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Money Talks: Plastic, Plastic Everywhere
00:35:03
Beth Gardiner explains how we ended up holding the (plastic) bag for Big Oil’s wastefulness.
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- [00:01]
Slate Money Host
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- [01:20]
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- [02:23]
Elizabeth Spires
Hello and welcome to Money Talks. I'm your host, Elizabeth Spires, and today I'm joined by Beth Gardner and we're here to talk about her new book, Plastic the Secret History and Shocking Future of Big Oil's Biggest Bit. So, Beth, introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your book.
- [02:39]
Beth Gardner
Hi Elizabeth. Yes, my name is Beth Gardner. I'm a journalist. The book is called Plastic Ink and it is, I think, an effort on my part to sort of reframe the conversation and reframe our understanding of Plastic around a sort of perspective of where it comes from rather than where it ends up. You know, I think Plastic is one of those issues that a lot of people are really concerned about, even if they're not sort of super connected to environmental issues or necessarily involved in that world. It's something that is so present in our everyday lives. And I just sort of observe anecdotally from people I know that a lot of people just like feel bad about it. They, they hate how much plastic they throw out all the time. All the, you know, the single use packaging and the utensils and all of that, that kind of comes into your life and then it very quickly goes out. And I hear also a lot of guilt being expressed by people I know about the amount of plastic that they throw out. And it just sort of struck me when I started to like dig in and learn a little bit about this industry that, you know, all of that concern, all of that focus on plastic feels like it either tends to focus on kind of where it ends up, you know, these terrible pictures that we've all seen of the beaches covered with trash or the turtle tangled up in a bag or whatever. And there's very little focus on where it comes from, which is, of course, the fossil fuel industry and its petrochemical subsidiaries. So that is sort of where I've tried to turn the lens in this book on where plastic comes from.
- [04:15]
Elizabeth Spires
Well, it's interesting timing because as we're taping this, we're currently at war with Iran. Hopefully by the time this comes out, maybe that'll be resolved. Not terribly optimistic, but I think when people think of the oil industry, you know, they primarily think of gas or consumers do, because it's their primary point of connection to the petroleum industry. But one of the things that I got from your book was just how big independent plastics industry is on petrochemicals. And that was really the origin point. So can you give us the sort of CliffsNotes history of how we ended up with plastic as a derivative of oil products?
- [04:52]
Beth Gardner
Yeah, exactly. So, and I mean, like you say, we're not used to thinking about this, right? And even me, like, I'm an environmental journalist and before I started really like delving into this with my own research and reporting, I didn't really know what plastic was. I mean, I kind of could have told you, like, yes, it comes from oil and gas derivatives, but like, that's sort of it. And like, I mean, I think if any of us looks at like a cardboard box or a piece of paper, like, we just know instinctively on some
- [05:20]
Elizabeth Spires
level that you can imagine it being a tree at some point.
- [05:23]
Beth Gardner
That was a tree Point.
- [05:24]
Elizabeth Spires
Right.
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Beth Gardner
But you look at a pair of eyeglasses or a plastic bag or like what even is that? And I think that in some ways actually is a benefit to the industry that we do sort of have this sense that plastic kind of comes from nowhere. Right. You know, obviously that is not the case. You know, we use this word plastic in the singular. In fact, it's really plastics. There's hundreds and in fact thousands of different formulations, different kinds of plastics from, you know, the fibers in your carpeting or your yoga pants to the resins in your water bottle or your really sort of super highly engineered sophisticated plastics in your laptop or your phone.
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Elizabeth Spires
Right.
