Judith Enck: One of the things is we have no choice. We now have all of this evidence. We have no choice but to act, because who’s gonna stand by and let us turn the ocean into a watery landfill? Who’s gonna stand by and read health study after health study about microplastics in our brains and breast milk and testicles? It’s just— not taking action is not an option.

Mike DiGirolamo: Welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. I’m your co-host, Mike DiGirolamo, bringing you weekly conversations with experts, authors, scientists, and activists working on the front lines of conservation, shining a light on some of the most pressing issues facing our planet and holding people in power to account. This podcast is edited on Gadigal land.

Today on the newscast we speak with Judith Enck, the president of Beyond Plastics, an organization of environmental policy and advocacy experts to end plastic pollution everywhere. She’s also the author of the recent book The Problem With Plastic: How We Can Save Ourselves and Our Planet Before It’s Too Late. Judith is also a former regional administrator at the United States Environmental Protection Agency during the Obama administration, and she has significant experience addressing the human health and environmental impacts of plastic waste.

In this conversation, she speaks to me about what she believes are the top priorities for ending or severely curbing plastic pollution and protecting human health. Government interventions top her list. But she explains to me why the UN process for a global plastic treaty may not deliver the effective change society needs in time, and instead urges the High Ambition Coalition of nations to forge ahead with their own plans.

Additionally, she outlines how plastic pollution is so ubiquitous, penetrating the human body—our brains, critical organs, and our blood—how it’s putting our ecosystems at risk, and how and why fossil fuel and plastic-producing lobbyists are still pushing plastics despite these massive human and environmental costs, many of which they have been aware of for decades.

While the situation is serious, Enck outlines reasons for listeners to remain hopeful and, perhaps most importantly, how to take action.

Hi Judith. Welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. It’s a privilege to have you with us.

Judith: I am thrilled to be here. I love Mongabay journalism. Thank you.

Mike: Thank you very much. You’re no stranger to environmental regulation, being a former regional administrator from the US Environmental Protection Agency, and then you founded the organization Beyond Plastics to combat plastic pollution. But you’ve also published widely, expressing concerns that plastics recycling is not viable and likely never will be. Can you explain for our listeners why?

Judith: Sure. So I actually started my little town’s recycling program decades ago, and I want to encourage listeners to keep recycling your paper, cardboard, metal, and glass. Please compost your yard waste and food waste. But we have to recognize that plastic recycling has never worked—never will work. Here’s why.

Plastics are made from 16,000 different chemical additives, many different plastic types called polymers, and many different colors. So unlike, if you’ve got a newspaper, you can recycle that into a new paper product, like a cardboard box. An old aluminum can can be recycled into a new aluminum can. But with plastics, there are too many different polymers, too many different colors, too many different chemical combinations.

So for instance, you might have a bright orange hard plastic soap detergent bottle near your washing machine, and maybe a black plastic takeout food container in your refrigerator, and a plastic bag in your living room. I don’t know why you’d have a plastic bag in your living room, but you might. None of those plastics can be recycled together. Different polymers, different colors, different chemicals.

Now, the people who know this are the companies that make plastic, and yet they have spent millions of dollars all over the globe telling people, “Don’t worry about all your plastics in your life, just toss it in the recycling bin.”

The situation is so serious that in the United States, the California Attorney General, Rob Bonta, sued ExxonMobil. ExxonMobil is the largest plastic producer in the United States. They were sued for deception around plastics recycling and also deception around the industry’s latest false solution, which is called chemical recycling or advanced recycling.

This state lawsuit was filed in the state of California in September 2024. Exxon filed a motion to dismiss. That was not granted by the court. And now Exxon is trying to get this state case moved to federal court, and we’re awaiting a decision on that.

I think it’s a very winnable case because it’s about facts. The nice thing about local recycling coordinators is they keep good records. So if you are the California Assistant Attorney General, you depose the Los Angeles recycling coordinator and say, “How much polystyrene or Styrofoam did you recycle in the last five years?” Good chance they’re gonna say, “Less than 1%.” You then depose the San Diego recycling coordinator: “How many plastic bags have you recycled?” “Less than 1%.” And so it proves the case that all of this high-profile advertising about plastics recycling turns out to be deceptive.

I think people should still recycle soda bottles, milk jugs. It’s a very limited universe. The notion that most plastic can get recycled in your home is just not the case.

