The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Martin Sheringer: "The Growing Threat from Chemical Pollution"

Episode Date: September 21, 2022

On this episode, Professor of environmental chemistry Martin Sheringer joins Nate. Together, they discuss Sheringer's most recent paper on PFAS - the 'forever chemicals, their ubiquity in waterways all over the globe, and their numerous critical health effects. More broadly, they outline the risks and scenarios of plastic pollution to planetary futures - and what we might do about it. Is it possible to live in a (mostly) plastic free world, and do we really have any other option? About Martin Sheringer Martin Scheringer is a professor of environmental chemistry at Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, and works in the research program on Environmental Chemistry and Modeling at RECETOX. He holds a diploma in chemistry from the Johannes-Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany, and a doctoral degree and a habilitation from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich, Switzerland. For Show Notes and Transcript visit: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/37-martin-scheringer

You're listening to The Great Simplification with Nate Hagen's. That's me. On this show, we try to explore and simplify what's happening with energy, the economy, the environment, and our society. Together with scientists, experts, and leaders, this show is about understanding the bird's eye view of how everything fits together, where we go from here and what we can do about it as a society and as individuals. This week, I am pleased to welcome Dr. Martin Scheringer. Martin is a senior scientist at ETH Zurich and a professor of environmental chemistry at Messarach University in the Czech Republic. He specializes in research on environmental and human exposure assessment and is also involved in the science policy debate. Today we discuss Martin's most recent paper on PIFAS, or the so-called forever chemicals, which are being found to be much higher than safe levels

for humans in waterways and rivers around the world. We discuss their various health effects, including endocrine disruption. And more broadly, Martin and I talk about the risks and scenarios of plastic pollution to planetary futures and what we might do about it. Please welcome my friend and colleague, Dr. Martin Scheringer. Good morning, Martin. Hello, good afternoon, Nate. Good afternoon, yes.

So good to see you in person last week. Was it last week? Oh, time flies. Yeah. 10 days ago or whatever. How are you? Good, busy. We are in the middle of a bit of a tsunami of media attention.

So let's get right into that. What are you and your colleagues working on that's getting this media attention? Yeah, that was a paper, a scientific paper we published two weeks ago, and that caused a big splash much more than we had thought. And this paper is about what we call PIFAS. Pfras, the name stands for what's called polymper fluorinated alkalis substances. And that's a complicated chemical name. The key here is that these chemicals contain fluorine bonded to. carbon. And that makes them very special and very different from many other chemicals. And that's

what this paper is about. Okay. I want to get into the implications of that. But let's take a step back first because I think a lot of the listeners here are familiar with biodiversity loss and climate change and ocean issues. And they're even familiar with the fact that plastic now outweighs all animals on earth and the ocean Pacific gyre of plastic in the oceans. But you work on microplastics, things that are unseen and kind of unquantifiable. So can you break it down from the top? What is chemical pollution from plastics, especially on the micro side? And how does this work, this microscopic stuff?

Does it fall off of little household items and plastic bottles or just give us a big overview? I'm happy to do that. And I may go back to that paper about these Phaas because that is a first starting point that shows what's going on. In that paper, we summarized findings of different measurements of these PFAS chemicals in rainwater from around the world. And that was shocking to many people that these chemicals are in the rainwater, everywhere in the world. And they are not just there, but they are there at levels that may even exceed what's now a health advisory. So they may actually be of concern. So what we find here is chemicals that are present everywhere, everyone exposed to them, and that may be of a health concern.

So I graduated college with a 3.7 GPA, but I got C. in every chemistry class I took. So please help me out here. It's not my strong suit. How would Phaas or any other chemicals get into the rainwater? Do they evaporate with water from really? So they're that small and they go with the water. Yeah, exactly. These chemicals and many other chemicals that we have to see to cover in this broad problem of chemical pollution. These chemicals, they outgas from the materials they are used in. So, PIFRAs are water repellent and oil repellent. They are used as impregnation agents for textiles, for outdoor clothing, for protective garments,

and for many, many uses or articles that people have in their hands every day. But they don't just stick to that surface, but they, as I said, outgas. And then they start a long journey. They travel with air, with wind, they are deposited with the rain, they get into the soil, they get into the water, they move with ocean currents. So they really have a long journey ahead of them. And because these chemicals have a special aspect of special property, they are super stable. So they have a lot of time to travel. That's why they get everywhere in the world.

But the basic mechanism is really they outgas and they start their journey and they go around. They circulate in all media. multimedia chemicals, air water, soy vegetation, food, drinking water. And they go back, come back into our bodies. My understanding is that these plastic jugs last seven to 800 years before degrading. But then what they degrade into probably lasts even longer. How long do these PIFAs last and what do they eventually degrade into? That is exactly the problem also what caused the big splash, these materials, these chemicals don't degrade into anything in the environment. They will never go away.

Ever? For them, ever. Yes. That is shocking, isn't it? I didn't know that. Yeah. The only way for them that the levels could go down is that the chemicals dissolve and dilute or dilute in the deeper oceans, because that's a lot of water that can take up a lot of chemicals,

but they still won't go away. They will just go from where we are here, from our immediate environment into the deeper water. And what will happen in the deeper water over centuries and millennia? We don't know. Not much. It's cool and dark there. Nothing is going to happen really to them down there. So that's the shocking thing. And that comes from the fluorine carbon bond. These chemicals contain fluorine bonded to carbon. And if a chain of carbon atoms where fluorines are attached. And that part, this fluinated chain makes them so special because this fluented chain does

not interact with anything. It's water repellent, it's oil repellent, and that makes them so strong impugnation agents. It also makes them lubricants because they're not sticky at all. They make things glide easier. So they are for example used in ski wax to make skis glide faster. But of course, that is kind of crazy really because then, of course, they go out into the snow and again start their journey circulating in the environment. So I think ski wax is in totally irresponsible application of these chemicals.

So what percent of our products have these sorts of chemicals or related chemicals in them? Yeah. That's why I want to start from them because they form a certain group and they have this very special group. And there are about 5,000 chemicals of that type, more or less. Overall, there are more than tens of thousands. I think it's 300,000 chemicals that are on the market commercially globally. So many, many more than these PFRs. Of course, they have different properties.

