The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - The Plastic Crisis: A Health and Environmental Emergency | Reality Roundtable 15

Episode Date: February 10, 2025

(Conversation recorded on January 21st, 2025)   Many of us are familiar with the problem of plastics as a distant issue in the ocean, primarily affecting fish and sea turtles. While these environmental effects are critical, the full scope of plastic's repercussions on human health and well-being is largely unknown by most people, even as the research shows alarming – and growing – adverse effects. What do we need to know about this pervasive material and how it affects the human body?  Today, Nate is joined by environmental health researchers Leo Trasande and Linda Birnbaum, as well as environmental policy advocate Christina Dixon, to discuss the harmful effects of plastic on human health and the ongoing global policy efforts to regulate the plastic and petrochemical industries. Their conversation dives into the risks of frequent plastic exposure, paths toward a world with reduced plastics use, and what it might mean for the economy if we made – or did not make – significant changes to the ways we use plastic. How can we balance the requirement for essential plastics with the urgent need to reduce our production and consumption of these toxic materials? What further unknown health effects are still in need of research - especially in the case of thousands of untested chemicals used on the market? Lastly, what is the current state of regulation on plastic production and consumption, and how can everyday citizens play a role in shaping the future of the plastic industry?    About Leo Trasande: Dr. Leo Trasande is the Jim G. Hendrick MD Professor, Director of the Division of Environmental Pediatrics, and Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Pediatrics at NYU School of Medicine. He also serves on the faculty of the NYU Wagner School of Public Service and the NYU College of Global Public Health. Leo is an internationally renowned leader in environmental health. His research focuses on the impacts of chemicals on hormones in our bodies. He has also led the way in documenting the economic costs for policy makers of failing to prevent diseases of environmental origin proactively.   About Linda Birnbaum: Linda S. Birnbaum, Ph.D., D.A.B.T., A.T.S, was director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) of the National Institutes of Health, and the National Toxicology Program (NTP) from 2009 to 2019. As board certified toxicologist, Linda also served as a federal scientist for 40 years, including 19 years at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), where she directed the largest division focusing on environmental health research. Birnbaum is now a Special Volunteer at NIEHS and conducts research as part of the Mechanistic Toxicology Branch. In October 2010, she was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, one of the highest honors in the fields of medicine and health.    About Christina Dixon: Christina Dixon is a campaign leader at the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) in the UK, using policy, advocacy, and corporate campaigning skills towards environmental issues. Christina currently leads the EIA's plastics treaty campaign, where she oversees a diverse and highly skilled team of legal, policy and campaigning experts combating plastic (over)production & pollution, waste trade, commercial whaling, illegal marine species trade, and bycatch.    Please note that, starting with this episode, Reality Roundtables will be released on Mondays going forward.   Show Notes and More Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the whole story of The Great Simplification? Watch our 30-minute Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future Join our Substack newsletter Join our Discord channel and connect with other listeners  

The chemicals used in plastic materials are essential to the lifespan of petrochemical companies and countries, I might add, that are poisoning us. So we have to get out of the mindset that plastic is essential for human life because that is a manipulation of the message. In fact, plastic is only essential for certain people's profit and plastic is essential piece of the unraveling of our human existence. You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Hagen's. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment, and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming Great Simplification. Joining me today are Linda Burnbaum, Dr. Leo Trasande, and Christina Dixon, three individuals deeply involved in research and advocacy for the regulation of plastic production and consumption. Linda Burnbaum was formerly the director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences of the National Institute of Health and the National Toxicology Program. She is now a scholar in residence at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. Leo Trissande is the Jim G. Hendrick M.D. Professor, Director of the Division of Environmental Pediatrics and Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Pediatrics at NYU School of Medicine.

Christina Dixon is a campaign leader at the Environmental Investigation Agency in the United Kingdom using policy advocacy and corporate campaigning skills towards issues, in particular plastic pollution and ocean conservation. This episode, in my opinion, is a dynamic and eye-opening conversation about the current state of plastics in our world. If you find this topic as interesting and concerning as I do, I encourage you to also give our other previous episodes on plastics a listen, which cover the details of plastic food packaging with Jane Munkah, Pfas with Martin Scherringer, plastic effects on fertility with Jeremy Grantham and Shauna Swan, and the supply chain of subplastics. all of which are linked in the description of this episode. But before we begin, in order to hit the ground running, as it were, I thought it would be helpful to have a quick primer on how the world currently uses plastic and the effect it is having on our health. Currently, we make humans around 500 million metric tons of plastic per year,

and the industry is aiming for a doubling of that in the next 25 years. All of this plastic eventually ends up in our global ecosystem. in some form or another, and size. Much of it stays in the environment for a very long time, in some cases, forever. Much of the plastic we come in contact with every day is invisible to us or not even on our century radar. It is now in most or even all of the tissues of our bodies, including our brains, as well as in every ecosystem around the world that's been tested.

we discard incomprehensible plastic waste, including 5.7 million toothpaste tubes, 570,000 cell phones, and 2.3 million pairs of sneakers every hour around the world. The supposed silver bullet of the industry is the recycling of all this plastic, yet the reality is recycling is at best an energy-intensive delay in its eventual disposal in the environment. There are three primary problems that plastic causes. Number one, the pieces of plastic that physically interfere with normal ecosystem functions. Number two, the toxic chemicals that plastics leach out throughout their production, use, and disposal.

And number three, the fact that plastics are at the heart of the consumptive culture that drives the economic superorganism and Western lifestyles. Plastics contain thousands of chemicals, with only a handful of having been tested for toxic properties and impacts. Those that we know about are associated with nearly all of the major health problems that plague us, including fertility loss, diabetes, obesity, cancer, neurological orders such as autism and ADHD, and the list goes on for quite a while. For those listening who are familiar with the narrative of the Great Simplification and the human

superorganism, there are several factors unfolding in finance, energy, global supply chains and politics that will all affect the future of plastic. Like all that we talk about in this podcast, it is unfolding rapidly in a complex and unpredictable way. Efforts to address the problems of plastic have escalated rapidly in the past couple of years, including an ongoing attempt at a global plastics treaty through the United Nations. Many NGOs and individuals are working on this, among whom are the three individuals joining me today, who know a lot and care a lot about this issue. With that, please welcome Linda Burnbaum, Leo Trissande, and Christina Dixon.

Leo Trasande, Linda Burnbaum and Christina Dixon, welcome to the show. I have just read an intro on some plastics headlines relevant to our world. I'd like to get into that, but if you would briefly each introduce yourself, your name and where you work, currently, and then we'll get started. My name is Leo Trissande. I'm a pediatrician and epidemiologist, and I direct the Center for the Investigation of Environmental Hazards at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine in New York City. I'm Linda Burnbaum.

I retired a number of years ago from being the director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, which is part of the NIH. And I was also the director of the National Poxicology Program, which also, in a addition to NIH involves FDA and CDC. I'm currently a scholar in residence at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University and spending my time making good trouble. You must know my friend Pete Myers. I know Pete very well. And last but not least, Christina. Yeah, my name's Chris Dixon or Christina as you like. And I am a campaign leader at the Environmental Investigation Agency based in the UK. And I, I,

I work on a lot of issues across our ocean program, but predominantly on securing a global plastics treaty, which is how I fill my days. Excellent. So thank you all for being here. Jeremy Grantham was recently on the program, and he told me that he believes plastics and specifically endocrine disrupting chemicals are a bigger threat to humanity and the future than climate change, which from a plastics ad hoc. or scientists, that might be one thing. But this guy has been a staunch climate change warrior and activist. That's quite a strong statement. Do any of you agree with that? Or what's your take on that statement? I'll say that I think it's partially true, because at least at this point, climate change or much of it may still be reversible. I am not positive. that we can reverse the contamination of our world, and maybe more than our world, maybe our solar

system, with the tremendous amounts of plastic that will essentially never go away, or at least some form of them will never go away. I would maybe add something to that, which it's not disagreeing. I think it's complementary, but from my perspective, plastic pollution and the health crisis that relates to plastic pollution is also really interlinked to the climate emergency. And so one thing I think that it was missing from the sort of list of headline kind of terrifying facts about the issue is that we're not really talking about the fact that plastics are actually fossil fuels. So the continued expansion of plastics, that is the plan B for the oil and gas industry. This is what they're looking to do, make more plastics over the coming decades. And recent modelling has shown that

it's impossible to stay within the 1.5 degree trajectory of the Paris Agreement. unless we reduce the production of plastics because emissions are really concentrated in the production of plastics. So I see plastic pollution and climate as very interlinked. I don't see them as separate issues, but I also understand that the growing understanding of the health impacts of plastic, that is an emerging area of research, which I'm sure Leo and Linda can tell you a lot about, but they're all connected and we can't really, I don't think we should silo the topics in that way, if that makes sense. It does make sense, not to mention the fact that if we gave up all oil and gasoline and diesel fuel, we would still have all the fractions left in a barrel of oil that are processed into plastics. And if we were somehow able to give up plastics, we would also have all the diesel and gasoline and other fractions. So they are joint products from a barrel of oil. Leo, did you have any comments on that opening statement?

