Plastic Podcast Episode 16 - Plastic context: a life cycle assessment of economy and health

In this thought-provoking episode of the Plastic Podcast, host Clark Marchese and guest expert Rachel Karasik delve into a comprehensive life cycle assessment of plastic, exploring its impacts from production to disposal. They discuss not only the environmental and health damages associated with each stage of plastic's journey but also the often overlooked economic benefits that contribute to its pervasive use. Through detailed analysis, they uncover how plastic's lifecycle impacts various populations differently, emphasizing the need for policies that address these inequalities. This episode illuminates the complex interplay between economic gains and public health costs in the world of plastic, making a strong case for more informed and intentional use of this ubiquitous material. Join us as we navigate the intricate pathways of plastic's impacts on our health, economy, and environment.

Episode Guest: Rachel Karasik

More information about Rachel Karasik at NIVA Here

Connect with Rachel Karasik on LinkedIn

Browse Rachel Karasik’s publications on Google Scholar

Something in the Water Ep 2 on Spotify and Apple Podcasts

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:
[00:00:09.750] - Clark Marchese

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Plastic Podcast, the show that tells the science and the story of our relationship with plastic. You think plastic just fell out of a coconut tree? Plastic exists in the context of all in which it lives and what came before. Which is why today we're doing a life cycle, cost-benefit, health and economic analysis of plastic in context. I am your host, Clark Marchese, and let's get started. If you've been listening to the show for a while, a word you will have heard many times is life cycle assessment. Whenever we say this word, we say how important it is when it comes to plastic. Now, if you knew this week, a life cycle assessment is a systematic analysis analysis of impacts of a particular product starting all the way back to the extraction of raw materials from the earth that are used to make that product, all the way down to what happens to after people stop using it, and all of the impacts in between. Now, you could do a life cycle assessment of any product, really. But on Plastic Podcast, we're going to do plastic. A comprehensive analysis would look at any possible impact it could have.

[00:01:24.410] - Clark Marchese

But that would be a really large scale project. So many life cycle assessments choose one handful of impacts. It could be impact on the environment. You could even break that down to be more specific, only looking at greenhouse gas emissions, for example. Today, the impacts we're going to be talking about are human health and the economy along each stage of the plastic life cycle. Now, to help us through this, I found a researcher named Rachel Karasik. Rachael is an expert in environmental management, environmental policy, environmental justice, across a host of environmental concerns, plastic being only one. Rachel worked with a team on this assessment, and what I liked about it, and what I found so interesting, was that it not only looked at the harms the plastic causes, but it also looked at the benefits. We're going to go through this life cycle assessment step by step and look at the health and economic benefits and harms of plastic. We're also going to ask ourselves why it's important to look at the benefits and the harms side by side. It's a long journey, so let's just get started. All right. Hello. Welcome to the show.

[00:02:37.810] - Clark Marchese

It's lovely to meet you. Thank you for being here. The first question is if you could just introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your research.

[00:02:44.890] - Rachel Karasik

Yeah. Hi, Clark. Nice to meet you. Excited that you're doing this work. My name is Rachael Karasik, and I am currently a research scientist at the Norwegian Institute for Water Research, the acronym for which is NIVA. I'm based in Oslo, Norway, and I do research in the international environment and development program within NIVA. But for five years before that, I was working in the US, which is where I'm from, at Duke University's Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment, and Sustainability within the Ocean and Coastal Policy program, where I started my work on plastic. So broadly But broadly speaking, I am interested in environmental policy. I'm really interested in understanding what the social and economic outcomes of that policy are. I'm really interested in the ways in which environmental problems are distributed across different populations as environmental justice issues, but also the ways in which solutions to those problems do or do not maintain or exacerbate those inequities across populations. So plastic is largely what I work on, but I'm also interested in fisheries, food security, habitat restoration. So that's me in a nutshell.

