Instant Genius - Sustainability Special - Solving the world’s plastic pollution problem

Episode Date: September 21, 2023

We humans depend on the Earth’s natural resources for our very existence so it’s vital that we take as good care of them as we can. However, it’s abundantly clear that the environment isn’t in great shape at the moment. In this special six-part series we explore the different factors affecting the sustainability of our natural resources, investigate what their current state is and discuss what we could be doing to take better care of them. Thanks to its ease of manufacture, versatility and durability plastic can be used for making everything from packaging and building materials to children’s toys and clothing. But the material’s great success comes with an equally big downside – how do we dispose of it once we are finishing using it? In this episode we catch up with Dr Costas Vellis, a lecturer in resource efficiency systems at the University of Leeds. He tells us how widespread plastic pollution is, how we have reached this point and what we can do to solve the problem. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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delivering digital precision with analogue warmth, so you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus magazine. We humans depend on the Earth's natural resources for our very existence, so it's vital that we take care of them.

However, it's abundantly clear that the environment isn't in great shape at the moment. In this special six-part series, we explore the different factors affecting the sustainability of our natural. resources, investigate what their current state is, and discuss what we could be doing to take better care of them. Thanks to its ease of manufacture, versatility and durability, plastic can be used for making everything from packaging and building materials to children's toys and clothing. But the material's great success comes with an equally big downside. How do we dispose of it once we've finished using it? In this episode, we catch up with Dr. Costas Felis, a lecturer in resource efficiency systems at the University of Leeds.

He tells us how widespread plastic pollution is, how we've reached this point, and what we can do to solve the problem. Is there an actual scientific definition of what a plastic is? I guess there are many scientific definitions. The term can be used for different things. If you ask different scientific disciplines, will give you different definitions. for example, plasticity is used in physics in a different way from what is used in chemistry. What we're seeking here is a definition from chemistry. So the term plastics possibly refers to loosely defined term in a sense, because we refer to that to the material that contains polymeric chemical compound

and in addition many, many other chemical compounds that overall, give this material the properties that we seek. So it would refer to the basic chemical compound as a polymer rather than as a plastic. Now, these polymers can be natural and exist in nature. I mean, some of the chemical compounds that are in the natural products like trees, wood, are polymeric materials. So here we're referring to polymeric compounds that are man-made, so are part of a process to create technical engineering materials. The second aspect to that is that loads of those plastic materials as we have been creating them so far.

Most of them, they were sourced from oil that we extract from the fossilized materials, also are part of use of fossilized resources. And this gives us a bit of a complex definition, but this is as much closer as you can go towards a simple definition. So we have the basic polymeric material. It is man-made. We make it in industrial processes. We add other chemical compounds.

We get what in common language refer to as a plastic material. How many different kinds of? of plastic materials are there? This is a hard question to answer because we have been extremely successful in innovating different chemical compounds that in that sense, again, everyday use and in order to facilitate recycling,

we have come up with a universal categorization and most of our listeners should be familiar with seven categories of plastics, Many, many familiar plastics is, for example, P.T., polyethylene, polystyrene, polyvinyl chloride, and so on. So these are wide groupings, and they mainly refer to the basic polymeric compound that we use. However, if you start then adding all the what you call additives and filler materials, all the other chemical compounds that are used in addition to the polymer into the plastic material, we're ending up with tens of thousands of combinations that they give the plastics, their different

properties, being very stiff to very soft, the different colors, the different textures, the different technical functionalities. So despite that, we're starting with a relatively limited number of basic polymers, we end up having tens of thousands of materials used as plastics. So how long have we been using plastics? We start experimenting with man-made plastic materials quite a lot ago, and we had some great success, for example, almost 100 years ago with Bakelite materials, that you can still find them into some secondary hand soaps as vintage or even antique items now. but the major breakthrough is after 50s.

So we, comparison to what we have now, we have almost zero production, consumption, use of plastic back into 1950s. And from there, we started a trip that has brought us into an exponential curve in the use of plastics in our economy. So I think most people will know that plastics are used to make water bottles, for example, or casings for electronics. But there are also lots of other surprising uses of plastics that you wouldn't necessarily think of. Yes, plastics are everywhere, isn't it? The test is to turn your head around you in any environment that you're based, and you start looking at the materials that were surrounded with or even the materials we're wearing. I mean, most now, almost half or more of our clothes are made out of man-made plastic materials.

If you go into any medical operation, you'll see a lot of the materials actually are made out of plastic, even materials that would use inside us. Most of the food packaging, as you understand it, the film materials are used to preserve and transport the food from other parts of the world or make it keep longer in our fridge are also made. out of plastic. Some of the pipes now that are underground into the civil engineering infrastructure that they transport, for example, the natural gas they were made out of plastics. The frames in our windows possibly are made out of plastics in most of our homes. So plastics have been the material of choice, replacing all sorts of other technical engineered materials, from paper to wood to ceramics to metals over all these seven decades back from the 50s because it has proved to be more technically suitable or more affordable.