They are not as extreme, but they have all kinds of properties. They may degrade easily. They may also be persistent like PCBs, polychlorinated biphanils. They may be very toxic, they may be less toxic, whatever. But overall, there is a soup of chemicals that are circulating around us and also within us. And I think that is now the answer to your question. What is chemical pollution about? It's really about that messy soup of so many chemicals that we don't even, that we can't really control.

And can't see and can't feel in the short run. Oh my gosh. Right. That is the, you know, you have often said that we are energy blind. But of course, we are also chemicals blind, which is natural. Because we're externality blind, my friend. Yeah. But also here, it fits exactly.

It's just kind of blindness. Of course, it's not just physical blindness, but it's also mental externality blindness. I agree. Okay. So I have a ton of questions. for you, professor. So when these chemicals were invented 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago, the chemists that developed them at DuPont or the oil refineries or wherever, they had to know that they would degrade a little bit into the environment. So was it, there was, let's just optimize

profits and this is such a microscopic thing, it's not going to be a big deal or, I mean, how did that thinking unfold or did it? Do you have any insight into that? Not really. I have asked myself that same question many times. How did we end up in this mess? I mean, my grandfather was a chemist in the 1930s and 40s, but we never talked about these aspects, and he made dice stuff. But the people who invented these Phaas substances, I don't know.

I think they could have known, but perhaps it was just the solution to pollution is dilution. So if they remade the 1970s movie The Graduate with Dustin Hoffman now at the end, instead of him saying plastics is the key to the future, it might have been the impact from plastics, would have been the takeaway line. So let me get back to your recent paper. Are there two phenomena that are being measured? Number one, that the concentration of PIFAS in the rainwater is increasing. And number two, scientists are recognizing that the safe level of PFS is actually lower than we originally thought.

Yeah. Mostly the second thing. The first thing is the levels have been more or less constant at these concentrations that have been measured many times in different parts of the world. They have not increased a lot over the last couple of years, but what has decreased exactly, as you said, is the level where we see a concern. Because more and more has been learned about the toxicity of these chemicals and they do different things, different types of harm to the body. So let's get into that. So what threat do these and related chemicals pose to our health and functioning, let's say, in

a 20 to 30 year timeframe? How might we be compromised in ways that could be difficult to recover from from the microscopic chemical pollution? There are many aspects, many ways in which chemicals can interfere with the body. So we were asked in response to that paper, what does that mean now? And the lowest level, these health advisories that have been published now by the US EPA, by the way, they reflect concerns about immune suppression in babies, in infants. So these chemicals, PIFAs may lower the formation of antibodies and the immune response.

So that is a very subtle effect that is new, at least to me that was new to learn that this is something that is really something we have to be mindful of. Then what they also do is they reduce the sperm count in men. And so we do have really different effects in different groups of the population that set in at different concentration levels of the chemicals. So it's not just we are safe and then we cross a line and we are under the impact of these chemicals and are massively poisoned. It is different. It's really that different groups of the population have different effects in their bodies already.

And the higher we go in concentrations, the more happens. So at higher concentrations, these PFS, they cause liver damage, kidney cancer, testicular cancer, loss of weight. metabolism of lipids is disturbed, many things that also happen in higher concentrations. But you see, there's this kind of cascade of range of things that are caused by the chemicals. How would one get exposed to higher levels of concentrations if it's just kind of dilute in the rainwater and such? Yeah, that is, have you watched the movie Dark Waters? No. That is the answer, because that is about the DuPont case.

I think it was in Parkersburg in West Virginia, where DuPont had a plant where they made Teflon. And to make Teflon, which is also a PIFAS, they used or they needed and had to use another PFS called PFOA. And then in the process wastewater, they released these wastewater containing PFOA to the Ohio River and the groundwater and it was everywhere in high concentration, much higher than what we have found or what people have found in the rain and in somewhere else, higher levels. And then that killed the animals of a farmer. The cows kind of dropped dead.

And I think that was the start of the battle. And there was a lawyer, Rob Belots. And he actually was working, I think, in favor of Fort DuPont. But then he saw that case of the dead cows on that farm. And then he was thinking about all that concern and kind of turned around. And then all the people had cancer and all kinds of really serious diseases in these neighborhoods. So it's a dramatic story and a dramatic fight in battle. And it's worth watching.

Dark Waters and Rob Bilot is played by Mark Ruffalo. Okay. Okay. I will watch it. Though, to be honest, I tend to watch science fiction or comedy now because my whole life is a drama, documentary sort of inbox, as I'm sure yours is too. So is a PFS considered an endocrine-disrupting chemical? There's a lot of news on EDCs. Is that like an umbrella term for all these, or are there subcategories?

Probably, yes. That is not really my area, my field. Endocrine-disrupting chemicals, endocrinology. That's super complicated, and there are so many hormones that give so many signals to the body. But everywhere where these hormones act, other chemicals can interfere. And PIFAs also do that at some point in some way, but I don't know exactly how and where and why. The reason I ask is you and I have a lot of friends in common who are scientists and some of our colleagues have told me that they can make a plausible case that chemical pollution endocrine disrupting chemicals can be a bigger risk to human and the natural world futures than climate change. What do you think of that assessment?

And can you speculate on that? I wouldn't compare them on a scale because there are different dimensions. They act in parallel. We are under these stressors, under these impacts anyway, from both sides. And from other sides as well, there are other stresses. I wouldn't compare them on a scale of bigger. But because both of them are happening. We are under toxic impacts and we show the population humans show the effects.

We see them. There are so many non-communicable diseases that have increased a lot over the last 15, 20 years. And that is caused by, to some extent, certainly by chemicals, but for sure. At the same time, we see all the climate effects. And this year, 2022 is a drastic, I think, a turning point probably. And we have seen so much about all the heat waves and droughts and the impact. So I think we are under all of this now. No, I agree with that.

