924: Chris DeArmitt | Rethinking Plastic's Environmental Impact

21:03It's very, it is something when the former president of Greenpeace says, oh, they're just full of BS now and it's a grift. Like that's kind of horrible. It seems very odd that somebody in that position would do that just because he's salty about something. So it's probably there's maybe an element of truth to that stuff. I mean, there's a whole book worth. It's not a tweet. It's a book. He was the only scientist left and he got annoyed that they just went off in this crusade to get money and were doing more and more stupid things, including being against chlorine. You know, they're like, oh, we want to ban chlorine.

21:32Well, first of all, you'd have to ban the ocean, right? Because the ocean's full of sodium chloride. You'd have to ban table salt. And even worse, you'd have to ban 35 % of medicines which have got chlorine in them. So he was just saying, let's be sensible. Let's make a difference. But let's start off with the facts. And that didn't fit their agenda anymore, so he left. So to put a bow on this, it takes about three to four pounds of other materials to replace a pound of plastic. On average, yes. On average. You can choose that. You prove that to yourself in your kitchen. That's the average of the thing, the stats I just mentioned about bags, straws, bottles made out of aluminum, glass, metal, paper, plastic, whatever.

22:01So the other element here is, and you mentioned it's turning into a cult. I acknowledge that, but I also think it's just really a lot of it is cognitive bias. If I get a metal bottle and I'm like, this is my gym bottle and I use it every day. That's great. And I use these mugs, these metal mugs. I use these every day. But you know what? I have like seven or maybe 10 of these. Yeah. I really actually need one. I have to use each one of those, like you said, let's say 500 times to make up for the amount of plastic. That's a lot of years and years and years and years. And that's if I don't use or reuse the plastic bottle that, let's say, this soda came in.

22:42But you know what the soda came in? It came in this. Yeah. This can. this aluminum can. So actually, I'm just using a crap ton of resources. And the other problem here is I feel good using this metal mug because I'm not throwing it away. But what I don't see is the production process that got this metal mug to my table. So all of that is just at zero. Just like with plastic, we're assuming, or I should say, I'm assuming both of these things arrive to me having cost the same amount of CO2 resources, whatever, but that's not true. I think, oh, look, I'm doing something that's good for the environment.

23:15But what I don't realize is I'm digging out of a hole that's 500 times deeper than the hole required that got that plastic bottle to the top of my desk. Right. I'm digging it out of that invisible hole. It's an interesting point. I love those metal cans as well. I've got those. What are they called? Those, you know, the same Yeti. Yeah, those Yetis. I've got a whole closet full of them, too. I'm not against metal. I think it's fantastic. I love gadgets. I love all that stuff. So I'm not against them. But as you said, this doesn't make it green just because it's the nicer product and feels better in the hand.

23:42One thing that people are overlooking a lot is, A, to check the facts, but then they get onto this thing about degradation and blah, blah, microplastics. So we have to cover that topic because people will ask about it. This has been the most incredible marketing job by these green groups because when you think they're like plastics are bad, right? Because they degrade. Well, first of all, they tell you they don't degrade, right? Which is not true. Plastics degrade really rapidly. They even biodegrade. There's hundreds and hundreds of articles about plastic degradation. The global market for plastic stabilizers is$5 billion a year.

24:11Nobody's going to be spending$5 billion a year to stabilize something that's stable, right? That's business suicide, right? So there's whole teams of scientists that have been for 50 years trying to find better stabilizers to stop plastics from degrading too quickly. Plastic bag degrades in less than one year outdoors, according to peer-reviewed science. So these green groups that tell you 400 years, they're just lying. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Chris DeArmit. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by 1-800-CONTACTS. You know that last pair of contacts panic?

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26:42You can find the course at jordanharbinger.com slash course. Now, back to Chris D 'Armit. Unfortunately, I did an episode on bioplastics, and it's a little, my memory's a little fuzzy because it's been a minute, but some of those bags were still in the ground after three years, but the problem is those are bioplastics that were supposed to be biodegradable or at least made out of bio. So the big problem, and that's what we found in our episode about bioplastics, was a lot of those bioplastics are way worse than synthetic plastic made out of petroleum in terms of degradation. But they're supposed to be like, oh, look, this fork that's not recyclable is something I can throw and it just vanishes into the earth.

27:23And it's actually worse than just a plastic freaking fork. That's right. Because of different factors involved in the chemistry of these things. And they take way more resources to create. They're more expensive. Bioplastics, if you haven't heard that episode of Skeptical Sunday, they're just a big red herring. It's a big distraction. It's a plastic distraction inside the plastic distraction. That's right. And so it's kind of like plastic inception. You're right. Most of the bioplastic stuff doesn't make sense, especially the degradables. And if you look at the life cycle analysis, they're usually worse, much worse for the environment than regular plastics.

27:55And plus, regular plastics degrade anyway. I call it the Harry Potter solution. This is a solution. We take bad people who are literars, right? And we expect them to be able to drop whatever they want on the floor and it's going to vanish by magic. And that's not a green solution. The green solution is stop people from littering. And we know how to do that. That's already proven. And use the greenest option. So cane them if they litter like Singapore. Yeah, that's right. I know. The only bioplastics that make sense is sometimes when you make the regular plastics like polyethylene and polypropylene, you don't have to make those from fossil fuel.

28:24Those are the two biggest plastics. You could make those and other ones from plant-based oils. That's a type of bioplastic that does make sense. And it is green. We talked about those. And of course, the quote unquote problem with those is they're chemically the same as regular plastics, which we thought was alarming. But now this episode, which is debunking a lot of the things that we've a lot of sacred cows are killing sacred cows to keep the metaphor consistent. That's a good thing. Like, wow, you can use something that normally would use petroleum and you can use something else. And it's the same exact thing.