Sure, I have two. So Chris really beautifully described it. Plastics are fossil fuels. So I can't really distinguish the threats. And in the context of the California wildfires, it's no secret that the wildfires are burning plastic. Those particles are going into the environment. They're causing increased air pollution and that is further accelerating climate change. And then the climate change in turn is inducing fires. So we're talking about a vicious circle. And that is to me why I find it really the better way to describe this is that it's fossil fuel production and consumption that's at the core of both of these interlinked threats. Well, at the core of that might just be consumption. Agreed. I think the second statement that I would I would quibble with or I would

add to clarify, is why these are such threats. So these are threats not because the population is going to decline, but because we are sicker and fatter and poorer as a result. So it's not just because these chemicals in plastic decrease sperm count or affect our ability to conceive alone. It's because they contribute to heart disease. They contribute to prematurity. They contribute to a variety of cancers and conditions chronically that run the lifespan from womb to tomb.

That is why plastics are such a crucial threat to our ability as humans to sustain ourselves on the planet. The planet will be fine. That's the irony of all this. We like to say that the planet is going to burn up, but our ability to survive as humans on the planet is what's at risk. Said differently, CO2 in the atmosphere is one of the waste products from fossil hydrocarbons, and it's affecting our external environment. But the other waste product from fossil hydrocarbons is in our bodies. It's an internal poison, if you will, and both are invisible. So they're difficult for people to emotionally, immediately see the negative external and internal impacts of our consumption and our incentives and our prices and our things.

That's right. So microplastics have really brought this issue to the four because they've made what we knew was invisible and a huge problem more directly visible. and they've caught the public attention in a way that chemicals used in plastic material simply didn't. I still can't get my head around all the things in my life that have plastics that I do these podcasts on plastics, and I'm very concerned about it, and yet I go back to my own life. I have a sleep apnea, so I wear a CPAP machine at night, and it's this plastic, pliable mask that I put on every night. I have no idea what's little micro things are leaching off of that and going into my body. And the thing is, is I don't think, I mean, corporations use narrow boundary goals for their profit, investment, revenue tech decisions. And all these things you're mentioning, we don't even study the impact.

I mean, aren't there like thousands or tens of thousands of potential chemicals and chemical compounds? Like, how do we even test what the impact on humans are on those things? So I'd like to distinguish a little. Okay, please. Or it's not distinguish. It's integrate, I think. And I love the idea, the comments that both Chris and Leo were making about the integration of climate change and plastics and being driven by fossil fuels. But I think when we talk about plastics, it's both the physical nature of the plastic.

which themselves, the microplastics and even tinier pieces of plastic called nanoplastics, and the physical nature, how that can irritate a biological system. And we have a lot of data now from aquatic wildlife, and we're beginning to get it from animals and people. But it's the chemicals that are used both making the plastic, that are in the plastic. and I should say many of these chemicals are not tightly bonded to like the backbone of plastic, but they're just kind of mixed in.

It's kind of like when you make a super saturated sugar solution, and if you get to a point and stuff can come out. Well, overuse, these plastics come out and over time. And what you alluded to, Nate, was you compartmentalized into different areas, And people think, oh, there's problems with when you make the plastics with pollution happening. And then there's problems when you use the plastic with pollution happening. And unfortunately, most of our policies and regulations talk nothing about, well, what happens when you stop using the plastic? We don't look at the entire life cycle of the plastic.

And that's why people forget that the styrofoam that you have your coffee in today, that that styrofoam is still going to be around a million years from now. A million years? Mm-hmm. So we took fossil carbon and hydrocarbons that were stored underground for millions to tens or even hundreds of millions of years in the case of coal. And we applied technology to those things, and we used them in a geological tiny,

fraction of a second of time, and their byproducts are going to be here for millions of years after in a form that the environment cannot assimilate? I think that's a fair statement. In other words, we have been successful, and I use that term in quotes, we've been successful in creating things that we really don't understand what their long-term impact is. And to back up a sense, I think we all need to remember when plastics were first created, many of us thought they were miracles. Wasn't it wonderful? I could have a bottle that I didn't worry about it breaking. I think the problem is people didn't think about the consequences of these things. So when we look at plastics or so many chemicals, we have to begin to ask questions.

Do we really need it? When do we really need it? Sleep apnea at this point in time, you may really need it for your health. Okay? And maybe your plastic sleep apnea tubing and stuff that you use for many years is not a major problem. But think of all the single-use plastics, all the unnecessary uses. But here's the thing, for the sleep apnea company or for any company to actually test all the adverse impacts, especially over years of something that uses plastics would render every product unprofitable. So our entire system is based on narrow boundary criteria of making decisions.

Is there considerable testing now, at least a power law sort of thing where we get 80% of the problem with 20% of the testing? Are there like massive new tests on plastic compounds and their health on humans? kind of the same as it always has been. Well, I think as far as the health effects and the stuff, we know that there are like 350,000 or more chemicals that have been intentionally synthesized in the last 70 years. That doesn't talk about things that have happened

because some of those chemicals interacted with the atmosphere or interacted with others. But even of those 350,000, less than 20 percent, have any testing at all. And very few have any kind of extensive. testing. There are new approaches that are being developed for more rapid kind of screening testing, but nothing, let's just say, the great majority of things are not tested and will not be tested, because at least in the United States, and I'm not sure about the UK, I know a little more about

the rest of the EU, Chris. Maybe you can comment, you know, the attitude with chemicals is innocent until proven guilty. I think that's a fair as a sense. across the board, actually, unfortunately. And I've just attended a treaty negotiation where we couldn't even really agree on the concept of chemicals of concern, used or present in plastic, in order to create a kind of global understanding of how we might regulate chemicals in plastic. So I don't have full confidence that, you know, the level of knowledge and understanding that you're imparting right now, that that's shared or understood universally, unfortunately. And so that kind of miracle product that you described has really quickly become a nightmare and

one that a kind of regulatory nightmare as well, because policy is not keeping pace with the speed of development within like the technology of plastics, for example. So I work in systems ecology where I talk about the carbon pulse, which is we're alive at this time where we're drawing down ancient carbon millions of times faster than it was trickle charged by photosynthesis. And we and our farm animals outweigh wild animals. animals, 50 to one humans and our farm animals. And factoids like that that are disturbing once you fly up high enough and look down at the roadmap. Each of you are working, you know, diligently in the plastic space.

What are some of the things that I didn't mention in my intro that are hooks in and factoids that you bring up in your discussions with people? You know, Jeremy Grantham is very focused on sperm count and endocrine disrupting chemicals. Martin Scherringer talked about PFAS as the forever chemical. What are some of the hooks that you're particularly concerned about and speak about? Some of the greatest concerns I have with plastic. And I should back up and say, I'm not an expert in understanding the physical impacts that tiny plastic particles can have on our body. bodies. I think we all are disgusted by the fact that we poop out a credit card's worth of plastic every week. Wait, what? Every human, like an industrialized world? I mean, it wouldn't be

shaped like a credit card because that wouldn't work well. That size, we're getting a little too graphic for me, but yes. Excrete that amount of plastic? Correct. And I'm not sure if that is not even an underestimate of the total. But I think what I have more knowledge about the chemicals that are used in plastic to give them the properties that you like, whether it's hardness, and that was things like, for example, bisphenol, BPA was used to give you nice hard bottles, for example, or things like phallates that in some cases are used to give you flexibility, or things like flame retardants, which theoretically were supposed to prevent things from rapidly bursting into flames or the PFAS, which are in everywhere, everything, all of us. I think it's the chemicals and their

long-term impacts, and I would say some of my biggest concerns are for the brains of our children. So I read recently that something like 0.5% of the weight of our brains is made up of microplastics. Is that a valid stat? I can't say that the number. I do know that you can find plastics in the brain, that you can, they are able to traverse the blood brain barrier. They're also able to traverse the placental barrier. So they're getting into our brains, into our unborn children. They're getting into men's testes. They're getting throughout our body. So in the, 300,000 years of our species history, this is the first generation that babies are born with plastic in their bodies already on day one. Our babies are born pre-polluted.