So in lots of ways then the sort of adoption of plastic has been a huge success story. But there's a downside to our use of plastic and that's the pollution. So what's the current state of plastic pollution? Indeed, we have moved from our understanding that plastic is fantastic when we're in the early days of our love affair with plastic as a material. But also we have now come to a very challenging realization. And this relates to the fact that these fantastic engineered material that gave us so much solution and so much of our prosperity relies on them, they were not made to be released in the physical or even man-made environment. in any form. And this is the core challenge we're having around the plastics pollution. Of course,

the term plastic pollution is an umbrella term. It encompasses many different aspects. For example, a lot of emphasis came from the presence of plastics in our seas and the damage done to animals. However, now we are having a much more complex situation and understanding of, what constitutes plastic pollution, and these would include, for example, burning of the plastics in open uncontrolled fires, what you call open burning. It would include from bigger items to smaller items, what you call macroplastics, and so on. So we made all these plastics. They were not meant to be released in the environment, but there they are, and that's the core of our major plastics pollution global challenge.

So what's the sort of picture looking like then for the future? Is plastic pollution getting worse and worse? Definitely so. As we speak, every second plastic pollution is getting worse. It is already out of control. And as we speak, we have substantial quantities of plastics emitted into the environment, either as physical objects, either as fragments or, as I said, burned in an uncontrolled fashion, where all the products of this open burning will also be released into the environment. So you mentioned there, the ocean, I think the first thing that will come to a lot of people's minds

when they think about plastic pollution is these huge ocean garbage patches. What are these, and how do they form? Well, absolutely, these are capturing our imagination, isn't it? And we have seen actual photographs of those patches or garbage islands and so on, however they're called. However, we have to understand that these are just the top of the iceberg. They're a very small part of the problem we're facing.

There are a demonstration that plastics do not stay in the place that it was released into the environment. It would move. Of course, if it is in our seas, it will follow the circulation of the seas, and there is global circulation that is responsible behind the concentration of items in those areas in our oceans. But in the same mechanisms with different scales, you could see concentrations everywhere in the environment. And these were released somewhere either on land and transported through our hydrology, through the drainage to rivers, to estuaries, to the seas, or were released originally in the seas and were accumulated there.

And it would be items also that they have not sunk because a lot of the plastic items would not stay on the surface of the water, would sink, or just sing those that they have not sunk. They would also might be transported there through the air, less possible, but still another mechanism through major storms and equivalent meteorological phenomenon. So this patches in the sea is something that we like to focus our attention. I think it's a core indication of the nature of the problem. It's not the only one.

It's not necessarily the most worrying one. So having said that, what damage do they cause to the environment? The damage plusks are causing to the environment spreads over. many different aspects and different scales. We are very familiar and I think what is most established is damaged caused to animals. For example, some of them would ingest the plastic, mistaken it for food, so it could fill their stomach, so they die from starvation, or it could get stuck in their throats, causing suffocation, and so on. We can see also entanglement of biggest species. We usually see images such as sea turtles, for example, being entrapped and tangled

into fishing nets, fishing gear, so they could physically hurt them or it could stop them from being able to get to the surface, to breathe, and so on. We have another major aspect that is under a wide exploration, as we speak, which is the chemical contamination, contamination from possible release of chemical compounds that are contained in plastics, or those that are formed as part of mismanagement, such as the open burning, which are much more obvious. So, having, of course, then an air pollution problem. But also, there are other types of damage. They're not associated to animal health. There is damage associated to the touristic product, when we see a beach, have traveled half of the world and to get your lovely

since on holidays and your swimming. It's a big item of plastic or microplastic in there or plastic littered across the beach. Maybe that's not the most inviting environment that you would like to enjoy. They could be also accumulated into our drainage systems and causing flooding in many parts of the world and so on. So we're talking a whole array of different types of damage

from physical damage to financial losses to also cost of cleanups. So there are all sorts of different types of damage here. Some of these damage is well established. Some of it we just start investigating as, for example, what could be the possible implications for human health. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building.