28:54That's amazing. The plastic. That's not just proven that recycles with the regular stuff. And it's been on the market for years. Right. So people can go and buy this stuff now. It's not a hypothetical thing. Well, the problem is a lot of the other bioplastics, they don't recycle. So you literally have to throw them into the landfill, which is even worse than just using the regular-ass plastic that they were supposed to replace in the first place. So that's what's frustrating. And if you mix those in the recycle stream with regular plastics, they ruin the recycling of those plastics. So it's a mess.

29:19The problem with the recycling thing is, and again, we talked about this on Skeptical Sunday, is, yeah, if you throw in, let's say, a fork that's a biodegradable plastic with the recycled forks, they'll just take all of those and go, you know what, we can't sift through this. and they throw them away because it's kind of like throwing a full can of tomato sauce in all the empty cans of tomato sauce that you're recycling. It ruins the batch and they're not going to hire somebody to shake each one and make sure it's real. So they just chuck it out. And it results in facilities that would normally recycle plastic saying, hey, we don't take silverware because one in a thousand is one of these things and it just destroys our machinery or doesn't work.

29:55And so now we just are going to throw away anything that's in this category because this bioplastic that's in there. So it's very disheartening to see that those even exist. Yeah, let's go with this recycling thing that you're talking about, because there's a lot more to say on that too. So a couple of main points about recycling is about 90 % of plastics can easily be recycled. You just melt them and make a new product, right? So people who says that black plastic is not recyclable, that's a lie. If they say PET is not recyclable, or PVC or PE or polypropylene, they're all recycled. PET, easily recyclable.

30:28You just have to separate it, melt it, make a new piece. And that's proven, it's done. And we know it's green, right? It's vastly less. So we're taking something which is already the greenest solution, according to lifecycle analysis, and we're making it 70 to 90 % greener by recycling it and not having to go and get new fossil fuels and all of that, right? It's so much less energy to just take the material you already made and recycle it. So not only is it the greenest solution, it's easily recyclable. And when you do that, it becomes even greener than it was before by a huge margin. So those things all make sense and they should all be done.

30:57And here is something which is a misconception from the public. They think there's some conspiracy. The plastics industry has got a low recycling rate and there's some conspiracy that they never really wanted to recycle. And if you follow the news headlines, that's not what you see. You see hundreds of millions of dollars being invested and then the company's going out of business fairly regularly because it's not that easy to make money recycling plastics. And here's something will blow your mind. I talked about perspective. I read books not just about plastics, but about all materials. and what I found out was that the worst materials in the world for the environment are platinum, palladium, and gold.

31:28They're horrific for the environment. I mean, you mine, you know, a hundred tons of dirt to get a tiny scrap of gold and you throw the rest away. You've got cyanide, which is used to process it. It's just horrific in terms of CO2 and fossil fuel, the energy used, the pollution, terrible, right? What else do we know about platinum, palladium, and gold? They're some of the most expensive things in the world. And on the other end of that seesaw, we have the greenest things like polyethylene and polypropylene. And they're green and they're also really, really cheap. So there's actually, for many materials, almost a linear correlation between how expensive something is and how bad it is for the environment.

32:01And if you think about it, it makes sense, right? What goes into a life cycle analysis and what goes into cost? It's transportation, it's energy use, it's how much pollution you have to clean up and how much waste. Many of the same things that make something expensive make them bad for the environment. And so that's what we find with plastics. They're very green and they're very cheap and it's not that economical to recycle them. And on the other end, people are not throwing away gold and platinum and palladium. They always magically managed to find those and recycle them and never throw them away.

32:28People are in parking lots sawing off catalytic converters to get palladium. Pulling copper pipes out and lead off of roofs and everything, right. So that is a misunderstanding. You can make money recycling plastic. There are companies doing it successfully on a huge scale. There's a company in Germany that's 100... You know, they tell you you can't recycle plastic bags. There's a company called Papier Mettler who have a process in Germany, and they've been doing 110 ,000 tons of plastic bags a year, right, profitably. So it can be done and it is done. This is a PSA that I put on a few shows, and it's a great time to do one now.

32:59You can recycle plastic bags and plastic packing material in the United States, and almost nobody knows this. You can go to a place like Target, and you can bring all of that stuff in. I think Home Depot has it too, you can shove that stuff in there. And there's companies that buy it. And I think they turned it into building materials or roofing materials. And you know, that stuff's already made. And I, somebody had wrote in when we did another episode on plastics and they work for that company and they're like, we are desperately in need. We are buying up all this cause it's, it's net cost next to nothing.

33:33Cause it's otherwise discarded. There's actually a shortage of materials. So they, they end up making and they make new plastic to make this product that they use that would actually be better having just been made out of recycled plastic bags. So make sure you don't throw those away. You can't put them in the recycling bin. We talked about that in our recycling episode because they gum up the machines, but you can recycle this stuff. And in fact, companies need it and it's profitable to do so, which is great news, right? Because that means all the stuff we feel bad about, almost all, can actually be turned into something that gets used for decades.

34:05That's exactly right. And they can be recycled multiple times, more than paper, for example. Paper can only be recycled a few times, but some of these plastics can be recycled 20 or 30 times, which is tremendous. And there's another thing going on with the plastics thing. People use this word recyclable. They try to sue Walmart for saying things were recyclable when they weren't. If you look at that word recyclable, it means literally able to be recycled, right? It doesn't promise that somebody's going to recycle it when you drop it in your local bin, right? It's still recyclable. It's like if I have a soccer ball, right?

34:31It's kickable. If I decide not to kick it, it's still kickable whether I kick it or not, right? And people have got some sort of mental block when it comes to recyclable that this closed loop symbol means that it's definitely going to be recycled in your area. I mean, no manufacturer could guarantee that. You might buy it here and throw it away in Antigua, right? On holiday, right? Who knows where you're going to dispose of this thing? So this symbol means it can be recycled. And if you're, like you said, they take these plastic bags, which are very recyclable, and some areas don't like them because it gums up their machines, right?

