Sian Sutherland

0:04Hello and welcome to The Midpoint. Today something a bit different. I heard our guest speaking at a longevity forum in London. And while the other speakers talked about building muscle, eating Mediterranean diets and other very useful science-backed ways to live better for longer, Sian Sutherland came on stage and quite bluntly told us how our overuse of plastics was pretty much killing our species as much as it was the planet. And yet she did it in a way that wasn't preachy or shaming. She called herself a plastic sinner. And let's face it, we all are. We know we are, but we don't know what to do about it because we go into the supermarket and everything is covered.

0:38We can't all live off-grid. and we can't all wear hemp. But forget the obvious plastics. It's the stuff you can't see, which Sian told us is causing more problems for the human race. Sian is an entrepreneur who previously started a beauty brand, so co-starting Plastic Planet in 2016 was definitely a gear change. But she is pro-business, pro-science and pro-solutions. She's positive and I think you'll enjoy what she has to say.

1:08Welcome to The Midpoint, Sian Sutherland. I'm so thrilled that so quickly after I described in the introduction I saw you speaking at a longevity forum, I've been able to persuade you onto The Midpoint. Thank you. It was all meant to be. I mean, here we are. You're in Soho. I'm in Soho. I know. You were 50 yards down the road, apparently, when I said to you, not when I said to you, but I said where it was. You said, yeah, I'm round the corners. And it did feel like that when I was listening to you that I wanted you to come on and talk to our listeners about the content of your speech the other day.

1:36Because if you say to somebody, oh, I've got somebody coming on who wants to rid the world of plastic, you might think, well, that's going to be quite preachy. Yeah, exactly. And so let's go back, because you are clearly a formidable woman, a persuasive woman. It feels to me like the energy that came from you on the stage. So your business career, you described yourself as a serial entrepreneur. Was it ever thus that you had this kind of passion, whatever you did, that you were able to persuade people to move mountains? I think if there's any red thread that connects all the different businesses I've been involved in as an entrepreneur, it's probably bringing people together and building a team.

2:14And even though most of them have been commercial endeavours, I think it's looking at things as a kind of movement build versus I'm just selling people stuff. And that's never really interested me. it's always been about building communities, building movements. So yes, I am probably the least likely eco-warrior you'll ever have sitting in front of you. And as I was saying the other day, massive plastic sinner. I've been involved in a number of different businesses, but my most recent business, I co-founded and ran a pregnancy skincare brand. And so you can imagine, I have pumped out into the environment millions of plastic bottles without really thinking about what happens to them next.

2:57So what was the eureka moment, the light bulb moment where you decided to take on this enormous challenge? Well, it happened quite organically. But as I was exiting the skincare business, I was asked to advise the Hong Kong board who were making the first documentary feature about the problem of plastic and the ocean. It was a documentary called A Plastic Ocean before Blue Planet 2, before the world had really woken up, thanks to Sir David Attenborough about the problem of plastic. and it was at that moment that I had this this unbelievable you know rapid learning curve and epiphany of realizing what we are doing and we still do every single day but not just to the oceans and everything that lives in the oceans but to the air to the soil and now to our own bodies and as I exited the skincare brand and I was looking at like many entrepreneurs thinking what can I do next can I advise other businesses can I start something else and I couldn't leave the plastic problem alone.

3:57So I wondered if there was a way to create a different kind of organisation, not another charity or NGO. There are many of those and God bless them. But perhaps coming at it from the angle of business because obviously I believe passionately in the power of business to do good. And so we created a Plastic Planet, myself and my co-founder, Frederico Magnusson, to see if we could just ignite and empower the world to turn off the plastic tap. So we are nothing to do with beach cleans. We're nothing to do with waste. I don't see plastic as a waste problem. I don't even see it as a pollution problem.

4:32It's an industry problem. It's a design problem. So that's where we need to focus our attention. Which takes it away then from the kind of blame on the person who's walking outside here now with a plastic bottle. Because for quite a lot of people, there is just no alternative in those moments. I was thinking when you were speaking about, oh God, I used a plastic bottle this morning. And then I started thinking about the news and thinking, well, you see those, you know, during the height of the conflict in Gaza, you saw the huge plastic bottles of water being taken in, which they desperately needed because they had no fresh water.

