Plastic Podcast Episode 14: Plastic in Drinking Water - Something in the Water Cross Over
This week we hand the microphone over to our sister podcast, "Something in the Water," to hear host Elena Berg tackles the pressing issue of plastic pollution, focusing on the bottled water industry's environmental footprint and the social justice impacts of plastic. Featuring insights from anti-plastic activist Malia Elder and plastics researcher Dr. Sherri Mason. Dr. Mason reveals her research finding plastic in our drinking water. Malia explains the social justice implications of plastic production and waste, and how these issues intersect with water consumption. The episode serves as a wake-up call that the bottled water industry is only one of many industries contributing to the plastic problems at hand and stresses the need for wide scale systemic change.
Episode Guests: Dr. Sherri Mason and Malia Elder
Find more information about Dr. Mason here and browse her publications on Research Gate.
More information about the episode and Something in the Water here.
Episode Transcript and more information on the Pine Forest Media Website
Follow Pine Forest Media on Instagram @pineforestmedia
Hosted by Elena Berg
Written and produced by Elena Berg and Clark Marchese
Audio Editing by Clark Marchese
Cover art by Sarah Glavan
Theme Music by Josef Salvat
Transcript:[00:00:08.980] - Elena Berg
Hello, everyone. It's Elena Berg, your host of something in the water, the podcast where we dive into the world of water, from luxury mineral springs to the challenges of access, environment and industry, for a deeper understanding of what we drink. Welcome back to our second episode. We have a big episode today. In fact, it might be our longest one, so buckle in. And because there's a lot to learn today, let's have a little warm up. I'm a professor, after all. So we're going to start with a pop quiz. But don't worry, it's not graded. It's also multiple choice. So which industry do you think uses the most plastic?
A, packaging
B, textiles
C, electronics, like iPhones.
D, transportation cars and things like that.
Okay, time's up. The answer is packaging guys, and not just by a little. Worldwide. As of 2018, the packaging industry takes up 46% of total plastic production. That's almost half. So packaging and plastic are a big issue. It's something we all have to confront, and it's something that comes up a lot in the fine water circles. This is not a show about plastics, but when we're talking about bottled water, it seems a bit of an elephant in the room.
[00:01:27.450] - Elena Berg
So I think it's best just to address it head on and early. So why is plastic such a big deal in the bottled water industry when many other beverages and products are also packaged in plastic? Well, I think it goes back to the very idea of putting water, this essential human resource, into a bottle in the first place. So, because we already have that awareness, everything people do in the water industry is highly scrutinized. The industry becomes a focal point for this discussion about waste and plastic pollution. I say, fair enough. Let's address that elephant in the room. We have two really interesting guests today. The first is my former student, Malia Elder. I worked with Malia when she was a student at the American University of Paris, and she wrote an amazing thesis about plastic and environmental racism. And now she continues to be an anti plastic activist and is just finishing up a master's of environmental studies and sustainability science at the University of Lund in Sweden. We talked about how the plastic bottle for water specifically has come to symbolize the evils of all plastic pollution. We talked about creative solutions for recycling bottles in Sweden.
[00:02:34.620] - Elena Berg
Finally, we talked about the social justice implications of plastic in terms of production, consumption and waste. As a scientist myself, I wanted to get a scientist on Zoom to talk about the science of plastic in our water bottles and in fact, in our water as well. I called up Dr. Sherri Mason who's a titan of plastics research. We talked about how plastic from all sources gets into our earth systems, how plastic from bottles gets into our water, and how it even finds its way into our taps. Sherri tells us all about the study she conducted to find this out, just how much plastic there is, how it gets there, and how using filters or drinking water from a bottle instead is not the best way forward. Here's where we pause. We're not alarmists on this show, and we're not here to demonize tap water. Quite the opposite. Even as a water sommelier, I drink tap water almost exclusively. Protecting and promoting clean, healthy tap water is absolutely vital. And it's not just me, right? That's my priority. But it's also the priority of a lot of the water Someliers that I work with. Episode nine of this series will be dedicated to discussing public levels of trust in tap water and instances of government failure.
[00:03:47.620] - Elena Berg
But for the most part, tap water is very safe to drink, and I'd advocate that everyone enjoy water from the tap if they are lucky enough to live in one of those areas where it's safe. Lastly, long intro. I know before we begin, I want to recap what we talked about last episode. I hope we can remember that not all water is the same. In addition to bringing water to those who don't have access, bottled water in certain contexts can facilitate an epicurean experience that I believe shouldn't be dismissed. Water is one of the many products that will continue to be bought and sold in packages, both for necessity and enjoyment. We simply have to take stock of our situation and find the best way forward. Alright, without further ado, let's get to it. Malia, it's so good to see you. As all professors know, we learn just as much from our students as they learn from us. And you taught me a lot about plastics. First of all, thank you for coming on the show. I think you're the perfect person to ask this question because you spend a lot of time in activist circles.
