Plastic Podcast Episode 7 - Plastic for Posterity: Museum Studies x Polymer Chemistry
In this episode of Plastic Podcast, host Clark Marchese delves into the interdisciplinary world of plastic conservation with Dr. Yvonne Shashoua, a researcher at the National Museum of Denmark. They explore the nuanced role of plastics in history, culture, and the environment, discussing everything from the preservation of historical artifacts like WWII propaganda balloons and spacesuits to the impacts of plastic degradation in ocean environments. Dr. Shashoua shares insights from her extensive career in polymer chemistry and museum conservation, revealing the complexities of preserving plastic artifacts for future generations and the potential for reusing waste materials in innovative ways. This episode serves as a fascinating exploration of how museum science and conservation can inform our understanding of plastics and their place in our world.
Episode Guest: Dr. Yvonne Shashoua
Browse her publications on Research Gate .
More information about the episode and the Plastic Podcast
Episode Transcript and more information on the Pine Forest Media Website
Follow Pine Forest Media on Instagram @pineforestmedia
Hosted, produced, written, and edited by Clark Marchese
Cover art and PFM logo by Laurel Wong.
Theme music by Tadeo Cabellos
Transcript:
[00:00:10.110] - Clark
Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Plastic Podcast, the show that tells the story of Plastic, how we got here, where we are, and where we need to go. I am your host, Clark Marchese, and I can't even tell you one thing we're serving today because I've got the whole menu for you and we are not leaving one single crumb. But before we get into any of that, I have a bit of housekeeping to do with all of you. I am introducing two new features to the podcast, and the first is a Trivia Game. My local drag queens are only doing it once per week at the moment, and I just think we need more. Each week, I will put a Trivia Question at the opening of the show. For our listeners on Spotify, you can scroll down to the bottom of the episode page on the app and submit response. For anyone else listening anywhere else, you can submit your answer through a direct message on the pineforestmedia Instagram at pineforestmedia. No cheating because that's lame. You will find the answer to the Trivia Question at the end of the credits of the next week's episode.
[00:01:16.670] - Clark
For everyone who gets the answer right, you will be entered into a raffle to win a special prize that will be given out at the end of every month. I'm not sure what the prize is going to be yet, but I'm also taking suggestions. Spotify listeners, you will also I'll also see a place to suggest a prize on the episode page of the app as well. And same story for everyone else, slide into my DMs. Okay, now here's the very first Trivia Question. The first type of animal to ever be cloned was what? A, a dog, B, a rabbit, C, a sheep, or D, a rat. Bonus points if you DM me her name. Jolene is not her name, but that is your hint. Next, for our Apple podcast listeners, I appreciate your kind reviews so much, so I'm going to start reading one per week at the end of the episode credits. I'm telling you now that there aren't all that many. If you write one, chances are high, you're probably going to get picked. Okay, now on to the episode. This may be the most interdisciplinary episode we've done to date. We are combining museum studies with polymer chemistry, history, and environmental science, with traces of archeology, Anthropology, politics, and of course, plastic, all in one fabulous interview with a multidimensional scientist named Dr. Yvonne Shashoua
[00:02:31.740] - Clark
Yvonne holds a PhD in polymer chemistry, environmental archeology, and material sciences. She is currently working as a researcher at the National Museum of Denmark on preserving plastic items of historical significance for future generations. Now, I came across Yvonne's work when I was looking for a guest to talk about plastic and art, and that's not what she focuses on. But the more I read about her, the more I told myself, I really want to talk to this person. So I asked her, and I'm so glad she said yes. We got to talking about the importance of preserving historic artifacts of plastic, how that's actually done. We talked about spacesuits, propaganda balloons, and Barbie. And finally, we talked about the science of museum conservation and how it can inform our response to plastics in the environment. And without further ado, let's get started. All right. Hello, Yvonne. Welcome. I'm so glad I get to talk to you today. Let's just get into it because I know you have a lot of different research interests. Can you tell us a bit about yourself and what you do?
[00:03:35.260] - Dr. Yvonne Shashoua
Yeah. My name is Yvonne Shashoua. I'm a research professor at the National Museum of Denmark. My background is as a polymer chemist. Many years ago, Then I worked in the paint industry, making the polymers that go into paints, which are very similar to those that go into plastics. But I'd always been interested in museums. I'm not quite sure why, because I dropped history at a very young age. But I was very lucky because museums collect objects that are made out of lots of different materials, and they have an obligation to preserve them for future generations. So I joined the British Museum in the conservation research section, testing all kinds of adhesives and paints and glues that were going to be used in conserving objects to belong their lifetime.