You know, microplastics have gotten the attention of the public profoundly, but we still don't know how much plastic are in people's bodies. The technology of measurement is such that we can't compare across studies. the New England Journal of Medicine study that documented the fourfold increase in heart attack, stroke, and even death as a composite event was based on technology that arguably can't be fully reproduced across individual studies. What I can tell you, as Linda alluded to, is that phallates were associated with early cardiovascular mortality a couple of years earlier, such that 50,000 American adults, men and women, between the ages of 55 and 64, die each year as a result of thallate exposure. The irony is that there's actually concordance between that New England Journal of Medicine Study and the previous work looking at thallates

because it was polyvinyl chloride plastic that was also associated in the microplastics and nanoplastics in the carotid arteries with heart disease. and so we're actually a lot closer to what you might call causal evidence that plastics kill people through early heart disease. I'm not going to tell you it's 100% definitive, but we're quite well on the path. And so when people say to me, okay, we're reducing fertility and unable to produce a population that's supposed to grow even further than it is, I'm also saying, look, It's killing people in the airport at Newark. People are dropping dead early. And I think that should really get people's attention even more than the fact that it's reducing the ability of our population to reproduce. I think some would argue that our planet is overpopulated right now as it is.

I have so many questions, but let me allow Christina to answer my original question, especially as a communicator and campaign leader on policy at such, what are some of the hooks and summary points that you use on this issue? Well, actually, something that just kind of popped into my head whilst I was listening to everyone talking was really around the framing of the problem and what the solutions might be, because we've just heard a lot of really scary information about the health impacts of plastics and our levels of exposure. But if you were to take the kind of industry narrative on face value, it would be that we can all just, you know, choose to reuse our bag or to do our recycling and everything will be fine.

This is basically a waste management problem. And if we manage our plastic waste correctly, there's not really a problem. And it's, you know, everything will be okay. And that's really not the case. There are many things in life where you can make informed kind of consumer choices that protect yourself. I'm going to wear a helmet when I ride my bike or I'm going to put a seatbelt on in the car and that might make it a bit safer for me. But the level of exposure to plastics in the environment make those kind of decisions basically out of our hands. They take that informed choice away from us. We know there's a problem and ultimately plastics are everywhere in the air that we're breathing. Plastics are in our bodies before we're even born. So we have no agency then in making those choices to protect ourselves. So that's not really answering your question, Nate, actually,

but it was just something that from a communications perspective, I think is really important because we are now beyond the point where our kind of individual actions can really help protect us. What we actually need is a collective global response to the problem of plastic pollution that really gets at the root of what the problem actually is. So it's not a waste management problem, although, of course, we're structurally dependent on, for example, exporting our plastic waste to the global south where it's not properly managed because we're

overburdening countries. So there are waste management problems. There are waste pickers who are exposed to terrible health impacts from handling plastic weights. But the problem goes way, way bigger than that. We're talking about upstream, the overproduction of plastics, the use of fossil fuels to make plastics, the communities that are living on the front line of a massive petrochemical buildout where these communities are exposed to terrible, terrible pollution in their water, in their air. And that is like on a projection to grow exponentially in the coming decades because there isn't a collective global understanding about plastics in the high level sense. This is no longer about, you know, reusing your plastic bottle. I mean, that's nice to do.

I recommend that you do it. But that's actually not where we are right now. It's much, much bigger than that. So when I talk to people about plastics, for me, the main message that I'm trying to convey is that this problem is much bigger than a simple behaviour change thing. Like, yes, we can change behaviours that might help. We can reuse, refill, repair, use less in the first place, of course. But ultimately, we need a massive system change that would actually create a whole new society that is far less dependent on the production and use of plastics. And that's scary. That's economically terrifying. It's big system change. But until we understand that that's what's required to protect communities and the environment into the future, we're actually going nowhere.

We all just met so you don't know that I often use the phrase, I have so many questions on my podcast, but I seriously have so many questions. As you were speaking, I had a glimmer of hope, which was then just, just crushed by another insight, which I will share. The things you're talking about should be nonpartisan, bipartisan, apply to liberals and progressives and conservatives and Republicans. I mean, this affects all of us and our children. So that's the glimmer of hope is unlike the way that the climate change and ecological biodiversity and such has kind of been. siloed on one side of the political spectrum.

This at least in theory could be galvanizing for both sides. However, it's not like chloroferal carbons or unleaded gasoline or DDT that you could keep everything in the economy the same except for you fix that mosquito spray because plastics are everywhere. They're in everything that we do. So would popular mass education and awareness of the things that you all work on and the danger to our babies and to our hearts and to our brains and all the things, what would be the consequences of that? Would it be another 1980s Exxon said that we're aware of climate change and it's not an issue? like the big business would just sweep it under the carpet with lobbying and such,

or could it actually lead to policy and responses globally, it sounds like it would be necessary? Or is this different than climate change like the United States or France or New Zealand or wherever could get their act together on plastics and be better off? So I have a little bit more hope because ultra-processed food is a heavy pathway for plastic use and for contamination of food with plastic associated chemicals. Because when you heat it,

the packaging, it leaches into the food. It doesn't have to necessarily heat. Linda can tell you a lot more of it. It happens on its own. These are chemicals not covalently bound to the plastic in the first place. They absorb under normal conditions. They absorb without acidity,

without alkaline conditions. the whole spectrum of pH, these chemicals, thallates, break down because they're additives to plastic, they're not covalently bound, and then under normal conditions, normal temperature conditions, goodness gracious, polycarbonate, polyethylene plastics, they break down. These are polymers. These are chained, billion long chains of molecules, and they're not impervious to just the conditions under which they're used. And so when you think about what gets into our bodies, as a result, that has many people on both sides of the aisle very enraged. And they feel like the Food and Drug Administration, which is largely a drug administration in the United States, has been asleep at the wheel. And they're ready to step in and really address the issue.

the question is, is that going to hit a brick wall in the form of the petrochemical industry? Because the chemicals used in plastic materials are essential to the lifespan of petrochemical companies and countries, I might add, that are poisoning us in our food, directly above all, but not just food. and in the meantime they unfortunately are essential to the death and poor well-being of all of us across the planet so we have to get out of the mindset that plastic is essential for human life because that is fundamentally a manipulation of the message in fact plastic is only essential for certain people's profit and plastic is essential piece of the unraveling of our human existence. Do we have the academic research capacity generally to say these 20% of plastics and chemical compounds are probably responsible for 80% of the damages and let's focus on those?

Or is it a like complete, like all of them are bad? Or are there some culprits that would be targeted first if we were to start to reduce? I'd kind of like to go back a little. We know that some are very bad. But our whole history, and it's a short history, we're talking, you know, decades, not millennium, is that we substitute, you know, we say this chemical is bad. So we come up with another chemical, which kind of looks like the one we had and you don't have to change the process and you don't have to change the product. And then 10, 20 years down the road, you find out, oh, my God, it's worse. So we call this unfortunate substitution or whack a mole or the chemical conveyor belt.

You can pick the terminology. But the point is, instead of focusing on a solution, we focus on the problem. So instead of saying we need a way to safely package something, you know, we need safe packaging, we say, oh, we've had all these PFS lining the plastic or we've got all these PFS that are on the side chains of our plastic and we'll just change to another PFS because there are 15,000 of them. Or we'll do the same thing with BPA. You know what? Why do we do that? because this PFS number A has been shown by people like the three of you to be bad. And so the industry is like, well, we can't use PFSA, but let's try PFS X.