[00:04:56.740] - Elena Berg
But something that I've started to notice since I began hanging out with water producers is that it seems like we all know that plastic is this huge issue, and we all seem to realize that the plastic water bottle specifically is this symbol, one that's met with condemnation and is used to represent all plastic pollution. If we're doing a podcast about, I don't know, lettuce, which often doesn't come in plastic, but might sometimes plastics, either way, probably wouldn't be so much a part of the conversation. I want to ask if you have any thoughts on why the plastic water bottle has become such a symbol.
[00:05:33.060] - Malia Elder
Yeah, I think that every environmental issue or social movement usually has a symbol of some kind, something to represent the bigger picture. It would be accurate to say that the anti plastic movement has somewhat used the water bottle as their symbol. I do think it's faulty to think that the water bottle specifically is the issue. I think that most plastic activists may say that, oh, it's such an iconic symbol that everyone knows and everyone uses. It's also quite aesthetic. I think it'd be quite ugly to have a flag with a plastic bag on it that's kind of mushy and deformed, or it's harder to draw. But a bottle is so simple. It is a product that a lot of people buy quite regularly and interact with. Anyone knows what a plastic water bottle looks like, and everyone has bought one at some point in their life. I think that's why it's kind of like, naturally developed as this main symbol for the anti plastic movement. But I do not think it's fair to think that one symbol means that there isn't a bigger story behind the movement. I think it'd be really false and very sad if people just think that we're going after the water bottle and not going after the bigger systems and injustices that come with the entire production, consumption and waste management of plastic of all shapes and sizes.
[00:07:04.890] - Elena Berg
Yeah, I think that's really true. And I want to pull more focus towards that bigger story, not only to sort of reduce demonization of bottled water in certain contexts, but also because I think that missing the bigger story comes with its own problems. If people think that their work is done, if they never purchase another bottle of Dasani, then I think we're in trouble. Maybe to take a step towards understanding that story. I've heard you use a metaphor a number of times that has to do with a running tap. Would you mind sharing that with us?
[00:07:36.050] - Malia Elder
I love the running tap and mop metaphor. I actually borrowed it. I think it existed before, but I did borrow it from this anti plastic NGO called Wasteless in southern India. But the idea is that if you were home and someone left a running tap and there was water spilling all over your apartment, your first reaction would be to close the tap, to stop the water from pouring, and then to clean up the mess. However, working with plastic, there's such a focus on plastic waste management that it very much is as if we left a tap open and kept mopping the floors and trying to get rid of all this waste while the waste was still being produced and still pouring everywhere. And so it is very inefficient to only focus on plastic waste without also focusing on plastic production and the source of where that waste is being produced. So I think that's where the metaphor comes from.
[00:08:41.740] - Elena Berg
Oh, I love the imagery that that creates. It also kind of begs the question of who controls that tap. Something that's talked about a lot is the individual responsibility that we each hold to the environment. I think this discussion has merit, and it can be a really useful way of unifying and rallying people. But that tap with all plastics, not just bottles, is typically controlled by these giant companies. Sometimes I worry that that individual responsibility narrative is used by these companies as a sort of scapegoat to shift the blame. After all, the ‘Do Not Litter’ campaign in the US was started by the companies that were producing the packaging that ended up out in the environment, right? So they shifted blame from themselves to the consumer. I want to hear your thoughts about any value you think there is in focusing on the consumer habits, or if you think it's better to sort of name and shame the larger actors, or if you even think that blame game is one worth playing.
[00:09:40.710] - Malia Elder
I think maybe it's less about assigning blame and more about assigning responsibility. I think that's how I would switch it in its framing, just because I think that space for individual change and of course, systematic change, or bigger capitalistic systematic change, and I think both have to happen at the same time. I don't think we should just focus on individual behavior. But then I do see a perspective where we, and I'm guessing most people listening to this podcast are going to be people from the western world. And it's important to think that we are the ones causing the most harm to our planet. We look at our carbon footprint, our carbon footprints in the west are just this much bigger. And so I think that that does come with a certain responsibility towards trying to change our ways for the planet, but it also comes with a responsibility to put pressure on our governments and put pressure on those bigger systems.
[00:10:45.080] - Elena Berg
I really like this approach. So you live in Sweden and you grew up there? I lived there myself for four years. So I think a lot of lessons can be learned from the Swedes. Shout out to Greta Thunberg.
