Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. You've probably heard something about the danger of plastics, but has it changed any of your behavior? Today, we take a deep dive into the problem with plastics with my guest, Judith Enck. Professor Enck teaches at Bennington College and is the founder and president of Beyond Plastics. She served in the Environmental Protection Agency during the Obama administration and also served in New York State government as a deputy secretary for the environment. Professor Enck is with me today because she's written a new book with Adam Mahoney titled, appropriately, “The Problem with Plastic: How We Can Save Ourselves and Our Planet Before It's Too Late”. Professor Enck, welcome to the program.
Judith Enck: Thanks, Grant. It's a real pleasure to be with you, thanks for having me.
GR: Well, we really appreciate you making the time. So, before we get into some of the arguments that you make in your book, I wanted to start with just a very basic question for our listeners and just to remind us all, what is plastic made from and how is it made?
JE: Well, plastic is a very durable material that never biodegrades. It's made from fossil fuels and 16,000 different chemicals. And it really was brought into commerce right after World War two. It was created by a guy from upstate New York named Leo Bakelite (Baekeland), and it has dramatically increased in the last decade or two. And that's because plastics used to be made from chemicals and crude oil. Now it's made from chemicals and ethane, which is a byproduct of fracking. Because there's a glut of fracked gas on the market is why we are seeing the proliferation of plastics.
GR: Okay. So what are the qualities about plastic that have made it so ubiquitous over time? It's obviously light and somewhat strong, what else do we need to know about it?
JE: Well, it's durable, it's heat resistant. You can make many, many different colors. I mean, the way I want to answer this is explaining why it's mostly not recyclable. So, take an aluminum can. You can recycle that aluminum can into a new aluminum can. Take a newspaper, you can recycle that into new paper products, cardboard paper. Plastics are made from many different types of plastic polymers. There are 16,000 chemicals used to make plastic in many, many different colors. So that's what makes up plastic. So that also makes it really hard to recycle. Think of your own home or apartment, you might have a bright orange hard plastic detergent bottle near your washing machine.
GR: I do, I do.
JE: In your refrigerator, you may have a black plastic takeout container. Those two things cannot get recycled together because they're different types of plastics, they're different colors. So the people who knew for decades that plastics are really hard to recycle and why we have in this country an abysmal plastic recycling rate of only 5 to 6%. The people who know this are the companies that make plastics. And yet they have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising telling us, don't worry about all your single use plastic, just toss it in your recycling bin, knowing full well that most plastic never gets recycled. And the deception is so serious that California Attorney General Rob Bonta sued ExxonMobil in September of 2024 for deception around plastics recycling. So, keep recycling your paper, cardboard, metal, glass. Please, please, please compost your yard waste and your food waste. But recognize that plastic recycling has been an abysmal failure.
GR: Interesting. I knew that a lot of plastic wasn't recycled, but I didn't know exactly why. So that's very, yeah, I appreciate that. Well, briefly as an overview, and then we'll get into some of the specifics as we go, but briefly as an overview, what's the problem with plastic overall? You mentioned that it doesn't biodegrade, what are the other problems?
JE: Well, it's entering our ocean in a rapid fashion. 71% of the Earth's surface is ocean and every single minute two giant garbage trucks, the equivalent of two giant garbage trucks, dump plastic into the ocean. So we are turning our ocean into a watery landfill. Second big problem is climate change. I mentioned that today, plastics are made from a byproduct of fracking. That is making the climate crisis worse. Third, we have the really significant concern of environmental justice. Most plastic is manufactured in Texas, Louisiana and Appalachia, doing enormous health damage to people living near these plastic production facilities. There's a stretch of the Mississippi River, which we talk about in the book, between New Orleans and Baton Rouge called ‘Cancer Alley’, and that's because of the concentration of petrochemical facilities making people sick. Johns Hopkins recently did a study where they documented the cancer rates in Cancer Alley are seven times higher than the national average. So, I have visited communities in Port Arthur, Texas, the Houston Ship Channel, up and down Cancer Alley. These have become sacrifice zones, government regulations have failed these people living in these communities. And because most plastics never get recycled, if you go to the other end of the spectrum, what happens to them after they're manufactured and used? They mostly get released into the environment inadvertently and into water bodies, or they go to landfills or garbage incinerators. Those disposal facilities are typically sited in low-income communities and / or communities of color. So environmental justice is a big part of this book and part of the dedication in the book. The fourth major issue is just taxpayer savings. You and I, as taxpayers spend a lot of money getting rid of non-recyclable plastics when we think we could do a lot better on reducing the amount of plastics and also shifting to reusable, refillable products. And then finally, we have the health issue with plastics. So it's people being poisoned near plastic manufacturing facilities. But you and I have little shards of plastic known as microplastics in our bodies. We breathe them in through our nose or we swallow them. So just in the last few years, there have been peer reviewed scientific studies documenting the presence of microplastics in our blood, our kidneys, our lungs, in the human placenta, both the fetal side and the maternal side, in testicles, in breast milk, also in our heart arteries, the microplastics attached to plaque. And a study found increased risk of stroke, heart attack and premature death if you've got microplastics on plaque. And then finally, there's a study documenting that microplastics pass through the blood brain barrier. And that has been linked to Alzheimer's disease and other neurological disorders. Now, I want to emphasize that we need more of these studies. You don't make a solid conclusion based on one study. But we now have multiple studies looking at different parts of the human body and I'm willing to go out on a limb and say, no amount of microplastics in our brains or our heart arteries are acceptable.
