Democracy Now! Audio - Kitchen Nightmare: How Plastic in Everyday Objects Leaches into Food, Hurting Human Health, Environment

Episode Date: December 8, 2025

Watch Part 2 of our interview with former EPA regional administrator Judith Enck about her new book, The Problem with Plastic: How We Can Save Ourselves and Our Planet Before It’s Too Late.

This is Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org. I'm Amy Goodman, back by popular demand with part two of our conversation with Judithank, the president of Beyond Plastics, the former regional EPA, that's Environmental Protection Agency administrator. Her new book is titled The Problem with Plastic, How We Can Save Ourselves in Our Planet before it's too late. Judith, can you take us through your kitchen and tell us what you did since you're so concerned about plastic? Sure. The kitchen is the place to start because there's so much plastic and also it touches our food and our beverages. So I got rid of my plastic cutting board and I had a wood cutting board and now I have a titanium steel cutting board, which works beautifully. The most important thing I did is I went into the utensil drawer and I couldn't believe how much black plastic I had. And what is black plastic? So it's made from typically made from recycled electronic waste and it's the color black and there's evidence that there's leaching from the

utensils. So you mean like I'm using my iPhone to eat my broccoli? Close. Your old iPhone. Yeah, you're using your old computer to make your omelet in the morning. I'm sorry to share that news. I was surprised at how much black plastic I had in my drawers, and I hate throwing things out. So I just had a pile of black plastic. I threw it in the garbage. That's all you can do. What about Tupperware? No Tupperware. You want to store your food in glass or stainless steel. For the holidays this year, I bought a whole bunch of tiffins. They're little stainless steel, almost like bento boxes. Don't put that in the microwave. but that's what I, if I'm out at a restaurant and I have leftover food, I mean, I've been doing

this for years to the great horror of my two sisters. It would be appalled when I would pull out a Pyrex or now a Tiffin and scrape my leftovers in there for lunch the next day. What about when you go to a restaurant and they give it to you in a cardboard box? Yeah, that's probably okay. I'm a little worried about the plastic liner in the cardboard box. So I bring my own stainless steel tiffin. The key thing is think about what you use the most that's in plastic. For instance, there was just a study about the little curig K-cups, which I've always been worried about because that's really hot water going through your coffee grinds. And you definitely have problems with microplastics with the curig cups.

Unfortunately, microplastics have been found in some tea bag. So using loose tea and the little metal holder is better. But also just kind of do an inventory of what's always in your refrigerator. For instance, we're not big condiment people in our house. So I don't care too much about the ketchup bottle. However, I am married to a terrific guy who unfortunately drinks a lot of orange juice, loaded with sugar. So we got frozen concentrate juice. I grew up on frozen concentrate, but now to get frozen.

fresh orange juice at the store is amazing, but that, of course, is in a plastic container. Yeah, I would skip it. You know, it's the sacrifices we make, not to have microplastics in our body. Your mother was, as usual, your mother was absolutely right with the frozen concentrate juice and probably bought a lot in glass jars. Also, it's changed a lot. I mean, I mentioned about half of the plastic ever produced is in the last 18 years. So if you are in your 70s or 80s, you probably grew up not with much plastic exposure. But today, you go down the baby food aisle in a supermarket. Most baby food is in plastic pouches.

You look at breast milk that women freeze. It's in a plastic bag that's often frozen and then put in the microwave. So we're really paying attention to exposure. of little ones and also pregnant women. In part one of our discussion, we talked about what you put in the microwave. Take us through that again, but spend more time on it. There are many foods, even TV dinners, where you just pop it into the microwave, and it says microwave safe.

So tell us more about what that means. Never put food in the microwave in plastic, because they, There are 16,000 chemicals used to make plastic. When heated, some of them are released or leach into the food. You might remember TV dinners and lean cuisine. It kind of had a plastic taste to it. You know, nothing tastes better in plastic. None of us voted for more plastic,

but yet you go to the store or you order food online and more and more is coming in plastic because the big food companies find, it cheaper. But it's not really cheaper when you factor in health and climate change impacts. You were talking about Currig, the little packets, whatever you call, the plastic cups, the pods that have become so popular. What about like the black plastic coffee pour over thing? Yeah, you definitely want to go for as much glass and metal as you can. It's hard to find for French press and pour over, but they're out there and you want to look for that. And even just

like old traditional coffee makers are all plastic. And, you know, even if the craft is glass, but the worst thing is heat and plastic together. It's not just in your kitchen. I remember walking down the street in Manhattan a few summers ago. It was a brutally hot day and a truck pulled up and lifted the side, and it was filled with Pepsi bottles. And that soda was really hot in the truck and then brought inside to put in the refrigerator. So even during transportation, whenever there's heat, there's a concern about chemicals leaching into the product. Talk about silicone. Yeah, silicon's a hard one.

