How did our plastic addiction begin? – On the Green Fence

#plasticrecycling #environment #plasticpollution

Episode 1: How did our plastic addiction begin?

Plastics have only been around for a little over a century. But in that time, they’ve become a huge part of our lives. Each year, the world produces 430 million tons of plastics, and that figure is set to triple by 2060. So how did we get here?

Journalist Susan Freinkel tells the story of our toxic relationship with this miracle substance, which is both essential to modern life and the cause of a worsening environmental crisis.

Plastics are made with fossil fuels, and the carbon emissions produced by manufacturing them is on par with the aviation industry. There’s also the vast amount of plastic rubbish that ends up in the environment, enduring for centuries. Is it too late to do something about our plastic addiction?

Interviewees featured in this episode:

Susan Freinkel, journalist and author of the book “Plastic: A Toxic Love Story”
Sheila Aggarwal-Khan, director of the Industry and Economy division at the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP)
Virginia Janssens, Managing Director of the trade federation Plastics Europe

On the Green Fence is produced by DW studios in Bonn, Germany.

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Chapters:

00:00 Intro
02:59 The problem with plastic
06:55 A toxic love story
08:23 The invention of celluloid
11:51 WW2 and the plastic explosion
17:36 The rise of disposable plastics
21:45 Different types of plastics
24:07 The romance sours
30:14 Who produces the most plastic?
35:23 Moving to net zero

On the green Fence the green F That cleaned up morning Dy all right see you later then have a nice day it’s only been about half an hour and before I’ve even left the house I’ve touched about a dozen things and they all have one thing in common they’re all made of plastic it’s probably the same

For you just take a quick look around how many of the things around you right now have plastic in them including your clothes phone desk computer whatever it might be this incredibly versatile material exists in just about every product it comes in so many different forms and is virtually impossible to

Avoid because it is just so widespread in our societies and economies I’m Neil King you’re listening to DW’s environment podcast on the green fence and in this series we’re going to be looking at how plastic came to play such a big role in our lives what it means

For our health and the environment and what the solutions are that could win us off our plastic addiction the growth trajectory of plastics is just for quite frankly scary by 2050 we will produce between 3 to four times as much Plastics as we’re producing today are we going to just end

Up with a legacy of plastic pollution that will not be manageable and that is not just going to affect the environment but human health as well plastic in its price doesn’t take into account the externalities the cost of pollution the cost on Marine health the cost on human

Health I really think Plastics is a tangible expression of all that is wrong with capitalism the Modern Life would not be possible nor would it be to really combat climate change if we were to vilify plastic and say out with plastic Plastics play a key role also in enabling the renewable energy uh

Infrastructure whether we talk about solar panels or wind turbine blades Plastics a wonderful material the thing that’s wrong with plastic is the way that we use it we’re designing things to last for 100 years and then we using them for 20 minutes and throwing them away that’s the problem

Each year the world produces 430 million tons of plastics according to the oecd and that figure is set to Triple by 2060 the growth and enduring popularity of plastic isn’t surprising in many ways it’s a miracle substance lightweight durable malleable and cheap it’s revolutionized sectors such as transport medine Agriculture and construction

Modern Life Is Impossible without plastic but it also comes with problems most Plastics are made with fossil fuels the carbon emissions produced by manufacturing them is on AAR with the aviation industry if nothing is done to change that emissions from the Plastics life cycle are set to more than double

By 20160 reaching 4.3 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions the sector will need to decarbonize to meet Global targets to prevent runaway climate change and then there’s pollution the qualities that make plas plastic so valuable its durability and strength also make it a nightmare for the

Environment if it ends up in nature it can take centuries to break down only 9% of plastic waste is actually recycled the rest is incinerated goes to landfill or ends up as litter about 22% and once in the environment it often splits up into smaller pieces so-called microplastics and these have been found

Just about anywhere scientists have looked for them in the deepest parts of the ocean in snow on Mount Everest inside seabirds and also in the human body the International Community is trying to do something about this the United Nations is negotiating a global treaty to end plastic pollution kind of