Mike: Yeah, and you outline in your new book that plastics producers have known this since the 1970s—that plastic recycling technology wouldn’t actually be able to do this. And you cite that industry executives admitted this openly in about 1974. So can you describe that event, so to speak, and why they forged ahead and pushed plastics recycling anyway?

Judith: There are some whistleblowers who pointed it out, as you say, since the seventies, that we’re out over our skis. We really should not be saying this. This is not true. But I compare it to the tobacco industry. There’s a famous photo or video of tobacco executives raising their right hand in Congress and swearing that there’s no evidence that tobacco products damage public health. It’s quite similar.

The industry knows it. And when I say industry, it’s fossil fuel companies, chemical companies, and big consumer brand companies like McDonald’s or Amazon or Kraft Foods. They all know that most plastics cannot actually get recycled, and yet they tell policymakers and the public just the opposite.

Mike: So it’s well documented now that the chemicals in plastic, some of them are toxic, including PFAS or forever chemicals. And tiny particles of microplastics and nanoplastics are now ubiquitous and present in the human body—that they’ve managed to cross the blood–brain barrier and embed themselves in our critical organs and cells, potentially leaking these toxic chemicals into them. They’ve been found in human fetuses before they’re born. And so this is a big, massive public health issue. But there currently appears to be very little redress for all of us impacted by this.

So I wanted to ask you: Is there any hope of class action suits against fossil fuel companies and plastic producers for knowingly pumping such toxic material into the environment?

Judith: They’re actually doing that. I’m not aware of toxic tort litigation that you’re speaking of. We’ll see what happens in the future. This is the issue that keeps me awake at night.

We know that there are microplastics in our brains, in our heart arteries. They attach to plaque. And a New England Journal of Medicine publication—and that’s the most prestigious medical journal in the United States—found that when microplastics attach to plaque, there’s an increased risk of stroke, heart attack, and premature death.

Microplastics have been found in our blood, in our kidneys, in our lungs, as you mentioned, in the human placenta, both the fetal side and the maternal side, and in breast milk. So our babies are being born pre-polluted. And it’s not just the physicality of the little bits of plastic that we’re breathing in or swallowing.

Microplastics, by the way, are five millimeters or less, the size of a grain of sand. But there’s also nanoplastics, which in some instances can be even more dangerous when they penetrate lungs, circulate in our bloodstream. We do excrete some of it, but not all of it. And this is a major concern.

I honestly think in just a couple years regulators and policymakers around the world are gonna say, “Oh my goodness, the scientists were warning us of these health effects. Why didn’t we do more?” And in particular, “Why didn’t we do more on food and beverage packaging—plastic that touches our food?” And that often gets hot. People should know: never put plastics in the microwave. But also, plastics and food and beverage can get pretty hot when it’s being transported, in trucks and trains and boats. And heat and plastics are not a good combination.

So again, none of us agreed. We didn’t give our consent to have little shards of plastic in our body. And I think in the future there’s probably going to be litigation, but I’m not aware of any today on that particular point. I think the plastics industry would say, “You can’t prove that it’s our plastic in your lung that is causing the problem.” It is death by a thousand cuts—which is a terrible analogy—but there’s so much that we’re exposed to. Unless some really smart scientist can come up with some fingerprinting technology for plastics—

Mike: Thank you for sharing that information. That’s good insight, especially in that last part.

So you emphasize in the book at various points that the most important measure to protect ourselves from plastic is government regulation. But I need to know what kind of government regulation, because the global plastic treaty negotiations virtually collapsed in 2024, and the chair of the UN negotiating committee resigned in October. And they’ve announced another effort to have a third summit scheduled for February 7.

But considering the past failures of these treaty negotiations and the seeming unbending resistance by major plastic-producing petro-states, including the United States, is it time for negotiators to declare the UN environmental treaty process broken and find another route to achieving the goal without international consensus?

Judith: We are never going to have international consensus because plastic companies and fossil fuel companies have an iron grip on so many countries, including the United States, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and others.

I am encouraged that there’s a High Ambition Coalition at the UN negotiations. Last time I checked it was about 168 countries. So you pose a very substantial question. Should the High Ambition Coalition countries that genuinely want to see a reduction in the production of plastics—should they bang their head against the table and stay at the table with the petro-states? Or should they break away and do their own negotiation?

