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March 29, 2023 - RFK Jr. The Defender
40:46
Plastics Are Poisoning Us with Marcus Eriksen

One of the world's leading scientists on plastics and plastic pollution discusses why plastics are so harmful to humans and the planet in this episode with RFK Jr. Eriksen also tells his tales of sailing around the world on a raft made of junk to raise awareness. For more info visit www.5gyres.org

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Hey, everybody.
Today, I've got an amazing guest.
Marcus Erickson is research director and co-founder of the Five Gyres Institute and recently co-founded Leap Lab.
He's regarded by many people as the world's number one expert on plastic pollution.
I think you've been studying it for 40 years or close to that.
He studies the global distribution and ecological impacts of plastic pollution.
And his studies have included over 20 expeditions sailing across all five ocean basins, the Bay of Bengal, the Southern Ocean, the inland lakes and rivers, and publishing the first global estimate of all plastic of all sizes floating in the world's oceans in 2015.
And I think that was the year that you built that That very strange, it looks like a catamaran in the pictures out of junk.
It is.
It's sinking in all the pictures that I've seen of it.
It's hard to believe that you sailed it across the ocean.
And it was sinking.
It was.
On day three, we actually, I called my wife from sea on a satellite phone and said, Hey babe, we're sinking.
And she organized, not quite a rescue mission, but she rescued us by sending us more and more supplies.
I had to reinflate all the bottles and get some additional twine to hold the pontoons together.
It was really, it was a pile of junk.
And the intent was, you know how nonprofits work.
You want to get ahead of the game.
We're doing research, you know, sailed around the world, but to grab the public's attention, you're competing for attention.
We made a homemade raft, 15,000 plastic bottles, and we put an airplane on top of it, a Cessna 310 aircraft.
I think it's the first airplane to drift across the ocean from Los Angeles to Hawaii.
An unexpected three months.
I thought it would take three weeks with no motor, no support vessel.
We just had the mercy of the waves.
But we made it and it worked in terms of a PR stunt.
It really helped us, you know, capture more eyeballs and more attention to the issue of ocean plastic pollution.
And what was the airplane for?
That was your rescue craft?
That was my cabin.
It had no wings.
It was just a fuselage.
And yeah, that's what we lived in for three months.
Me and my co-navigator, Joel Paschal, the two of us lived in this thing.
And my wife, Anna Cummins, she was mission control.
She was saying, you know, here comes another hurricane.
Stay north.
Get out of the warm water.
Get in the cold water where the winds die down a bit.
It was much more than I bargained for.
But, you know, because I survived, it's a great story to tell.
It looks like it probably had a maximum of like three knots.
Let me put it this way.
It did not look either aero or hydrodynamic, but I cannot believe you sailed that thing across the ocean.
Sailing is a very kind word.
It was really just drifting.
So we averaged 1.5 knots.
I mean, I could have walked to Hawaii faster.
Really slow.
But we were able to make a bunch of little short videos.
I was making 30-second videos at half a megabyte.
But there's one video in particular that really caught everyone's attention.
And it's an image of a fish that I caught.
We were down to eating peanut butter and fish by month two.
And I caught this one little rainbow runner, about maybe 12 inches long.
And I filleted.
I was going to eat it.
I opened the stomach.
The stomach was very tight.
It was expanded and tight.
I touched the knife onto the stomach and it burst open and 17 particles of microplastic, each one the size of a grain of rice, popped out of its gut.
I was really in the middle of nowhere.
And an animal that I was just looking for sustenance.
And this middle of nowhere, our trash was impacting marine life.
It made me really realize that, you know, the plastic pollution issue, it really is global.
Every corner of the planet has our trash.
And it's increasing the number of particles are getting smaller, they're fragmenting, and they're getting into everything, including you and I. I want to talk about that.
I want to ask you another question about that fish, though.
Because when you're out in that blue ocean going very slow, the fish actually congregate up under your craft, right?
Or were you actually fishing with hand lines?
We did some hand line fishing, not much.
Honestly, we didn't see many fish.
