The Jordan Harbinger Show - 818: Matt Simon | How Microplastics Poison the Planet

Episode Date: March 28, 2023

Matt Simon (@mrmattsimon) is a science writer at Wired magazine and the author of A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies. What We Discuss with Matt Simon: Microplastics contain a cocktail of toxic chemicals, many of which are linked to diseases like diabetes and cancer. Microplastics break even further into nanoplastics, which are small enough to move through human organs — including the brain — and enter our cells. Nearly everything around you — carpets, curtains, coasters, cups, packaging, clothing, couches, beds — contains plastic, and it all sheds plastic particles. Your home is one of the most polluted places – you could inhale as many as 7,000 microplastics a day. What we can do to reduce our exposure to microplastics and decrease our reliance on overall plastic consumption. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/818 This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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The deepest points in the ocean are contaminated with this stuff. There is, I don't think any reason to believe, especially given nanoplastics being so small and being so common in the air and in the ocean, that these aren't getting into every organism. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills are the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with scientists and entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists,

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By the way, you can search for anything we've ever done on the site, any promo code, any feedback Friday advice, any interview we've ever done, using our AI chatbot, Jordan Harbinger.com slash AI. where you can find it. Today, plastic rain is the new acid rain. No exaggeration. We are literally bathing it, inhaling it, drinking it, eating it. It's everywhere from the bottom of the Mariana Trench to the top of Mount Everest. Our clothes are made of plastic. Our car tires shed plastic, carpet, water bottles, yoga pants, those shed plastic. Plastic baby bottles, babies drink millions of these particles each year. It accumulates in our homes, in our food, in our water, in our bodies, and the bodies of our children and our pets. Today on the show, we'll discover how plastic is taking slash has taken over the entire planet.

We'll talk about how our microbiome has small communities of bacteria forming right on plastic pieces, right around there, moving around the ocean, getting eaten, getting shot out by other organisms, including us, and right back through the system, once again, mothers pass along these plastics along with endocrine disruptors along to their babies. That changes the course of their development as humans or animals, whatever kind of baby it is, but all is not lost. Join us today for an exploration of microplastics and nanoplastics and what we can do to dig out from underneath this mountain of plastic under which we have buried ourselves. Here we go with Matthew Simon.

I think all of us have heard of the plastic patch in the ocean the size of Texas, but what I didn't really realize until talking to you, which was a fun conversation, is that there's a plastic patch growing inside each and every one of us, which is unfortunately not anywhere near as cute as it sounds. No, it's, I think we have had a lot of publicity, a lot of media attention around these specific garbage patch sorts of situations. All the while, we have had really this thorough contamination of the entire planet and essentially every organism in it with little tiny bits of plastic, which scientists

didn't really have a grip on until quite recently. It was really the past 10 years. The term microplastics, we wouldn't even coin until 2004. But since then, there has been really this ramping up of research into, first of all, where exactly this stuff is in the environment. We have a good handle on that now. Now more the attention is turning to the consequences of this truly omnipresent pollutant that is in all these different environments and all these different organisms.

I've heard of microplastics, but not nanoplastics. And somehow that's even scarier. Look, can we start by defining microplastic and nanoplastics so that I think there's plenty of people who've never actually heard the term. They just know it means small plastic. Yeah. So we can start with macroplastic. The big stuff, I mean bottles and bags, it's floating around on the ocean. The point where a bottler bag breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces, it becomes a microplastic when it gets smaller than five millimeters.

And that's about the width of a pencil eraser. So on the upper end, you can actually see microplastics with the naked eye. but these get much, much smaller. They get continuously smaller as they're breaking apart. These plastics are strong but not indestructible. These bonds are kind of splitting and the chemicals are leaching out. And when these particles get so on and smaller, they get down into the nanoscale. And there's a little bit of disagreement still on what exactly we should consider that threshold

when a microplastic becomes a nanoplasic. But it's typically around a millionth of a meter. This is a very small little particle that can at this point, get into not only individual organisms, but individual cells in those bodies. And that's, I think, the real concern is that you have a lot of microplastic in the environment, and scientists are just starting to quantify nanoplastics, but they're finding much, much more of these. The smaller it gets, the more numerous it gets. That's the ultimate concern here, is that scientists are just beginning to look at the small stuff, and that's what's getting

absolutely everywhere. The amount has been doubling every 15 years since 1941, which is, I guess, what, when plastics were made for consumer use and not exclusively for military or in a lab or something like this? Plastics were invented actually in the late 1800s and hadn't really been fully commercialized until World War II when this started becoming really an omnipresent material in the military. So it's making plexiglass for planes and nylon for parachutes and things like that. It was really after World War II that production got going in earnest. And since 1940 or so, we have seen an absolutely exponential increase in the amount of plastic for the better part of 80 years. And scientists are finding that maps perfectly to that exponential rise in production,

the exponential contamination of microplastics in the environment. They can go and look through something like ocean sediments off the coast of Southern California and go back through the years because these layers accumulate year after year and have actually quantified the perfect mapping of microplastic contamination growing exponentially in the sediments over time over the decades with the amount of plastic that is produced. This has been replicated in other kinds of environments that, yes, we have solid evidence that as plastic production continues exponentially, we're going to get exponentially

more contamination of the environment. So essentially, it sounds like the plastic, record is fossilized in the ocean sediment and the soil? Is this going to form a record of human presence on Earth, just like we look for fossils and bones and whatever in the certain layers of the earth, future humans will be able to figure out when we live by the insane amount of plastic in the layers that were on top during our time? Is that what you're talking about here? It is going to be an artifact and it's going to be truly embarrassing. I think future generations will look back on this time in just astonishment that we let the plastics in a sense.

produce as much of this stuff as they wanted. We can look back, again, in these sediments and see that the more plastic we produce, the more microplastics are escaping into the environment. And that will fossilize. So there's actually, there's talk of, you know, using this as a marker for human existence on this planet, our impact on this planet. You know, a thousand years from now, whatever our species look like, or if an alien species has taken over by that point, who knows? If the, if the planet is still inhabitable, that will be a truly baffling marker in the fossil record. I was actually just going to comment that maybe humans won't make it that long as a species. So the problem kind of solves itself. We don't have to worry about being

embarrassed by future humans because they're all dead already. Yeah, they ate plastic as babies and died. And I'm not even joking about that. Apparently babies do eat plastic because we feed them tons of things that are wrapped in plastic, plastic bottles, and we're eating plastic as well. And I wondered kind of how this happens. Is it like fish eat them? Then we, other fish eat those fish, the fish that ate that fish? Is that the basic idea here? That was where the concern started a number of years ago when scientists were thinking, okay, well, we're finding a lot of this stuff in the ocean. What does that mean for the contamination of the organisms that we eat? So they have been finding that something like a

fish will ingest these particles. It'll reside in their guts, and it actually can translocate. It's called through the gut tissues and to the other tissues, the muscle tissues, that we eat. I think the larger issue is ocean critters that we eat whole. So oysters, mussels, clams, that sort of thing. These are filter feeders. They are pulling in water and filtering out food, but in so doing also filtering out microplastics. And there's been some quantifications of, you know, if you're a religious eater of muscles,

you might eat tens of thousands of particles a year that way. The bigger issue here is that we should actually be more concerned about what falls on our plate as we're eating. Probably the larger source by far of microplastic contamination of the human body is in indoor air. So we, by one calculation, are inhaling 7,000 particles a day just because we're absolutely surrounded by by plastic in its many forms. So they've actually done some quantifications and have showed that you're probably eating just as many microplastics that are in the food as are falling on the food on the plate as you're eating. If that's a lot, that's. have thoroughly contaminated indoor air is.