Like the 2015 Paris agreement to tackle climate change the plan is to have a draft deal by November this year and a final treaty with binding measures to manage the entire life cycle of plastic is to be finalized by 2024 she agal Khan is the director of

The industry and economy division at the United Nations environment program or unep Sheila also supervised a recent unip report titled turning off the tap how the world can end plastic pollution and create a circular economy the biggest challenge I would say is how do you reduce the scale of the problem

Because just trying to solve you know the way in which plastic is used is not going to be enough to to solve the scale of the problem and then of course looking at what does it mean to substitute problematic and unnecessary Plastics with other material that doesn’t have an environment social

Footprint then to be able to look at reuse systems so that you carry products and goods in a different way from how how we transport them and package them today and then looking at you know what will it mean in terms of all the changes that member states have to put in place

The kinds of targets they’re going to need and what what that’ll mean eventually for how they will regulate and incentivize industry to to take action we’ll come back to Sheila a bit later in this episode and while governments are agreeing on measures to make sure less plastic ends up in the

Environment scientists and entrepreneurs are working on other solutions for example Technologies to improve recycling including engineering bacteria that can eat plastic other innovators are creating fossil-free plastic out of entirely new materials that can biodegrade by themselves or designing a way to remove microplastics from water

So this series will be about some of the more interesting solutions that are on the table when it comes to solving our Plastics dilemma but the best Solutions may fall short if we fail to grasp the Dynamics that made us so dependent on Plastics to begin with plastic seemed

Like this miracle material in the early days answer to a lot of problems um offering a lot of great things for life that’s Susan Frankl a journalist from the US and the author of the book plastic a toxic love story in it she documents the rise of plastic and how it

Came to be that we live in a world pervaded by plastic stuff and at a certain point we have sort of come to realize that we are very dependent on this stuff that has serious serious problems both for our health and for the environment looking at that story line

From Rapture to disenchantment it really describes sort of A Love Affair gone wrong or even more than that a kind of dysfunctional relationship because we are utterly dependent on this stuff that is very bad in many ways for us okay so let’s go back to where this

Romance began and for that we need to go back more than a hundred years to a time before Plastics when many of the objects around us would have been made from materials from the natural world things like wood glass Metals ivory silk tortoise shell but around this time in

The second half of the 19th century there was growing awareness about the limits of what the natural world could offer and the search for new malleable materials was on chemists and inventors had been experimenting with different substances they already had natural polymers Plastics such as Rubber and

Shellac but things took a leap forward with the discovery of Celluloid I’ll let’s Susan explain the rest and Celluloid came about partly out of concern over the potential Extinction of elephants so elephants were being hunted for their Ivory and in the late 19th century Ivory was used for all sorts of

Things you know for buttons for cane heads for the handles of silverware there was a big demand for Ivory but one of the biggest demands was for Ivory uh to be used for billiard balls Billiards had become a super popular game and they were concerned that there were such demand for Ivory

That elephants were being hunted into Extinction so in the late 1860s one of the billiard ball makers uh published an ad soliciting any inventive genius to come up with an alternative or substitute for iory that ad caught the eye of a kind of amateur inventor named John Wesley hayatt who decided he might

Try to do something and he began tinkering trying different materials and eventually had this big breakthrough of combining cellulose which was basically cotton and um camper and other solvents and came up with this material that was hard but also could be molded it was malleable it sort of had the consistency

Of shoe leather and he called it celluloid And Celluloid was a pretty big Commercial Success it was used for dentures buttons hair pins and combs just to name a few applications and the great thing was that it mimicked premium natural products such as Ivory or tortoise shell so it looked like the real thing but it was much cheaper and

Could be mass-produced so that was kind of the start of the romance this new thing this new material that en a people to have um kind of luxurious looking items or not so luxurious simple items but at a fairly cheap price and ironically Celluloid was sort of sold as