Actually, I met one sailor who had done a similar voyage on a wooden raft back in 1958.
And he told me stories of seeing sharks every day, seeing tuna and mahi-mahi and ono, all these fish.
We didn't see any sharks, any tuna, any ono.
We caught, I think, 16 mahi-mahi.
That's it, in three months.
As you indicated, they do swarm under your boat.
So we were always able to jump in and get mahi-mai using a spear gun, spearfishing.
There were other smaller fish hanging around, but largely the ocean was empty.
So that's a whole other issue besides, you know, microplastic pollution is overfishing.
The exploitation of fisheries and international waters is kind of off the charts, happening everywhere and depleting fish stocks.
But yeah, plastic pollution, I was really surprised to find that inside the gut of a fish, I was a thousand miles from land in all directions.
And there it was.
Yeah, and I mean, one of the worrying things is the plastics that you can't see, the microplastic, that may also be in that fish.
You've done this peer-reviewed publication.
I think there's 11 other authors on it.
And this was published on March 8th, 2023.
And it is trending all over.
It's probably the lead trending environmental article at this point in time.
And the title of it is A Growing Plastic Smog Now Estimated to Be Over 170 Trillion Plastic Particles Afloat in the World's Oceans, Urgent Solutions Required.
Tell us about that.
This was the culmination of really a lifetime of work.
Over 20 years I've put into this, ever since grad school went right into this career path.
And I've met some really amazing scientists.
So on that paper, it was well crafted as a science study.
And I'm very proud of it.
We had three generations of scientists.
I was able to invite Captain Charles Moore, the person who discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
And then Ed Carpenter, the first person to publish anything on plastics back in 1972, got him on board.
And then this other fellow, Robert Day, he was publishing in the early 80s.
And I asked him, do you have any hidden data?
He had a little clipboard, a little folder of data unpublished from the 1980s.
So he added his data to the pot.
We took every published studies in the last 40 years, put that together, and took my studies from 20 expeditions.
And we were able to put together 11,600 data points in the ocean over 40 years of time in every ocean to create this time trend.
So we're looking at how has plastic pollution in the oceans changed From the early, from the 1970s, late 70s, 1979, until 2019, a 40-year time trend.
I mean, it was hard to find data for every single year.
In some cases, we couldn't.
I would say, looking at that 40-year time trend, those first 15 years until about, you know, the 1990s, early 1990s, we didn't have a whole lot of data.
So our data shows not much change, but we're not very confident in that data.
The middle section, though, from 1990 to 2005, much better data, but still, it's kind of staying level.
The amount of trash, it's increasing a little bit, but not at such a rapid rate as we saw recently.
So since 2005 until present, what really surprised me Was this exponential increase in the amount of microplastic on the ocean surface.
From 2005 to present, it went from no more than a few trillion particles to 170 trillion particles on average.
And I'm not talking like 170 trillion bottles or bags or large items.
We're talking microplastics, things less than the size of a grain of rice.
So what we've noticed is that the trash that's out there Older trash and the new trash going in.
It's falling apart.
It's fragmenting.
It's turning into what we call in the paper a smog.
Almost like the way we look at smog over our cities, air pollution, little small particles creating clouds of pollution over our cities.
That's highly toxic.
The same thing for plastics.
We've got this growing accumulation of microplastics, micro and now nano, Creating these clouds, these plumes of microplastic particles by the trillions in every water body, hovering over the centers of oceans, and each particle carries its own burden of toxicity.
It's absorbing chemicals.
It might have some chemicals already attached to it from production, then it's absorbing like DDT pesticides, won't mix with water, but sticks to plastic.
PCBs, PAHs, industrial chemicals, they won't mix with water, but they stick to plastic.
So you get this growing smog, again, these plumes, these clouds of plastics forming in our oceans.
And our paper really got the best data available, the best modeling to come up with that big number.
But what we do in the paper, we talk about, you know, why?
Why do we think this...
This growing smog of 170 trillion particles is happening.
We think there are three reasons.
One is that what's out there is just getting smaller.
It's fragmenting and fragmenting and fragmenting.
