a call for alternatives. Some scientists, please invent some sort of synthetic material that can replace ivory in these balls, so we can switch to that, maybe save a few elephants in the process. But it was more like, here's you put up ten thousand dollars, which was a lot of money, and the.
Elephants that play billiards were especially they.
Were loving this. They were eating it up. So that actually led to the first mass producible plastic and that actually just kind of shifted. As we got closer and closer to World War Two, more and more materials were starting to be replaced by synthetic alternatives in plastic. So plexiglass was plastic in it nylon for parachutes in World War Two. That's a synthetic material.
It wasn't originally just a military application. It was the billiard game.
It was billiards.
Oh did he get to manufacture.
This actually, so Mina saying that he actually never coughed up that money. But the company that started producing this first mass producible plastic, there was a version of it previously that nobody figured out how to mass produce, but they concocted this kind of early plastic. It was actually really funny. There was there's ingredients cent that were quite flammable, so you would have sometimes in these billiard games they'd hit the ball hard enough and it would pop. It would explode like gunpowder. So it wasn't a perfect alternative to elephant to us by any that sound, but it was like, that's how weird is it that we are in the catastrophe and the emergency that we are in right now because of plastic pollution because there needed to be an alternative to billiard balls made out of elephant ivory?
Now, what is it that people discover in the earliest stage just the petroleum yields plastic? Were they working on something else with petroleum and then all a sudden they realized that it you boiled it, then you let it sit in the pot, and that turned to this blob of future billiard balls. Like, how was it that petroleum was the source of plastic.
So any plastic at its core is a chain of carbon, just a bunch of carbon chained together into this really strong material. That's what makes plastic so durables, carbon stuck together. Obviously, fossil fuels are a source of carbon. So as you know World War two was kicking off, we were also getting much deeper into fossil fuel production for any number of military uses, but also burgeoning car culture here in the United States. So the petrochemical industry taking off at this period realized that we could take some of these byproducts from fuel production and turn them into petrochemicals, which we then turn into plastics, And ever since then, plastics and climate change have been just very directly linked. This is two sides of the same coin, which makes it a much more difficult problem to tackle because of the fossil fuel interest in this country. But this whole time, it's carbon. It just comes right down a carbon. There's a bunch of chemicals added to make a plastic a plastic, to make it more waterproof or clear clear, to make it more stretchy, durable, that sort of thing, But at its core, it's carbon. You actually make plastics bioplastics out of carbon taken from plants. But that's problematic in its own right. As I talked about in the book.
When I think back to my childhood, we had a milk man and he delivered milk in a truck and put a metal container on your front porch with glass bottles of milk every day or every other day. And then you turn around at some point and everything is inside a plast container. Yes. Now, when a product is inside a plastic container, particularly over a long period of time, do some of the chemicals that are kept inside these do they interact with the inside walls of the plastic and there's plastic released and in the product.
Yeah, So this is known as leeching in the industry. So you have a bottle of water, There have been a number of studies that have actually quantified the amount of microplastics in that water, which is a lot much more so than you get in the tap water that I'm drinking here out of a glass container right now. But you also seem to have the leaching of these chemical components in plastics into both liquids through bottles, but also our food that's all wrapped in single use plastic. The very important study came out last year of the year before looked at a particular class of chemicals called thalates in plastics, and they look through people's blood samples and then looked at their health issues use. And they estimated, at a very conservative level that these thalites could be responsible for up to one hundred thousand premature deaths in the United States each year. And that's a very conservative estimate. They cannot say at the moment how those salites are getting from plastic into those bodies, Like maybe it was partly microplastics and nanoplastics, Maybe it was these chemicals leaching into foods or liquids that are in contact with single use plastic. They're not sure yet, but we have a growing body of evidence right now that there are a number of chemicals and plastics that are for sure terrible for human health.
And again I'm thinking, like, if I'm spraying something on a countertop to clean the countertop, has plastic leeched inside that bottle into the product that I'm spraying, Yes, because that's what I was going to assume. It's got to be the case that this stuff can't stay on either side of some biochemical wall for very long.