GR: Kind of like smoking. Well, you've anticipated so many of my questions. We're going to dive into some of these things as we go forward. I'm Grant Reeher, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media and my guest is Judith Enck. She's a professor at Bennington College and the author of, “The Problem with Plastic: How We Can Save Ourselves and Our Planet Before It's Too Late”. I did have one question before I pursue some of the things that you've just brought up there in your answer. And that is, are certain kinds of plastics or plastics in certain forms more dangerous than other kinds of plastics?
JE: Yes. So we're very focused on PVC plastic, polyvinyl chloride. 99% of the highly toxic chemical vinyl chloride is used to make PVC plastic. Vinyl chloride is a carcinogen. We've urged the federal Environmental Protection Agency to ban vinyl chloride. Some of your listeners might know the community East Palestine, Ohio, where just over two years ago, a train derailed.
GR: Yes.
JE: And very unwisely, the governor and the rail company decided, rather than carefully removing the vinyl chloride from the train cars and what was released into the environment, they decided to do an open burn and just set it on fire so that the rail corridor can open more quickly. I think East Palestine is just an incredible visual of the problem of moving vinyl chloride all over the country, and it's mostly used to make polyvinyl chloride plastic. So we've got a real focus on vinyl chloride. I'm also concerned with plastics that are used in food and beverage packaging. When that plastic gets warm or hot, you may have leaching into your food or your beverage. People who, for instance, put frozen food in a plastic container into the microwave, they may notice it tastes a little plasticky when it's fully cooked.
GR: Because it is. (laughter)
JE: Yes, it leaches into the food. And so if people have learned nothing else from this radio show, please do not put plastic into the microwave because you're going to get some chemical leaching. And unfortunately, the FDA is very quick to approve the use of plastic in packaging, including recycled plastic, which is incredibly problematic.
GR: Well, you mentioned the microplastics that we breathe in and, you know, are in our organs. I'm wondering, is that what when I hear conversations about forever chemicals forever plastics, that's what you're getting at?
JE: Not exactly.
GR: Not exactly, okay. So what's the difference?
JE: So, the microplastics are like physically little shards of plastic five millimeters or less. The chemicals hitchhike on the little pieces of plastic. So forever chemicals, which is PFOA and PFAS, they are used in plastics. So, it's a double threat. It's the physicality of the little pieces of plastic and then the chemicals hitchhiking on the little pieces of plastic that we're concerned about.
GR: And those little pieces of plastic, that's when I read about the ocean teeming with these things. That's what they're talking about, that's what you’re talking about.