[00:11:07.340] - Elena Berg
Do you have any examples of a swedish approach to plastics management.
[00:11:11.730] - Malia Elder
Sweden has like, if we were talking about bottle plastic, they do have a very interesting system where it's quite monetary. So every time I buy a plastic water bottle, I think they have a similar system in Germany as well. You have pumped, which means I have to pay like one extra crown, a Swedish crown, which is equivalent to about $0.10 in euros. So it's a very small fee that is added to my bill when I buy a bottle of water or a bottle of soda, any kind of plastic bottle, and then at the end I bring them back to the store and they pass through a machine and I get my money back. Most households in Sweden have a special bucket for just cans and water bottle or like plastic bottles so they can get their money back.
[00:12:01.300] - Elena Berg
Yeah, I bet it adds up after a while. It may not seem like much, but after a couple of months you'd have a number of free lattes. So the government then recycles the bottle?.
[00:12:12.050] - Malia Elder
I mean, Sweden is known for having a pretty good plastic recycling process where they do recycle I think it's like in the upper 90% of their waste. So they do recycle quite a bit of plastic. I can be a little critical about plastic recycling because I think that's an improvement. But I don't think that's the final solution because you can only recycle the same amount of plastic a certain amount of times. And then you'll need to add some new plastic to strengthen those bonds because it will start breaking apart otherwise. So you still need to produce a little bit more plastic in order to properly recycle the plastic.
[00:12:49.870] - Elena Berg
Right. Recycling helps, but it's not the perfect solution. Referring back to that metaphor, this would be mopping, not closing the tap. Have you noticed any shifts in products?
[00:13:00.590] - Malia Elder
I can see that in Sweden, like plastic, production has reduced quite a lot from when I used to live there, back when I was maybe like twelve. There are a lot more cardboard boxes, even in liquor stores you can find wine in cardboard packaging. And so there's been a shift into trying to use less plastic in general. So I do see that it's worked in the sense, in that sense that people putting pressure and people purposely trying to buy products that are not packaged in plastic seems to make a difference. There is a certain amount of power we have with our purchases, our purchasing power. We can kind of, I guess, vote with our money. I'm quite critical of the capitalist system in general, so I don't like that very much. But it's true that there is a certain amount of power we hold.
[00:13:53.950] - Elena Berg
I think that's a really good thing to keep in mind when we go to the grocery store. If a mineral water is something that we want to enjoy, we can vote by supporting brands that are local, for example, or taking steps to bring their product to us with the environment in mind. At the very least, how far a product travels and how it's packaged should be part of our mental calculation. I want to shift gears a little bit since we're on the topic of consumer choice. We'll hear more from Malia at the end, but now seems like a good time to bring our second guest into the conversation. We're going to switch to talk about levels in water now. It may seem like an abrupt shift, but there's a through line, I promise. Sherri Mason is that rockstar researcher that I mentioned earlier. She did a huge study looking at plastic content in bottled water across different companies. See consumer choice through line, I told you. But the study came about due to another project that Sherri was working on. I'll stop talking now so she can introduce herself.
[00:14:53.380] - Dr. Sherri Mason
So, my name is Sherri Mason. I am a professor of chemistry and director of sustainability at the Erie campus of Penn State University, and my research is focused in freshwater plastic pollution.
[00:15:07.550] - Elena Berg
Thanks for coming on the show. So you conducted two very large studies measuring levels of plastics in both tap water and bottled water. But before we get to the results, can you tell us a bit about how the study got started in the first place and how you go about testing for something like that?
[00:15:23.500] - Dr. Sherri Mason
So the tap water study was done first. A graduate student from Minnesota reached out to me. She was in the school of Public Health and wanted to do some kind of a research project on microplastics and public health and was reaching out to me for ideas. And I said, you know, no one's looked in tap water, and I get a lot of questions about tap water. I think that would be really interesting. And kind of sent her on her way and thought she was just going to kind of take that and run with it. And then separately, an organization called Orb Media had reached out to me, and they are really interested in bridging between science and the media. And so they were kind of wondering, where is the growing edge of plastic pollution research at that point in time? And again, I had mentioned the fact that I had gotten a lot of questions right as my work is coming out. The question was kind of, well, is this in our drinking water? Is this in our drinking water? And so I shared that with them and then they both ended up coming back to me almost within the same week and saying, okay, we need help with this.