A environmental friend I mean ads by John Wesley High’s company emphasized you know this looks like toris shell or like Ivory but you’re not doing the same damage to the natural world that is very ironic isn’t it the conservationist angle and now we’ve got an environmental

Problem because of it yeah I mean if um if we look um a little later than Susan you know after that there were a series of new types of plastics that were discovered and um things progressed very rapidly it was a bit of a golden era for

Plastics and uh but I mean the industry involved in making Plastics um it was still very small at the beginning of the 20th century um can you perhaps explain how did World War II change the game um well let me just say back you up one

Second it was small but one of the things that happened in the beginning of the 20th century or the 20s and 30s is that petrochemical companies got into the business so it wasn’t just sort of like a lone guy John Wesley Hyatt building off from his shed in his

Backyard and building a a small company you started to get the big petrochemical companies into the business nonetheless as you say it was still a fairly small industry World War to help build the Plastics industry and the way it did it is there was a a real need for um

Materials to supplement the traditional natural materials like steel or silk or brass and the military called on the Plastics industry which was still a very young industry to see if they could come up with uh viable Alternatives and by that time enough new Plastics had been developed and there was enough sort of

Expertise in polymer production and Engineering that the industry complied and they started developing things for the military so for instance in place of silk parachutes the new Dupont which had recently invented nylon was able to supply nylon parachutes or you were able to come up with a hard plastic to replace the

Helmets today’s military weapon becomes tomorrow’s peacetime instrument Plastics will play as large a role in peace as they do in war so that demand to supply the military during the war led the industry to sort of vastly ramp up its production capacity and its sophistication in manufacturing and you know production of

Plastics basically quadruple over the course of the war the military also found uses for things for Plastics that had been invented but nobody had known what to do with it so for instance polyethylene had been invented during the 30s uh by scientists at um Imperial chemistry in England but they didn’t

Know what stuff was they thought it was interesting they couldn’t figure out what to do with it well it turned out polyethylene would be great at helping them build a lightweight Airborne radar that could be put onto airplanes gave the Allies a critical advantage in the

War and finally they had found a use for this interesting plastic that then you know found New Uses after the war in Packaging This wasn’t just a time of technological change was it I mean there were advances in science and chemistry but also there was a lot of social change around this wasn’t there well yes I mean you know I think there was it was sort of a perfect

Storm of things I mean the war ends and you have people who suddenly have a lot of money to spend and there’s a lot of money being pumped into the economy and consumers at least in this country are being actively pushed to consume it’s considered a patriotic duty to you know

To buy a home to outfit it with new furniture and the latest kitchen appliances and so forth for today Plastics are changing the appearance of our everyday world as the years go by new materials will be found new processes discovered and new Machinery invented not by those

Now engaged in industry but by you with New Uses there arise new wants new wants mean new markets and new Prosperity so you have this big push of consumption you have this industry that has vastly ramped up its production capability and now needs a place to sell

Its stuff and those two things come together very nicely in the decades after the war my mama done told me she told me h we’re having a party a Tupperware party Plastics wasn’t responsible for sort of the consumer lifestyle that developed after the war but it certainly facilitated it because it made it

Possible to supply a lot of stuff for cheaper it made a lifestyle of convenience and comfort and ampleness possible after the war it sort of facilitated the changes that were taking place so Plastics didn’t make fast food franchises occur but the availability of plastic packaging made it easier to sell

Food on the go it didn’t you had the rise of self-served grocery stores and drug stores and plastic supplied this packaging that made it possible for consumers to really see what they were pulling off the shelf and you know to create kind of enticing packages or see-through packages so you could see if

You know the baloney was still good or not it facilitated these things in the 70s when women began entering the labor force plastic packaging around kind of pre-prepared food you know frozen meals and so forth made it easier for women to go into the workforce and no longer

Necessarily have to come home and whip up a whole meal from scratch it was a big day for Barbie she was up bright and early to choose just the right costume to wear and Lego is here hey kids look A Whole New World to build it’s sort of like the material