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Beth Gardner
But fundamentally these materials all share one thing, which is that they have their origins in either oil or gas. So there's a lot of different kinds of plastic, there's a lot of different ways of making them. But basically if it's coming from oil, these oil companies, the Exxons and the shells etc are, you know, drilling this oil out of the ground. You get a barrel of crude oil that is actually like really diverse and potent combination of chemicals. So what they do is put that oil in a refinery and you, you remove the gas, the diesel, the jet fuel, the shipping fuel, you know, and then you're left with sort of a chunk of stuff, maybe 15, 20% of the barrel as they call it, which is a whole bunch of chemicals. So if you're an oil company, you send those over to the petrochemical facility, which is, you know, quite often right next door, because this is a very deeply integrated sort of set of supply chains that we're talking about. And a petrochemical facility is a, you know, an industrial factory that uses super, super high temperatures and super high pressures to break apart these molecules, these hydrocarbons, and then recombine them in different formulations. So if you're talking about oil, you're often getting this chemical called naphtha, which is a really important building block for lots of different plastics. You get also get lots other chemicals like benzene, you know, these things that are sort of additives to give plastic certain properties. You, you have a sort of base material and then you can make it, you know, more foamy, more rigid, more flexible, different colors. You add other chemicals to make it, you know, non flammable or less likely to sort of decay in the presence of oxygen. So, you know, what this is telling you really is that the process by which plastics are produced is very, very deeply interconne with the process by which we get oil. And the same is True for, you know, natural gas, particularly in connection with fracking in the US has been a really big driver of American plastic production in recent years. To bring it back to, I guess, your question about the Iran war, I think what it is really underlined for us is that that plastic, at the end of the day is a petrochemical. It is a fossil fuel product. People are very accustomed, like you said, to the idea that when there is a disruption as some kind of a geopolitical upheaval like this war in Iran and the closure for so many weeks now of the Strait of Hormuz, that that is going to have an impact on like our fuels. Right. So the price of oil goes up. You see it kind of like in the news, and then a couple of days later, that big sign at the gas station, when you go to fill up your tank, the price has gone up. Plastic. There's a lot more steps between sort of the oil or gas well and the plastic bottle, the packaging, whatever. So it takes a little longer to sort of work its way through in terms of like driving the price. That is actually something that's happening now. It's another inflationary pressure, but I think not only is it slower, but it's less visible to us. Right. There's no gigantic sign that tells you that this material is coming out of an oil or gas well. But, you know, in fact, that's where it's born.
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Elizabeth Spires
Are there any plastics that are not. Don't have a petrochemical precursor?
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Beth Gardner
Yeah, there's a very small percentage of. They sort of call them bioplastics. Interestingly, one of them is cellulose acetate, which is the plastic that's often used in cigarette filters. It tends to come from like a wood pulp.
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Elizabeth Spires
You know, you get this makes them healthy. Right, Right.
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Beth Gardner
You need like a carbon based backbone ingredient. And typically that comes from oil and gas. The molecules in oil and gas are super long, so they're very, very versatile. And the small number of plastics that can come from more organic materials, but interestingly, that does not necessarily mean that they are less harmful. They're, you know, still very complex chemicals with a lot of really negative impacts on the environment and our health.
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Elizabeth Spires
There's a really interesting part of your book was where you talk about the interplay between the tobacco industry and petrochemicals, which I had always assumed probably do take cues from each other. But I thought the direction was, you know, oil companies learning from tobacco companies. Yes. And you make the case that it was really the other way around. So can you tell us a little bit about that.