We're asked about that a lot. We're still researching it. it is viewed as an alternative. Explain what it is. Yeah, it's sand-based. It has a little plastic in it. It's a material that we are doing more research on, so I don't want to make any conclusory statements on silicone.

You worked as regional director of the EPA under both Obama's terms? Yes. And what did that mean? What did you do there? I mean, right now you see. President Trump really working on deregulating through the EPA and through his EPA administrator, Lee Zeldon, who, of course, like you, comes from New York. Yes, Lee Zeldin, the worst EPA administrator in history, even worse than Scott Pruitt. Because Lee Zeldin just does whatever the White House

tells them to do, including this whole area of energy dominance. We used to hear about energy independence. Now the Trump administration wants to export fossil fuels to other countries. So being in the regional office was actually very fun during the Obama administration. We could be innovative, entrepreneurial. I worked to get PCB lighting out of the whole public school system in New York City. And explain what PCB lighting is. Sure. So PCBs are a carcinogenic chemical and they suppress heat. So old lighting fiction. known as ballasts contain PCBs. And we heard from parents in Manhattan

who were concerned about PCBs and their kids' school classrooms. So we... How do they get out from the ballast? Through heat and also the ballasts are very old. So sometimes you would see PCB oil leaking. And we went in and took samples off of desks and cardboard boxes.

EPA today would not do that kind of investigation and enforcement action. Today there is no environmental cop on the beat. EPA is not doing the science that it used to. The Trump administration abolished the largest office at the EPA, which is the Office of Research and Development. Imagine no environmental research happening in our country. But most importantly, I think, is EPA has been told not to enforce the law.

And what's missing in this conversation that I want to point out is the states can really step in if they want to. And most states, including New York and New Jersey, are not. Because the way it works is you've got these federal laws like the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act. Those are then delegated to the states to enforce and implement. So this is when we need the states to have more money in their environmental agency budgets and a much more robust commitment to enforcement, knowing that EPA is not doing it anymore. So the A has come to stand for the environmental protection and absentia. That's one word for it. So if you can talk about the role of the international community, I mean, as I was saying in part one,

plastics was hardly discussed at the UN Climate Summit in Brazil, but now the UN is working on, for example, the issue of plastics. Who's doing it? Well, it's UNEP, the United Nations Environmental Program. It's great that they're focusing on it. However, the process they're using is you have to reach full consensus, which is so unrealistic. We need action because there's something called the International,

waste trade with plastics, where plastics are collected, say, in the Northeast, and then exported from ports in the Northeast to other countries. So we are dumping huge amounts of plastic in the global south, specifically Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, and also a lot of plastic is showing up for some reason in Turkey. Most of it doesn't get recycled, so it's just open burned. But how are we dumping it there in all these places? Giant ships are arriving with waste plastic from curbside recycling programs. And then waste pickers go through looking for number one and number two plastic, the small amounts that can be recycled.

They typically will bring that plastic to their home where it's heated in outdoor furnaces attached to their home and then cut up into little pieces of plastic brought back to companies. There's an excellent movie called The Story of Plastic put out by the organization, The Story of Stuff. It won an Emmy, and it really puts the spotlight on the international waste trade. So we need this UN treaty to work. At the last meeting, it just, there was no consensus. And the environmental community felt that it was better to have no treaty than a weak treaty. So thankfully, we have groups like Center for International Environmental Law and IPAN at the table.

But this is going to be a long-term process. And I agree with them. It's better to have no treaty than an effective treaty. I remember when President Trump campaigned for the presidency, the plastic straw became his symbol. He proudly sold plastic straws, talked about the problem of paper straws. every time I see a plastic straw, I think about it in the eye of a turtle. Explain. Yeah, so a few years ago, a marine biologist was out on the open sea

and came across a giant sea turtle with a plastic straw in its nostril. And that YouTube video got millions of views. So when I'm out at a restaurant and I say, no straw please, if it's a younger waitstaff person, they will often say, because of the turtle? And I'm like, yeah, that's part of it. So it's so interesting how that is penetrated, consciousness. And the plastic straw, we use a lot of plastic straws in the world, but it's kind of a gateway issue to get people thinking about plastic. Now, President Trump, unfortunately, actually put out like a 15-page single-space executive order on plastic straws

and paper straws. And I remember a national reporter sent it to me. And we were talking and thinking, this can't actually be from the White House. It was incoherent. It was not on a PDF document. And I said, before I comment, please confirm with the White House press office that this is real. And sadly, it was. It's the most deranged thing on plastics you'll ever read. And people should not be distracted by it. As you did your work, I mean, you've been working on this issue for years in writing the problem with plastic, how we can save ourselves on our planet before it's too late. What surprised you most? What surprised me the most, and it's a great book with Adam Mahoney. Adam is a young reporter from New Orleans who made sure