One plastic bag can make, you know, 10,000 microplastic fragments, but then also increase production.
In the last 15 years, we produced well over 5 million tons of new plastic.
And with new plastic comes more pollution as well.
And the third thing, and this is really interesting, the third thing, if you look at the policy landscape, like what were the international agreements over this 40 years?
You know, back in the 1970s and 80s, during the environmental movement of that time, you saw some really good international policies, like dumping at sea.
Many countries would take their trash offshore and dump it.
MARPOL Annex 5 was maritime law in the 80s that made that illegal worldwide.
And every country had to comply because it was legally binding.
It wasn't like a voluntary thing where, oh, maybe we'll comply or not.
Legally binding.
And it worked.
And there were several legally binding treaties.
What we saw from the 1990s, let's say towards the millennium and onward to present, the legally binding treaties begin to fall to the wayside and industry wins the argument of making them voluntary.
Voluntary policy does not work.
When a company has to choose between its bottom line or a choice whether to comply or not, they'll often just go with the bottom line and not risk losing profit or competitive edge.
So voluntary measures in the last 20 years, they haven't worked.
And I'm sure it's a combination of all three things.
It's fragmenting, more production, and really poor policy that's responsible for this exponential increase in microplastic in the world's oceans.
When you say they were legally binding, how does that work?
Was there an enforcement agency?
Were there penalties?
That's always a problem with the treaty.
How do you make it enforceable?
Yes, and I'm not totally familiar with what the enforcement measures are.
I don't know if there were tariffs or some kind of penalty associated with those policies.
With MARPO Annex V, you would get penalized and you would not be able to operate your fishing fleets.
Okay, well, that's a very, very stringent penalty and one that everybody should pay attention to.
And they worry.
There's incentive to comply if there's a penalty.
If there's no penalty, the compliance really falters.
And how does this affect all of the different, you know, the food chain in the ocean, the phytoplankton, the zooplankton, and then up to the kind of the, you know, larger predators and the grazing fish and ultimately the marine mammals?
That's a really good question, and I often get the question, does it matter?
If there's a smog of plastic out there, is it a benign material?
And the answer is no, it's not.
So what we know is that microplastics, they act like sponges, and they accumulate, as I mentioned before, pesticides, other industrial chemicals, PAHs, PFAS, all these things will stick to plastic.
Anything that's hydrophobic, doesn't mix with water, can be lipophilic and stick to plastic.
So one little particle of plastic can become this little toxic pill.
And as organisms ingest it, you have to consider that most of the ocean is being filtered through marine life very quickly.
Within a matter of months, the first 100 feet of the ocean surface is passing through some organisms somewhere.
The trillions of organisms, the planktonic organisms, all the way to marine mammals are all ingesting and filtering out this water.
And they're taking the microplastic with it.
So what we're seeing in some cases is that as animals ingest plastic, their body chemistry, the soup in their stomach of enzymes and so forth, can sometimes pull those chemicals off of plastic, and then those get ingested into the animal's body.
We have seen that happening.
So that's the ingestions, the ingestions and toxification from plastics.
But there's also entanglement.
A lot of entanglement happens from organisms eating trash or getting tangled in everything from the plastic bands around boxes that remain this little circle that can trap animals.
I've seen those around sea lions, for example, to big fishing nets.
There's no shortage of images on the web of whales with their tails wrapped in plastics or sea turtles with their limbs amputated by having fish in line around them.
So its entanglement and ingestion are some of the harms.
But we're also seeing this on land.
So while my work has been oceans-focused, the issue isn't.
The issue is really looking at every single biome.
I have colleagues have found microfibers on top of Everest in the Alps.
I have colleagues have found plastic pollution in the deepest trenches of the ocean.
In fact, James Cameron, in his deep sea vessel, he was able to document plastic trash down the bottom of the Marianas Trench.
I recently, a few years ago, I went to Dubai.
I was there doing work.
I was going to work in the Persian Gulf in that water body and survey for microplastics.
We're finding lots of pre-production pellets, the raw feedstock for plastics.