World helped facilitate social and economic changes that were underway for other reasons as well but they helped make it easier I mean as it just outlined there were many more products that were being made um you know different kinds of plastics Plastics as well in the 50s and lat but if we just

Go a bit deeper on that idea you know of disposable Plastics um I mean this sort of new throwaway mentality or idea I mean how new was this for people was it was this something that people you know accepted very fast and willingly or was it something that was foreign that you’d

Have something that would just end up in the bin which actually had value right I mean it’s it’s from fossil fuels yeah yeah absolutely I I think it was a new idea in many ways I mean and and if we just sort of look at the 20th

Century you know the people who are coming out of the war was a generation that had come through the depression and through the War years and had come through years of sort of skimping and saving and really raised on an ethos of you don’t throw stuff away you find a

Way to reuse it and Plastics first went into durable goods but once that market became fairly saturated there was a very conscious effort you know you might even say a little cynical effort on the part of the Plastics industry to expand they they recognized that the newest markets

Were going to be in disposables and so suddenly you get this big push into packaging and other kinds of disposable goods and those were a hard cell to a generation that had grown up on an ethos of not throwing stuff away I mean when the first coffee vending machines came

Into use and they had these little plastic cups that the coffee would come down into people wanted to reuse them and they had to be taught oh no no no you don’t reuse it you can throw it away when the first plastic bags came out again there was sort of this initial

Resistance um and part of the resistance was to the idea that you were taking this thing that was going to be completely thrown away it’s not really the way that Society worked for most of our existence uh we had uh found ways to reuse things whether it’s pulling the

Nail out of an old piece of wood and to make something else with it or unraveling an old wool sweater to use the wool again and it’s something else or you know the people who used to go through instead of tossing trash would go through trash and pull out viable

Things I mean p that used to be a whole lifestyle for Peddlers in the 18th and 19th and 20th Century I guess also some somewhere there at the heart of the problem that I sort of sense is problematic is the fact that virt Plastics are still I mean to this day

They’re cheaper than actually recycling the product and perhaps also this this throwaway mentality was kind of generated from the fact that people were offered new brand new products at a cheaper price than actually repairing things or redoing things and uh I mean that’s in a way that’s a sickness isn’t

It in a way that we still suffer from absolutely it it is a sickness I really think Plastics is a tangible expression of all that is wrong with capitalism and the ways in which it encourages a mentality of just constant consumption continued growth and expansion and new

New new is the best way to exist and you know plastic AIDs that one of the problems with plastic things is you can’t repair them you can’t fix them if something plastic is broken you can’t really do anything with it and a lot of plastic things we don’t even really know how they Work plastic production grew rapidly in the second half of the 20th century in 1950 the world was producing just 1.5 million tons of plastic today it’s more than 400 million tons the amount of plastic waste has increased dramatically as well one reason for that is the extremely low

Recycling rate and another is that single-use Plastics make up a significant share of Plastic Products things like bottles that are designed to be thrown away after they’re used these short lift Plastics account for 2/3 of plastic waste according to the oecd now according to the UN cigarette

Butts are the most common type of plastic found in the environment followed by food wrappers plastic bottles plastic bottle caps plastic grocery bags plastic straws and stirrers there are dozens of types of plastic known as polymers and they’re used for all sorts of things but the top uses are packaging building and

Construction and clothing let’s take a look at the most common types introducing polyethylene or PE this is the world’s most commonly produced synthetic plastic it comes in low density and high density forms it’s used for a range of products including grocery bags cling wrap seral box liners and even Bulletproof [Applause] bests number two polypropylene or PP this is one of the most durable types of plastic used to make products from straws and bottle caps to car parts and containers for holding hot food number three is polyvinyl chloride or PVC also known as vinyl this hard sturdy plastic is used in construction

For pipes and rain gutters to make credit cards and music records but it is considered toxic because it leeches dangerous chemicals throughout its entire life cycle and it’s notoriously difficult to recycle so most of the time it’s just discarded another big one is polyethylene tari talate also known as

