Megan Hall: Welcome to Possibly, where we take on huge problems like the future of our planet and break them down into small questions with unexpected answers. I’m Megan Hall.
Many of us have seen litter on the beach. And of course, there are those sad pictures of sea critters tangled up in plastic! Which made us wonder: what will it take to prevent all of this plastic pollution in the ocean?
We had Max Kozlov and Fatima Husain from our Possibly Team look into this. Welcome, Max and Fatima!
Max Kozlov: Hi, Megan!
Fatima Husain: Hello!
Megan Hall: So, Max, let’s start with plastics in general. How concerned should I be about all the plastics in my life?
Max Kozlov: Well, the problem is that you can find plastic in just about anything we use today.
Fatima Husain: Like in things you might expect to have plastic, like plastic bags or tupperware containers.
Max Kozlov: And in things you might not.
Chelsea Rochman: It’s in our drinking water, it’s in the food that we eat. It’s in the dust that we breathe.
Fatima Husain: That’s—
Chelsea Rochman: Chelsea Rochman. I’m an aquatic ecologist. I’m a professor at the University of Toronto.
Max Kozlov: Chelsea studies how plastics, chemical contamination, and climate change affect freshwater and marine ecosystems.
Fatima Husain: This wasn’t really a hot research topic back in the day. But from 1950 to 2015, plastics production has increased from around 2 million tons to nearly 380 million tons a year!
Megan Hall: How much of that can we recycle?
Max Kozlov: It’s hard to say. It all depends on what your local recycling facility can process.
Fatima Husain: But in the US, only about eight percent of all the plastic that’s used by consumers actually makes it to the recycling plant.
Megan Hall: I get that a lot of plastics are thrown out, but how do they end up in the ocean? I mean, don’t most of them go to the landfill?
Max Kozlov: You’re right: most plastics do go to the dump. But they don’t always stay there.
Fatima Husain: The US ships a lot of its trash overseas, and once it’s out of the country, some of that waste ultimately ends up in waterways like rivers and oceans. But that’s not the only way: plastics can also end up in the ocean when people litter.
Max Kozlov: Chelsea says all that plastic comes with a heavy toll for aquatic life.
Megan Hall: Like what?
Fatima Husain: Well, some of the bigger plastic pieces can strangle aquatic creatures or fill their guts.
Megan Hall: What about tiny pieces of plastic? What happens when that stuff gets into the ocean or swallowed by fish?
Max Kozlov: Yeah, scientists call those microplastics. And they’re everywhere.
Chelsea Rochman: We know it’s in every level of the food chain. So it’s eaten by zooplankton, then goes up the food web to prey fish, to predatory fish, to sharks, whales, to the fish that we eat…It is a ubiquitous contaminant, if you want to call it that.
Fatima Husain: Early studies show that microplastics appear to be harmful to aquatic life, but scientists are still trying to figure out exactly how microplastics might affect their health, let alone our own.
So for now, we can’t really say how worried you should be about them.
Megan Hall: But, what’s the take-away here?
Max Kozlov: Well, it’s important to remember that the plastics we create will be around much, much longer than we will because they take a really long time to break down.
Fatima Husain: So the hundreds of millions of tons of plastic we’re creating each year will only continue to accumulate, no matter how quickly we try to clean it all up.
Max Kozlov: Chelsea says that means we need to rethink our relationship with plastic.
Megan Hall: Bottom line, though, is it really going to make a difference if I’m super careful about the kind of plastic I use?
Fatima Husain: That’s a good point. Chelsea says we need to make bigger changes too.
Chelsea Rochman: The reality is that we, as citizens, can’t necessarily just do it alone. We kinda need governments to create legislation and policies that give us the foundation to do better.
Max Kozlov: She recommends advocating for policy changes like putting caps on fossil fuels for brand new plastic or rewarding companies for using recycled plastics.
Megan Hall: Got it! Thanks, Max and Fatima!
That’s it for today. For more information, or to ask a question about the way your choices affect our planet, go to the public’s radio dot org slash possibly. Or subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts.
Possibly is a co-production of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, Brown’s Climate Solutions Initiative, and the Public’s Radio.
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