September 20, 2012 • 36 mins
How much of your environment is made out of plastic? Where does it come from? Where does it go? How does plastic affect your iPhone's weight? Join Julie and Robert as they discuss humanity's relationship with plastic and the great Pacific garbage patch.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb. My name is Julie Douglas. Julie,
how much plastic is in your life? Like? How much?
How many plastic things did you encounter, say just this morning,
(00:24):
just this morning? I didn't count, but I thought about it,
and I thought, well, if I were to just try
to live a plastic free existence, I would say that
about seventy of everything that I touched that was surrounding
me would just disappear, and I'd be left with like
a shell of my house and like, you know, maybe
(00:44):
one last item a glass you Yeah, yeah, I mean
I was. I was looking around myself, and it's pretty
startling because like even like now, since I'm using a kindle,
it's like I'm reading on plastic. I'm I'm certainly we're
doing all this research and writing on plastic for the
most part. Occasionally we have an actual book thrown in
(01:05):
there um or some printouts that came from a machine
that was made out of plastic, but they're plastic is
just all over my work life and then my my hobbies.
I'm like you know if I if I'm painting, at
least do these little migment miniatures that I paint were
made out of metal? But now it's cheaper to do
them out of high grade resins, So they're they're made
out of plastic. Um. The cats they're pooping into plastic boxes,
(01:28):
they're eating out of plastic. I'm eating out of plastic um.
Sometimes there are sometimes glass. I do use glass for
the food. But but still you go and you buy
plastic and everything, but you know, everything's like wrapped in
three different sulfane wrappers. You're not careful, and uh yeah,
it's just everywhere. I mean even your clothing. To write,
(01:49):
there are certain types of polyester um, and we think
of polyester is being like really seventies thing, but that
the fact of the matter is that there are types
of polyesters that are really lightweight that you wouldn't even
know um are in your clothing. That's plastic, plastic components
in otherwise metal looking objects. I mean, how much of
our our vehicles are filled with plastics? Earphones plastic, the
(02:11):
earbuds we stick inside of our bodies are made out
of plastic. Surgical implants of various kinds are made out
of it. We store everything in it, we we lie
down to sleep in it. If you have one of
those those cool race car beds. Um we have. We
have remade our world into a plastic line. We protect
ourselves with it. Teflon if you wuning teflon, that's plastic,
(02:32):
also used to store like many volatile substances like acids,
um as well. I mean, it's it's everywhere. And uh
and the really amazing part too for me, because you know,
we're stuff to blow your mind, so we really you know,
we want to focus on that that mind blowing aspect
of any topic we cover, and certainly plastics may not
(02:52):
sound that exciting, but think about it. It's something that
you know, you go back a couple of centuries and
uh and and there wasn't plastic everywhere. We were having
to depend on other materials. And now plastic completely envelops us,
completely surrounds us, and there's no turning back. It's a
huge innovation. Uh. There's a lot that is actually democratizing
(03:13):
about it. We'll talk about that later. Uh, but of
course there are some drawbacks to it, and it's sort
of one of those things that once you have this technology,
and you open Pandora's Box. It's not like you're gonna
go backwards and say, you know what, let's just start
putting milk into the glass and jukes again. Yeah, you
can start doing it on a you can try on
a local level. And certainly i'd look to hear from
(03:34):
anyone who has given up plastic completely, um because because
again that would be it's more of an effort than
you would think. And you're wearing moccasin's right now, right, Yeah,
even her shoewear would be affected. So I mean, it's
but certainly on a larger level, on a cultural level,
it's just impossible to go back these substances that we've
we've taken. It's like, like you said, it's like a
(03:55):
Pandora's box. It's like it's like a magical genie has
given us a gift, and then we just side we
might want to take it off, and we realize it's
fused with our skin and in some cases, all right, well,
let's talk about the ubiquity of plastic. In terms of
some statistics. It turns out that we make one and
fifteen million metric tons a year, the equivalent of the
(04:17):
weight of three hundred and forty seven Empire state buildings,
and ten per cent of that makes its way to
the sea. And what gets to the sea has been
tossed off by ships and oil rigs, and the rest
comes from floods and sewage. Yeah. Yeah. And then of
course that plastic winds up wrapped around sea animals or
(04:39):
or in their bellies more off the not or just
floating in giant heaps on the surface and the beaches. Yeah,
and which is nothing is more depressing, by the way
than walking down a stretch of beach and looking out
at the horizon and just taking in the wonder of
nature and then stepping on a lighter or you know,
(05:00):
six pack ring. It really is depressing. Um. And then
we Americans produced two hundred and forty pounds of plastic
per person per year, so that's a little statistic for you.
And four hundred billion plastic bags are discarded worldwide every year.
That's another thing to keep in mind. Little plastic bags
get to the grocery store. But again, if you travel back, uh,
(05:20):
you know, a couple of centuries, you're not going to
find this situation. You're not gonna find plastics everywhere. Um.
One of the more fascinating um little stories of the
genesis of plastic um comes to comes to us from
an article called Plastic Fantastic by A. Jennifer Kahn for
Mother Jones Um. And in this article she she mentions
(05:43):
how in the eighteen fifties you had this, uh, this
major manufacturer of Billard's equipment. You know pool. You know
you're shooting pool. You're you have these pool balls and
you have to everyone know foot pool is. But but
to to play pool, you have to have these these objects. Right. Well,
in the old days you had to make the Billard
balls out of ivory, okay, and you can only get
(06:06):
like eight balls out of a single large Asian elephant tusk.
And while these used to their elephants everywhere they were,
they were easier to come by. But by this point, uh,
they were hunted to near extinction um for their ivory.
So I mean more importantly that that is the whole extinction,
near extinction of the Asian elephant. There. That's certainly a
(06:28):
the more pressing concern. But for the purposes of this story,
where are they going to get more Billard balls? They're like, well,
that sucks with the elephants. But man's got to play
play billards, and billards is our business. Ladies got to
wear a corset another thing. So they need a material
to replace ivory. So manufacturer Michael Pellan offered a ten
(06:49):
thousand dollar reward to anyone who could create an artificial
material that mimicked ivory. So it needs to be pliable,
it needs to be durable and um. And this was
the the actual quote is that if any inventive genius
would discover a substitute for ivory, possess possessing those qualities
which make it valuable to the billard player, he would
make a handsome fortune for himself and earn Austin's serious gratitude.
(07:13):
And so New York chemist John Wesley Hyatt steps up
and uh, and he creates this compound called celloid. Hi. Who,
I'll have it right here, Yeah, go for it. And
so he brings these selloid balls to Michael Pellan, presumably
collects the reward, and we have billards to this day
(07:36):
and a few elephants. And this is the first sort
of tinkering that we see with materials to try to
replicate other sort of items like ivory. And then you
have Charles Goodyear who uses volcanization to process natural rubber.
Now he discovered this in blimps and begin hunting them
for their plastic, right blimp? No, No, I have that
(07:56):
that wrong. Yeah, the blimp started hunting him. No, I
was thinking like the like the Goodyear blimp is a
natural creature that is hunted for sport and for its
precious plastics. Yeah, but that's not the case. No, it's not.