[00:04:21.010] - Clark
So plastics are relatively new. Some museums have artifacts that are thousands of years old, but plastic just hasn't been around that long. I'm curious, have we been interested in preserving plastic in museums since they started housing them, or did it come later?
[00:04:35.290] - Dr. Yvonne Shashoua
In 1991, there was a huge conference in Canada called Saving the 20th Century. It was the first time that museums from all over the world got together and acknowledged and panicked about the fact that they hadn't realized that their objects and artworks and military collections were made out of plastics or had plastics in them and that they were going to degrade made. Before that, we thought that plastics would last forever. No need to think about their conservation because nothing was going to happen to them. I was pretty lucky because then I had the right chemical background to start researching into why they were breaking down, how long it took, and what we could do about them. Then in 1998, the National Museum of Denmark also got really interested in plastics and advertised a PhD scholarship, which I got, and I've been very happily working at the National Museum Denmark ever since.
[00:05:31.610] - Clark
Okay, incredible. I know that you also do some work looking at plastic in the ocean environments. How does that tie into all of this in the museum?
[00:05:39.660] - Dr. Yvonne Shashoua
Museums research a lot into how materials break down in real-time. That means that unlike industry, if we made a Barbie doll now, and we wanted to see how long she would take to break down, we are not going to sit here and wait and watch every day and see, Oh, It looks like the skin is becoming a bit yellow now. Oh, getting sticky, and we haven't got time for that. What industry do is they accelerate the aging process. They try and speed it up. They expose dolls and products to very strong light or heat or exactly those conditions that they think that the product is going to be used under. If it was a vinyl floor, they'd probably do a lot of scrubbing tests to see how long it would take before there were scratches. But in the museum, we're doing exactly the opposite. We're trying to slow down deterioration of our plastics. We have time to look at our objects and see how long they take to break down in real-time. That's exactly what's happening in our environment. I think that the research that goes on in museums fits perfectly with environmental research, where we're looking at materials and what happens in real-time.
[00:06:52.430] - Clark
That's such an interesting intersection that you've situated yourself into between history and arts and culture, mixed with chemistry and ocean environments. But now you're working with the National Museum of Denmark, and you've explained a little bit about what their interest is in preserving artifacts. But can you tell us about what you're working on there right now, any particular project you can share with us?
[00:07:12.980] - Dr. Yvonne Shashoua
At the moment, I'm working on preserving two enormous propaganda balloons from the Second World War.
[00:07:20.480] - Clark
Okay, wait. What is a propaganda balloon?
[00:07:22.890] - Dr. Yvonne Shashoua
Propaganda balloons were the equivalent of drones today. If we wanted to inform the Danish public or the European public, we'd probably use the Internet. But if we, for some reason, wanted to disperse a message widely on paper or printed or send them gifts to buy their favor, we would use a drone to cover that area quickly. Well, in the Second World War, they use balloons. They made huge balloons, like weather balloons, out of the finest military raincoat material, which is cotton, coated with rubber. And whether it's synthetic rubber or natural rubber, the chemistry is the same. I can't actually find that out. But the problem is they've been stored in a little metal box since 1942, when they were given to the museum by the German military who had no use for these balloons. And it's a lovely project because they're really disposable objects because they're sent up filled with hydrogen. They disperse their propaganda leaflets. Then when they're so light, they either fall to the ground or they continue upwards until they explode. They're like single-use drones disposable. But we have two in the museum, and now we've unpatterned from their tiny release them from their metal container.
[00:08:41.090] - Dr. Yvonne Shashoua
There's all kinds of possibilities for them. They could be exhibited, they could be stored for the future, or they will be stored. We have to find out why are they degrading? They've got lots of red spots on them, like measles. What's caused those spots? Can we do something about them?
[00:08:54.940] - Clark
Okay, so I'm curious, since you're interested in preserving the exterior of the balloons, do they Do you have messages printed on the side of them, too, like blimps, or did they just distribute these leaflets?
[00:09:05.260] - Dr. Yvonne Shashoua
They're used in Korea with a message printed on them, but these were actually printed newspaper messages, and they're just in a basket underneath the balloon, and then they get released. There's an explosive cord, a fuse, that burns down with time. Every hour, so many were released. The balloons get lighter and lighter and lighter. It's actually really an amazing design that we we don't see today because there's no external engine or power that moves it. The downside of it, and one of the reasons why balloons are not used for those important jobs today, is that you're at the whim of the direction of the wind. If there's a hole in the balloon, of course, it comes down in the wrong place. The speed at which they were developed for the Second World War is something that I also see reflected in plastics, where the Second World War was also a time of high activity for developing plastics and using them in a very short time.
