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 co...