It gets everywhere, And I like to have people think about glitter. Glitter is a microplastic. It's little pieces of colorful plastic.
Think of how I see glitter.
It drives me crazy. I mean greeting cards. Stop it. So think about glitter. Think of all the nooks and crannies that glitter is so easily gets into. That is how microplastics behave in the human home and in the environment. It gets absolutely everywhere. These things are tiny. First of all, plastic bites nature is a very light material, so it very easily takes the air. If you look through your window and see the sunlight coming through, and you can sometimes see little floating bits of seems like fibers, those are most likely microplastics from your clothing. So it's it's like glitter. It gets everywhere, and unfortunately, like glitter, it's hard to get people to stop using it.
What's of the most common type of clothing like obviously all of us have been made aware that the stain guard coating on sofas we have the coated stuff and that fiber the coating wears off. I was told the plastic comes off, the microplast takes literally feather off of or just acterior rate off of the couch. Where did the plastics come off of? What clothing?
This is one of the rather sneaky ways that plastics have infiltrated our lives in recent decades that we just weren't aware of. I do not think that most people realize that two thirds of clothing now is made out of synthetic fibers like polyester or nylon, that is plastic that's made out of fossil fuels. There was a study that actually found that just by walking around as a human being wearing these synthetic clothes, you might shed a billion fibers a year. A lot of that is settling on the floor of your home, but also taking to the air. Your couch is probably made out of synthetic fiber, unless it's pure cotton, which is unlikely carpeting is made.
I don't have to worry about.
So that's the issue, like right and so, like right now, I think I'm wearing a sweat. I think it's wool. I'm not sure, but even natural fibers now are oftentimes coated in plastic because it makes them waterproof. So we have like you're not safe from any sort of clothing. Some I think cotton might be pure cotton, but there's a high chance of it actually having plastic associated with it. Carpets made out of synthetic fibers, hardwood floors most of the time now are made out of plastics like laminate and vinyl, that sort of thing. Everything in the home is basically made out of plastic, and that is why scientists have been founding really stunning numbers of microplastic in the home, probably about six times the amount of microplastic in indoor air as an outdoor air. So we are, by one cognition.
Those air filters on all the time in our house.
Yeah, good idea. I don't want to ruin that for you as well. But there was a study that found that those filters capture some microplastics, but because they're made out of plastic themselves also produced plastic. But it's probably better than them. It's probably yeah, it's probably better than not that break even.
Now we got introduced to Jan Schlickman, who was the protagonist of Jonathan Harr's book, a civil action that was made into the film with Travolta, where they came and basically said that these children who were in this leukemia cluster were more likely killed and given leukemia by breathing in this contaminated word in the shower was going into their lungs, which were more sensitive. And I'm wondering is that true. Is that something we need to be concerned about in our world now where the water itself is contaminated with plastic.
This is the frontier in microplastic science right now, is that we have good qualifications of where this stuff is a lot of the places in the environment, I should say every place in the environment we have microplastics. There's a lot of in the human home. We are inhaling, by one calculation, seven thousand microfibers a day. And when you think about children, they are spending a lot of their time on the ground crawling around. There have been a number of sites that consistently come up with the same figures that there's probably hundreds of thousands of fibers settling on the average living room floor each day, and we don't want children trapesing through that. Children are also putting a lot of things in their mouths, plastic toys. The huge source of microplastics into children's bodies is that when you prepare infant formula in a plastic bottle with warm, hot water, that has been shown to produce millions of microplastic. Yeah, it's and that's so important is that you should never, under any circumstances prepare things that are warm or hot in plastic.
Well, the cups we serve them, they're drinks.
This bamboo great, Yeah, dude, Like, don't freeze plastic even unfortunately that that kind of cuts into frozen foods.
Don't.