Because you are not aware of it yet? Is it something as simple as that? Yeah. I think some of it's just it's easy. It's easy to change. So I think BPA is a beautiful, not beautiful, a very sad example. mothers and young parents didn't want their babies to be poisoned by BPA that was in baby bottles and sippy cups. So they protested and they stopped buying baby bottles and sippy cups with BPA.

And so industry actually sued the FDA to get BPA out of baby bottles and sippy cups. But guess what? They didn't switch to BPF or BPB or BPAF or BPAF. or BP SIP, and I could go on with the whole alphabet soup of very minor changes they made in the original molecule, which didn't change the function of the product. And why haven't we learned that if you don't change the function of something, if you don't change how you can use something in production, why would we think biology wouldn't, would change? I mean, that's, I'm kind of getting a little maybe over the top here i don't know nade whether i'm really answering what you're not

over the top um unfortunately i'm experienced a little dissonance here because off camera when we introduced ourselves we were laughing and joking and so i feel like this is a fun conversation with the three of you uh that have aligned values and it's freaking disgusting and hitting me in the stomach the the gravity of of what you're saying, some of which I knew, but not all of it. So there's nothing over the top here. What's over the top is that our culture has, by solving the problems of the past, the solutions have brought us to today. And that it takes podcasts to get people more aware of these things.

Although I do think you, the three of you've been working on this a long time, I think you would agree that even relative to three or four, years ago, interest and awareness is exploding on these issues. So that's a good thing, yes? Definitely. I think in the UK at least, but I would say it's kind of been mirrored globally. We call it the Blue Planet effect because of the TV show, Blue Planet, kind of catapulted. That was the scene with plastic floating in the ocean. And it kind of catapulted the issue of plastic pollution onto the public agenda, but that put it onto the political agenda because you suddenly had people going into their supermarkets and saying, actually, we don't want all of this

plastic crap. You know, we don't need like a banana wrapped in plastic. That's crazy. Just give it to us. It's got its own skin. You know, and it created that consumer pressure sort of created the wave that we're riding now where we do see. And yet, if I may be a little positive, a kind of global policy response, it's happening much slower than I would like. But it's, it is a policy response and it is that collective global action that I was talking about. The idea that we would even negotiate a treaty on plastics five or six years ago with that's bananas, that's actually, we've come a really long way. And with each round of negotiations that we have for a new plastics treaty,

I feel like the kind of envelope of what I think is possible is pushed a little bit further. So, for example, now we're talking quite seriously about a global cap in the production of plastics. That was a completely off-the-wall idea that I don't think anybody thought would be possible even two years ago. So things are moving, and public awareness is really – is there. But, you know, law and policy and science also has to catch up with that. So that's where we are now, I think. So, Leo, I know you want to follow up with that, but let me ask a brief question. And climate change is a global thing because we all share an atmosphere.

But is plastics the same way? I asked earlier, could an individual country make draconian rules and changes and improve the health of the ecosystems and the people living in that country? Or is it still there's negative effects in the air from microplastics and nanoplastics that travel around the world? Is it a global issue? or is it more local and national? I would say that it's a global issue.

The reason that we're talking about having, for example, a treaty on plastics is because what's been happening thus far, you know, the status quo that we have is a complete fragmentation of approaches to dealing with the problem. So you have many countries now have bans on certain plastic products, for example. They might have bans on the import of plastic waste that I kind of talked about earlier, so saying actually we're not going to import plastic from the US or the UK to recycle it anymore. You guys can deal with that problem yourself. But at the end of the day, plastic as a product and as a pollutant is completely transboundary.

You know, something that I lose in the ocean in Brighton where I live could end up in a completely different place. In the same way that everything in this room that I'm talking to from, you know, is produced in a different part of the world. So the polymer will be produced somewhere. It could be assembled into the computer that I'm talking to. you on in another country and then it's shipped to the UK and when I dispose of it as e-waste it could go to I don't know Kenya so it's it's when we're far beyond a situation where an individual country could actually solve this problem themselves and quite critically the pieces that are most complicated and they relate to the things that

Linda and Leo have been talking about they relate to product design so what is actually going into products that we're bringing into our homes so what kinds of chemicals for example, are in those products. And product design regulation is completely patchwork across the world. So at the moment, we're importing things and we don't have any control over the design of those products. So particularly small countries, for example, where they rely on the import of plastic products, they can't really create any requirements on the production and design of them. So they have no agency over the safety of those products. So that's why globally we need a kind of combined approach. Yes. Plastic is a...

a worldwide problem, just as climate change is. But in certain cases, countries or states can make a difference by their regulations. So, for example, in the United States, there are many chemicals, for example, that are banned in California. And because California is the fifth or six largest economy in the world, producers don't want to make something that they can't sell or use in California. And I think the same thing is true that it's not the best way, but there are ways that individual states, countries can make a difference for their population that will impact how other states or countries respond. I think I would agree. The only issue is that it also depends on, you know, what is the size of the market that you're talking about? So the EU is similar,

has very progressive legislation related to plastics, not perfect, but world leading, I would say. But what about if you're a small island developing state, does that mean that you get all of the crappy products then imported into your country because you don't have that purchasing power? So I think the problem is that, you know, the examples that you gave are good ones, but there's a completely unequitable approach, actually. And that's the issue that I was really talking about. So let me ask a follow up to that. So the core of this podcast is about the carbon pulse and energy resources, materials that we don't pay for the creation or the pollution of the main input to our economic system, which is the benefits from oil and gas. So back 100 years ago, when we had a billion odd people, things could be grown locally

and they wouldn't have to be transported long distances which would require packaging. So part of the need or the perceived need for plastics today is the cost and convenience of getting things to where the people are, consumable foods and such. Presumably if we all lived more locally and didn't buy stuff that was packaged and shipped around the world, we would need less plastics. So how much of this is more local movements around the world? And would that make a difference or is it much, much larger than that? Just to take a step back, these are externalities that are.

that are rising out of plastic production and pollution and consumption. And the adverse consequences, the externalities, hadn't been quantified until very recently. So we had done a series of studies documenting that direct disease costs in the United States due to chemicals used in plastic materials are $250 billion a year, 1.2% of the gross domestic product. And that's just that one externality. others too. Of course. I mean, if we talk about the

cost of cleaning up Phafas, an estimated $100 billion, the point being that the ecological costs usually, that my ecological economist colleagues usually joke that there's zeros on the right side of the number that we find for disease-related costs, and Lindis points that apt, that the ecological costs are likely higher. And then you're forgetting the fence-line community impacts. What's that? From, well, communities that are living near plastic production facilities have a disproportionate chemical exposure.

And they suffer worse disease and costs more per person. And then the waste pickers are another population. Often women of childbearing age who have a disproportionate exposure compared. These $250 billion in cost per year in the U.S. were related to general population exposures to phallates, bisphenols, P, Foss, and Flames. retardants. Let me ask this, Leo or Linda or any of you. This is being recorded on January 21st. It'll be out in a few weeks. We've just witnessed the horrific fires in Los Angeles. And only a few months ago, the flooding from Hurricane Helene in North Carolina, where there were

a lot of chemical plants and other things that washed in. I have a friend of mine whose dog died because he ate something that was in the yard, that was toxic. That's not something we've talked about, but when there's a disaster like that and things are dispersed or burned, like is the air? I mean, people are breathing the air in Los Angeles right now with all these houses that are full of plastics and other things. That's also an externality that we don't even have the ability to study. Is that a serious issue? Well, there's a lot, there are people beginning to address this. We've known that forest fires, you know, the air pollution generated from forest fires is really bad for your health for multiple reasons.