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and unforgettable listening experiences at home. Try it for yourself at a focal powered by name boutique. Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. So this is maybe quite a big question, but why is plastic pollution such a problem then? Why is it so difficult to clean up and why does it persist for so long? Clean up is notoriously difficult, isn't it? So let's establish that once for good. The only way to fundamentally clean up is to turn the tap off, prevent the plastics from being released into the environment in the very first place.

and this will take time but is the only real, radical, effective solution in the mid to long term. In the meantime, we might try to remove the plastics from the environment. If there are bigger items, what you call macroplastics,

this might be possible to a certain degree, but they're generally dispersed. So it is very difficult to make this happen. Now, if these are dropped in the street as part of a literary, maybe you have the street sweeping, maybe you have a vehicle, a robotic vehicle even, and would be able to reclaim and remove those items from our streets.

If we're talking about the mangroves, for example, or an estuary, this might be much, much more difficult because they would be dispersed all over. If then we're talking about the smaller items, the microplastics, then this is far more challenging. We might be able to come up with solutions for, example, for our washing machines and have installed filters that are blocking those materials. But then if you try to remove them from rivers or the seas, it's far, far more challenging to isolate these tiny billions of dispersed particles. So we've mentioned microplastics a couple of

times there. So what exactly are we talking about when we talk about microplastics? And where do they come from? The definition between macro and microplastics is a useful one but also an arbitrary one. So there has been historically developed such a split with an arbitrary limit of five centimeters. So whatever is smaller in the predominant dimension than five centimeters, we call it microplastic. So there are smaller items, essentially that's what they are made out of plastics. And They can go as well as you can imagine. They can go down to the micron and nanoscale, so being very, very, very tiny that we cannot see.

Still, these are dispersed everywhere. So we need this scale descriptions because different phenomena in terms of release, dispersion, and potential damage would be associated with their size. What do they come from? Well, the bigger items, clearly, they come from our waste, our solid waste, and that are not collected and ending up into the environment. The smaller items would have multiple sources, but primarily we can split them into two major categories.

Those, they were made in the first place by humans to be small, or those that they end up being released and, end up from bigger items breaking out into, breaking up into smaller ones, what you call fragmentation. So we have been putting this microplastics, for example, into our cosmetic products. We realize that this is not good. We have already legally and technically addressed this issue. We don't need them in there. We can replace the functionality with other types of materials. But other sources of microplastics are much more difficult to control.

Every time we wash our clothes, if these are made out of plastics, we have small fragments that are detached and are getting into our wastewater. When we are driving, there is abrasion from the contact of tires and the road. That's the very purpose of braking to create abrasion and stop. This creates this microplastics. There's microplastics from paint and so on. But the vast majority of the plastics are into the macro-scale region. So although it's very hard to have a very accurate inventory of what are the plastics emitted into the environment, we think that the bulk of them may be at a split of 80, 20 are macro to macro.

So sticking with microplastics for a minute there, I mean, there's more and more evidence that these are everywhere in the environment, aren't they? even to the point where they're getting into human food sources. Indeed, we have now realized that microplastics have dispersed everywhere. So a lot of studies in the recent years have revealed their level of dispersion there in the most remote environments of our planets, into the deepest oceans, into places where humans have never set food, into Antarctica, They are into our potable water. They're into, I might say, alcoholic beverages that you consume a lot here in the UK.

For example, beer. They are into food. They're into the air. We're inhaling through the dust. And now, as a result, because we are inhaling and ingesting those microplastics, they're also in our body. We can find them in our blood. We can find them in our stools.

So, yes, microplastics are dispersed everywhere. So what do we know about what they're doing to our health? We're not really sure about the effect of the microplastics to our health. I think there is grave concerns there, but also the scientific evidence is at its early stages. So we're investigating those effects, but there is not absolute scientific certainty on the risks posed and what are the actual effects. So I would say we're doing absolutely the necessary investigations, the wider scientific community is looking at that with great intensity as we speak, but we should also try to be cautious in that respect because there's no conclusive evidence

on major issues, as we speak. That said, other forms of plastic pollution, such as we're as the emissions from open and controlled burning can be much more directly linked with potential health risks and damage. So I think one issue that we can't overlook here when we're talking about plastic pollution is the idea of recycling. So first off, what makes some plastics recyclable, but others unrecyclable? Ideally, would lack everything to be recyclable, isn't it? I mean, that aligns a lot with the set of values. you have developed over the last decades. However, some of the plastics, yes, around 20% are not technically recyclable, at least with the traditional methods, the prevalent methods of recycling,

which is what you call mechanical recycling. This is because we would have to heat them a bit, and when we heat them these chemical compounds that they're made from are really destroyed. and we cannot put them back together through that process that we typically follow. So for the residual 80% that are technically recyclable in principle, there are all sorts of other difficulties. Most of them relate with the cost of collecting back all this material that is dispersed throughout the economy and also with removing the contamination that comes with them from use or being. incurred inherently within the materials and making that happen. So great potential in that direction,

