Science Vs - Plastics: The Final Straw?

Episode Date: September 13, 2018

We’re back! This week we tackle the War on Straws and how worried we should be about all the plastic filling our oceans. We speak to marine biologist Christine Figgener, environmental educator Carrie Roble, physiology Prof. John Weinstein, and ecology Prof. David Barnes. Check out the full transcript here. Selected readings: The infamous turtle videoAn ambitious project that mapped the Great Pacific Garbage PatchThis paper that breaks down the sources and amount of plastic getting in the ocean John’s study on how fast microplastics formThis meta-analysis on microplastics, fish, and invertebratesA review of some of the chemicals in plastic and child health Credits: This episode was produced by Wendy Zukerman along with Rose Rimler, Meryl Horn and Odelia Rubin. Our senior producer is Kaitlyn Sawrey. We’re edited by Caitlin Kenney and Blythe Terrell. Fact checking by Michelle Harris, Meryl Horn and Rose Rimler. Mix and sound design by Emma Munger. Music by Emma Munger and Bobby Lord. A huge thanks to all the researchers we got in touch with for this episode - including Dr Chris Wilcox, Dr Denise Hardesty, Prof Anthony Andrady, Dr Carolyn Foley, Dr Tracy Mincer, and Dr Laurent Lebreton. Thank you! Also thanks to the Zukerman Family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This is the show that pits facts against flotsam. On today's show, plastics. This summer, there was a war on the plastic straw, as cities across the U.S. banned this little sucker. Plastic straws are already banned in Seattle, Fort Myers, and on the oceanfront in Miami Beach. Large fines can now be doled out to businesses handing out straws in certain cities around America. Starbucks will soon ban plastic straws from all of its stores. And for many of us, this kind of popped out of nowhere.

It seems like all of a sudden, people were freaking out about plastic straws. It's polluting all of our oceans. It's affecting the people. And this anti-straw movement can pretty much be traced back to a single video. Many people have seen this very disturbing image. But the news channels just couldn't stop showing. It's a video of researchers finding a turtle in the ocean

with a straw up its nose. This YouTube video shows researchers pulling out a ocean with a straw up its nose. This YouTube video shows researchers pulling out a straw from a sea turtle's nose. They pull it out and it's intense and pretty horrifying. Now it's a little bit graphic, but let's put it up full frame for you so you can take a look. Because really that's at the heart of what we're doing. That turtle video touched a nerve and it added to the growing anxiety that people have about all the plastic that we're using.

So today we're going to talk to the scientist who created that video and a bunch of other researchers to answer the following questions. One, how big of a problem are plastic straws in the ocean? Are they just a straw man here? Two, how much other plastic is actually out there? Three, what happens to the plastic once it's in the ocean? Like, is it going to be there forever? And four, is it going to make marine life and us sick? When it comes to plastics, there are lots of punny news reports. It may be the final straw for straws. But then there's science.

Science vs Plastics is coming up just after the break. Welcome back to today's episode on plastics. Our first stop is that infamous video, the one that galvanized the war on plastics and got us all hot and bothered about straws. It all started with this researcher, Christine Figener. She studies sea turtles at Texas A&M. So what do you love about turtles? They're almost like dinosaurs. So the species that exist nowadays have seen the dinosaurs, right? But for as long as Christine has been studying turtles in the wild, she's seen plastics cause problems for them. Several years before she filmed that viral straw video, she had this other

intense experience. She was watching a sea turtle trying to lay her eggs, which they do through an opening called the cloaca. And she noticed that the turtle was struggling. When I looked a little bit closer, I saw kind of a piece of plastic sticking out of her cloaca. And I was like, oh my God. So it seemed she couldn't lay. So I was like really carefully pulling on that plastic. And eventually it came out entirely. It was a whole plastic shopping bag.

Oh my God. And finally, after that came out, she was able to drop her eggs. A whole plastic bag inside this turtle's body. And a recent review paper that looked at almost 2,000 sea turtles estimated that perhaps half of all sea turtles have ingested plastic. And so after seeing this kind of thing day after day, Christine was angry and frustrated. But for years, she didn't want to share it. She recorded and uploaded videos of turtles, but they just showed them swimming serenely, no plastic in sight.