35:01That's not the same thing as being unrecyclable. That just means your machine doesn't like it and you couldn't be bothered to invest in the machine that would work. People need to draw that line. So I think we need a new word like recycle likely and a new symbol that goes with it that tells people like more or less how likely is this to actually be recycled. People need to stop hijacking this word recycle abel, which is defined in the dictionary and inventing a new meaning for it, which is how likely it is to be recycled and then complaining it doesn't meet their new definition. That's an interesting point.

35:28I also want to say that you talked about the degradation of plastics, the stabilizer market, which is, I guess, things that stop plastic from degrading, is between$2 billion and$8 billion. So if plastic didn't degrade, who's spending$8 billion and what are they spending it on, right? So these were trying, like I'd say, you will get rich beyond your wildest dreams if you can stop plastic from degrading in contact with water, dirt, or the other elements while it's being used, which is incredible. So if you're trying to make plastic that does degrade, all you have to do is not buy something that's really expensive and add it to the plastic.

36:03That's exactly right. The easiest thing to do. In the beginning, they didn't know that they needed stabilizers, and they found out these plastics were just degrading in front of them, right? They literally had a pile of polypropylene plastic sitting in the sun, and it got so hot from degrading so quickly that it melted under its own heat of degradation, right? And then they were like, whoa, holy moly, this stuff, that's the second most common plastic in the world. You can't even use it without stabilizers. Same with PVC, same with polyethylene. They even took a polypropylene film, a thin film, like a trash bag type of thing, and they left it in a dark desk drawer for a year, and it lost all of its strength.

36:33from degrading, just from being attacked by oxygen. So these stabilizers are very important. And another important point to make is we do have plastic pipes, which are certified to last for decades in the ground. And why are they certified, right? Because they're much thicker than a bag or a piece of packaging. That helps. So you can put more stabilizer, and they put a lot more stabilizer in there and much better kinds of stabilizers. Whereas when you're making a bag, you don't expect it to have a long lifetime and there's just enough stabilizer to use it a couple of times. And then, as I said, if you left it just outside on the ground, it would disappear in less than a year, according to science, whereas the pipe might last 50 or 100 years.

37:06I'm going back to an earlier point. Removing just 1 % of materials and waste by stopping the use of plastics would just significantly increase the total amount of materials and waste. And the EPA data actually shows that plastics have massively reduced the total waste going into landfills over the last few decades. I just kind of want to hammer that home because we talk about landfills and like, oh, my gosh, these things, they're getting huge. Plastics are a huge amount of what we see in there or when we think of what goes into a landfill, but it would be even more if we didn't use plastics, which is a little disturbing.

37:38I don't expect you to opine on this, but plastics, we've talked on this show about endocrine disrupting chemicals and things like that from plastics. That's a factor of not wanting to drink or eat out of a plastic container that I think is kind of important, right? You know, oh, the metal's not as good for the environment. Yeah, but I'm putting my baby's milk in here. I don't know if I want these chemicals that leach from plastic in there that don't leach from metal. Do you know much about that? I do. I've read hundreds of articles on that. So, I mean, the first thing to know is that we're not living in the Wild West, right?

38:08I mean, the FDA has literally certified these things for food contact, right? You can't put a piece of plastic as a drink container unless it's FDA food contact approved, right? And they've measured like there are almost no chemicals. PET might have zero chemicals in it. Polyethylene or polypropylene has like hardly anything in it. just the teeniest amount of stabilizer to make it stable enough to do its job. So there's not like a ton of chemicals in there. In some cases, zero chemicals. As I said, it's all certified. It's all tested. There's whole books on it. There's been measurements on migration of stuff from plastics for decades, and it's just not even a thing.

38:40The only plastic that really is in food contact that leaches BPA, for example, you hear a lot about BPA as being the main endocrine disrupting chemical. That's only polycarbonate, and that's not even used for drinking bottles and stuff anymore. So that's 1 % of all plastics leeches a tiny amount of something which is below the level, way, way below the level that would ever cause any harm. And that's what people are freaking out about. BPA, it's in less than 1 % of plastics and it's at levels that have been measured for decades and it's not even a problem. I mean, BPA is 10 ,000 times weaker than estrogen as a hormone.

39:12And the amounts there are just nothing. We're talking a couple of molecules, which doesn't affect anything. What about those water bottles you and I used to use when we were kid that tasted funny. You remember those? You could just taste the chemicals in your water. It's banned now. Was that BPA? I would imagine those were PVC bottles. I would imagine. I do remember having some funny tasting plastic film when I was like in my university days that was kind of weird, had something in it. But as I said, we've had like plastics have been around for decades. All of that was regulated to death, you know, so there was just nothing there.

39:42And the other thing is, when you look at these other materials, let's think about lead poisoning, right? We had lead. Lead in gasoline. We had people drinking out of lead. We've still got $15 billion to replace lead pipes, which are everywhere poisoning people, right? We've got heavy metals in classrooms. So it's very strange to think that people think plastics are dangerous. There was a big thing recently. An organization called Beyond Plastics decided to mysteriously attack plastics and glorify copper, right? Because Congress has given$15 billion for the replacement of lead pipes. So they issued a report just demonizing plastics, and they completely forgot to say that copper pipes fail the safety tests at high and low pH because they give out dangerous levels of copper, right?