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Beth Gardner
I mean, that is so interesting, right? And I think we're all kind of accustomed now to this idea that Big Oil and Big Tobacco are often sort of likened to one another in the tactics that they use to sort of cast doubt on really, really solid science. In the case of tobacco, the relationship between smoking and lung cancer and other health problems. In the case of Big Oil, it's mainly around casting doubt on climate science. A lot of this was laid out very, very vividly in the landmark book Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Reskis and Eric Conway. And I interviewed a guy named Carroll Muffett for this book. And at the time, he was running an organization called the center for International environmental law in D.C. which is like a research and advocacy group. And he said to himself, and he explained to me, you know, these industries are so often compared to one another. I wonder what the actual relationship between them has been, like, what connections are there? So he went into, you know, there was millions and millions of pages of documents from the tobacco industry that were made public after the state lawsuits against tobacco, Big Tobacco were settled. And a lot of these documents are now available in a sort of big online archive out of, but based out of ucsf. So Carol Muffett was like, all right, I'm going to go in there and, like, look and see what I can find. And he said the first thing he would look at was like, is there any board overlap? Are there instances where tobacco board members were also on the board of oil companies? And he said, like, literally in the first 10 minutes, he found, like, multiple examples. So then it was kind of like, okay, what next? And he started to look at, like, what did this relationship actually mean? And this was. I mean, so many people have commented on it to me that it's like one of the really shocking things in the book. And I was so shocked by it as well. Because what Carol Muffet found when he started looking through these archives was that back in the sort of 60s, 70s, 80s, the tobacco industry, even before climate change, was really on the radar. The oil industry was dealing with a lot of sort of public concern around what are the health effects of air pollution from oil and gas combustion, right? So the oil industry had a lot of expertise in, like, testing exhaust and testing smoke. So the tobacco industry came to them and said, like, hey, can you guys, you know, ExxonMobil, whatever, can you, like, test some of this tobacco smoke for us? And, like, let's really try to figure out what's in it. So they did there's, you know, documentary evidence and memos and letters and all of that stuff to this effect. And you know, of course they, they found some nasty stuff in that tobacco smoke. And so did anybody say, like, let's warn, you know, smokers to stop inhaling this stuff? No, of course they didn't. What Carol Muffett found in these archives was that the oil industry and their petrochemical subsidiaries, you know, a lot of plastics are made by, for example, ExxonMobil chemical, the chemical arm of Exxon Mobil. These petrochemical and oil companies started saying, like, hey, maybe we can make cigarette filters for you. Because the tobacco industry had decided that filters are, unfortunately, they really don't make smoking less harmful. They can sometimes even make it more harmful. But they are a really handy PR tool.
- [13:46]
Elizabeth Spires
Right.
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Beth Gardner
So the oil companies proposed a new kind of filter which would be made from polypropylene plastic that never really took off. But the efforts did continue for I think, a couple of decades. And I think what it really underlines is this sort of voraciousness on the part of the oil and petrochemical companies to constantly open up new markets and find new ways of selling oilplastic. The other really shocking thing that came out of that, it turned out that the tobacco industry had been hiring PR people, you know, made to order scientists to do their own studies on tobacco. They were hiring people who had started out working for the oil industry. So we sort of have, you know, fallen into this notion that big Oil in their climate denial has kind of taken a page from the playbook of big tobacco. But what Muffett and his organization found was that actually it went the other way. That these tactics of doubt and denialism originated with Big Oil. Plastic is a big part of that.
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Elizabeth Spires
The filters in the cigarettes actually made them less healthy, I think you've heard.
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Beth Gardner
Yes, I mean, there's really shocking research about that.
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Elizabeth Spires
Right.
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Beth Gardner
And there is just absolutely bald faced explanation in some of these tobacco documents by the tobacco companies saying, like, this is a good gimmick for sales. Yeah, there's research that says, you know, when you inhale through a filter, they can add sort of like different microplastic particles that go into your lungs. And it also I think sort of changes often the way that people inhale. So they're taking the smoke in more deeply and, you know, they can actually make smoking less healthy rather than more.
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Elizabeth Spires
Well, speaking of the marketing and the lobbying around these activities, so thank you for Smoking is a favorite movie and book of mine. But after reading Your book, I think it didn't go far enough in skewering the tobacco industry and the arms industry and so on. So another big theme of your book is really how the industry has managed to create demand for products by marketing them in a certain way. But also you describe a level of greenwashing that really exceeds what I normally think of as greenwashing, where a brand just slaps an add up for Earth Day or says something is recyclable. And you sort of go into a bunch of case studies and how this happened. So one is just the creation of the ubiquitous recycling symbol with the triangles and the arrows and how it's been co opted by the industry. And reading your book, I realized this totally worked on me. Yes, because they came up with a classification system which, you know, if you have anything that's plastic, you can look and there's probably a little numbered symbol that looks like the recycling symbol. And it sort of makes you think that these items are recyclable, but they're not. So the origin of that was.