but also major limitations in terms of actually making it happen. So another issue here is biodegradability. Why don't so many plastics biodegrade? And how long does a typical plastic persist in the environment once it's there? Biodegradability is very interesting. I mean, I have time to think that is difficult to make plastics biodegradable or degradable. So the fundamental reason we have so far creating plastics and using plastics was their durability, their ability to persist in the use that we want them. So by engineering, we've made plastics non-degradable

and we would like to keep themselves for many, many uses. So if we want them to make plastics degradable and biodegradable, this is feasible, but then we would need still to think what the plastics are degrading into, what is a benign degradation pathway, and still we would need to collect the plastics and put them into an environment that can biodegrade. For example, some of the plastics now that we have recently engineered, to be biodegradable. They might struggle to degrade into water environments, but they're ends in urge to degrade into controlled industry-level composting industrial plants, which is totally

different. So the question of biodegradability is not just an inherent property of the material itself, but it relates also to the environmental conditions that prevail, and then these would be totally different in different environmental compartments. So we've talked about the challenges of recycling and biodegradability. What about exploring other options? Are other materials like glass or aluminium actually more environmentally friendly options? It is hard to define what is most environmentally friendly option. Actually making plastics lighter and thinner and using those lightweight materials to transport, food across the world and the packaging has been part of the successful story of our

equine efficiency aspirations so far because we would have to consume less fuels and our energy being largely fossil-based, it means less greenhouse gases emissions overall. So we purposely have been replacing other materials that are heavier with plastics that are lighter, metals, stones, ceramic materials like, or similar with stones and so on. And this has been part of the success story of plastics so far. So the core question and challenge we would have replacing the plastics would be achieving similar technical characteristics. For example, some of the membranes who use for food preservation, we don't have

alternatives in other materials. We could start replacing plastics going back to paper and aluminium. Some of those might be far more recyclable. Aluminium is by far the most recyclable, technical, engineered material and success story we have in the recycling world so far, but it would mean a higher cost and it would mean heavier materials to transport around the world. So there are all sorts of dilemmas in that road of replacing or choosing between different materials and not all the problems and the challenges we're having with plastic pollution can be solved with material substitution of existing materials. So having said that, you know, is there anything that, say, governments or large companies can do to help this problem?

Of course, both governments and large companies have tremendous responsibility, but also opportunities to make a positive change here. The governments are introducing laws, but also taking initiatives to guide us on the use of materials. But the biggest problem we're having, of course, is the municipal solid waste that being uncollected across the global south. This is the bulk of the plastic, where the bulk of the plastic pollution comes from. And then the challenge we're having is that national and regional and local governments prioritizing solutions to that problem, creating the infrastructure, providing the services that are needed for the waste to be collected in the very first place, to give you one most prominent example.

And this is an area where things are failing. If we were talking about the developed world, then the solutions would be different. When it comes to companies, of course, there are all sorts of thoughts in the way that they could help in that direction. A lot of thoughts are focusing around the responsibility they might have in the first place for putting materials that might not be collected after their use or not be recyclable and the certain environments. that they are consumed, so their thoughts that the cost for the services and infrastructure that are needed could be actually covered by the companies themselves, through schemes what we call products stewardship and so on, but also considering what they put in the market in the very first place if the conditions are not suitable there and they won't be suitable

in the foreseeable future. So we're just crudging on the surface here, but there are definitely all sorts of things that governments and companies can do. As we speak, the governments are into a major international negotiation around a new potential plastics treaty that could result into agreement between the governments of the countries of this world on how to tackle this global challenge. So just by way of summing up, then one final question. Do you feel optimistic about the future when it comes to plastic pollution? You know, can we solve the problem? As a scientist, I'm inherently optimistic. I believe in human ingenuity.

I believe in the ability of human societies to adapt and solve problems. We can see success stories in similar global challenges of the future, such as the ocean layer depletion or the spray. of Mercury and so on, also through international treaties and localized, adapted action. So, yes, I think we can hope that into a few decades from now, we would not discuss in this as a major global challenge. That said, the current pace of release of plastics into the environment does not make us optimistic also the current pace of solutions that we have already at hand, such as deployment of waste collection and recycling infrastructure, again, cannot make

us substantially optimistic because the pace that these solutions are deployed is insufficient to stop the problem. We need more radical solutions. We need also look at the entire life cycle of plastics, and these massive chains can happen. A lot of people, a lot of organizations, a lot of bright minds work on that. So hopefully, next time we're going to talk, we're going to have much, much more positive amids and prospects to offer. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Dr. Costas Vennis, a lecturer in resource efficiency systems at the University of Leeds. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now.

pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or download us on your preferred app store you can also find us online at sciencefocus.com This podcast is sponsored by Name Audio and Focal The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analogue warmth alongside French acoustic specialist focal

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