JE: Yeah, the plastics. Well, there are these big islands on the surface of the ocean, they're called gyres. And they're a little bit of a misleading image because when plastic makes it into the ocean, and the way it gets there is, let's say you're walking down the street in Syracuse, and somehow a plastic wrapper gets away from you, something light, you didn't litter it on purpose, but it happens. And it rains, it gets into the storm drain and then goes into a stream, a river, and then eventually the ocean. It gets out into the ocean, it's exposed to sunlight, it gets brittle. And then the wave action acts almost like a paper cutter. So one hamburger wrapper becomes hundreds of little pieces of plastic. Most of the plastic in the ocean falls to the sea floor, it's not on the surface of the water, and it is eaten by fish and sea turtles and seabirds. There are these terrible, iconic photos of seabirds, albatross in particular. They consume plastic, they feel like they're full, so they stop eating calories and they die. And then scientists do autopsies, and there are these photos of their guts filled with plastic. If it's a red bottle cap, for instance, they think it's shrimp and they eat it. So, plastics are devastating the ocean. And remember, the ocean covers nearly 71% of the Earth's surface, it's a major source of protein for many people around the world. And we know that the microplastics are building up in the marine food chain.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Judith Enck. She's a professor at Bennington College, has served in the Obama administration and in New York State government, and is the author of a new book titled, “The Problem with Plastic: How We Can Save Ourselves and Our Planet Before It's Too Late”. So, I wanted to come back to something you mentioned in the first part of our conversation about the fact that the dangers in making plastic and in dealing with it are not equally distributed across different groups of society in this country, and I imagine also probably in terms of countries in the world, I imagine the southern hemisphere probably gets more of the byproduct of all this than we have to deal with. So, curious to hear a little bit more about that, the injustices that you see.
JE: Yeah. Thank you for raising this. So, you're right, the plastics are being manufactured in low-income communities and communities of color in the Gulf South and Appalachia. And then there's a huge amount of waste plastic exported to the global South and other countries. So just really harrowing depictions of waste plastic going to Indonesia, to the Philippines, to Vietnam. And I highly recommend that people watch the movie called, “The Story of Plastic”, which is available on the website of the NGO called, “The Story of Stuff”. I teach a class on plastic pollution through Bennington College, and it's available on Zoom and people can audit it. Most of the students are actually auditors, and every semester we show that movie, “The Story of Plastic” and talk about it and it really puts the spotlight on the export of plastic to other nations that are not equipped to handle it, just like we are not here. In terms of the United States, I think I can best summarize the situation by reading the dedication to the book, which I'll do quickly.
GR: Okay.
JE: “By design, low-income people and communities of color bear the burden of plastics. The destructive web of plastics gathers in their neighborhoods, rivers, air, and bodies. We dedicate this book to those living in the shadow of plastics facilities in Louisiana, Texas, Appalachia, and elsewhere, in the sincere belief that they should live in a world beyond plastics, and that such a world is within our reach.”
GR: Well, that's a perfect segue to what I wanted to ask you about now, which is what is within our reach? And so how should we be thinking about what we need to be doing differently? You do write in your book about what you call false solutions. What are these and why are these dangerous?
JE: Well, there's a bunch of false solutions that are promoted by the plastics industry because they don't want to reduce the production of plastics. There's something called chemical recycling, which is heating plastic to a very high temperature and then turning it into low grade fossil fuel, the last thing we need. There are some companies that want to turn waste plastic into plastic bricks. Well, what happens if those bricks catch fire? And also, what happens with plastic bricks and plastic lumber is there's abrasion. And then when it's exposed to sunlight and then you've got little bits of microplastics falling into the soil and into the air. So what we see is whenever we advocate for policies that reduce plastic, whether it's a plastic bag ban to promote reusable bags or utensils only upon request when you get takeout food, like, we all have these kitchen drawers that are just overflowing with plastic utensils and straws and condiments that we're never going to use. There's a bill pending in the legislature that said, you only get that stuff if you ask for it, and it'll save restaurants money, by the way. Whenever ideas like that surface, the army of lobbyists show up in the city council, the state legislature, and say, no, no, no, we don't need to reduce plastics, we can use chemical recycling, or we can turn it into to decking in your back deck. And none of them are sustainable or healthy options.
GR: If you’ve just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher and my guest is Judith Enck. She's the author of, “The Problem with Plastic: How We Can Save Ourselves and Our Planet Before It's Too Late”. So, you also put forward what you argue are better solutions. I think we've got an inkling of some of them, you've mentioned them along the way, ways to use less plastic. But tell us what those solutions are and why they're better.