And I'm in Dubai and I meet this veterinarian, really interesting man.
He had been given, I think, 50 million bucks from Sheikh Mohammed to build the best camel hospital on the planet.
And he looked at me and he said, if you want to see the impact of plastics, You got to come with me.
So we drove about 60 miles into the desert.
We were going over these rolling hills.
There's acacia trees all over the place.
Beautiful landscape.
There are a few fences I saw covered with plastic trash blowing across the desert.
Get to one ridge, look over the edge, and there are a few little piles of white bones here and there.
And he said, that's normal.
You know, animals will come out here.
The herd passes through.
One gets left behind and dies.
The bones stay.
We went down to one, and he said, let's dig.
I said, what do you mean, let's dig?
He begins digging inside the ribcage.
You can imagine, like, this skeleton.
It's belly up.
The ribs are sticking out of the ground like in little rows.
So inside the chest cavity, we're digging right there, and we start seeing plastic trash.
And I began to wonder, you know, What is this?
How did this get here?
How much is going to be here?
We kept digging and digging.
We pulled out a mass that was roughly, I'd say, 50 kilograms.
This huge thing, about 80 pounds.
This big, massive wad of plastic bags.
And we went to five skeletons, pulled out five of these things.
I've got them here in my garage because we published on it.
He had observed in his career over 300 camels died in his hospital due to ingesting plastics.
We published this paper about the plight of plastics of camels eating plastic waste.
And it was kind of a horror story, the way these animals suffer from this.
You can imagine, like right now, if you had 20 bottle caps and 30 plastic bags in your stomach, you couldn't pass it, couldn't regurgitate it.
The suffering, the stress on your esophagus and your stomach lining...
Sepsis from bacteria in there, and the false sense of satiation.
You feel you're full when you're not, and you malnourish, you dehydrate.
So he saw this happen to hundreds of camels.
We published this paper, and I'm proud to say within a couple years, less than two years, Dubai banned plastic bags and found a reasonable alternative in a different material.
Again, the issue, it's really global.
It's impacting a lot of organisms from the middle of the desert to the bottom of the ocean and everywhere in between.
One of the concerns that, you know, that I've worked on for many years and that we have in the United States, because I've been focused a lot on endocrine disruptors and the phthalates and BPAs and plastics, we're seeing these anomalies, which are no longer anomalies, but in sexual development in boys and girls, but particularly girls getting, you know, nowadays commonplace for nine and 10 year olds to get their periods.
And a lot of that, I mean, it's clearly coming from endocrine disruptors.
The most common vector of exposure is, you know, are these different plastics?
And I, you know, whether it's from plastic water bottles or all of the things that we eat that are packed in plastic that absorb a lot of those chemicals from the plastic wrapping, you Even organic food that is stamped, the food that's stamped that the, you know, BPAs travel from the ink, travel into the, you know, through the plastic they leach through, they get into the organic food.
Is that something that you look at at all?
You know, they're just the exposure, the human exposures.
I was on a paper probably 15 years or earlier in my career with a fellow, last name Balm Saul.
And Balm Saul was a scientist who kind of blew the lid off of BPA. I mean, he got a lot of pushback from industry about BPA, bisphenol A. And he had seen, you know, some endocrine disrupting features in the mice he was studying.
He was studying mice for a different reason, but it was the Lexan PANS Where he had the mice living and the water dishes that had BPA that were causing these effects.
He didn't know where they're coming from until they realized, oh, it's the plastic.
So I'm really glad that you brought this up.
It really is an issue.
In addition to, you know, plastic pollution, we have a lot of issues with the kind of chemicals that are on plastics.
They're plasticizers and additives.
Things like As you mentioned, bisphenol A and phthalates.
Phthalates are common in children's toys.
Like what makes a rubber ducky a flexible rubber are phthalates.
It can be up to 50% by volume can be this chemical phthalates.
Phthalates is an endocrine disruptor.
If you're giving your kid a soft chew toy with phthalates, you're giving them an endocrine disrupting popsicle to chew on.
Bisphenol A is another one.
Bisphenol A, as you know, is an endocrine disruptor.
