The True Dangers of Microplastics with Judith Enck

29:48So I don't live in Cancer Alley, but I can work on policies around the country that reduce the demand for plastic. And that's why people want to really pay attention to the use of plastic in their own lives. The end of the book, we have a checklist. We have some tips on how to reduce plastic. But the reason I wrote the book was also along with my co-author, Adam Mahoney, who's an amazing young journalist in New Orleans. It's for people to protect their own health, but also be inspired to get in the nonpartisan political arena to work for change. I mean, it's interesting, right?

30:34Gwyneth Paltrow:And when you talk about Cancer Alley, it makes sense that we, because we imagine in our culture right now, we imagine plastic as a waste issue, not a petrochemical supply chain issue. So I think that's critical. It's critical for understanding the runoff and the waste that's causing 7X cancer in this cancer alley that you speak of. And obviously that's extremely acute. And what about for this kind of mindless daily use? Like how, you know, I was thinking about this this morning, like I have one remaining black plastic, you know, silicone spatula because I have a nonstick pan that's doesn't have any chemicals in the pan, but I, but I can't use a metal spatula on it.

31:30Gwyneth Paltrow:Right. Like these areas where plastic persists or the black plastic utensils, if you're eating, if you're eating on the run. So I would love to know outside of runoff and, you know, environmental from the, from the petrochemical supply chain, what are the daily ways that we are ingesting plastic the most? is it the water bottles? Is it cutting boards? Like how is it getting into it? You mentioned breathing it in at the beginning. So can you, can you take us through how they are getting in? Sure. And there are some things we can take action on, but we all have to breathe. And so there's not much we can do on that exposure.

32:17You know, Gwyneth, it's different for, for everyone. And even if we're really careful with our use of plastic, the choice has been taken away from us. I mean, I work for Beyond Plastics. I still buy plastics when I go to the supermarket because I have no choice on many items. What I urge people to do is look at what they use the most. So just as an example, in our household, I'm married to a wonderful man, but he drinks a lot of orange juice. And I've been telling him for years it's high in sugar, but he drinks a lot of orange juice. Like, you know, that's the worst thing I can say about my beloved husband, Mark, is he drinks a lot of orange juice.

33:01Wow, that's a good marriage over there. Mostly, yes. I didn't want to keep bringing, you know, plastic orange juice bottles into the house or even the cardboard bottles with the plastic lids that when you turn it, little microplastics maybe getting into your beverage. So we just bought a glass pitcher and we buy frozen concentrate, orange juice and lemonade. In our household, not to overshare, we don't use a lot of condiments. We're not condiment people. So I have a plastic plastic ketchup bottle in my refrigerator probably since the Obama administration. And I don't worry about it because we don't use it a lot.

33:52But look at like, if you're like me, a big coffee drinker, how are you making your coffee in the morning? I would avoid those little plastic pods because you don't want the hot water coming through the plastic to make your coffee. And that's something you're having every morning. So you want to pay attention to your heavy use. The frequency. Yeah, especially for food and beverage. You mentioned definitely ditch the plastic cutting board. You know, it's kind of obvious, but then people, it's not obvious. It's like, yeah, you're cutting things. So you're going to get little pieces of plastic. But even I pay attention to, you know, you buy yogurt or hummus.

34:36and there's often that little plastic layer on the top, you pull it back, there's a good chance little tiny bits of plastic are getting into your hummus or your yogurt. So we need to be vigilant, but we shouldn't beat ourselves up. There's this great quote from, I think her name is Anne-Marie Chabot. She's the zero waste chef. And she said, we don't need a small number of people doing zero waste perfectly. we need a large number of people doing it imperfectly. Right. So I don't like to guilt people about using a lot of plastics, but at the same time, it's not just an altruistic thing to reduce climate change and reduce toxicity.