The reason I pose the question is we have tens of millions of people aware and working on climate change issues, rightfully so, both for adaptation and mitigation. But we may have tens of dozens of people working in your sector. It seems to be just widely unrecognized as kind of a existential risk in coming decades. So I'm just wondering if this goes unchecked and if it's a slow ticking time bomb of the impacts, both to humans and to other species, what could happen in the next 50 years with the accumulation of these Phaas, endocrine-durrupting chemicals, other things? What do you think about that? I mean, what would be things that would happen? And by the way, you mentioned humans and our livestock.

Are we seeing the impacts of Phaas or endocrine disrupting chemicals and sperm count decline on non-human species? Yeah. So first point was the number of people working on these problems. And I totally agree the chemicals problem, the toxification problem, I think, is underrepresented. It's not really addressed in the way and to the extent it should be. And there is a bias, a certain, the picture is too narrow. But of course, on the other hand, if we have many more people working on chemicals, we will come back perhaps to this later.

We also would have to communicate all of this. And then there may be also an inflammation overflow. We have to learn about how to handle all these different. messages from the different parts of the problem, but I agree. More people, more resources, more time and money is certainly needed for the chemicals problem. And I can tell you why in a couple of minutes. That is certainly the case. Now, what is coming out of this? And I think it's probably what we already see. As I said, there are all these diseases that have increased, are increasing. And that's probably just going on like this. So it is all these, um,

cardiovascular diseases, it's metabolic diseases, obesity, it's reproductive problems like the sperm count, the sperm decline. So that's continuing. So metabolic diseases, cardiovascular obesity could have origins from the chemical pollutions that we're consuming invisibly? Definitely. Definitely. How so? There's even the term, there's even the term, obesity genes for chemicals that cause obesity. So somehow Now, again, that's not really my area, but what I have learned, what I can say here is early in development of a fetus or even a newborn, I guess it features, wherever exactly it is. There are different types of cells. And for example, there may bone cells, cells that will form bones. They are reprogrammed into fat cells.

And then you get obese animals. This has been done in animal tests, and there is, there were mice. and there was one mouse that was normal and there was the mouse that was treated and that was three times of the size and the weight of the normal mouse. So we can see that how these cells are reprogrammed and it turn into fat tissue. So this is happening in utero already before they start eating McDonald's or whatever. Yeah, but then of course, exactly. Later on we may add on to this first exposure and do more harm because there are so many hormonal, there are so many changes that

are triggered and controlled by hormones in puberty and later on in life where these chemicals can again interfere. So that is an ongoing process. And also testicular cancer in young men is something that happens more and more often and is a signal here. So you see all of these elements of a bigger picture. are already emerging. I think that is something we have to just project into the future as answer to your question, what's coming out of this chemical pollution problem.

So you and I have known each other for a long time and you've followed my work and I talk about the biological, the behavioral aspects of why we are in this mess. And one of them is that we're a biological species that cares about the present more than the future. So a lot of the risks that we see are emotionally invisible to us. There's nuclear risk. There's climate change risk. But climate, we're at least seeing heat waves and fires in Australia and British Columbia and things like that. So we get this emotional reminder or glimpse of what's coming, but not so on these microplastics,

unless there's a news or an interview like this one, they're just totally invisible. So it's just yet another aspect, another cost of our economic system that is fully backloaded that we don't include in our everyday prices and decisions. Right. I totally agree. And there are obvious reasons for that because, as you said, it's invisible. These chemicals are not visible in. in the water we drink and the food we eat, although packaged or processed and packaged food may contain lots of them.

That's what Jane Munke with the Food Packaging Forum does. And we still don't see them. And then secondly, really, even if we know about or learn about it, what can we actually do? Because these chemicals are not part of our lives. They are not a moving part of what we normally do. We have no agency here, really. They are in our environment and our computer.

in our food packaging, in our clothes and whatever. But again, we have no agency. You would have to change a lot to create agency for people to be able to decide what kind of chemical do I want to have and why and how and whatnot. So you probably know the stats to this when I was reading up before this interview. I think we create 300 million tons of plastic every year. And roughly half of that is single-use plastic. drink or eat or use it once and it's in the garbage.

So that's the stuff that ends up in the ocean gyres and in the landfills and there will last a long time. But are those little plastic knives and forks and bottles? Is there also the invisible outgassing occurring on those items? Yes, because the plastics contain in addition to the backbone, the polymer that is the hard material. They also contain lots of what's called additives, chemicals that make them more durable. For example, UV light absorbers so that the plastic doesn't get brittle and breaks. There are UV absorbers in the plastic or just dye stuffs or flame retardants and plastic softeners. And heavy PVC is 50% by weight is stalates, not PVC, because to make it soft.

So 50% will just out gas. Thalates are very bad, right? They are well-known endocrine-suppany supplement chemicals and are bad, yeah, for that reason. Exactly. So imagine 50% of an item of heavy PV, soft PVC that will go out in the end beat. The first part during its use phase in a human environment and in indoor environment, but then when it's out there in the outer environment, then these chemicals just out gas and circulate in the, environment. I'm just looking around my desk here, my podcast desk, and I have this, my bike helmet.

I don't know why that's here, but a vitamin bottle and my eyeglasses and the clickers and the thing for my phone. I mean, there's plastics everywhere. Yes. I mean, you could argue we are living in the plastocene. Absolutely. So on other podcasts, I think it was an early one with Art Berman. We discussed how gasoline is one of many of thousands of products that we get from petroleum. And if somehow, miraculously, we stopped using internal combustion engines and went totally to electric vehicles, we would still need to extract the same amount of oil because we have demand for all those other products.

So plastics that come from petrochemicals, if I recall correctly, are expected to be 50% of the growth in petroleum demand in the coming 20 years. So is this an example of where we need an input and its demand creates a byproduct like plastics? And then the demand for the byproduct, in this case, petrochemicals outstrips the demand for the original product like high fructose corn sweet sweetener as a byproduct of creating ethanol. Like what if we stopped gasoline?