And when you're breathing this stuff, a lot of it's getting probably absorbed into the bloodstream because these nanoplastics are so small, but it is quite easy for our lungs to absorb them. Okay, so we're breathing them in, and we're also eating them because they float around and land on our food from the air, but also they were already in the food,

but it doesn't matter because they were already in the food that we cooked anyway if we're eating something that's, well, if we're eating something that's alive, right? What about a plant? Plants, there's been some interesting research in determining whether they can actually take up these particles through their roots. And that does seem to be the case because these things are getting so small. As these plants are growing, they're absorbing both water and these microplastics and nanoplastics,

that then gets translocated into the tissues that we eat. The issue here really comes weirdly to laundry. Two-thirds of clothing now is made out of plastic. So nylon, polyester. When you wash that, a bunch of those fibers break off into the wash, sometimes by some calculations, a million or so fibers per load. Wow. And that flushes to a wastewater treatment facility. And the wastewater treatment facility actually ends up sequestering a good amount of those particles in something called sludge, which is human waste that is then applied as fertilizer to fields.

The rest of the particles, something like 10% of the particles, are flushed out to see in the effluent. but the 90% that are captured are in the fertilizer that we're putting on our crops, billions of pounds a year in a place like Europe or North America. There's just so much of this sludge going on to fields, and it's essentially concentrated micropastics. And that's where the concern among crop scientists is, is that we are applying a coating of microplastic to the crops that we eat. And that comes with both the toxicity of the particle itself,

but also these particles act as Trojan horses. they're carrying fecal pattern, and they have been shown to have antibiotic-resistant bacteria on them as well, and that's getting into our crops. Wow. Yeah, it's a complicated question because there's no escaping these particles. At any point in the food chain, it is getting contaminated with microplastic. If these particles are all over the place, they must also impact the soil, not even just by going in the plant, but I would imagine farming when your soil has a ton of plastic in it,

that's got to have effects for water and absorption and other times. types of issues, right? This is one of the reasons why I call microplastics a poison like no other. Something like mercury or lead is obviously a toxic substance. They're neurotoxins. We know they're terrible for life. But they're, you know, there's single elements. Microplastics are this really confounding mixture of at least 10,000 different chemicals

that have been used in the production of plastic, a quarter of which scientists consider to be of concern as 2,500 chemicals, meaning they're just either outright toxic or they're persistent in things like soils or in organisms or in human bodies. So it's also weird because it's this physical thing, right? So as you say, is it changing the properties of a soil? Yes, there has been some research showing that if you're adding a bunch of plastic particles, it's reducing the density of that soil. It actually makes it so more water can evaporate away, which is increasingly problematic on a planet where we are dealing with drought. So there's actually A paper that came out, I think yesterday from the European Union of farmers kind of revolting

against this. So they are getting a lot of compost that comes from people throwing out their scraps. We're putting them in bio-based plastics supposedly compostable. They're not, really. It's all plastic. It's all going to break down all the same. And there's farmers in Europe saying, we can't do this anymore. There's just too much plastic in this compost, too much microplastic and too much macroplastic,

some of the bigger pieces. We are very concerned about the health of our soils, among any number of other reasons that plastics are getting into soils just through industrialized agriculture. It's an emergency for sure because, you know, we are going to struggle going forward just producing crocs on a planet where temperatures are much higher and there's much less water. And you mentioned we inhale these. Do we know how many, has anyone done the math on like how many pieces of plastic we inhale per breath, for example? I haven't seen it done per breadth, but it was 7,000 per day, so divided by 24, whatever that number is, I'm terrible. That's all a lot. It's a lot.

And it's going to very much depend person or person. So you might have heard that humans might eat a credit card worth of plastic every week. That's kind of iffy because we are as individuals exposed to such different amounts of microplastics. So if you are surrounded by more synthetic clothing, for example, there was one, calculation that found that just by walking around in synthetic clothing, we might shed a billion fibers a year. Those fall typically to the ground eventually, but get kicked up in indoor air, re-suspended for us to breathe. And the concern here is for children and toddlers who are spending a lot of their time on the floor, rummaging around, kicking up these fibers and inhaling,

which is paramount that we vacuum as much as possible, for instance, to make sure that these particles aren't accumulating in indoor spaces. Jeez, okay. And by the way, it's five particles per minute if you break it down like that, roughly. 4.91. Let's round up because who knows. I mean, what's the difference at that point? Right.

You also mentioned that a lot of the particles that we put on our plants and in our farms, whatever, they come from washers. Why not filter the water, or is this one of those times that a layman makes a really simple suggestion and sounds like an idiot for making it? No, not in any form whatsoever. No, it's a fantastic question with an infuriating answer, is that washing machines very well could have these filters on them. Some of them do.

We do not have them in the United States because we put filters, the lid filters, on our dryers instead. So France is actually leading the way on this, and they're saying that by 2025, all washing machines that come off the production line have to have a built-in microfiber filter. That's just standard now there. But we need those in every washing machine on the planet.

And as a sort of stopgap measure, we need more of these aftermarket filters to add to the washing machines that we have at home right now. I have one that works seemingly pretty well. It's a replaceable filter that you then send it back to the company that then turns that into something useful in the sense that they're using that microplastic in a form that is locked away from the environment. So we need those stopgap measures for sure because we can't run. rely on wastewater treatment facilities.