5:01And you're thinking, how else are they going to get that? And so, you know, you start microing all these problems, don't you, to yourself and thinking about your own life. But you were very clear that this is not our problem. No, it is not your problem, Gabby. It's not my problem, really. It's not the man or the woman on the street's problem. It's been made our problem. We've been made complicit in this problem because now we are aware of the plastic crisis. We've seen the images of plastic waste and the huge dumps in North Africa and Myanmar and Malaysia and our recycling. We've seen that being burnt on the roadsides of Turkish villages.

5:40So we're made complicit in that problem. However, it needs to start at the very design process. We need to rethink the material that we use in the first place. And so my pushback on this is not the guilt that you may feel as an individual, the fact that you used a plastic bottle this morning, but why is it legal to sell you that plastic bottle in the first place? Why has the law, why have governments not caught up with the science of what we know now to be the impact of plastic? Yes, on the environment. Yes, of course, on the marine environment, definitely in the soil. There's up to 37 times as much plastic in our soil.

6:19as there is in our oceans. We rarely talk about that. This is where we're growing the food for our children, the building blocks for their lives. Why is it legal now we know what we know? And now particularly now we know what the impact on human health is. Is it still even legal for us to sell plastic packaging? That was the kind of focus of your speech, which I was so intrigued by. It wasn't about those mountains and icebergs of plastic, which are just horrific to see. It's the plastic that's going inside our bodies all the time and what that is doing to us as a species. And particularly the area that really kind of shocked me was fertility and the links with fertility and where, for example, the quality of male sperm is going and the devastation that could have in a few generations' time on the population of the planet.

7:12Yeah. There's a wonderful doctor who is, I don't say her age, but she's not quite as old as David Attenborough. But she, for decades, has been researching this, and that's Dr. Shanna Swan. And she wrote the book many years ago called Countdown. And Countdown really is looking particularly at fertility and the impact of some of the chemicals in plastic. It's so easy for us to think that plastic is an element, a material in its own right. It isn't. It's a mixture of chemicals. And we add those chemicals to give it its extraordinary qualities, be it rigid or stretchy like cling film. And it's important to say that's half the battle, isn't it?

7:49Because it has got extraordinary qualities. It's a miracle. So in the last 15 years, we've massively ramped up the use of plastic. It's omnipresent in everything. And Shanna Swan has really looked at the impact of the chemicals within plastic particularly. And those are endocrine disrupting chemicals. And your endocrine system, which people are starting to become a little bit more aware of, a little bit like gut health. Nobody talked about gut health and microbiome 10 years ago, and now everybody talks about it. I think the endocrine system, it will be exactly the same. People are waking up to the fact that this is the signaling system of your body.

8:26So it tells your body, it's your hormone system, it tells your body how to act, how to grow, how to live, how to be. So if you disrupt that system, you're disrupting everything, your defense system, everything. And it majorly impacts your fertility. And within plastic, there are 16 ,000 known chemicals. 4 ,000 of those have been tested for the impact on human health. And almost all of those 4 ,000 are known to be harmful to human health. Many are on the European Register of Chemicals of Extreme Concern. So it's kind of crazy that this material that now makes up 70 % of our clothing, nearly everything in your supermarkets, be it food and drink, is wrapped in plastic.

9:10It's really difficult to buy food and drink without it. The second biggest user of plastic is the built environment, the paint on the walls, our carpet, our chairs, everything around us, this table. Everything has plastic elements and therefore plastic chemicals in it. So it's extraordinary that this material that is so untested has escaped all global health regulation in many ways is still as abundant as it is. And Shanna Swan obviously has done a lot of research on that now. And her book countdown records all of her research. And then obviously that's being updated all of the time. And she's been doing some really remarkable studies.

9:51I spoke to her a couple of months ago and she is actually going into people's homes couples who cannot conceive and she is like plastic detoxing their environment to see if she can take some of those chemicals away and to see if it will have an impact on their fertility So that you potentially could reverse the damage that the plastic has done So give us some of those very stark figures that you talked about the other day if you can remember the ones Mel fertility is down 53 % So the health scientists believe by 2043, which is suddenly feeling quite tangible, men will not be able to reproduce in the old fashioned way.