40:20So anybody who was genuinely interested in safety and genuinely interested in informing the public would not just demonize one material and completely omit serious problems with other materials. You would give a balanced perspective and then make a choice on what really makes sense. They did the same thing when it came to dioxins. They said plastics give out dioxins, but it turns out the metals industry is giving out far more dangerous dioxins. You can literally type in dioxin EPA and you'll see a pie chart that shows the metals industry is the main problem when it comes to toxic dioxins. People making copper pipes have lost tens of millions of dollars in lawsuits for poisoning their own workers with dioxin.

40:54So again, they're just making stuff up, presumably to get this giant amount of money that's floating out there and misrepresenting the truth. This reminds me of when people say, be careful, bananas are radioactive, which is technically true, right? There's this small trace amount of radiation in a banana and probably in everything else. But then they're saying, eat this uranium coated piece of fruit instead. And you're like, oh, okay. Yeah. Cause bananas are radioactive. You say, as you chomp through this yellow cake coated apple, it's intellectually dishonest, I guess is where we're going with this.

41:26Speaking of intellectual honesty, is there not a point at which the benefit of recycling, let's say an aluminum can catches up to the expediency and resource use of plastic. No, it never does. Never? No, because the energy use is huge. And what people will say is, oh, look how much more energy you save by recycling an aluminum can, right? And that's true because you used vastly more to make it. And so you save vastly more when you recycle it, right? And don't have to. But every time you do it, you have to re-melt it. And aluminum melts at 660 degrees Celsius, glass is thousands of degrees, and plastic melts at a couple of hundred, right?

42:02So it's obvious, even to the layperson, it's melted at much lower temperatures, processed at lower temperatures uses much less energy and is always far, far greener. That just means, and this I suppose is obvious to many as well, the amount of energy that you need to extract those resources from the earth versus to create that plastic bottle. It's just so much more energy that's required to do that. And until we have nuclear fusion, plastic is going to be more energy. Well, I guess it won't. Until energy efficiency literally does not matter anymore. Right. That's exactly the point. If you have unlimited free energy at some days, then maybe things will change.

42:37Another misconception is people say plastics are bad because fossil fuel is used to make them. But if you look at the total fossil fuel used to make all materials, and I put a post on LinkedIn about this because I found the data in a book, and it compared the fossil fuel used to make metal, like magnesium and other materials, and plastics were lower than all of them. Because although fossil fuel goes into the plastic and it doesn't go into the metal, the amount of energy that you need to make those materials, the amount of fossil fuel you have to burn to make that energy is so much higher than all the other ones.

43:05So this actually went viral on LinkedIn. It got 280 ,000 views. Finally, people saw that although fossil fuel goes into plastic, the overall fossil fuel usage is way, way lower than all the other materials. I've been just so wrong about this for so long. And I've done so many shows about this. I mean, not that everything we said in every show about plastics was incorrect. A lot of stuff we said about recycling was correct. A lot of stuff we said about bioplastics was correct. But we got sort of the base premise wrong, which is that plastic is bad. Yeah. They did a study. They started in Germany and then they went to France and some other countries in Europe.

43:40And they said, what do you think is important for the environment? And they all said plastic bags is the number one cause. And then they compared that to what actually makes an impact. And what actually makes an impact is driving less, taking one less flight, eating less meat. And so this is a problem. People are going around waving their cotton bags, feeling like saints and actually increasing harm. Some people are faking it, right? They just virtue signaling. They want to look like good people and they can't find three minutes to look at the evidence and actually do something that's green because it's turned into a cult.

44:07And it's being fed by not just these NGOs who are telling lies to get millions of dollars, but also the media. So there was a recent study on microplastics and they took all the scientific articles and said, okay, of all these articles, about 20%, the scientists say that there's probably an issue here, right? There could be some danger. 20 % of the scientific articles. But of the media articles, it was 93 % said that there was a definite danger. I mean, I think you emailed me because somebody had sent you our show on microplastics and was like, it was so scary. And that was a journalist from Wired who I don't think he's not like a bad person who has an agenda.

44:42He just was scared of everything that he was reading about microplastics and put them all into one place. And it was terrifying. It was one of the most depressing episodes of this show that I have ever done. It was episode 818, How Microplastics Poison the Planet. I mean, there were things in there like you're eating a credit card worth of plastic every single week. There's going to be more plastic than fish in the ocean. I mean, that type of statistic or whatever you want to call it is so disgusting and horrifying. It's so powerful, but also it's 100 percent wrong. So if we look at the credit card of plastic up to a credit card of plastic a week, that was funded by the World Wildlife Fund.

45:22So that's what they wanted to see. Right. They want scary numbers so they can get you angry enough to donate, presumably. If you look at the latest scientific article, which is not funded by any interested party, they said it would take 20 ,000 years to eat a credit card worth of plastic. Not a week, 20 ,000 years. These people are very professional. They've got huge marketing budgets. They've got teams of professionals. I'm a lone scientist doing this in my spare time, just trying to correct this misinformation. These people are just making stuff up. Even when you debunk it, nobody's interested in the truth because the truth isn't as exciting as the lie.

45:53And if you look at the turtle with a bag around its neck, I actually busted the BBC a few weeks ago. I said, hey, that's a Photoshopped image. Here's the original with no bag. Please update it. You're misleading the public. And they did update the article. They published a new one. They said the previous picture was misleading. And I said, your data's wrong too. So they updated that. And then the USA Today people, they covered that plastic pipe thing we just mentioned. And I contacted that journalist. She was mortified that she'd been misled into publishing misinformation. She published an update on it, showing the facts because I showed her the evidence.

46:22But unfortunately, only about one in 20 journalists seems to actually care about the evidence. So that guy from Wired didn't. I've written to them many times. I've written to Ars Technica. I paid my own money, hundreds of dollars to get a list of journalists at Bloomberg, Washington Post, New York Times, BBC, The Telegraph, USA Today, everywhere. I wrote to all of them, 30 of them, hundreds of dollars of my own money, working email addresses, not one bounced, but not one reply. Not one professional journalist who wanted to see the evidence, even though it's condensed onto one page. I didn't ask them to read a book.