[00:10:01.710] - Clark
Is there any way for us to know what messages that these particular balloons were carrying or where they come from?
[00:10:07.240] - Dr. Yvonne Shashoua
Yeah, we have the printed messages. We have the whole things. We know that they're British because they're in military green, which is the khaki color, which was the British uniform color from 1848. As I said, I've analyzed them and they're the finest raincoat fabric, so they were probably incredibly expensive to make.
[00:10:29.990] - Clark
What was the message?
[00:10:32.030] - Dr. Yvonne Shashoua
Oh, I'm afraid I can't. Okay, it's classified. I can't tell you. No, it's not classified at all. I think it's written in German because it was for the German public, so I haven't actually translated. The museum curator, that's his part. My parts of science.
[00:10:46.720] - Clark
Okay, I did look into this, and I couldn't find the exact message that was on the balloons that Yvonne is working on. But I did find that this was an extremely common way of distributing information for basically every war that we've had on Earth in the 20th century before the invention of the Internet. I found that Western forces sent over 300 million leaflets into Eastern Europe alone in only a two-year period during the Cold War. So basically everyone was using them, and they said all kinds of things. They had cartoons on them, speeches, disinformation, press updates, everything. If you saw that new movie with Julia Roberts that the Obamas produced, Leave the World Behind, no spoilers, but it's like those leaflets that they get at the end. Obviously, studying propaganda from a historical perspective is really important, your work is helping us keep these pieces alive. Do you have any reflections on the importance of preserving not only plastic, but just all materials that we find in museums?
[00:11:40.380] - Dr. Yvonne Shashoua
In a way, it's not a matter of opinion, whether I think it's right or not. They're actually our museum laws that all museums, registered museums throughout the world, are governed by, which says that we have an obligation because they're not our objects, they're objects for the nation. We have an obligation to preserve them for future generations. It's important that we do because, for example, plastics. In today's environmental and climate situation, we're thinking that plastics are just the worst, the devil's work, the worst thing that could ever be invented because we see them as pollutants. But if we go right back to when plastics were very first developed in 1862, it wasn't a totally synthetic plastic as we know today, but it was actually developed to replace billard balls, or ivory in billard balls. You could argue that it was a sustainable material stopping so many elephants being killed for their tasks.
[00:12:33.470] - Clark
Yeah, actually, we tell the full story of this in our very first episode on the history of plastic, so you can go back and listen if you haven't.
[00:12:40.110] - Dr. Yvonne Shashoua
But then speeding ahead, those materials were made out of treating paper with acid. Basically, that's what bioplastics or bio-based plastics are. Since the Second World War, we've come far away from making plastics out of paper and treating with acid because crude oil has been our of choice since the '50s. But now with the environmental crisis and the price of oil and the running out of oil and coal and gas, we're looking again at bio-based plastics. We're going back to plant-based materials. Whereas I'm sure that we're thinking, Oh, this is totally new. This is an amazing new development that we use plants. No, because those were the very first plastics that we have in museums. I think now it's really important that we've preserved those. We've got the original recipes and ingredients to investigate how did they perform, how did they make them, and the advantages and disadvantages. So they're not totally new materials. We come back to history and use it.
[00:13:42.660] - Clark
Yeah, that's fascinating. We also did do an episode on biodegradable plastics and bioplastics, and unfortunately, in their current iterations, they're not exactly the magic solution to a problem. Go back and listen to find out why. But people are seriously talking about going to spend some time on Mars for a while, so I have to believe that we can figure out a to make these bioplastics in a way that does work. It's so interesting that we have the original recipes preserved in museums. I want to start to talk about the how of how this is all done, but after we talked about the balloons, I'm still so curious, what else have you worked on or are you working on now?
[00:14:16.100] - Dr. Yvonne Shashoua
One of the most important objects that I've been, luckily, I don't have to work on it, but researching into it to find out how to preserve it for the future, are spacesuits. In 2005, Andreas Monson, the first Danish astronaut went to the International Space Station, and his spacesuit has been donated to the museum. Of course, it's really important to keep the degradation at an absolute minimal level because we don't want to find out in 10 years time that we can't exhibit it, we can't show it to schoolchildren, we can't investigate it. It's very similar to the design of the Apollo spacesuits at the end of the '60s and the '70s. In both design and the types of materials, those spacesuits spacesuits. I was lucky enough to work with the National Air and Space Museum when I was a PhD student and researched into PVC degradation. I've seen close up those Apollo spacesuits. They were made at that time out of the plastics that were available. There weren't special plastics developed to make the spacesuits. So there are around 11 different kinds of plastics that were used in the Apollo spacesuits, and very similar materials are used today in modern spacesuits.
