People vilify plastic. they should use it better instead

0:10Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Rosie Bloor. And I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

0:24There have been many conversations over the years about how to make prisons work. But what about when prisoners are finally released? And here in Britain, people are famously quick to say sorry. Our data journalist looks at apologies in the workplace and whether being apologetic gets you further ahead or leaves you in a sorrier position.

1:01First up, though.

1:10The printable application of Bakelite resinoid is in the manufacture of molding materials. After the resinoid has been ground to a fine powder, fillers such as woodmeal or fabric, as well as dyes and pigments, are added. The first plastic as we now think of it, completely synthetic, hardened, endlessly shapeable was called Bakelite, and it was revolutionary. Containers and bottle caps are now molded from Bakelite materials. Each day produces a new idea for its use. Each day for weeks and months and years and decades. At Ewan Nickel, you're within reaching distance of something plastic right now.

1:54So many things in daily use, both in the office or home, are made of Bakelite. It's everywhere because it's so useful, so endlessly malleable, colourable, and of course, durable, which in recent decades has given it a terrible reputation.

2:14Environmentalists really hate plastic. In part, that is because discarded plastics blight otherwise lovely landscapes, you find them in rivers and choking ocean life. But also, increasingly, it is because we are aware that they break into invisible fragments, which have been found in rain, in food chains, and in human brains after they've entered the food chain. Rachel Dobbs is The Economist's environment editor. But I think that a lot of times they're too hard on plastic. Plastic is a miracle material, and without it, the world would be significantly worse off. The problem is how we deal with it, and if you're thinking that the answer to the problem is just recycling, it's probably not true.

2:49All right, quite a bit to unpick right at the outset there. Let's start with miracle material. Tell me why that's your belief. So the really interesting thing about plastics is that because of their structure, they're made up of these kind of repeating units of monomers. that can be edited into almost any kind of shape, which means that plastics can be used to replicate the properties of almost any material. But they can also then make it lighter, easier to mass produce, cheaper, more durable, which means that you can use plastic in place of things that you would be otherwise getting from the environment.

3:21So before plastic, everything had to be made out of ivory, horn, wood, resin, fibre, glass, all these kind of things, which meant that you were taking huge amounts from the natural world. And it would be impossible to rely on those materials to the level that plastic now allows us to do. And a lot of environmental damage would have been done trying to do that. One of the first plastics was a substitute for ivory because demand for stuff like billiard balls and piano keys had pushed elephants almost to the point of extinction. So what plastic has done is allow economic growth and development to be decoupled from environmental extraction.

3:58But all of that, as you say, not without its ills. No, it isn't without its ills. There is evidence that it is harming the natural world. I'm not trying to mount the argument here that plastics being found in the stomachs of albatrosses is going to be a good thing. There's also really legitimate growing concern about what exposure to plastics does to human beings. And they are detecting far higher levels of plastic in basically anything that you now look at. That is definitely something that needs proper investigating. And if there are going to be long-term health effects from this kind of exposure, that is something that we need to know about and we need to be able to treat.

4:35There is evidence in lab trials that these microplastic exposure can cause stuff like inflammation, which is the basis of a lot of chronic diseases. So all of that does need to be dealt with, in large part, by a huge amount more research into what these actual problems are and what the chemicals of concern are. And the other suggestion you made at the outset there was that recycling is not the cure to this, to keeping plastics out of the environment, to stopping the ills, despite my constant daily aspirational recycling bin filling. Why is that? So I'm not trying to say that recycling is pointless, but recycling is not and was never going to be the solution to deal with the plastic waste problem as a whole.

5:17And in large part, that is because recycling is really difficult. It's much harder than people realise You cannot turn different types of plastic into each other just by chopping them up. Any kind of recycling requires really onerous sorting. And it is a very expensive and laborious process. Because of that, almost always recycled plastic is more expensive than the virgin plastic type. And because it's so difficult, because it's not economically viable, what you end up seeing is that rich countries don't want to deal with this entirely themselves and end up exporting quite a lot of their plastic waste.