So these are the things that really these are the things that tear apart microplastics from these macroplastics. The things that break down plastically. The environment is UV bombardment. It breaks apart the bonds in that plastic, but also freezing and heating plastics are very tough, but it does break apart these ways over time. So when we're thinking about the exposure that humans have, and especially children, we need to consider. Inhalation is probably the major one, just because there's so much an indoor air. We're drinking a lot of it. Because I'm in San Francisco, we get water from hetch Hetchy. It is not filtered on our way to our tasks because it's such pure water. But there's so much microplastic falling out of the sky that every water source is good. That's everywhere, it's everywhere, and it's like even underground water sources, they're finding microplastics have seeped through the dirt into these aquifers. There is no escaping them. We are now at this frontier where we know that we're exposed. We don't know how much microplastic. Is too much microplastic to have in the body. Obviously no particulate matter is good to have in the lungs, but we desperately need to know, especially for children, is there too much microplastic to have in the body. It's not gonna be good, Like there's no good ways for this to go, but how bad could it potentially be.
There's no way that micro or for that matter, nanoplastics can be removed, for example, like on a centrifugal device, meaning is there any way to get rid of it out of water?
There are some early studies into ways that you can do really precise filtration. So if you think about there's waste to recycle waste water actually by passing it through very fine membranes and the water that comes out of it is actually so pure that they have to add minerals back into it. It actually does terrible things for the human body. So that would remove microplastics for sure. That's just very expensive to do. That's that's what desalination does, and that's why desalination is so expensive. You could do that for microplastics, but it's just the issue is, like I'm drinking water out of this cup right now, there are microplastics falling into the water right now. So even if it's filter that clear, Yeah, even if we're being bombarded.
By nanoplastics and microplasics while we're doing this show.
Yes, not to freak you out. Just because we can't see it doesn't mean it's not there. You can actually see some of these microplastics, they're big enough, but there's so many more in the nanoscale that we cannot see, and we know almost nothing about what this means for human health.
Journalist Matt Simon. If you enjoy conversations on the fate of municipal trash and recycling, check out my episode with former New York City Deputy Commissioner of Wastewater Treatment Pam Alardo and New York City's first recycling, z are Ron Gonan.
This is the fascinating world of biology. We use a community of bacteria that actually digests the suspended organic material and clean the water via that method, and from there it goes to another settling tank where we settle out the biomass that just consumed all this organic matter. But the water that comes out of the final settling tank gets disinfection basically household bleached to take any particular pathogens out, and that gets either discharged to receiving waters or in some cases, in some cities, they're able to polish a little bit more, ease it for irrigation purposes.
To hear more of my conversation with Pam Alardo and Ron Goonan, go to Here's the Thing dot Org to the break, Matt Simon shares what he believes is the only solution to the plastic crisis. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. Matt Simon writes in a poison like no other, that the vast majority of plastic produced on the planet becomes waste, ending up in our landfills or our water. I wanted his perspective on the possibility of biodegradable plastics.
Videgradable is a sticky term without a really agreed upon definition. Videgradable basically means it breaks down faster. So you can think of like a composting bag. You compost in, you throw it out. That is a plastic. Still it's meant to degrade under certain conditions. So that's in a composing facility where the temperatures are very high for a long perd that's not.
Made of a vegetable product, or it can. It can.
It can be made like the carbon can come from plants that be a bio based plastic, but it's still mixing with all kinds of other petrochemicals, and yeah, it makes it a plastic.
Noting that is just absent petrochemical.
Sadly of plastic as we know it is a carbon typically comes from car from the carbon from fossil fuels, but also all the other petrochemicals that make a plastical plastic, that make it tough, that make it durable, that make it light, those are made from from fossil fuels as well. So you can have a bioplastic it's made from corn fantastic, except to actually scale that up if you were to replace all conventional plastics with bioplastics, would require an enormous amount of land, would come with just an enormous amount of water use and emissions. So it's problematic in its own right. So biodegradable theoretically means that it breaks down faster in a composting facility. Unfortunately, if those bags are breaking down in that comp.
Just plastic broken down.
The plastic bag just spread out on a field in its deconstructed form, it's glitter. It's glitter. But if you have that same bag that escapes into the ocean, for example, that isn't an environment that is not meant to break down, and it was designed to break down under high temperatures mixed in with all this organic matter. And they've done studies that have they they've set these bags in ocean water for years at a time and found that it just doesn't break down. They bury it, it just doesn't break down. So it's like usually biodegradable for a specific set of conditions, but so much of this stuff is escaping into the environment where it's not going to biodegrade, and even if it does, all these are shattering into microplastics all the same these are not alternatives. The only thing that's going to get us out of this mess, and I try to drive this home in the book, is that we have to stop using plastic and replace it with what metal, glass, that's much more easily recycled. We recycle at this point five percent of the things that we throw into recycling them.