[00:15:27.390] - Clark
So if we start to think about the actual work of preserving these materials, when did that start? You mentioned that plastics degrade faster in different environments like the ocean, but when did we start to notice that they are degrading in museums, too?
[00:15:39.930] - Dr. Yvonne Shashoua
So what happened at that conference was that we realized that all the other materials we have in museums, like metals, corrode, yes, stone is very stable, textiles break down, but plastics, they break down the fastest. It's not that they're developed to break down quickly. They weren't, but they just do. They're much less stable. We have much less time. If we're thinking about preserving plastics for the next generation, we have to get active on that activity very early in the plastic object's life, if we can, because we haven't got the luxury of time as we have for other materials. It's very rare that museums, unless perhaps you're a design museum and you get the very first Lego bricks as they've been produced and get to look after them before they start degrading. But for most objects, museums get them once they've been used and played with, like Barbie. Then we have a challenge because once you see symptoms of breakdown on plastics, like cracks or stickiness, it's too late to go back to the new object. We can't reverse degradation We can only slow it down. That's a bit different to some other materials we have.
[00:16:50.540] - Dr. Yvonne Shashoua
The answer to your question is things are breaking down very fast. I've been in the National Museum of Denmark for 25 years, and I have seen objects be deaccessed as we call it. We don't throw anything away, but they come into my research collection if they're no longer showing that that they're supposed to, their significance is so reduced that they can't be exhibited anymore.
[00:17:13.060] - Clark
I guess that's somewhat true with all museum artifacts. We can't go backwards in time. All we have left of the Rosetta Stone is all we're ever going to have left. But it's interesting that you describe plastic artifacts as having a short lifetime, which is somewhat contradictory to what we hear about plastic so often, that they last forever. But Since we can't go backwards, what can be done to slow down their degradation?
[00:17:33.760] - Dr. Yvonne Shashoua
We have two options with conservation. We can either slow down the rate of deterioration, or if we see deterioration, then we can treat the object to strengthen it. But it's a bit like when you're ill, it's best to try and avoid being ill rather than trying to take a medicine to heal yourself afterwards if it's avoidable. The focus is on slowing down the rate of degradation, and that can be done in several ways. First of all, most plastics degrade by reacting with air, with oxygen in the air. That process is massively speeded up if they're also exposed to sunlight. The first thing we can do, very simple, don't let our objects get exposed to sunlight. It's more difficult to do something about air because, of course, there's air all around us. But we can preserve them in a special atmosphere without air. It doesn't have to be vacuum packs. There are absorbents that take the air out of an closure, and We can use those to pack our objects in. The other thing we can do is reduce the temperature because all chemical reactions slow down by approximately half. Every 10 degrees Cintegrate, you cool them down, objects down.
[00:18:43.030] - Dr. Yvonne Shashoua
We can store them in a freezer or in a fridge to cool them down. If they're not needed for exhibition or for study all the time, that's a great option. We can also put if they're giving out acidic gasses, for example, those early plastics like the cellulose nitrate, a hair combs and collars, they give out acids. If you don't remove the acids, the reaction becomes what's called autocatalytic, which means that it really speeds up. We can store them with absorbents to take those acids out so that that reaction is kept at a normal rate or even slowed. We have several options there.
[00:19:17.690] - Clark
I'm curious, are there any ways that the lessons you're learning about plastics in the lab and in the museum can inform the way we address plastic in the environment?
[00:19:25.560] - Dr. Yvonne Shashoua
Yeah. I'm just saying to you about the enemy of all plastics is oxygen. Oxygen and light. If we think about plastics being dumped in the oceans or plastic pollution somehow ending up in the seas, this is something that my research has shown in practice, but the theory is there. If the plastic waste is sitting on the surface of the water, it's getting a lot of oxygen and a lot of light. Well, in the summer, a lot of light, and even in the winter, in Denmark, some radiation. If it stays there, it's going to degrade much faster than the material which perhaps up some gravel and falls to the middle of the water column or even ends up on the bottom of the sea. Because down there, it's cold, there's no oxygen, there's no light. In theory, and in practice, if a plastic ends up on the bottom of the sea, it could be there for a very long time because the factors that are causing the degradation are absent. That's something that we don't think about. We think about the sea as being a homogenous mass of water. But where the pollution ends up is going It's going to have a big impact on how long it takes to degrade.