5:48And it ends up in countries that have even less resources to deal with this properly. And again, because the economics of it aren't great, often it ends up being dealt with by vulnerable workers in bad working conditions. This is something that you see in Turkey, which takes 40 % of both Britain and Europe's plastic waste. And when this stuff is dealt with by people who do not have the resources to do it properly, that is also when a lot of it ends up being illegally dumped and finding its way into the natural environment. So plastics save us from an even worse environmental fate. but what's been done, what is being done so far isn't enough.

6:21What would be? What is the fix here? So better recycling is part of the solution. But what that means is for that better recycling to take place in the rich countries that have the resources to do it. And that should also probably be augmented by advanced recycling, which is a new form that is becoming more popular in which you are using chemical processes to break down plastics into the actual feedstock so they can be made into entirely new plastics. but also what the world needs to get more comfortable with are the solutions that have previously been really unpopular so landfill should be a huge part of it and so should burning plastic for energy i mean both of those are kind of surprising solutions have been demonized by environmentalists and others as exactly the wrong thing to do with plastics yeah people really really do not like the idea of either landfill or incineration and actually resistance to those things is one of the reasons why recycling was pushed so much in the first place, much more so than the viability of recycling.

7:19But the thing to remember here is that if managed correctly, these are good solutions. So landfill, what correct management means is making sure that they are properly lined so that you are not getting chemicals and microplastics leaching into the environment, making sure that you are pumping off the gases that the plastics give off as they decompose. So methane is a big one. And that will require proper infrastructure and careful monitoring for a long time, because as we know, plastics stick around for a long time. And that requires investment and is somewhat hard to do, but it is better than failing to do recycling well, as is the case in many poor countries that don't have the resources to do it properly.

7:57And incineration, there are arguments for that too. Yeah, incineration, again, has been really unpopular because of fears about the toxins that it gives off and also the carbon that it gives off. And both of those things are true, but we now have the technology to manage those much more efficiently. So again, you're capturing any kind of runoff, but you can also capture the carbon that comes off that. And then if you are also using the incineration of this burning waste for energy, you are then getting an energy source which doesn't require burning fossil fuels. But very few countries around the world are really comfortable with this.

8:33You have some, China does a lot of it. Japan does a lot of it. The EU increasingly does quite a lot of it, but it is still broadly quite reviled elsewhere. And that really shouldn't be the case. I mean, this all makes sense. And you say the technology exists, but the insistence at each stage is this is going to take some effort, is going to cost some money, but not expending the effort or the money is kind of how we've ended up with some of the system that we've got now, like sending your plastic waste to some other country to act as a landfill for you. Yeah, this is going to be costly and difficult, but it will be less costly and difficult than trying to move to other types of materials.

9:07And it is worth investing in because plastics do give us so much. We just need to work out a better way to deal with them at the end of their life cycle so that those benefits can continue being gained. We should all just wrap this up and then I'm going to go incinerate all of my recycling. No, no, because Jason, do you have proper facilities for carbon capture and storage? I don't think you do. What? Doesn't everybody? I'm going to get my own carbon capture and storage facilities built at home so I can feel better about this whole story. I think that doesn't work. Rachel, with a little more reservation, I will continue for the moment to recycle as before.

9:42For the moment, thanks for your time. Yes, please do. I don't want to take away from this to be that everyone should just abandon their recycling. But thank you, Jason.

10:06Few things are more likely to generate negative headlines than releasing thousands of prisoners early as Britain's government found last autumn In an attempt to free up capacity in prisons the automatic release dates for many inmates were brought forward some left after serving only 40 % of their sentence We now have a situation where we have some people serving two-thirds in custody, some people serving up to the halfway points in custody, and then others, subject to the early release scheme, serving 40%. Mark Day is from the Prison Reform Trust. What we've got is this sort of confusing mess, and it's all been created by parliament really.