It's inside the lining of all of our metal cans.
The reason why metal cans don't rust from the inside is a thin layer of plastic on the inside, and very often that is bisphenol A. You mentioned, you know, organic food is packaged in plastic.
When it's packaged in plastic, can we still call it organic?
Why do we not have these kinds of labels for our packaging as well?
When we're consuming foods that are adjacent to this packaging for sometimes months or years on the shelf, they become, they absorb what leaches out of that packaging.
So I think there's a need, and I'm so glad you pointed this out, that some of these endocrine disrupting chemicals, they render our organic produce, in some cases, inorganic.
It would take away that designation because of the volume of endocrine disrupting chemicals on that packaging.
Yeah, and, you know, we've been trained to accept that packaging and to desire it so that, you know, it's unusual for an American to go into a grocery store, even to a Whole Foods, and pick carrots out of the bin, or unwrapped food that is mainly, maybe oddly shaped, that is not uniform, and that is not wrapped doesn't really seem like real food to us anymore.
It is a strange thing.
You know, I often talk about, you know, we had to be trained to be throwaway consumers.
If you think of how our American culture was during the Great Depression, you know, my grandparents wouldn't throw a thing away.
They even washed their plastic bags in the 70s.
And also World War II, we were a culture of conservation for the war effort.
We recycled everything.
There were paper drives, there were metal drives, there were victory gardens.
So post-World War II in the 50s, we had to be taught planned obsolescence and to buy and then wait a few years until it's dysfunctional or unfashionable and then buy again.
That changed.
So yeah, I love that you observed that part of American culture.
But it's only the last hundred years that we flipped from a culture of conservation to a culture of planned obsolescence and throwing things away.
But, you know, I think there is an opportunity and what makes me optimistic is that I see The change happening.
Not going back to any semblance of inconvenience, but thinking, getting smarter about our packaging and our materials and our delivery systems, the business models for delivering goods to customers.
There's so much innovation and entrepreneurship out there that it leaves me somewhat optimistic, cautiously optimistic.
And what do you think the solutions are?
What are you targeting?
I mean, what's your dream for legislation or other solutions?
Well, I think it's a few things.
I think, first of all, we have to realize that there's going to be no silver bullet solution.
So one thing we've been communicating lately is we want to solve this issue, you know, one industry at a time.
I've been to so many conferences where there's one person sitting at the same table as me that's really focused on just fishing gear, plastics and fishing gear.
One person focused on e-waste.
One person is focused on medical ways.
Another person on car tires.
I'm on oceans and single-use plastics.
And it's almost like a Tower of Babel.
So I think first thing is to look at our individual sector, because each sector, it's a different chemistry, different polymer, different additives.
It's a different societal use of that product, different ways it gets in the environment, different impacts it might have.
So the solutions are going to be very different per sector.
I'm also seeing there are folks looking at each sector, but then looking upstream, rather than the downstream, let's just clean it up and let's just recycle more, which is, unfortunately, that fails.
I'd love to talk about that.
More preventative measures.
we're seeing cities eliminating from their communities the kinds of plastics that are the most costly to those cities in terms of cleanup and waste management and pollution leaving those cities.
So a lot of cities are, for example, eliminating things like straws and bags and utensils and cups and cup lids, and are favoring things that are a little more benign by design, a little more environmentally friendly, easier to compost.
So we're looking at better systems for how we move materials to consumers about the legacy of waste.
We're seeing some better waste management.
Then we're seeing something else I like, and that is the reuse economy.
Every time I go to a city now when I travel, It's not difficult to find a reuse station where you can bring your own packaging.
And like you had mentioned, you got goods in bulk.
You bring your own packaging, you get five pounds of beans.
I actually did that yesterday.
I was getting cashews and almonds in a bulk store.
So we're seeing these business models in the reuse economy, as well as smarter packaging and better systems of waste management in cities.
And that's where I think we're seeing examples that are beginning to spread around the country.
On an international stage, there's the UN Global Treaty that's being discussed right now.
A year and a half ago, the UN decided to take up this challenge.