[00:04:07.280] - Clark Marchese

Okay, great. I've talked to a good number of researchers at this point who focus on plastic, and their specialties range a lot of different topics from oceans to soil to human health. Usually, when I have those discussions, it's cross-sectional. Their research lies along one step of the life cycle of plastics. Sometimes we will reference other parts along this chain production, but usually they focus on one segmented step. We've mentioned a couple of times on the show the importance of analyzing the entire life cycle of plastic. That's what we're going to do today in this conversation because you wrote an article that is titled Inequitable Distribution of Plastic: Benefits and Burdens on Economies of Public Health. This is a life cycle assessment, not necessarily of everything having to do with plastic. We're not looking at the environment here, for example. This article looks on health, burdens, and economies. But another Another thing that's interesting is that it looks at the benefits and burdens. Oftentimes, we're only looking at burdens when it comes to plastic and life cycle assessments. I think that looking at them both at the same time is a useful approach, perhaps especially for someone who is interested in policy, because when we see who benefits, we start to understand why things are the way that they are, and that's the basis towards which we can direct policy.

[00:05:20.640] - Clark Marchese

I imagine how this conversation will go is we'll go down each of the stages of the life cycle of plastic that you've identified and see who benefits and see who suffers. But before we Can we start? Maybe you can tell me a bit about the motivation behind this project.

[00:05:33.550] - Rachel Karasik

Yeah, sure. I would love to. I always think about the way in which one piece of plastic moves throughout potentially the world during its entire life cycle from its extraction to whatever its end-of-life fate is. And not only does it move, it also has a number of impacts as it moves through that life cycle. So that one piece of plastic can make a lot of people in a lot of places some money, and it can also harm people, too, along the way. For me, it was, is there a way to illustrate that that one piece of plastic will have numerous impacts on different populations in different areas, and that's the approach of the life cycle. But I also think part of the motivation was to demonstrate plastic as a symptom of a bigger cause and disease of capitalism and exploitation and overconsumption, and just an example of that. I think we really wanted to frame plastic as an environmental injustice across this entire life cycle that targets multiple populations as it moves along, rather than a problem that can be easily fixed if you change your fork at your smoothie place. Duke University has as a network of people.

[00:07:03.320] - Rachel Karasik

It's called the Plastic Pollution Working Group. There are folks who have my area of expertise, so they're legal scholars or they're policy researchers, but there are also people who do have a lot of expertise in environmental justice. There are health researchers, cancer biologists, food access folks in that group. We really wanted to think about how can we knock heads to show the ways in which where I'm going to assessing the impacts of plastic. And that's where the idea came from. And I think the last thing I'll say about that is, yeah, I think not only are the impacts of plastic, whether they be environmental, social or economic, often discussed on a life cycle stage basis. But you very rarely in the dialogs and spaces that I've seen will hold the benefits right next to the burdens and have a frank conversation about trade offs, which are often the types of analysis we make in policy making, and we have to name who's losing and who's winning. I'll just say one more thing. I know I already said this is the last thing I'm saying, but this is not a comprehensive review. This was 10 people, mostly in the state of North Carolina, workshopping ideas.

[00:08:20.800] - Rachel Karasik

We don't claim to be more than that. I think a thorough, comprehensive global analysis of all of the winners and all of the losers is needed, but we didn't have the scope or the resources to do it. So this is really an example based on the expertise of 10 people who mostly look a certain way and come from a certain socioeconomic status talking about it. So there's a lot of gaps and there's a lot of misses in this work as well, but we see it as a starting point.