10:30Job done. We are living a handmaid's tale. And it's extraordinary that there is not more alarm about this. And then many people will say to you, yeah, but Gabby, it's because, you know, Sian, it's because women are deciding to have babies later in life, which is absolutely true. Therefore, their fertility may be lower than it was, say, than in their 20s. Same with men. But then you step back and think it isn't just humans that are impacted by these endocrine-disrupting chemicals. It is every living creature on the planet. And snails and fish and mice are not deciding to have a career path and have children later.

11:09And wait a bit later. Yeah, exactly. But they are not reproducing at the same rate. their fertility is also impacted. So some of those slides that I put up the other day of the devastation to the animal and the marine kingdoms I think are really stark. You started, I think, at the very beginning talking about, which really kind of seemed to impact on Kenny, my husband, he mentioned it afterwards, was the windscreen. Yeah. Do you want to tell that? Yeah, just that fact of I can remember as a child my mum, you know, in her old Ford Corsair, Us four kids piled in the back, no seatbelts there. And we would, you know, we'd drive to North Wales for our summer holidays.

11:48And halfway through, she'd have to stop and scrape the bugs off the windscreen. And we'd go down to Dorset often. And I'll go all the way down to Dorset. If I get one splat on my windscreen, I've got the wiper out. Because it doesn't happen anymore. No, I think there's a real kind of moment of intake of breath almost. When most of the people in the room realise they don't wipe with their windscreen. We don't have that buggy windscreen problem anymore. And that is because in Europe alone, we are 75 % down on our winged insect population. And we all talk about bees and the importance of bees. But every single insect has a place in this unbelievably complex and interconnected web of life.

12:31And when we start to take insects out, when we lose insects, when we lose the big fish of the ocean, And all of these things are going to have an enormous impact on the health of our planet. So going back to what I originally said, which was trying to kind of, you know, get myself out of the problem. It's not my fault. And everybody feels like that. I didn't go into the shop and make all the bottles plastic. We do have, you know, ways of everyday mitigating plastic, obviously. And we can try and live a slightly more plastic free life if possible. Some of the harder plastics that we sit on or we, you know, we have at work are going to be impossible almost to remove from our lives.

13:05So your job, your job, your mission is my job. Yeah. Well, we all hope you succeed. Your your mission is, as you say, to go back to to kind of source and ask the questions of governments and organizations of why they're not looking into and using what are actually out there as viable alternatives. So why have you found that they're not doing that? So what I was explaining the other day is that I work at a plastic planet. I look at it in two ways. And one is the cattle prod. So exactly that. How are we going to catalyze industry? How are we going to poke them so that they will move even faster?

13:40Because it's incredibly easy, particularly if you're a brand director or a CEO who's got his own exit strategy in four years' time. Why is he going to disrupt their entire production system that is built on plastic right now? So it is difficult to move a lot of the systems, you know, the manufacturing systems with a large capital expenditure, you know, and decades of investment to switch to new materials. So everybody is kind of treading water right now thinking we're just going to wait for somebody to invent a new kind of plastic that's not going to impact human health. So I really understand as somebody who comes from the world of business how difficult it is.

14:22so that the cattle prod part of our work is obviously looking at what's the achilles heel that is going to prove risk to industry if they don't change fast enough and risk to governments if they don't protect their citizens because that's why we vote them in and that and and the most obvious risk is the human health impact so that's why we do a lot of work on the human health science on giving our plastic health council scientists this global stage giving them a megaphone so that all of us are much more aware of it because what's kind of shocking to me is that this science is a lot of it isn't new and I'm talking to that room of largely educated women who are really interested in their own health and the health of their children and so few people knew and yet everybody will probably know I don't know the cost of a skiing holiday or or school fees or like you know the decline in the property market right now we'll all talk about those things but there is something about climate and i'll put plastic in into that world um that we are may perhaps disempowered or it's just too miserable we don't talk about it nearly enough there are so many problems it feels like and therefore we and and we feel helpless you know what can i do all i do is i go to the supermarket i'm made to feel guilty i put it in a bin i think I hope it's a recycling bin.