Did we stop demand for all these plastics? Can the growth in plastics demand be halted? Or does the industry world demand for this have its own metabolism separate from the transportation sector? That was a big bite. But what do you think about that? Yeah, that's a big bite and the complicated one. First of all, I mean, Art Berman says oil is the economy.

So I don't... He got that for me. the way, but go on. Okay. That's fair. Yeah, whatever. But yeah, can we really do what you said as a hypothesis or as a thought experiment that we stop using gasoline?

I think the oil part or the fuels part is much more important than the plastics part. So what you are saying is that the plastics part may take over if we go down somehow, some way with the oil, with the fuels part. But I think the fuels part will always be dominant. In terms of amounts right now, the chemical industry takes about or uses about 12% of the global oil production. And the rest is for fuels, for transportation and heating or whatever we use. Do you know what the corresponding number is for natural gas where we get our plastic bags from and other things? It's probably higher than 12%.

Not directly, but it's probably also a fraction like that. Okay. And now, of course, if there is this scenario that the fuels part goes down, then the chemical industry may want to scale up the plastics or the chemistry part. But I'm not sure about that. I don't think that's possible even because we need the fuel. We need oil for the economy in the function of a fuel, not in the function of a feedstock for the chemical industry. But if it were the way you said, of course, the industry is pushing for that, but there's no real need. Plastic is not the economy.

We live in a plastics world, that is true, but that is not necessary. We could also live in our current modern life with many other materials that would be used to make the items we use in our lives. So plastic is not the economy, whereas oil is. So what good progress is being made on that alternative products made with things that aren't come from petrochemicals? Is there a lot of progress on that, like using bamboo or other things? That's a big concern, for me at least, and also a very controversial topic. Because some people say the chemical industry has to be decarbonized.

And I don't really understand or see what that means because, I mean, the products are made of carbon and could say, okay, we need to get the carbon from somewhere else. So we grow bamboo or we grow whatever we can take from the fields. But given the scale of the chemical industry that we have, we would be in massive competition with food production or we'd have to just flatten ecosystems and forests and convert. them into agricultural areas to grow the feedstock for the chemical industry. That would be total nonsense. So I think that avenue is not there. So I think the only way is the chemical industry has to be scaled down. And then we may still use fossil fuels because it's a smaller amount that we use for them

to make chemicals or we may also use some biofuels growing, what was grown on the fields. then of all the footprint would be much smaller. With the current size, it cannot be green. A couple thoughts. Help me out here. So if we decarbonize the transportation sector, we haven't really decarbonized because all that carbon is still in all our entire plastics

and clothes and textiles and everything else. else. I mean, in order to truly decarbonize, which includes the things you're talking about, it has to be a smaller scale and we have to like really change the economy dramatically. I mean, just looking around my house and my refrigerator and my pantry, I mean, how long will that take to change the supply chains and inputs with all the packaging that's happened? And how do we do that? Yes, nobody really knows, but I think that could be done. That is a smaller challenge compared to getting rid of fossil, let's call it fossil carbon right now as a fuel. Right.

Because that is the function. And you have spoken about that a lot, how many people we have are the slaves that work for us, the energy slaves that work for even. 500 billion per year, roughly, depending on the assumptions. And that is still what that's what. where we are standing on or from which we are working on. And then still given that input, we could still modify our supply chain for everything else. Again, we don't have to live in a plastic world based as long as we all have all that energy, energy input and have our modern lives. So could we go back 50, 80, 100 years to use glass reusable milk jugs instead of plastic,

discardable? I mean, certainly the technology exists. It would be probably more costly. How much of using plastics and throwaway things are just because energy has been relative to its value, unbelievably cheap, that we just did it because it was the most efficient and profitable thing. Yes, exactly. Energy and fossil carbon as a feedstock has been unbelievably cheap. And that's why it's so easy to make everything out of plastic. But of course, there are alternatives. And I'm not saying I have a solution. That would really imply we would have to rebuild lots of supply chains

in the way we make food and we distribute food and all that. But still, what's possible is, of course, glass. And glass can be made lighter because it's possible to make glass much harder so that it doesn't break. And then you can make it thinner and lighter and the energy needed for transport is less. So there is progress also. It's not that we always have to carry around heavy glass bottles that we need a lot of gasoline or diesel to be transported.

That can be changed. And of course, it should be, it would have to be more local or regional. The transport distances would have to shrink a lot. But that's for many reasons that this is going to happen, I think. There are political risks and other types of risks that now interrupt the supply chains anyway. And we have to rethink many of our supply chains. So why not rethink them in a way that makes life more kind of, yeah, kind of more regional and more centered around what the people actually really need?

Yeah, I mean, you know I agree with that. So Martin, as a longtime collaborator, you understand the premise of what I refer to as the great simplification, that a number of the core systems we depend on are going to go through. dramatic downsizing, change, transformation. Some of those like big international agriculture are currently very chemical dependent. So given this landscape, what do you see as the survivors and replacements within that industry, the international ag industry that uses pesticides and fertilizers and ammonia and products from fossil hydrocarbons? Yeah, that's another big one.

I'm only asking you big questions, Martin. I see. Yeah, because again, of course, there has been a lot of debate about what is the potential of, let's say, bio-organic food growing and small-scale farms and all that. Is that really a possibility for the number of people we have in the world right now? And I would guess that probably we would need some amounts of fertilizes and also pesticides less than now, less and fewer, also does fewer chemicals that are used as pesticides and a simplified way of pesticides. But to have a sufficient yield, I guess that is still needed or will be needed.

But that may be a gradual process that we have to really think about what are the priorities is how much energy can we use for what purpose? And one of the purposes will certainly be agriculture and also probably to some extent fertilizer. Others would then be still transportation and others would then still be some kind of chemicals that may survive even under much more limited conditions. What would be the one, two or three single most important chemical products that make our current world, functional. I mean, what would you take with you on an island?