46:53I just asked them to read one page and see some of these facts. And no one was interested. That is not encouraging because it makes me think that either they're not receptive to information that goes against something. I mean, they're not doing what I'm doing, which is saying, oh, crap, I've been wrong. Let me hear why, which is scary because you're a journalist, like literally your freaking job. Or they just go, yeah, but look how many clicks we're getting on these articles about plastic. Why do we want to stop doing that? because those are my most popular pieces, which is also not really how you should be doing journalism.

47:26That's right. That's right. But you're right. They follow the money. That's the best way to find out what's going on, which is why I disclosed my sources. And there was an amazing study. It said that if you were to lose$10, I would have to give you$20 to make up for the negative feeling you got from losing$10. So bad news is twice as powerful as good news. And that explains why they only cover the bad news because or make it up because, you know, that's what gets the advertising dollars and the clicks. This is the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Chris DeArmit. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors.

48:03All the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. You can email me. You can even use the AI chatbot to surface promo codes. It's important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Chris DeArmit. people are going to worry about this did we just cherry pick the container example they're going to say hey look okay the bottle thing the aluminum can thing fine but what about you're missing the biggest thing which is building materials or automobiles have tons of plastic in them i'm worried people are going to say we cherry pick that particular category because that's the one that makes plastic look the best so i've looked at 50 life cycle studies and that covers containers and mailers and plastic pipes.

48:44There's 14 on that. They agree. There's actually 13 that agree. And there's one where they cheated, which doesn't agree. And I've looked at the bags, 28. I've looked at straws too. So basically, just type in LCA plastic, do it yourself and see which ones come up. And you'll see that plastic is the greenest solution in almost every case you can imagine. The people who accuse me of cherry picking literally come with no data. I come with 28 studies on bags, everyone ever published. And then I go to an expert to have them reviewed, to make sure that it's all above board and they're professional studies and they agree.

49:14And then they literally accuse you of cherry picking. I'm like, well, where's your evidence? I'm like, you never even went to the orchard. Forget about cherry picking. You didn't even grab the basket and get near a cherry tree, right? So I literally present every single study and including the ones that present harm, for example, and then explain why the science isn't good. I thought, okay, I'm gonna find a counterexample. What about cars? Well, as it turns out, cars use much less fuel energy now because they weigh a lot less. Yes. You know why they weigh less? Because they're using plastic and rubber instead of metal.

49:45Yes. Old cars weighed a freaking ton, literally. I mean, they were just, there was just tons of metal in those things. I'm glad you mentioned that because if you look at those numbers, and so there are numbers you can look up, like how much gasoline do you save per pound of weight you save in a car? And the number is huge. So the life cycle of a car, about 80 % of it or 90 % is driving around the car and burning gasoline, right? So if you look at those numbers of how much plastic is in the car and how much weight you saved, you end up working out that the entire plastics industry is net CO2 and net fossil fuel negative because you save so much fossil fuel from making cars lighter and making planes lighter, as well as preserving food and insulating homes from heat.

50:22If you add up those savings you get from using plastic, it's more than the CO2 and the fossil fuel used to make the plastic in the first place. That's a little confusing. How can we be saving more fossil fuel than we're using? I obviously misunderstood you because I think it sounds like you're saying we're saving more fossil fuel than we would be if we weren't doing the thing at all, which can't be right. Can you explain that? So if you took a car and you've saved, let's say you put a pound of plastic into it, right? All right. And then you save five pounds of fuel, fossil fuel, you know, oil, because you've saved that weight driving the car around over 20 years, you're net negative on fossil fuel.

50:55You spend one and you save four, right? So you're three in credit. It's the same thing as people say to me, oh, well, these green groups are always talking about all the fossil fuel impact or the CO2 impact of plastics, right? So of course, everything has an impact. And the CO2 impact of plastics is 0.5 % of CO2. And they only tell you the debit side. Imagine I asked you, Jordan, and I said, how wealthy are you? And I only looked at your debits, right? So I didn't count your house. I didn't count anything you actually own. I didn't count your income. All I said is, hey, you owe$3 ,000 on your credit card.

51:24That's a negative thing. I'm going to dismiss all the positives and only look at that. And that's what these green groups are doing. They're saying plastics are bad for CO2 when the actual number is half of 1 % of CO2 emissions come from making plastics. But when you look at the CO2 saved by using plastics, because of the weight savings in cars and planes and preventing food usage, spoilage, and from insulating homes so you don't burn as much fossil fuel to keep your home warm, you save more CO2 and fossil fuel than you use to make the plastic in the first place. And no one's talking about that.

51:53It's a complete lie. As I said, if I said to you, what is your net worth? You can't count any money you own or any assets. All we can do is look at your credit card debt. That would be criminal, right? That would just be a gross misrepresentation of the facts. And yet, that's exactly what these green groups are doing right now. Still, the element of plastic having endocrine disruptors or being toxic bothered me. And then I started to look up actually toxic things and how toxic plastic was. And there are lots of little toxic rubbers and plastics that are generally not used in things that you are touching all day, like polyethylene, polypropylene, polyester, the stuff that's all over your house.

52:29most of that is actually quite non-toxic. But what is carcinogenic is soot, obviously from burning anything, like even cooking, quartz dust, wood, leather dust, all the stuff we wear that looks like environmentally friendly. This is a wooden desk. If you saw this thing up, you got sawdust, carcinogenic. I mean, it's probably very low, but coffee dust and metal dust and cement dust, if cement is 84 % of what we are using and building, I mean, that stuff, that stuff's really bad for you. That's very horrible. And that's my point. If you look at particles we ingest, which is called dust, right? So they've done a great job marketing this thing, right?