[00:20:33.790] - Dr. Yvonne Shashoua
That can be both a good thing and a bad thing. I know that there's some ideas that it'd be great if plastic just degraded, if the waste plastic just disappeared, we couldn't see it. Maybe it's good that it stays on the surface and degrades. But the downside of that is, what does it degrade to? It degrades to microplastics, which are tiny particles, which are easier for animals to ingest, to be transported around. So that's not so good.
[00:20:58.430] - Clark
Okay, so all we have to do take big, giant bags, probably made of plastic because plastic is cheap, and scoop up all the ocean garbage and close the bags off with the trash inside, tie rocks to the end, and sink it down to the marionas trench where it can stay preserved and caused no problems. This is, of course, a joke. There are lots of communities There are a lot of things that live on the ocean floor that probably would not like that at all. But I think the takeaway is that last sentence you said where that where pollution ends up affects how it degrades and, consequently, the impacts on the immediately surrounding environment. We are going to start the wrap up now. There's one question I I'd like to ask towards the end of interviews, which is, is there one piece of good news that has come out recently in your line of research that you could share with us?
[00:21:37.110] - Dr. Yvonne Shashoua
Yeah. Good news in the way that while we think about plastics in the oceans degrading fast and the animals are being affected by it, what we found is by putting plastics, a single-use plastic cups and cutlery under the water, we have a special site to expose them to see how long they break down. What we found was that they very quickly get a biofilm on them, a coating of barnacles and seaweed and all kinds of other animals that make a chalk coating that actually reinforces them, the plastics. That means that they don't break down very quickly. In fact, they act as a hiding hole for fish and crab, because now, if you think about a plastic coffee cup, it's now covered with a very pretty, actually beautiful coating of barnacles and seaweed, and it's now a dark hole with reinforced walls that animals hide in. So if something could be a positive, we can say that.
[00:22:41.100] - Clark
That is super interesting. I like to hear how other species are interacting with plastic in ways that might benefit them, because we're not the only ones living in this Anthropomorcine. I know some bird species like to give each other gifts of plastic or to collect little treasures for their nests. And now you just told me that cubs can turn into a tiny home for an ocean creature. I Do you think positivity has to be an active choice at times? So thank you for sharing that. And in a similar vein, what's the best part of your job?
[00:23:07.110] - Dr. Yvonne Shashoua
I think I'm very fortunate because plastics is a subject that everybody has an opinion on. There is hardly anyone, if you went out into the street and said the word plastic, what do you think about plastics? You'd get endless opinions about how we have to live without them, how they're so bad. Then if you ask someone, okay, but what do you think about having plastic fillings in your teeth that are white instead of in the old days you had mercury? Or what do you think about the reason why we can store blood, when we donate blood for two years without it being going bad, is because we have PVC blood bags. Then they start thinking, Maybe there are some good things. What we know is that it's the way that we use plastics that's bad. And this idea about using plastics once, buying a salad in a box, a plastic container, and throwing it away, this is not such a positive use for it. If we could focus on the plastics that we set a value in that give us value, I think we'd be on a better track. I love debating that and discussing and coming with a scientific aspect and then hearing about the cultural aspects that not everyone considers plastics as good or bad.
[00:24:11.830] - Dr. Yvonne Shashoua
There are some people that hate plastics and some that love plastics. Artists are really... Many artists are very interested in plastics, but terrified of the word chemistry. But when you start talking to them about the properties of plastics, which is chemistry, they're really interested. They're fascinating about how we can use our analytics of equipment here in the lab to more about these materials.
[00:24:32.640] - Clark
Yeah, I agree. I think whatever anyone's opinion is on plastics, I hope one thing we could all agree on is that we do need to be more intentional about what we're doing with it. I think we have to be honest with ourselves about the fact that plastic has really helped us out as a species, medical applications being only one example, but buying a salad in a box is something we do need to be moving away from. The last question is very broad, open-ended. Is there anything that we didn't discuss today that you think that we should talk about?