Well, let me ask you that. Then. I've often said in terms of this issue, because I'm an anti plastic person going way back now, what I've accepted about recycling and what I have fixed on about recycling is it at least people feel that they're trying to do something on a day to day basis, even though the actual impact is low. It's not really making very much of an impact, is it.
The issue of the United States is that it's a profit driven industry. So if you cannot profitably recycle plastic, these companies don't bother. What we have been doing in developed countries like the United States has been shipping what we can't profitably recycle overseas. So this is another hidden aspect of carbon emissions associated with plastics.
Is that what are we shipping overseas.
The plastic waste that we cannot profitably recycle, so those are usually more recyclable. The issue becomes usually the more complicated plastics like pouches for baby formula. Those are multi layered, very difficult to recycle. We have just been shipping at overseas. Where we do wear has been China up until a couple of years ago, where they said no, we're not doing that anymore. That is now switching to other developing countries where they are now overflowing with our plastic waste. They're burning it in open pitch places like Malaysia, Indonesia.
And they burn American plastic products in open pits.
This is poisoning communities there. It is sending clouds of microplastics into the atmosphere and addition, all the chemicals that are poisoning the surrounding communities or they're bearing it if they're not burning it. It is a wildly inefficient system that we in America have been kind of on the hope system, which is I hope this gets recycled if I throw it in the bin, when in reality, five percent of that is getting recycled here the rest being shipped away.
And when you say five percent, you mean five percent of the total amount of product that's consumed every year or or five percent of the stuff that actually people believe is being recycled.
The latter, yes, the stuff.
So people believe that there's a whole cornucopia of things, or at least a massive amount of a few things that are being recycled, and only five percent of it is actually recycled.
Yeah, so fundamentally recycling is busted in this country. I do want to be very clear that I want people to put things in that bin because we need to put pressure on these systems to change. We need these like the system needs to catch up with our hopes as consumers. Right, we can't just get dejected and throw everything in the trash, because that's exactly what the plastics industry wants us to do. Oh, I mean anything around plastics, like getting sad about microplastics. They want us to feel dejected, just like they want us to feel bad about climate change. They've always like VP and mented the idea of a carbon footprint to make us feel like this is our issue as climate change. Maybe if you fly less, we're going to make more progress on climate change. They're going to do the same exact thing with plastic, which is what they did with recycling decades ago. The plastic symdistry pushed that really hard because if we think that we're recycling more, we will not feel bad about con soon to mollify you, yes, And the issue there is that we have been increasing the production of plastic exponentially. We are producing a trillion pounds of plastic a year now that is going to triple by twenty fifty if we do not stop the industry from doing this. So when we talk about these individual things that we can do, all well and good to reduce your exposure to plastic and your consumption of plastic, but we need systemic change that I think begins with politicians that need to realize that the climate change and plastics are two sides of the same coin.
As many people of my age recall that there's one product that is very popular, they're everywhere, and they had a plastic bottle. Then they came back and said, we've made the bottle even lighter.
That's profit driven. That's not of the goodness of the heart. That companies have been using more plastic and thinner plastic. It makes these products lighter, and it actually decreases the cost for shipping those that's what Actually, that's the base of what got us into this mess. At its core is much lighter than glass or metal. Everybody switched to it because it increased profit margins. But this is what we're up against right now, is that this stuff has so thoroughly saturated the market we have no choice. So like capitalism is supposed to be about choice, Like we have twenty different kinds of toothpastes in the grocery store, we don't have an option for any of those to come in something that's not plastic. I thought capitalism was all about choice, but apparently not. We have just no alternative. So even if you are very mindful about the way that you might be using too much plastic, and I never want to push this on the consumer as it being their fault, even so, you just don't have the opportunity to switch away from it because we are just not given any options now.