There's something like 10,000 of them in the United States alone. And outfitting them with the equipment to capture these microfibers more deliberately would be extremely expensive and just a logistical nightmare. I guess going even farther back upstream, at the end of the day, we just need clothes that we know are not going to shed as many fibers, which new techniques for their construction. But also, just as a tip, there has been consistent research showing that the more you wear an article of clothing, the less it emits fibers. So we just need to get away from fast fashion to be sure, because that stuff's cheap anyway and breaking down consistently. But we need to be

better about wearing clothes for longer, which comes with all sorts of other benefits, you know, not producing as much fabric across the world. So yes, a great question with an infuriating answer is that it was totally possible all along, but these companies just didn't do it. It seems like if that's the point that's creating a ton of these things, it's this little one or two sheet thing that you could even throw away, which I know is also wasteful but probably less damaging, would cost pennies produced at scale. Yeah. I put out an op-ed a couple months ago arguing that every government should pay to send one of these filters to each household. They're like 50 bucks. So it'll be a couple of billion a dollars, which is a drop in the

bucket as far as government spending is concerned. And the environmental mitigation would be huge. If we're stopping these fibers from even getting to a waste water treatment facility, that's the best option. So until we get legislation in the United States, hopefully, to force washing machine manufacturers to put these filters in by default, it's unfortunately up to us as consumers to clean up this mess for these companies that have created it. Right. It's always like that. And we'll talk about recycling in a bit because I did a whole show about it and it turned out to be like 99% BS. But I want to go back to something you mentioned earlier called translob. And this is terrifying. Tell me about this. This is just when you thought it couldn't get any worse. It gets worse.

Yeah, translocation has been studied in largely fish. So when we're talking here, okay, we know that if a fish is swimming through the sea, there's a lot of microplastics there. What is it ingesting? And would that be okay in a certain sense if that microplastic just goes through the digestive system without getting caught in the fish? But that is not always the case. We are finding that lots of oceanic organisms are showing up with these particles in their bellies. So that's our scientists. started thinking, okay, well, is that particle somehow going to get through the lining of the stomach, the gut, and into these other tissues that we then eat? And they have shown that, yes, quite easily, especially these very small particles readily pass through the gut. This has also been shown in mouse models. Mouse models obviously used as a proxy for humans. We're not mice, but you have to do these studies on mice first to see what might apply also to humans. These are also passing through the guts of mice and into the tissues of their body. They're also showing that mother mice will expose to these particles, send these particles to their children. Human mothers

are, we know for sure, are doing the same because we are finding microplastics not only in human blood and guts and lungs and all sorts of other tissues. We're finding them in placentas and we're finding them in an infant's first feces, which means that the child has been exposed to microplastics, through the mother before it's even born. We don't know the consequences of that. We know for sure that it is not good to have places of microplastic, especially in an infant body, especially considering that so many of the chemical components in microplastics

are known as endocrine-orrupting chemicals or EDCs, which means they really muck with the hormone system, and you do not want that in a developing child. The issue, and I think the question here now, how much is too much. How much microplastic is going to be too much in the human body before we start seeing effects? That is an unanswered question, but I think in the coming years, we will see much, much more of that research. Yeah, we actually did a whole show on EDCs with Dr. Shannon Swan. She's really focused on this. Oh, she's great. Yeah. That was episode 658, by the way, and it's scary

because these things are everywhere. You're rubbing them on your body or whatever. You're eating them like we just discussed with translocation and whatever else gets these into our system, and they can mess with your hormones. And for adults, it's like, okay, maybe, and I say this lightly, as if it's light, maybe there's an increased cancer risk because of these endocrine disruptors, but for babies, you just need a whole lot less to screw up a baby brain or a baby body than you do an adult. And if it's bad for adults, it's almost certainly bad for babies, and we just don't know

how much. And babies are on the floor and putting plastic stuff in their mouth. and so they're just exposed to even more of this with less ability to resist it and a higher susceptibility to whatever this stuff does. So it's really, really scary to think about. And the endocrine disrupting thing is only going to get worse as we create more and more of this. I'm not sure if this came up in your episode of Ashana, but the way that endocrine-shrase is particularly nefarious

in that when we think of something being toxic, it's usually the more you get, the more toxic. It is just like it's a straight line plotted on the graph. The way the EDCs work is quite different and quite strange, and that you can get a lot of toxicity at a very small dose. As you increase that dose, that toxicity goes down and kind of flattens out at the bottom. But then as you increase it again, it goes up. So it's a U-shaped instead of a typical straight line.

And that, you know, if we're thinking about microplastics being these very small particles, are we getting enough of them in our body and enough of these EDCs in our bodies to have an impact? And it's important to note that, you know, there is research on chemicals that are in plastics exclusively. So plasticizer chemicals. They're in plastics. That's where we're getting them. One city connected them to 100,000 premature deaths in the United States each year.

And that was a conservative estimate. So those chemicals are coming from plastics. We don't know fully yet is, is that because so much of the single-use plastic is in touch with our foods and water that we're eating? or is there also a contribution of microplastics to that, as we're especially inhaling them. These EDCs, you do not need a tremendous amount of them to have a really terrible effect on the body.

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And many of the guests on the show, subscribe and contribute to the course. So, come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course, again, for free at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Now, back to Matthew Simon. You mentioned in the book, something like sardines are so contaminated that if you eat three of them, you end up with a grain of rice of microplastic in your system. So a lot of people might be thinking, now invisible levels of plastic, nothing I can do about it,

it can't be that much. And again, yeah, we probably excrete that, but that could also be an endocrine disruptor. And there's just kind of no way for us to tell the appropriate dose of endocrine. Disrupting Chemicals, I guess. I know that sounds weird. It almost reminds me that movie, thank you for smoking. Have you seen this movie where he gets kidnapped by activists

and they slap all those nicotine patches on him? And then he's like, thank God I was smoking so much that I had a tolerance for this nicotine. Smoking saved my life. It reminds me of that, like, well, the solution for microplastics in our environment is to add a ton more so that that U-shaped curve gets activated and the damage is lessened.

You just got to get on that trough. Just got to get in the trough. You're going to be okay. It's just a balancing act. It's a delicate one. But I think we can do it. No, no, no. And we can talk about mitigation later.

But day to day, there's so little that we can do at the moment. Like, just you and I sitting here right now. We're inhaling this stuff. We need mitigation on so many levels. And I think it can be done. But we're going to get, you know, like the tobacco industry, we're going to get a tremendous amount of pushback from the plastics industry, which would very much like to keep producing as much.

plastic as it possibly could. We are producing a trillion pounds of plastic a year. A trillion pounds? Yeah. Any material, that's a lot. But one of plastics is that it's so light. Like, you need a lot of plastic to make a trillion pounds of plastic a year. So it's just like, given the opportunity, they will keep producing exponentially more plastics. And again, we're trying to this idea that as we produce exponentially more, scientists are finding exponentially more microplastics in the environment. So in the book, I talk about a number of demonstrated harms that we already know for organisms in the environment. But, you know, what organism might not be suffering today from microplastics exposure may very well be in 5, 10, 20 years as these concentrations go up

exponentially. That is the urgency. That's why we cannot wait to act on this. And we cannot let the industry bamboozle us into thinking something like recycling is going to fix everything. Yeah, I want to talk about recycling as well. Just before we do, though, you mentioned in the book Obesogens, and I was wondering if the endocrine disruption coming from plastic could be part of this problem. Obesogens for people that haven't heard of this are chemicals in the environment that can actually contribute to obesity. You know, we take pot shots at food companies and stuff like that on the show as well, but it's not always just the food that we eat that causes this. A lot of times people have real hormonal issues that cause their obesity or contribute to their obesity. And it seems like

plastics could be one of those things. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it seems like that's what you might be saying. I mean, there's some speculation among scientists that, you know, obviously it's not plastics that have caused the obesity crisis across the world, but could they be a contributing factor by way of these endocrine-disrupting chemicals that are known abusogens? There was at least one paper that I talk about in the book where they very explicitly saying, we need to look at this quite emphatically because one of the ways that we can can actually very quickly reduce that, is to just surround ourselves with fewer single-use plastics.