I don’t actively work on the treaty for a couple reasons. One is I don’t think the UN rules of reaching consensus is really going to result in much. Now, not all the treaties operate by consensus, but if you have to reach consensus, there are not enough years in my life to see an outcome that is going to be effective.

However, I do not want to undercut the work that’s being done by really important international environmental groups like the Center for International Environmental Law and IPEN and Greenpeace. I believe they are still recommending staying at the table. And it’s important to recognize that if the environmental community was not at the table, there’s a good chance they would have adopted a really inadequate treaty. So as long as people have the wherewithal and the frequent flyer miles to go to all of these meetings, they should still go.

I think the question is: do you do a parallel process? Do you grab the High Ambition Coalition countries and try to reach an agreement on reduction? And then you look at the United States, for instance. While Donald Trump is president over the next three years, we’re not going to see the United States play a helpful role.

But how about involving subnational bodies? How about the state of New York, the state of California, the state of Oregon, the state of Massachusetts—cities? If I had a million more hours in my week, that’s what I would work on. I would forget the Trump administration and get states and cities to engage with the High Ambition Coalition.

And it’s not gonna be the whole world, but it’s a lot of countries. Maybe they can come together and agree to a binding agreement. It wouldn’t have the imprint of the United Nations, but I believe this actually happened with landmines about 15 years ago, when countries just couldn’t reach agreement. Canada said, “We’re giving up. This is not gonna lead to anything. Come to Ottawa, the capital of Canada, if you’re really serious about dealing with landmines.” And my understanding is that in about a week they reached a written agreement.

So I think the UN negotiators need to think outside the box, and they need to recognize that the Trump administration does not represent the whole of the United States in terms of what you can and can’t do on plastics.

Mike: So with plastic waste growing astronomically, the Global North continues to try to export its waste problem to the Global South, which often lacks the technology, the funding, or the facilities to dispose of it. So do you see the Basel Convention on the control of transboundary movements of hazardous wastes as a means to making each signatory nation become responsible for its own plastic waste?

Judith: Absolutely. It’s immoral what the United States and parts of Europe are doing, exporting massive amounts of plastic waste to Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam. And then in Europe, for some odd reason, Turkey is receiving a lot of plastic waste.

And what happens is, when it arrives, waste pickers—people who are struggling economically in those nations—are pulling out some of the number one and number two plastic where it might get recycled, but the majority of the plastic is just open-burned, or it gets into a river, or it goes to a landfill. And it is not good for health, not good for the environment, not good for water quality.

And I also think it’s time that the big shipping companies like Maersk—how do you say that? M-A-E-R-S-K.

Mike: Maersk, I think.

Judith: Yeah. They should stop being in the business of shipping waste plastic to countries that don’t have the proper infrastructure to accept it. And when I say proper infrastructure, I don’t mean burning it at incinerators or cement kilns.

There was an effort maybe three years ago to get some of the big shipping companies to recognize that this is a real problem. And I think we’ll probably have more luck with the shipping companies than the receiving countries.

Mike: On that note about burning, there’s a thing called refuse-derived fuel, or RDF. It’s the bailing of waste wood, cardboard, and textiles together with up to 50% plastic and then burning it as fuel in waste-to-energy incinerators. And it’s booming as an approach to disposing of plastic waste. But like the advanced recycling critics say, it’s just another way of burning plastic. So can you talk about the public health risks posed by burning plastic using these and other approaches?

Judith: Sure. I happen to have a fair amount of experience with refuse-derived fuel, RDF, because there was an RDF plant in Albany, New York, where I was living at the time. They would pelletize mixed municipal solid waste at a landfill and then truck it down to the RDF plant in a heavily populated minority community in downtown Albany.

And it really did tremendous health damage to the people living near these facilities, including serious cases of lead poisoning, and significant private litigation against the state of New York, who was the owner-operator of the facility. I do recall families with young children who were lead-poisoned living near these facilities.

Due to community concerns, the RDF plant, which was known as the Albany ANSWERS Plant, was shut down years before they planned to shut it down. There’s a lot of good reporting in the Albany Times Union newspaper on this.

It’s a type of burning. It will create air pollution. When you burn even small amounts of plastic, you get dioxin that is formed—the most toxic chemical known to science.