[00:08:49.350] - Clark Marchese

Yeah, I think that's a great way of putting it. And I can already see two benefits of analyzing the benefits of plastic alongside the burdens. The first is oftentimes plastic either gets villainized completely as it's completely unnecessary. That's a really easy argument to refute. Always and never statements don't make the strongest arguments in the first place. You could always say, We can't get rid of plastic. People's jobs depend on it. We need it for the medical industry. It saved so many lives during the pandemic. But then if we take this approach and we look at the benefits and harms next to each other, I think that can prompt an intentionality around our plastic use that's definitely missing at the moment. We can limit it to the use of essentials and ditch the unnecessary single-use stuff. Then the second is, as you alluded to, seeing who is harmed next to who benefits can help us establish a causal relationship that can hopefully lead to accountability. Let's go down this life cycle. The first stage is production. I'll remind anyone who just listened to our episode on carbon emissions from plastic production. Today, we're not looking at climate, we're not looking at emissions, we're not looking at the environment directly, we're just looking at economy and health.

[00:09:59.520] - Clark Marchese

So production. Who benefits, who gets harmed?

[00:10:03.200] - Rachel Karasik

Yeah. I'll say that there's no agreed-upon life cycle within the Plastic Scholarships. We drew from a resource from the UN, and we were really looking at the life cycle of a macroplastic product, in which case production largely begins with the extraction of fossil fuels and petrochemicals from in the US, places like Louisiana and Texas. That then goes through a refinement process and then palletizing and manufacturing. Even within production, you have a number of industries, many of which are industries that are amongst the highest earners in this world. We're thinking about our ExxonMobil and our Aramco and our Chevron that are participating in this stage of the plastics lifecycle. Within that stage, you have profitable companies that are generating a lot of money from the extraction, the refinement, the production of plastics.

[00:11:13.050] - Clark Marchese

Okay, we're already seeing why this type of assessment is important because ExxonMobil, while it does get a lot of attention, people don't really associate it with plastic.

[00:11:22.730] - Rachel Karasik

Then you also have the employees of those companies who are obviously earning a lot less than people in the C-suite, but nonetheless are retaining employment from the petrochemical industry that's feeding the plastics industry. Then you also have people who live nearby those plants. Those are often in the US called fence-line communities. Those people are exposed to a lot of hazardous chemicals, both through air pollution and water pollution, that are associated with those stages of the life cycle. I think one of the best, if not the best, studied examples is Cancer Valley in Louisiana Indiana, which is, I believe, in a 150-mile corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, with a high density of petrochemical plants. I don't remember the exact statistic. It's in my paper, and it's in a lot of papers. It's been studied since at least the '80s. But the highest rates of cancer in this country come from Cancer Alley, and that's the petrochemical industry. On the one hand, you've got a lot of people making money. Well, you've got some people making a lot of money. You've got a lot of people making some money. Then you've got a lot people being exposed to chemicals, either through work or through where they live.

[00:12:34.640] - Rachel Karasik

Sometimes those are the same people who are making so money and who are being harmed.

[00:12:38.770] - Clark Marchese

Okay. For anyone who hasn't heard of Cancer Alley, I don't mean to brush over it because it's a very poignant, upsetting, and elucidating case study. It's probably the most famous example of an environmental justice catastrophe having to do with plastic. It's actually going to get its very own episode in a couple of weeks. If you're following the show, you will see it in your feed. What I What I can say now is that there's a major racial dimension to this example. This corridor is made up of majority Black communities. I learned actually in the second episode of Something in the Water, which is another Pine Forest media production, that prior to being called Cancer Alley, It was called Plantation Alley. There's a lot to dig into. I'll link that episode of Something in the water in the show notes as well. We will move on for now, but stay tuned for more on this. That's production, everything from to fossil fuel extraction to manufacturing. The next stage that you've identified is consumption. What do we need to keep in mind there?

[00:13:37.930] - Rachel Karasik

The consumption phase is the phase that the general public is most familiar with. It's the seconds or years or anything in between in which we interact with plastics, most often through touching them or using them to ingest our food or to drink our water, to wear our clothes. Through that contact or through that exposure, exposure, either through ingestion or inhalation, we get exposed to plastic material, and we also get exposed to the chemicals that are in plastics. These are the things that make them colorful and malleable and versatile and bendy, but also strong at the same time and waterproof and all the things that we love about plastics. The number keeps going up. I think the latest figure is 18,000 chemicals that have been found in plastics. Several thousand of these are considered, at least by EU standards, to be toxic or hazardous, and hundreds, if not more. We just don't know the status of these. So these are burdens that are associated with the consumption stage of plastic.