The tricky thing with microplastics research in human health is teasing apart the contributions of microplastics and any number of other sources of chemicals in the environment, again, at least 10,000 different chemicals used in plastics, a quarter of which are of concern. That's a lot. And like, which ones do we need to be most concerned about?

Also thinking about the organisms in the environment. One organism might be very sensitive to a particular chemical that another doesn't really care about. So I talk in the book about tire particles in Washington State. They're microplastics. Tires are essentially plastics now. They wash up into rivers and kill salmon en masse. And there's a very specific chemical that is doing that. And these scientists did some interesting sleuthing to find that.

Further studies have found other fish that are sensitive to that chemical. How many more out there are dying because of tire particles? that are microplastics, but how many other chemicals, entire particles, or microplastics generally, might be affecting organisms that we don't know about. And it might not know about until it's really too late. You mentioned recycling earlier. What's the issue here? I've done, again, shows debunking recycling, but a trillion pounds is a lot.

I'm guessing we are not recycling a trillion pounds of plastic every year. Far from it. The truly tragic reality is that in the United States, the recycling rate is 5% now. Historically, it has been 9% across the world. We were bamboozled by the plastics industry. So they were very much all about recycling. So what that did was shunt the responsibility onto us as consumers. So it's our fault that this stuff is escaping into the environment. If only we would recycle more, if we'd be more responsible. We could have this beautiful circular economy where We don't really have to produce that much more plastic because so much of it's just in recirculation.

The fallacy in there, obviously, is that the plastics industry wouldn't need to keep producing exponentially more plastic if recycling worked. There are countries like Germany that actually do recycling quite well. They're recycling more like 50% of their plastic. The issue in the United States and other developed countries is that historically we have shipped massive quantities of the plastics that we cannot profitably recycle. That's a key phrase here because, It's not that recycling has been impossible.

It hasn't been profitable to do so. And under the capitalist system that we have in the United States, it's not a municipal thing, right? It's like these are for-profit companies. It should have always been the government massively taxing these plastics companies to fund massive recycling programs.

But it's that we've been shipping so much of the stuff overseas where it's either burned and open pits or just escapes into the environment. These are developing countries that we're saddling with this extremely toxic substance, especially if they're having to burn it because they don't have any room. So going forward, I do see a role for recycling,

and I think a lot of plastic scientists and activists would say the same, but it's not a crutch because the industry will, again, use it to produce more and more plastic. At the end of the day, we just need to make less of the stuff. There's no substitute for that, because we don't want to surround ourselves with this stuff that we know to be toxic in its various forms. So, yeah, maybe more recycling,

but we cannot rely on us to get us out of this crisis. What about biodegradable plastics? You know, I see those utensils come in and I'm like, great, it's biodegradable, but I don't know. It sure feels like plastic. I'm tempted to bury one and dig it up in a few months and see if it's gone. But I just, I kind of feel like it's going to take, yeah, it's biodegradable. Maybe it only takes 50 years instead of thousand.

I don't know. Scientists have already done that, actually, with some interesting results. Yeah, so they took biodegradable plastics and, you know, dropped them in the ocean for months, years, and found that they didn't really biodegraded at all. They would bury them and found that it may be biodegraded a little bit, but it was still intact enough to actually carry stuff in a plastic bag. The issue with biodegradable is that the bag isn't disappearing, right? It's just been deconstructed. It's exploded into microplastics. Theoretically, biodegradable means that just happens faster, but that is usually under a certain set of conditions, and that is a

in an industrial composting facility where the temperatures are very, very high. You don't get that in a typical backyard if you have a compostable bag. And especially if any of those biodegradable bags escape into the environment out in the ocean, the temperatures are not very, very high. And it's just the different conditions

that the bag was not designed for. So it's a plastic all the same. And it's a plastic because it has all these chemicals that make it a plastic that are the ones that are scientists that are concerned about. You'll hear about, you know, bio-based plastics, which are just plastics where the carbon comes from plants like corn instead of from fossil fuels. It has all the same chemicals that hold it together to be a tough

plastic. So these are not the answer. I think there's going to be room for new materials that move away from just kind of the general idea of plastics. So, you know, like mushroom-based or bacteria-based. Perhaps that can replace some packaging, but we have to make sure that they are, in fact, biodegradable, and when they do so, they are not toxic. That's a very tall order. So I just, I cautioned people to be very skeptical about such things, because given the opportunity, the industry will push these out and say, oh, look how green we've become. We're not the same plastics industry. Don't worry about us. In the book, you mentioned that dumping plastic into the environment is racking up. You called it a toxicity debt in terms of how toxins are released by the

plastic. Tell me what that means. This was a concept proposed. and a paper that I believe came out in 2020, 2021, these scientists were saying, okay, well, here's the issue. We have a lot of bags and bottles and other macroplastics, the big stuff floating around out there, especially in the ocean. And over time, they are breaking into microplastics.

One of the big things is UV radiation. If a bag is floating around, is bombarded by sunlight, that tends to break apart the bonds and plastics, releases microplastics, releases the component, chemicals in those plastic, many of which we know to be extremely toxic. So they're saying, even if we were to somehow stop releasing plastic into the environment tomorrow, we would have this debt of toxicity because all this stuff is still out there. It's still breaking into smaller and

smaller bits. And when it does, it becomes available for more organisms to eat. So like a sea turtle can choke on a plastic bag. They're not nearly as many creatures. that big in the ocean that can choke on the big stuff, there are far, far more creatures that are very tiny that can eat these microplastics and choke on them. I encourage people to look up a plankton pundit. He's a scientist who has really good videos on his Twitter feed about, he says plankton. He has been looking at these creatures and just these microfibers and essentially choking on them. So this is the debt that we've racked up. It is not so simple as just shutting off the tap of plastic because we then have to reckon with what's already out there.

