The Plastic Crisis Isn't On You, Actually

Quinn: [00:00:00] Plastic. It is the miracle material that has quietly become the infrastructure of modern life over the past 63 years and the almost undefeated business model that's continuing climate change and keeping fossil fuel companies alive and reshaping our bodies, our oceans, and our politics. Yeah, plastic keeps food fresh and hospitals running and cars and planes lighter, and it's also in the air we breathe, the water we drink and the supply chains that keep churning out more of it while they tell us recycling will handle it. Meanwhile, cities and states are actually trying to reign it in. Companies are pledging circularity and regular people are left staring at their blue bin thinking, does this matter? Does any this work?

So what can I do about plastic? Every week, thousands of people ask us the most important question in the world. What can I do? So every week I turn around and ask someone who actually knows what the hell they're talking about the very same question, [00:01:00] in this case, that is Beth Gardiner, she's a journalist and author and she's here to talk about her new book, Plastic Inc. Beth pulls back the curtain on how plastic became so pervasive, why the personal responsibility story has been so convenient for yet another industry, and what the real solutions actually look like. 'cause obviously that's why we're here. For packaging, product design, corporate accountability policy that actually reduces the stuff at the source.

So stick with us because at the end of this conversation, what can I do? Won't feel like a shrug. It'll feel like a plan.

Beth Gardiner, welcome back to the show.

Beth Gardiner: Hi, Quinn. So great to be with you. Thanks for having me again.

Quinn: You're welcome. I looked it up. It was six years ago the last time we talked.

Beth Gardiner: 2019, my book came out. 2020 was probably when we spoke. Yes.

Quinn: Yeah. Yeah. Nothing eventful has happened.

Beth Gardiner: No, not at all.

Quinn: Yeah.

Beth Gardiner: Very stable global environment.

Quinn: Totally.

Beth Gardiner: Yeah, it's really comforting. [00:02:00]

Quinn: I usually, immediately, these days I probably, since we last spoke, I found these questions that are sort of meaningful to me and to our audience, and the name of the show is a little different because of that. I think it's kind of been the point all along, but I honed in on it now it makes sense. Before I ask you to answer the question, I wanna provide a little context. What I love about your journalism in general, much like, what Amy Westervelt does with Drilled.

Beth Gardiner: I'm flattered already by the comparison. She’s one of my heroes.

Quinn: She's incredible. Your last book Choked to this one. You seem to have exclusively chosen to cover things that make me furious, which I really appreciate. We seem to share. Thank you. And Amy as well. This operating principle, which is like, you get part of the way into the book and you're like, I fucking knew it. I knew it. So my standard question is this. Why do you have to do this work? [00:03:00] Why do you have to do this work? Why do you keep coming back to these things?

Beth Gardiner: I mean, that's such a good question. And about the infuriating thing, like I take that as such a compliment because I don't know, I don't know if you've read the incredible book Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keef about the Sackler family. Yeah. And I read a review of that somewhere and I can't remember if it was like a published review or just somebody's like comment on Amazon or whatever.

Quinn: Yeah.

Beth Gardiner: That said, on every page of this book, I gasped and said they fucking did what?

Quinn: Right, right. Every time you’re just like these motherfuckers.

Beth Gardiner: Right, when I was writing this, that was like what I was trying to convey to the reader. Perfect. Because that's what I was experiencing as I was reporting.

And learning about it. I mean, listen, I've been doing environmental journalism, environmental writing for quite a few years now. It's challenging in a lot of ways because people always say environment stories are hard to engage with. They can get really dull, [00:04:00] right? You can get lost really quickly in sort of the scientific weeds or the regulatory, legal, there's a lot of like detail and there's always this issue that the subject is people care, but it's really daunting and it's really upsetting and we feel powerless and it's hard to read about it.

Right. And I totally get that. But at the same time as a journalist, like what story is actually more, well, there's so many important stories. So it's probably not really the right way to think about it anymore, but sort of generationally like, you know, in the long span of millennia, like climate change is just, it is actually still the biggest story even in the face of everything that's going on with our democracy and the rise of fascism and all of that.

Although they are deeply interconnected, it's the biggest story there is, and then there's so many different ways you can cover it, right? There's so many journalists out there. You know, Elizabeth Colbert is one of my huge, like climate journalism heroes. She's, I would say, by and large, [00:05:00] looking more at sort of the impacts, like what's happening out in the world, in nature, in all these different ecosystems that we can see.

There's so many different ways to like look at this story because it's such a big story. To me, I'm interested in like the cause, like who is causing this? Like what is driving this? That's like you said, that's what Amy Westervelt has been like leading the way on in such a big way, this kind of climate accountability reporting. And then the other thing that's so hard about climate reporting is how do you break it down and find a piece that you can like do something meaningful on that hasn't been written about already by so many amazing other journalists and authors? So with Choked, my first book about air pollution, I really felt like this is such an important story on its own actually, even if it was not even related to climate.

It is, it is not getting quite enough attention. It's not getting the coverage that it's really due [00:06:00] given, you know, the number of people that it kills and sickens every year. And similarly with this book, with Plastic Inc, I kind of felt like as an environmental journalist, and a lot of people I think had sort of thought of climate change and plastic pollution as being these sort of two separate problems, like kind of both super distressing and upsetting.

Climate change may be more existential, but we are all sort of horrified by these pictures you see of, you know, beaches covered with trash and a turtle with a straw. They're not, you know, whatever. It's horrifying. But I sort of thought of them as separate. Then I kind of came to understand that they actually are really interconnected and in fact the biggest way, there's a lot of ways they're interconnected, but the biggest way they're interconnected is that it’s the same companies. It's the Exxon Mobils and the Shells and the Saudi Aramcos who are, you know, keeping us hooked on oil all these decades and denying the science and all of that, delaying, foot [00:07:00] dragging. And they're also the ones who are making plastic. And while we are, you know, you and I are kind of taking our little bags to the grocery store and personally, I like kick myself when I forget my bag and I have to take a disposable bag.

Quinn: Right, because shame on you, Beth. Shame on you.

