Look around you: at this very moment, chances are that within a one-foot radius of your body, there’s something plastic. The ubiquity of plastic comes with a steep cost, however. This week on Sea Change Radio, the first half of our two-part discussion with Matt Simon, a Wired staff writer and author of A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies. In this episode, we learn about the history of plastic manufacturing, look at some unexpected ways that we’re exposed to microplastics, and examine how plastic recycling falls well-short of its promise.

Narrator | 00:02 - This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I'm Alex Wise.

Matt Simon (MS) | 00:17 - We need just a fundamental renegotiation with our relationship with plastic.

Narrator | 00:25 - Look around you: at this very moment, chances are that within a one-foot radius of your body, there’s something plastic. The ubiquity of plastic comes with a steep cost, however. This week on Sea Change Radio, the first half of our two-part discussion with Matt Simon, a Wired staff writer and author of “A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies.” In this episode, we learn about the history of plastic manufacturing, look at some unexpected ways that we’re exposed to microplastics, and examine how plastic recycling falls well-short of its promise.

Alex Wise (AW) | 01:30 - I'm joined now on Sea Change Radio by Matt Simon. He's a senior staff writer at Wired Magazine, and his most recent book is “A Poison Like No Other.” Matt, welcome to Sea Change Radio,

Matt Simon (MS) | 01:41 - And thank you for having me.

Alex Wise (AW) | 01:43 - So, your most recent book, as I just mentioned, is, is entitled A Poison Like No Other. It focuses on microplastics. You wrote a piece for Wired recently highlighting a study that showed that microplastics are a real problem in the recycling process. Why don't you explain, first of all, how much our plastic recycling system is failing us.

MS | 02:09 - It is, unfortunately failing us on a number of different levels. So, the promise all along this is a promise pitched by the plastics industry itself, was that if we're able to continuously recycle these plastic products, that we could keep these, these materials in circulation. The subtext of that being, well, if that were the case, we wouldn't need to produce any more plastic, right? So why would a plastics industry want us to do something that would decrease their, their bottom line? So all along reporting has come out. NPR did a piece about this a couple years ago, that that found that the plastics industry pitched recycling as a way to shunt the responsibility for plastics pollution to the public. So, it's your fault and my fault that we're not recycling bottles in bags enough, and they're escaping into the environment and, and that onus is on us. But all along the plastics industry knew that the economics of recycling just didn't add up. It is much, much cheaper to just keep producing virgin plastics, largely because the price of fossil fuels are still very low. 99% of plastics still being made out of, of fossil fuels. So this study that you mentioned, came out, I believe last year, was really a one of the first quantifications of this thing that we didn't consider in plastics recycling, is that another angle into this, which is as the plastic is, is processed in this facility, it's chewed up, shredded, washed multiple times, that wash water is then flushed out into the environment so when that stuff is all chewed up, it produces lots and lots of microplastic and nanoplastic microplastic typically being defined as something that's smaller than five millimeters, nanoplastics typically being smaller than a millionth of a meter. So that effluent is spewing into the environment. And this, this study quantified that it's something on the order of 6.5 million pounds of microplastic coming out of a single re...