It's not disappearing. It's again, just breaking into smaller and smaller bits. It's out there just in a deconstructed form. In the book, you mentioned something called the Plastosphere. What is this? This sounds like, I don't know, a new ecosystem based around plastic. Is that accurate? It's actually really fascinating in a, I guess, in a morbid kind of way. So these little pieces of plastic floating around out there turn out to be extraordinarily biodiverse. in their own way. It's odd. So when you put these things under a microscope, you can find just a really teeming community. Bacteria and viruses, even larvae of small creatures can attach to these pieces of plastic and hitch a ride. And this is, it's been termed the plastic spheres, this new

concept. It's a new, essentially a new ecosystem on planet Earth that we have created by loading the planet with plastic. Unfortunately, they have also been finding lots of nasty bacterias in particular on these little piece of plastics in the plastic sphere. Vibrio is one of them. This is responsible for some of the violent sickness that you get from seafood. That has been found on microplastics. Here's a fun thought experiment. A little microplastic can grow this plastic and a fish mistakes it for food. It sees it coated in something that might smell nice to it. And it consumes it. That microplastic passes through its digestive system, comes out. out through the other side. Scientists are showing that these microplastics very readily come out

of the ocean. So they come to the surface in bubbles, and when those bubbles pops, it flings the microplastics into the air that then blow onto land in sea breezes. So when you're at the beach, you're inhaling microplastics that have come from the ocean and potentially inhaling microplastics that pass through the gut of a fish. And again, scientists are finding these nasty bacteria on them. Nobody's really linked any sort of sickness. two microplastics with bacteria hitching a ride on them. But this is, again, the Trojan horse effect. We don't have to just worry about the component chemicals in these microplastics,

but what pathogens that could be transporting into our body, especially if we're, again, coming back to microplastics coming off of our clothing, passing through human sewage and being applied to fields, is that transporting some of these pathogens onto our foods? It hasn't been shown yet, but I would not be surprised if that's eventually the case. Geez, okay. So animals in the sea either eat them or I think coral was using it in their home, or maybe even other animals are using it in their home in the sea. What percentage of sea life has microplastics in it? Do we know? Is it just everything now? It is not unsafe to assume that it's everything. So anywhere scientists look there finding these particles, you mentioned. Coral, there is good research shown that they're actually incorporating these micropastics into their, you know, the hardship. shell of the coral that we know as the corals is actually a bigger portion of the animal.

They're actually a little tiny polyps. They're animals that filter feed out of the water like clams and oysters do. But when they're catching food, they're also catching microplastics that they incorporate into the calcium carbonate shells, essentially, that they build. They have also been shown to be toxic to these coral polyps as well. The seas are so thoroughly saturated. They are finding microplastics in extremely high concentrations in the Mariana Trench. The deepest points in the ocean are contaminated with this stuff.

There is, I don't think any reason to believe, especially given nanoplastics being so small and being so common in the air and in the ocean, that these aren't getting into every organism. It again comes back to how much is too much, but there's speculation that this is contributing to the problems that corals are having in addition to ocean acidification and ocean warming. How much is microplastic contributing? Not quite sure yet, but again, not a good thing to have in any organism, that is for sure. So if it's in the Mariana trench, then it's, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say pretty much every surface animal, then we'll have it too. Because if we're mostly making these things and discarding them on the surface and it somehow made its way to the deepest part

of the entire ocean, then they got to be in every surface animal and probably every bit of sea life. Yeah. We haven't been talking about the atmosphere. atmospheric stuff yet. Now, we'll get that. It's so thoroughly saturated the air as well. And new research on nanoplastics has shown that if you're standing on a remote mountaintopopatopatopin top in Europe and the Alps, just by standing there, there are hundreds of millions of these nanoplastics falling on your shoulders.

There is so much of this in the atmosphere. There's been more quantifications of microplastics, which are these, again, smaller than five millimeter. But when you get to the nanoscale, below a millionth of a meter, It is a fundamental component of the atmosphere. And it's because of the way the atmosphere works, it has blown everywhere. It's interesting, I visit a scientist in the book, and I hike up a mountain with her in Utah, and we go to see one of the atmospheric instruments that she captures stuff falling out of the sky,

and she's using that to quantify just how much of this is falling out. It is a lot. She was saying that this has been out of control for so long, that it's impossible to pinpoint where a particular microplastic in her samples fell from. So, like, did it come from a city, you get taken up in the atmosphere, fall in remote Utah? She can't tell because this stuff has all mixed together so thoroughly. So you get tire particles in there. You get microfibers.

You get chunks of bags and bottles and stuff that have all taken to the air and mixed into this great big microplastic soup in the sky. So if it's falling in remote mountaintops, what about the Arctic, Antarctica? I know you mentioned that this is everywhere. So what is that doing to these remote places and ecosystems? Yeah, they're finding a lot of it actually in the Arctic in particular because that is relatively close to Europe, obviously. So they are showing especially a lot of car tire particles,

these microplastics on sea ice, which is not where car tire particles belong. And they can do some modeling and show that, yes, winds were blowing at this time and that was coming from Europe. this stuff is so light and so tiny that it very easily goes airborne. And the issue with the Arctic is that they're concerned that because plastics are, again, this physical thing in the environment, this very strange sort of pollutant, because they're often dark colored, blues, browns, blacks, any kind of color that you can imagine a plastic being,

there's a concern that if that's falling in the Arctic in enough concentrations that can actually help absorb with that dark material more of the sun's energy and actually contribute to the loss of sea ice. They're finding also a lot of it swirling in the ocean in the Arctic. And these are very delicate ecosystems that are not used to having plastic particles in the stuff in the ocean is coming from largely Europe's wastewater treatment facilities that, like anywhere else in the world, pump out microfibers in the effluent that go out to sea. They're finding a lot of microfibers in particular in the Arctic. It's thoroughly, corrupted and nowhere really on the planet is safe because this stuff has gone fully atmosphere.

Do we know at which point plastic will outweigh fish in the ocean? That's the stat that gets thrown around and makes people gasp. I always forget when we expect that to happen. That's 2050. Okay. By 2050, there's one calculation that all of the plastic in the ocean is going to outweigh all the fish, which is not particularly ideal, but also by 2050, and that's why they're basing this calculation, is that we will have... a tripling of production of plastic by 2050 from 2016 level. So by 2050, it'll be trillions of pounds of plastic a year. And I hate to harp on this, but this is the urgency, is that as we produce exponentially more, there is a very clear link between the exponential rise in microplastic

pollution in the environment. So with fish, it's, you know, outweighing all the fish, it's obviously all the bags and the bottles and stuff. But think of those as essentially, It's pre-microplastic. Anything that you can see floating out there is just going to break into smaller and smaller bits. It hasn't disappeared. It's just distributed more broadly in the environment. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Matthew Simon.

We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, please, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support one or more of our sponsors. All the deals, discount codes, fancy URLs are all in one place. Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. You can also search for any sponsor using the AI chat bot on the website at Jordan Harbinger.com. It's really important to support the sponsors.

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So thank you in advance for supporting those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Matthew Simon. You mentioned tires a lot here. People give off half a pound to 10 pounds per year of microplastics, according to what you wrote, depending on the country they live in. I'm guessing the worst offender has to be the United States, not because we're bad people, but we do use a lot of stuff. We buy a lot of stuff.