I would say we need some pharmaceuticals, definitely. They are essential. Pharmaceuticals come from petrochemicals? Yeah. But historically, of course, not. They come from plants. Plant-based herbal medicine was the root of modern medicine. But yeah, of course, the current products come from plants.

the chemical industry. But still, I think we need, we need, or humans need pharmaceuticals to painkillers and many things that are just make life much better and help us survive difficult situations. So that would be one brown, one area. Other things would be just chemicals for practical use. So adhesives and paints and glues and varnishes and chemicals that you need for building houses. So a lot of simple chemistry that is very productive and useful. And I think all of this is what people would figure out. They would see what they need. And there is of course the knowledge.

Now I assume the knowledge is still there, how this can be made. So there would be a list of things that would certainly be given priority. And other things would just disappear because the priority is not there. And of course, as I said, a fertilizer and pesticides would also be probably depending on of course where we are and what's grown, what's the crop, what are the conditions and all that. If I was on Desert Island, the three things I would bring would be the Lord of the Rings trilogy, my golden retriever and a good sturdy knife. But I get your point. Yeah, no chemicals, perhaps some chemicals.

Perhaps some chemicals in the book, not in the Golden Retriever, other than probably the food I'm currently feeding the Golden Retriever probably has chemicals in it. As a fourth item, you may have a bag of chemicals. Right. That's right. So what about pesticides? This may not be your core focus. But I remember a few years ago there was this big controversy about Roundup and how Roundup

was now being illegal in Europe. And I forgot who creates Roundup, ADM, or I'm not sure who, but... It was Monsanto. But then some executive said, it's totally safe. I would be willing to drink it directly. And I don't know if he actually did that or not. But how much of the impact of these intense chemicals would be immediate if you got exposed to high levels of it?

and how much of it would happen over 20 or 30 years, or what I suspect you're going to tell me is, we don't know because there's no funding to do such experiments. Okay, that's an interesting one. There are different answers here. There is a long tail, and that's something we know even without funding for long-term tests, because that's from the persistent chemicals that will be there for decades. Going back to the beginning with PIFAS, that won't go away. These chemicals will be around and will cause damage in 20, 30, 40, 50 years.

Similar PCBs. PCBs were made mostly in the 60s, 70s polychlorated bifinals. They have now entered the oceans and they are still there and they cause massive damage to whales. In particular, orca whales, orca populations are collapsing because of PCBs. Nowadays, there was a dead orca found on the coast of Scotland in 2017. There was a report. And that whale had enormous levels of PCBs in its blubber. And they said that it was infertile.

It was a female. She never had offspring. And they said that the animal died because it was caught in a net. Normally they don't do this. They are so intelligent that they can navigate the nets and everything. And they said in the investigation that it is very likely that the cognitive capacity or ability of the animal was also reduced by the PCBs, which is what PCBs do. We know that. So in the same way that Mercury concentrates in larger fish and they tell us not to eat it, it's PCBs concentrate in the larger top of the food chain.

Yeah, exactly. So that's a long lasting footprint that will not go away. and that we know about even today. So that's one answer to your question. What is the long-lasting? Yeah, let me, Martin, we probably want to keep this to an hour and a half, but I think I could talk to you for five hours on this, partially because it's freaking me out.

I've been exposed to this line of thinking, but I haven't actually had a deep conversation like I'm having with you on this. There's just so much else, but this is, I feel this is far, far, far more important than our media and our cultural conversations are. So I just want to keep poking at you when things come to mind. So getting back to Golden Retrievers, I did some research that in the 1950s, the average Golden Retriever lived to be 15 years old.

And I know that's not remotely the case now. Now you could argue that it's due to inbreeding or things like that. But some of the comments were because of the chemicals and the food supply, etc. But just more broadly, I mean, the amount of cancer in our world, it seems like everyone knows someone that has or has died from cancer. Would we know that the preponderance of cancer could be linked to long-term exposure to chemical endocrine disrupting chemicals, Phaas, PCBs, things that are invisible to us. Has there been research on that? What can you say about that?

Yeah, I mean, that is the crux in a way of all this chemical and epidemiological research in connection with humans. Because what people, what scientists can do directly in the experiment is animal testing. So they can apply the chemical on the skin or into the organ of the animals and find out what happens and what kind of cancer it may develop. But then of course, there's always this question of what does that mean for humans. And then we only have these associations. So we can go out and investigate the population, lots of people. That's what they did in the Pachsburg case with P4 and from DuPont. They had 80,000 people who were all exposed to high levels of P4A.

And then they looked at all confounding factors and tried to take them out of the picture of these factors. what they came out with at the end was a list of, I think it's eight or six diseases that were highly likely, highly likely caused by P4. To such an extent, highly likely that it was they could really make a lawsuit and won so that DuPont had to pay, I think, $800 million. So that was really very close to not even, you can call that a proof. It's a philosophical question here. It's not a causal result from a test in a human. It is just what we see here in people and what we see here at levels of P4 in their water,

drinking water and food. And if we remove everything, we see there are these eight things that stick out. Cancer, testicular cancer, kidney cancer, I have the list here. And thyroid disease, ulcerative colitis, high cholesterol, and pregnancy-induced hypertension. That's what they found as the ones that were most likely caused. by P4. So that's, but you see, we're kind of hitting a wall here in terms of final proof. And that's, of course, what the opponents can always say.

They say, oh, there are so many other factors. There could be electrosmok, somebody is smoking. There could be other chemicals. So there's P4 and there's Roundup. I mean, perhaps they are always used Roundup in their gardens. And that's where it comes from. There's not a smoking gun. There's just a lot of smoke.

Right. Exactly. Lots of guns, lots of smoke. and not clear or how many bullets come out of what gun. Right. So which of the bad actor chemical families have really long, wide tails that will be doing damage a long time from now? Do we know that? Yeah.

I mean, again, the persistent ones, because they don't go away. So again, PCBs and PFAS. And then the other thing is really that we resupply lots of chemicals that are degraded, that would go away, relatively quickly, but we always make large new amounts of cellades and flame retardants and things that we always resupply. So if you have always a new carpet, a new car, new electronic devices, you add more sources of these chemicals to your life. But that would not have to be and to last. That could be stopped. What cannot be stopped is the ones that just have these long lifetimes and don't go away. And those aren't so much a personal consumption decision.