35:24It's in our own health interest and our kids and our grandkids to reduce the use of plastic. But the fundamental problem is we need more choices. in our supermarkets. And we needed, you know, we needed to scale up. We needed to be affordable. I worry about like organic food for many years was so much more expensive than conventional food. Again, a dorky parenting story. When my son was really little, we got a big jug of organic apple juice. And the aforementioned husband reached into the refrigerator to pour apple juice and I snapped at him. And I said, no, honey, that's the baby's apple juice.

36:07You drink the toxic apple juice, which was so much cheaper. So on plastics, we don't want it to just be something that people need to spend hours searching the Internet. There are alternatives. I mean, there are some great companies, particularly soap companies and beauty product companies that are giving us alternatives to plastics. but we need it to be easy for people and affordable. That's only going to happen when we pass new laws requiring less plastic. So there's more of a market for alternatives to plastic.

36:46Gwyneth Paltrow:And then by economies of scale, if you're making a ton of healthier plastic or plastic substitutes, right? Then it becomes more affordable. So what are, you mentioned like mushroom plastic. I know people talk about corn plastic and biodegradable plastic, are these things real? Like, can you actually store food in something that's biodegradable and leave it in the supermarket? Well, I'm not a big fan of so-called biodegradable plastic because often it happens. What is it? Yeah, it's basically, it's instead of fossil fuel, you will use corn or some biomass material to make the product. So you'll see a lot of plates and utensils advertised as bio-based plastic or compostable plastic.

37:47Right. And that's not good. Well, we took a close look at this because I wanted it to be good. Right. But we make all of our recommendations based on science. And so we actually published a report that's on our website, beyondplastics.org. And we found that a lot of these products contained chemicals. And also, you don't want to put them in your backyard compost bin, because they won't degrade. They only degrade in commercial, high temperature commercial compost facilities, which most communities don't have. So I think it's well-intentioned, but not really.

38:28Gwyneth Paltrow:So some of them don't biodegrade at all. Some of them do, but they biodegrade, but leave toxic residue behind. Yes. I brought students to look at a composting facility, for instance, and it had like a compostable fork and it was still fully intact a long time after being in the big compost pile. But I think the solution is going back to basics. For instance, we just did a webinar with two women-owned companies, really interesting. One is called Ahizma. They make stainless steel trays and cups and bowls for schools. So rather than the school cafeteria serving hot food on single-use plastic, the children are served on stainless steel that is then washed and goes around thousands and thousands of times.

39:23And then the other company was called Useful. And that company was established by a pediatrician after she read about the health impacts of plastics by the American Academy of Pediatrics. The other company was called Useful, and they make, again, stainless steel reusable packaging for college campuses. And it operates almost like a library book system. You pay a deposit for the container, there's a date by which you need to return it. And these innovations are happening all over the country. AHISMA is in 300 different school districts in the last year. So, yeah, I think reusables, refillables is a much better road to go down than waiting for compostable plastics to have a breakthrough.

40:18Gwyneth Paltrow:And so what do we do? Like as, you know, I have a beauty company, I have a food company, I have plastic containers, unfortunately, in certain things. You know, if you switch to glass, there's breakage, there's much more expensive shipping costs. et cetera. So what is your recommendation, you know, for somebody like me? I imagine the beauty business we are, of course, all of us who have are in the beauty space where we're contributing to this issue. And I certainly don't want to be. So what are the, what do you advise? Well, it's, you know, it's different for every company and every product. I deeply appreciate that you're paying attention to this.

41:05You're right. Glass is heavier, and it breaks, but there's some products that it does lend itself. I'm pretty bullish on stainless steel. And there's one company, again, I probably should not be name checking companies, but let me just go wild. That's okay. No, it's good. I want to mention Plain Products. Again, a women-owned business where you get shampoo and conditioner and hand lotion in reusable stainless steel, very attractive. And when it's empty, you mail it back to them and then they send you a full container again. So during COVID, they had no supply chain problems. There's another company called...