It's not. But that is one of the reasons why
you rarely see them in the air anymore, right, because
I've been hunted down pretty pretty much. But um, but
he did use this volcanization process for Nepal rubber, and
(08:18):
this actually paved the way for something called thermo setting,
which melts materials and allows them to be molded into
a solid shape. And you get about six or seven
different people who are tinkering with this process. But it's
not until nineteen o seven when Leo Hendrick Bakeland improved
phennel formaldehyde reaction techniques and invented the first fully synthetic
resin to become commercially successful and trade named it bake Light,
(08:42):
which you may ring a bell for people, doesn't ring
a bell like that, you're standing out the old timey
phones um like with a rotary dial. That's like a
big white product. Oh, let's see, I think bakel I
hear bake light. I just think easy bake ovens. Plastic. Yeah,
but fast forwards one and you begin to see that
(09:02):
there are more and more products that are using plastic,
particularly when the US military begins to replace some metal
parts of plastic ones. And we're talking about anywhere anything
from like bugles to actual combs, because before that, combs
were made out of rubber, and before rubber, they were
made out of ivory. Actually, and people are creating a
lot of these by accident too, or just they're they're
(09:22):
tinkering with existing formulas. N thirties British researchers um more
or less accidentally in the created polyethylene um. So I'm
and you see see a lot of that. Like if
you look at the list of plastics, there's a long
list of various very important plastics, each one with with
certain terroistic characteristics that make it ideal for certain purposes.
(09:46):
So let's go a little bit into the basics of
how it's made. Plastics are made from oil, and oil
is a carbon rich raw material and plastics are large
carbon containing compounds. Uh. Plastics are polymers, large molecules made
of repeating units of smaller molecules, and these smaller molecules
are called monomers, and these are chemically bound together. And
(10:09):
a polymer is like a chain in which each link
is a monomer, So think of it that way. Um,
All plastic is made of carbon, and man made plastic
uses carbon derived from oil, while biopolymers, which we'll talk about,
or bioplastics use carbon derived from natural materials. Now, one
thing to keep in mind about the about the plastics
made from petroleum and and fossil fuel components. They're not
(10:34):
huge consumers of those, uh, five of the five percent
of the energy and uh. And originally, like some of
the earlier plastics were made from coal tar, which is
a waste product from from coking coal for incineration. So
um so so. And that was another thing to keep
in mind about why plastic exploded all over the place.
(10:54):
It wasn't. It wasn't because someone said, hey, here's a
really expensive means of creating something that doesn't work very well,
let's replace glass and stuff with it. And no, it
was super useful in in in various areas. But also
it was cheap to produce. You could produce more or
less as a byproduct of other activities. Yeah, it wasn't
basically like captains of industry stepping back and from the factories,
(11:17):
they're saying, hey, what's that what's that steam or that smoke,
and can we somehow harness it into something else? So
as you say, it is a byproduct types of plastic
polystream which you probably know is styrofoam, uh, polyvinyl chloride PVC,
like in pipes um you often see that, and plumbing
and poly vinyl led down chloride thram wrap. UM. You
(11:41):
mentioned kevlar. There's dacron, which is a coating on pianos
and guitars. Polyesters on pianos. Yeah, I know. See again,
your your piano would advantage. I would have thought that, hey,
the piano, that's a high grade item made well, even
the keys, you're not making those from ivory these days, right, right,
So your piano would vantage too if you were trying
to get rid of all plastic around you. Uh teflon
(12:04):
polar fleeced again, that's the type of lightweight polyester and
um in thermoset or thermosetic plastics like polyurethane um, and
that isn't everything from garden houses, two shoes, and truck seats.
It's everywhere, all right. So there's just a quick intro
into our plastic palace that we've built for ourselves, and
(12:25):
we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back,
we're going to discuss some of the ramifications of living
in that plastic cow All right, we're back. So, yeah,
we've created this enormous plastic world for ourselves. It's great.
It's made out of everything from PVC to to kevlar.
(12:46):
It's durable when we need we needed to be durable.
It's resistant to acids when we needed to be resistant
to acids. It's bendable when we want it to be
to be bendable. I mean, it's it's it's it's really
killing it. Really. It is one of those things that's
a material that is truly innovative, that you can put
your imagination into and make anything out of it. The problem,
(13:07):
of course, is that some plastics don't even break down
for about a thousand years. So obviously a lot of
the junk that we're creating, and I say junk in
in terms of like bags and things that we tend
to throw away or we think that we're recycling and
it's just going to be it's a one to one
proposition where this bottle will be recycled again into another
bottle is not necessarily the case. Yeah. And also when
(13:30):
you're dealing with a thousand year period for it to
break down, um, then you're then then it's not just
a matter of oh, the snack cake was in plastic
and now that plastics around for a thousand years. It's
also like I bought this stool at the furniture store.
It's made out of plastic, and I'm getting a lot
of use out of it. But then if you could
end up throwing it away in ten years, uh, fifty years,
(13:52):
if it's thrown away at the end of your life,
if it maybe the last two generations, it's still potentially
winding up his junk somewhere and continuing to just exist. Yeah.
And even if you were to recycle it, um, you're
essentially re melting like say bags and recasting the plastic.
And according to the United States e p A, manufacturing
new plastic from recycled plastic requires two thirds of the
(14:16):
energy used in virgin plastic manufacturing UM. And another problem
is that the polymer chains break during the process, resulting
in a lesser product. So again it's not apples to
Apple's process and it can only be recycled so many times. Also,
I wanted to mention that a two thousand and eleven
North Carolina State University UM study published in the Journal
(14:38):
of Environmental Science and Technology found that a biodegradable plastic
called pH BO emits more methane than food waste or
newspaper in landfills, and because it decreate degrades much faster,
the newspaper will emit that methane in a matter of
years rather than decades. So it's also a question of
making stuff that that can break down in a way
(15:00):
that UM is sustainable for us. Yeah, because you know
want situation where you're solving one problem, then you're creating
another that that tends to be with why these things ago? Yeah,
And then compounding that problem is that the EP estimates
that two thirds of landfills do not have methane collection capabilities.
So not only are you creating more methane, but you
don't have ways to collect it and to make sure
(15:22):
it doesn't go into the atmosphere. Of course, the big
thing that I'm sure it has come to a number
of people's mind already is is b p A. That's
a big deal these days. I mean, if you're buying something,
the plastic item to put food in or drink out
off you, you're probably looking to make sure that it's
b p A free well. And b p A is
something that is short for bicenol a, and it is
(15:45):
an estrogenic chemical, and those types of chemicals are chemicals
that are body's mistake for the natural hormones and the
estrogen family, leading to concerns that it can have harmful
effects um adverse fact effects excuse me, on fetal and
infant brain development, as well as an increased tendency towards obesity. Okay,
so this is really ties into our our fears and
(16:09):
and legitimate concerns about about the obesity epidemics, particularly in
the United States. The idea that we're eating horrible food
that's making us fat, and we're also eating it out
of out of out of these uh, these plastics that
are essentially giving our body what it thinks is estrogen
and contributing to that obesity right, and and this is
(16:29):
not a black and white issue at all. In fact,
if you think about it, um the plastics have been
in use or wide use for about fifty years, so
we don't have all the data yet, but we obviously
has been We've been collecting them, are collecting that data,
and there's a lot of information is coming out that
uh could play into some fearmongering. So we don't want
to necessarily do that, but we want to try to
(16:50):
hit some points and get a clearer picture if we can.
We will not come away from this discussion saying whether
or not plastic is harmful for us definitively into what
extent um, but we can at least sort of touch
on it. There's a two thousand and eleven study by
Paul Terry and jenkin Chen at the University of Tennessee,
and the studies called most plastic products released estrogenic chemicals
(17:13):
and UM parnables. Blogger and chemist Christine Lepisto actually talked
about this and when of her blog posts, she said
the study found that over seventy of plastics leached leached
estrogenic chemicals UM in a wide range of plastic products
right off the shelf, both with or without package contents,
and then she said that when the plastics were stressed
(17:35):
by simulations of typical real world situations like dishwashing or
microwaving or exposure to sunlight, that percentage actually increased of
the plastics tested. So, in other words, all plastics may
leach chemicals that mimic estrogen and UH to a pretty
large extent here. So we're gonna throw a little bit
(17:57):
more stats and studies at you just so that you
guys can kind of get an idea of what's going
on here. UM. B p A and rat studies. There
are a ton of them, UM that are pointed on
to all sorts of problematic scenarios. One of them is
a two thousand intense study of pregnant rats that were
dosed with either one point two or two point for
(18:19):
microgram grams per kilogram per day of b p A,
and the b p A was actually fed to them
in the form of sessame oil, and those doses are
well under the dose of fifty kgs the established amount
by the e p A is being safe for human
consumption or exposure. And they found that the male children
of those rats fed the bp A lowers fertility in adulthood,
(18:42):
and that the effect they persist for at least three generations.