And those are just living as a part of modern society because they're in the water. They're in the rain. Right? Yeah. Exposure right now exactly is via food, via water. Because they have been released. They cannot, we cannot take them back. It's there.

So this puts environmental justice at a whole other level because those areas of the world that have not been using these chemicals in their industrial economies, just like they've not been burning fossil carbon to power their industries, but are going to be suspect to higher temperatures and, you know, droughts and floods. These areas of the world, well, you just wrote a paper that said the rainwater everywhere on the world has two high levels for safe consumption. Is the environmental justice community being involved? in the global plastic endocrine disruption PFS story? I think so.

I'm not in that community myself, but I think, of course, that they are working on this and addressing it, but I have tried to make a connection here myself because what I have put in the focus of my work is two metrics of the hazard or of the problem of a chemical. And one is persistence, which means how long will it be there? and what is the footprint in the future. And the other one is what I called spatial range, or you can call it all the travel distance, something that measures how far a chemical goes. Because both of these aspects directly address the question of environmental justice,

because they show how far in space and time the burden is transferred, shifted away from the people who benefit from the chemical. So I think these metrics, as we call them, are really making it possible to directly, to open the door for an environmental justice discussion. So how does chemical pollution interact with other environmental issues like ocean acidification or climate change? Is there any additive effect or synergies or combinatories or anything like that? When the direct impact or where it adds to the problem massively is, of course, biodiversity

Because we have not talked about the chemical stress on humans, but of course animals have the same situation or are in the same situation under the same pressure from chemical exposure. There is insect decline, there's word decline, there's amphibing decline, and chemicals play a role in this. They are not the only factor that is clear now, but they certainly play a role. So sperm decline in animals. Also sperm decline in animals, exactly. but also decline of populations and of entire parts of the of the biosphere. You may have seen that the reports about insects that have gone down by 50, 70 percent by mass. And that's, we don't know exactly why that is, but pesticides are a large culprit.

Yeah. It's also habitat destruction in many factors, but also chemicals. So here we have a direct influence of. of chemicals on biodiversity loss. So biodiversity loss, species extinction is certainly impacted by or made worse by chemicals. That is one strong link. There's another one. Do you want to hear that now?

Yes. But I'll just pause and say, you're one of my favorite people. I'm so glad I got to spend time with you a couple weeks ago and I was really looking forward to this because I like you as a human. And I'm also feeling sick right now from what you're telling me, even though I kind of knew it. So it's this bittersweet sort of conversation. But yes, please tell me the second one.

Yeah. No, I understand. And I'm sorry, but yeah, I think we have to face it. Yeah. The second one is a simpler thing. It's just when it gets warmer, chemicals out gas more easily. So we have more information. So there's a positive feedback that as we warm, there's more chemical pollution.

Right. Basically that. These are the two links I would mention. Yeah. Okay. So chemicals aren't largely tested by industry for endocrine disruption effects before releasing them into products and processes, at least historically. So in your guesstimate, what percent of harmful chemicals or endocrine disrupting chemicals

or any of these categories, which I don't know their names, do you think we've discovered and there are people like you testing them versus some out there that are doing harm that are not even our radar due to lack of funding or research or just unknown? We don't know about them. Yes, that's another big one because there's another abyss here to look into. It's not just the testing for EDC properties. I mean, I don't know the answer because there's a wide range. There are some chemicals that are more powerful EDCs and they are more well known.

They have been identified because there is similar to known hormones, estrogen, for example. And there are other chemicals that mimic hormones to a lesser extent, but they still have some potency or they block a receptor where a hormone wants to dock and it can't because the chemical is blocking the receptor. And this is all gradual. So there are probably hundreds of chemicals that may have some weak. EDC properties. But as you said, totally true, there is no capacity really to test in a routine way

for them for these effects because they are subtle. The testing takes time. It's not trivial. But the herb is I mentioned is really that the testing scheme that is mandatory before chemicals can be put on the market

is much too narrow. So there are many aspects that have not been tested for, for many chemicals, for most chemicals even. So most chemicals, have been on the market for decades and we know basically nothing about their toxicity, not just EDC properties, but also other properties. There are just no data.

And that is a battle that is very difficult because this has been behind the scenes kind of. It was a technical discussion between chemical industry, regulators and scientists. And for quite a while there was, I think, the idea that this can be overcome with new testing and new methods and and high throughput testing, as they call it, all of that. But now we see that there are several hundreds of thousands of chemicals on the market. It's just not possible. It's too many chemicals. And we have to stop that paradigm of risk assessment, I think, here.

And have come up with a new scheme that helps us shrink the universe of chemicals on the market. And to shrink the universe of chemicals on the market, is this just a bunch of isolated academics like yourself that are studying this with, you mentioned Jane Monkey, who works for a nonprofit organization, but are there government agencies deeply working on this? And are there dialogues with DuPont and the other major chemical manufacturers, they have to be aware of the things that you've been speaking of. Has that conversation accelerated in recent years? or is it all swept under the rug?

It's at the beginning. I think it's dawling to more and more people, scientists like me at least, but also, I think other regulators, they see that. They see that their regulatory system cannot handle the problem, cannot do the task. So it's dawning on people that we have to change course here. So it's not something that is kind of, that's not existent as a discussion, but it's very small yet and at the beginning. but it's gaining some attention and people are just changing

I think their mindset at least some people so there are some discussion papers about how and why risk assessment chemical risk assessment has failed the paradigm that was in use for 30, 40, 50 years even

so I would have some hope that this discussion could gain momentum and try to at least change the direction but not not yet more it's difficult to say. So if personally, I clean up my life as much as is reasonable. No Teflon. I replace glass for plastic everywhere I can, safe fabrics and furnishings.

How much of my endocrine disrupting chemical exposure am I removing versus the percentage of my EDC exposure that I can't avoid without moving into a cave and eating grubs or something? I think you can remove quite a bit. And that's one of the positive notes here, I think. That's a good message. You can remove quite a lot. By not having a new car every couple of years that is full of, you can smell it. There's the new car smell.