Christine thought that showing people beautiful images would make them want to protect her turtles. I was still believing that I need to show the flawless beauty of nature. So I always avoided filming the really gruesome realities that we are facing a lot of times because I thought you need to convince people with positive images. Then one day in 2015, that all changed. She was researching on a boat in Costa Rica and she saw a turtle with something in its nose. She thought it was a barnacle. And Christine and her team worried that it was hurting

this turtle. So they decided to help the animal by getting rid of it, extracting it. And I just decided, okay, that's kind of a, you know, fun little out of the usual extraction that we're doing here. So I'm just going to record it. She took out her camera and she filmed it. Christine and I watched the video that she made together. You can see the researchers getting pliers and then pulling something out. Mr Surgeon.

You can see already the encrusted part in its nose. She's going to be so happy. Big booger. The turtle is making that little sneezing sound. Bless you. Have you ever heard a turtle sneeze? I have.

The video is this real close-up shot of the turtle's head, with a researcher's hand holding it still. I'm sorry, little one. I think you'll like it better afterwards, though. Oh, my gosh, and as you pull it out, it starts bleeding? And that was when I was thinking, okay, before we start pulling anymore,

I really want to know what that thing is made of, the material. So we cut up a piece, and one of my Costa Rican assistants bit on it and said, yeah, that's plastic. Yeah, what's plastic. Plastico. And when they pulled part of it out, Christine and her team finally saw exactly what it was.

Is it a straw? Don't tell me it's a freaking straw. I'm the one filming and cursing in the background. It's plastico. It's a freaking straw. Don't f***ing tell me it's a freaking straw. So this is the reason why we do not need plastic straws. As soon as Christine got back to land, she went straight to her computer. I really said, OK, now this cannot just rot away on some of my hard drives. This really needs to be somewhere out in the ether and raise awareness.

Why? Because you've seen, you know, plastic in lots of turtles, in dead turtles, live turtles. Why this time did you think this has to go out? For me, that was the moment where everything just totally flipped over. And I just thought, OK, this is it. This is literally the last straw. I'm so tired of pretending that everything is fine because it's just not. It's just not. And I have the evidence right here on camera and I'm just going to upload it. And so she did. And a lot of people watched this video,

millions in fact. But there was no talk of a war on straws right away. It took three years for the momentum to build. But eventually, NGOs started using Christine's video and actors like that babe from Entourage, he took up the cause of the straw. And then seemingly all of a sudden, straws were getting banned. And Christine, she still can't quite believe it. Wow, for the first time, there seems to be at least some kind of impact that I'm making on this world because usually I'm tucked away in the jungle and go about my daily job. And I might influence some people that visit our projects, but I never felt I had such an impact as in that moment. It's estimated that there are 7.5 million straws on U.S. beaches, and Christine is excited that

we're finally doing something about it. But as many straws as there are out there, Christine knows the problem is much, much bigger. So this is the thing that I'm getting worried that straws are taking out of context and presented as the holy grail that will solve all of our plastic issues. They are not. They are definitely not. So the straws are just a poster child for a bigger issue, and that is the issue of plastics in general. According to a paper published in Science a few years ago,

several million metric tonnes of plastic waste enter our oceans every year, and straws make up a tiny fraction of that. Plastic bags, plastic packaging, plastic toys, plastic bottles, they're all found out there floating in the ocean, getting in turtles' noses and causing problems for other marine life. So our next question is this. How is it getting there? Because when you're talking about millions of metric tonnes of plastic,

we obviously can't chalk this up to a couple of drunk idiots losing straws off their pina coladas on a booze cruise. Oh. But seriously, how does all this plastic get from our homes and our offices into the ocean? You're welcome. Thank you. This is your place. This is my place. We go up these treacherous stairs. To find out, we spoke to Kerry Roble, who researches plastics at the Hudson River Estuary Park in New York.

And Kerry is an expert on how plastics move from our homes to our waterways. And in her work, she's seen all sorts of plastics in the Hudson River. Plastic bottles, tampons, which, yeah, can have some plastic in them, and other creepier things. Oh, I mean, we just find the weirdest toys often. You know, severed doll heads and one eye, like, gone. Kerry tells us that we don't really recycle that much plastic. Yeah, according to the EPA,

less than 10% of all plastic in the US gets recycled. Less than 10%. A lot of plastics aren't recyclable. It's frightening, yeah. So what's happening to the rest of it? Well, let's start with the US. Most of our plastic goes into landfill, but some of it does get into the ocean. And one of the main reasons for this is that we don't always get rid of our trash properly. So let's say you flush something down your toilet or you even, you know, I just finished this bag of chips and you're in the middle of Manhattan, you throw it onto the street. Well, when it rains, it's going to go into our

sewers. And then our sewers get overwhelmed by these rain events. Our wastewater treatment plants max out. And so therefore, that water from our homes and from the streets goes into our rivers. It's not filtered during these rain events. And that's the big contributor of the plastic debris we're finding. So littering and overflowing sewers. Those are two of the biggest ways that plastics from the U.S. can get into the ocean. But when you look globally, the U.S. is far from the biggest offender here. The real problem actually comes from countries that don't have regular and consistent trash collection.