It’s expensive, also, RDF and mass incineration in general, or waste-to-energy, or whatever you call it—it’s a different name in a different country every decade, it seems—doesn’t eliminate the need for landfills. It just means you have to dispose less in the landfill because you have ash. So you have bottom ash and you have fly ash.

The fly ash is from the fabric filters or the electrostatic precipitators on the top of the smokestack. That’s where the toxins will concentrate, because you don’t want the mercury and all the lead and all the cadmium going out into the atmosphere. It doesn’t get destroyed during burning. So it’s captured by the air pollution devices. And then it’s fly ash.

And what many countries allow is mixing the bottom ash with the fly ash, so it’s a little bit diluted, but it still has to be landfilled and still poses a real environmental risk.

So I would strongly advise communities not to invest in refuse-derived fuel. It’s not new. It’s been around for probably 50 years and it has not worked well, and the technology has not really improved since then.

Mike: Hello listeners, and welcome to the 2026 season of the Mongabay Newscast. If you’re a returning listener, welcome back. And if this is your first time joining, welcome to the show. We encourage you to peruse our previous episodes and subscribe.

If you enjoyed listening to us in 2025, we still would love to hear your feedback. Our podcast survey is live and accepting submissions. You can find it in the links of the show notes of this episode, so please feel free to share your thoughts. But if you want to support us further, I’d like to encourage you to become a donor to the show. We’re a nonprofit news outlet, and donations are how we are able to bring you these conversations. Go to patreon.com/mongabay if you’d like to support us. Even a dollar per month makes a big difference. That’s all for now. Happy New Year, and back to the conversation with Judith Enck.

So in chapter seven of your book, you examine the actual policies that could really make a difference, and these include things like packaging reduction laws, extended producer responsibility, reuse and refill systems, procurement policies, and bans.

Of these policies, is there a top priority you think governments should implement right now to really make a difference on plastic pollution?

Judith: Forty percent of plastic is single-use plastic packaging. So I would start with packaging, particularly because that’s what our food and beverage is packaged in.

So I would do a comprehensive extended producer responsibility bill, but not your grandmother’s extended producer responsibility policy, because we’ve had that in Europe and Canada and it doesn’t really reduce packaging.

So what extended producer responsibility is traditionally is: you put a fee on packaging and then that new revenue is used to improve local recycling programs. Okay? It’s a new revenue source for local governments. But it doesn’t work for plastics because, in the United States, only five to six percent of plastics is actually recycled, and it’s not much higher around the world.

So instead, I believe you should do a packaging law that requires a 50% reduction in packaging over 10 years. And one thing—over 10 years, not 50 years—50% reduction over 10 years.

And what I learned as a former federal regulator is: you don’t do these long-term aspirational goals like “by 2050” or “2060.” You do it in two-year chunks. Then you can see: are you getting your environmental policy goal? And if not, how do you course correct?

So: a 10% reduction in packaging over two years, a 20% reduction over four years, 40% reduction over six years, and you eventually get to your goal.

The second key provision is to get the most toxic chemicals out of packaging, specifically PFAS or forever chemicals still used in plastics. All the heavy metals are a concern: lead, mercury, cadmium. Formaldehyde is used in packaging.

Third key provision is: do not allow chemical recycling or advanced recycling to count as real recycling.

Fourth key provision is—at least in the United States—the state environmental agencies are saying they don’t want to run the program. So what’s happening around the world is the industry is running the program through something called a producer responsibility organization. I don’t love it, but if you have to go with that, create a new office of inspector general so they’re looking over the shoulder.

And then finally, you can put a fee on packaging, but have the money not only go to local recycling programs, but also to fund waste reduction, reuse, refill. We need money to build the reuse-refill infrastructure.

What I mean by that is: if you go to the airport, there’s a good chance you can refill your metal water bottle at a water refill station. We need water refill stations or water fountains at bus stations, at train stations, in public buildings, public parks—not just the airport.

When children go to school, they’re often served lunch on single-use plastic plates, eating with plastic utensils, drinking out of plastic cups. How about investing in real dishes and dishwashing equipment? So our children eat off of real dishes, not plastic dishes.