53:08We call all other small particles, like you just mentioned, coffee or wood or metal. We call it dust, right? Dead skin cells. It's all part of dust. But they don't call plastic dust that, right? They don't call it dust. They call it microplastics because they can make more money scaring people with it. If you look at the of the dust we ingest, 0.001 % of it is plastic, right? Right. And as you just said, the other 99.999 % includes things which are proven to cause cancer and in giant amounts, right? Like quartz is proven to cause cancer. So is wood dust. So is leather dust. There's arsenic there.

53:39There's heavy metals like lead and mercury. And even there's been reports of school rooms, which have got dangerous amounts of toxic metals coming from the dust. There's dead skin cells. There's spores. There's all kinds of actual dangers. and people are obsessing over 0.001 % of safe polyethylene and polypropylene. I mean, it's been tested and found to be as safe as clay or cellulose, which is what trees are made of, right? And they're obsessing over that. So it's just distracting everyone from actual proven threats. And that's what's so frustrating. Another thing that's concerning me about this is I see restaurants and things like that switching from plastic to other materials.

54:15And some of that's probably okay. I don't know. I do wonder if companies are switching to using materials that are worse for the environment because of consumer pressure. And I don't have an example of that. I wonder if you do you happen to have one by chance? Because it seems like this has got to be happening. It did amaze me. I thought, how dumb are these supermarket executives who are replacing plastic bags with paper, right? Because there's 28 studies and literally LCA space BAG return. That's eight buttons. It takes you three seconds to find it on Google. You're telling me that no green group and no supermarket executive ever thought to check the science, which is out there for everyone to read.

54:48So they interviewed these people, these supermarket executives, and they said, we know that replacing plastic increases harm, but we do it anyway because that's when our customers want. Yeah, it's a virtue signal, right? You don't go to Whole Foods and they're like, look, we're using a crap load of plastic bags. Everyone's like, why? Well, here's all this data that you're definitely not going to read. Okay, no thanks. I'll just do what the customer wants, even though it's worse. That sucks. That's it. So they're stuck, they're trapped in a way that the misled customer, because they've got the dollars right, the misled customers are driving misled decisions.

55:16People are pandering to them. They're doing all this greenwashing. They're proposing. I know companies that sell the paper and the plastic product, and they've got customers begging them for the paper one for environmental reasons. And the salesperson literally has to tell them, look, we sell both. We may make more on the paper one. But if you're looking for environmental benefit, please buy the plastic one because every study shows that it's greener. And they're like, no, because no one's going to believe me when I tell them that, which is what I'm worried about with this episode. That's the danger of life.

55:42One thing I will say, Jordan, is I had a lot of backlash when I started with this. Oh, you don't say. Yeah, it's like, in that case, who's this shill? But the book's been out since 2020, and thousands of people have read it. I mean, tens of thousands of people have read it. And there's not one error in it. I have not found anyone come back to me and find any error in it. And everything I said, as I said, is backed with citations to the science. So there basically is no argument against what I'm saying. It's all just overwhelming evidence, and there's not much more to say about it. So people might not want to agree.

56:10I'm curious if there's an angle that we're forgetting. I know I'll get emails about it and I'm genuinely, I welcome those, right? I want to find out if we're just avoiding something or we haven't said something here because this makes me feel so much better. But I'm always very wary of like, oh, hey, don't worry about this big problem because it's a bunch of nonsense. That feeling is always, there's always a little alarm bell that's like, maybe it's not true. You know, I'm not used to feeling better. We're not used to good news. Yeah. And nobody covers it because people are making hundreds of millions from the lies.

56:43So nobody wants to cover it. I just put up a post today or yesterday that the amounts of plastic in the ocean is 100 to 1 ,000 times less than previously thought. So there was this huge number. Everyone quotes, there's 10 million tons going per year. And that was a guess. Literally, a scientist said 2 % of all plastic anywhere near the shore, anywhere in the world is going to leap into the ocean. That was like a back of an envelope. Total BS guess, right? Which they never should have done. And that's the number these environmental groups have persistently used for decades. since then. And in the intervening time, there's been study after study after study with millions of measurements spanning 50 years showing no increase and very, very low amounts.

57:18They're so low that they call them negligible, right? But that doesn't make you money, right? You can't scare people with that. And these environmental groups, even when confronted with study after study spanning 50 years and millions of measurements against their guess and their wrong number, which is old, they never update their website. This BS sits right next to the donate now button. And I call them on it on my website. I say, look at all the people who are saying things which are untrue, categorically disproven again and again, like more plastic than fish in the sea has been debunked many times.

57:46And it's still up there on their website next to donate now. And that tells you where the where the real motives are. I know what people are, at least some people are going to say is, hey, but we still see plastic in the stomach of all these sea turtles and animals. You know what kills animals in the sea? Fishing. Yeah. And I thought, well, maybe small animals. What about big animals? Whales? Fishing. Right. Because of the nets and stuff, especially. Yes. And then birds is buildings, power lines, and then way down the list is like pesticides and cars and animals and stuff like plastics don't even make the list for any of those things.

58:20Yeah. Hundreds of millions of birds are killed every year by cats. So if anyone was really worried about their birds, it's nothing to do with plastics. It doesn't even show up on the statistics. There's not a single mention of the word plastic or bag in any bird mortality study I've ever read. But what does kill them, hundreds of millions, is cats. So if you're really worried about birds, you put a bell on your cat. But people aren't really worried about birds. They're just looking for a way to demonize plastic. What about algae-based plastics? That's one thing we were talking about in our bioplastics episode.