15:45I hope something, some mythical, magical recycling fairy is going to do something with it. And every time I see a panorama programme expose of what's actually happening to all our plastic recycling, I feel even worse. So we need to move away from it being this individual problem to being an industry problem. And the catalytic lever of change there is going to be human health impact. But then the lightning rod, which is where I get excited as an entrepreneur, is, of course, and what are we going to use instead? And there are two opportunities there that I see. And one is, why do we have a bin at all?

16:23So we always, you know, I get calls whenever there's a new prime minister saying, oh, apparently we're going to look at recycling and we're going to follow the Germans. and Rishi Sunak is thinking we should have seven bins in our kitchen and we should all segregate at source. And what do you think, Sian? And I have to say, I think you're asking the wrong question. I think we should be saying, why is there any bin? Why have we normalized waste to such a level that we think we have seven bins in our kitchen and then let's imagine they all go into the same incinerator at the end? But why do we think that waste is inevitable?

16:57Why can we not redesign everything at the beginning? and a large part of the answer there is so simple and it is that packaging, which is 40 % of all plastic is made, is just used for packaging, kind of mad. We use an indestructible material designed to last for centuries just to carry something home. So why can we not have a system where we have returnable packaging? So every bottle or jar or carton or anything... You think about the pop, you know, the fizzy pop, We used to have a pot man and the bottles used to go back and it was five pence a bottle if you handed the bottles back. Yes. And I'm not sure what they did with them, but I mean, you'd hand your milk bottles back, wouldn't you?

17:36Well, largely with those bottles, they would wash them and they would reuse them. So many countries, and we're talking about it in the UK and Scotland are a little bit ahead, are looking at something called the deposit return scheme. And that will mean that you take your empties, largely bottles, and you put them into the different holes in the machine and you'll get money for that. The problem with that is it's just a glorified recycling stream. And what I love about the concept of returnables is, imagine a different system where you went to Boots and you picked up your favorite shampoo and it's in, let's say, a stainless steel or an aluminum bottle and it's labeled the brand you love.

18:13There's no refill system here, which is highly inconvenient, messy. You're time poor. You're not going to use a refill system. I don't use a refill system. And I know what I know, so I can't expect anyone else to. But imagine you grab that off the shelf. It's packaging that is asset-tracked to you. So, because packaging can be very smart now. You use your shampoo. When you're done, you can take it back to thousands of different drop-off points. From the charity shop on your high street to Yes Boots, but also Tesco or Sainsbury or anywhere, because you're all part of one system. And that bottle doesn't go into a recycling system.

18:49It goes into a rewash and a redistribution system. So you are using standardised bottles and jars and boxes across competitive brands and retailers. And then all they do is label it. And Scotland is already trying this out? No, because that's the DRS. So that's the end game. Yeah, that's the end game. But really excitingly, the architecture of this, which has been pioneered in the UK, and the people pioneering it, and we're part of the comms team behind this, they have been struggling for five years to get traction. but it is launching, this system is launching, with brands like Unilever, P &G.

19:26But you're still using plastic? No, they're going to be using metal. Right, okay. So these are metal. These are metal containers. Oh, right, okay. That then go into this system. Right, so the plastic, let's imagine a world where the plastic's gone and we're using aluminium or something to keep using those containers. Exactly, but it doesn't have to go into that energy-intensive system of recycling. It's only been used once to give you a shampoo. So why are we not? In beer, the beer industry, you do use exactly that system. They wash out their bottles and they reuse them. In Germany, if you buy mineral water, it's a glass bottle that is standard across many different water brands.

20:06They wash it and they recirculate it and it's labeled at the point of filling. So it's exactly that system, but for many, many different, particularly personal care products. So this is launching in Ottawa in 2026 across 75 different stores, 80 different product lines. And it's P &G and Colgate and Unilever, Mondelez, L 'Oreal. For once, competitive brands all coming together to change the system, not just the material. Well, that's where consumer kind of power can really direct the travel of something like that and push it into the mainstream, isn't it? Yeah. So the one thing that we could all be doing in the UK is saying, hey, why is this in Ottawa?

20:47Because these are global brands. The UK is a massive market. It's a tight geographical market. It's incredible innovation. It's got quite a conscientious consumer. And those kind of logistical systems, because we're a small island, can be set up very economically. So we should all be striving for let's have a returnable bin in our kitchen, not just a recycling bin. Do you think, because I know the kind of theme of your speech the other day seemed to be more on how it's affecting our health rather than how it's affecting the planet. We know the two are interlinked. Yes, one health. It's all one.