The wine industry is growing in parts of the world. In the US they’re spending 80 to 90 cents for every wine bottle. The wineries are interested in refillable glass wine bottles, but they need commercial bottle-washing operations so you can clean and sanitize the glass bottles. You can do the same thing with soda. You can do the same thing with milk.

But right now, the companies that produce so much of this waste have no skin in the game in terms of fixing the problem. They just sell us the products and the packaging, and then it’s up to taxpayers to pay to get rid of it all.

And even if you’re recycling, recycling is expensive to collect, process, get to the recycling facility. It’s much better than bury and burn, but it costs money.

So I would start with a robust, modern extended producer responsibility law. Second, I would do mandatory beverage deposits or returnable containers.

In the US, 10 states have refundable deposit laws known as bottle bills—very common all over the world. It’s pretty simple. It works. You want to have an incentive for refillable containers.

I would also ban polystyrene food packaging. Polystyrene is made from styrene, a known human carcinogen.

I would stop the intentional release of balloons into the atmosphere. The balloons go up, the plastic comes down.

When it comes to straws: skip the straw. You don’t automatically get the straw unless you ask for it.

There are a lot of policy options. But what happens is, even when you propose the most modest legislation at the local or state level, you’re met by an army of industry lobbyists who oppose this change.

I happen to do a fair amount of work in the New York State legislature in Albany, where a very good packaging reduction bill is pending. The last legislative session, there were 106 registered business lobbyists opposing the bill and only 24 in support. So we were outnumbered four to one. And these were not little mom-and-pop companies. These were companies like Exxon and Amazon and McDonald’s.

I’ve never seen so many lobbyists out in force opposing a bill that would really benefit our health, our environment, save tax dollars.

The bill did pass in the New York State Senate two years in a row. It’s now on the Assembly floor. We’re coming back strong in January to try to pass it and convince New York Governor Kathy Hochul to sign the most sweeping packaging reduction law in the nation.

Mike: So you’ve just listed a lot of really great policy suggestions, but you also mention there are a few measures people can take individually in their daily lives to limit their exposure to plastics. Can you explain what those are?

Judith: Yeah, it’s really important. So the book, The Problem With Plastic: How We Can Save Ourselves and Our Planet Before It’s Too Late, definitely leans in on policy options, including providing model legislation that can be used around the world. But we have to recognize that change is not gonna happen overnight, and it’s in our own health interest to reduce our exposure to plastics.

We have a chapter on 10 things you can do to reduce your use of plastic. We also have a household waste audit where you can go through what is in your own home and see what you can do to reduce your use of plastic.

So our 10 items are incredibly practical. You can bring your own reusable shopping bag to the store, including your own little produce bags. It’s not just your bags at checkout.

If you can access a food co-op, you can buy in bulk. You can bring your own glass jars and refill them.

Carry a reusable water bottle. Not only does that reduce your exposure to microplastics, but you’re gonna save a lot of money. I find it astonishing that one plastic water bottle can often cost a significant amount of money. So even if you’re just cheap, you should carry your own reusable water bottle.

Carry your own cutlery. I have not used plastic utensils in years. I just have this cute little kit in my purse, which is bamboo—fork and spoon.

Unless you’ve got a physical problem with your jaw, say no to plastic straws.

If you drink a lot of coffee or tea, bring your own reusable mug or container to the store.

Pack your lunch in reusable containers. Also, if I go out to dinner or lunch with friends and there’s a little bit leftover, I just get in the habit of bringing a little stainless steel tiffin to put my leftovers in there.

It becomes second nature once you start doing it. And then you climb the ladder and you get your friends and family to do it.

And when I say “climb the ladder,” let me explain, because people think, “What is she talking about? Climbing? Where’s the ladder?” What I mean is: you make some of these changes in your own life, and they’re not impossible. What I just ticked off is pretty easy.

What is hard is when you’re in a supermarket and your choice has been taken away from you, and you can only get certain items in plastic—which is why we need to change the law.

But reduce plastic in your own life, and your kids’ life, and your grandkids’ life—especially if you are pregnant or thinking of getting pregnant. There’s a lot of concern with reproductive toxins.

You make some changes in your own life, and then you look at your kid’s school. Then you look at your faith institution—your church, your synagogue, your mosque. You look at any civic organization that you work with. How can you reduce the use of plastic? Your business, your workplace?

Then before you know it, you’re at a city council meeting saying, “I have a model bill from this cool new book. Why aren’t we doing this in our city or our county?”