So what you're seeing here is um in a fact
that can carry through generation to generations. So if you
extrapolate that with a human, you could say, okay, so
if someone were to be exposed to be p A,
that at child's grandchildren, even though they were raised in
(19:03):
a psyche pure environment, their genes actually maybe a bit
distorted or changed because of that exposure to b p A.
Because if that's the extrapolation, we're taking this the data
from rats and trying to figure out how it affects
us um that, then this is really interesting. At two
thousand and ninth study of rats looking at endocrine disruption
(19:24):
found that when pregnant rats were fed b p A
and another group were fed oral contraceptives that have estrogen
eminem uh, it was actually the contraceptives that caused genital
mut mutation and reduced fertility and female offspring, while the
female b p A offspring rats were unaffected. Okay, so
(19:46):
this is mudding the waters a bit um, I don't
know what to be afraid of now, Well, right, um,
you know we're not obviously going to start feeding all,
you know, each other oral contraceptives. But they were trying
to use a control there, So estrogen being in oral
contraceptives was the control to see, you know, what was
going to fuss with the system. More turns out it
(20:06):
was the contraceptives. So then two thousand eleven Forbes magazine,
there's a article very interesting that says, majestically scientific federal
study on b p A has stunning finding. So why
is the media ignoring it? Yeah, it's a great article.
And the and in the article they quote just in
Tea Garden um it was part of that study, and uh,
(20:27):
Tea Garden says, in a nutshell, we can now say,
for the adult human population exposed to even very high
dietary levels, blood concentrations of the bioactive form of b
p A throughout the day are below our ability to
detect them, and orders of magnitude lower than those causing
effects and rodents exposed to be p A. So what
they had done in a twenty four hour period they
(20:48):
had actually taken human volunteers and fed them foods that
were you know, exupposed to be p A out of
can so on and so forth. So it was very
intentional exposure to b p A. And then that was
interesting to say that those those b p A levels
just weren't detected and it was very different from what
was happening with the rats. So it's telling us a
(21:08):
different story. Oftentimes, we will, you know, look to animals
to try to give us some sort of sense of, um,
you know, what sort of chemicals or environmental conditions could
possibly affect us as well. But the jury is just
still out on whether or not or to what extent
b p A affects us. That being said, certainly, you
(21:32):
start reading all this stuff and and I know, for
my own part, I think, well, I'm just gonna steer
clear of the b p A stuff when possible, just
to be on the safe side, right Sure, which makes sense,
and it's good that they took it out of baby bottles,
and because certainly that those are developmental times that you
wouldn't want any exposure, you'd want less exposure. Um. But
where we really see the canary in the coal line
(21:54):
again is with the animals. And we see this in
a very concrete way because a canary in the coal
mine sometimes has plastic inside the canary and the belly
of the Canary. Yeah. According to Mother Jones, uh, in
an article called Where Plastic Goes to Kill Each year,
undegraded plastic chokes to death some one hundred thousand whales, dolphins, seals, manatees,
(22:16):
plus an unknown number of sea turtles and about two
million birds. Yeah. I mean, and uh we we sall
some some articles too where they provide photographic evidence of
what this looks like like all the plastic pieces that
were taken from a turtle stomach or or or a
necropsy of a of a I think one of them
was an albatross. Ironically enough, that contains all of this plastic,
(22:41):
these plastic pieces that just wind up there. And it's
just really disturbing to to think of it, because I mean,
we've what we've all seen like footage of oh, there's
an animal and it got its neck cotton m a
six pack ring, you know, but it's even and that's
certainly disturbing in and of itself, but but then to
see that it's just winding up inside the animals and
causing all this uh, this discomfort, it's uh, it's really sober.
(23:03):
It was it the albatross too. They were talking about
the the young before they reach four months of age
aren't able to regurge tate, so whatever they take in
cigarette lighters or whatnot just kind of sits in their
belly for the rest of their lives. Um it's real, yeah, chief,
So it does remind me of the Simpsons episode where um,
it's a Lisa episodes of some people might have missed it,
(23:25):
but where Lisa gets uh Montgomery burns the evil millionaire
to the open recycling plant and uh and and she
thinks she's she's changed him because he hit rock bottom,
he lost the plant. Now he's reached into recycling, he's
into making the earth better. And then it's revealed that
his big plan for the plant and is that he's
going to take all these six pack rings and he
(23:46):
u has them sewn together into a giant net that
they then roll out into the ocean and just catch
all of these of it like everything from whales, the squid,
and just rolling him in and then turning them into
this this grotesque meat paste. So wow, all right, well yeah, yeah,
there's thanks for the uplifting a bit there. Um. Okay,
(24:09):
so obviously there's a trade off here. Uh, you know,
we've got plastic in our environment. It's not going away. Um.
There is a certain amount of adaptability that it provides
us in convenience in our lives. Um. You know, it's
used in cars. It makes them lighter and more fuel efficient,
which is very important. Um. And it makes our existence
less cumbersome and safer. And I'm thinking about that in
(24:31):
terms of like something like as basic as an ivy bag. Right,
that's no longer glass, and it's portable and it's not
something you have to worry about in an emergency situation. Um.
And it is somewhat democratizing. I mean, you think about this.
These products are made cheaply and they're available to nearly everyone.
Think about if it's an eighteen twenty one and and
(24:54):
you're trying to better yourself in society, it takes a
lot of money to go and get a comb made
of ivory. Yeah, so you're walking around with BedHead all
the time. Um, you know. But you know, I make
light of that, but seriously, this is something that would
would have marked been an outward mark of the halves
and have nots. So we just take this for granted
that all these different products and materials are available to
(25:17):
us and it is somewhat democratizing. And as we touched
on earlier, I mean, and then the medical industry, plastic
is everywhere and is often involved in in in UH,
in gadgets or to or procedures that would just not
be the same without plastic. And we have plastic implants,
we have plastic surgical tools, and then when you get
into the electronic equipment, certainly plastic is a key component.
(25:40):
The next time you're the doctor's office, look around at
all the plastic and try to imagine getting your check
up or procedure done without it. So that actually correlates
to to life expectancy, right, And I'm gonna get a
heart transplant if there's not plastic available or these tools
to make it happen. Um. All right, So when we
talk about all of these this this junk, all of
this plastic that we've created, and how it has democratized
(26:04):
our lives or its has changed us. Um, everything that
we discard seems like an abstract notion until you start
thinking about something called the Great Pacific garbage Patch. Yes,
and this is uh, this is an idea that that's
certainly captures the imagination. Because I know when I think
of it. I imagine like some Godzilla sized plastic heat
(26:25):
or just like an island with its own like plastic
monsters living on it out in the ocean. That will
show actually pretty close to what it's becoming. Right, And
but it's also been kind of a sticking point um
in arguments about the arguments that basically come down to
to what degree we should care about pollution and the planet,
(26:45):
where people are like, oh, the garbage patch is just
made up by by hippies. It's and then and then
other people on the other side is no, it's a
it's a real problem. In the other side, well, let's
see some photos of it. And this this kind of
back and forth that's kind of waged over the past
seven or eight years. I feel well, and there's this
idea that there's there's it's not just one patch either.