21:23Yeah. But the images, clearly the images of, you know, fish with straws inside their throats and turtles with, you know, plastic wrapped around them. That's not been enough, right? And so do you think it's when it really hits home for people when this message comes through that it is destroying our ability to procreate? Yes. Yeah. I think fertility is going to be a big wake up for people. And it was interesting just the other day and I quite often at talks will say anybody in the room who knows somebody who is using IVF to conceive, put your hand up. And every single time the majority of the audience put their hand up.

22:01and it's normalized that people now need IVF in order to conceive. And when I have my kids, who are probably a bit older than yours, I knew one person in the entire world who was using IVF. It just wasn't a thing then. And it's fantastic that IVF exists, but we need to look at it and think, but why is it becoming now? More and more common. Yeah. You know, it's a little bit like I read the other day that there are more C-sections than traditional births. And again, that's a question that we should be, you know, we're medicalizing something that is an entirely natural thing of procreation. So how receptive have government been and governments that you've spoken to in terms of trying to get that message across?

22:54I think you need government. Can you do this outside of government? You do need government because I think you need governments to recognise that for industry to change, they need legislation. And unfortunately, it does come down to banning things. You know, if you went out into London today and you got a takeaway, you would not find a plastic fork in London. Why? Because we ban them. Are we eating with our fingers? No. Because if you give industry certainty, they will innovate. And the problem right now is that particularly in this uncertain climate that we're all in, you know, with Trump in power, not even turning up a cop now, withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, saying that, you know, climate, probably plastic, it's all a hoax.

23:43But when you live in that world, it's very easy for industry to backtrack on every single one of their climate and particularly their plastic pledges. if you legislate then it's a have to not a nice to. Just think about the way we've changed plastic bags. I would never not have a bag full of reusable canvas bags to go to the supermarket. And we never, was it 10 years ago? Has it been that long? Yeah, it has been that long. That you would just expect the supermarket to provide all that plastic for you. And that's changed behaviour, hasn't it? It has changed behaviour. Unfortunately, it hasn't reduced the amount of plastic that we use for bags.

24:20Is that right? I know. I hate to be a Debbie Downer, but we use more plastic now than we ever used in all the billions of those flimsy plastic bags because we make the bag for life. And the bag for life's got plastic in it. And the bag for life largely is that thicker bag. So when you're at the till and you think, oh, I could spring 10p for the flimsy one, but I'll get a bag for life because it's a bag for life. We have on average 57 bags for life in every UK household. I know. And actually, the reality of a bag for life is life is 500 plus years. So King Charles would be using Henry VIII's stash of bags from underneath the sink in Windsor Castle because that's the length of time that plastic is going to exist for us.

25:07It hasn't existed that long even yet. This is another thing that you said the other day. 1907. 1907 it was invented. And that really, that was Bakelite was the very first creation. and it's really only in the last 50 years and then the last 20 years that we've massively accelerated our use of plastic and the reason for that is very simple number one it's an incredible invention and it has facilitated a huge amount for us and to make our lifestyle so hyper convenient and the other the other reason of course is that it's ridiculously cheap and it comes from fossil fuel industry. It's plan B for the fossil fuel industry is the increase in renewables.

25:48Actually, as we can witness now, what are they going to do with all this oil? Well, they're going to double down on plastic. Only yesterday, news came out from China, really good news, that emissions in mobility from China are down 5%, which is a global first. However, emissions in chemicals and plastic production are up 10%. So you can see the direction of travel. And that's why we've got to be hyper alert. And if we do anything as the general public, it's just be aware that this is happening. And the people that are going to be most impacted are ourselves and of course our kids. And that's the other area of deep concern for me is that our babies are now born pre-polluted.

26:33And the fact there is, there is microplastics, nanoplastics, the chemicals of plastic being transmitted to an unborn baby through placenta, through breast milk. The fact that an unborn baby's brain now has plastic in it is really shocking to me because we know so much. People will say, yeah, we don't really know, do we? We don't really know what the impact of plastic is. We do because there's decades of irrefutable peer-reviewed research on this, but industry would rather not hear it. And in terms of the alternatives, this is the area that I'm quite shocked hasn't kind of come along a bit quicker because, you know, it is an opportunity for business, isn't it?