Pet or pet used in packaging such as plastic drink bottles and in clothing as polyester it is one of the easier Plastics to recycle and the last one we’ll mention polystyrene or Ps also known as styrofoam it’s a rigid cheap plastic that’s great at insulation so it’s often

Found in construction and take away food containers it’s one of the few Plastics that can be turned into a foam and is considered dangerous because it can leech harmful toxins okay so now that we’re a bit better acquainted with plastics let’s get back to my conversation with Susan I’m afraid we’ve come to the point now where the romance is starting to sour plastic production is exploding single-use Plastics are on the rise and well disenchantment with this miracle material is starting to set in I think the turning point is really the late 60s

Early 70s I think that’s when you know we’re starting to get saturated with a lot of s SLE use Plastics and culturally you know one of the touchstones is when The Graduate came out uh that’s a movie but it came out in the late 60s and there’s this Infamous line where the

Main character Benjamin Brad is a college graduate back at home after he’s graduated from college he just has no idea what he wants to do with his life I just want to say one word you just one word yes sir are you listening yes I am plastics exactly how do you mean there’s

A great future in Plastics think about it by that time Plastics sort of suggest this just Dreadful arless vapid future and I don’t think it’s coincidental that around the time that movie comes out is also when you start to get the first reports of Plastics in the ocean that’s when you

Start to get the first reports that chemicals that are in some Plastics are leeching into human bodies I think we’re starting to see that our lives are suffused with plastics that very explicitly are are pushed as something that can be easily thrown away that are valueless so I think that’s sort of the

Turning point and then it’s kind of an up and down course from that point on to the present day where I think we it’s generally understood that Plastics are a big problem because up until then it was the other way around wasn’t it really that Plastics had more of reputation of

Being hygienic easy to clean um you just wash them and you’ve got rid of all the muck and nothing sticks uh so it’s it’s a bit of a reversal isn’t it yeah I mean you know there yes in a broad sense yes um it’s a bit of a reversal I mean

Plastics also the first Plastics were pushed as durable things I mean they went into durable products they went into things like you know kitchen counters or refrigerators or televisions or cars and they were touted for their durability and for their strength and then once we start to move into Plastics going into

Single use stuff and into junk it loses that cache and um although I don’t think it was ever explicitly stated that this is a worthless product you know that Association gets made at some level in the culture’s mind Susan it’s been just over 10 years now since your book um

Plastic a toxic love story was published do you think our relationship ship with plastic has gotten any healthier since then oh unfortunately not I mean at the time that I wrote my book it looked like there was some change of foot but you know Plastics production just keeps

Growing you know by the end of the decade we’re projected to hit 600 million metric tons a year and 800 million metric tons by 2040 we’ve produced more plastic in the last 20 years than all the previous time that we’ve been making plastic and it’s you know taking

Hold in more and more of the world both terms you know in terms of people’s lives and in terms of of pollution so no I think things I awareness has increased and that’s great and I know that there are efforts to come up with solutions to the problems

Posed by plastic but it’s a really complicated set of problems there’s not as one siiz fits-all Solution it’s hard to wrap your mind around what the level of Plastics in the environment really means and you know like the idea that microplastics could cross the bloodb brain barrier it’s just it makes you shudder but I also don’t actually know what that means I feel

Like we we don’t really understand and what we’ve done here and that also I think then complicates the search for answers um or for Solutions beyond the very clear need that we got to turn off the tap at the source I mean we have to stop producing so much plastic of any

Kind do you think we need to do away with plastics we can’t do away with plastics I mean it is too much a part of Modern Life and I don’t think we can you know I always say there’s no way that we can you know feed and clothe and house

And trans transport um the world a world of8 n billion people just on natural materials but I think we need to figure out um ways to make better Plastics and and it’s you know we need to sort of figure out both how to produce safer Plastics how to use them more