There are going to be three negotiations, and then they'll vote on the treaty in 2024.
So I'm one of the scientific advisors to that treaty.
There are about 80 of us.
And it's inspiring.
As long as we can keep the conversation about prevention, it's got to be legally binding about prevention, and it can't be voluntary and focused on just cleanup and recycling.
It's got to be preventative and legally binding.
You mentioned kind of the upstream issues.
One of the things that I see in my work is something that seems sometimes just insurmountable because there's a strong link between the use of fossil fuels, which is actually increasing now.
I think last year was the biggest year for carbon production.
And the production of plastics, and particularly fracking, which a lot of the byproducts of the fracking industry are used in plastic production, and that is kind of an economic driver for plastics production.
And there's now all these cracking plants up and down the Ohio Valley and all over the country that are part of the food stream for The supply stream for plastics.
And in fact, that train, you know, I'm representing a lot of the people in East Palestine whose lives were upended by a Norfolk Southern train accident, the derailment.
And that train was carrying vinyl chloride, which is, of course, one of the primary ingredients in the production of plastics.
And those trains are going all day long.
These communities across Ohio, and they're all involved, they're all connected.
The fracking is connected to the vinyl chloride, which is linked to plastics production, and they're all part of this feed stream, you know, for the industry that is driving more and more plastic production.
Yes, exactly.
That train was carrying vinyl chloride.
That's the building block of PVC. And those chemicals, as you said, they're moving around the country, moving around the world, everywhere we go.
And some of those drivers, we understand, there's a rising middle class worldwide that wants an increased quality of life that comes highly packaged.
A lot of products are plastic.
Also, a lot of industries and technology are lightweighting their vehicles, lightweighting their products with plastic.
So there are some key drivers, as well as a rising global population.
By 2050, we could reach 9 to 10 billion people.
And many of those, as they approach middle class, that's a big, big increase in demand for those materials.
What about recycling?
Does it work?
It can if it's set up for success.
And I can't tell you how many times I've been in conversations about recycling.
And when I talk with folks that are producers, every stakeholder has a different perspective.
The folks who make plastic, they really focus the conversation on the technology that's available.
And they also have these advanced recycling techniques, things called pyrolysis, Waste to energy.
They have all these technologies.
And I often say, if you throw enough money at it, you can recycle anything.
You can recycle anything if you...
We have the technology to do that.
But to make it successful, the economics have to be there.
And that's where the conversation almost always falls short.
If you're going to recycle plastics, which is actually pretty efficient for PET, you've got to have the infrastructure set up.
But then to recycle it, you've got to first...
Collect it from the end of the road, from the consumer, back to a recycling hub, where then it gets washed, repelletized.
Those pellets can go back into the market and get distributed.
There's a lot of transportation costs as well.
That is so much more expensive of a process than just getting the raw material, the raw feedstock from brand new petroleum, brand new ethylene coming from fracking stations.
So it can't compete economically unless you set it up to compete.
Therefore, I often tell industry folks, I say, well, if we're going to talk about recycling and how great the technology is, are you willing to support policy that's going to ensure that 75% or better of new products are containing at least 75% or more recycled plastics?
You got to give it some market share, otherwise it can't compete.
That's why recycling rates in the US are less than 10%.
The other thing I would also add is design.
We don't have any standards for designing to make recycling easy.
If you look at products that were made a century ago, you could take apart any piece that broke And find that part and fix it.
You could fix, repair your own goods.
Nowadays you have a blender, one button breaks and the whole thing becomes trash.
One of the things that you talked about is making the economics work, and I just want to suggest methodology for that, which is in many of the jurisdictions in Europe, the producer of products pays for the packaging and pays for the recovery of that packaging.
So if you send packaging out into the stream of commerce, you have to show that you've either reclaimed it, that you've recovered it, Or you have to pay for its disposal.
So the producer of the product actually pays for the packaging disposal.
Oh, in Europe, you don't get a credit card that's tiny inside a shoebox filled with plastic peanuts or styrofoam peanuts because whoever sent you that credit card is now going to have to pay for the disposal of all that packaging.