We often ask this question of people involved with an issue, to see beyond the American horizon, where are they doing a better job around the world and extracting plastics from the waste stream.
Germany's doing a much better job, but listen, they have a much more robust recycling system, like they're able to go in and pick out and recycle these much more complicated plastics that I mentioned, whereas we in the America we are saying screwabill ship it overseas, they'll deal with it. Recycling, though, is not the end all be all here. This is not what we should fall back on because it is in a poor state at the moment, and we're an emergency right now. This is a macroplastic and microplastic emergency because as we exponentially increase production, scientists are showing an exponential contamination of ocean sediments. For example, starting in the nineteen forties, you can track perfectly the amount of plastic production and the amounts of microplastic contamination going back to the nineteen forties in these ocean sediments map perfectly. So as we keep going on that exponential path, the whole world is going to become more contaminated with these microplastics. Recycling is not going to fix that. What is going to fix that is massively curtailing the production of plastics. And there's the treaty that is in the works right now might help with that, but there's also industry lobbyists there who are pushing very hard to keep producing as much plastic as they want because it's a profit driven enterprise. And if we think that recycling is working going forward, we won't make a big fuss about it. But we need fundamentally better systems like they do in Germany.
The petroleum industry is obviously a key player here, but they don't make plastics themselves, or do they own subsidiaries that make plastics.
Yeah, it's all inn twine, it's all one product. It's the stuff that they're pulling out of the ground. That's why there are so many emissions associated with plastics production. So it obviously takes a lot of energy to get that stuff out of the ground. Here's a lot of energy to transform it first into fuels that go into our cars and jets, but then to take the rest of it and turn it into plastics. It is energy intensive the whole way through. And there's increasing evidence that as microplastics are floating around in the atmosphere, for example, they're off gasing that carbon method and in particular which is an extremely potent greenhouse gas. So we may have a twofold problem in the atmosphere. One is that those particles could be interacting with clouds and interacting with the Sun's energy and perhaps warming the atmosphere. That's how that's like, we're getting the point where there's enough microplastics in the atmosphere for that to happen. Are they changing the way that clouds are forming and that weather patterns are forming. The other thing is that while they're up there, as they're breaking down, they're releasing continually these carbon gases. So at their cores, a little particle breaks down, the stuff at the middle eventually is exposed to the air and off gases. So we have basically these little gas producing particles all over the atmosphere. These are they're fossil fuels. Any plastic, very few, like one percent are now made out of plants. Ninety nine percent aut of are made out of fossil fuels, and they're they're associated with emissions are insane. The projection is that by twenty fifty the plastics industry will be polluting as much as six hundred coal fired power plants. And that's the tragedies that as we're decarbonizing in the United States and decommissioning coal fired power plants, the fossil fel industry is seen the riding on the wall and they're saying, Okay, we'll just switch to plastics. It's the same product. Basically, we're gonna switch to that that is not emissions free by any measure, and it could be interacting with earth systems in other strange way, like heating up beaches. All the microplastics mixed in with the sand could be messing with sea turtle clutches and things like that. It's I call it a poison like no other, because it is so.
I want to reach the poison like no weather is the name of your book, it is, Yeah, I do have that. No, I want to make sure we've got that down the I had an idea, and this is the part there's to be organized. Its massive campaigns of recycling where all that stuff goes to the military bases as recycling centers. You turn these old army bases into recycling centers and try to separate the plastics and the metals, and the glass and the paper, but mostly the focus on plastic. Have plastic and find a way to dispose of it, not recycle it, not use it again. If we're trying to push our way toward the non plastic world, which I mean, don't you feel that's pretty hopeless?