A recent paper estimated that two-thirds of the plastic trash entering the ocean every year comes from rivers in Asia. When people don't have a good place to put their trash, it's more likely to end up in the streets or in makeshift landfills, where it can then flow into rivers and streams that then feed into the ocean. The fishing industry dumping nets into the ocean is another big source of plastics. Okay, so once that plastic is in the ocean, what then? The currents are going to take it and it's going to move out into the ocean and likely get

stuck in some type of current system where it can escape. And that's what creates those giant patches of plastic garbage floating in the ocean, when trash gets trapped in these current systems. You may have heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is like this soupy collection of trash that stretches out to roughly twice the size of Texas. Yeehaw! Yeah, it's huge. And it's only getting bigger. A lot of the plastic in the ocean

is also sinking to the bottom of the seabed, where only the most daring scientists tread. After the break, we're following those scientists to the ends of the Earth to find out what happens to plastic once it gets there. There is nowhere that has escaped. There is nowhere pristine. That's coming up. Welcome back. So we've been talking about the very unfortunate magical school bus journey that millions of

tons of plastic take from our homes into the ocean each year. Now we're going to look at what happens to that plastic once it's floating in the ocean. Because all those doll's heads and straws, they don't just float there forever. They do eventually break down. And when they do, they break into these teeny tiny pieces, some that are so small you can't even see them with the naked eye. They're called microplastics. And scientists have only recently started to study these tiny bits of plastics.

And two years ago, they made a breakthrough. Thanks to a team headed up by this guy. You know, we are putting out tons of plastic, right, per year. John Weinstein is a professor at the Citadel in South Carolina, and a few years ago, he and his graduate student wanted to know how quickly microplastics were created. So they took strips of different types of plastic and let them sit in the waters of South Carolina.

They tested a bunch of plastics, including polyethylene, which makes up plastic bags. We looked at polypropylene, which makes up straws in a variety of different containers. And we also looked at polystyrene, which is more commonly known as styrofoam. John was thinking he wouldn't see microplastics for a long, long time. I thought it takes 50 years for the plastic to disintegrate. But just eight weeks after they started this experiment, John's student came to him with some big news. Microplastics were already coming off the strips.

To have her come in my office just really several weeks after we started that study to say that the plastics were producing microplastics really was just to me absolutely shocking. That's amazing. How is that happening? How is it breaking down so quickly? That's all driven by the UV radiation coming from the sun. We'd known that when the sun beats down on plastics, it can weaken them, causing them to crack into chunks.

But what John was seeing was that the sun also breaks down plastic in this other way, by breaking the chemical bonds in the plastic layer by layer. John walked us through how it works using this great analogy, a cookie. It's not like breaking a cookie in two and having some crumbs, but it's like taking that cookie and taking a razor and shaving microscopic layer by microscopic layer off the surface of the cookie. Why would anyone do that to a cookie? But anyway, other research is now finding the same thing,

that microplastics can start appearing in just two months. And the fact that microplastics are appearing faster than people thought has huge implications that we're just starting to understand. It means that plastic can spread out faster and infiltrate new places, even places that we thought were nearly impossible to reach. And perhaps no one knows this better than David Barnes. So I must admit, my life has been a whole series of remote places. David is a researcher at the British Antarctic Survey and one of his most recent trips was to a remote part

of the Western Antarctic Peninsula. He's one of the first people on Earth to go here because the glaciers have melted enough, thanks partly to climate change, that he can now get to spots that have just emerged. The impression that you get when you sail around the corner into the mouth of one of these fjords is huge mountains towering up above you, vast glaciers that are sort of,

the ice sheet is flowing down the sides of these mountains. And you really do feel like if anywhere is pristine in the world, it's these places. They're sort of the newest habitats on Earth. And David is here to look for microplastics, to see if they can be found this far from civilization. Now, because you often can't see microplastics and they can sink to the bottom of the ocean floor. To reach all the way down, David and his team use this very cool scooper tool. It's like a giant octopus, a giant metal octopus that sits on the side of the ship and it travels through the water column and lands on the seabed and thrusts down 12 see-through tubes. And then we lift it all the way to the boat.

I should say ship there, the captain likely saying boat. So they have all these tubes filled with mud and water, which they analyse for microplastics. We've probably all gone for a cup of tea while it comes up. And then as soon as it arrives on the surface, it's like a swarm of ants, the scientists, pouring over it. Yeah, so what did you find? So that's ongoing work.