[00:14:49.900] - Clark Marchese

Okay, not to plug another episode, but we just did one a couple of weeks ago that quantified, I guess, the vastness of our knowledge gaps around the health impacts of plastic consumption. So you can go check that out. It was with three scientists from the Minderoo Foundation. But in any case, health care is also extremely expensive, and we're also analyzing the economy as well, right.

[00:15:10.610] - Rachel Karasik

There's also a paper that came out by Leo Trasandi over at NYU, and he calculated the chemical-associated disease burden and the cost of that in the US. It's about $250 billion of cost from exposure to chemicals that's attributable to disease. That's the burden. Things like bisphenols and phthalates, which can be found in items like baby bottles, have an increased incidence of asthma, diabetes.

[00:15:41.210] - Clark Marchese

It's also worth mentioning that these health costs are being incurred by individuals who are affected or perhaps the government, depending on where you live. But they are not being offset by the petrochemical and the manufacturing industry, as we mentioned. They're not the ones who are paying the medical bills.

[00:15:58.310] - Rachel Karasik

Then you have the benefit, which is plastic extends shelf life of food. It makes food safer. It is used in a whole ton of medical equipment. Some would argue that it was a really, really important contributor to offsetting or delaying the spread of the COVID-19 outbreak. And so you're wearing glasses right now. Like, those are plastic. I'm wearing Comtex right now. Those are plastic. I would say there's a lot of benefits to plastic, But like you mentioned earlier, the medical benefits are non-negotiable.

[00:16:35.840] - Clark Marchese

Yeah. I think we have to at least acknowledge how much of our economy is supported by plastic. I'm not only wearing glasses right now, but to make this podcast, I'm wearing headphones. My microphone is made of plastic. My mouse is made of plastic. My business is able to function because of plastic. That's the case for a lot of businesses out there. So I think first it speaks to just how pervasive it is in our lives, but also it's an opportunity for us to move towards intentionality about what we use it for, what we need it for. The next step you outlined in the life cycle is collection and sorting. The one after that is recycling. Maybe you can tell us clearly what the difference differences between these two stages and whether or not we can address them at the same time?

[00:17:18.930] - Rachel Karasik

Yeah, these are often considered one life cycle stage, the collection, sorting, recycling, waste management. So the formal and somewhat informal processes by which something goes from something that's produced to its end of life. And again, we just chose a life cycle based on some literature. It's very open to how folks see it. But the example that we used for collection and sorting, which is probably applicable to recycling as well, is on the burden is that it's a very physically onerous activity. Studies that have been done on formal and informal waste workers, especially ones that are doing collection and sorting where they're going house to house, they're picking up people's trash, they're moving it into a truck or into a car or into a buggy, they're hauling it around, they're bending over, they're moving plastic to the left and metal to the right and organics to another place. It's a physical process. There's sprains, fractures, ocular trauma. There are just occupational hazards that come with this job. The extended burden of that, which is related to also waste mismanagement, I think is farther down the life cycle we have here, is that formal workers, and mostly for informal workers, that means that these folks also don't have labor protection.

[00:18:41.210] - Rachel Karasik

They're working often for very little money, and that's across both informal and informal sector. They're exposed to waste products. They could be hazardous, as we just spoke about. That means they're exposed to chemicals in those products, and then they don't have labor protections. They might not have health care. They They probably don't have health care. They don't have any negotiating power. They don't have a seat at the table. They don't have any of that. You've got a social public health burden that falls on among the most poorest and vulnerable folks across the world. Oftentimes in the developed world, we then export our waste to the developing world. They're then responsible for not necessarily the collection and sorting, but the recycling and end-of-life management management for our waste. But there are some interesting benefits. I think these are not necessarily the types of solutions we should be leaning on, but there's no reason that we shouldn't highlight them and celebrate them. There's a lot of roundup, community-driven, community-owned initiatives to use that waste to make consumer goods, upcycled goods, sometimes what it's called. To turn your plastic bag into a piece of art, into a piece of furniture, into a flip flop, to sell it to a that looks like me and finds that shit amazing.