27:14To go and invent something and create something that whether it's from bamboo, I was reading something about bamboo, bamboo plastic the other day, that would be sustainable. Something that has the qualities and the properties of plastic. Certainly when it comes to food protection. Because that's the bit that I find so frustrating when you go to the supermarket and two plums wrapped in plastic. Try living in Japan. Gosh, that sounds euphemistic, doesn't it? Two plums wrapped in plastic. Maybe in your head.

27:46But it does seem such a waste of that material. We're just trying to, as you say, transport it home. My favourite one is the coconut shrink wrapped. in plastic. It's like, wow, who eats the shelf? Mother Nature gave it that thing to protect it. Absolutely. Yeah, and Mother Nature, you know, if we just leave her alone, then the fact that there is microplastics six miles deep in the Mariana Trench and it's in the deep ice of the Antarctic, it's in every lungful of air we breathe in, you know, we're shedding our clothes, we're breathing in our clothes, every glass of water, glass of wine later tonight, all of those things are going to have plastic in them.

28:26We can turn off the tap. We will never clean up the mess because it's invisible to the human eye. So people that talk about let's go and clear up the great garbage patch in the Pacific, I mean, that's like big boy adventure magazine stuff. And it's all wonderful. And of course, we should do whatever we can. But ultimately, Mother Nature is going to fix this. All we can do, all our responsibility is to turn off that tap. So this is where I get excited as an entrepreneur of, so what are the materials of the future going to look like? And many of them are already with us. And when you look at something like cellulose, so cellulose, which that's what bamboo is made from, cellulose, which is the fibrous stuff that will make wood or hemp, miscanthus, which is elephant grass, or a lot of the agricultural waste that you see lying in the field after we've taken the food crop.

29:20then that is the most abundant material on Mother Earth and that is the material that we can borrow from nature to make things that are useful for us but what we have to make sure is that we don't toxify it in the process and many of the materials that we make as man we take from a very natural source and leather is a great example so the skin of an animal is obviously designed to go back into the earth as the nutrient for the next stage of growth because, you know, everything eventually goes back to the earth. There is no waste in nature. But what do we do? We take that skin and we tan it and we treat it with chromium and dyes and heavy metals.

30:02And then we use it as leather. And then when it does go back to nature, as everything does, it goes back as a poison because of everything that we've treated it with. And nature is binary. So what we give back to nature is either a nutrient for the next stage of growth or it is a toxin or a poison. And there is no grey area. There's no less bad because there is no waste. It has to be a nutrient, a healthy nutrient. And when I look at circularity in a lot of people in the world of materials or even the economy, we talk about circularity now. And there is no miracle new thing that we're inventing as man called the circular economy.

30:38It's just called nature. And if we could learn to borrow nutrients, materials, resources from nature, make things with them using cellulose but also using seaweed and algae and plant proteins and all of these amazing abundant materials that nature gives us every single day in vast quantities there is no lack of abundance in nature if we can learn how to make things with them but keep them clean then when they go back to nature they will still be a nutrient state and that is circularity and not only will they be safe for nature but they'll be safe for us So I get really excited in this world of innovation, which is why we built the world's first solutions platform, because you can't make industry feel bad.

31:22You can't back people into a corner with blame and guilt and then not bring them a solution or at least help so that you can catalyze them further into changing. So we built the world's first global solutions platform, which was largely created for the 160 million creators of the world. It was everything, everything, everything in this room here, in this street. Here we are in Dean Street. Everything is designed. Imagine if we could ignite these maverick designers to rethink everything at the beginning. So we launched a platform at the World Economic Forum two years ago. It's hosted on plasticfree.com.

31:57We took the payment wall down earlier this year because we need absolute free access to all of this information, thousands of case studies and proof points and hundreds of materials, so that people can really understand how we can design differently. And through that process, obviously, we've become a magnet for some of the amazing innovation and the new materials that are around today. So much so that we now build what we call plastic free land at some significant events. So things like the Blue Earth Summit, Change Now in March next year, in the middle of the Grand Palais in Palace, 40 ,000 people come.