Beth Gardiner: Exactly. So, you know, I'm more about like, who's driving this problem? Like who, 'cause you need to answer that question before you can start to fix it.

Quinn: We, for a long time, used this tagline of science for people who give a shit and people could sort of self-identify with that pretty quickly.

Science isn't everything. Everyone became an amateur scientist, for better or worse, through COVID and all these other things. So it's more like for, and we started involving ourselves more in like civil rights all, yeah. All that stuff. More for people who give a shit. Eventually, if you do this job long enough, like your journalism, and obviously ours doesn't go nearly as deep, but a broader, nuanced way and whatever. It's about will. Like there's very little like[00:08:00] innovation required to change what we need to do. So much of it's the choices we make.

Beth Gardiner: Yeah. Yeah.

Quinn: And you open the book with a quote: The future of plastics is the trash can.

Beth Gardiner: Right.

Quinn: Which is from 1963. And they talked about this gentleman Lloyd, and I'm gonna mispronounce his name 'cause it looks like the stuffing recipe to me.

Lloyd Stuffer. He said the industry needed to concentrate on single use to transform a one shot market for a few thousand units into an everyday recurring market measured by the billions of units, which also sounds a lot like the pharmaceutical industry. Here's where that balances out. 'cause I do wanna set the record, right? We have developed incredible drugs, right? Things that can, I mean, besides the vaccines, we're just deciding not to do anymore. But these daily drugs, these lifetime drugs, we now have a malaria vaccine, which we've also kind of decided not to do, all these different things. We've made incredible innovations. Plastic's incredible, right? It's made cars lighter. It's made [00:09:00] planes, leather, food storage. It's solved all these different things. Medicine.

Beth Gardiner: Yeah.

Quinn: They would love for you to stop right there. Right. Because the pharmaceutical industry would also love to really not have us focus on prevention and wellness. And know that most of the drugs are treating things that we could just deal with.

Beth Gardiner: Yeah.

Quinn: You describe here digging deeper, right. To this decades long project to teach us how to throw things away.

Beth Gardiner: Yeah.

Quinn: Tell me about when you first ran into that quote and you said you used to consider 'em as two different things, but I feel like through all your journalism you must have had an inkling of like, God dammit, I bet these are related and that, did that seal it for you?

Beth Gardiner: Yeah. Like plastic comes from oil and gas, right? Like I knew that, but I just didn't uderstand. I think, you know, we look around us, right? And we just see plastic everywhere. It's part of, you know, every part of our lives, right? From the moment you sort of like put on your glasses in the morning or go to the supermarket, right?

Quinn: Yeah.

Beth Gardiner: Open your [00:10:00] refrigerator and we're sometimes distressed about it. All the stuff we throw away, the single use, the takeout boxes and all that, but it's like we don't really kind of know exactly how we got here. And I think, yes, sure. I did have an inkling that they were related. But I think to me what was so shocking was exactly that quote that you mentioned.

You know, I've never heard his name pronounced, but I guess I, in my head I always think of it as Stuffer, Lloyd Stuffer, was like a plastic industry guy, and he spoke at a couple of conferences, I think in New York to plastic industry people in the sort of days when they were really, in the early kind of years of trying to get this material out into the world and to become the sort of fundamental part of our daily infrastructure that it is now. I think what shocked me so much was the deliberateness of the way that this system was created. Right? And like you say, plastic is miraculous. There are so many incredible uses for [00:11:00] it, but the industry, not only do they want you to stop there, but I mean they are constantly pushing that idea, right?

It's part of the sort of mechanisms of greenwash that they are so adept at kind of confusing us with and muddying the waters, you know, that's something that you hear all the time. Right? If you ask a petrochemical company, an oil company about plastic waste problems is, you know, plastic is essential.

It lightweights cars. It's used to make solar panels, you know, we want it in our, you know, sterile gloves and syringes, right? And of course, like all those things are true. It has a lot of valuable uses. Like I'm not saying in this book we should stop using any plastic. But there is so much just like ridiculous waste.

And the example that I used in the book, which a few people who've looked at it already like really resonated with them. 'cause several people have mentioned it, is one time I was at the beach and I was [00:12:00] getting an ice cream cone, and it came with like a little, I've only really seen this that one time, but like a little drip catcher at the bottom.

It was like a little plastic thing that went on the bottom of the cone. And it's like. That is not necessary. Like yes, if I go to the hospital, like I would like to have plastic, sterile, single use, you know, IV or whatever, right?

Quinn: Of course. Yeah. Because we know what it used to be, which is like we had ones that weren't plastic. Also, we didn't fucking wash 'em like it was not great.

Beth Gardiner: Right, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. No, and you know, but we don't have to go back to that if we want to like not have the ice cream cone drip catcher, and the throwaway forks and all this like crap that never gets used, right? So there's so much deception in even like what they emphasize and what they talk about. But you know, to go back to the idea that the deliberateness with which this system of disposability, that is now such a commonplace that we don't even really like see it or understand how it got there. It [00:13:00] was built with just great intentionality because it was extremely profitable.

Coca-Cola used to run an enormous infrastructural system of reuse, which, you know, our grandparents, it was totally routine for them, right? You bought the bottle, you brought it back to the store, it went back to the bottling plant. A truck picked it up, like those bottles could be reused 90 or a hundred times.

And this guy stood up on a stage and said like, that is lost revenue. Because we could have sold 80 bottles and we only sold one bottle. Like someone is making the bottle and you know, for Coke as well, it's lost revenue because they don't really, they didn't really wanna bother dealing with that.

At one point. They had to, there was no alternative to deal with the empties and refill them and wash them. And you have to pay people and you have to have trucks. And they would rather just like not deal with that. The packaging is not their problem, and it becomes our [00:14:00] problem. Those costs of dealing with the empties did not go away.

They got pushed onto us. The public, you know, because you're paying, whether it's a, you know, a rate fee to your trash and recycling collector, or you're paying your local taxes to pick up the garbage and clean up the streets, like they very, very successfully pushed that cost onto the public.

Quinn: Because you have morals and you at some point were like, I can't deal with this waste. And so, so comprehensively they said also, here's a plan we call Keep America Beautiful.