that we included the environmental justice issue throughout the book, not just as a standalone chapter. What surprised me the most and surprises me almost every day is the information on plastics and health. I also teach a class on plastic pollution at Bennington College, and people can audit it on Zoom. And when I started teaching the class, I always did a class on plastics and health. And I mostly found information about where plastics were manufactured, Cancer Alley, Louisiana, Port Arthur, Texas, Appalachia. I couldn't find what was plastic doing to all of us who were not living in those environmental justice communities. But now it's almost every month. There's a new report of scientists finding microplastics, small shorts of plastic in different parts of our bodies.

And then what's wrong with that? I know that sounds strange. So what's wrong with finding plastic in your body? But well, there are two things. One is just the physicality of foreign objects inside our body. We excrete some of it, but not all of it. But also, Amy, remember, there are 16,000 different chemicals used to make plastic, and a lot of them hitchhike on the little shorts of plastic in our body. Now, most recently, there have been studies showing linkages to health ailments. So, for instance, a remarkable study in the New England Journal of Medicine, the most credible medical journal in the nation. microplastics in our heart arteries, and if it attached to plaque, they showed an increased

risk of premature death, heart attack, and stroke. And then the brain study for the first time showed microplastics crossing the blood-brain barrier. We had not known this before, and the scientists made a correlation with increased risk of Alzheimer's disease and other neurological disorders. I honestly think in about five, six years, policymakers are going to look back because this medical evidence is just building, building every single month. And even with the Trump administration defunding health research, we will have studies from Europe, from Asia, from other countries, and also academic institutions. The health information is building up. People are going to say, my goodness, why didn't we do more?

to protect our own bodies. And it's a particular issue for families that are trying to get pregnant. A lot of the chemicals are reproductive toxins. I want to end where we started with what you do in your kitchen. So how do you drink your coffee? How do you make coffee? I grind beans in a grinder. That isn't plastic. That's not plastic. And I make it in French press. And I'm worried that when it's glass and it's metal, but it does, when you pour it through plastic, and that definitely is a worry. And I drink massive amounts of coffee. So if anyone's listening for the holidays, I need to find that component when you pour it through that it's metal or glass. And who are the largest plastic producers? And are they organized like big tobacco used to be?

Oh, it's worse. The largest producer in the U.S. is ExxonMobil. And so you have the political power of the fossil fuel industry and the chemical industry coming together. So there's a trade association called American Chemistry Council. Whenever we are in a city council meeting, a state legislative meeting, testifying in Congress, the American Chemistry Council. So they don't say American Plastic Council. Well, there is the Plastic Association. kind of the cousin of American Chemistry Council. But we're basically looking at, you know, big fossil fuel companies, big chemical companies like Dow and DuPont. And then the consumer brand companies are complicit. Like craft food, General Mills, Amazon, McDonald's. And they don't just pay their dues to these trade associations. They show up.

I was in Albany, the final days of the legislative session, trying to pass this. I'm sorry, the state capital in Albany trying to pass the most pioneering plastics reduction bill in the country. There was an army of industry lobbyists there in the middle of the night trying to block this bill. And we got it through the Senate. We got it all the way to the assembly floor. It didn't pass, but we're coming back in January. What I like to say is plastic pollution is not going away, and neither are we. All right. Last question is, what is that pioneering legislation, even if it didn't pass as a model for legislation around the country? So in New York, it's called the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act.

It requires a 30% reduction in single-use packaging over 12 years, unbelievably reasonable. It bans the 14 most toxic chemicals in packaging. It has a strong definition of recycling, so it doesn't include something called chemical recycling, which is very polluting what the chemical industry is promoting. And then it puts a really modest fee on packaging to fund local recycling programs, but more importantly, waste reduction programs. So for instance, most school kids are served breakfast and lunch on plastic plates and utensils. Let's buy school districts plates and dishwashing equipment so our children are not exposed

to microplastics when they're eating at school. If you go to the airport, you can bring your metal water bottle and refill it at the airport. Why don't we have those water refill stations at train stations and bus stations where more low and moderate income people travel? We need to build that refill reuse infrastructure, which you see in Europe, by the way. But all of that is going to take money. So putting a fee on packaging is a great way to fund that. Judith Anck, former EPA Regional Administrator. president of Beyond Plastics. Her new book is titled The Problem with Plastic, How We Can Save

Ourselves and Our Planet Before It's Too Late. To see part one of our discussion, go to Democracy Now.org. I'm Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.