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Beth Gardner
Yeah, so I interviewed, this was like one of my favorite people. I spoke to the guy who designed the, the three arrows. It's called the three Chasing arrows recycling symbol that we all are so familiar with. His name is Gary Anderson. He's like in the 70s now. He was a retired architect, he lives in Baltimore. He was a student at University of Southern California back in the late 60s, the early 70s. And he saw this flyer that was a competition sponsored by a cardboard box company. They wanted a symbol to represent the idea of recycling. And he sat down and came up with a few drafts. He'd been working with some arrows in another project he was doing and he really loved this idea of the Mobius strip, which this sort of infinite circle thing. And he won the competition. That symbol became the logo that we all are so familiar with. He kind of moved on with his life. Like no one he knows really even knows about it. He told me he never put it on his resume because he's an architect and he didn't want his job applications to be sort of classified with graphic design. But he said to me at the end of the interview, please don't turn this into something negative because that's not what this symbol is. For me, I'm, I'm really proud of what I created. And you know, he's totally right. It's an amazing visual and it captures this idea of sort of circularity in a certain kind of infinitude of reuse over and over again. That's the ideal of recycling. Right. And it is the case for a lot of materials. I don't want to cast dispersions on the whole concept of recycling in general. You know, if you're talking about aluminum cans or glass bottles or paper or whatever, like a lot of materials really can be recycled not infinitely and perfectly, but pretty effectively, that is not the case for plastic. However, the plastic and petrochemical industry really grabbed onto this idea of recycling and onto the three chasing arrows symbol because they understood. I think one thing I saw when I sort of looked over the history of our relationship, the modern relationship with plastic, which really goes back to the post World War II era, is that there have been these sort of regular moments of kind of crisis where public concern, public anger about the proliferation of plastic and plastic waste just keeps on bubbling up because people do get that there is like something really wrong here, that there's so much unnecessary plastic, there's so much waste.
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Elizabeth Spires
Right.
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Beth Gardner
And the industry understands that that public concern potentially poses a threat because anytime the public is worried about something, upset about something, it always, at least in theory, holds the potential to translate into some kind of political or policy action. Right. In this case, that could be like bans on certain single use items or even more broad legislation or regulation that could impinge on markets for plastic and the industry's ability to keep selling more and more. So to get back to your question about greenwash, the industry has always understood that they need to find ways of easing people's worries about plastic waste and all the stuff we are throwing out all the time. The writer Susan Frankel, in a book about plastic that she wrote back in the 2010s, interviewed this lobbyist from the plastic industry, one of the plastic councils who used the term guilt eraser, that the the industry sees it recycling as a PR tactic. Right. It's a way to ease our concern. There's so many technical, economic, logistical obstacles to actually recyc recycling plastic effectively, but they just throw that three arrows logo on everything. It's been warped beyond anything that designer Gary Anderson ever imagined. And we naturally sort of assume like, oh, that means you can throw it in the recycling bin. And it's really, unfortunately not always the case.
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Elizabeth Spires
There are a bunch of instances where you describe scenarios where a bunch of oil industry people get together and they form some kind of organization that sounds generic enough.
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Beth Gardner
Yes.
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Elizabeth Spires
That you wouldn't trace it back to petrochemical companies and you know, they build a sort of program around recycling where they go and do one project in a community and then sort of leave. But you point out, too, that if recycling were as viable as we would like to think it is, the recycled products would be competitors to virgin plastic.
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Beth Gardner
Exactly.
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Elizabeth Spires
And that would be a problem for the petrochemical companies. So there's a good reason to kind of not trust their incentives when they claim to do sustainable things.