And now people are looking at the additional contamination that you get not only from all the chemicals that get burned, but that are generated. So when you burn plastics, you generate some really, really toxic chemicals as well. well, like dioxins, you know, which I think many people are familiar with dioxin from what happened with Agent Orange, you know, and the Vietnam experience and so on. But I think the important thing is people are starting to realize that this is a problem. There were fires in California in 2017 or 18, I think. There were the mass of fires that also burned whole towns and burned industrial facilities. So then you get not only what ends up in the air, people forget about, and you mentioned it with your friend's dog, things that end up in the water and then get into the soil leading to

terrible contamination as well. Let me ask you a question that I'm really curious about, and I have an upcoming podcast with Shauna Swan, but it's now over three years since my first podcast with her where she mentioned alligator penises as one of the, you know, evidence that toxics and plastics are impacting animal species but are some of the things that we see do they happen

to wild animal species as well that are just out in the mountains and on the plains or in other countries do we have evidence that plastics are impacting wild animals? The answer is yes but the

but I want to make I want to hammer on a point that I think you've missed in the previous question. I've studied September 11 effects on children for now 15 years. And we've documented dioxins and Phaas at higher levels in exposed populations 10 years after the disaster. And so my concern is that when we get past the acute episode of a wildfire, we forget the longer-term impact. that come from plastic that are going to arise there. East Palestine, Ohio, there was an explosion of a vinyl chloride carrying facility that, you know, I've seen some data suggest, well, we don't see dioxin exposure in people, but we saw dioxin exposure well above the safe levels for EPA and soil. Those are going to be impacts that reverberate for decades to come. That's never going to show up in a $250 billion a year estimate. It's, you're right, wildlife effects. are going to put additional zeros on the cost of that impact. We are not properly cost accounting. We are overproducing plastic at a lower cost than the societal, the optimal amount.

Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, would be rolling over his grave at this phenomenon because it's causing market dysfunction. But if we really, on this issue and others, pay the true costs for our products, our economic system, the way we have it now couldn't exist. Well, I don't think Adam Smith would argue for zero pollution, not even Arthur Pagoo, who is the person who came up with the notion of attacks that would be exactly the amount of the externality that should fix this problem. But at the same time, we do need to recalibrate our focus if we're going to survive as a

species on this planet. And I want to riff a little bit on healthcare being part of the solution. We haven't talked about health care much at all in this conversation. I think it's really important. We have a paradox in healthcare as a practicing pediatrician. I use plastic to treat patients. And, you know, little babies get, you talked about your CPAP machine. Little babies get intubated with breathing shoes made of plastic to deliver surfactant

because their premature lungs are not making the lifeblood. of the respiratory system. Because of plastic? Because of plastic. Right. Now, I want to be clear because of essential plastic. And that's the key phrase. We have, and health care is part of the problem,

we have gone way too far to the wrong end, the extremes. Use the COVID-19 pandemic as an example. A lot of people were wrapping the trays that we used to give in healthcare facilities with an extra layer of plastic, thinking that COVID-19 is something that's on the surface. No, it's not. The masks were crucial to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

But we went into an over-hygiene mode, and we used plastic as a justification or as a blanket of safety. There are other situations in healthcare where we use, and in the general society, by the way, where we use plastic for no good human health purpose, or we can use alternatives. And that's why I'm so glad organizations like healthcare without harm are leading the momentum,

because the healthcare industry is often actually part of the solution. Think of medical waste incinerary as a mercury pollution. They got mercury out of medical waste incineraries before we got it out of coal-fired power plants, or at least had put the scrubbers on the coal-fired power plants. Well, I think, Leo, what you've gotten at a little bit, and I think this is worth mentioning, we always talk about risk benefit.

Sometimes we need to talk about risk-risk, and there may be risk-risk trade-offs. So, for example, intubating a brand, you know, a tiny baby with something to give them certain factants, maybe an essential use of a plastic. But we don't need every toy you buy your kid to be covered with plastic. plastic, they practically have to get an ax to break it open with. We don't, we don't, you know, there is so much unnecessary. And, you know, I think maybe these are things that, or approaches that could be started population-wide more quickly to say, we don't need everything wrapped in plastic. If I order from Amazon, which everybody does today, and I'm getting pills, why should, if I get two

bottles of pills, why should the two bottles of pills have to be wrapped in plastic? Absolutely no reason. So it's a different way to begin to think about things, kind of, how can we reduce our plastic while we figure out approaches to totally get rid of it? Among the ranks of you and your colleagues that are researching and working and fighting to address this problem, is the concept of essential plastic? And has that become something that you're galvanized around? And would people agree on these are the essential uses of plastic and everything else is either strong form or semi-strong form, no? Is there being work on such categorization? So I think we've got a long way to go,

but there is a watershed moment that we have not mentioned that I know Linda's very proud of. So we have, I now have as part of clinical care, a PFS test that insurance companies cover. So a first plastic chemical that is that health care providers are supposed to measure in populations living in contaminated water, communities with contaminated water. It's the first time we've had an environmental health test in clinical care for 50 years. Lead was the previous one.

And I think what we're going, and the reason why that moment's really important is that it makes the problem visible in a way that directly impacts their patients. the average medical provider gets between three and seven hours of training during the entire four years of medical schools. Just use medical schools. I think that's maybe NYU. I think there are lots of medical schools where if they get an hour, they're lucky. Well, and let me put a point on that. I live near Rochester, Minnesota. I swear Mayo Clinic has got to be one of the biggest plastic consumers in the world.

I mean, it's like everything, every test, everywhere. It's single-use plastic that costs the patient like me many hundreds of dollars. I mean, do we really need that? Is that an essential use? I don't know. Well, people don't do anything about what they don't see, right? So if it's not a problem that's part of the healthcare conversation, of course they're going to say, well, plastic is fine. of course they're going to see albuterol inhalers for kids with asthma or gastric tubes.

These are gastric tubes for folks who are having a really rough bout of cancer and they have an obstruction. They need to get their stomach pumped. That's totally reasonable. But we've forgotten the in, we haven't been curious about the invisible. So I'm riffing on Ted Lassel a little bit here. But the point being that we have to be curious as a health care community, be invisible. And the PFS clinical test is really the first step for people to say, hey, wait a minute. I mean, organizations like health care without harm are organizing certain hospitals to be the cutting edge.

And I'd like to think NYU is on that cutting edge, but not every hospital is going to do that on its own. It's only when we make the problem visible for the individual health care provider that it really becomes real. We have to, we think really hard about what we're using. What's the real problem here? Is it unawareness? by humans who buy things and choose things? Is it some cloak and dagger power profit motive by the chemical companies and the fossil fuel companies? Is it governments who see this as too big of an issue to solve so they kick the can

to the future? Is it some value system of what we care about and we don't care about our health and nature enough we care about convenience and comfort in the short term or some combination of all those things? Or what do you think? I would argue that it's a combination of all of the above, right? And so that's what makes it such an interesting problem to try and solve. Like listening to what Leo was saying about the healthcare sector, I went to Ottawa for some plastics negotiations. And when you arrived at the airport, there were billboards everywhere with kids with the kind of respirator marks. And mask on, and the slogan, plastics save lives. So the question is, you know, who's paying for this

advertising? Because there is, on the one side, you have the groups like healthcare without harm, who are saying quite clearly we shouldn't have blanket exemptions for the healthcare sector. There are clearly areas where healthcare practitioners could use less plastic and want to use less plastics. And on the other side, we have the vested interests of companies who are saying, no, no, no, we want the whole sector exempted because, you know, we want to kind of tug on the emotional heartstrings there and say that plastics are essential for human survival. So for me it's a kind of combination of all of these things. We have the climate playbook, if you like, being deployed here,

where you have large companies who are investing a lot of money in lobbying and trying to derail any kind of progressive conversation, which might harm their bottom line. So that kind of undermines the efforts of everybody else who's operating in this space, who can't compete with that type of investment in kind of greenwashing, false solutions, yeah, and emotive campaigning. Chris is making outstanding points, but this is where it gets a little bit fuzzy, is that sometimes the petrochemical companies are actually countries. So Saudi Arabia and some of the Arab nations were some of the loudest advocates in Busan

to gum up the works and slow the implementation of, a strong plastic treaty. For some countries like the bricks, the fossil fuel trajectory is the pathway to their economic growth. They're arguing that the U.S., Europe, Canada, and other industrialized countries, they had it easy. They were able to pollute the dickens out of the planet, and here we go. And so why can't I have my piece of the pie too? So that's going to require, and this is where we're getting into a really tricky spot, a deep and intense conversation about what's fair and sustainable development across the planet. I'm not sure the U.S. and the current administration is willing to have that conversation, but I think there are some countries in the

plastic tree negotiations that are too. Let me ask a two-part question. I'd like each of you to answer and then we'll get into quote-unquote solutions and direction forward. What is the risk for society and nature if we persist using plastics at the same size and scale as we are now or even growing it in the future? And second part question is, what is the risk for governments and industry if they persist using plastics in this default scenario? Well, we know now that the largest cause of disease and disability on death is in the U.S. and in the U.S. and in most of the world is chronic non-communicable disease. And that is increasing in multiple ways. And with that, I'm really including problems with fertility as well, non-communicable problems.