41:52Gwyneth Paltrow:But isn't that like, do you think that's realistic? Like, do you think that, you know, it's how easy is it to get people to adopt that behavior? Just considering how ingrained it is, you know, that we, we have a whole disposable, you know, I feel like I love that idea. I just, I don't know how difficult it would be to change behaviors, but maybe, you know, you do it and then. Well, you're right. It's hard. It's much harder than tossing something into a recycling bin or the garbage, but they make it easy because it comes in a cardboard box with pre-printed printers, printed addresses. And so you just put it in the box, return it to the post office.

42:39But it definitely takes extra steps. And I think a lot of this is going to be driven by the quality of the product. You know, they have salon style products. They're really nice. So I'll tell you a secret on hair care. Not that I'm a hair care maven, but I've been experimenting with shampoo bars because it just comes in cardboard. It's like a bar of soap. So some of them are really good, some of them not so much. And it's kind of like we're non-toxic cleaning products were 20 years ago. It's really just emerging. Another innovation that is easier for people is there's a company based in New York called Blue Land, and they have hand soap, they have toilet bowl cleaner, different things.

43:30And so you have the thick glass container that you keep forever. I'll have mine for the rest of my life, and I've dropped them. And then when the product is empty, when the container is empty, you just get a little disc. It's like a concentrated soap product. So you're just buying those little tablets, rather. And that really reduces the packaging. And the nice thing about Blue Land is I actually don't like purchasing things online because of the climate change impacts of transporting just one thing to your house. the nice thing about Blue Land is they're now in some major brick and mortar stores so when you're on your roller skates running through the store you just pick up the tablets and it's very easy

44:22Gwyneth Paltrow:right yeah they they're they're fantastic and I think they've they've really paved paved the way you know the the laundry detergent comes in a little tin thing and And yeah, it's a nice color. And it just reminds us, think of all the fossil fuels and money we're spending shipping water all over the place. Like all the water in detergent, all the water in soda. You know, you can now not just make seltzer at home through this product that just adds the carbonation. You know what I'm talking about, right? And now they have – you can get syrup for different sodas. Like it's the Dentist Full Employment Act.

45:10You can make like two bottles of soda hourly in your own home. And what's nice about that is you don't have all the plastic bottles that you have to recycle or return for deposit.

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46:21Gwyneth Paltrow:One thing I did want to ask you about was the plastic bags at the health food store, you know, when you go to like Whole Foods or whatever, and they're like, oh, well, this, these little plastic bags for produce or even like Air One, like these fancy grocery stores, these are totally biodegradable and safe to put your tomatoes in or whatever. Is that incorrect? Um, you know, it depends on the product, but I, I don't think there's a safety risk when, you know, you put your tomatoes or your avocados into one of those bags. I think that's more of a waste issue. When you buy tomatoes and avocados, do you even need a bag?

47:07Right. You know, can you just avoid it?

47:10Gwyneth Paltrow:I'm bringing a tote bag to the grocery store, but sometimes you forget or you're on your way home from work and you need to run in and get stuff. Yes. Is it better to use? Because sometimes they say, oh, it's better to use those than paper bags. Paper bags are more of a problem. I mean, I feel like there's a lot of misinformation around this stuff as well. There is. And supermarkets love plastic bags because they're cheaper than paper bags. But, you know, if you forget your reusable bags, there's actually a whole Portlandia episode on this, my very favorite TV show. I would go with paper before going with any kind of plastic because the paper is not a petrochemical product and you can actually recycle that paper bag when you get it home.

47:55Gwyneth Paltrow:One thing I did want to circle back to that I found really interesting, that you made the argument in the book that consumers were subtly trained to feel responsible for pollution, right? Like it's our fault and we have to pick up after ourselves. But given the supply chain, how does that narrative take and hold so successfully? Oh, I'm so glad you're raising this. Well, not by accident. I mean, again, the multi-million dollar advertising campaign. You know, years ago, there was this ad campaign all over TV about litter bugs. And there was like, remember the man dressed up as a Native American with a tear?