10:50The early release scheme may have been the least bad option for a government that inherited overflowing jails, but it's highlighted a different problem. Those who are released from prison often end up returning. Last autumn, the government implemented a big early release programme where they let thousands of prisoners out on a couple of days in September and October. Tom Sass is our Britain public policy editor. What it has done is shone a light on some of the wider problems in prisons. and one of those is the fact that we're actually pretty bad at this process of releasing prisoners with any sort of plan for finding housing or work.

11:33Tom, some critics were fearing a crime wave as a result of this scheme. Has that happened? Have we seen a crime wave? Well, six months on, it doesn't look like there has been. The real test of this will be when we get the big national crime survey, which looks at overall levels of victim-recorded crime, but we won't get that until next year. But what we can do is look at police-recorded crime, which comes in on a monthly basis, and we can look at some of the best-reported and best-recorded crimes, so things like vehicle theft. And if we look at London, we see crime has been falling, not rising in the months since that big early release programme.

12:09We can also look at rates of recall to prison. Those were already very high before this release programme, and they've merely stayed at that high level. So it doesn't look like there's been a big crime wave unleashed by this. Tom, we've often talked about politicians discussing how to make prison work, but I think what you're saying is that we need to make prison release work better. Is that right? That's right. So I think a lot of the focus in Britain is on how bad prisons are at locking people up. We talk a lot about overcrowding, violence, drugs, lack of rehabilitation. But What we found looking at the data is actually we're also really bad at releasing these prisoners from jail.

12:50A big factor here is whether someone has a home to go to when they get let out of prison. They're about twice as likely to end up back in custody. If they don't, what we found is less than half of prisoners had a place to go to in the releases up to August 2024. And that was before these big releases. It's probably got worse. what I've found talking to people in the prison system is that because of the speed at which these releases were done a lot of resettlement work wasn't completed before cells had to be vacated so you have stories of inmates just being given a tent and a sleeping bag on the way out and actually rather a lot of inmates going out to sleep rough.

13:29Now some of these problems are hard to fix we've got a lack of social housing hostels which a lot of freed prisoners would go to they've got big problems around drugs and criminality. So that's one reason why a lot of prisoners would rather end up in a tent than end up in one of those places. And if a former prisoner does find somewhere to stay, how easy is it for them to get a job? It's pretty hard. We found that only one in five prisoners that get released have a job after six weeks. And that doesn't improve very much over time. So after six months, it's still only one in three, which is really not very many.

14:07In reporting this piece, I sat with a group of prisoners who'd been out for a year or two in Northumberland. And they described this really difficult process, actually, of just applying for dozens and dozens of entry level jobs, getting all the way through the application process. And then suddenly they would get rejected. And it's because they've got to the point where they have to declare their criminal record. And what we have in Britain is actually a very stringent approach to criminal records. So even quite low level offences stay on people's record for a very long time. And that can in effect bar them from some of those entry level jobs.

14:42And that's bad for them. But it's also bad for us because it means they're more likely to reoffend. And what's the answer, Tom? How do we fix it? So I think things like housing are pretty hard to fix. You need quite a lot of investment. Criminal records, we could change that quite easily. We could make it easier for people we let out of prison to get back into work. And that would be a good thing all round. But perhaps the biggest thing I think is linking up what happens inside prison with what happens outside prison. So really you want inmates who are developing plans for where they're going to live, what they're going to do for work when they're on the inside so that they have some of those plans for when they're released.

15:21And there's an awful lot of risk aversion. Prison governors quite like high walls, They don't particularly like charities coming in and trying to train people up and give them skills. So that's why we end up in this place. There are a small number of charities who are trying to do some of this work on skilling people up and giving them links to outside, but it's not happening across the board at all. When the government came in, they made a big deal about this overcrowding crisis. And the early release program was the emergency measure to give themselves some breathing room. I think now the question is, can they succeed in reducing some of the demand for prison places, but also can they make prisons in general work a bit better?