(27:05):
There are several patches um. But what we're talking about
is the Texas sized garbage patch in the North Pacific Gyre,
which holds an estimated three million metric tons of mostly
plastic trash, six times the mass of the plankton found there.
And most of this is broken down into microplastics that
(27:25):
chemically bond with PCBs DDT. We know this is deep, right,
and endocrine disruptors to make this area a million times
more toxic than surrounding areas. So the problem here is
that those little plankton sized flakes that have broken down
are then mistakenly consumed by jellyfish and small fish that
are are then consumed by larger fish which that are
(27:47):
then consumed by us. And so you have so and
then we up with little plastic pieces and the remnants
of plastic inside the entire food chain. Yeah, but okay,
here is the silver lining here, and I love there
has actually been a bacteria found or several that consume plastic. Okay,
this and this reminds me to some of the like
(28:08):
talking about oil spills and the idea that oh we
do have. You can see some bacteria that is developing
the ability to consume petroleum uh and so it stands
to reason that that they also will eventually uh and
and are developing an appetite for plastic as well. Well.
And you know, of course there are some concerns with this,
but for the most part, this is really incredible news
(28:30):
and you know, there needs to be a lot more
data involved with it, and uh you know, in terms
of trying to figure out whether or not this is
a good sustainable solution. But I wanted to mention that
Yale has an annual rainforest expedition and laboratory where they
let students venture into the jungles of Ecuador to search
for plants and then culture the micro organisms within the
(28:53):
plant tissue and um one of the students brought back
a fungus that they found love of too much on polyurethane.
So and there have been several different um as I
say about tiers that have been found too much on plastic,
but I really wanted to talk about this one because
it's called Pestelopotopas microsphora, and it is the first one
(29:17):
that anyone has found that that survives solely on a
steady diet of polyurethane. And it gets even better because
the fun guy can survive not just on plastic alone,
but also in anaerobic conditions without any sort of oxygen.
So then you start to think about landfills and how
they're basically airless and this is the perfect condition for
(29:40):
this sort of fun guy, so they could just run
wild in a like a tightly packed down landfill and
just eat all the plastic cup exactly. I mean, this
has a ton of promise. But then, of course there
are some people who would say, okay, so now that
you have this fun guy that you know, is it
breaks down uh plastic and eats it. What happened if
(30:00):
you know this goes palace. We live in the plastic palace,
and we're celebrating the emergence of the back of a
plastic eating back period. Right, So then you're going to
the Michael Crichton route and you start to think, okay, well,
in the hospital setting, you certainly wouldn't want, you know,
the the new hip that's going into your body to
to have some sort of um bacteria or you know
(30:22):
that would break down that hip or anything else really
in any of the tools that are going to be
used on you. Yeah, the figuring I just painted. It's
bad enough I have to worry about the kitten eating it.
I don't want to worry about bacteria eating it as well. Yeah,
it's it's very interesting proposition and if you want to
read more about it, you can check out the paper.
It is called biodegradation of polyester polyurethane by Endo Fight
(30:45):
It fun guy. Wow, to think about polyester too, being
susceptible to this. So many great garments. Half of that's right,
it would take out all the second hand stores. Yeah,
the big take home out of all of this. Again,
we've we've built this, this plastic palace. We've build this
plastic lives for ourselves. It's it's everywhere, and we cannot
go back. We can't just decide we're not gonna do
(31:08):
plastic anymore. It's just not gonna happen. But what we
can do is we can of course manage it. We
can develop better ways to break down the plastic that
we have. We can depend more and more on bioplastics
that are made from things like like corn and uh another,
biological agents who are not having to depend even a
little bit on petroleum and and and also just become
(31:31):
smarter with our use of it, realizing that once you
create something out of plastic, it's not necessarily something that
can then be recycled and made hold again. It's you
need to think of it as a real investment of
you know, even if it's a small one. So if
it's you know, something like if it's a if it's
a choice between taking sixteen snack cakes and individually packaging
(31:52):
them and then putting them in a larger package. We
should we should air on the side of putting them
all in a single bag. You know, just all the
little things that add up to the whole of just
using less plastic, using it in a smarter manner, and
using more sustainable plastics. Yeah, so there you go. That's
that's a good reminder next time you go to the
grocery store or you're sorting out to the plastic in
(32:13):
your life and wondering if everything's realatting recycled into what
degree we have control over the situation. Yeah, I mean
one for me, I've been trying more and more to
avoid individually packaged snack items, you know, because I mean
it's attractive on one level. You're like, oh, I can
buy the bag of snack Micks, or I can buy
the bag of six bags of snack Micks that are
small and they fit easily into your lunch box. Or
(32:35):
I can take just a few seconds and and or
or heaven forbid, use a little will control and take
the whole bag of snack Micks to work with me
for the week that never but but still I can
certainly divide it up. I don't I don't need the
other little pre made bags already there. But anyway, so
plastics aside, Let's let's call over the robit and uh
(32:57):
read a little listener mail. All right, This one comes
from Jackie Jackie Ritson and says, greetings, Uh, first the
tried and true cliche awesome podcast. Just listen to the
cracking episode and have a couple of comments. Personally, this
is my favorite apparently mythological creature. I suspect this comes
from a combination of twenty Leagues under the Sea awesome film.
(33:20):
I always I watched the Disney movie a lot growing up,
and you was always enamored by the scenes with the
squid uh and Pirates of the Caribbean, which also fetched
the cracking um. And she continues. The reason I say
apparently is because I have a strange desire for one's
beat to turn up as proof of their existence, which,
as we discussed in the cracking episode, that's uh what
(33:43):
some archaeologists are up to as well, curious into the
is to the existence of a possible um prehistoric cracking.
She continues, Anyway, you made a comment early on about
how cephalopods were essentially mythical until the eighteen seventies or
of sometime around then. It reminded me of one of
the stories in Kim Newman's book Hound of the of
the the Ubervilles, all about professional professor Moriarty. A great read.
(34:08):
Uh this uh my favorite, the Red Planet League, in
which the professor seeks to destroy his nemesis, the Astronomer
Royale or the Astronomer Royal, I'm not sure. I can't
remember his name at the moment the professor plans. The
Professor's plan involves the use of some rather ugly squid.
Uh but more I shan't say. Well, that's my email again.
(34:31):
Great podcast. I'm off to listen to the one on Gigantis.
Um I had to skip ahead, I mean to the
Krackens cheers, uh Jackie so uh yeah, so there's some
favorite Krakens that just reminded me of the artwork that
you sent the other day of the silkenferred. Yes, yeah,
(34:52):
if you uh I put we post ended up posting
it on all the social media things. So go back
and look at that if you get a chance. It's
pretty pretty wild. It makes it look like a p
you want to own. Yeah, I mean, really, you add
some fur to it and it's amazing what can happen.
It's it's funny because it reminds me of a dream
that my wife had. She had a dream where she
had like a kid in the sized octopus that was
furry and um, and then her brother was trying to
(35:15):
take it from her or something but brother. Yeah. So
so anyway, I always great to hear hear from from listeners,
and especially there with with their own like personal likes
and dislikes in their own nostalgia might happen to be
relearning a particular topic. So so that's great. Thanks for
writing us. If you would like to write us, particularly
(35:35):
if you have comments about plastics plastic in your life.
Have you managed to free yourself from plastic? Do you
think it's even possible? How much plastic is in your life?