We buy a lot of fast fashion. And we drive a lot. And you keep mentioning tires. So I'm guessing that happens when the tires get used. Yeah, so you need to replace your tires every so often because they have obviously worn down. but that where, where do you think the tire has gone? Well, it's broken down into tiny, tiny pieces and has just distributed broadly in the environment.

When I mentioned the fish in Washington State, that happens after rains. So the first rains come and wash all those tire particles off of roads and into river systems. In a place like the United States, obviously where we drive a lot too much, obviously, we get much more emissions of these microplastics from tires. And I should just clarify that tires are plastic because it's synthetic rubber.

Now it's not just made out of pure rubber from forest. We would lose all of our rubber trees if we supply all that natural rubber. So it's a big component of them are synthetic rubbers. It's a kind of plastic. These are classified as microplastics. When I talk about mitigation, I love these solutions that solve a bunch of things at once. This is known as multi-solving in climate activism, is that if you do something like, increase public transportation.

You get cars off the roads. You get fewer microplastics because there are fewer tires on the roads. You reduce emissions and you generally take cars off the road so they're not killing as many people here, especially in the United States. So there are ways to mitigate microplastics that are actually good on a number of different levels. We should do them just because of microplastics mitigation, but for any number of other things. I found it interesting in your book.

You wrote, so when animals eat these. plastics, especially sea life, the plastic pellets, they make the poop attached to them sink more slowly, which means they get eaten by other animals in the middle of the ocean that feed on the fecal matter of other animals. And since they're sinking more slowly, the animals at the bottom of the ocean who also rely on these poop pellets, they get less because there's more transit time from higher up in the ocean to down in the ocean. It's amazing to me that we have figured this out, I mean, just imagine who knew that poop flotation mattered. Somebody got their Ph.D. in that.

I'm just saying there's a marine poop professor out there somewhere whose claim to fame is that they figured this out. And frankly, it's quite impressive that they did. Yeah, more marine poop professors than you know. There's a lot of people working on this. And this is coming back to this idea of it being a poison like no other. It is truly bizarre in its reach. So these scientists figured out that if you feed it.

copa pods. These are, it's a kind of plankton. So plankton is a mixture of both microscopic plants known as phytoplankton but also little tiny animals like fish larvae, some little crustaceans, these are what copepods are, make up this big cloud of plants and animals at the surface of the ocean, the very base of the oceanic food web, because so many things dying on this stuff and then themselves get eaten. So these researchers thought, okay, well here's an interesting experiment. Let's feed copepa a bunch of microplastic and see what that does to their pellets that come out the other end of them. This is important because those pellets end up sequestering carbon. So if those copepods

are eating the phytoplans in which have themselves absorbed carbon like any other plant as it grew, and that pellet sinks down to the bottom of the seafloor. This is a well-known, well-established mechanism for sequestering carbon out of the atmosphere, locking it down in the depths. So what these researchers found was that, unfortunately, if you change the consistency of these pellets by adding a bunch of microplastics to the diet, it makes it sink much slower, much slower. So what that then could potentially do is open that up to more of the scavengers kind of in that middle of the ocean that would dine on that. So they themselves would get more of a chance to eat this carbon, and that keeps it from reaching the seafloor. So we might be losing if we get, I don't know if they're there yet, but if we get more and more microplastics and copepods are eating more and more of these things and their pellets are changing

on a wide scale, are we going to lose this very important method for sequestering carbon out of the atmosphere? Yes, it's a fascinating field of research, copepod poo, but it turns out to be extraordinarily important for climate change as well. What are some of the common things that we eat that have tons of plastic in them and we might not realize it. You mentioned fish. What else? Anything that is in contact with plastic, especially. So everything. So everything. So when we talk about fish and we talk about plants growing fields, potentially absorbing microplastics, it's probably not going to be as much from the source

as it is from the packaging and shipping and being in our homes. Okay. So one of the things I tell people is to never under any circumstances heat or freeze plastic. Do not microwave things in plastic under any circumstances. Beyond the UV radiation that I already mentioned, that breaks apart plastics quite readily, plastics fall apart when you heat and freeze them. Do not do that. That sheds these microplastics, but also causes the component chemicals in that plastic packaging to leach into the food.

So what we can do, obviously, is very much cut back on the use of single-use plastic in packaging for food. Switch to other materials like glass and aluminum and cardboard. I don't know how many folks have been able to buy strawberries in like a, essentially a box. It's a cardboard clam shell, really. Why aren't all strawberries packaged in cardboard? Why are we putting them in plastic still?

It's things like that. It's like if we get enough momentum among consumers who are starting to push back on this, that we don't need all of our food to be wrapped in this stuff, cucumbers. and potatoes and stuff like that are wrapped in single-use plastic in the supermarket, which is madness. Again, our descendants are going to look back in absolute astonishment as to what we let the plastics industry do to us and to the planet. Completely unnecessary.

But yeah, I would just, when it comes to food and water, do not heat or freeze them under any circumstances and just use them as less as possible. Did wearing masks during the pandemic do anything to stop us from inhaling microplastics? Yes, there was a stereotype. that actually found that masks do keep a significant amount of the microplastics that are floating around in indoor air from getting into your lungs, in addition to COVID, which is a good thing to keep from getting. Well, you know, don't you're going to get people triggered on this one.

Well, yeah. But yeah, so we just eat them instead, and then we throw the mask in the ocean, which is made of a bajillion microplast, or becomes a bajillion microplastics after that that we later eat. So we don't inhale it, but then we eat it later. a million. Right. Yeah. No. So, that's good. But... But then not. Well, if they're disposed of an improper way. What I think it really shows is the massive contribution to indoor air in particular. It seems across many different studies that there's maybe six times the amount of microplastics in indoor air than there is an outdoor air, which is wild because we spend something like 90% of our time

indoors. And it's going to require like better filters for like, air filters, like air purifiers and homes, we're going to be careful there because those are also made out of plastic. Because everything is made out of plastic. There's a study that found that, like, an air conditioning system actually does a pretty good job of when it sucks in air. It filters out microplastics, but then can tend to expel microplastics because all the inards are made out of plastic anyway. So we need more studies finding the sources and the waste to sequester these particles, but indoor air is really where it's most heavily contaminated. I have air filters because I don't want stuff from the outside.

And I can imagine it's filtering out dust and all these, I don't know, VOC's volatile organic compounds. And it's like, but don't think you have clean air, Jordan. Here's a bunch of plastic from the filter that's cleaning out the other stuff. Yes. Instead. Ah, so frustrating. It's so frustrating. Yeah.

And also think about nanoplastics. A filter that might be really good at filtering out very small particles may well not be good if we're talking about plastic particles that get down to a millionth of a meter. Right. These are very small. So I think going for, I assume that in the coming years, we're going to have companies come out saying that they've solved this. They've produced a filter that perfectly filters microplastics out of indoor air.