[00:16:32.910] - Dr. Sherri Mason
It became a collaboration between my research lab. This graduate student who I was distance mentoring and Orb Media did a lot of the outreach, and they funded it. We wrote up standard operating procedures, SOPS, as they're known for short, and said, okay, this is how you collect a sample. So it was kind of a citizen science kind of initiative where we asked people, we would send them boxes that had a sample container that had the standard operating procedure. It had a label so they could send it back, and it had a form we're coming from. And then once we had these two sets of data, we merged them together to understand sample X-Y-Z one, one, two came from Argentina or something like that.
[00:17:23.630] - Elena Berg
Okay, so, big project. What'd you find out? Do we have plastic in our tap water?
[00:17:28.770] - Dr. Sherri Mason
We do have plastic in our tap water. How much? So we did a global assessment of tap water. So we collected over 100 samples from across the globe, from anywhere from kind of developing nations to fully developed nations, several, obviously, here in the United States, and analyzed them and found, on average, globally, about four and a half pieces of plastic per liter of tap water, which the fact that it's there obviously is a little concerning. But I don't want people to be completely freaked out.
[00:18:10.270] - Elena Berg
Well, I don't want to freak out, but I imagine that's everyone's first instinct. Tell me why we shouldn't.
[00:18:16.910] - Dr. Sherri Mason
It's about moderation. I think that the fact that it's present in our water, our drinking water, something that is so necessary and fundamental for life, is a concern and something that we should be aware of. But I kind of think of it as like, the canary and the coal mine at the levels that we're currently seeing it. It's something that we should be aware of and be looking to change. But this isn't kind of a catastrophic event, but it's really kind of a warning to us about our relationship with this material.
[00:18:48.450] - Elena Berg
Okay, so the message is, don't freak out, but definitely respond. I guess our response should be directed at the source. Right? So do we know how the plastic is getting in the water?
[00:18:59.230] - Dr. Sherri Mason
How does it get there is a whole different question. In our tap water, it seems that it's largely actually getting into our water through contact with air.
[00:19:10.850] - Dr. Sherri Mason
And the reason I say that is because 98% of the particles that we identified in tap water were fibers, and fibers are readily transferred, transmitted through air. So the air we're breathing in right now, as we have this conversation, it has plastic microfibers in it.
[00:19:31.580] - Elena Berg
That's not what I would expect. Maybe let's take a step back. Are tap water providers aware of this? If it's coming from the air, it seems like it's something that would be hard for them to control.
[00:19:44.030] - Dr. Sherri Mason
This is really important because when our study came out, I had a number of water treatment operators who contacted me and were concerned. And the reality is, especially in developed nations, our water treatment is quite effective. It does exactly what it's supposed to do. They filter down to the micron level, so they're doing what they're supposed to do. But as soon as that water comes in contact with air, we have this transfer of plastic from the air into the water. And so it's not that our water treatment processes are not operating properly. They are, they are doing everything they can possibly do. But the reality is plastic has become so pervasive that there's really no way for us to prevent it ending up in our water, in our food. Anywhere we look, we find plastic.
[00:20:41.490] - Elena Berg
What was the reaction to the results of the study?
[00:20:43.820] - Dr. Sherri Mason
So the tap water study was done first. That information came out. My hope and an anticipation, to be honest with that study was that it would be a wake up call to a lot of people that if we're already seeing plastic in our water and we're at this kind of a production, what's going to happen if we triple production, which is where the industry wants to go? And so I kind of really wanted it to be kind of a wake up call to our globe on our relationship with this material and kind of rethinking it. Instead, what I heard on some of the news reports as the tap water study came out was, oh, well, I'll just drink more bottled water. And honestly, it was really depressing. It was really depressing?
[00:21:35.430] - Elena Berg
Oh, gosh, yeah, that's disappointing. But I guess it's not totally surprising.
[00:21:40.920] - Dr. Sherri Mason
It also speaks volumes to how good marketing is. Right. So you have these companies that are marketing their product as being clean and pure, wrapping it in plastic. People still think that it's going to have less plastic than something that comes out of their tap. Right. That has very little contact with plastic items, maybe only like the pipes or something like that. Right.
[00:22:11.480] - Elena Berg
So is this response what prompted the bottled water study?
[00:22:15.000] - Dr. Sherri Mason
What Orb media and I and my research student decided to do was, okay, we're going to pick up the pace and we're going to do a bottled water study. And so really quickly we shifted gears to doing this global bottled water assessment. And that started with doing a market study that was conducted by Orb Media. So they figured out who was the top selling brands across the globe and within specific regions. So, for example, in China, their top selling brand is Wahaja water, which you don't find anywhere else. Right? So Aquafina, Dasani, Nestle pure life, these are the top selling brands worldwide. And so we identified eleven brands. Some of those brands are single source. There are certain companies that will bottle water from a particular place, and that's the only place that they bottle it. There are other places like Nestle Pure Life, Aquafina, Dasani. If you have a tap and you'll sell them the water, they will bottle it right from your house. But it's all under the same brand. And so those we sampled in multiple locations. So from the United States, from, say, somewhere in Europe, from somewhere in Asia, we would sample them in different locations.