Actually say, that's where I have actually a little bit of hope. You mentioned the milk bottles, which is interesting. I hadn't thought of that. I was watching old Westerns. I was thinking about general stores. Like back in the day, if you wanted beans or something, right, you go to a general store. They got a big burr lap sack of beans. You put your beans in your own bur lapsack, you take it home. Plastic was in no way in that supply chain. And when you think about the ways that plastics have really infiltrated our lives in the past few decades, and these really sneaky ways, it was not that long ago that we were getting along perfectly fine with that single use plassic. I'm in my late thirties. I remember a time when it was nowhere near the way it is today. There was a period in human history, the vast majority of human history actually, that we didn't use plastic, and we got a I'm perfectly okay. So I think that that's where I have a little bit of hope, is that maybe there's a tide turning here where people are realizing just how silly single use plastics are. Cucumbers are wrapped in single use plastic in the grocery store these days. They have their own skins, right, that's one of their charms as cucumbers. They leave them alone, leave plastic out of this. I think as we it dawns on us as a society just how out of control this has gotten. That hopefully we pull back on single use plastics in general. But I think there will be uses for plastic going forward, like in medical devices and things like that. That's okay, obviously, but singles plastic is absolutly out of control. And I think if we get enough support on the ground level, of the community level, and we can spend more time and money lobbying politicians on this to get them to realize that we are in an emergency that if we let the plastics industry keep doing what they want, they're going to contamine. They're gonna be like, they're going to kill the planet. This is planetary vandalism. And there are already indications that ecosystems are suffering, and there are a number of documented cases of animals dying because of ingesting microplastics. We have the evidence that it's really bad, and I go through in the book all these much more intricate ways that it could be affecting the planet that we also need to consider. But we can't wait for it to be a for sure thing that we know that's happening to like plankton or whatever. We need this right now. We need to stop the production of plastic where we can, because it's totally out of control.
What organization that people might be familiar with or not, you think it's doing some of the best work and most cutting edge work on developing policies to solve the plastic problem.
I wouldn't want to endorse anyone, but there are number ones is like a group called Beyond Plastics, for one. They're just a lot of scientists that are also getting more vocal about this, beyond these advocacy groups, because they have known about microplastic contamination for a few decades now, but the bulk of the research has really come out in the past few years. It's slowly dawning on that this is like a catastrophe of the highest order that affects basically every organism on this planet. So we need right now politicians to turn around This is me being way too idealistic in the United States, Like how do we divorce the fossil fuel industry that is so intricately intertwined with our politics. I don't know. The only way I see that happening is is it and I think this is already happening, is that people are starting to realize just how out of control it is and how crazy it is that we are so surrounded by plastics. This is an experiment that is forced upon us. We never asked for this, like I never asked for acomber to be wrapped in singles plastic. I doesn't want to the damn cucumber. It's out of control.
Science writer Matt Simon. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend and be sure to follow Here's the Thing on the iHeartRadio app, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, I'm and sharees what city he believes is doing a proactive job of keeping the ocean clean. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. I am speaking with Matt Simon, author of the book A Poison Like No Other, Approximately eighteen billion pounds of plastic enter the ocean each year. The Ocean Cleanup is a nonprofit organization working to solve the problem by catching and extracting plastic from our bodies of water. One area they are concentrating on is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is estimated to be twice the size of Texas and the weight of seven hundred and forty Boeing Triple Seven's.
It is this place in the ocean where currents tend to accumulate floating plastic, so that is coming off of either our west coast or from Asia. That stuff just kind of gathers in the middle of the Pacific, and you think of like this garbage patch. It's not like a salt you can't walk on it. It's not like an island. It's more spread out than that. So this campaign, their idea is to build this giant U shaped plastic tube, tow it out, have that catch all the plastic that floats into it, send a boat out to get that plastic, bring it back on shore, recycling into products that then go to consumers. The issue is a couple of fold So for one, the Ocean would have other ideas about building a very long plastic tube and deploying it on the surface. It broken half very early on in the campaign. They had to tow it to Hawaii or repair clean up. The other issue is that plastic pollution in the ocean is a three D problem. You are in that campaign gathering what's on the surface, but below that there is a whole lot more plastic and a whole lot more microplastics, and that's what it's not catching. It is catching the big stuff.
But you don't discourage people from trying to get rid of the big stuff.