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Beth Gardner
Yeah, very much so. And I mean, I think the underlying framing here that they have always tried to go for is, you know, recycling is one aspect of it. Right. But the industry has really always tried to convince us that plastic is a waste management problem. This is about where it ends up. It's not a problem of overproduction. The way we're sort of drowning in plastic now. The pictures we see of it floating through the ocean or whatever, that this is all about plastic not ending up in the right place. And it's not about the fact that there is, you know, so much plastic being produced. Right. If you look back to 1950, like I said, sort of, that's a bear of modern plastic. The industry produced 2 million tons of plastic that year. Now we're over 500 million tons annually and going up. So when you talk about these sort of, you know, very anodyne names of industry organizations, to me, the ultimate one is Keep America Beautiful. If you're old enough to have been watching TV like I was back in the 1970s, you might remember this character called the Crying Indian, which was one of the most iconic TV commercials of that era and of the 20th century, really, created by this organization called Keep America Beautiful, an anti littering campaign. You know, could anything possibly sound more anodyne and benevolent? The tagline of Keep America Beautiful was Keeping America beautiful is your job. And while most of us probably thought of this organization as being a sort of generic civic organization, civic body, it was actually an industry organization. Some of the earliest members were Coke, Pepsi, Philip Morris Tobacco, the American can company with that tagline of Keeping America beautiful is your job. You know, they're doing two things, both of which are really central to the greenwashing. Almost prototypical to the whole genre of greenwash. What they're doing is twofold. I think number one is obviously on the surface, right? They're shifting responsibility away from industry and corporate responsibility and towards the public. Right. That all the plastic that people were getting so worried about that's ending up on the beaches and the roadsides and all this is. It's like a littering problem. They coined the term litter bugs. Like a few irresponsible individuals are failing to put their waste packaging in the right place after they go to McDonald's or whatever. It's not a problem of too much plastic being produced. If it just ended up in the right place, if you put in the right bin, then everything would be fine.
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Elizabeth Spires
Right.
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Beth Gardner
But it's not only about shifting the responsibility away from the corporations and onto the public, but it's also about actually redefining what the problem is. And I think this is important to emphasize because it's been very, very effective. Recycling fits right into that, right? If we put in the recycling bin and it goes to the recycling ferries or whatever, it's all fine. And they can just sort of keep making more and more plastic every year, keep pushing it sort of into our lives in the way that we don't necessarily have choice about. And that framing of waste management versus overproduction has been really, really powerful one.
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Elizabeth Spires
Yeah, this is another thing where, you know, I was born in the mid-70s. I remember it was like, oh, I fell for that propaganda. Yeah. What year did that ad come out?
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Beth Gardner
I think the first version, if I'm remembering correctly, launched the year of the first Earth day, which was 1971. But it continued in different iterations through the 70s. The ad was so that TV stations kept having to order new sets of films from the ad council, which made it because they were wearing them out. It won all kinds of awards. Interestingly, the actor who portrayed the quotes, the crying Indian, was actually an Italian American guy. And the tagline of that ad was like, people start pollution, people can stop it. And again, it's about sort of putting that responsibility onto us. Right. And there's another writer named Finis Dunaway who wrote a book called Seeing Green about all these different ways that images can be used in environmentalism, in greenwash. And he wrote that, you know, it's just an extraordinary thing that this figure, this crying Indian became for so many Americans a sort of figure of environmentalism, of sort of responsible stewardship. It was actually an industry creation.
- [25:43]
Elizabeth Spires
The irony of tobacco companies participating in this and sort of exploiting, you know, stereotypes about indigenous people, Right? Just sort of icing on the cake.
- [26:13]
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Elizabeth Spires
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Beth Gardner
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- [28:14]
Elizabeth Spires
One of the things that came up before we started taping was it's hard to get people to wrap their head around large environmental problems because people have kind of climate anxiety. It seems like it just intractable big thing that you can't do anything about. But I think in the last few years it's been easier for people to kind of connect directly to the problem because we, we know so much more about microplastics.
- [28:36]
Beth Gardner
Yes.
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Elizabeth Spires
And you know there's a stat in your book that says we all eat basically a credit card's worth of microplastics every week. And people are more knowledgeable about the fact that they can be carcinogens, endocrine disruptors and so on. So, so that is something that people can kind of hook into. It's a way to kind of think about it without it feeling like a giant problem. When you're talking to people about these things, they ask you well what can we really do about this? Am I just going to die full of despair in microplastics or are there solutions?
- [29:07]
Beth Gardner
I mean I totally agree with you that the microplastics are just like an incredibly powerful connector for people. Because that just feels so terrifying, I guess, and so tangible, you know, research, that it's finding microplastics in our brains and our arteries and our blood makes this much more intimate problem. It's about our health. It's not just about sort of this abstract idea of environment out there. Right. I definitely agree with you, too, about this whole issue of despair.
- [29:36]
Elizabeth Spires
Right.