[00:23:27.870] - Dr. Sherri Mason
So it was eleven brands, but 19 different countries that we purchased those from. And out of each case of water that we received, we usually pulled out ten bottles from the 24 that generally were shipped. And we would analyze those ten bottles for those eleven brands. In bottled water, you find significantly more plastic than you do in tap water. So in tap water, the number was five and a half pieces of plastic, mostly fibers, 98% fibers per liter of water. Within bottled water, the average was 325 pieces of plastic per liter of bottled water. Most of that plastic was not fibers, it was rather fragments. Fibers were the second most common shape. And the importance of that is that. That tells me as a scientist, that there's a different source of where that plastic is coming from. So the majority of the plastic within bottled water seems to be coming from the act of bottling the water or opening the bottle of water. It's from the packaging.
[00:24:44.630] - Elena Berg
14, take two. Okay, so it's there. We know it's there both in our taps and in our bottles. I wanted to ask the same question about the tap water study and the bottled water study, and it's about distribution with the bottles. Did you find that certain companies had a higher content than others? This is not necessarily to name and shame per se, but perhaps it could give us insight about certain practices that yield higher plastic content over others.
[00:25:12.360] - Dr. Sherri Mason
Yes, we had one bottle of Nestle pure life that had over 10,000 pieces of plastic. In terms of understanding why, that is a really difficult question, because I think there's so many factors in it, the integrity of the plastic bottle itself. One of the things that industry does is they really tout the fact that, oh, this bottle uses less plastic than that bottle.
[00:25:42.150] - Malia Elder
Right.
[00:25:42.500] - Dr. Sherri Mason
But the problem with that is that it tends to make the bottle flimsy, and so it almost breaks more easily. And so you have a number of different kind of factors that can play into it. I think one of the things that oftentimes people don't kind of understand when it comes to science is that when you're creating a study, that study is designed with what is your question in mind? And so the study is always designed to answer that question, and then you have to do follow up. Right. This is the scientific method, is that doing one study just leads to more questions, and then you have to design other studies to answer those questions. And that's how it works.
[00:26:25.760] - Elena Berg
That makes perfect sense. Perhaps it's a bit of an unfair question because I start listing all of the different variables you'd have to control for it, and you can see how big of a question that becomes, everything from production to temperature to contact with sunlight to time the water spent in the bottle, et cetera. So what I also want to ask the same question about distribution in tap water. Something that we'll be continually addressing on this show are issues of environmental justice. Something we know is that certain areas, and more importantly, communities, are exposed to higher levels of plastic and air pollution. So if plastic is truly entering our water supply through contact with air, did you see any trends in the divergent concentrations of plastics? In a geographic sense, yeah.
[00:27:09.040] - Dr. Sherri Mason
So one of the things that we asked in the survey that we gave people when they were bottling their tap water was where their water came from, because we were kind of really curious if we would see those variations. What we discovered, basically, is that people don't know where their water comes from. Some of the questions that we were interested in understanding as part of that top water study, we just weren't able to answer because of lack of general knowledge. What we did find was kind of interesting. The one thing that we could at least locate was we compared developed nations to developing nations. And so I expected developing nations to have higher concentrations than developed nations. And it was actually the within, you know, the western world, basically Europe and the United States. Our numbers were a little bit higher than what you saw within developing nations. I'm not sure, given the data that we had, that it was statistically significant. So that's a different question. But it was interesting that it was kind of opposite of what my expectations were. I'm not sure that we have a good understanding as to why that is.
[00:28:26.920] - Dr. Sherri Mason
It may just be that there is a higher prominence in certain plastic products within developed nations, like carpet or clothing. That leads to that, but we don't really have a good kind of feel as to why that is.
[00:28:43.740] - Elena Berg
Okay, so that brings up a lot of different possible threads of discussion. For the purposes and constraints of your study, it makes sense to sort of compare nationwide averages, but it would perhaps also be worth looking into variation within the same country. It's time to loop Malia back into the conversation. As a reminder, Malia did her undergraduate thesis with me on the social justice implications of plastic production.