Beth Gardiner: Right.

Quinn: So let's talk a little bit about how they do recognize that they said, okay, great. Here's how we're gonna deal with it, is you are gonna deal with it. Not just the excessive ice cream drip things. Those are the ones where I, I'm just so angry all the time.

Right?

Beth Gardiner: Yeah, yeah. Right.

Quinn: But also just mainline production. Talk to us about Keep America Beautiful [00:15:00] and the Crying Indian, and this denial playbook that everyone thinks. Well, I guess unless you read your work and Amy's work started with tobacco, it is not. This is the same playbook over and over and over again.

Beth Gardiner: Exactly. Yeah. And it actually really originated with the oil industry. A lot of research now has shown so, you know, ever since this idea of disposability was invented, sort of post World War II and gradually you know, sort of built into the world right. And into our lives, people have had concerns about it, right?

The public has been concerned about it and over the course of the history as plastic production has gone up and up and up, and that's one thing I just tried to like really keep a focus on in the book. It's the production, it's not demand and us as consumers. But there have always been these moments of like sort of public disquiet and concern.

And there's been times when it's boiled over, usually related to like waste. And in the eighties there was this whole perception [00:16:00] of a landfill crisis. You know, in the the late 2010s there were these viral videos of birds and fish, and, yu know, sort of stuffed with plastic, their bodies on the beach or whatever.

These moments where public concern has really threatened to actually derail this project of industry to, you know, just make everything disposable, throw away and sell more plastic at the bottom line. One of these big moments was in the late 1960s and the early 1970s as environmentalism was sort of really growing and gaining steam. And there was a lot of concern in the industry that there were gonna start to be laws at the state level, at the federal level, to either ban, you know, disposable throwaway bottles, require them, require the companies to take them back, or at the very least put a, you know, a mandatory fee on them and deposit that sort of thing.

So the industry really had to think about how it might head that [00:17:00] off. And what they did was come up with this idea of anti-littering campaigns. It sounds so anodyne. Right. And the name of this organization Keep America Beautiful to most people today still, you know, sounds like a non-partisan, you know very non-controversial civic organization. Right. It was not, it was an industry organization. Different members over different times, but it was founded by some of the really big, like food, drink, petrochemical and oil companies, tobacco companies, Philip Morris, I think was one of the early members.

These big canned, the American Canned Company, big packaging producers. People were concerned about litter and about waste and landfills. And so the, this organization Keep America Beautiful, came up with this, you know, they were already doing sort of, you know, newspaper ads and billboards about littering don't be a litter bug, and it was all about, it's so analogous to like the oil [00:18:00] industry and the carbon footprint.

This is a problem if you're concerned about plastic. It's not that there's too much of it, the problem is just that it's ending up in the wrong place. Right. It's a waste problem and it's a waste management problem. It's a litter problem and the bad guys are, they call them litter bugs. That was the term that came into use in the 1970s.

Quinn: God, that is such a specific throwback. Oh my gosh.

Beth Gardiner: Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And those of us who are old enough also can remember. The 1970s, it is still considered like an iconic moment in TV history. The Crying Indian, the actor was actually an Italian American guy, but sort of, you know, decked out in a sort of stereotypical way to look like a Native American guy, paddles his canoe down a creek stuffed with trash, and then suddenly he's standing by the side of a highway.

People are throwing their trash out the window as they go by, and the, you know, the tear is coming down his cheek. Right? And the tagline is, some people care about [00:19:00] the environment and some people don't. And you know, we need to, it's all about the individual, right? We need to take care of the world. We need to stop littering.

It was aired so many times on TV that the films ran out, that the TV stations were ordering more. And it was an extraordinary moment that the oil and chemical and packaging and beverage industries created this character that actually became like sort of an iconic figure in the environmental movement.

He was actually an industry creation that was all about shifting responsibility from industry and production to the individual and consumption, and also shifting even our understanding of the problem, right? The problem was not that, that too much packaging was being produced, and that industry had replaced systems of reuse with systems of throwing everything [00:20:00] away.

The problem was just that you were careless and you threw your cigarette pack out the window instead of putting it in the trash where it belonged. So it's shifting responsibility. It's muddying the whole idea of the problem and plastic and all the junk that we're creating and selling and pushing into your life is just fine as long as it ends up in the right place.

So it's all about sort of like, and this has been the playbook over the years. Sort of diffusing anger by co-opting it and redirecting it, that the problem is the individual. And it's, and it's on us to be better, not be litterbugs. And it's such a shocking moment and that that ad and that campaign became part of our culture, but it's really, you know, absolutely analogous right, to like, guns don't kill people, people kill people. It's, the problem is not the industry. The problem is the individual.

Quinn: They're not idiots. These people are extremely [00:21:00] comprehensive and intentional, I mean. Watch Med Men, right? But also watch the first episode of Mad Men where she's smoking in the doctor's office. While she's pregnant. Which they not just didn't say no to, they encouraged. And they knew. Because as we always talk about here, sort of this mechanism I call compound action. Which is like to defeat something like fossil fuels for transportation specifically, or smoking and lung cancer. It really requires a kitchen sink effort, right? It requires marketing and legal and taking smoking outta movies and all this different stuff, but they have always designed it, their own kitchen sink version.

Absolutely like you said, from the marketing to legal and all this. And so as much as, you know, the saddest conversation I have with people is when I tell 'em, especially after the Chinese decision a few years ago not to take our plastic, is that effectively, like recycling is not real unless it's glass or aluminum. Right. And people get sad and they go, I've been doing the wrong thing. I'm like, not your fault.

Beth Gardiner: Yeah, exactly.

Quinn: But it's more that [00:22:00] not only, and you really get into this in the book, that you may feel a sense of we have, maybe not in the past few months, that we have started to win this quote unquote, climate fight. In fossil fuels to know that they have had an extremely profitable backup plan this entire time, which is, like you said, it's the same companies with plastics.