It would be skeptical of such things. Yeah. Well, that's like there's one air purifier, and it's like, we take the volatile organic compound and then we destroy it with UV light. And I was like, do we want to combine? bust or whatever, this toxic thing also inside the house? Like, I'd rather you trap it and then they throw it out in three months or clean it off or whatever the thing is with the filter. I don't know if you need to incinerate things in my baby's room. That doesn't seem any better.

So there's a lot of these sort of gimmicky things, like you said, where a company will say, we have no microplastics. And then it'll be like, oh, I wonder how they do that. And it'll be like, we use asbestos trademark to clean out our air. There's no microplastics in here. it's just going to end up being another thing like that. We have a proprietary blend of other stuff that turns out to be way more toxic than microplastic that we used to get the plastic out of the air. Bring them back to the asbestos, always good. Yeah, what could go wrong?

Something that's really important to consider going forward is that we need ways of sequestering these fibers in indoor air, but we need also ways to safely dispose of that stuff. So if you have like a washing machine filter and you pull out the fibers that it's captured and put it into a trash can, that's no guarantee that that's actually going to not take to the air at some point in the trash management process. So we need to really treat this stuff as toxic waste because it is. And we need ways to not only capture them, air filters, wash machine filters, that sort of thing. But we need ways also to dispose of it. It has to be a full cycle, unfortunately. It's going to be difficult to solve, but maybe it'll happen.

I think in 300 years it's going to be illegal to dig down to the level of soil where we are without special precautions. Like, you need to build something? Well, you need to build a tent over this with a vacuum seal because you're going to break the plastic barrier where in the 2000s we had just tons and tons of crap in the soil and they don't want that to get released. People are going to go, wait, let me get this straight. You wore plastic clothing and you sent it through the washer and then you sent it through the dryer. And then when you were cleaning the dryer filter, you reached in with your hand, ripped it off that thing, throwing millions of these things into the air while you just breathed it in, and then you shoved it into a trash can where it blew around all over your house,

all around outside. A truck came by, threw it in there, trailed plastic all through there, and then dumped it outside in a big pit where it just shot everything. Like, you might as well have eaten the damn lint filter yourself, because you eventually did anyway. Two things there. So one is that we need to be also careful, unfortunately, now about cotton and wool, so natural fibers are oftentimes coated in plastic to make them waterproof or flame retardant. So we, nothing is, nothing is pure anymore, nothing is sacred. But yeah, two, there's a clothing now made out of plastic, but the other third, that's no guarantee that it doesn't have the same chemicals associated with it.

And two, when it comes to this toxic side of plastics, I mean, just look at what happened in Ohio, right? That was a train carrying vinyl chloride, which is used to make PVC plastic, final Chloride is a well-known carcinogen has been for decades, and that makes PVC that goes into a lot of the plastic products around us at every point in the supply chain from even before a plastic becomes a plastic, toxic chemicals are spilling all over the place. When it becomes a plastic, that's a toxic manufacturing process. And we think that somehow that toxicity goes away when it becomes a product that ends up in our homes. It's, no, it's madness. I think that's maybe where

we're seeing, I don't know, see change here when it comes to public opinion, when we're realizing we have been bamboozled by the plastics industry into thinking that this is a benign material. That's how it's always pitched, right? Like it makes everything safer, right? No, it is toxic. And from every point, production to disposal, if we're talking here about getting rid of these fibers in a safe way, it is straight up toxic. We just need less of it at the end of the day. And if we let the industry say, we'll just recycle more. We don't want this stuff recycling through our lives. We want as little contact. with it as possible. Given everything you're talking about now in this episode in our conversation here, it has become really obvious that cleaning up plastic in the ocean and everywhere else is not as simple as floating some giant plastic tube over the surface of the water, collecting cups in a garbage patch or filtering things out in a river or whatever. Can you leave us with something hopeful? Because this sounds impossible. It just sounds like why try it? There's already, we've saturated the whole planet with this. What the hell? It's never going to get fixed even remote. close in our lifetime, so who cares? You know, I don't want people to think that.

No, and I spend the last chapter of the book going through some of these mitigation measures. So you mentioned these cleanup efforts. That is, we're talking about dragging a giant tube through the Pacific Garbage Patch to catch a bunch of plastic. It's too late at that point. That is as far downstream in the process as you can possibly get. We're talking about downstream here in plastics mitigation, researchers want us to go as far upstream as possible. So if we're talking about ocean plastic, you don't want to do it in the middle of the Pacific. What's actually quite useful is one of my favorite pieces of technology in history is known as Mr. Trashwheel. I talk about it in the book. Mr. Trashwheel is a, it's, that's actual name.

It's a barge in Baltimore Harbor. It's got big googly eyes. It's absolutely adorable. What it does is it captures plastic floating through the harbor before it can reach the seat. That's literally farther upstream in this case. We're catching it before it can actually get into the ocean. But the farthest upstream we could possibly go is, again, to massively curtail the production of plastic. And that is what a UN treaty is currently under negotiations is working toward is ideally mandatory caps on the production of plastic because the curve is going exponentially

as far as production is concerned. The plastics industry, this is what they see as their source of revenue going forward. They know that we're going to decarbonize our economy. We're going to burn fewer fossil fuels as fuels, and they want us to use more fossil fuels as plastics. That's what they're betting on. We cannot let them get away with that because the more they produce, the more corrupt the planet becomes with their product.

So I think the most effective thing that people can do is clean up their own home. Yes, great. If you get a washing machine filter, you know, you are contributing a fraction of oceanic microfibers, but maybe that convinces one of your friends to get one, and it spreads by word, mouth, and now more people have microfiber filters on the washing machines. I don't want people, though, to feel guilty about their contribution to this. It was not our fault as consumers, and that is the propaganda from the plastics industry, has been all along. If you've just recycled more, you idiots, this wouldn't be such a problem. Meanwhile, we're going to keep producing more and

more of this stuff, don't mind us. So I think that there is a sea change here, that people are more and more realizing that this has gotten absolutely out of control. And there are ways that we can mitigate microfibers in our own home by vacuuming and, you know, putting filters on washing machines. But at the end of the day, this is going to require people as a society to elect politicians that fully understand the scale of this threat and fully understand that this is intimately linked to the climate crisis. Plastics are fossil fuels.