And then you go to the next level of government—your state or territorial government.

You can’t do it alone. So find an environmental group or a medical organization or a civic organization that’s interested in this. Team up with them and start working on policy reform.

The bad news is: you cannot shop your way out of this problem. You are going to be exposed to plastics even if you’re super cautious, and you want to be particularly cautious with your kids.

So do what you can in your personal life. There is a woman who is a zero-waste chef and she says, “We don’t need a small number of people doing zero waste perfectly. We need a large number of people doing zero waste imperfectly.” And that applies to plastic.

And also, do not feel guilty if you are not successful in getting rid of most plastic in your life. It’s not easy. It’s not easy when you’re traveling. It’s not easy when you’re visiting relatives. It is a good idea to start arguing with your relatives, though, if they’re serving you a lot of bad food on plastic. But you do the best you can because none of us voted for more plastic, but here we are.

Mike: Yeah. I can definitely empathize with the difficulty of trying to limit my plastic exposure and having very limited options to do it.

We’ve talked a lot about human health and public health, and that is all extremely important. But I do think we should dedicate a bit of time to discussing the environmental impact to wildlife. And to do that, I think the context of oceans and marine life is really important, because about two garbage trucks full of plastic enter the ocean every single minute. And this is coming at immense environmental cost.

There’s evidence that microplastics are impacting phytoplankton, which are vital to marine food chains, making atmospheric oxygen and storing huge amounts of carbon. Judith, can you describe the potential cost to marine life and, ergo, our life? What do we know—and crucially, what do we not know that we should be concerned about here?

Judith: This is very serious. And the way plastic gets into the ocean is: most of it is from the land. You’re walking down a street and a plastic food wrapper gets away from you, or a plastic bag gets into a storm sewer. When it rains, then it gets into a stream, then a river, and then the ocean.

Once it’s out in the ocean, it’s exposed to sunlight. It often gets brittle. And then the wave action in the ocean will turn one plastic water bottle into hundreds of little bits—little pieces of plastic—and that is building up in the marine environment.

Remember, the oceans cover about 71% of the Earth’s surface, and today we are turning the ocean into a watery landfill. The microplastics are being eaten by fish, by seabirds, by sea turtles.

Microplastics are showing up in fish that are sold commercially to you and I, and it’s getting worse. So that’s why we have to really look upstream: how do we reduce the production of plastic? So when someone—even innocently—lets a plastic bag get away from them when they’re walking down the street, it doesn’t wind up in the ocean, and it doesn’t wind up sacrificing the quality of marine life.

And remember, for a large number of people, the ocean is their main source of protein. So you do not want microplastics building up in fish that people eat.

We already know that it’s found in drinking water. Microplastics are found in honey, in beer—thankfully not yet wine. That’s when we’re gonna have to pack it in if we see microplastics in wine.

But this is pretty serious. Again, I’m coming back to human health, but ecologically, this is a very serious threat.

It affects coral reefs. Coral reefs are the nurseries for fisheries, and coral is so stressed. We see more bleaching. We see the warming ocean affecting coral.

When I served in the Obama administration at EPA, I had the best region. I was a regional administrator for New York, eight Indian nations in New York, New Jersey, but also Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. So I got to confer with coral reef experts, and they too are concerned about plastic pollution in the ocean.

Mike: We’ve talked about some heavy and depressing subjects, but in chapter eight you outline reasons to be hopeful for change. I was wondering if you could tell us: what are some of the reasons you would like our listeners to know about?

Judith: One of the things is we have no choice. We now have all of this evidence. We have no choice but to act, because who’s gonna stand by and let us turn the ocean into a watery landfill? Who’s gonna stand by and read health study after health study about microplastics in our brains and breast milk and testicles? Not taking action is not an option.

Here’s what is interesting: 50% of all plastics were created in the last 18 years. I remember 18 years ago. So this is a modern problem that we can tackle.

Most plastic ever produced—unless it was burned—is still with us today, because it does not degrade.

And in the book we profile people who are really taking on this issue in a significant way and getting results. So on page 150 it starts with “Listen to Women for a Change,” because it’s mostly women who are leading the charge, which I find interesting.