And until if we continue, if that continues to increase, we're beginning to already see some of the impacts on quality of life. So who would have predicted, 30, 40 years ago, that our third of our kids would be overweight or actually obese, that a third of adults would be obese. These problems, for example, which is associated with increased cancer, increased heart disease, decreased fertility, all kinds of problems. And this is not restricted to the developed world. Most people are aware of the obesity problem and know that that it's true, I think very few people would link that to plastics or endocrine disrupting chemicals.

Because I would say we have not communicated that. So you're confident that is one of the main drivers? I think that is a main driver. When I look at the chemicals that are involved in plastics and I look at things that are associated with the increased risk of obesity, type 2 diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease, asthma, small for birth weight babies, preterm birth, less fertility. It's the same nasty actors in many cases. So instead of me going on a low carb diet, I should go on a low plastics diet.

The world needs to go on a low plastic diet. We are limited as individuals in what we can individually do to change our own behavior. We really need policy change. and policy change, I'll take it as a start at the local level, but we really need it to happen internationally. And when you say what makes the difference, I think, Chris, you mentioned the climate change kind of playbook where they were, you know, kind of obfuscating the facts. It's really going all back to the tobacco industry playback, where you delay, you obfuscate, you deny, and we're seeing the same thing again.

with certainly the fossil fuel industry, climate change, and plastics. And as we started at the beginning with a discussion that climate change and plastics go hand in hand. Did you want to answer my question on what the future looks like? Is it just, I mean, this whole conversation makes me think we're living the Twilight Zone TV show. I mean, I've been living this and not aware of it until just a couple years ago on the plastic stuff. But you think the future is grim, all the other issues aside, just because of the plastics if it's not changed.

I am concerned whether I already have grandchildren who are, some of them are already grown up, but when I'm concerned about my great, great grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and I wonder what kind of life they will be able to have in the world with the levels of pollution and the levels of climate change. I think Linda, well, if I wasn't scared before, I certainly am now. But I think, you know, when I think about your question, I think about the fact that the planet, separate from the health crisis, although it's actually very much part of the same problem, You know, we're facing many intersecting crises, right?

You know, there's the triple planetary crisis, which is biodiversity loss, pollution, and the climate emergency. And plastics actually has been shown to sort of be directly connected to all three parts of this crisis. And we're on a planet of finite resources. So this trajectory where we constantly extract and produce, that is unsustainable. That's obvious, both from a planetary perspective and a humanitarian perspective. So what does that mean for the future? I don't have the answer to that question. I wish I did. I'd probably be rich or I wouldn't be rich because someone would try to silence me. But, you know, we really need to think about how we transition to kind of, I guess like let's call it zero waste, genuine circularity, but basically protecting finite resources, you know, truly valuing the planet's resources and cultivating a completely different culture that considers production, the reuse, the repair of things, really valuing what we have. Otherwise, you know, we've just seen, you know, consecutively the hottest months on record again and again. It's,

you know, a record busting couple of years in terms of global heating. So we know we can't continue. You know, I don't have to be a scientist. I'm not a scientist. I don't have to be a scientist to tell you that this trajectory is unsustainable. So without a radical pivot, we're on a road to nowhere. I would quibble with one thing you just said, because from what I know about you and what I've read about you, you are already rich, given what you're doing with your life and your personality and such, just not in the ways that our culture might indicate by dollars or pounds in the bank. And I think it's language reframings like that that get at the heart of these issues. But thanks for your comment. Leo, did you want to weigh in?

Sure. So again, I think the planet will end up being fine, but I think the human life on the planet will suffer faster even than Linda described. I think this is a one to two generation opportunity. And what will also happen is akin to what it was described in the handmaid. tail. We will probably have a situation where, and it won't be because of chemicals affecting our potency or ability to conceive. It'll be because of a broader array of threats, but people will be contaminated and there will be a fight over food, water that is safe to eat and consume. And that could very well produce an enhanced global conflicts the way it's already been described for climate change. So instead of fighting over food and energy and water, we're going to be fighting over consumable, healthy, non-contaminated food and water. That could be a proverbial endgame here. I mean, I don't mean to sound alarmist. I'd never thought of that before.

But these are the steps that we are already traipsing. So I haven't asked you this explicitly, though, you've inferred it. As a pediatric, attrition, what scares you most in your daily work about toxicity, plastics, and such? But scares me the most is some of the longer-term consequences that we haven't even scratched the surface to our understanding. So we've alluded to 16,000 chemicals used in plastic materials. We have no hazard data, none, no information, no se savi, sobre de 10,000. We don't know about 10,000 of the 16,000. So I'm not saying all 10,000 are toxic, but I am saying that there are, you know, we talk about thallates, bisphenols, P-FOS.

There are big, P-FOS is a very big category of chemicals and flame returns. Now, I'm including the organophosphorus as well as the brominated in that group. But that's, you know, a sliver of the category of chemicals. And yet we can't wrap our heads completely around all the potential consequences because latency of chronic disease can be in the decades, not in the years. And so what I'm, you know, we're seeing an uptick where people are getting colon cancer in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. There is something really problematic about that uptick. It's subtle, but, you know, we're seeing certain cancers in reproductive cancers in women go sky high in ways that we didn't imagine before.

we used to think of just breast and ovarian cancer as being on the rise. There are others that are going up. So that, to me, is where I'm getting horrified. It's as a pediatrician, people, as Linda said, are being pre-polluted, and we have no idea what the long-term consequences are of that. We also, Nate, now know that some of these changes that may take decades to become obvious are going to be passed on to the next. generation too. In other words, we're not necessarily changing our genes, but we may be changing

how our genes turn on or turn off. We're beginning to see more and more information for that, and that is super concerning. So what are the, you know, take off your hats as scientists and activists in this space. Paint me an imaginary or possibly realistic pathway, a scenario in the coming 10 to 20 years that we redress the worst of this? What would it take and what sort of direction? Start with you, Chris. I can have a go at this, but, you know, this is not, you know, there's going to be many different answers to this question and many different possibilities. But I do like to think about when I'm looking for some kind of glimmer of positivity, thinking about, you know,

the hole in the ozone layer, right? Which, you know, I was born in the 80s and when I was in primary school, that was the big environmental topic that we were scared of as kids. You know, there was a lot of awareness about the hole in the ozone layer. It was growing. People were getting skin cancer. It was, you know, it was a nebulous and terrifying concept for kids, but it was something that we learned about at school and we were encouraged to write to our members of parliament and kind of, I guess, activate on the issue of the hole in the ozone layer. And there was quite a rapid policy response once the big threat of the hole in the ozone layer became apparent. And the global community came together and set up the Montreal Protocol,

which is considered to be the most successful multilateral environmental agreement in the world. But the Montreal Protocol deals with combating the hole in the ozone layer, right? So regulating the substances that were causing that hole. And that hole in the ozone is repairing and those substances, whilst they are still being illegally traded and they are present, they have been radically reduced and the problem is shrinking because of a collective global response. So it's interesting for me as someone who works in kind of global policy to think about what were the elements of the Montreal Protocol that were successful and how could they be replicated here? Because we had the public awareness. We had the industry realizing

that something they were producing was harmful to people. and planet. We had funding in the Montreal Protocol multilateral fund, which was channeled towards helping countries implement the solutions. So this kind of, these elements like adequate financing to help solve the problem, a collective and common understanding of what the problem is, and bringing industry on board to regulate harmful substances. These are all part of a kind of package of things that need to happen and I think are happening when it comes to plastics. So I see some positivity there. And that's kind of one of the areas. There are many other things, but that's just one thing that I like to think about, you know, what can we learn from where we have had

success in combating a complex environmental challenge? Yes, the industry producing hydrofluorocarbons was much smaller. It's a much small, it's a smaller problem, less ubiquitous, but still significant. And we had a lot of the same aspects with that problem that we have here in plastics, you know, a concerned industry, trying to obfuscate, etc. And they were overcome. So there's something in that, I think, which I would, I'm just going to take a positive because I felt like we did go a bit doom mongering there for a second. Quite rightly so, but.