[00:20:02.890] - Rachel Karasik

In small quantities that does not compare to, I am assuming, I don't think the research has been done, but I think we can assume with 100% certainty, the revenue generated does not compare to what the petrochemical industry makes, but it allows certain communities to take ownership of their waste issue, to generate some revenue, to provide some stability, et cetera. That social entrepreneurship, social enterprise, does not not get at the source of this problem. But again, I think there's no reason not to celebrate the ways in which communities have been so resourceful in dealing with a problem that is not their making.

[00:20:41.650] - Clark Marchese

What about disposal then?

[00:20:43.390] - Rachel Karasik

Yeah, similar stuff This informal, formal waste sector moves across collection, sorting, recycling, and disposal. So a lot of those same benefits and burdens apply where, A, there are occupational hazards, but on the flip side, there are some opportunities opportunities to generate some revenue and create some small social enterprises from that waste. In the US, again, which is the basis of a lot of this work, because that's where the researchers were, but I think this is probably true in other countries that have a higher waste management capacity, which tends to be developed countries. These waste management companies, they often are dominated by one or two private companies that contract with municipalities at all, and they employ tens of thousands, if not more people. The CEOs make millions of dollars, and they tend to make money based on what's called a tipping fee. That's the weight of the trash that goes into landfills. They have no incentive to recycle. They have no incentive to reduce the amount of waste. Of course, they have sustainability programs, and I think the folks who work in them are really, really dedicated. I'm not knocking that. But the way that economic system is set up currently, and maybe there are some exceptions in some places There are places that are piloting innovative policy, I don't know.

[00:22:02.540] - Rachel Karasik

But those waste management companies are pretty motivated to get as much waste into those landfills as possible, and they make a tremendous amount of money doing so.

[00:22:11.440] - Clark Marchese

Yeah, that's a tricky one because obviously, there are a lot of problems associated with landfills, but after being recycled, it could be considered one of the better places for plastic waste to end up. Then, of course, a lot of plastics, it's actually impossible to recycle them. But this is giving me the question because the next stage is mismanaged waste. I guess that means that some pathways are better than others. What's the difference between what is classified as managed and mismanaged waste? And then also, how do the benefits and burdens differ there as well?

[00:22:43.980] - Rachel Karasik

What I would call managed waste is waste that moves through this one end-of-life pathway where it ends up in either a recycling plant and a controlled landfill, so one that has been regulated and permitted by the government or legally incinerated in an incineration machine that has buffers and scrubbers to prevent the release of air pollutants or is otherwise under the regulatory landscape of a country. There's also mismanaged waste, which is the waste that does not end up in any of those fates. That could either be because it ends up on the side of the road, or it could be because ends up in, for example, a pit in a community, and they burn that pit. Things like open burning and open dumping, which are not regulated by governments, are what we consider mismanaged waste. Similar to all of the other fates of waste, the benefit is that it can allow for some community-driven social enterprises to collect that waste and use it to either sell it to your Coca-Cola or your HP or to upcycle it into products that they can sell. They then have some opportunities to generate revenue. There have been some studies to show that it is helping to maintain a couple of dozen jobs for folks in the communities that are doing that.