Sustainably and how to dispose of them in sustainable ways I think there are certain Plastics that need to go I mean I think vinyl is a terrible plastic it shouldn’t exist 40% of plastics now go into single-use products um that’s got to change so it’s it’s I think we need

To rethink how we use this stuff and and the thing is we talk about you know should we get rid of plastic but it’s not one material it’s thousands of materials and so we need to sort of think carefully which are the ones that we can use which are the places that we

Can use them how can we use particular ones more safely that’s part of what makes it such a difficult problem to solve many thanks to Susan Frankle for joining Us as we’ve heard plastic production and plastic waste is projected to continue growing over the next few decades as is the Plastics carbon footprint so addressing these problems is going to require a rethink of how we produce use and dispose of this valuable material Asia is currently the largest producer

Of Plastics in the world China alone accounted for 32% of Global Production in 2021 while North America is in second place with around 18% Europe is responsible for around 15% of production the plastic waste makers index says just 20 petrochemical companies are behind the production of more than half of all

Single-use plastic us-based company Exxon Mobile is at the top of the list followed by us chemicals company Dow and China’s copek together these three account for 16% of polymers destined for single use plastic looking more closely at plastic waste the biggest contributor on that front is the us where the

Average person generates 2 121 kg per year according to the oecd in European countries it’s around 114 kgrs per person so about half that in China and India it’s under 20 kilog now the UN argues that the global Community can cut plastic pollution by 80% by 2040 If It Moves away from Virgin

Plastics and reduces the amount of plastic produced in the first place we’d also have to dramatically improve reuse and recycling systems so that these products stay in the economy and don’t end up in the environment now more than 100 countries have implemented their own measures to Target Plastics including

Restrictions or taxes on single-use Plastics EU countries have banned disposable plastic plates straws Cutlery and cotton buds China has also banned single use bags and utensils from major cities India too has banned the use and production of single-use plastics Spain has a tax on non-reusable plastic packaging while the UK taxes plastic

Packaging that has less than 30% recycled plastic some of the measures being intensely negotiated as part of the UN plastic treaty include caps on plastic production reducing problem Plastics that are difficult to recycle and placing restrictions on certain hazardous chemicals I asked Sheila agal Khan director of the industry and

Economy division at the United Nations environment program what else we can expect so of course it the global instrument that is being negotiated now is being negotiated by member states and so member states will decide on the level LEL of ambition they they choose

To have um and they would be able to set the regulation and laws in place to be able to change behavior of Manufacturers um across the full value chain but at the end of the day of course we’re also expecting industry actors again across the full value chain

To also come forward and already start taking action even ahead of a treaty being negotiated at unep I mean do you do you get a sense of just how much push back there is from the fossil fuel and also the Plastics industry um towards you know this Global treaty or are they

Are they playing along are they willing to compromise um I think it’s a mixed bag I don’t think I could say that it’s a homogeneous situation um we see some looking at postc consumer resin in their in their production of polymers um we see others looking at substitute

Materials but but we haven’t seen changes in terms of the kind of additives going into the Plastics that are being produced and we haven’t seen changes in terms of the this the range of different polymers that are being produced some of which are not recyclable now of course um one thing is

Making changes to prevent more plastic pollution but um another question is also what will happen to all the plastic that is already in the environment what what do we do with that in fact really a very big worry because I think it’ll only continue to grow so as long as

Action doesn’t happen to look at the preventative side of things we will just keep getting more and more plastic that becomes Legacy we do see some players out there looking at collections I think it’s important but it’s not going to probably be able to tackle the large scale of plastics and microplastics that

Are already in uh water bodies and in the terrestrial environment we see some players looking at incinerating what they’ve done with existing fac facilities some looking at even building new ones uh which is again a risk because you could end up locking yourselves into infrastructure that hopefully will not necessarily be needed

If you were to change the Plastics production at the you know at source so you know if you were to move to substitute materials if we were to reduce the size of the volume of plastics coming into the economy that would really shift the whole Space the the connection between carbon emissions