What is plastic done for you? Um? What are you
doing to try and uh curb your plastic usage? Then
right into us. You can find us on Facebook and
tumbler as stuff to blow your mind, and you can
(35:56):
also find us on Twitter where we are blow the
Mind and you can also dry that's a line at
blew the Mind at discovery dot com For more on
this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works
dot com.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb. My name is Julie Douglas. Julie,
how much plastic is in your life? Like? How much?
How many plastic things did you encounter, say just this morning,
(00:24):
just this morning? I didn't count, but I thought about it,
and I thought, well, if I were to just try
to live a plastic free existence, I would say that
about seventy of everything that I touched that was surrounding
me would just disappear, and I'd be left with like
a shell of my house and like, you know, maybe
(00:44):
one last item a glass you Yeah, yeah, I mean
I was. I was looking around myself, and it's pretty
startling because like even like now, since I'm using a kindle,
it's like I'm reading on plastic. I'm I'm certainly we're
doing all this research and writing on plastic for the
most part. Occasionally we have an actual book thrown in
(01:05):
there um or some printouts that came from a machine
that was made out of plastic, but they're plastic is
just all over my work life and then my my hobbies.
I'm like you know if I if I'm painting, at
least do these little migment miniatures that I paint were
made out of metal? But now it's cheaper to do
them out of high grade resins, So they're they're made
out of plastic. Um. The cats they're pooping into plastic boxes,
(01:28):
they're eating out of plastic. I'm eating out of plastic um.
Sometimes there are sometimes glass. I do use glass for
the food. But but still you go and you buy
plastic and everything, but you know, everything's like wrapped in
three different sulfane wrappers. You're not careful, and uh yeah,
it's just everywhere. I mean even your clothing. To write,
(01:49):
there are certain types of polyester um, and we think
of polyester is being like really seventies thing, but that
the fact of the matter is that there are types
of polyesters that are really lightweight that you wouldn't even
know um are in your clothing. That's plastic, plastic components
in otherwise metal looking objects. I mean, how much of
our our vehicles are filled with plastics? Earphones plastic, the
(02:11):
earbuds we stick inside of our bodies are made out
of plastic. Surgical implants of various kinds are made out
of it. We store everything in it, we we lie
down to sleep in it. If you have one of
those those cool race car beds. Um we have. We
have remade our world into a plastic line. We protect
ourselves with it. Teflon if you wuning teflon, that's plastic,
(02:32):
also used to store like many volatile substances like acids,
um as well. I mean, it's it's everywhere. And uh
and the really amazing part too for me, because you know,
we're stuff to blow your mind, so we really you know,
we want to focus on that that mind blowing aspect
of any topic we cover, and certainly plastics may not
(02:52):
sound that exciting, but think about it. It's something that
you know, you go back a couple of centuries and
uh and and there wasn't plastic everywhere. We were having
to depend on other materials. And now plastic completely envelops us,
completely surrounds us, and there's no turning back. It's a
huge innovation. Uh. There's a lot that is actually democratizing
(03:13):
about it. We'll talk about that later. Uh, but of
course there are some drawbacks to it, and it's sort
of one of those things that once you have this technology,
and you open Pandora's Box. It's not like you're gonna
go backwards and say, you know what, let's just start
putting milk into the glass and jukes again. Yeah, you
can start doing it on a you can try on
a local level. And certainly i'd look to hear from
(03:34):
anyone who has given up plastic completely, um because because
again that would be it's more of an effort than
you would think. And you're wearing moccasin's right now, right, Yeah,
even her shoewear would be affected. So I mean, it's
but certainly on a larger level, on a cultural level,
it's just impossible to go back these substances that we've
we've taken. It's like, like you said, it's like a
(03:55):
Pandora's box. It's like it's like a magical genie has
given us a gift, and then we just side we
might want to take it off, and we realize it's
fused with our skin and in some cases, all right, well,
let's talk about the ubiquity of plastic. In terms of
some statistics. It turns out that we make one and
fifteen million metric tons a year, the equivalent of the
(04:17):
weight of three hundred and forty seven Empire state buildings,
and ten per cent of that makes its way to
the sea. And what gets to the sea has been
tossed off by ships and oil rigs, and the rest
comes from floods and sewage. Yeah. Yeah. And then of
course that plastic winds up wrapped around sea animals or
(04:39):
or in their bellies more off the not or just
floating in giant heaps on the surface and the beaches. Yeah,
and which is nothing is more depressing, by the way
than walking down a stretch of beach and looking out
at the horizon and just taking in the wonder of
nature and then stepping on a lighter or you know,
(05:00):
six pack ring. It really is depressing. Um. And then
we Americans produced two hundred and forty pounds of plastic
per person per year, so that's a little statistic for you.
And four hundred billion plastic bags are discarded worldwide every year.
That's another thing to keep in mind. Little plastic bags
get to the grocery store. But again, if you travel back, uh,
(05:20):
you know, a couple of centuries, you're not going to
find this situation. You're not gonna find plastics everywhere. Um.
One of the more fascinating um little stories of the
genesis of plastic um comes to comes to us from
an article called Plastic Fantastic by A. Jennifer Kahn for
Mother Jones Um. And in this article she she mentions
(05:43):
how in the eighteen fifties you had this, uh, this
major manufacturer of Billard's equipment. You know pool. You know
you're shooting pool. You're you have these pool balls and
you have to everyone know foot pool is. But but
to to play pool, you have to have these these objects. Right. Well,
in the old days you had to make the Billard
balls out of ivory, okay, and you can only get
(06:06):
like eight balls out of a single large Asian elephant tusk.
And while these used to their elephants everywhere they were,
they were easier to come by. But by this point, uh,
they were hunted to near extinction um for their ivory.
So I mean more importantly that that is the whole extinction,
near extinction of the Asian elephant. There. That's certainly a
(06:28):
the more pressing concern. But for the purposes of this story,
where are they going to get more Billard balls? They're like, well,
that sucks with the elephants. But man's got to play
play billards, and billards is our business. Ladies got to
wear a corset another thing. So they need a material
to replace ivory. So manufacturer Michael Pellan offered a ten
(06:49):
thousand dollar reward to anyone who could create an artificial
material that mimicked ivory. So it needs to be pliable,
it needs to be durable and um. And this was
the the actual quote is that if any inventive genius
would discover a substitute for ivory, possess possessing those qualities
which make it valuable to the billard player, he would
make a handsome fortune for himself and earn Austin's serious gratitude.
(07:13):
And so New York chemist John Wesley Hyatt steps up
and uh, and he creates this compound called celloid. Hi. Who,
I'll have it right here, Yeah, go for it. And
so he brings these selloid balls to Michael Pellan, presumably
collects the reward, and we have billards to this day
(07:36):
and a few elephants. And this is the first sort
of tinkering that we see with materials to try to
replicate other sort of items like ivory. And then you
have Charles Goodyear who uses volcanization to process natural rubber.
Now he discovered this in blimps and begin hunting them
for their plastic, right blimp? No, No, I have that
(07:56):
that wrong. Yeah, the blimp started hunting him. No, I
was thinking like the like the Goodyear blimp is a
natural creature that is hunted for sport and for its
precious plastics. Yeah, but that's not the case. No, it's not.