[00:25:00.340] - Dr. Yvonne Shashoua
No. I think your last point about intention. Of course, to some extent, we can't control how much plastics are produced. I sometimes feel frustrated that we have an idea that there is this big industry, no doubt, that make plastics. But we also have a responsibility ourselves to limit our plastic use where we can, and I know that we can't always. But for example, in Denmark, we have plastic bottles. We pay a deposit in the supermarket on them, and when we take them back, we get that money back. But I see I've heard many times that plastic bottles are just dumped on the side of the road or they're not returned properly. That's a small thing that we can do to help the waste situation.
[00:25:40.190] - Clark
Okay, last question. Is there anything you'd like to share about the future of your work? What are you working on next?
[00:25:45.790] - Dr. Yvonne Shashoua
I'm just about to start a new project about looking at how waste materials could be used to make new plastics or new products. One of the big problems in Europe is that cigarette buts, cigarette filters filters are found on the pave in ashtrays in communal areas. It's very difficult to collect them because they're small pieces that have to be almost hand collected. Also, where did they go? There's no recycling system for them. But the actual filter is made out of cellulose acetate, which is one of the very first bio-based plastics developed in around 1920. We're developing a way to extract the plastic out of them, that same plastic, and make things out of them, something that's more useful than cigarette filters. I'm really looking forward to using the knowledge from the very first cellulose acetate and seeing if I can apply it to plastic waste.
[00:26:39.280] - Clark
Oh, amazing. I can't wait to see what comes with this project. I'll definitely be following that. I want to say thank you so So thank you so much for coming on the show today and for giving us your time and teaching us a bit more about plastic.
[00:26:50.130] - Dr. Yvonne Shashoua
Thank you. It's my pleasure.
[00:27:00.360] - Clark
I am so happy I got to talk to Yvonne about her work. I think this discussion really gives us an opportunity to think about the cultural aspect that plastic plays in our lives. Let's take Barbie alone. Barbie had a humongous impact on culture throughout the last 70 years or so. The first batch of Barbies were made in 1959, and you can find at least one in the National Museum of American History, or Herstry. Thank you very much. And it's the one wearing that black and white striped swimsuit. Now, I've only seen the new movie, like around only 800 times, so I could be wrong. But I believe that's also the first outfit that Margot Robbie wears in her Oscar-worthy performance. Although I do think Emma Stone did a very good job as well. Anyways, there was a massive amount of research that went into making that film, and it was made possible because we have a historical record of the doll. And thanks to the work of scientists like Dr. Yvonne, they haven't all turned into weird Barbies. Although we love you, Kate McKinnon, as well. The point is, museum science and conservation made this film possible.
[00:28:01.920] - Clark
We could do a whole podcast about Barbie, but the film does a pretty good job of unfolding the historical impact of the doll. Even the creation of the 21st century film and its reception are part of the Plastic Toys story. At It's adding its own contribution to and commentary of today's culture. I could go on and on about Barbie, but the point is plastic artifacts can be hugely impactful, Barbie just being one example, a poignant one. But also increasingly, historians are pointing to the importance of studying the mundane, the day-to-day. I've been to museums where you walk up to the display case and they're like, This is a spoon that's a thousand years old. So maybe in a thousand years, either we'll have figured out how to live without plastic or we'll just be gone. And whoever or whatever is here will have a museum that shows a human plastic spoon that someone used for their yogurt in 2024. And that's history. So okay, I can feel that I'm rambling now, which usually means it's time to sign off. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you in here next week to learn more about plastic.
[00:29:17.480] - Clark
You've been listening to Plastic Podcast. You can find more information about this week's guests and links to their work in the episode description. Next week, we will be speaking with Dr. Sadat Gondogu about his work quantifying microplastic concentration in food items. The cover art for the show was done by Laurel Wong, and Laurel also did the Pine Forest Media logo, and the music you're listening to was done by Tadeo Kbezos. I am your host, Clark Markazy. This episode was produced, written, and engineered by me. So if you loved it, I will not only see you here next week, but I would really appreciate a five-star rating across platforms and a review on Apple Podcasts. Plastic Podcast is part of a larger network of sciencey podcasts called Pine Forest Media. You can find more information about us in the episode description as well or on the website at pineforestpods. Com and Instagram at pineforestmedia. We've got some exciting science podcast coming out this year, and that review I was talking about really helps the entire network to grow. All right, thank you to all of you who have made it this far. There is no Trivia answer this week because there was no question last week, but I do have a review to read.
[00:30:21.920] - Clark
Natj99feef says, Researched, relevant, and really fun. A perfect source of digestible scientific information with an adorable host. Full disclosure, I do know who this person is. Thanks, babe. Now, that's all we have for today. See you next time