16:01And part of that will be getting better at release. Tom, thank you so much. Thanks, Rosie.

16:22Okay, one of our data journalists, Doug Dowson, is here. Hi, Doug. Hi, Jason. Right. Opening question. How many times today have you said that you're sorry? Today? Well, I was brushing my daughter's hair this morning, and I was maybe a little bit too rough, and she gave a little ouch, and I apologize for that, I think. That seems fair. I gave one or two apologies on the tube. That always happens, bumping into people. People bumping into you? Does that get a sorry? Yes. Any sort of bump will get a sorry on the tube. Yeah, that's just how it is here. Yeah. Any sorries in the workplace today? Not today.

16:57No, no, no. Just bulldozing through people and just saying nothing. I am unapologetic in the workplace. Unapologetic. Yep. So I've actually been thinking about apologies lately because I came across a study that actually looks at and analyzes how apologies can hurt or help you in the workplace. So you have turned the sorry question into a data question. I love this. Are there people who are more prone than others to saying they're sorry? It turns out that there is. So Canadians, in addition to... I knew Canadians were going to figure it out. In addition to being notoriously nice, apparently apologize relatively frequently.

17:37British people, they're very polite. They also say sorry, apparently at four times the rate that Americans do. and I came across a study that looked at workers in some Asian countries and it found that Chinese people are the most likely to admit guilt but the least likely to actually apologize. So an interesting kind of nuanced finding there. So it varies from place to place. But you said the place that interests you most is the workplace. What's the dynamic there? Yeah, so the conversation that comes up most often is about the differences between men and women and how women are often thought to apologize more often than men.

18:17There are those kind of phrases that come up all the time in emails. You know, sorry to bother you, no worries if not. That's a popular one. So these phrases apparently are much more popular with women. And career experts think that this might hold women back. They say that it's intended to be friendly, but it can come across to some people as unserious or even incompetent. So I looked at a paper by two economists at Stanford, Lily Liu and Marshall Mo, who set out to study this question and try to sort of quantify this gender gap in apologies. So how do you kind of academically isolate and investigate that?

18:58Yeah, so what they did was they recruited around 700 Americans and had them role play and they split them up into a group of workers and a group of bosses. and the workers were asked to answer multiple choice questions from a standardized test, like an SAT test type of thing. And the bosses were asked to evaluate their performances and decide who should be promoted among the workers. And the key point here is that before these promotion decisions were made, the workers were asked to write a note to their employer to try to sway the outcome. and what they found was that men and women performed equally well on the test, but women were twice as likely to include the word sorry or apologize in their messages to their employer.

19:52And then when they were asked afterwards, after taking the test, how apologetic they were about their performance, women were around 12 % more apologetic than men. So a 12 % gap, it was a significant gap. I mean, that's interesting in itself, but I guess the bigger question is about whether that has any effect on promotion in this sort of role-playing exercise. Yeah, so that was the key question here. And what they found was when bosses were asked to kind of evaluate the workers, they evaluated the, we'll call them the apologizers, the people who apologized more. They evaluated them worse. But here's the thing.

20:32They also reported feeling warmer towards these workers. So those two effects kind of offset each other. It turns out that the more apologetic workers were promoted just as often as the other employees. So it didn't really have an effect whether they were apologetic or not. So two questions then. One which comes about with all these sorts of psychology and experimental economics kinds of experiments. Does it translate to the real world? And if so, the advice is what? To keep apologizing at will, it doesn't matter? Right. I mean, you can take this for the grain of salt. It's all experimental results.

21:09They're not observational studies of people in the real world. But the lesson seems to be workers don't have to avoid being warm and sometimes apologetic in their emails and other correspondences with people in the workplace. When it comes to furthering your career, at least in this lab at Stanford, it doesn't hurt to say, I'm sorry. Right. Doug, thanks for your time and sorry for interrupting your good work today. Thanks, Jason.

21:55That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.

22:05Thank you.