Women like Debbie Lee Cohen, who got the New York City public school system—the largest in the United States—to stop using polystyrene food trays when her two little girls were going to school. Sadly, we lost Debbie Lee Cohen last summer to cancer.

Women like Diane Wilson, a fourth-generation shrimp boat captain from Texas who took on Formosa Plastics for their plastic pollution in the San Antonio Estuary. She sued Formosa and won the largest Clean Water Act citizen suit in the history of the Clean Water Act.

My friend Sharon Lavigne, who is with RISE St. James in St. James Parish, Louisiana—she lives in Cancer Alley. This is a stretch of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans where there’s a real concentration of plastic production facilities. Sharon Lavigne is also standing up to Formosa Plastics.

Winona LaDuke. Suzette Mullen, my colleague. Dr. Shanna Swan, who is a brilliant and savvy scientist who looks at the reproductive toxin impact of plastic.

Annie Leonard, former executive director of Greenpeace USA, who started this feisty little group called Story of Stuff. And they published this amazing movie I highly recommend everyone watch called The Story of Plastic. It won an Emmy award. It shows the international waste trade of plastic and also the damage in Cancer Alley.

I don’t think the general public knows how much work is being done at the local level to address the plastic pollution problem—and people are winning at the local level.

It’s really hard to get progress in Washington, DC these days. The UN plastic treaty has been a disappointment. But there is stuff happening at the local and state level. Don’t tell anyone, because we are making progress. And we don’t have a lot of time.

You pass a plastic bag ban in your city, you are reducing demand and the damage in the communities where plastic is produced.

So I don’t want to be Pollyanna about this. It’s a serious problem. But people are waking up to it and they’re taking action—mostly women.

Mike: Judith, is there anything that we haven’t discussed that you would like our listeners to know before we end the interview?

Judith: There’s one final thing, and that is the impact on climate change.

Plastics historically were made from oil and chemicals. Now plastics are made from 16,000 different chemicals and ethane, which is a byproduct of hydrofracking.

What we’re seeing is the big fossil fuel companies are recognizing that there is less demand for their fossil fuels for electricity generation because we’re finally making some progress on clean renewables. Not enough, but we’re seeing significant investment in solar, wind, geothermal, small-scale hydro. Most new electricity-generating projects are renewables, which is really encouraging.

But if you are ExxonMobil or Shell, you’re like, “Holy ghost, what’s happening to my market?” The other big market for fossil fuel is transportation. And a lot of people are buying electric cars. A lot of local governments are buying electric buses. We’re even seeing electric trucks, although not a lot. That’s important to reduce diesel emissions and all the particulate pollution.

So again, the fossil fuel companies see that they’re losing market share. So plastics is Plan B for the fossil fuel industry.

We did a report at Beyond Plastics about two years ago, and it’s on our website. Folks can go to beyondplastics.org. In October 2022 we issued a report, The New Coal: Plastics and Climate Change, because I wanted to look at what are the greenhouse gas emissions when you produce, use, and dispose of plastics.

And what we found was: as of 2020, the US plastics industry was responsible for at least 232 million tons of greenhouse gases every year. To put that in context, that’s about the same emissions from 116 coal-fired power plants.

So as we’re working to shut down coal-fired power plants, we’re replacing those greenhouse gas emissions from plastic production, use, and disposal.

So the climate change connection on plastic is significant. And I know that people working on climate change are really stretched and really busy, but we need to make that plastic–climate change connection better understood with policymakers and the public.

Mike: Judith, where would you like to direct listeners to learn more about your work and possibly get a copy of your book?

Judith: Go to beyondplastics.org. That’s plural: beyondplastics.org.

And you can get my new book anywhere. It’s called The Problem With Plastic. It’s published by The New Press. It’s in bookstores everywhere. It’s wherever you buy your books. I want to encourage people to buy it from independent bookstores, but it is available on Amazon.

And Amazon actually selected the book as one of its top eight nonfiction books in the month of December, which suggests to me they haven’t read the book. But wherever people buy books, please buy the book, and buy one for your library.

And if you’re feeling really generous, buy one for your elected official. Ask them to read it and then discuss it with you.

Mike: Judith, thank you so much for joining me today. It’s been a pleasure speaking with you.

Judith: Thank you. Great to be with you.

Mike: If you want to learn more about Beyond Plastics or purchase a copy of The Problem With Plastic, please see the links in the show notes.

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