Beth Gardiner: Right. And even, you know, today, the Exxons and the Saudi Aramcos can see that in the long term. And it's not even necessarily like climate policy anymore. That's the biggest threat to them. But it's that they're being undercut economically. Solar and wind are now the cheapest forms of energy. They're way cheaper than coal. They're cheaper than, you know, gas, and that is dangerous if you are a fossil fuel company, electric vehicles, you know, despite everything the Trump administration is doing are on the rise, they are getting cheaper and they are getting better, you know, in the rest of the world, if not potentially the United States for the next few years, [00:23:00] since things are being blocked out and sort of ripped up.

But this is a big threat to the oil industry, so they can see that in the years to come the demand for oil and gas as fuels is, you know, pretty soon getting ready to flatten and potentially start declining. And that has been a big part of this push into making more and more plastic. You know, partly it is just a continuation of longstanding trends.

If you look at the sort of trend line, ever since the 1950s when plastics really entered the consumer economy in a big way, the numbers have just gone up and up and up and up. Every year, the amount that is produced by companies and sold. And pushed into our lives. And the projection is for that to continue.

And there is even more motivation to do so now because these companies can see that their model is under threat economically and, you know, on a policy level from [00:24:00] whatever belated and inadequate efforts we are making to address the climate crisis that we are in.

Quinn: Because it’s something, because at some point we will continue to make progress on it. And they're going great, here's you know, the new Tupperware that you need.

Beth Gardiner: So plastic is another way to monetize that oil and gas and to keep it flowing. And a, you know, a good chunk of it still gets burned and it's super damaging climate wise as well.

Quinn: Let's get personal on all this. You traveled all over the world.

Beth Gardiner: Yeah.

Quinn: To cover this book. And, you know, with all your journalism, I really appreciate how you don't just, oh God, what are the idiot idiots call it? Writing it from the ivory tower? Fucking never existed. Doesn't exist anyways.

Beth Gardiner: Yeah. There's no ivory tower. There's just like a really cluttered living room,

Quinn: Correct. There's not even like a cluttered office. It's a cluttered living room. Yeah. That's it. That's it. Terrible. Like my wife always writes her screenplays with like our dog in her lap and just like, that's it. You went to Manchester, [00:25:00] Houston, Indonesia. One of the things that bothers me most on the planet, Cancer Alley, they have relied on this idea that we are so into like liberty in this country. Right. Whether it's guns or it's meat. Whatever it might be.

Beth Gardiner: Yep.

Quinn: To normalize, again, fossil fuels and plastic and tobacco. And to normalize kids' lunch debt. Right? Stuff like that. Not my problem. Right. That's someone else. They should work harder. Medicare. Medicaid. There should be work requirements. They should work. It doesn't matter where in the world. I'm trying to struggle to understand why we seem to be susceptible to net zero. And advanced recycling. And carbon credits and letting a place be called, informally be called Cancer Ally.

Beth Gardiner: Yeah.

Quinn: For 25 years and not be able to completely overcome that. And obviously again, it's about will, it's about money, it's about these things.

Beth Gardiner: Yeah.

Quinn: Why do, why does this keep succeeding? [00:26:00] Am I making any sense? This is like in my brain all the time.

Beth Gardiner: Yeah. You talk about carbon credits, right? And advanced recycling. These are ideas that the industry has pushed really hard because they actually understand that we want it to be okay.

Right. We feel awful. Right? Like I talked to so many people who say just friends who are not really particularly necessarily engaged with like environmental issues, but they'll just be like, oh, I feel terrible every time I get a takeout meal. And I, you know, throw all the containers in the garbage, or I didn't let my daughter buy a water bottle when we were out in the park because like, I didn't wanna throw another plastic bottle in the trash.

Like, we feel bad, like we are not idiots. We get, and we all can see that like, this is not great. It's not a good system. There's so much waste, it's so damaging, even if we don't necessarily understand the details of that. And that is a good thing, right? Like we have that concern. We live in the system.[00:27:00]

Where we don't necessarily have the power to, you know, if you want water, like there might not be a water fountain, right? Like you have to buy the plastic and throw it out. But we have this concern and industry gets that and they play on it, you know, and that's why they talk so much about recycling, even though they have understood from, you know, the word go basically, that it was not really feasible with plastic.

You know, like you said, recycling is meaningful. If you're talking about paper or cardboard or aluminum or glass, those are like materials that technically can be reprocessed and come out pretty good and be used again a number of times. Plastic less so, but they have always pushed it because, you know this writer Susan Frankl, who wrote a terrific book about plastic about 15 years ago spoke to an industry lobbyist who used the term guilt eraser, that the industry understood that recycling was a guilt eraser.

We all feel bad about plastic, [00:28:00] and we want it to be okay because we don't kind of really have a choice unless you're gonna spend a lot more money or a lot more hassle to go to like the plastic free store or whatever. It's not feasible for most people. And then you talk about things like Cancer Alley, these places along the Gulf Coast of Texas and Louisiana, where people are living next door to these plants that are turning fracked gases into plastic ingredients and then processing them further into raw plastics, and there's all kinds of carcinogens and terrible pollutants going into the air. Listen, Texas and Louisiana are very conservative places. There're states where the oil and gas industry has had a very, very longstanding presence.

They are very economically and politically powerful and they have a ton of influence at the state level over the state regulators, over the state lawmakers who set the terms by which the regulators can operate. [00:29:00] You know, and if you talk to them, the Texas and Louisiana environmental departments that are regulating these facilities and ostensibly protecting the communities that live nearby, they will tell you that they follow the science and protective levels and all of that.

But you know, if you talk to the people who live there, and if you talk to the experts and the environmental advocates who are paying attention, they will tell you that it's regulatory capture, meaning that the industry has so much power over these agencies, the regulatory agencies, that they're essentially toothless or they're even, you know, doing industries bidding in some cases.

So, you know, I think it's about political power and marketing kind of savvy and resources and all of us who have our lives to live and we can't spend all of our time like kind of going to the plastic free store and like deep diving into understanding the details of what they're [00:30:00] presenting to us in ads and all of that. And we wanna believe it because it would be so much nicer if it was true. Right?