48:47He was actually an Italian actor. And that was a concerted, orchestrated effort to shift responsibility for plastics and litter away from the petrochemical companies that are making it and toward you and I. We're just irresponsible litter bugs.

49:07Gwyneth Paltrow:Right. And we ruin beaches with our leaving of the plastic bottles on the beach. And it's our failure. Yeah. And it kind of worked. It shifted the narrative toward it's all our fault. It's not, you know, giant companies that are pumping known carcinogens into the sky and into our drinking water. It's you and me, Gwyneth. We're just, you know, that paper wrapper got away from us. And we also see it in the climate change space, this whole phrase of our carbon footprint. So I discourage the use of the phrase plastic footprint. Most of us don't litter. And if you do, it's by mistake. It's just there's so much darn plastic in our lives.

49:54Inevitably, it gets out into the environment. Yeah, absolutely.

49:59Gwyneth Paltrow:Especially, I mean, I'm always struck. I took my children on a trip once to Indonesia and we were walking on an incredibly secluded beach that was very hard to get to. And it was just a wash with hundreds of plastic water bottles. So, you know, we set out to get, of course, big plastic bags and collect as many of the bottles that we could. But I thought, you know, to me, it seems like one of the top offenders, just just culturally speaking. I mean, it was it was very shocking. And I live by the beach here and I'm always surprised by the amount of plastic water bottles. It just seems unnecessary.

50:42It totally is. I mean, you we've got access to clean drinking water. It's not that hard to bring your own container. And for unless you're in Flint, Michigan or something. Right. When that all happened. Yeah. If you've got a problem with lead pipes, then you do need, you need, you know, emergency water. But most of the time we're not in emergencies. But countries like Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines are getting inundated with plastics from the United States. Not just what washes up on beaches, but there are there's a business called Waste Exporters. And they actually send by ship massive amounts of plastics to other countries that don't have the infrastructure to deal with this.

51:29And it's causing huge problems in their rivers and the ocean. And that's why there is an effort at the United Nations to do an international plastics treaty that has been a struggle because the countries that make a lot of plastic, like Saudi Arabia and the United States, aggressively block the UN process to tackle this internationally. But we do not have clean hands because the U.S. exports a lot of plastic to other countries as waste. What happens, you know, and sometimes I'll go down like an internet hole and watch those river cleanup videos or the boats that go out into the plastic island and collect plastic.

52:20Gwyneth Paltrow:What happens, what is the safest and most responsible way to deal with waste plastic once it's collected, if any? Yeah, there are no easy solutions. And in fact, I think those projects where they try to skim the plastic off the surface, they're well-intentioned. But the reality is once the plastic gets into the ocean, over 99 % of it falls to the seafloor. floor. So there's no way to get it back. That's why we are so focused on reducing the production, use and disposal of plastic, because once it gets into the ocean, you're not getting most of it back. And when they do skim it up, it's degraded, it's dirty.

53:06It probably just goes to a landfill. I mean, there are different projects that they say they recycle the ocean-bound plastic. I actually hate that phrase. And for years, my little nieces would give me those plastic pieces, like plastic bracelets for Christmas. I'm like, oh, thank you, darling. And then I would just be so unhappy that they were hoodwinked into thinking that was, that's how they should spend their money to clean up the environment. But most of the plastic in the ocean comes from the land. And when I first saw the statistics on plastics in the ocean, which are quite significant, I thought that it was like ocean-going vessels that were illegally dumping.

53:56There's a little bit of that, but over 90 % is just we're walking down the street, a plastic bag gets away from us, a plastic bottle gets away from us, it gets into the storm sewer, goes into the river. We know all rivers empty into the ocean. So the plastic water bottle is out in the ocean. It's exposed to sunlight, so it's brittle. And then the waves are almost like a paper shredder. So one plastic water bottle becomes hundreds of pieces of plastic that builds up in the marine environment. They don't stay on the surface, but a lot of the plastic, unfortunately, is eaten by fish, by seabirds, by sea turtles.