Or the new car smell is you're inhaling EDCs. Yeah, right, right, right. Telites and flammish hardens, whatever it is that is in the plastics, that is in the car. But you do know that smell. That is the new car smell. There is computers with flame retardants. And if you don't have a new computer and iPhone and whatever that you always have with you close to your face, you can reduce that exposure. Also carpets of certain types.

I mean, modern carpets that may be impugnated with PIFAS or processed and packaged food. If that's all reduced, then a lot, I think, is already at least no longer in your immediate environment. Of course, there's still something that may not be able to, can't remove from the water or so from your drinking water from the tap water. But still, you can accomplish a lot by making a drastic change to your personal environment. My system's mind was racing while you were saying that, that if people became aware of the risks of all these PIFAs and EDCs in our everyday materials, there's going to be a big movement to just having furnishing. and flooring with wood. And then we're going to draw down that resource as an alternative.

I don't know the mass balance of wood and how much wood would kind of grow, could be grown. 2.8%. The volume of our forest, every year they grow depending on where they are. 2.6 to 2.8% is the volume that could be extracted and keep the forest body intact. And that is a tiny fraction in BTU terms of the amount of fossil BTUs we use every year, a tiny fraction. Yeah, of course. As a few, that's shockingly little. But as a material for building your home where it lasts much longer, there's a perspective here.

No. Okay. So you teach both at ATH Zurich and also at... University in Czechoslovakia. I'm not sure how to pronounce that. Yeah, Masarik University in Brno. Yeah. So how do your students respond to hearing about all this? And is there a difference between Switzerland and Czech Republic? Not so much. I don't see a real difference.

I think what I mostly see in students, but also in colleagues, in members of faculty and other scientists I talk to is people focus on their immediate work. They focus on their studies as students, on their exams, on their projects. Scientists also focus on their projects on their grants and the things they need to do to survive and to keep going with their normal lives. So I think there is to some extent a healthy response that people withdraw from these big questions, the big picture discussions because they are difficult and not part of our normal life and our normal mindset.

So they can't, it's not easy to handle them. I mean, you and I have been struggling for this for long. We have spent years trying to accommodate these things as part of our lives and our work. But that is hard. So I see that reaction that people would try to keep going, which I understand. And I think, as I said, I think it's even healthy. But on the other hand, of course, this is a problem because we don't speak about the elephant in the room, which is the crisis and the overshoot problem and all that. And the longer we don't speak about it, the worse it gets.

The elephant in the room is that the room is full of elephants and the meta-crisis. Right. Right. Not just one. Yeah. So what do you see as the communication information barrier to making progress on this issue? Do just more people need to know about it? Does there need to be infomercials or do you have an opinion on that?

Yeah. Two aspects here. One is really just what you said, information. But that has to be produced, has to be created, it has to be made available. And for example, colleagues and I have worked a lot in the last two, three, four years to argue for an IPCC for chemicals. So we have now reached a point that at the UN level, there are negotiations starting that such a panel should be, will be established for chemicals. Because there is one for climate. And, And there's also one for biodiversity and it's very logical and I think useful that there will be one for chemicals as well. That is something. And yeah, I can show you much more about that process, very interesting process, very complicated, time consuming. But then of course the other aspect is where does this information go?

How can it be made effective in people's lives? And that's where what I said earlier, where do people have agency regarding chemicals? And as long as chemicals are only the background. background of our lives, we can't do much, even if we learn a lot about chemicals, and then even the information may be counterproductive. See, I think we need a different mindset, more even than just information. Well, as we unpack all the different aspects of the backloaded costs of our prior 50 years economic system, there is a sense of it's too much. I don't want to hear about it.

And I think we're leading with the stick instead of the carrot. And ultimately, I think we have to design a different way of interacting with each other and with consumption and with the natural world. And I don't think we're going to do that out of fear. I think we're going to do it out of this is how I choose to live a different way. And I'm going to avoid the consensus trance of following what everyone else is doing, stand by my principles and live this way. But I don't think there are any, we all have a foot in both worlds, and it's very difficult to extricate ourselves from the many tentacled chemical and hydrocarbon consuming and emitting superorganism that we're part of now. That was more of a statement than a question. Yeah, I like the tentacles, exactly.

It is tentacles. That's really hard for us to, yeah. So you've listened to many of my podcasts. You know at the end, I'm going to ask you some personal questions more broadly about your outlook on life and what you think about. But before I get there, let me really put you on the spot, Martin. If you were to oversee this future IPCC of chemicals, swing for the fences, what are some of the things? that we really need to do and could do to minimize this aspect of our future risks, that of PIFAs, PCBs, endocrine-disrupting chemicals, the lot.

How would you frame that problem and response? Look at the IPCC. The IPCC is important, has been important all the time, but of course it can't do wonders. So in the end, this is an information mechanism. It's a platform for information sharing, for building consensus, for identifying uncertainties. It's a lot about science and the process of science, how what we understand. And of course, as a scientist, I would love to be in that role, I can clearly say. But I'm not sure that really, it really would help us actually solve the problem.

It would certainly have a strong, could make a strong contribution by providing much more of all that information that we are lacking right now. and we would then ask for people to just generate that information, do the testing, create the data, put them all together, create the bigger picture, I think in alternatives, in scenarios of how many chemicals actually need to be used. Right now, there's a big discussion about something called the essential use concept. So what are the essential use of chemicals? And what are the other ones that can we can drop? These kinds of conversations, I would try to trigger, to stimulate. But again, look at what the IPCC has a question. accomplished and what it has not accomplished.

Two things there. I think we could do the same thing for fossil hydrocarbons. I mean, there's a difference between cost and price and value. Price is what consumers pay. Cost is what the oil companies pay to extract and refine it out of the ground. But the value is what it's providing to society, which is orders of magnitude more than the price or cost. And so there are certain uses that are vital.

over a millennial timeline and we're just pissing it away because it's nearly free. I'm sure you could make the same case for many of the chemicals. Does such a hierarchy exist that if you take 100 products that are made from petrochemicals, that maybe these five are critical and these 10 are largely useful and these 85 could be done away with? Is that already exist? No. It doesn't exist as a list like this. I think that's exactly the right thing to ask, totally.