- [29:37]
Beth Gardner
And I've had so many people say to me, you know, just random people I'm chatting with or acquaintances or whatever I've described. I'm working on a book about plastic and the petrochemical industry, blah, blah, blah. And just a word that is always coming up is, like, depressing. Oh, that sounds so depressing. And, you know, I totally get that. Right. Like, I feel that sort of too, sometimes. But I mean, to me, and I think part of the reason why I really wanted to reframe this issue around corporate accountability rather than this idea of personal responsibility is that, you know, like, I am totally the person who is, like, carrying around my little canvas bags when I go to the grocery store. I've always got my water bottle with me, right? Like, I try to, you know, not get plastic bags. I try to not buy bottled water if I'm out. But I feel like we all sort of know on some level, and this is not meant in any way to minimize the importance of those things. And I still do that, but it feels a little bit futile. And then when I started to read, like, oh, my God, you know, while I and so many other people who worry about this are carrying our bags to the grocery store, we feel bad if we forget them. Exxon and Shell and these other huge oil companies, they're actually ramping up to, like, double and triple production of plastics. So, I mean, yes, you could say that feels a little bit despair inducing. But I actually think that understanding the origins of this thing that we see all around us and that so many of us are worried about, to me it's like enraging rather than depressing. I mean, okay, yes, it is sometimes kind of make you want to curl up under the covers. But you have to understand what's driving a problem before you can solve it, right? Yeah, that's my worldview as a journalist, at least that I can help to correct our understanding a little bit that this is actually not on us. And the industry so much likes to talk about sort of consumer demand. People are addicted to convenience or whatever. And when you turn around and look at the way that they are pushing more and More plastic into the market. You see that it's not about demand really. It's more about supply. This is a material that has this really extraordinary ability to reverse the normal relationship between supply and demand because it is so cheap and because we so often don't actually have a choice. If you go to the supermarket and you're buying fruit or whatever, it's wrapped in plastic. You want the fruit, you take the plastic. So I think it's important to understand at least what's driving it, and you ask about solutions. The thing that I heard the most, and when I spoke to sort of policy experts in this area, kind of the holy grail, is this idea called extended producer responsibility, which is fundamentally an effort to change that dynamic that I just described of so much plastic being pushed onto us and pushed into markets because it is so cheap. Obviously, the reasons why it's cheap are because it doesn't incorporate the real costs, which are not only the health and environmental costs that are sort of, you know, we bear societally and individually, but also there is a financial cost, right? We, as taxpayers or as ratepayers for, like your trash collection company, we're paying the burden of managing all that plastic waste that is produced by, you know, Coke and Pepsi and P and G and Unilever and all these companies that are profiting off of using all this disposable plastic packaging, Right? So the idea of extended producer responsibility, California has passed a law to this effect. Handful of other states have as well. The European Union is moving in this direction, is that you are making those companies pay and bear the cost of subsidizing recycling and of dealing with all of this trash collection and waste management.
- [33:30]
Elizabeth Spires
Right?
- [33:31]
Beth Gardner
So the idea is that not only does that. That remove that cost burden from the public, but it also helps to reset the incentives for the industry that plastic is no longer quite so profitable for them to use in this, like, incredibly wasteful fashion because they have to pay the real costs rather than the sort of artificially low cost that they're benefiting from right now.
- [33:56]
Elizabeth Spires
And that all makes perfect sense. But I think of the, you know, corporations are so good at playing hot potato with whose fault and responsibility it is. So even with the waste management problem, you also write about how corporations didn't want government regulation around that and would argue that the private sector would do it better. And as a result, we end up shipping a ton of waste to China. And then in 2018, China said, no more. We're not taking any more of it. So what's the State of affairs now
- [34:23]
Beth Gardner
in that department, that was a real wake up call. That moment in 2018 and 2019, like half of the world's plastic waste, which was being exported ostensibly to be recycled, right? You know, you throw out your plastic bottle into your recycling bin somewhere in the United States and Europe and Australia. It gets sold on to sort of this chain of brokers, and it was ending up in China, and China decided, we don't want it anymore. So what happened then was just a huge upheaval in these sort of waste markets that are invisible to us as consumers and as individuals, but are how our recycling gets supposedly recycled. So basically, all these waste brokers, these companies that were dealing with this stuff, just started looking for other places to send it. Initially, the first huge wave after China closed was a lot of plastic waste getting sent to Southeast Asia. And then, you know, those countries, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines started cracking down a little bit. You know, they actually do want, want well sorted clean plastics. There's certain types that can be recycled somewhat effectively. They want that. But it was coming in this, like, gigantic unsorted mess that they couldn't really handle, soiled with food and dirty diapers and all kinds of junk. So what's happened is that the industry has continued looking for sort of different places to send it. It's like a kind of global cat and mouse game. This stuff just keeps getting shipped to different places. I think that's where we still are today. There's been some kind of onshoring of recycling back to Europe, back to the US Rather than exporting it. You know, there's more plastic just ending up in landfill, getting incinerated. And on some level, at least that's a little bit more honest than what was happening before.