The the crisis and also the Plastics industry the fossil fuel industry um I mean we’re using plastics for practically everything these days in in in the modern day world um it’s hard to imagine it functioning without Plastics right now um what happens to Plastics if we you know actually Implement our Paris

Climate Target goals and go Net Zero by 2050 because then the carbon emissions um that are caused by Plastics would also have to go to Net Zero wouldn’t they yes and in fact we see industry trying to move towards net zero um I guess the biggest challenge is is you

Know if we will be able to have substitutions to be able to and substitutions that actually also don’t have a footprint um I guess they we would of course see a lot of less plastic pollution than we have today but it would really mean a change at a

Systemic level across the full value chain okay so it’s high time to hear from the Plastics industry now my name is Virginia jansens and I’m the managing director of plastics Europe Plastics Europe is a Trade Federation that is based in Brussels and represents member companies who produce over 90% of all

Polymers across Europe there’s a lot at stake for the European Plastics industry which employs around 1.6 million people and creates a turnover of €360 billion euros we need to recognize the severity of the climate crisis and the challenge of plastic wage it’s huge so we need to

Be very ambitious in this regard for us as well I mean we work with the premise discarded plastic waste is unacceptable in any environment and that is our guideline in our action as well in our driver so we support as an organization and our members of course the very same

Objective to end plastic pollution by 2040 and we want to support that through the creation of a circular economy so it sounds like the industry recognizes the problem and is willing to transform and we’ll be looking more closely into the aspect of recycling in a separate episode of this series but while

Recycling sounds good most critics say it’s completely insufficient to address the problem and that Plastics production needs to be capped at the source so I asked Virginia how she feels about a cap on plastic production our answer to making sure that we end plastic pollution uh Neil and where we see the

Biggest fair and just impact is to work rather at the application Level and see where there is problematic and evaluate where there is problematic unnecessary plastic applications that are just prone to be littered for instance there’s a lot of people speaking about caps but they all have different caps in mind

They have different definitions in mind uh is it a cap on Virgin is it a cap on on everything how will that play out how will that be applied fairly at a global level when we look at developing countries developed countries the need for Plastics as well as a material in

Developing countries how can this be done at the polymer site okay so we’ll leave Virginia there for now we will be hearing more from her throughout the series my main takeaway from the chat with her was that the industry opposes a cap on Plastics production and instead wants to ramp up the recycling

Infrastructure something that will likely render the UN plastic treaty talks more complicated but what happens if the talks fail and we don’t get a binding un Plastics treaty in 2024 I put that question to Sheila from unep I think very big worry because we’re seeing a growing amount of

Literature coming out on the health impacts and and so and even as we speak you know we’re constantly being sent new scientific findings on on the impacts of microplastics on health and so some say you know are we going to just keep waiting as the evidence starts to grow

And are we going to just end up with a legacy of plastic pollution that will not be manageable and that is not just going to affect the environment but human health as well okay so Sheila had the final word in this episode and her reference to the legacy of pollution and

What this could mean for planetary and human health is actually the perfect segue to our second episode which is going to be about microplastics including some promising Solutions and Innovations to tackle this growing problem every single water sample that we’ve ever studied from anywhere in the world

We can find tiny pieces of plastic just about every species that we’ve studied we’ve been able to show that they’re either ingesting Plastics or they’ve got Plastics in their tissues I think we were equally a shocked when we found out that tires is the second largest microplastic pollutant in our oceans yet

Nobody is talking about it you just add this absorbent into the water put the magnet all absorbent and microplastic it will be separated from the water and clean water can be passed through and used so that’s what we’ll be looking at in the next episode of our series on

Plastics I hope you’ll be joining us for that time to wrap up many thanks to my colleague and producer Natalie Mueller and my sound engineer Mel Springer and a big thanks to all the interviewees featured in this episode for taking the time and sharing their expertise and

Views and as always a big thank you to all our listeners for sharing reviewing and subscribing to on the green fence my name is Neil king take it easy and take care I’m the green fence