58:45It seemed like that was not ready for prime time, but that it might become a thing. And algae grows everywhere. I mean, it's almost like you're trying to get rid of it in many cases. Yeah. Well, in every case, I would say, look at the life cycle analysis. Show me evidence. I see a lot of these companies and promoting things. And I say to them, well, show me the proof that you've got a whole company based on making this polymer. You claim it's green. Show me a report that shows it being greener than polyethylene or polypropylene. And it never comes. And the easy way to know if you're a lay person, because they're going to say, I don't have a life cycle study with me when I go shopping.

59:14We mentioned earlier that greener things tend to be cheaper. So if you're in a supermarket and you don't know what to buy, buy the cheapest one. The cheapest material is usually the greenest because it's using less resources and less fossil fuel and less transportation or the rest of it. And the other thing to do is buy the lightest one. Just put it on the balance and buy the one that's the least material. And you'll find out that the plastic straw is the lightest option. And of course, no straw weighs nothing, right? That's the very lightest option. So they're not 100 % accurate. But if you're in a supermarket and you don't know what to do, pick the cheapest or the lightest of the choices.

59:44Yeah, I suppose that doesn't factor in the human labor cause, right? I'm thinking like free trade coffee versus like, I don't know, slave labor coffee or chocolate or whatever. That's another factor. That's another factor. Yeah, that's beyond my pay grade. Yeah, indeed. Well, it sounds like, as you say, you can be for the environment or you can be against plastics, but not both. That's right. I would just encourage people. I'm not saying plastics don't cause impact. But what I am saying is we can't keep ignoring 99 percent of our problem and think that we're going to make a difference because we're not.

1:00:13So we need to start having policies and spending money and spending our time and our worry. You know, you can't worry about everything. Let's worry about stuff that actually makes an impact and make a world a better place based on things that are true. and stop listening to these environmental groups who apparently abandoned the environment decades ago and are just, you know, shilling it out there and ripping us off. Well, there's a lot of egg, I guess, on my face for other podcasts that I've done about plastics. But I guess the comforting thing is maybe I'm not the only one, or not maybe I'm not the only one.

1:00:39I'm definitely not the only one because everything you read about plastic is catastrophic. Yes, yes. Well, a couple of things to say on that, Jordan. One is you have my tremendous respect because as I said, if you go to a bunch of journalists, most of them are just spewing, parroting internet myths for advertising dollars. So respect that you're one of the very, very few ones who looks at evidence and shows a story if it has merit. And I know you checked into the data, so I'm not just making this stuff up. So that's one thing to say. And the other thing is you have a get out clause because there's a thing called the illusory truth effect.

1:01:09And they've proven that if you tell a lie enough times to a person, even IQ doesn't defend them. So even being smart doesn't defend you against somebody just repeating a lie. And after a while, it sounds reasonable. And that's what's happened to most of us. We've all been brainwashed with things which are simply untrue. Well, I really appreciate you coming on the show and talking about this. I RIP your inbox and Twitter from people who are, well, you're probably already dealing with the blowback from this. I mean, I would imagine you're in many circles, just not very popular with this information.

1:01:37I am now. I wasn't in the beginning. I got tons of pushback, but now I've got a huge following. And as I said, even the BBC and USA Today correct things when I pointed out to them. And I've spoken to Senator Rob Portman, who was unaware that plastics have reduced material or to landfill and so forth. So it's making a real impact. I'm being asked to give keynote speeches all around the world because it seems I'm the only scientist who's read about microplastics and litter and waste and ocean plastics and marine animals and degradation. No one else has read all of that science. And so I seem to be the only person who's able to present the evidence.

1:02:07Well, good for you, man. Thanks again for coming on the show. And to the audience at large, I welcome your feedback. I should say plastics at jordanharbinger.com, but it's just jordan at jordanharbinger.com. And people know how to reach me. Tell us where we're wrong. I'm genuinely curious if somebody can come up with a real kind of counter argument to this stuff that we haven't discussed. If you go to phantomplastics.com, you can click on the plastics in the environment tab at the top and you can see all of this condensed, again, with a video and backed by all the science. So please don't lay into what we've said until you've actually looked at the evidence.

1:02:39That's what people tend to do. They're so busy trying to cling to the lies they believe now because it's less work for their brain than considering new evidence. And that's where I respect you again, Jordan. So great job. Yeah, thank you very much. And again, thank you for your time and expertise. Really appreciate this. Thank you. We've got a preview trailer of our interview with Vince Beiser. It's all about sand. You heard me, sand. It's actually quite fascinating. There are even sand mafias killing people over sand. So stay tuned for that after the close of the show. If anybody had told me three, four years ago that I was going to be spending my every waking hour thinking and talking about sand, I would have just laughed.

1:03:14It's actually the most important solid substance on Earth. We use about 50 billion tons of sand every year. That's enough to cover the entire state of California every single year. Every year, we use enough concrete to build a wall 90 feet high and 90 feet across, right the way around the planet at the equator. A bunch of sand might get broken off of a mountaintop, washed down into a plane somewhere, and then that sand gets buried under subsequent geological layers and pushed down under the earth and compressed and turned into sandstone. And then that sandstone may get pushed up again by geologic forces over hundreds of thousands of years and worn away again and again broken down back into grains.

1:04:03So an individual grain of sand can be millions of years old. We're fully eclipsing the rate of creation here. You're probably sitting in a building made of just a huge pile of sand. All the roads connecting all those buildings, also made out of sand. The glass, the windows in all those buildings, also made of sand. The microchips that power our computers, our cell phones, all of our other digital goodies, also made from sand. So without sand, there's no modern civilization. And the craziest thing about it is, we are starting to run out. For more on why sand is the next petroleum-like resource and some crazy stories about sand pirates and the black market for sand, check out episode 97 with Vince Beiser right here on the Jordan Harbinger Show.