Quinn: We wanna believe that the problem is like microplastics, a spoon in your brain instead of the people who live next to these facilities. But the direct harm is very measurable and you can see it. And we have satellites where you can see it, and you can see it in, in the test scores of these children.

Right. Yeah. Obviously just like your air pollution stuff. And I mean, you went to the waste mountain in East Java. Like what again? Like when you spend time with each of these people. And you understand like very personally what the cost of this system is.Again, not just like, oh, don't microwave your plastic burrito thing where it says like, open it up for 30 seconds.

Beth Gardiner: Yeah.

Quinn: This is every day, right? And they're subjected to that 'cause it had to go somewhere.

Beth Gardiner: Right.

Quinn: What does measurable justice look like for these communities that again, are all over from like fracking in Pennsylvania to again, East Java, like what does [00:31:00] measurable justice start to look like? I'm trying to stay future positive and like solutions oriented where we can.

Beth Gardiner: It's a really big question and I think I would say it starts with at least stopping the harm, right? Yeah. Like regulating these things better. Like for example, during the Biden administration, there's a lot of complicated regulatory details about how federal and state power interact when it comes to sort of like Clean Air Act and carcinogenic, you know, pollution that's coming out of, you know, ethane crackers as these big plastic making facilities.

Some of them are known. The Biden administration actually took some pretty significant steps forward to tighten the ways that toxic emissions from manufacturing facilities are regulated. You know, it was small steps, but it was the beginning. I met this guy Robert Taylor, who lived just outside of New Orleans, right beside the Mississippi River, near a plant that makes neoprene, you know, the stuff that's used for wetsuits, artificial rubber, right?

It's got a laptop [00:32:00] case sitting right here made out it, it's everywhere. Right. And when you make neoprene, you emit a chemical chloroprene, which is super toxic. And Robert Taylor's neighborhood right beside this plant is like 95% Black. A lot of people who are descendants of slaves along the Mississippi River, these African American communities that have been there for, you know, centuries and people are really suffering illness. It's dispersing the communities. People move away. They get buyouts sometimes from the plants. You know that is the impact. And when you talk about sort of positive action, I was there a few years ago. It was during the Biden administration. There was a lot of litigation going on and Robert Taylor said he was starting to have some hope for the first time because Biden's EPA director, this guy named Michael Regan, came there and talked about environmental justice. There were some steps being taken, an agreement with the company to reduce emissions. And you know, of course that [00:33:00] was ripped up on probably January 20th or 21st last year. Right. So it's not, none of these things are impossible problems.

It's kind of like air pollution, you know, some of it is air pollution. But I mean, my first book about air pollution. It's not really rocket science to fix it. And when you talk, you were talking before about will, like we just need the will to do it. Like yeah, we need the will to do it, but in actually, that even doesn't capture the reality, which is that it's not like, do we will it, do we want it as a public, like nobody really wants, like cancer causing chemicals coming out of factories, right?

People live nearby, but these companies are so powerful, right? Like was it a billion dollars or something that the fossil fuel industry was talking about giving to Trump during the campaign, like, and they get what they pay for. These companies are very powerful, whether it's at the state level, the federal level, the local level, even where they fight tooth and nail against any kind of [00:34:00] local effort even.

To put, you know, a fee on plastic bags or deposits on cans and bottles, that kind of thing. They're very, very powerful and a lot of it happens behind the scenes, so we don't see it. They present a very nice face in public and they talk about sustainability and recycling and, you know, we're going green and all of that.

And it's hard as you know, individuals who are not like experts and have all the hours in the world to study this kind of stuff, to really understand those dynamics. But to go back to your hope, like there's ways to fix it.

Quinn: Yeah. I don't use will in a naive way. Sure. I only, I use it in a, when I, when someone's like, which bin does this water bottle go in? And I go, it doesn't fucking matter. You know, China stopped taking this and this.. And we don't know how to recycle these things. It doesn't matter.

Beth Gardiner: Right.

Quinn: What, what I mean by will is like we don't need that innovation if we can [00:35:00] start cutting it off at the source, right? Extraneous, over stuff that we do not need. And again, it's the will includes just an understanding from books like yours, air pollution of like how and why and where, understanding the apparatus. We take a lot, talk a lot about people when they go, you know, how can I affect this thing?

I go, well, let's understand which jurisdiction is actually most responsible and charge them with you know, 'cause that's where you gotta start. So much more is on the local level than people thought. Maybe not necessarily for plastic. You get the point.

Beth Gardiner: Yeah.

Quinn: And then it's understanding, okay, what is their backup plan? Right? So for the climate fight, it is plastic. So we gotta make sure we're, we can't just let them go to that. Right. What did, what did you call that, their escape hatch?

Beth Gardiner: Yeah.

Quinn: Right. Yeah. But then it's like you said, it's going to the source. It's going for our antibiotics issue, it's going to like, why are we giving these proactively to industrial pharmacists? Right. It's, going like, this is not because your child has three strep throats. And I understand how you talked about going to this, I have always imagined going to one of these that you're, you talked about going to the [00:36:00] petrochemical conference in Dubai.

Beth Gardiner: Oh god. Yeah.

Quinn: Playing bingo with, it's insane, right? Yeah. But it's so important to have journalism, but also journalism like yours, where you go, I can not compartmentalize, but I can balance this is power and this feels impossible to defeat. Going to these things and going, oh my God, with there are actually measurable things we can do here.

Beth Gardiner: Yeah.

Quinn: Right. Yeah. You talk about Diane Wilson, right? With the Sustainable Fishing Cooperative. France and Germany are starting to actually build some infrastructure. Again, like it requires the kitchen sink. We have to go to those conferences to keep reporting out on 'em and going they're pretty sure this can keep going. Right? 'cause we're okay with Cancer Alley. But we can do stuff.

Beth Gardiner: Yeah.

Quinn: What's the thing that you feel is most measurable? That if we pushed enough people on it, at whatever jurisdiction could start to really chip away this so the people don't constantly feel like, well, fuck it.

Beth Gardiner: Right. I mean, if you talk to [00:37:00] people who are, who are sort of experts on the policy side of this, what they always come back to is this idea of extended producer responsibility. They call it EPR laws, which is basically it's about making the producer of the package responsible for what happens to it rather than you be responsible for what happens to it.