They actually, when they're released as microfibers in the environment, scientists have shown to off-gas carbon. They're contributing to climate change out there, in addition to just obliterating into tiny pieces that get taken up by all sorts of creatures. So that's where I'm actually quite hopeful and optimistic here, is that we're seeing movement on this, that France putting a mandate on microfiber filters for washing machines in 2025, maybe getting, ideally some caps on production in this UN treaty. But most of all, getting people angry about this, about, I mean, when I talk in the book about psychiatrists might not appreciate me, telling people to get angry, but that's the most powerful thing we can do here is to push back

against these sociopathic corporations that have destroyed this planet in pursuit of what, of making shareholders happy. We can't let that happen anymore because given the opportunity, they will keep producing more and more of this stuff, and eventually they'll just become untenable for much of life on earth to actually exist if this gets even more out of control. Matt, thank you so much. A little bit depressing, but also really important. And, you know, You know, whatever. It's real, right? This is, it's not something you can avoid, so you might as well know about it, I suppose. Yeah. I mean, get angry and take action. We as consumers actually have, I think, a lot of power and a lot of momentum at this time. This is not something that we can let

stand any longer. Thank you very much. Thanks for having. Appreciate it. We've got a preview trailer of our interview with Vince Beiser. It's all about sand. You heard me, sand. It's actually quite fascinating. There are even sand mafias killing people over sand. If anybody had told me three, four years ago, that I was going to be spending my every waking hour thinking and talking about sand, I would have just laughed. It's actually the most important solid substance on earth. We use about 50 billion tons of sand every year. That's enough to cover the entire state of California every single year. Every year, we use enough concrete to build a wall 90 feet high and 90 feet across right the way around the place.

planet at the equator. A bunch of sand might get broken off of a mountaintop, washed down into a plane somewhere, and then that sand gets buried under subsequent geological layers and pushed down under the earth and compressed and turned into sandstone. And then that sandstone may get pushed up again by geologic forces over hundreds of thousands of years and worn away again and again broken down back into grains. So an individual grain of sand, can be millions of years old. We're fully eclipsing the rate of creation here. You're probably sitting in a building made of just a huge pile of sand.

All the roads connecting all those buildings also made out of sand. The glass, the windows in all those buildings also made a sand. The microchips, the power our computers, our cell phones, all of our other digital goodies, also made from sand. So without sand, there's no modern civilization. and the craziest thing about it is we are starting to run out. For more on why sand is the next petroleum-like resource and some crazy stories about sand pirates and the black market for sand,

check out episode 97 with Vince Beiser right here on the Jordan Harbinger show. Oh, so it is a little dark, right? It seems hopeless in many ways. Urban rivers are just conveyor belts of plastics out to the open sea. The Ganges River, for example, has a daily outflow, daily. of around 3 billion with a B plastic particles every single day. Just think about that. That's disgusting, to say the least.

I can't even overstate that. Cigarette butts have other toxins right on those plastic fibers that people are sucking down and then thrown in the water. Children inhale more microplastics because their face and nose is lower to the ground and the lower to the ground, the more likely you are to inhale microplastic. So once again, us short adults or babies get the shaft. we may actually be at a place where the ocean is blowing more microplastic onto the land than the land is blowing into or flowing into the ocean. Think about that. Three billion just

from the Ganges River and yet the ocean is still giving us more plastic. In other words, there's such a collection of microplastics in the ocean now that the water and sea breeze carries more out to land that we do dumping more waste into the water. Of course, this problem only gets worse exponentially if we keep dumping and probably will keep happening for decades and decades after we stop, because, well, that's how the ocean works. Everything we wear, everything we eat is from plastic, manufactured from plastic, coated with plastic, manufactured near plastic, touches plastic. Plastics are going to create more emissions than coal plants by 2030, and we are still building coal plants. So keep that in mind. Plastic mulch is something I also never heard of. It

increases yields in the short term, but over the long term, it ends up naturally being a huge problem. This is because we use billions of pounds of plastic mulch every single year in agriculture. China uses enough plastic mulch to cover the entire state of Nebraska every single year, over the whole state. Think about how much that is. A lot of microplastics, they also contain toxic chemicals as well, or endocrine disruptors that we touched on, but not only are those endocrine disruptors on the plastic. They can be inside the plastic.

The plastic can be around the endocrine disrupting molecules. So basically, there's a microplastic shield around an endocrine disrupting chemical or toxic chemical. So this toxic chemical is now protected from being broken down outside until it ends up in a body or a digestive system. And then it slowly releases into that body, that system, whether it's a human or an animal. It's kind of like how a tablet or a pill is coated on the outside to make it easier to swallow and get into your system. Not good. Matt notes in his book that a European consumer eats up to 11,000 pieces. of microplastic per year based on their consumption of mussels, clams, scallops, and, you know, I guess the jokes on them. American food is already mostly plastic. How else does plastic affect

sea life? Can they get inside fish organs like gills? Yes, they can. So imagine a fish trying to breathe with pieces of plastic, like plastic bag, in the lungs. Microfibers catch on gills and make it harder for fish to breathe, so they have to work harder to get oxygen. This, of course, affects all sea life, not just fish. Wet wipes shed, sweaters shed, even, even, Even flushable wipes, those shed plastic. You're walking around shedding this stuff everywhere. It's called the pig pen effect, based on the Charlie Brown character. This is the shedding of microplastics and nanoplastics from our clothing, just everywhere.

You're walking outside with a little plasticy windbreaker on. You're shedding that crap all over the place. It's really hard to imagine that we could stop this. The ocean currents, of course, move the pollution around. So they're finding plastic in Antarctica. It's crazy to me. Places where humans have never been, they're finding plastic because it moves around in the jet stream in the water and everything.

Trailer nets in the ocean are shedding plastic. Paint fragments are shedding plastic. Also, speaking of plastic in the lungs, that can cause things like cancer, especially if the plastics have other things on them, like bacteria and heavy metals, other things that Matthew mentioned stick to the plastic itself. Asbestos can get into the lungs. Plastic does too. It's not an exaggeration to say that this is as bad as any other sort of carcinogen.

Also, there's something called nerds. These are huge containers full of millions of power. of little plastic pellets that they use to make basically anything. These will get swept off of ships or fall off of ships or sink from ships, and they'll spill millions of pounds of these plastic nerdles, or they'll get melted from a fire and then dumped into the water. It's actually more expensive and difficult to clean them up than to simply leave them on the ground and make more.

So what happens? They just leave them there, and they make more. It's awful. Imagine millions of pounds of little plastic pellets dumped into the ocean on a shipwreck. It's really horrifying. and they travel far. Actually, beachcomers, they call them mermaid tears, which is, I guess, dark humor at its best. And by the way, you might think, well, I don't work at a textile factory. Fine. Unless you work at a textile factory, though, the place where you inhale the most pollution

is the room you're probably in right now, especially if you're at home in your bedroom, you know, where you spend decades of your life just inhaling whatever's in the air. And as Matthew said, yeah, we can buy better clothes, we can wear them for years, but this is really an industry issue. It's not a consumer issue. It's not a recycling. issue. This isn't something that can be shoved off onto us. This is something that we have to prevent by making sure that we stop making this crap. Easier said than done. Big thank you to Matthew Simon, the book, and all links to the resources will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com. You can also check out our chat, GPT bot to search for anything we've

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