[00:24:15.940] - Rachel Karasik

Then the risk, especially for open burning, which at least in the literature, is cited as the worst feat of mismanaged waste because it's unregulated and it's open. A lot of people have probably seen it and maybe not realized what it was if they're driving by somewhere and there's just a pile of trash and there's smoke coming out of it, that's an open burn. And so open burn releases burnt plastics. The chemicals that we've talked about that are associated with it. And then also burnt plastics can often release dioxons, too. So for folks who live near those sorts of environments, those are also fence-line communities where they then have high exposure to the risks. And so there have been some studies around the world of the health risks associated with living near mismanaged waste sites broadly, but open burn dump sites more specifically.

[00:25:11.740] - Clark Marchese

The last stage is pollution. And I think the benefit would be similar to mismanaged waste, but it seems like the burdens are slightly different. So what can you tell me there?

[00:25:23.100] - Rachel Karasik

Yeah. So pollution is what I consider to be. Now you've got plastic that's entered the environment. I mean, it can be covered and retrieved, but it's not the same as plastic that's in an open dump, for example, and could enter the environment, but for right now is still in this waste category. Yeah, same upcycle opportunities. The other thing is that like, ocean plastic, just plastic that has been recovered from the ocean, has some amount of market value. And so even some bigger companies are playing around with the types of products that they can make with Ocean Plastic. Adidas has a sneaker. Another company has a sneaker that I actually had for a while. It was very comfortable. There's a shininess to Ocean Plastic that some of them more multinational and global brands are capitalizing on and generating some revenue from. Then in terms of the burden, yeah. Plastic that's entered the environment, for example, in a fishing village or in a community that relies on tourism, can have some amount of economic impact on the ecosystem services provided by that habitat. That could be fisheries revenue, it could be tourism revenue. There are some studies that show that places that have beaches that are polluted suffer from decreased revenue, and that in general, the public is more interested in going to places on vacation that don't have beaches.

[00:26:52.560] - Rachel Karasik

And the same goes for fisheries. I think this is true for other types of environment, but there's an overwhelming amount of research on the impact of marine pollution on economies and less so on other types of pollution. So terrestrial pollution, agricultural pollution, etc. So yeah, that can impact the ability of a fishing community to be able to access the amount of catch that they need to be sustainable.

[00:27:19.150] - Clark Marchese

I want to just take a minute to appreciate how far we came on this whole journey. We started with a fence line community in Louisiana, living next to an oil refinery And we went all the way down to the fishermen anywhere all over the world. That's a really long journey. And I think people... I mean, obviously, people don't think about that when they have a straw and they throw it away after 10 seconds. But that's where plastic starts and that's where plastic ends. And that's what happens along the way. Also, I mean, this is just economics, but these cost burdens are compounding. Yes. If you have to pay a million dollars for health care because you've been poisoned a plastic factory down the street, or if you generate less and less revenue each year as a fisherman because the fish are dying from plastic, there's an opportunity cost. Maybe you can't afford to send your child to school and then their earning potential is lower, and this can have a generational compounding effect.

[00:28:16.580] - Rachel Karasik

Yeah, right. This isn't a comprehensive review, but just based on this cursory approach, we see that the folks who are burdened by plastic are already burdened by other social, political, and economic hazards and are vulnerable to a lot of different environmental effects, particularly climate change, et cetera, et Earth.

[00:28:45.650] - Clark Marchese

I think we've seen a trend of unequal distribution of burdens across every step of the life cycle. Your work focuses on and is designed to inform policy. How can we address these unequal burdens through policy?

[00:29:01.200] - Rachel Karasik

Yeah, great question. I don't know if I have all the answers. I jotted some down. A couple of things that come to mind are using regulatory levers to address chemicals broadly. That's going beyond plastic's policy into chemical regulation to better assess, do risk hazard assessments for, manage, control the chemicals that are used in plastic. Thinking about how we address just the chemicals in plastic, I think, is a huge part of this policy question. The second, and this is a policy solution that people are really enthusiastic about, I think it has a lot of potential if designed and implemented well, is what we call extended producer responsibility or EPR. You've alluded to this notion here that the folks who are producing, distributing, importing, making a A lot of money from plastics should have some responsibility over its fate, who it's harming, usually through a fee-based process to pool together resources that can do a number of things combined. So one is invest in better waste management infrastructure and collection infrastructure. But those resources can be used for a bunch of other stuff, education and outreach, research and development into how to use chemicals more sustainably or remove chemicals from the production process.