Okay. It would be a very, very interesting discussion to have, and we would get very different lists, probably, but then there could be even an intersection overlap of these lists, and there could be a core part where the lists would even agree. It would be very interesting to learn. So taking a step beyond the potential IPCC of chemicals, what if you were benevolent dictator and had some... simple choices to make on reducing these risks to society, what would you do?

I'm afraid I can't step out of my shoes as an academic. So even as a dictator, I would go for information, but I would probably run a campaign. So with advertisements that tell people about all this in a way that is not just dry and scientific information, but really makes the connection to their lives and tells them the story about what could be done and how it could be improved. And that would be a huge thing to do. And if I had the means for that, I would go for that. Moving on to the personal questions part of the podcast, Martin. Do you as a teacher have specific recommendations for your students or young people globally listening to this podcast?

who have become aware that they are going to live their lives during a period of energy, environmental, biophysical constraints and risks to, you know, what encounter to what our cultural stories are telling us? What advice do you have for young people? I would say, and I try to do that also where I teach in some conversations that may happen in between, I would say that people should try to accept. these many or look at these many elephants in the room and make make these problems and these topics part of their work at least or their academic thinking and learning. So they should accept that this exists, all of this and that they should talk to each other

about it and to their teachers and they should form groups, networks. They should write about it. They should try to insert it into the conversation or the conversation, sorry, in the wider society, I mean, like Fridays for future, but perhaps more targeted as a learning process, not just to be activists as an activist and try to force something, because I think it can't be forced. We have seen that because we are all in that boat and we can't force something against ourselves. We have to learn and we have to, and young people at the universities, I think, are the right

ones to talk to about all this and they should learn to talk about it among themselves and then develop a critical mass of people who can think about all that better than we can right now. Well, we're, we and our colleagues are trying to breathe life into that conversation. So thank you. Exactly. Yeah. So more broadly now, I'm not just talking about plastics, pollution.

But do you, someone who's very fluent in the polycrisis and how all these things fit together, do you have any suggestions for people listening to this show on how they can prepare themselves in their communities for the coming great simplification? How we as individuals and communities might be able to meet the future halfway? Yeah. Similar to what I would do with the students, I will also, again, because we have that silence, there's this big void, there's this silence. People, even people who's who privately would say, I am scared. Something is going very wrong here with many things. They don't say that openly. So again, I think the first step has to be the people talk about this more openly and somehow make it real.

Because right now it's not real. It's an unreal conversation in most parts of the society. Not here. You have a facility. this and I think it's a great, great piece of work that you're doing here with these conversations, because that is what we need, I think, really that people can talk about it in a structured, an organized way without being just overwhelmed or be in their partisan camps and fight each other and all that. So again, I would ask people to learn and talk. And then, of course, form their networks and try to be more resilient, but we don't know what's coming. I like that answer.

Thank you. What do you care most about in the world, Martin? I mean, the obvious answer is, of course, my family, because that's what we all do. We have our immediate environment of people we love and we live with. And I try to help my two sons to navigate the mess in which we all are. But beyond that, I think it's much more because we are all connected to the bigger world. And when I see all that destruction, the clearing of, forest, the Amazon destruction, the fires, the dying animals, but also dying people, people starving.

I find that extremely hard to take and to handle. So I think we are all connected with the world as a bigger environment. And now this is going, this environment is being destroyed. And so we all, I think we care about that. But how can we emotionally really handle that? I don't know. That's a big challenge for me. I've long worried that people that are empathic like yourself, in contrast to people who don't

really care about those things, will burn out because it is a big cross to bear to not only see this in the news, but to professionally work on it like you do every day looking at statistics on the environment and pollution, etc. So on behalf of our listeners, I thank you for your work. Again, outside of plastics per se, but what one issue in the world are you most concerned about just in the next decade or so? I think, yeah, we can see it right now in a way.

It's war. And it's the progressing, they're accelerating, runaway climate disasters. Again, I think this year is a turning point, probably, and things are accelerating a lot. And that will cause a lot of migration, upheaval, and whatever is coming. That is disturbing. And in contrast, in your communities in Switzerland and also in Czechoslovakia, what are some things that you're most hopeful about? in the coming decade or so.

I think people can adapt if they have to, if they really have to, if they see what's coming and what's in front of their eyes or if it really changes their life or threatens their lives, they can adapt to a lot of things. So I would hope for this adaptation on the smaller scale. I would hope for common sense, normal people having common sense and coming up with common sense reactions to all the mess. Because right now we don't see common sense reactions. We see political action that is not common sense. Perhaps it's impossible at that level. Yeah. I think we're going to need realists in society and we're going to need better governance somehow. And I don't know how to get there, but governance kind of underpins all of our

issues that we discuss on this show. So I'm going to give you one more chance, not on chemical pollution. But if you were just generally benevolent dictator on this planet and there was no personal recourse to your decisions, what one thing would you do to improve human and planetary futures? I think there is not one thing I could do here. I could find because that would be the magic bullet. So you would delegate your benevolence to someone? I would consult with people. Well, I mean, with you, with you. I mean, is it possible that we could have some sort of technocracy in the future that there was a council of elders that had scientific exposure that was politically neutral

or bipartisan that could convene on these polycrisis risks? Is that something that our culture is capable of? In principle, yes. I think, yes. We should hope for that. Thank you. We should do this more often. And I appreciate your time and your work.

Do you have any other closing thoughts or advice or wisdom for our listeners? No, I would just like to thank you that I could speak here. And also for the entire great simplification work that you do that I think is wonderful and important. And please keep going. I intend to. And we will have lots of resources and show notes for people that want to take a deeper dive into your work and the more broad risks and research on endocrine disrupting chemicals, PFAS and other chemicals. Thank you so much, Martin. Enjoy your weekend.

And let's talk soon. Thank you. Bye. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of the Great Simplification, please. Please subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform and visit the great simplification.com for more information on future releases.