32:33It's an amazing event. You must come. And we will be building plastic-free land there because it's so important for people to see and feel and touch these materials and realize, oh, so a different way of making stuff is possible. because we're so used to thinking there is only plastic and only plastic will give us the lives and the products and the convenience that we love. And it just isn't true. Sian, your passion and your drive is just incredible and infectious. And it feels like you've found, I'm sure you've enjoyed all the different careers and jobs and businesses that you've run and been involved with.

33:13But does this feel, it feels to me like you've kind of found your reason for being almost. I think you've bit the nail on the head because, yeah, I've loved every career that I've had. And they've been very varied. And of course, they're all connected and they all overlap. And a lot of it is the same kind of business common sense. But it's all built me for this. I know that now. And I have to say, doing this work for the last 10 years, even though it's easy to feel despondent, Is my KPI a reduction in plastic in the world? Of course it is. Have I failed at that? Of course I have. Because we're on track to treble plastic production within the next 20 years.

33:55So we all need to double down and work harder at this and talk about it more and expose the impact on human health, particularly for children, much, much more. But I have met in the last 10 years the most extraordinary, wonderful, amazing people. It has put me in contact with other worlds that for me all overlap. Like why am I also involved with Imperial and the mental health therapy work using psychedelics? I don't know because I don't think we're going to fix this until we fix this. So I find that all of these different experiences in life, as in nature, everything is incredibly connected. It sounds cliche, but it is.

34:38and that wonderful web of people and mission and communication. And I always say I used to sell stuff and now I sell change. It's using all of that skill set from my past of being an entrepreneur and business discipline and ROIs and KPIs, but addressing it to an area that hopefully is going to have more impact than just selling stuff. And in terms of stuff, how much have you changed the way you live your life and how difficult has it been to do that? I mean, you don't live off grid, obviously. I definitely don't live off grid. I definitely don't live plastic free. And people, I've had journalists say, hey, can we come and photograph your fridge, Sian?

35:26I say, why? It's a sea of plastic because it's too hard. You know, if I buy a bag of salad, that bag of salad is going to be made out of plastic. and I am time poor like everybody else and I'm addicted to convenience like everybody else. So I am not one of those incredible people that keep their waist in a jam jar for a full year and I absolutely applaud those people because it's incredibly hard to live your life in a very different way. My mission is how do we impact industry? How do we impact governments? So what's your top tip for individual accountability though? if there's anything that you think people can do.

36:04So a very good friend of my co-founder, Fred, and myself passed away. She died of breast cancer. And it was kind of shocking to me. She's not involved in the plastic fight. But when she went to her oncologist some six, seven years ago, the first thing she was told is, right, take plastic out of your kitchen. So do not cook in plastic. Do not store your food in plastic. and do not freeze your food in plastic. And it really struck me, why do you have to have breast cancer before you are told that? So I think the one thing that you can do is take it out of your kitchen, try and disconnect plastic from your food and drink.

36:50It is not a healthy material. If anybody wants to find out more about that, then I highly recommend going to our website, which is the Food Packaging Forum. So it's an institute based in Zurich. And Dr. Jane Munk, who is amazing, she's one of our Plastic Health Council scientists, and she has spent a decade researching the leakage of micro nanoplastics, but particularly the chemicals, into our food and drink. So that is an entire repository of all the scientific papers of the chemicals and the potential impact on human health. not to scare you because there's nothing worse than just saying oh you know daily mail tea bag give you cancer um what we have to then do is they and this is how we can how we can eat and drink in a slightly different way and it's it's it's just a modicum of change but it's very important that we have those kind of institutes and the pressure that they put on governments constantly because ultimately what we need is not for you to wait to be told by your oncologist to take plastic out of your food and drink, but for governments to mandate supermarkets and brands that it shouldn't be legal to sell it to us in the first place.

38:03Thank you so much. It's been absolutely fascinating and inspiring and slightly worrying, actually. Oh, I hope not, because knowledge is power. It is, it is, but you can't help but have a little bit of the mental process thinking about the future generations and just how much more devastating this is going to be for them if this, as you say, if the tap is not turned off soon. No, and a trebling of plastic none of us can afford. Good luck. Thank you so much, Gabby. Thank you for coming on The Midpoint. Such a pleasure.