Quinn: It's like the scope three for emissions, right?

Beth Gardiner: Yeah. Except actually making them pay for it. It's not just about accounting for it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So for example, like, yes, Europe has been a leader in addressing plastics. Still not enough, but they are taking some really significant steps. The EU. But here in the US, California passed a really big EPR law. They're making, they're making the companies, the companies that make the plastic and the companies that use it and sell it like the Cokes and the Pepsis and the Proctors and Procter and Gambles, who are the ones, you know, selling them, using and selling the packaging contribute into a fund to subsidize recycling.

Because recycling [00:38:00] does not pay for itself. And to subsidize trash collection, right, to make these things possible because it's their packaging. So it's not necessarily that they are gonna like personally take back every bottle and do something with it, but they're gonna pay the cost. Other states have done this too.

Maine has a pretty strong law, because when you come down to it, at the end of the day, the reason that plastic has proliferated in such an insane out of control way throughout our economy, like this ice cream cone, drip catcher, or all the other examples, we know so well, the Amazon packaging or whatever is because it is so cheap.

And it is so cheap, in part because it in large part comes from sort of waste products of oil and gas. Like a lot of the, when you frack, right, you get the methane, which you can burn for energy, and then you also get this thing called ethane, which for a long time they were just like burning it off to get rid of it at the wellhead. Then they realized they could build plants and make it [00:39:00] into plastic. So partly it's just a waste source and that's why it's cheap. But another big, waste product. But another big reason that it's so cheap is that. It does not include the true price. Like right. We were talking earlier about how they used to take the bottles back, Coke and other companies and now they don't.

And we are paying as taxpayers the rest of the price, which is the cost of managing it. You know, let alone what happens to people in Indonesia or Southeast Asia or Mexico, because this global network of waste is always the destination. Countries are always. It's always moving around. It's like a cat and mouse game, but somebody else is dealing with the end phase of all this waste that we're creating.

Right? There's also a cost on our health with these chemicals that are the food and drink packaging that we're using, or even like the clothes that we're wearing, the workout clothes, it's all plastics, right? It seeps into your body like the [00:40:00] price tag of plastic does not include that. So it's why, you know, for example, like one thing we've all seen sort of, particularly since COVID is like you go into a restaurant and you're eating there.

It's not like a takeout. But they're still giving you a plastic cup that you throw away at the end. Like that did not used to be like that. Right? So we get why, like it's kind of hard to create a takeout system that's not based on disposability, but it's not hard to create a eat in the restaurant system where the glass is glass and it gets washed.

Quinn: Those are the excessive ones. Because what do we, what do you doing?

Beth Gardiner: And I'm not really blaming the individual restaurant, right? Because it's hard to run a restaurant.

Quinn: Who has no margins.

Beth Gardiner: Your margins are super tight, right? But this material is so cheap because it does not include the real price of it, that it's cheaper for the restaurant to do that rather than to pay the extra staff.

Or maybe they don't have space for a dishwasher in the, another dishwasher in the back, right? Like [00:41:00] plastic is so cheap that it is cheaper for them to give you a cup that you throw away rather than a cup that they're gonna collect and clean and reuse. So that's the fundamental problem , the low cost of plastic.

That's why it has proliferated in this out of control way and these extended producer responsibility laws. There's different iterations, there's different ways of doing it, but it's about changing that fundamental dynamic.

Quinn: It's so interesting, the things we focus on in budgeting at the local and state and national level and international level. Whether it's money to PEPFAR and USAID. Or counties and states that still have school lunch debt. Right. Or one of the things, here's one. Yeah. If you would like to write about it, I would be grateful. Okay. Period poverty.

Beth Gardiner: Yeah. Uhhuh.

Quinn: Things that make me, I have a list here of like things that make me fucking angry that I'd love for Beth to write a book about, endometriosis. I'm looking for a note. I can, I can keep going.

Beth Gardiner: I’m looking for book ideas .

Quinn: We always talk about like, we never pay the full cost of fossil fuels. It's like you said, 'cause [00:42:00] we never calculated, if we did, it would be untenable.

Beth Gardiner: Right.

Quinn: We never calculate the true cost of like, we don't have paid leave. Maternal leave. Like what is the true cost of that? Yes. What's the true cost of not studying women's health basically ever? Yeah. In anything, people talk about Amtrak's budget, right? Yeah. And they wanna focus on this or, we're here, we're Dominion, which is like one of the worst utilities on the planet. To be clear, has been trying to build this wind farm and Trump keeps cutting it off. It's just about done.

Beth Gardiner: Yeah.

Quinn: There'll be a little extra tag on your bill. For various things, which separate discussion shouldn't exist. Meanwhile, you're paying more for trash because of the recycling bullshit, right?

Beth Gardiner: Yep, yep. Exactly.

Quinn: We just, we struggle so much to understand like that so much of this is not required.

Beth Gardiner: Well, and because there has been a very deliberate effort to make it invisible, right? Like I think you'd need to always keep coming back to the companies and the industries that are making money out of this and that have in many ways built the [00:43:00] system with their political and economic power, and it benefits them tremendously to the detriment of the rest of us.

Quinn: Can you talk about the plastic trifecta? I had that written down and I forgot to bring it up.

Beth Gardiner: Yeah, so that's the idea of Judith Enck who's the head of this, a group called Beyond Plastics. She was an EPA administrator during the Obama administration. And I met her at her house in upstate New York and we talked about how to make it better. And she said to me, my theory of change is you make a better law. And that is totally it, right? Like we want the individual actions or whatever.

And to her, like her conception of individual action is like, fine, yes, bring your reusable bag to the store. Carry around your reusable water bottle. I'm sure she does that. I do it too, but her organization is actually training people to interface with their state legislators or their local, you know, city council or whatever it is, take steps.