JE: Well, we cannot shop our way out of the problem. No matter how careful you are, you cannot avoid plastic in your typical supermarket. So, we really need to see policy reform or systemic change. For instance, there's a bill pending in the New York State Legislature called the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act. It requires a 30% reduction in single use packaging stretched out over 12 years. Not 30% in two years, it's 10%, then 20% then 30% over 12 years. The bill also bans 17 of the most toxic chemicals used to make packaging. Chemicals like the PFAS forever chemicals, lead, mercury, cadmium. We really prefer that not be in packaging. And again, it's reasonable. There are 17,000, I'm sorry, there are 16,000 chemicals used to make plastic, we're looking at prohibiting just over a dozen. Third, it prohibits what we just talked about, chemical recycling is counting as real recycling. And then finally, it authorizes modest fees on packaging with this new money going to local governments and the private sector to support better recycling and waste reduction. So better recycling doesn't help us on plastic, but it does help us on paper, cardboard, metal, glass. But also having money for waste reduction, reuse, refill is so important. What does that mean? It means your local school could install dishwashing equipment so children are served food on real dishes rather than single use plastic. Some of us go to the airport and we refill our water bottle with, hopefully not a plastic water bottle at a water refill station. Why don't we have water refill stations where lower income folks travel like bus stations and train stations and every public park? There was a time when you had water fountains in public parks and Main Street. So that re-use, refill infrastructure takes money. Why don't we have refillable wine bottles in the Finger Lakes? Wineries are very interested in that because they're spending a lot of money buying new bottles every time. But we need a commercial bottle washing operation in the Finger Lakes so those bottles can be returned and sanitized. So, we're going to solve the problem in 120 different ways. But we need a new law like the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act to be adopted to incentivize all of this. So this bill has passed in the New York State Senate, two years in a row, thank you Senator Rachel May of Syracuse for voting yes.
GR: She's a frequent guest on the program, I should say. Go ahead.
JE: Love, love, love Senator May. And we now have to get it through the Assembly, where we're asking Speaker Carl Heastie to bring the bill up for a vote. It's on the floor now, it doesn't even have to go through committee. So, 2026 is an election year, there's an army of lobbyists opposing the bill. But local governments, tax payers, medical experts, environmentalists, civic leaders need to come together. And in fact, there will be a big lobby day in Albany to bring average citizens to the state capitol, to advocate in support of the bill and that will be on Monday, February 2nd. And listeners can go to beyondplastics.org to get information on how to register for the lobby day or just information on this bill if they want to drop a note or make a phone call to their state Assemblymember and state senator.
GR: Okay, who's leading the way right now on these kinds of things? And I mean that in terms of countries and states within the United States and then any localities that you think? You know, you teach in Vermont, I often associate Vermont with great environmental efforts, but who are the folks that are out in front on this?
JE: Trance, to a degree, they're promoting reusables, but unfortunately, a lot of it is plastic. But they're doing some other good work. There are countries in Africa that have adopted single use plastic bans. In the United States, it's spotty, but the leadership's actually coming from local governments. Vermont passed something called the Plastics Trifecta all in one bill. It banned polystyrene foam food packaging, banned plastic bags, and also takeout plastic, you know, the utensils if you ask for it. Vermont's pretty good. New York City adopted some pretty good laws that the state then followed. California is screwing things up across the board on waste issues, which was a little surprising to me. For instance, they passed a plastic bag ban ten years ago, but they allowed for thicker, single use plastic bags, and it took them ten years to fix that. The leadership is coming from local governments and then occasional states, but we've got a long way to go. This is the long game and unfortunately, Washington, DC is not doing anything helpful. In fact, they are hurting on the plastics and toxics issue, whether it's Congress or the EPA.
GR: I'm going to be very unfair to you here at the end, we only have just a few seconds. But the one last thing I wanted to ask you is, in a lot of ways, this is all been very depressing, enlightening, but depressing. Can you just leave us in 10, 15 seconds with a thought that's going to lift us back up again?
JE: Yeah. You know, the book includes profiles of amazing people who are working in difficult communities. People like Sharon Levine in Cancer Alley, Diane Wilson in San Antonio Bay, Texas, who are really taking on special interests and winning. So, plastic can be a little discouraging, but we're also seeing progress, and ordinary people can make a difference when they come together.
GR: Perfect, thank you. We'll have to leave it there. That was Judith Enck, and again, her new book, written with Adam Mahoney, is titled, “The Problem with Plastic: How We Can Save Ourselves and Our Planet Before It's Too Late”. It's an important book, and it's an important call to action. Professor, thanks so much for making time to talk with me, I really appreciated it.
JE: My pleasure. Thanks, Grant.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