It's not. But that is one of the reasons why
you rarely see them in the air anymore, right, because
I've been hunted down pretty pretty much. But um, but
he did use this volcanization process for Nepal rubber, and
(08:18):
this actually paved the way for something called thermo setting,
which melts materials and allows them to be molded into
a solid shape. And you get about six or seven
different people who are tinkering with this process. But it's
not until nineteen o seven when Leo Hendrick Bakeland improved
phennel formaldehyde reaction techniques and invented the first fully synthetic
resin to become commercially successful and trade named it bake Light,
(08:42):
which you may ring a bell for people, doesn't ring
a bell like that, you're standing out the old timey
phones um like with a rotary dial. That's like a
big white product. Oh, let's see, I think bakel I
hear bake light. I just think easy bake ovens. Plastic. Yeah,
but fast forwards one and you begin to see that
(09:02):
there are more and more products that are using plastic,
particularly when the US military begins to replace some metal
parts of plastic ones. And we're talking about anywhere anything
from like bugles to actual combs, because before that, combs
were made out of rubber, and before rubber, they were
made out of ivory. Actually, and people are creating a
lot of these by accident too, or just they're they're
(09:22):
tinkering with existing formulas. N thirties British researchers um more
or less accidentally in the created polyethylene um. So I'm
and you see see a lot of that. Like if
you look at the list of plastics, there's a long
list of various very important plastics, each one with with
certain terroistic characteristics that make it ideal for certain purposes.
(09:46):
So let's go a little bit into the basics of
how it's made. Plastics are made from oil, and oil
is a carbon rich raw material and plastics are large
carbon containing compounds. Uh. Plastics are polymers, large molecules made
of repeating units of smaller molecules, and these smaller molecules
are called monomers, and these are chemically bound together. And
(10:09):
a polymer is like a chain in which each link
is a monomer, So think of it that way. Um,
All plastic is made of carbon, and man made plastic
uses carbon derived from oil, while biopolymers, which we'll talk about,
or bioplastics use carbon derived from natural materials. Now, one
thing to keep in mind about the about the plastics
made from petroleum and and fossil fuel components. They're not
(10:34):
huge consumers of those, uh, five of the five percent
of the energy and uh. And originally, like some of
the earlier plastics were made from coal tar, which is
a waste product from from coking coal for incineration. So
um so so. And that was another thing to keep
in mind about why plastic exploded all over the place.
(10:54):
It wasn't. It wasn't because someone said, hey, here's a
really expensive means of creating something that doesn't work very well,
let's replace glass and stuff with it. And no, it
was super useful in in in various areas. But also
it was cheap to produce. You could produce more or
less as a byproduct of other activities. Yeah, it wasn't
basically like captains of industry stepping back and from the factories,
(11:17):
they're saying, hey, what's that what's that steam or that smoke,
and can we somehow harness it into something else? So
as you say, it is a byproduct types of plastic
polystream which you probably know is styrofoam, uh, polyvinyl chloride PVC,
like in pipes um you often see that, and plumbing
and poly vinyl led down chloride thram wrap. UM. You
(11:41):
mentioned kevlar. There's dacron, which is a coating on pianos
and guitars. Polyesters on pianos. Yeah, I know. See again,
your your piano would advantage. I would have thought that, hey,
the piano, that's a high grade item made well, even
the keys, you're not making those from ivory these days, right, right,
So your piano would vantage too if you were trying
to get rid of all plastic around you. Uh teflon
(12:04):
polar fleeced again, that's the type of lightweight polyester and
um in thermoset or thermosetic plastics like polyurethane um, and
that isn't everything from garden houses, two shoes, and truck seats.
It's everywhere, all right. So there's just a quick intro
into our plastic palace that we've built for ourselves, and
(12:25):
we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back,
we're going to discuss some of the ramifications of living
in that plastic cow All right, we're back. So, yeah,
we've created this enormous plastic world for ourselves. It's great.
It's made out of everything from PVC to to kevlar.
(12:46):
It's durable when we need we needed to be durable.
It's resistant to acids when we needed to be resistant
to acids. It's bendable when we want it to be
to be bendable. I mean, it's it's it's it's really
killing it. Really. It is one of those things that's
a material that is truly innovative, that you can put
your imagination into and make anything out of it. The problem,
(13:07):
of course, is that some plastics don't even break down
for about a thousand years. So obviously a lot of
the junk that we're creating, and I say junk in
in terms of like bags and things that we tend
to throw away or we think that we're recycling and
it's just going to be it's a one to one
proposition where this bottle will be recycled again into another
bottle is not necessarily the case. Yeah. And also when
(13:30):
you're dealing with a thousand year period for it to
break down, um, then you're then then it's not just
a matter of oh, the snack cake was in plastic
and now that plastics around for a thousand years. It's
also like I bought this stool at the furniture store.
It's made out of plastic, and I'm getting a lot
of use out of it. But then if you could
end up throwing it away in ten years, uh, fifty years,
(13:52):
if it's thrown away at the end of your life,
if it maybe the last two generations, it's still potentially
winding up his junk somewhere and continuing to just exist. Yeah.
And even if you were to recycle it, um, you're
essentially re melting like say bags and recasting the plastic.
And according to the United States e p A, manufacturing
new plastic from recycled plastic requires two thirds of the
(14:16):
energy used in virgin plastic manufacturing UM. And another problem
is that the polymer chains break during the process, resulting
in a lesser product. So again it's not apples to
Apple's process and it can only be recycled so many times. Also,
I wanted to mention that a two thousand and eleven
North Carolina State University UM study published in the Journal
(14:38):
of Environmental Science and Technology found that a biodegradable plastic
called pH BO emits more methane than food waste or
newspaper in landfills, and because it decreate degrades much faster,
the newspaper will emit that methane in a matter of
years rather than decades. So it's also a question of
making stuff that that can break down in a way
(15:00):
that UM is sustainable for us. Yeah, because you know
want situation where you're solving one problem, then you're creating
another that that tends to be with why these things ago? Yeah,
And then compounding that problem is that the EP estimates
that two thirds of landfills do not have methane collection capabilities.
So not only are you creating more methane, but you
don't have ways to collect it and to make sure
(15:22):
it doesn't go into the atmosphere. Of course, the big
thing that I'm sure it has come to a number
of people's mind already is is b p A. That's
a big deal these days. I mean, if you're buying something,
the plastic item to put food in or drink out
off you, you're probably looking to make sure that it's
b p A free well. And b p A is
something that is short for bicenol a, and it is
(15:45):
an estrogenic chemical, and those types of chemicals are chemicals
that are body's mistake for the natural hormones and the
estrogen family, leading to concerns that it can have harmful
effects um adverse fact effects excuse me, on fetal and
infant brain development, as well as an increased tendency towards obesity. Okay,
so this is really ties into our our fears and
(16:09):
and legitimate concerns about about the obesity epidemics, particularly in
the United States. The idea that we're eating horrible food
that's making us fat, and we're also eating it out
of out of out of these uh, these plastics that
are essentially giving our body what it thinks is estrogen
and contributing to that obesity right, and and this is
(16:29):
not a black and white issue at all. In fact,
if you think about it, um the plastics have been
in use or wide use for about fifty years, so
we don't have all the data yet, but we obviously
has been We've been collecting them, are collecting that data,
and there's a lot of information is coming out that
uh could play into some fearmongering. So we don't want
to necessarily do that, but we want to try to
(16:50):
hit some points and get a clearer picture if we can.
We will not come away from this discussion saying whether
or not plastic is harmful for us definitively into what
extent um, but we can at least sort of touch
on it. There's a two thousand and eleven study by
Paul Terry and jenkin Chen at the University of Tennessee,
and the studies called most plastic products released estrogenic chemicals
(17:13):
and UM parnables. Blogger and chemist Christine Lepisto actually talked
about this and when of her blog posts, she said
the study found that over seventy of plastics leached leached
estrogenic chemicals UM in a wide range of plastic products
right off the shelf, both with or without package contents,
and then she said that when the plastics were stressed
(17:35):
by simulations of typical real world situations like dishwashing or
microwaving or exposure to sunlight, that percentage actually increased of
the plastics tested. So, in other words, all plastics may
leach chemicals that mimic estrogen and UH to a pretty
large extent here. So we're gonna throw a little bit
(17:57):
more stats and studies at you just so that you
guys can kind of get an idea of what's going
on here. UM. B p A and rat studies. There
are a ton of them, UM that are pointed on
to all sorts of problematic scenarios. One of them is
a two thousand intense study of pregnant rats that were
dosed with either one point two or two point for
(18:19):
microgram grams per kilogram per day of b p A,
and the b p A was actually fed to them
in the form of sessame oil, and those doses are
well under the dose of fifty kgs the established amount
by the e p A is being safe for human
consumption or exposure. And they found that the male children
of those rats fed the bp A lowers fertility in adulthood,
(18:42):
and that the effect they persist for at least three generations.