Well, you must not watch this podcast much because this is kind of middle of the road so far. Linda or Leo, do you want to chime in? I want to comment and also tout the Montreal Protocol, because one of the aspects with which Chris didn't mention, was the issue of essentiality so that you continue to use something where it is absolutely essential. If there are safe alternatives, and I want to use alternative in the big sense of solving problem by a different way, if you have a safe alternatives, you use it. If you don't, you start looking for one. And if there aren't, at the time, you keep using it in essentiality.

I think that needs to be an approach that we need to support and encourage from anything. Sure, with many of these chemicals like PFS, we have to turn off the tap because the more we make, they just are accumulating in us and in the environment essentially forever for any of them. But the point is, there are some essential uses, at least at this point, that we may need. But that would dramatically reduce the total amount. And I think you could say the same thing about plastics. That, first of all, there are some plastics which may be safer than others. How they're made, what they're used, how they could eventually break down.

You know, making things that will never go away. Fifty years ago sounded like a great idea. We learned that's not such a great idea. But I think that we need to begin to say, let's put some pragmatism into into things, and let's do what is absolutely essential, and let's get rid of the rest. So there are three periods where we have not had an exponential growth of plastics. The 1970s oil crisis, the 2008 financial crisis, and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. We have a really tall order before us.

The first step, above all, is to flatten the curve. we don't flatten the curve. We are going to have in low and middle income countries the same degree, if not more, chemical contamination, than we do in the U.S., Europe, Canada, and all the industrialized countries. We already see it with PFAS levels. When you look at low birth weight counts due to PFOS,

it's not the U.S. that leads to the way it's the Asian countries, hundreds of thousands of cases of low birth weight babies who are less well able to perform, in school who are more likely to be obese and have early cardiovascular disease, not to mention a few other things. And as a pediatrician, you are confident that there's a causal link between that and plastics, toxics? Yes.

There's, I mean, we, you know, we hemmed and hawed in expert panels back in 2015, almost 10 years ago, I'm embarrassed to say. And we had 15 exposure outcome relationships directly related to endocrine disrupting chemicals. A few years later, that list was at 32. We just continue to keep finding health effects. That didn't include cardiovascular disease back in 2020 when we published that review article. We can debate for hours what causality requires, but if we wait for causality, we'll all be dead. Well, that's one of the issues, right, is this is a mismatch with our evolutionary wiring as a finite life, short discount rate.

steep discount rate short attention span species is this isn't like we had a fire and then we looked at the problem. This is a 10 year lag time or longer in some cases of the negative effects of our consumption. So it's like just like climate change. It's almost a perfect storm for our brains to ignore and deny because it's abstract and in the future. So let me ask you this. And I'll let you finish my original question.

relative to climate change, advocacy, education, communication, research, I would imagine that the plastic space is a tiny fraction of the resources and people like the three of you. And yet, to my original question, Jeremy Grantham thinks this is a bigger risk to civilization than climate change. Is that changing? Are we getting a lot more people on fighting on the good team, so to speak? I think we're making progress there. in communicating and having people becoming more aware of the problem. Just like for such a long time, when people talk climate change, all they thought about was polar bears. And they didn't think about people.

And I think for plastic, people think about mounds, you know, of debris. They're not thinking about getting into ourselves and the impacts it's causing on us. I think we're a little behind with climate change, but I think we're coming along. And again, supporting Chris and Leo, these are intimately linked problems. I'm not an expert on this, but the way I see it is there's four different leverage points. One is our value system as humans alive during this time. And that not only is relevant to plastics, but the environment and human well-being and all kinds of other things that we're going to have to be willing to give up some of our convenience and comfort for. the greater good on these issues.

You know, otherwise it, otherwise, you know, they're, otherwise it's difficult. The second is the prices that we pay for things don't include most of the harmful effects to ourselves and to the broader environment. So the prices have to at some point reflect the negative impacts of plastics in our processes. Third is governments may have to play a role in saying what is essential and what is dangerous. And then fourth is a crisis response where we see the smoking gun like DDT or the ozone, as Christina mentioned, that we're like, oh, my gosh, this happened because of plastics, we need to respond. So all of those things, I think, need to change. Leo, did you want to add anything more to what you think is possible?

and what scenario would allow a quote-unquote fixing of this problem other than another recession? So I want to be positive in that I have been in the Plastics Treaty process since before the first intergovernmental negotiating committee meeting. I was in Senegal for the first pre-meeting, and not an iota of human health was mentioned. Human health was in the treaty, but no one was talking about human health. Now we see in Busan, South Korea, led by countries where there are not a lot of researchers studying the health effects of plastic, Rwanda, Kenya, Panama, screaming and bashing their hands on the wood, hopefully tables. And they're screaming about the consequences to their populations. So I think we are on a very steep part of the curve.

We need to unfortunately replicate the plastic production curve in terms of the exponential growth of scientists in the community. We definitely need to transfer knowledge about the health effects of plastic and the technology to measure plastic in people to those countries or we are never going to have a proper body count. We barely body count lead. I can tell you when we did the global cost of lead exposure, we still don't have done. data for many of the African countries, and this is 100 years after we first identified lead poisoning. So we have a huge way to go, but we've come such a long way, and we're putting a lot of pressure on Generation Z and the millennials to step right up into this. I'm an Xer. I'm in the middle. I'm trying to carry the torch as best I can. But what Linda said earlier, this is now beyond

individual behavior change because it's embedded in our whole system. So what is your hope for millennials that they do? They rise up and they speak out and they step up. And this is no longer just about a climate change issue. Chris said it really well. It's a triple planetary crisis. It's plastic. It's climate change and it's biodiversity. If we don't address all three of those problems, the good news is there's a vaccine. It's called a global plastics treaty that can address. all three of those in one go. So I hope I'm not divulging any secrets, but I have friends that were at the Busan conference, and they were so jaded knowing that countries and the big businesses would kind of shrink the

bandwidth for people like yourselves, that they made bingo cards that had things like red lines or I'm confused or there's a plastic bottle on the on the table and it was like they knew that all the science would be presented but still the power in the industry to push back on this would would win the day and at least on the surface it seemed like it did that was a few months ago that that conference yeah if I can just say for a second I felt like I was on call the last night of the treaty I was the last speaker on behalf of the general public. That was at 2.30 in the morning on the day after the meeting was supposed to close. So talk about doing it on call night for the planet. That's how I personally felt. And you should have been

at prime time, but they delayed and obfuscated. So you went at 2.30 in the morning? Yes. Wow. Chris. Yeah. And I will say I stayed for you, Leo. I was there behind you at 230. But yeah, I think, so there's the kind of what happened, the negotiations on the surface. And I think you alluded to that. I've also been guilty of a bingo card myself. But then I've had the time now since coming back from Busan and admittedly I felt extremely deflated. You know, this is one of the main things I work on. I feel deeply invested in trying to get a good outcome. But having had time to sort of step back a little bit, I also think, and I alluded to this earlier, but, you know, we worked with governments on trying to get a proposal for, you know,

legally binding measures to reduce the production of plastics, right? Something that I had thought was, you know, a little bit off-the-wall blue sky thinking, but, you know, it's something that we're really passionate about at EIA. And at the end of the day, we had over 100 countries put their name to proposals to have legally binding measures to reduce the production of plastics, right? That's over a hundred countries gathering around that vision. We also had a moment in that kind of nightmare plenary that felt like it would never end. We also had a moment where the delegate from Rwanda gave this really powerful speech where she talked about everything that was necessary to secure an agreement on plastics. And she talked about the financing that would be required, the need to address production,

the need to ban products, the need to address chemicals. And that was on behalf of over 90 countries that she made that statement and the entire plenary, with some notable exceptions, stood up and gave a standing ovation. And I think that now we're seeing a tipping point in political momentum that has been lacking at the previous rounds of negotiations. You know, too much time, too much floor time has been given to the countries that are only there to derail progress. And that group of countries is a small but very vocal minority, but they've been able to kind of dictate the negotiations. And now what we're seeing is a shift, actually, where a kind of collective global majority that actually wants something good is standing up

and saying, you know what? Enough is enough of this time wasting. If you're not going to come with us, we're going to do it ourselves. So I think something meaningful happened in Busan, actually, despite the bingo cards and the deflation. Is the United States one of those countries that's standing in the way of progress? If I was to give an honest answer to that, I would say actually not until recently, I don't know what's going to change. So, you know, actually we had the US supporting conceptually the idea of an aspirational global goal on production, making some quite positive noises.