1:04:54Like I said at the top of the show, I love this message. I am, of course, hoping it's accurate and that we didn't just get played. I don't think Chris did that. I don't get that vibe from Chris at all. I did extensive research and screening for this episode. That said, I'm not a scientist, so I can only do so much here. And science changes, right? We might find out that something that tested fine is actually adding up in the environment over time. I really don't know. Chris does know. I mean, he's read every scientific article on plastics, which is no small feat. Absolutely incredible. So while this might mean we don't need to put a ban on plastic, it doesn't mean we don't have to recycle things or reduce, especially reduce our use of single-use items.

1:05:33While we might not have a toxic plastic issue, we still have a garbage problem. If we keep throwing stuff in the ocean or the ground, I want to be very clear on all that. The idea here is not plastics are harmless, let's just keep doing it. The idea here is throwing anything away after a single use is wasteful, and that's a big takeaway. It's not that the boogeymen are plastics, it's the single-use part of single-use plastics that's bad. Plastics in the body, as far as the science on plastics in the body, we're going to link something in the show notes with a list of citations and references that refutes a lot of that whole, there's plastics in your brain type of stuff.

1:06:06As for his credibility, there's a whole section of his website on that. We're gonna link to that in the show notes. I asked him about this. I said, look, people are gonna say, well, you're a plastic scientist. Of course you say all this stuff. Come on, man. Chris replied, my job is to help companies select the correct plastic and improve plastic materials for a given application. That's where my income is from. I'm also an expert witness. So for example, I helped over 9 ,000 women get settlements for plastic mesh that was implanted in them and later caused problems. There are many examples at phantomplastics.com where I also provide a breakdown of my income.

1:06:37That's very transparent, by the way. I love that about him. He goes on, the plastics and the environment work, which meant thousands of hours reading thousands of scientific articles, was all done unpaid and the findings shared for free via the Plastics Paradox book, videos, the websites, radio and TV interviews, and so on. And by the way, he does give his book away for free on the website all about plastics. So if you really wanna do a deep dive into this stuff, it's quite interesting, I read a bunch of it. crucially, every statement is backed by citations to solid peer reviewed evidence and none of the work shown is mine.

1:07:06That's, of course, him saying that he didn't commission any of these studies. He didn't get commissioned to run any of these studies. He says, so although I am one of the world's top scientists, fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, fellow of the Institute for Materials, Minerals and Mining and chartered chemist, none of what I say depends on my credibility anyway, which is true. I mean, science stands up for itself. That's how it works. And then one last pot shot at some of the environmental groups who said,

1:07:53Now, of course, he's not talking about all environmental groups here. He's talking about the ones that exaggerate or make up claims in order to get donations. He's pointing the finger at Greenpeace because the president or former president of Greenpeace is the one who exposed a lot of this stuff. I didn't look into that. So if somebody can say, hey, this is a bunch of crap. Cool. I'm here for it. But it seems pretty credible. I mean, the book is indeed by the former president of Greenpeace. And it indeed says what he claims to have said here in that. That's as far as I get from that book, because I don't have that guest on the show.

1:08:21Maybe I will one day. Also, from a listener this morning, in fact, quite the timing. Tyler says, I was mentioning in the original email that all the plastic, et cetera, they're trying to make from renewable sources are the same molecules with the same environmental impacts as petroleum-based plastics. He's talking about bioplastics because we did an earlier episode on that, if you recall. He goes on, so essentially all that renewable-based plastic does is increase the carbon footprint and agricultural demands of a resource we currently just pump out of the ground. There's no meaningful difference between the two products on the back end, and petroleum is actually more environmentally friendly on the production side.

1:08:56Go figure. And for the people who are concerned about plastic being a persistent environmental pollutant, that's very misguided for one simple reason. Plastic burns. That means it's exothermic when it's broken down. That means eventually a fungus or bacteria or other microorganism will eventually either evolve to eat it or we will engineer one. There are also several already that eat PET in salt water. At one point in the planet's history, every novel stable polymer, think cellulose or lignin, was not biodegradable because no organism had evolved the enzymes to digest it. This is one of the competing hypotheses for why all the coal on earth comes from one single time period.

1:09:32That lignin-bearing plants piled up for millions of years because nothing could decompose them, that's the Carboniferous period. Today's biodiversity and scientific research makes the likelihood of plastic remaining a persistent pollutant for more than another decade or two very unlikely. The most likely scenario is that it's going to be just as compostable as paper and leaves soon, and that will have positives and negatives. Imagine your plastic lawn furniture degrading the same way wooden pieces do, et cetera. I could go on, but it's already a long email. Needless to say, I don't hear anyone talking about what is most probable, only catastrophic and nihilistic environmental BS and denialism on the opposite side.

1:10:05Now, this is a plastic scientist who listens to the show, not just a random listener with an opinion. And one last PSA, you can and should recycle plastic bags and packaging. I don't mean throwing it in the recyclement. I mean, you can do that at any Home Depot, Lowe's, Target, I'm sure many other grocery stores do this. They repurpose this stuff into building materials. A show fan actually works in this industry and they need materials. That's the bottleneck here. So you're doing everyone a favor, especially the planet, if you recycle unneeded plastic bags and plastic packaging materials. Head on over to Home Depot, Lowe's, Target, or your local grocery store and do that.

1:10:39And if everyone does that, we're making a dent in the garbage problem, folks. All things Chris D 'Armit will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com or ask the AI chatbot on the website. transcripts in the show notes, advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. We've also got our newsletter every week. The team and I dig into an older episode of the show, dissect the lessons from it. So if you're a fan of the show, you want a recap of important highlights and takeaways, you just want to know what to listen to next.

1:11:07The newsletter is a great place to do just that. jordanharbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. Don't forget six minute networking as well. It's over at jordanharbinger.com slash course. I'm at jordanharbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Milio Campo, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about.

1:11:39If you know somebody who's really interested in material science, plastics, the environment, and maybe this would be news to them, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time.