[00:29:07.050] - Malia Elder
Yeah, I think when we talk about social justice and plastic, the way I see it would be to divide into three separate sections. You have social impact when it comes to production. Those are the ones I focused on when I was writing the pieces, and I think that's maybe the area that's less talked about. Then you have some level of social implication or social injustice when it comes to consumption, and then at the end you have waste, which is probably the most talked about. I think the biggest impact in social justice is still plastic production. People don't focus on the entire story of plastic production because where do plastics come from? They come from fossil fuels. A lot of people calculate the impact. They don't actually calculate the fracking to extract the oil because that's part of the process too. And that has a huge co2 footprint. And then you can also ask yourself, where are we frackicking to get the oil? On whose land? I know that in Norway they have a lot of oil. And this being a huge issue because it happens to often be on Sami indigenous land. And the same can be said in the US.
[00:30:11.000] - Malia Elder
There's been a lot of issues between oil fracking, oil extractions and indigenous rights. So there you have a whole social issue as well. And then you go to refining the oil, because once the oil is extracted, you still have to refine it before you can start making plastics. And where do we put refineries? Who lives around those refineries? Usually people of color.
[00:30:34.890] - Elena Berg
So this is reminding me of your thesis topic. You did a case study on this. Can you talk to us about cancer Alley, the case that you chose?
[00:30:42.570] - Malia Elder
I think Cancer Alley is just the easiest example because it's very well researched. It's basically a stretch of industrial land in Louisiana, in the lower Mississippi region, and a lot of people of color are known to live in those areas and they've seen a huge rise in the amount of cancer detected in that area. Now, what's really hard with cancer alley, it's an industrial area. So there are a lot of companies, and there are a lot of industrial complex. So how do we assign blame to one specific company when there's so many present there? Right. And how do we pinpoint which one is the one that's really putting people at risk? Well, what I did in my undergrad thesis is that was looking at the social impact of plastic production. So I focus on really understanding and outlining how plastic is produced and then using cancer alley kind of as a case study. What I did do, which was quite interesting, is that I went to a lot of the companies that had their industrial complexes on Cancer Alley, and I kind of saw which ones I could draw a line between plastic production or any step of the plastic production line, and the company.
[00:31:50.020] - Malia Elder
And I did see that there was a large majority of the companies there were somehow involved in a step of plastic production, whether it was like making a chemical that would be used for molding and engineering plastic or refining plastics or working with any sort of plastics. And then a large number were also kind of unknown, like they were producing things that could be linked to the plastic industry but could also not be linked to it. There was a very small minority that I could see for sure had nothing to do with plastic production.
[00:32:20.970] - Elena Berg
So I think that what we're kind of getting at here is that it's not an accident that these companies are concentrated in specific areas, and it's not an accident that the people who live near these areas are of a particular demographic. And as we learned from Dr. Sherri Mason, the more plastic in the air, the more plastic in the water. So if certain groups of people live in places with higher concentrations of plastic in the air, it starts to affect their water, health, and this kind of cascading series of impacts. Environmental racism is a concept that everyone should be familiar with, but it may be really important to kind of bring everyone into that conversation. I'm wondering if you can give us a definition or an explanation of what that concept of environmental racism gets at.
[00:33:07.500] - Malia Elder
Prior to being called Cancer Alley, it was called plantation Alley - because that specific stretch of land had a very deep connection with slavery in the South, in the US. So it was known for being a space where a lot of slaves used to stay and live. So I think that just like comparing those two, the fact that it used to be plantation alley and it became Cancer Alley tells a really deep story. But in general, what can be said when it comes to environmental racism anywhere is that I've always seen it as, like, it's easier to exploit and put people of color at risk. And, I mean, that's the same goes for indigenous people or just anyone that's kind of oppressed in today's society. It's easier to put those people at risk because their lives are not seen as valuable. This idea that a certain color skin should be prioritized over another, or is more valuable than another, black lives matter less than white lives. So it's okay if we have our refinery in that spot near those people. What are they going to do about it? They don't have enough money to hire a lawyer and take us to court, right?
[00:34:18.420] - Malia Elder
They don't have as much. Yeah, I guess, in general, they just don't have as much power in this capitalist system. So it's going to be harder for them to put up a fight. But if we put that same refinery in a rich, white neighborhood, then we'd have a problem.
[00:34:32.790] - Elena Berg
Okay, so if we keep this in mind when we hear what Sherri Mason just told us, that plastic gets into our water through contact with air, there's a lot more plastic and air going into the lungs of people of color in the United States, on average, let's say, and therefore into the freshwater as well. Another link I can find between Malia's work and Sherri's is that global north, global south divide. Sherri tells us that the developing countries have more plastic content in their air and their water. But Malia explains that the social injustices of plastic extend beyond the production, like we see in cancer alley. Malia also explains how the consumption and disposal of plastic can be problematic.