So what you're seeing here is um in a fact
that can carry through generation to generations. So if you
extrapolate that with a human, you could say, okay, so
if someone were to be exposed to be p A,
that at child's grandchildren, even though they were raised in
(19:03):
a psyche pure environment, their genes actually maybe a bit
distorted or changed because of that exposure to b p A.
Because if that's the extrapolation, we're taking this the data
from rats and trying to figure out how it affects
us um that, then this is really interesting. At two
thousand and ninth study of rats looking at endocrine disruption
(19:24):
found that when pregnant rats were fed b p A
and another group were fed oral contraceptives that have estrogen
eminem uh, it was actually the contraceptives that caused genital
mut mutation and reduced fertility and female offspring, while the
female b p A offspring rats were unaffected. Okay, so
(19:46):
this is mudding the waters a bit um, I don't
know what to be afraid of now, Well, right, um,
you know we're not obviously going to start feeding all,
you know, each other oral contraceptives. But they were trying
to use a control there, So estrogen being in oral
contraceptives was the control to see, you know, what was
going to fuss with the system. More turns out it
(20:06):
was the contraceptives. So then two thousand eleven Forbes magazine,
there's a article very interesting that says, majestically scientific federal
study on b p A has stunning finding. So why
is the media ignoring it? Yeah, it's a great article.
And the and in the article they quote just in
Tea Garden um it was part of that study, and uh,
(20:27):
Tea Garden says, in a nutshell, we can now say,
for the adult human population exposed to even very high
dietary levels, blood concentrations of the bioactive form of b
p A throughout the day are below our ability to
detect them, and orders of magnitude lower than those causing
effects and rodents exposed to be p A. So what
they had done in a twenty four hour period they
(20:48):
had actually taken human volunteers and fed them foods that
were you know, exupposed to be p A out of
can so on and so forth. So it was very
intentional exposure to b p A. And then that was
interesting to say that those those b p A levels
just weren't detected and it was very different from what
was happening with the rats. So it's telling us a
(21:08):
different story. Oftentimes, we will, you know, look to animals
to try to give us some sort of sense of, um,
you know, what sort of chemicals or environmental conditions could
possibly affect us as well. But the jury is just
still out on whether or not or to what extent
b p A affects us. That being said, certainly, you
(21:32):
start reading all this stuff and and I know, for
my own part, I think, well, I'm just gonna steer
clear of the b p A stuff when possible, just
to be on the safe side, right Sure, which makes sense,
and it's good that they took it out of baby bottles,
and because certainly that those are developmental times that you
wouldn't want any exposure, you'd want less exposure. Um. But
where we really see the canary in the coal line
(21:54):
again is with the animals. And we see this in
a very concrete way because a canary in the coal
mine sometimes has plastic inside the canary and the belly
of the Canary. Yeah. According to Mother Jones, uh, in
an article called Where Plastic Goes to Kill Each year,
undegraded plastic chokes to death some one hundred thousand whales, dolphins, seals, manatees,
(22:16):
plus an unknown number of sea turtles and about two
million birds. Yeah. I mean, and uh we we sall
some some articles too where they provide photographic evidence of
what this looks like like all the plastic pieces that
were taken from a turtle stomach or or or a
necropsy of a of a I think one of them
was an albatross. Ironically enough, that contains all of this plastic,
(22:41):
these plastic pieces that just wind up there. And it's
just really disturbing to to think of it, because I mean,
we've what we've all seen like footage of oh, there's
an animal and it got its neck cotton m a
six pack ring, you know, but it's even and that's
certainly disturbing in and of itself, but but then to
see that it's just winding up inside the animals and
causing all this uh, this discomfort, it's uh, it's really sober.
(23:03):
It was it the albatross too. They were talking about
the the young before they reach four months of age
aren't able to regurge tate, so whatever they take in
cigarette lighters or whatnot just kind of sits in their
belly for the rest of their lives. Um it's real, yeah, chief,
So it does remind me of the Simpsons episode where um,
it's a Lisa episodes of some people might have missed it,
(23:25):
but where Lisa gets uh Montgomery burns the evil millionaire
to the open recycling plant and uh and and she
thinks she's she's changed him because he hit rock bottom,
he lost the plant. Now he's reached into recycling, he's
into making the earth better. And then it's revealed that
his big plan for the plant and is that he's
going to take all these six pack rings and he
(23:46):
u has them sewn together into a giant net that
they then roll out into the ocean and just catch
all of these of it like everything from whales, the squid,
and just rolling him in and then turning them into
this this grotesque meat paste. So wow, all right, well yeah, yeah,
there's thanks for the uplifting a bit there. Um. Okay,
(24:09):
so obviously there's a trade off here. Uh, you know,
we've got plastic in our environment. It's not going away. Um.
There is a certain amount of adaptability that it provides
us in convenience in our lives. Um. You know, it's
used in cars. It makes them lighter and more fuel efficient,
which is very important. Um. And it makes our existence
less cumbersome and safer. And I'm thinking about that in
(24:31):
terms of like something like as basic as an ivy bag. Right,
that's no longer glass, and it's portable and it's not
something you have to worry about in an emergency situation. Um.
And it is somewhat democratizing. I mean, you think about this.
These products are made cheaply and they're available to nearly everyone.
Think about if it's an eighteen twenty one and and
(24:54):
you're trying to better yourself in society, it takes a
lot of money to go and get a comb made
of ivory. Yeah, so you're walking around with BedHead all
the time. Um, you know. But you know, I make
light of that, but seriously, this is something that would
would have marked been an outward mark of the halves
and have nots. So we just take this for granted
that all these different products and materials are available to
(25:17):
us and it is somewhat democratizing. And as we touched
on earlier, I mean, and then the medical industry, plastic
is everywhere and is often involved in in in UH,
in gadgets or to or procedures that would just not
be the same without plastic. And we have plastic implants,
we have plastic surgical tools, and then when you get
into the electronic equipment, certainly plastic is a key component.
(25:40):
The next time you're the doctor's office, look around at
all the plastic and try to imagine getting your check
up or procedure done without it. So that actually correlates
to to life expectancy, right, And I'm gonna get a
heart transplant if there's not plastic available or these tools
to make it happen. Um. All right, So when we
talk about all of these this this junk, all of
this plastic that we've created, and how it has democratized
(26:04):
our lives or its has changed us. Um, everything that
we discard seems like an abstract notion until you start
thinking about something called the Great Pacific garbage Patch. Yes,
and this is uh, this is an idea that that's
certainly captures the imagination. Because I know when I think
of it. I imagine like some Godzilla sized plastic heat
(26:25):
or just like an island with its own like plastic
monsters living on it out in the ocean. That will
show actually pretty close to what it's becoming. Right, And
but it's also been kind of a sticking point um
in arguments about the arguments that basically come down to
to what degree we should care about pollution and the planet,
(26:45):
where people are like, oh, the garbage patch is just
made up by by hippies. It's and then and then
other people on the other side is no, it's a
it's a real problem. In the other side, well, let's
see some photos of it. And this this kind of
back and forth that's kind of waged over the past
seven or eight years. I feel well, and there's this
idea that there's there's it's not just one patch either.