Don't you dare say that's ongoing, David! Ongoing work is the science equivalent of you'll just have to wait a year to find out if John Snow really died. Suffice to say, it's very frustrating. So I can't say too much. Only that we know that we've got some plastics in the water column. So in the water samples, you can see microplastics. How scary and sad is that?

There is nowhere that has escaped. Plastic can go from anywhere to anywhere and is. And there is nowhere pristine. We're going into environments that have only just been created. And even in those environments, there could already be plastic. And once microplastics find their way into all these nooks and crannies all over the world, I mean, it's hard to believe we could do anything about it. And so do you think realistically we'll ever get rid of all the plastic in the ocean?

No, I don't. I really don't. I really don't. I think that would be near impossible because all the stuff that's reached the seabed is there for good. I think much of the microplastic is there for good. So this takes us to our final question. If microplastics are truly everywhere and they're here to stay, then what? What does all this mean for us and for the fish? Well, here's where things get tough. Because we don't know what this means.

The research here is so new that we really don't have concrete answers. Here's what we do know, though. is so new that we really don't have concrete answers. Here's what we do know, though. We do know that microplastics are getting into fish and then we are eating some of those fish. We also know that microplastics can attract chemicals, things like pesticides, which have found their way into waterways. This has been shown in lab studies. But the big questions are, what do those chemicals and microplastics do once they're in fish

bodies or in our bodies? Many of the questions you're asking, we just, we really don't know the answers. It's really hard to know quite how serious a problem it is. Some studies suggest that microplastics are harmful for animals in the ocean. But then other studies are showing that for some fish, they seem to be benign. And this is true for studies on humans ingesting microplastics as well. The research is just really inconclusive, which is very frustrating. But still, none of the scientists I spoke to said,

it's fine, we don't have to worry about this. They were either very worried or they said, it's not looking good. David sat on the very worried end of the spectrum. I think it's scary and we should be scared. It's really that the problem is growing faster than our knowledge. So it's sort of playing catch up, but we're sort of chasing this snowball that's getting bigger

and it's kind of getting further away from us. So when it comes to plastics, how do they stack up? One, how big of a problem are plastic straws in the ocean? While there are millions of straws on our coastline, when we look at all the plastics in the ocean, straws are a tiny piece of the puzzle. Two, how much other plastic is actually out there? Millions of metric tons of plastic enter our oceans every year. Three, what happens to them once they're in the ocean? Well, they break down into tiny, tiny pieces called microplastics that are forming much faster than we thought in weeks, not years. And four, is it going to make marine life and us sick?

Well, there are lots of fears out there, particularly that the chemicals attached to microplastics can harm us. But really, it's too early to say. And it could take years, decades, before we know if microplastics are a big problem. And by then, there will probably be so, so many more of these teeny tiny bits of plastic out there. And this is why some scientists, like Christine Figgener,

who made the turtle video, reckon that if we can reduce at least some of that plastic, then that's a good idea. Which brings us back to the little old... Sorry, just needed something to drink. It brings us back to all this talk of a ban on straws. I mean, even if straws are just a small percentage of the plastics, I think it's still part of the plastics, right? It's definitely one object less that is going to cause harm in one way or another. And I think if you start with plastic straws and once the awareness is there, I think you will also maybe think about other objects that you can

eliminate. So I think it would be huge. And I honestly hope that, I don't know, if we're ever going to talk again after five years, that we might say, hey, look, we don't, plastic straws are not a thing anymore. The power is yours. She said five years, right? That's science versus plastics. For this episode, we spoke to about 15 researchers and our script has 73 citations. They're all linked in the script, which you can get to from the show notes if you want to read more. This episode was produced by me, Wendy Zuckerman, along with Rose Rimler, Meryl Horn and Odelia Rubin. Our senior producer is Caitlin Sorey. We're edited by Caitlin Kenny and Blythe Shirell.

Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Meryl Horn and Rose Rimler. Mix and sound design by Emma Munger. Music written by Emma Munger and Bobby Lord. A huge thanks to all the researchers I got in touch with for this episode, including Dr Chris Wilcox, Dr Denise Hardesty, Professor Anthony Andrade, Dr Carolyn Foley, Dr Tracy Mincer and Dr Laurent Lebertin. Thank you also to the Zuckerman family and Joseph Lavelle-Wilson.

Next week, we're tackling essential oils to find out if they could be a powerful medicine or if they're a bunch of Insta-crap. There's a lot of science. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time.