Right. Like, [00:44:00] and a lot of the steps are pretty small, right? The plastic trifecta, I'm not gonna remember it exactly right. But it's a three different laws or measures that they want people to press their local or state government to take. And one is, I think a fee on throwaway bags, plastic and paper actually, because it's the idea of, it's the model of disposability, not just the material plastic that is the problem. You know, bans on sort of like materials like styrofoam. These are small things, but they have a big impact to industry. Like I was saying earlier, you know, they fought tooth and nail, they've thrown the kitchen sink, whatever mixed metaphor you wanna use, at stopping, at stopping bans, even in like a tiny little town, I went to this amazing little town called Bisbee, Arizona. Up in the mountains down near the Mexican border, they tried to ban plastic bags or put a fee on plastic bags, like a five or 10 cent fee, right? And the industry went [00:45:00] ballistic and the state ended up passing a law that said, no city or town may tax or ban plastic bags or other containers. And the reason why that is really disheartening, a lot of states have those laws, it's called preemption. But the reason why they do that is because those laws are actually really powerful. And it's not just because of the direct effect of like the plastic bag.

You know, fewer plastic bags being used. The industry says that plastic bags are, you know, a tiny percent of total plastic. And that's true. And it's only, you know, a small piece, but it is a step and it is actually something that shows you if you live in a place that has a restrictions on plastic bags like New York City or I live in the UK, there's way fewer plastic bags than there used to be since they introduced a fee.

You can still get one, but you have to pay for it. 15 cents, something like that. This is powerful because it actually shows you that it's not the end of the [00:46:00] world. And that it's actually pretty easy to live without. Like, I forget the numbers. Like the average American gets like 500 plastic bags a year or something like that.

It's crazy. And you can actually be fine with like, I don't know, 20 plastic bags a year. It's meaningful in itself. And those plastic bags do some harm, you know, birds choke on them or whatever, but it's also a signal that like it's actually a small step and then like the automatic question is like, the natural question is like, what do you do next?

That's her idea. And that individual action is less about like which thing you put in the recycling bin and you know, it's also an individual action to like lobby your city council or your state legislature or whatever, and these small steps are actually, they matter. And the reason, you know, they matter is that the industry is willing to like throw a ton of money at stopping them.

Quinn: You know, when people of color say, well, does my vote even matter? And you go like, if it didn't matter, they wouldn't be trying to fucking stop you from voting for all of this time.

Beth Gardiner: [00:47:00] Exactly.

Quinn: No, I think it's great. And we are really focused on helping people turn out for local and state stuff because, first of all, again, it works. And two, it is a foot in the door and it's very easy to normalize things in the other direction where you go, oh, we didn't need any of this.

Beth Gardiner: And also these local, these local things are like really contagious. And that's the other thing that industry understands and, you know, I have a whole chapter about these plastic bag bans and how they, the first one was passed in Suffolk County, New York in the 1980s, and the industry fought so hard against it.

It was eventually overturned by a court before it was ever enforced, and New York State passed its own plastic bag, I can't remember if it's a ban or a fee off the top of my head, 30 some years later. And the guy who had been the driving force behind the Suffolk County, Long Island ban in the eighties was a state lawmaker in Albany, the capital who pushed [00:48:00] this plastic bag ban 30 years later.

But he said those lost decades, you know what we could have done when we were going in the other direction? But when he did that in the eighties, it set something off across the country and other localities immediately started doing it because people actually want these things, whether it's, you know, fees on bags or container deposit laws or what have you.

They poll very well. They have really tangible, immediate, beneficial effects. They're not usually as inconvenient as people anticipate them being. So they're not only, they're powerful, but they're kind of contagious.

Quinn: But you have to show up. You do. Because if you don't show up at your city council or school board or whatever it is, someone else is showing up and that's where we are a hundred percent.

Early COVID, I was still in Los Angeles and SoCal Gas, another monstrosity of a place. I believe they threatened to send like a bus full of [00:49:00] COVID positive people to a meeting. I mean, it was just like, oh my God, what the fuck is wrong with these people? But it's a really good lesson to go like, that they will show up. And that's how we got here. You have to show up. And again, it can be contagious, it can be wonderful. They say solar, contagious, right? We're social people. You look at it and your neighbor goes, what's that?

Beth Gardiner: Totally. And this guy Steven Englebright, who was the lawmaker I was just talking about, passed the first, the country's first ban on plastic bags in Suffolk County, Long Island, New York in the 1980s told me that he was like absolutely shocked when all these industry lobbyists showed up.

And he said, I never expected the industry to care about, you know, a tiny little law in a, you know, a rural suburban county.

Quinn: They know it's a foot in door and they're not having it.

Beth Gardiner:. They saw it, they saw that it was powerful potentially.

Quinn: Anything else you would, again, you're a journalist but that you would recommend or you feel like has really stuck out to you now as you're starting to really talk about the book more and more that you feel like [00:50:00] is interacting with people and making them go, like, that's something I'm gonna go do.

Beth Gardiner: I felt so much when I was writing this was that I would talk to people about it. You know, I would be like at a, just a social whatever. Like people, someone asked me what I'm doing and I would talk about this book and like so many people would say, oh, that sounds depressing.

Quinn: Oh yeah. I know that story.

Beth Gardiner: And actually when you're in it and you're writing the book, I don't know, I wasn't in that so much. It's more like, oh, I've met this amazing guy and like he designed the recycling logo and like, this is such a cool story and you just get. Or I'm like, you know, found this like 200 page PDF from the 1970s of this like big conference with all these industry people and there's this like amazing, like garbage man who gave a speech and you know, you get sort of lost in the fun parts of writing it, I guess, and what you're learning and finding.

But that depressing thing, I heard it so much. I totally get it because like, it is depressing, right? And particularly with plastic, we feel so disempowered by [00:51:00] like, even if you're like, okay, I'm gonna like not buy that water bottle even though I'm a little bit thirsty because I don't wanna throw, like, that's meaningful.

But like, we also kind of feel like, you know, that's not really making a dent in the like 90 gazillion water bottles that get thrown out every day, whatever the number is, it's infuriating. I also feel like in a weird way, it's kind of empowering to really understand this, that it's not, it's not actually us.