[00:30:31.720] - Rachel Karasik

It can finance reuse models, it can finance alternatives and substitutes, et cetera, et cetera. The fees that those companies pay, those can be what we call ecomodulated depending on the impact of the products that they make and the materials that they use. That can be structured and designed in such a way as to incentivize producers to maybe use less plastic, participate in a reuse system, system, reduce the amount of chemicals, be more transparent, whatever you want to do. The third policy lever I thought about is a policy lever that is not currently actively engaged in the plastic policy space, if you will, and that's labor. So labor protections, but also upskilling, reskilling, training, safety training, doing a lot of the work with the people who are working. And then what else do I have here? There's a new concept called green chemistry or sustainable chemistry. So trying to find alternatives or substitutes for both chemical processes and chemicals that are used in manufacturing that are either degradable or less harmful, and the government can encourage green and sustainable chemistry. Another thing has to do with the licensing and permitting and sighting of either production locations or waste management.

[00:32:01.790] - Rachel Karasik

Those are often cited in poor communities and vulnerable communities. Because of a lot of complicated stuff that I'm not smart enough to explain well, oftentimes these places will be cited right next to each other. And individually, their impact may not be below thresholds, but collectively, their impact becomes above those thresholds. They shouldn't be sided there together, but because of laws and loopholes, they are. So trying to make that process a little bit more stringent to prohibit this high density and clustering of petrochemical facilities and manufacturing facilities. And this isn't exactly policy, but class action lawsuits and liability is another avenue that is starting to be taken to try to get the companies that generate a lot of revenue from plastics and don't necessarily have responsibility for the end of life of those plastics or who they harm to pay for those.

[00:32:57.930] - Clark Marchese

Wow, that's a very good list. I I think we should do every single one of them. Something that strikes me, though, is that several of them, almost all, are focused on the earlier stages of the life cycle, whereas a lot of discourse around plastic's policy over the last several decades has been predominantly focused on waste. And this shift in focus towards production is somewhat recent, but also necessary and thankfully, growing.

[00:33:24.060] - Rachel Karasik

There's a great metaphor about if your bathtub is flooding, the first thing you do is turn off the top. You don't try to take your little bucket and pour the water out of the bathtub.

[00:33:35.250] - Clark Marchese

Yeah, that's a good one. We are going to start to close out, and there's two questions I like to ask towards the end, especially with plastics, because oftentimes the news we're hearing can be bleak or overwhelming at best. Is there one piece of good news that's come out in your field of research that you can share with us so we can take an active effort towards positivity?

[00:33:55.940] - Rachel Karasik

Yeah, I love optimism. It's also the beginning of the fourth round of the negotiations for a global plastics treaty. I think that's obviously, in my world as a plastics policy researcher, the development that has the most potential and the most opportunities. We have no idea how it's going to go, but we're getting in six months' chunks closer and closer to getting to a plastics treaty that is unanimous, that is agreed upon, that is, to some extent, binding on on all signatories. That's really exciting.

[00:34:33.900] - Clark Marchese

Yeah, this Plastics Treaty comes up almost every episode.

[00:34:37.750] - Rachel Karasik

Yeah, we're really counting on this treaty.

[00:34:41.670] - Clark Marchese

The last question I want to ask is, is there anything that we didn't talk about today that you think is important to mention about this life cycle assessment of plastics, both the benefits and the burdens across either public health or the economy?

[00:34:53.540] - Rachel Karasik

No, I would just say that I wrote this. I love all the people that wrote this, but I would I always listen to the people who are most affected by this who are on the front lines and doing the work and resisting. So I would take the time to find those communities, and I would share from them first and foremost. And there was something else I thought of, but I completely forgot it.