- [36:15]
Elizabeth Spires
So I know you're not an advocate, you're journalist. But if your friends ask, read your book, and they, you know, are newly incensed by more knowledge of what's actually happening, what do you tell individuals in terms of what individual people can do to address the problem?
- [36:32]
Beth Gardner
You know, it's a good question. And I, I am not an advocate, but I interviewed this really prominent advocate in the plastics world named Judith Ank. She runs a group called Beyond Plastics, which is based out of Bennington College in Vermont. And when people come to her, you know, and if you talk to environmental groups, right, they say, like, plastic is the biggest thing that brings people to kind of engage with these groups. What her organization is, they give people training, like how to lobby and engage with your local or state legislature, your lawmakers, about, you know, they have certain. She calls it the plastics trifecta. I think it's bans on like straws and styrofoam and fees on plastic bags. There are actually measures that can make a difference in reducing plastics markets and plastic consumption. I think the industry has encouraged us for so long to think just about our own usage and our own responsibility. It's a very, very politically powerful and politically savvy industry. They have spent decades fighting, really bare knuckles tactics and big money behind the scenes. Not just against like sort of federal legislation and regulation that might impact on them, but at the state level and at the local level. You know, I, I spoke to people from like county legislatures, really small towns. Like, the industry throws everything at even a tiny little town, right, that wants to put a ban on plastic straws or a fee on plastic bags. And I think that what that tells you is that they understand that those measures are actually very powerful. You know, even if a county or a city passes a ban on certain single use plastic items.
- [38:18]
Elizabeth Spires
Right.
- [38:19]
Beth Gardner
But I think that those measures tend to be contagious. You know, one city or county passes them next door sort of sees like, oh, gosh, the world didn't end when they started charging 10 cents for plastic bags. You can still get them if you need them. And the usage went down by like 80%. So I think that those, those local measures are really meaningful. They're very powerful. So I would say to people that it's not, not hopeless. Actually there are things that can make a difference. We see that when they're enacted in different places that these policies are powerful.
- [38:56]
Elizabeth Spires
All right, so that's it for Money Talks. Thank you to our guest Beth Gardner for joining and thanks to Jessmyn Molly of cplay Normada for producing. We'll be back Saturday on our regular edition of Slate Money.
- [39:22]
Slate Money Host
Slate Money is sponsored this week by your Next Dollar, a podcast from Nerd Wallet Wealth Partners. Your Next dollar is built specifically for high earners like you. It covers the financial complexity that comes with a higher income. If you have equity compensation, RSUs, tax planning, housing decisions, figuring out when it's actually okay to enjoy your money. It turns out that the more you earn, the more complicated the questions get. And yet somehow there's even less content built for you. Until now. Yournext dollar covers both sides of the equation. Building wealth and spending on what actually matters to you. Because at a certain income level, the question, the question isn't should I save more? It's what should I do with everything I have? Financial advisors from NerdWallet Wealth Partners join the show regularly to discuss the questions they hear from high earners like you. The nuanced real world stuff generic financial content doesn't cover. If you want help getting more out of every dollar you earn, follow YourNext Dollar wherever you get your podcasts sponsored by YourNext Dollar, a podcast from NerdWallet Wealth Partners, an SEC registered investment advisor. This podcast is for informational purposes only and is not investment tax or legal advice.
- [40:44]
Sponsor Announcer
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