'cause I think so many people, the one thing I heard a lot was depressing and the other word I heard a lot from, again, like friends who were not like super engaged with environmental issues. It's not their main focus, was guilty. I feel so guilty when I get a, you know, food delivery and I throw it all out.

Like I just wanna take that away because that's actually what the industry wants us to feel. They want us to feel sort of disempowered, like we live in this system. Disposability is not negotiable, not to be questioned, it just is. [00:52:00] And they want us to feel guilty or blame each other, right? Like, oh Quinn, I can't believe you, you know, forgot your bags and you got all those plastic bags from the grocery store. We're blaming ourselves or we're blaming each other. So to me, even though, yeah, it is depressing and like sometimes we all just wanna like curl up under the covers. Like I totally get that. I feel that way too. Right?

It's a lot. It's a lot. And plastic, it just feels horrible, right? When you see these pictures of, whatever, a beach covered with, you know, trash and it keeps washing in, but to me it's actually empowering to say, actually it's not us and it's not your fault Quinn, for, you know, forgetting your water bottle or whatever.

We need to look at the, who are really the main actors here, which is these huge, rich, powerful corporations, unfathomably wealthy corporations. 'cause we kind of know that these little small bore things that we're doing, like they feel like you kind of feel like you have to do them. And I do still carry around my bags and my metal bottle and all of that, but like it [00:53:00] feels kind of futile.

We know that really already. And to actually shift the lens towards who is really doing this, it's kind of empowering because then it's like, okay, well now we need to think about solutions and how do we fix this? It's pretty clear it has to happen at a political level. But it's not about personal responsibility and, you know, your sort of own feelings of guilt or my feelings of guilt or whatever.

So in a weird way, I kind of find it certainly infuriating, but also like empowering to, like, you have to diagnose it correctly, right? We're, we have the wrong diagnosis right now, which is that it's our fault for like quotes demanding plastic. 'cause you don't demand it. If you go to the supermarket and you buy some bananas and they're like in plastic.

Quinn: The shrink wrapped individual cucumbers. Oh. Don't even get me started.

Beth Gardiner: The industry is always talking about consumer demand for plastic. Right. But you demanded bananas. [00:54:00] You didn't demand plastic.

Quinn: Correct. No. Your individual responsibility is to take your anger, it's like the Star Wars, like the emperor, like good. Let the heat work. Like great. Use it and go to your city council meeting and bring somebody, right.

Beth Gardiner: Exactly.

Quinn: That is your responsibility. 'cause it is going to require all of us, but we can start to put a dent in those things.

Beth Gardiner: Yeah. And I think that's why I think that sort of Beyond Plastics and the Judith Enck, the engaging people with state and local like, 'cause we all feel some amount of despair at the federal level right now. It's pretty clear that the Trump administration is not gonna be, you know, enacting measures to deal with any of these problems. But, you know, the opposite obviously, but actually the local level really matters. And that's where a lot of plastics action has happened. And it's contagious and it's meaningful.

Quinn: I don't wanna keep you much longer. What are some books you're reading these days?

Beth Gardiner: I'm reading this great book right now called North Woods, and I'm seeing it everywhere. So I think it's like [00:55:00] maybe one of the big books right now. It's fiction and it's set like on this plot of land in, I guess it's Massachusetts, like in New England.

Quinn: Oh, I heard about this.

Beth Gardiner: Yeah. And at first it starts with this couple who are, who escape from like a Puritan colony. They run away into the woods and they're pursued by like the Puritans or whatever, and then they finally like make their, and it's, the first passage is written in this sort of like little bit obscure, like, you know, it's a first person, kind of like old style spellings, and you're a little bit like, Ooh, this is gonna be a little dense.

If the whole book is like that and you think you're gonna follow this story of this couple, but then actually in the next chapter, it's like, I don't know, 30, 40 years later, you're following the land. It's like this little patch of, I didn't really mean to give an environmental example. It's not necessarily, but it's just a novel I enjoy.

Quinn: No, it's fine. I get it.

Beth Gardiner: I think we're following all the people who are gonna live on this, this little piece of land over the centuries. And it starts in, I don't [00:56:00] know, the 16 hundreds and who knows where it's gonna end.

I'm not that far in now. I'm probably a hundred pages in. But yeah, it's a really good read. I recommend it. Northwoods, I can't remember the author off the top of my head.

Quinn: Author is Daniel Mason.

Beth Gardiner: There you go. Daniel Mason.

Quinn: Yeah. That's awesome. That's really great.

Beth Gardiner: Yeah. Also, I got another one. I just finished listening to, I think this was 40 hours, biography of Mark Twain.

Quinn: Oh, is it good? I gave it to my mother-in-law for Christmas. But I haven't read it myself.

Beth Gardiner: It's great. Yeah, it was terrific. It was terrific. I listened to it, you know, no rush. If you're listening to 40 hours, you can't be like, I've gotta finish by next week. But, you know, it took a couple months.

Quinn: That's how I felt when, it was about 10 years ago that the Grant biography came out and I'd been so excited about it for so long, and then it showed up and I was like. Oh my god, it's 900 pages.

Beth Gardiner: Yeah. Maybe there's a little temptation to wanna kind of get lost in in history a little bit.

Quinn: I'm with you.

Beth Gardiner: And in the past, but we all need the things that recharge us, right?

Quinn: Yes, I'm usually between like a Grant biography or dragons of some kind, [00:57:00] so.

Beth Gardiner: Okay. That's great.

Quinn: Whatever works. Beth, thank you so much for all your work on these vital things. And again, I really appreciate your perspective of these mother fuckers.

Beth Gardiner: Yeah, thank you. Thank you for caring and sharing the sharing the righteous fury.

Quinn: It's very important. I appreciate it.

Beth Gardiner: I'm so grateful for your interest and your coverage of, you know, this and so many other, like really big, important, important, issues.

Quinn: I’m trying. The point is like to expose it and then go, we can actually do things about these things.

Beth Gardiner: Yeah. Yeah. I love that.

Quinn:That's it. You can read our critically acclaimed newsletter and get notified about new podcast conversations@importantnotimportant.com. Thanks so much for listening and thanks for giving a shit.