(27:05):
There are several patches um. But what we're talking about
is the Texas sized garbage patch in the North Pacific Gyre,
which holds an estimated three million metric tons of mostly
plastic trash, six times the mass of the plankton found there.
And most of this is broken down into microplastics that
(27:25):
chemically bond with PCBs DDT. We know this is deep, right,
and endocrine disruptors to make this area a million times
more toxic than surrounding areas. So the problem here is
that those little plankton sized flakes that have broken down
are then mistakenly consumed by jellyfish and small fish that
are are then consumed by larger fish which that are
(27:47):
then consumed by us. And so you have so and
then we up with little plastic pieces and the remnants
of plastic inside the entire food chain. Yeah, but okay,
here is the silver lining here, and I love there
has actually been a bacteria found or several that consume plastic. Okay,
this and this reminds me to some of the like
(28:08):
talking about oil spills and the idea that oh we
do have. You can see some bacteria that is developing
the ability to consume petroleum uh and so it stands
to reason that that they also will eventually uh and
and are developing an appetite for plastic as well. Well.
And you know, of course there are some concerns with this,
but for the most part, this is really incredible news
(28:30):
and you know, there needs to be a lot more
data involved with it, and uh you know, in terms
of trying to figure out whether or not this is
a good sustainable solution. But I wanted to mention that
Yale has an annual rainforest expedition and laboratory where they
let students venture into the jungles of Ecuador to search
for plants and then culture the micro organisms within the
(28:53):
plant tissue and um one of the students brought back
a fungus that they found love of too much on polyurethane.
So and there have been several different um as I
say about tiers that have been found too much on plastic,
but I really wanted to talk about this one because
it's called Pestelopotopas microsphora, and it is the first one
(29:17):
that anyone has found that that survives solely on a
steady diet of polyurethane. And it gets even better because
the fun guy can survive not just on plastic alone,
but also in anaerobic conditions without any sort of oxygen.
So then you start to think about landfills and how
they're basically airless and this is the perfect condition for
(29:40):
this sort of fun guy, so they could just run
wild in a like a tightly packed down landfill and
just eat all the plastic cup exactly. I mean, this
has a ton of promise. But then, of course there
are some people who would say, okay, so now that
you have this fun guy that you know, is it
breaks down uh plastic and eats it. What happened if
(30:00):
you know this goes palace. We live in the plastic palace,
and we're celebrating the emergence of the back of a
plastic eating back period. Right, So then you're going to
the Michael Crichton route and you start to think, okay, well,
in the hospital setting, you certainly wouldn't want, you know,
the the new hip that's going into your body to
to have some sort of um bacteria or you know
(30:22):
that would break down that hip or anything else really
in any of the tools that are going to be
used on you. Yeah, the figuring I just painted. It's
bad enough I have to worry about the kitten eating it.
I don't want to worry about bacteria eating it as well. Yeah,
it's it's very interesting proposition and if you want to
read more about it, you can check out the paper.
It is called biodegradation of polyester polyurethane by Endo Fight
(30:45):
It fun guy. Wow, to think about polyester too, being
susceptible to this. So many great garments. Half of that's right,
it would take out all the second hand stores. Yeah,
the big take home out of all of this. Again,
we've we've built this, this plastic palace. We've build this
plastic lives for ourselves. It's it's everywhere, and we cannot
go back. We can't just decide we're not gonna do
(31:08):
plastic anymore. It's just not gonna happen. But what we
can do is we can of course manage it. We
can develop better ways to break down the plastic that
we have. We can depend more and more on bioplastics
that are made from things like like corn and uh another,
biological agents who are not having to depend even a
little bit on petroleum and and and also just become
(31:31):
smarter with our use of it, realizing that once you
create something out of plastic, it's not necessarily something that
can then be recycled and made hold again. It's you
need to think of it as a real investment of
you know, even if it's a small one. So if
it's you know, something like if it's a if it's
a choice between taking sixteen snack cakes and individually packaging
(31:52):
them and then putting them in a larger package. We
should we should air on the side of putting them
all in a single bag. You know, just all the
little things that add up to the whole of just
using less plastic, using it in a smarter manner, and
using more sustainable plastics. Yeah, so there you go. That's
that's a good reminder next time you go to the
grocery store or you're sorting out to the plastic in
(32:13):
your life and wondering if everything's realatting recycled into what
degree we have control over the situation. Yeah, I mean
one for me, I've been trying more and more to
avoid individually packaged snack items, you know, because I mean
it's attractive on one level. You're like, oh, I can
buy the bag of snack Micks, or I can buy
the bag of six bags of snack Micks that are
small and they fit easily into your lunch box. Or
(32:35):
I can take just a few seconds and and or
or heaven forbid, use a little will control and take
the whole bag of snack Micks to work with me
for the week that never but but still I can
certainly divide it up. I don't I don't need the
other little pre made bags already there. But anyway, so
plastics aside, Let's let's call over the robit and uh
(32:57):
read a little listener mail. All right, This one comes
from Jackie Jackie Ritson and says, greetings, Uh, first the
tried and true cliche awesome podcast. Just listen to the
cracking episode and have a couple of comments. Personally, this
is my favorite apparently mythological creature. I suspect this comes
from a combination of twenty Leagues under the Sea awesome film.
(33:20):
I always I watched the Disney movie a lot growing up,
and you was always enamored by the scenes with the
squid uh and Pirates of the Caribbean, which also fetched
the cracking um. And she continues. The reason I say
apparently is because I have a strange desire for one's
beat to turn up as proof of their existence, which,
as we discussed in the cracking episode, that's uh what
(33:43):
some archaeologists are up to as well, curious into the
is to the existence of a possible um prehistoric cracking.
She continues, Anyway, you made a comment early on about
how cephalopods were essentially mythical until the eighteen seventies or
of sometime around then. It reminded me of one of
the stories in Kim Newman's book Hound of the of
the the Ubervilles, all about professional professor Moriarty. A great read.
(34:08):
Uh this uh my favorite, the Red Planet League, in
which the professor seeks to destroy his nemesis, the Astronomer
Royale or the Astronomer Royal, I'm not sure. I can't
remember his name at the moment the professor plans. The
Professor's plan involves the use of some rather ugly squid.
Uh but more I shan't say. Well, that's my email again.
(34:31):
Great podcast. I'm off to listen to the one on Gigantis.
Um I had to skip ahead, I mean to the
Krackens cheers, uh Jackie so uh yeah, so there's some
favorite Krakens that just reminded me of the artwork that
you sent the other day of the silkenferred. Yes, yeah,
(34:52):
if you uh I put we post ended up posting
it on all the social media things. So go back
and look at that if you get a chance. It's
pretty pretty wild. It makes it look like a p
you want to own. Yeah, I mean, really, you add
some fur to it and it's amazing what can happen.
It's it's funny because it reminds me of a dream
that my wife had. She had a dream where she
had like a kid in the sized octopus that was
furry and um, and then her brother was trying to
(35:15):
take it from her or something but brother. Yeah. So
so anyway, I always great to hear hear from from listeners,
and especially there with with their own like personal likes
and dislikes in their own nostalgia might happen to be
relearning a particular topic. So so that's great. Thanks for
writing us. If you would like to write us, particularly
(35:35):
if you have comments about plastics plastic in your life.
Have you managed to free yourself from plastic? Do you
think it's even possible? How much plastic is in your life?
What is plastic done for you? Um? What are you
doing to try and uh curb your plastic usage? Then
right into us. You can find us on Facebook and
tumbler as stuff to blow your mind, and you can
(35:56):
also find us on Twitter where we are blow the
Mind and you can also dry that's a line at
blew the Mind at discovery dot com For more on
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