And it works very well in Europe compared to what we have.
What we do is we...
Have the taxpayers subsidize that cost?
It's not free market capitalism.
It's an externality.
And that's why we have landfills in all these communities.
And it's because of a market failure.
failure.
It's because the people who are causing the problem are not being forced to pay to clean it up.
If you really want to have free market capitalism, actors in the marketplace should be paying for all of the costs of bringing their product to market, including the cost of cleaning up after themselves, which was a lesson we were all supposed to learn in kindergarten.
But they're able to evade that cause and escape the discipline of the free market and force the public to pay their production costs by putting all this crap out into the marketplace and knowing that the taxpayer is going to have to pay to recover it.
You know, those extended producer responsibility bills, they're so difficult to get through.
I think the industry recognizes that that is a threat to their bottom line.
If the polluter has to pay, it can cost them potentially billions in having to be responsible for the end of life of their stuff.
I mean, who captures those negative externalities?
You know, as you know, as you just said, it's a consumer.
It's a taxpayer.
And I can tell you, myself and other middle-class Americans, we're tired of paying for landfills, tired of paying for roadside cleanup, for putting nets and rivers to capture trash or beach cleanups.
It's not something that we should have to pay.
I think the producer of the packaging, the products, should have skin in the game.
But they've been very successful, as you know, deflecting those externalities that cost money.
I'd be curious to know, how do we get a good EPR bill through?
Well, there's going to be tremendous resistance from the industry.
We tried to do it a few years ago, and we got a couple of people from the industry who were willing to support it, including, strangely, Nestle, which, you know, produces all these, you know, Arrowhead water and Poland Springs water and local spring waters all over the country.
But they tried to get some of the other industry groups on board.
But it's really the plastic producers that We're good to go.
I completely agree.
And that's why I come back to the point, you know, if Nestle, being convinced Nestle to say, would you be willing to help pass legislation that all new water bottles that you make need to contain at least 75% recycled plastics, create that market for recycling?
Because right now it doesn't exist.
That's why it fails.
The technology is there, but economic failure, unfortunately, is still present.
I wonder if Nestle, if the other big beverage bottling companies, we can get them on the hook to at least buy back.
If they're going to message recycling, they've got to set up for economic success.
I mean, that'd be great, but it's responsibility to be willing to buy back your product and put it back in new bottles.
By law, so it levels the playing field across all companies making beverages out of plastics.
I think that would go a long way to solving this.
What are some simple things that people can do to avoid ingesting plastic materials in their daily life?
Well, one thing is for an individual to not ingest plastic particles in their food and their drink, it's kind of hard to avoid.
We have found microplastics in a lot of different bottled water.
We found it in beer, in salt, in a lot of consumer products.
You touch it and it perhaps makes this cloud of dust, like lint in your dryer.
Those microfibers, we found those in human lungs.
I think what you could do is just live a healthier lifestyle.
You're eating organic.
You're buying in bulk.
You're going to a farmer's markets, bringing your own cloth bags, you know, avoiding some of that plastic packaging.
But I often tell people when they say, what can the individual do?
I usually respond with, get organized.
If this issue is something that you can get passionate about, there are others like you in your community.
And I have seen so many small groups that go to city councils and demand change.
And if you get students with you, young kids, I've never seen a council member tell a young kid to sit down.
They will listen.
So get organized and get your, what you believe, what you love in front of policymakers to make your local change.
At the same time, decrease the amount of packaging in and around your home, around your family.
Thank you very much.
It was really fun talking to you.
Likewise.
My pleasure.
Thanks for the time.
Is your lab open or your farm up there open to the public?
It is.
It is.
We have 15 acres.
This farm, it was actually owned by Steve McQueen back in the late 80s.
And he built a 4,000 square foot metal barn to house his car collection.
I've now got it full of fossils and exhibits.
We're building a small science center here in Ventura County where there isn't one.
That's a side.
Half my career is classics, the other half is informal science learning.
So yeah, if you're past Ventura County, come on by.
Yeah, I will.