[00:35:11.100] - Malia Elder
At the end, you have waste, which is probably the most talked about, especially in the sense that a lot of plastic waste in the past, but also to this day, it has been imported to other countries. And so just the general idea that our waste can just be brought to, usually a non western country and kind of like, dumped there is inherently problematic. And there you can definitely talk about environmental injustice and environmental racism. It's gone a little bit better, I think. Now we're at around 2% of global plastic waste is exported. But still, when you look at the exporting, it's either between two western countries or a western country and a non western country. So it's never the global south exporting to the global north. It's only in one direction. Even if we just think 2% of the world's plastic production is still like a huge amount of plastic just being dumped into countries where they don't really have the right infrastructure to take care of it, and it's quite literally ruining their lives and environments.
[00:36:17.840] - Elena Berg
So then we can probably even attribute some of the plastic content in air and water in the global south to western consumption. Speaking of which, can you explain the social injustice aspect of consumption.
[00:36:29.980] - Malia Elder
When it comes to the consumption of plastic? I think the injustice is more focused on the fact that we still have very little knowledge about exactly how plastic is affecting us. It's a product we consume every day. We're always exposed to it. We don't always know how it impacts our health. And so I do think that's like a form of injustice as well, because we do deserve access to that knowledge as plastic users, and we just don't have it. We know that certain kinds of plastics can cause cancer. It depends on the plastic codes. But there are a few plastics that are toxic, and we know that those have been linked to a higher probability of developing cancer. But we also just don't know exactly the risk impact. And it's only recently that they found microplastics in the placenta of mothers during a study. And that was here in the west. So it's even impacting the development of your infants. It's hard to know exactly how having microplastics in a placenta is going to affect babies, but the fact that we apparently now can interact with plastic before even being born is quite alarming. Finding causation when it comes to health is extremely difficult with, like, 100% certainty.
[00:37:45.030] - Malia Elder
But I think for me, there is an injustice in not knowing how something may impact me. I don't feel like there is any informed consent in that sense, and I think that's quite alarming.
[00:37:57.270] - Elena Berg
I hadn't thought about the informed consent aspect of plastic use. I guess that's why the work of Sherri Mason is so important. Let's talk to Sherri a bit more about how she thinks we should be moving forward, both in helping to reduce plastic content in our water, but also perhaps to protect our own intake. Is there a filter or something we can use? I don't know. You'll tell us?
[00:38:18.000] - Dr. Sherri Mason
Number one, is to just reduce the amount of plastic that's in your lives, right? So drinking tap water over bottled water, I know that there are places like the tap water is not safe, and so obviously there are exceptions to every rule. But generally speaking, our tap water is exceedingly safe. It's much more regulated and tested than is bottled water, which has no regulations on it. So highly recommend people just kind of think about how is plastic making its way into your life and finding ways to reduce that. But then also just thinking about your food and how you're purchasing that, how you're packaging and saving that. So finding ways to reduce your plastic usage at a whole is really important. If you're thinking about filtering it out of your tap water, you're kind of missing the point, honestly, in many ways, right? It's in our water because of the prominence plastic has in our lives. And so that's really where you have to focus is understanding what we have to do is lower the production of plastic. And that means everything we do from how we wash our laundry, right? So finding ways of getting laundry detergent to your house that is not packaged in plastic, shampoo, conditioner, food, anything, just start looking around your life and go, do I really need this in plastic?
[00:39:46.560] - Dr. Sherri Mason
Is this the only way I can get this item into my life? And so really kind of thinking about ways to reduce your plastic usage is ultimately how we get it out of our water. That's the biggest thing. Because if you think about it, most filters are plastic. So if you're trying to reduce your plastic, you filter it out of your water and it goes into a filter, and then what are you doing with that? You're going to throw it away. Most filters seem to be more of a delayed mechanism than an actual filter. So they'll initially filter the plastic out, but it's kind of like in soil. The more water that runs through that filter, it's going to push those plastics through. And so you delayed it. So maybe it's not in your first glass of water that you got out.
[00:40:34.430] - Dr. Sherri Mason
Of your filter, but it's in your 10th glass. You didn't really solve the problem. I would suggest that the levels that we're seeing in tap water right now I don't think are alarming. I think they're concerning, and I think that they should cause people to rethink the relationship with this material. And if you really want to reduce the plastic that's making its way into your body, rethink your relationship with this material and find ways to reduce your plastic usage as a whole.
[00:41:01.160] - Elena Berg
That's really good advice. And also something that we're kind of addressing on this show is how the plastic water bottle specifically has become a symbol for all plastic pollution. And how some people may think that if they just make the switch away from bottled water, for example, they've done all they need to do. But it's good to remind ourselves that there's a lot more ways that plastic is all around us. And while we do this, you'd recommend that people still should feel safe to drink tap water unless they've been told in a specific context not to.