54:38and that is kind of the quiet emergency that we're turning the ocean into a watery landfill and virtually no one knows about this and remember fish from the ocean is a major source of protein for so many people around the world and now we have data showing the presence of microplastics in fish that we are eating?

55:07Gwyneth Paltrow:Oh my goodness. It's kind of depressing, but important, very important to understand. Is it going to be really the consumer that starts to understand this and then demands change? I mean, of course, and then laws come from that. Like, do they happen in parallel? What can we be doing as citizens to change, you know, the supply and demand such that there's less need to make plastic? Yes, it's, you know, it's a couple of those things. So I'm a big believer in the phrase, when the people lead, the leaders will follow. And we see genuine concern by so many people. And it's across the board. I mean, we have polling showing bipartisan support for reducing the use of plastic.

56:02Unfortunately, that bipartisan spirit does not topple into legislative bodies where, unfortunately, most people in the Republican Party are voting against our most important bills on the plastics front. But I think what is unfolding, and I'm probably like clinically optimistic because I am, I sit at this perch where I see everything going on on the plastic scene around the world. Local governments are adopting local laws. You know, on our website, we have a model bill to ban plastic bags, ban polystyrene food containers because you don't want hot food on polystyrene containers. We have this simple little proposal called Skip the Stuff, where when you order takeout food, you don't automatically get the plastic utensils and the straws and all the napkins.

56:59We just helped. We worked in a coalition to pass that in the state of New Jersey. So there are hundreds of local and state-level laws that are being adopted. And we're not seeing anything helpful out of the federal government. So the place to focus is at the local level and the state level. And then how do we marshal this concern from ordinary citizens into policy change? You know, that is going to be tedious work. It's also fun. You know, we're neighbors meet neighbors. We started a program called for Beyond Plastics called Local Groups and Affiliates. People can start a local Beyond Plastics group.

57:46We're not very bureaucratic. We don't call it chapters, but there are groups of mostly women all over the country that are coming together and tackling this issue in their own community, and then they will scale up. I feel duty-bound to mention there is a big gender gap on the plastics issue. I teach a class on Zoom through Bennington College on plastic pollution. And most of my students are community people that are auditing the class. Every semester, over 95 % of the class are women. And also at the local level, it's women that are leading the way. And so that's also why I'm optimistic. Women really focus on public health.

58:32They care about their kids and their grandchildren. Yes. And we wrote the book so everyone had everything in one place. and it is maniacally footnoted. There's lots of footnotes at the end. So if you show up at a meeting with your city council member and they challenge something that's said, you just go to the footnote and use the book as an organizing tool in your community.

58:58Gwyneth Paltrow:And in closing, Judith, I would love to just ask you, just tell me three little changes that I can make today towards this end. look at your own use of plastic. So definitely you mentioned you bring your own bags to the supermarket. If you drink a lot of coffee, bring your own reusable mug to the coffee shop. You know, shift to frozen concentrate juice if you know someone who drinks a lot of juice in your life. So, you know, look at your own use of plastic. Second, enter the political arena. And I don't mean that in a partisan way, but, you know, go to our website, beyondplastics.org. We have model local laws.

59:46We have reports. You've got to be informed on this issue. And the third thing is we all have to vote because we need elected officials who actually care about protecting health and the environment and who are not in the pocket of polluters. And that's our biggest problem right now. It's not lack of information. It's lack of political courage in legislative bodies and an unwillingness to go toe to toe with plastic polluters. I mean, that is what we've got to change in the next year.

1:00:23Gwyneth Paltrow:Okay. Well, it's been such a pleasure having you on the podcast. I really appreciate your time. It was a great education for me. And keep up on your amazing crusade beyond plastic. We will. Thank you. So grateful that you had me on today. Thanks.