And we know that the US can be a critical player in brokering deals. So I'm as cynical as the next person about the US position in negotiations. don't get me wrong, but there were some constructive movements coming from the U.S. Let me ask each of you this. Are there any important emerging research that you are part of or aware of or anything we should be keeping an eye on in terms of developments of the worlds of plastics or plastic alternatives? I'll let you each speak to that. Linda? I think the science is clearly demonstrating not only that plastic, are in all of us, as well as in the whole ecosystem, but that they are having health impacts.

And those health impacts are not necessarily readily visible like it does if you get a bug and you get sick and you get rid of the bug and you get better. Because many of the changes that are brought about by the plastics are going to be lifelong, especially things that impact our fetuses, our infants, our children, and it have lifelong impacts. And I think the fact that it's not just one health impact, but there's a plethora of responses is something that we need to be aware of. I would plug two fantastic things that came out over the last year or so. One was the Monaco-Mindaroo Commission on public health, which kind of simsum. synthesized all the information around plastics and health in a very accessible way, which I was then able to use to communicate around these topics very effectively in my work.

And the second was from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, looking at plastics and climate and modeling different scenarios around polymers and the relationship to climate. And so I really felt when we commissioned some research last year around scenarios for plastics industry and the 1.5 trajectory, there's just not enough research on plastics and climate, actually. So I would feel like my recommendation or my request would be to invest more in that space because we are finding everything we're learning about the relationship between plastics and climate and the growth trajectory that Leo was talking about, extremely. alarming. And that's also because of the health impacts, right? Build out means more health impacts as well. So my call to action would be to dedicate time in the research field to that. I think we focus too much on documenting the human costs in developed countries. The petrochemical countries are not going to change their ways as easily as the low and middle income countries are really going to drive the conversation forward.

And stay tuned for more work that really documents the impact there. Because the assumption is, well, you know, in Africa, they don't get exposed to chemicals used in plastics. We know that the OECD estimates that chemical production and consumption is actually going to be majority low and middle income countries by 2030. Let me ask you this question. And as we approach our time limit here, as a podcast, host who is deeply concerned about this and willing to try to communicate to our listeners and to the

wider world. What are some key research questions or key topics? We don't have to discuss the person at this point, but what really needs to be wider understood and disseminated in our world about this issue and podcasts and movies and documentaries, everything? I'll let each of you give a brief answer to that? I think we have to be pragmatists and focus on what we can stop using and stop needing now. In other words, let's take the easy wins first. And I think the second thing is, is we need to make people realize that recycling doesn't work for plastics and stop. You know, we're all trying, everybody I know tries hard to recycle. So real quickly, When I have a styrofoam coffee cup and I throw it in the recycle bin, what ends up happening to that, especially if nothing happens to, I mean, styrofoam can't be recycled.

Okay. So then I put it in the garbage. So it sits in a landfill for a million years. Correct. And I think people need to understand that and that. Well, I care about this issue and I didn't know that. And I think that that's an example. You know, I think a number of years ago, Nate, probably 20 years ago when recycling really got going, at that point you had to separate.

Your plastic was in one container and your paper was in another and your aluminum was in another and so on. And your paper, you know, it's, and that worked actually for recycling because you can recycle paper and you can recycle aluminum and you can recycle glass. But the problem is plastic can't be recycled more than once. and even then most of it is already too contaminated to use. So we should be a social, like, a disgust slash shame factor when we're using styrofoam cups. Like that should be the anti-flex symbol. Like, I don't even think about it, but look at all the office buildings in the world

that have stacks and stacks of styrofoam cups that everyone gets coffee in the morning. We should bring a ceramic cup and fill it up with our coffee and then wash it or whatever. Anyways. These are societal changes that I think appropriate messaging, appropriate social media kind of examples could help bring about. And you do have more and more people doing that kind of thing, that kind of limited thing. But it's a good start. Real quick, Chris and then Leo, on research topics or things that we should address more. I mean, I think there are too many to pick, but if I was just going to pick one, I would say something that I work on quite a lot because in the kind of UK context, I work on a campaign related to supermarkets in the UK and plastic reduction in the grocery retail sector. And one thing we promote heavily is the transition to reuse systems as well as refill initiatives and also kind of separately to the supermarket work. You know, something I'm really passionate about is repair. And I don't think there's been enough work to really explore the commercial and financial levers that are necessary to dramatically scale up, reuse, refill and repair initiatives. Because they've been trialed, they've been piloted. It's also historically how a lot of our consumption was done, right? Think of the milkman.

I have actually a milkman here. I leave out my glass bottles. They come and collect them. They replace them with my oat milk. And it's just on my doorstep in the morning. These projects and these schemes, they've existed for generations. But we have basically because of the kind of, I guess, not having really the true costs that we've talked about, we're being pumped with single-use plastics because it's more convenient and it suits our convenience culture or our throwaway culture. But there is a system that has existed that we could return to, but it needs to be commercially viable for businesses to want to invest in that transition, right?

And currently any sort of, I guess, desire to transition is being hindered by a lack of enabling policy and a lack of commercial viability. No single company wants to have that kind of first-mover disadvantage where they're investing in the necessary infrastructure. They want to have investment in the infrastructure at the national level so that these systems can actually function effectively. And it would be great to see more research and development going into that because when you look at the UK investment finance in the kind of plastic sector,

it's predominantly going into things like chemical recycling. That's where the bulk of the funding is going. And for me, chemical recycling is a complete full solution. And we're not matching that investment in what would be considered by me to be more sustainable alternatives. A full episode on why recycling is not the answer for plastics. I would be interested in that because I need to know more about that. Leo, what were your thoughts? We put a lot of public media attention on microplastics and seem to,

and there are some campaigners, no offense to Chris, you're not one of them for sure. that have minimized chemicals used in plastic materials as a problem and focused on the microplastic. Look, I get it. Visible matters, but I again go back to being curious, as curious about the invisible as the visible. So we need particularly to document chemical exposure in populations where we assume plastic doesn't exist.

Look, I mean, in Amish populations, you find dallate exposures at really high levels. So it's everywhere, but we don't talk about it. And I'll just add one other thing. We do need to in parallel study microplastics together with chemicals used in plastics in the same studies. Because the question's always going to be, is it the particle that's delivering the chemical or is it the particle itself that's causing the damage? That's a huge unopened riddle. Thank you all for your time and continued work on this issue.

it's fascinating and horrifying. And as much as I already knew, I've taken some things away. First of all, no styrofoam cups ever, but there are others. Could each of you just give 30 seconds max of closing comments that you'd like our listeners to take away with? Christina, start with you. Oh, no, I was hoping you weren't going to ask me first. But okay, I think that as I've said, I work on the plastic. I don't think the plastics treaty is the be-all and end-all. It's not going to be the kind of silver

bullet for solving all of our problems. But this opportunity, it should be the catalyst for system change, right? And national change, regional change, international change. And it should be sending a signal to companies all around the world that change is coming. And we need to rapidly start shifting to alternatives and looking at the viability of alternatives. And at the local level, we can already be implementing a lot of changes that can trigger kind of inspiration, broadly speaking. So I think plastics treaty, I'm fully invested. I want a good one. But I also think we don't need to wait for a treaty to start solving the problem of plastic pollution. Thank you. Leo. Reducing plastic consumption and production can not only improve human health for generations

to come, but can actually provide economic benefits that are greater than the costs of the plastic substitutes that we would entertain. As a society, we need to start thinking about what do we really need instead of conspicuous consumption. Here, here. Thank you all for your work and this conversation. And to be continued, this issue is on my front burner. Thanks.

Thank you. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please follow us on your favorite podcast platform. You can also visit ThegreatSimplification.com for references and show notes from today's conversation. And to connect with fellow listeners of this podcast, check out our Discord channel. This show is hosted by me, Nate Hagan's, edited by No Troublemakers Media, and produced by Misty Stinnett, Leslie Batlutz, Brady Hyan, and Lizzie Siriani.