[00:35:17.800] - Clark Marchese

Okay. But yeah, that actually came up when I was interviewing the scientist from the Minderoo Foundation who did the report on plastics in human health. They say, Our job is to find evidence, and we'll find empirical evidence linking plastics to human health outcomes, but we see community suffering. Do we need to find a direct link from every single chemical to make a policy change that we already know is necessary?

[00:35:41.610] - Rachel Karasik

Yeah, I think the McKinsey report is not actually more powerful than the lived experience of someone who's been so deeply harmed by this industry. Oh, I remember what I was going to say. Tell me. Sorry. I would just say that this is part of a system. The plastics crisis is part of a bigger global crisis around overconsumption, exploitation, suppression, oppression. Not every scientist feels that way, but I feel that way. I think it's just important to understand it as a symptom of a much bigger problem and not something that's separate from it.

[00:36:24.170] - Clark Marchese

Yeah, I think that's both very important to keep in mind and a very important note to end on. The last, last My next question is, where can people find you and follow your work?

[00:36:32.340] - Rachel Karasik

Oh, you can Google me. I'm Rachel Karasik, so you can find my email on my organization's website, the Norwegian Institute for Water Research or NIVA. I use Twitter or X, but less and less so for obvious reasons. I'm on LinkedIn. I also don't use that very much, but I am on it, and I will respond to anyone who wants to talk more about it, who either wants to agree with me or disagree with me.

[00:36:59.790] - Clark Marchese

I can vouch for that. She is here talking with me right now.

[00:37:04.090] - Rachel Karasik

Yeah, I do love talking about this with people.

[00:37:08.000] - Clark Marchese

All right. Well, with that, I will say thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for walking us through this life cycle assessment, and thank you for your very important research in this space.

[00:37:17.110] - Rachel Karasik

Thank you, Clark

[00:37:27.020] - Clark Marchese

Okay, a major thank you to Rachel Karasik. I hope this episode really conveyed the importance of a life cycle assessment. We need the full story. I think towards the end of the episode, we saw how helpful having this full narrative is in crafting policy. Again, this assessment only looked at health in the economy. In a broad sense, we could dig deeper and we could also look at different impacts. I think an environmental life cycle assessment of plastic would be too large for one episode, but maybe even this entire podcast series, if you stack a bunch of episodes together, it could be a environmental life cycle assessment of plastic. At least that's my aspiration. As always, if you found this episode interesting, send it to someone you know. And thank you for being here. And that's all I have for you today. 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. Cover art for the show was done by Laurel Wong, and the music you're listening to was done by Tadeo Cabellos. I am your host, Clark Marchese, and this episode was produced and engineered by me.

[00:38:39.650] - Clark Marchese

So if you found it interesting, send it to someone you know. Plastic Podcast is part of a larger network of sciencey podcast called Pine Forest Media. You can find more information about us in the episode description or on our website at pineforestpods. Com or on Instagram and TikTok at Pine Forest Media. We've got some exciting sciencey podcast coming out this year, and a five-star rating across platforms or a review on Apple podcast is one of the best things you can do to help us reach more people and for the entire network to grow. All right, thank you to all of you who have made it this far. Today's review comes from McAttack No Slack from Idaho who says, Very well said. Very well-researched, great science that is easy to follow. I highly recommend this podcast. Thanks, McAttack No Slack. If you would like your review to be featured on the show, all you've got to do is leave one on Apple podcast and you'll probably get picked. Now, the answer to last week's Trivia Question. The answer was Mount Everest. Mount Everest is the name of an active volcano on Antarctica. If you are curious about Antarctica and want to learn more things about it, I can recommend you check out my new podcast series, South Pole, all about the science of Antarctica, and you can find that wherever you stream.

[00:39:52.770] - Clark Marchese

There was no Trivia Question for this episode, but I'll catch you again next week. That's all I have for you today, and we'll talk soon