And I saw that you collect fossils, and I go out periodically to South Dakota to the Heinrich Reservation, and And I have some paleontologist friends out there.
I do take my kids fossil hunting out there.
It's fantastic.
And I've also gone up to Alberta and found some amazing stuff.
My son found a full saber-toothed head in South Carolina.
We go with a paleontologist called Japheth Boyce, who's right on the Wyoming border.
Up north, the border of Wyoming and South Dakota or Wyoming and Montana?
Wyoming and South Dakota.
That's not too far from where I am.
I've been digging in eastern Wyoming for about 30 years every summer.
I had a career diversion.
Either I work on plastics or paleontology.
So I chose not to be a paleontologist.
You don't get a job until you wait until some professor dies.
Then you can fill their shoes and get a job.
But I chose to do this work, environmental work.
But I've got in my garage, I've got 10 Triceratops skeletons.
And we're going back the first two weeks in July.
And if you're interested, we invite anyone to come out for one week at a time.
I've got a Triceratops, a partial skeleton in the ground.
And...
We're building a small science center here in Ventura County.
I'm building another one in Lusk, Wyoming.
I just bought an old car dealership, turned into a really funky roadside museum.
It's about probably two hours from Mount Rushmore on the Wyoming side, of course.
At one point, I was kind of researching about starting a program with the Sioux because Pine Ridge, it's just like every time there's a range in it, Rain and Pine Ridge, you have all these fossils just popping out of the ground and they have everything.
They have Pleistocene, you know, mega mammals all the way back.
You have different kind of geological formations out there.
And, you know, to try to train some of the, you know, the young people on that reservation about how to find them because, you know, now they're selling them and there's, you know, there's money in them now.
And it's just, it's like wealth that's just rotting on the ground every time it rains.
I saw that market change.
I began doing this in the early 90s before Jurassic Park.
And there I could trade with cowboys, ranchers out there.
I could trade.
I'd fix fence.
I'd trail cattle.
I'd dock sheep in exchange for collecting fossils.
Now, they want you to fix fence and give them, you know, money per bone.
Which is fine because of the EcoTour.
I did get some grant money to invite some kids here in Ventura County.
I'm looking for, you know, science, exceptionally science students that the only barrier is economics.
I can pay their way.
But I've got some extra funding.
If you know any students there in South Dakota on the reservation that want to come dig dinosaurs.
You know what?
I'm going to look into that.
I'm going to look into that.
Thank you.
Yeah.
I'll send you a flyer on this year's expedition, and if you've got students that are hungry for science, just ignore the fee on the flyer, and I'll take them out to the field.
We've got a 7,000-acre ranch.
Had about 25 people last summer.
Last summer was great.
I found a beautiful triceratops upper arm bone, a beautiful turtle, and a T-Rex tooth.
My second best T-Rex tooth ever was last summer.
Fantastic.
It would be a pleasure to talk to you, Marcus.
Hey Marcus, quick question.
What kind of water do you drink?
Do you filter it?
What's that?
Reverse osmosis.
What do you do for your drinking water?
I've got a Brita filter I'm looking at, and I have my stainless steel bottles.
On the junk raft, when I was floating across the ocean, I had a reverse osmosis pump, and I would spend the first two hours in the morning filling a two liter bottle with this pump for two hours to fill the bottle.
For the next two hours, put it to my mouth and fill my body for two hours.
That was every day for three months in the middle of the ocean.
Marcus Erickson, where can people, how can people support you and how can they, you know, follow you?
To go to our website, the Five Gyres Institute, that's the number five, G-Y-R-E-S. We're doing a lot of work.
We're an organization, we do the research, we publish the papers in peer-reviewed journals and bring that to the public, to policymakers, to industry, to say, look, here are the facts, What can we do?
Now I'd offer one quick, quick antidote.
We're studying biomaterials now and finding so many innovative companies across the United States who are ready to replace plastics with biodegradable materials for thin film packaging.
So I like to see research translate into real solutions, and that's what we're about.
And again, it's 5gyres.org.
Marcus Erickson, thank you very much for joining us.
My pleasure.
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