[00:41:30.110] - Dr. Sherri Mason
Yes. And this gets back to the fact that bottled water is not regulated. It doesn't abide by the same regulations that tap water does. So a water treatment facility has to report hourly a certain number of times, know certain chemicals that they're testing. Know. And so when people like, for example, in the United States, raised the alarm that there was lead, know. Water in Flint, Michigan, or Baltimore, you know why we know that? Because of regulations. You know what we don't know about the bottle of water you're drinking. If there's lead in it, because there's no regulations, there's nobody testing for it, and there's no requirement of that testing or the reporting of those testing results. So even if a company is doing it just because they want to be good stewards or something, they don't have to report that information anywhere, and they don't have to report it on a continual basis in a publicly accessible forum. You can go online to your water treatment facility and see their results. None of that is required of the bottled water industry.
[00:42:41.250] - Elena Berg
Well, Sherri, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today. I definitely learned a lot. Before we start to wrap up this episode, I want to ask both of our guests if there's anything else that they think we missed today or anything else that you'd like to add. Let's start with Malia.
[00:42:58.290] - Malia Elder
I think we just need more education about plastics. I think it's crazy that it's a material we interact with every single day. Yet if I walk up to most people and I ask them if they know anything about the seven plastic codes, they'll say no. And that's kind of crazy. If I ask them if they know which plastics are known to be safer and less likely to leach into their food or their water, and which plastics are known to causing cancer or having a higher probability to give you cancer, most people will say no. I think that's really scary. So I do want to see an educational movement when it comes to plastic. If we're going to continue using that material. I do think that we also need to be educated about what we're using and what we're putting in our bodies. I think it would be actually quite interesting if the water industry partook in creating an educational campaign or trying to educate their consumers, then I do also think that there are ways of moving away from one time use plastics.
[00:43:58.490] - Elena Berg
All right, Sherri, same question.
[00:44:00.990] - Dr. Sherri Mason
We go looking for life on other planets. We look for water, and we look for water because to our knowledge, you can't have life without water. That's how fundamental it is, and so I wish people appreciated it more. As a chemist, it's my favorite molecule. It's amazing in so many ways that I could spend just an hour talking about how wonderful water is and how unique on a chemical standpoint that one little molecule of three atoms is. So I think it's important for people to recognize and to understand that by being kind and thoughtful with regard to water, you're being kind and thoughtful with regard to all of humanity and every living thing on this planet.
[00:44:50.830] - Elena Berg
Very well said. Thank you, Sherri. Wow. Okay, everyone, those were some intense interviews. There was a lot of information, but the show is called something in the water, after all. And I guess we have to contend with the fact that plastic is part of that mix. But there's a lot of other things in water, and part of this podcast is to foster a curiosity for different kinds of water. As a water sommelier, I don't want this reality to prevent you from enjoying the experiences that water has to offer. And as an environmental scientist, I don't want anyone to become resigned to a dystopian plastic future. It's a bit of a complex situation we find ourselves in, but the only way forward is to be aware of the choices we make. I still plan to purchase and enjoy water that comes in a variety of packaging once in a while. As a treat, I will also enjoy different kinds of wine and maybe some soda and occasionally even some nutella. We can find hope and solidarity in the collective efforts we take to reduce our impact when we can. This has been a really introspective day for me since.
[00:45:54.540] - Elena Berg
Speaking to Sherri and Malia just highlights how complex our choices are and how big the problem is. And that's why we need to imagine solutions, and we have to find ways to not lose hope. But that's all we have for you today. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for listening to the second episode of something in the water. Please join us back here, wherever you're listening to this next week when we talk to Doran Binder. He runs a bottled water company called Crag, where he bottles water straight from the source, and he uses reusable glass bottles. I'm your host, Elena Berg. This podcast was produced and written by myself and Clark Marchese. This episode's guests were Malaya Elder and Dr. Sherri Mason, and we've put some information about them in our show notes. This is a Pine forest media production and full transcripts can be found@pineforestpods.com. The music you're listening to was produced by Joseph Salvat, my friend and future guest on the show. Cover art was made by Sarah Glavin, and the show was edited by Clark Marchese. Finally, thank you to the American University of Paris for making this podcast as possible.
[00:47:02.250] - Elena Berg
If you feel called, writing a review and giving us a five star rating is the best thing you can do to help us so we can make more sciency podcasts in the future. This is my first audio endeavor as a water sommelier, but as a scientist, we've got a lot more to cover than just water. Okay, bye bye for now.