So when scientists who are setting plastic talk about mitigating plastic pollution, they want to go as far upstream as possible, and by that I mean the fartheres step stream we can go is to stop producing the plastic in the first place. That way it cannot escape into the environment in anyway if it doesn't exist, but if you go farther downstream. One of my favorite things on the planet is something in Baltimore Harbor called Mister Trash Wheel, which is a barge that they put big googly eyes on and it actually does the same thing where it intercepts plastic floating out of the harbor before it can get into the seat. So that is catching those plastics before they're out, and you have a very much harder time getting a hold of them, like the Ocean Cleanup is trying to do. So we need to move as far upstream as possible, and what Ocean Cleanup is doing is very far downstream, and that just makes things much more difficult. It's actually quite effective to do beach cleanups. You just have people on the shore who might volunteer their time. But I also bristol this sort of stuff because this shouldn't be our responsibility. This is not our problem. This is the plastics industry problem. They created this catastrophe, and now we are the ones who have to walk along beaches and clean stuff up. Then that should be their money and time going to doing that sort of thing.
Now I see people in New York take the top of a pack of cigarettes off and throw them on the ground. And this is a source of tremendous anger for me. What pigs people can be and throwing their garbage here and there and just assuming that it's going to be collected. I mean, how many billions of cigarette butts go down storm drains and out into bodies of water.
Trillions four trillion a year are discarded cigarette and I'll talk about this in the book. Four trillion are discarded each year into the environment. Those are made out of plastic. So those are made out of microfibers made out of plastic. When you when a smoker steps on it, when they put it out, that starts breaking apart. It primes it to disintegrate into microplastics.
Cigarettes.
Yeah, cigarette butts are one of the most usually the most commonly collected item on beach cleanup blocks that they're a huge source of plastic pollution that you think it'd be bottled in bags. Nope, it is cigarette bets because exactly like you're talking about, people just do not give a damn. Maybe they don't realize that it's not like it's not made out of cotton or something. It's not going to biot A grade. It's a synthetic fiber and it's loaded with all the smoke chemicals that you were sucking through it before you throw it out. So I would say that I think with plastics that part of that is a large part really is education. I don't think a lot of people realize just what is made out of plastic. I don't think they realized maybe the cigarette bets are made out of plastic, that they're actually littering plastic into the environment. They probably don't realize that, like where does that actually go? It must go to a treatment facility where they're going to pluck out every tiny little bit of thing before setting the water out to the ocean. No, no, not the case. I think that education with plastics is going to be a huge part of it, talking to people both about the way that they're using it and you know, disposing it in improper ways, but also this bigger systemic change that we need here, which is to massively cut back on the production of plastic and get people to realize how terrible for the planet this stuff is in any number of ways.
Now, the other thing, the last thing I want to say is who would you say, Is there someone in Congress? Is there a governor or is there a member of any legislature who do you think has the right ideas about this problem that you think you've had their ear. Who's someone who's good on this issue of solving the plastic problem?
If anyone who is the is the organ senator or Representative Merkley Jeff Merkley Jeff Merkley.
Yes, he is a US Senator from Oregon.
That's been floating the idea of microplastics specifically here in Congress. And what I'm hoping with the book is that it does inspire some conversation around moving from the understanding of plastics as this macro thing the bottles and bags, into the micro scale and the nanoscale, which is the stuff that's really in every aspect of our lives. It's again in the air that we're breathing. You and I right now. I think when it becomes more visceral for people like that, maybe that inspires more political change, because that the only way that we're going to get these petrochemical companies to stop producing some stuff is political. It's like to put this treaty is actually going to try to put a cap on the production of plastic.
So that's your prescription in the short term is caps.
You think that that's the way to go, the only way, it's the only way, Like, we cannot continue in triple production of plastic by twenty fifty and come out at the end of it with a better world. That's the extreme urgency right now is that we need to do this at this moment to cap production because given the opportunity, these companies are going to make as much money as humanly possible, they are legally obligated to their shareholders to maximize profit and in doing so destroy the planet, which is a perversion and that needs to stop. And the only way that we're going to put the brakes on that is politically, hopefully with an international treaty and hopefully one that does not get watered down by the lobbyists who are attending these talks.
Thank you, Thank you so much. My thanks to Matt Simon. This episode was produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach MacNeice, and Maureen Hobin. Our engineer is Frank Imperial. Our social media manager is Danielle Gingrich. Here's the Thing is recorded at CDM Studios. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the Thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio.