Full Transcript

Chelsea Rochman:
How long it lasts, whether it’s decades, hundreds of years, thousands of years, millions of years. We don’t know. And I think that’s what a lot of people are trying to understand right now is like, how are organisms evolving? Does that mean it’s going “away”? These are all questions we’re trying to understand, but I can tell you that where plastics are entering this area, you dig, and there are layers of plastic, and it’s hard to imagine hundreds of years or thousands of years from now that that would be gone.

Jay Famiglietti:
Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Let’s Talk About Water and to our first episode of 2021. I’m your host, Jay Famiglietti. On behalf of our podcast team and all of my friends and colleagues at the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan, I’d like to wish you all a happy new year. Let’s get to it.

Jay Famiglietti:
We’ve all seen the terribly sad photo of the sea turtle with the straw up its nose or the beached whale with a belly full of garbage. It’s a huge problem and it makes me queasy just thinking about it. But today we’re talking about the plastics that we don’t see. Microplastics. Microplastics are small pieces of plastic that are less than five millimeters long, or about half the size of your fingernail. These pieces further degrade into microscopic pieces and then they get everywhere. They start off as innocuous little bits in things like toothpaste and exfoliating facial scrubs. In our kitchens, they fall off of our pot scrubbers in wash down the drain, or they come from the breakdown of the mountains of other plastics that we use. We now know that most of that’s not even being recycled and it it just sitting in disposal sites around the world, degrading and entering the environment.

Jay Famiglietti:
But even more alarming, they’re found in our bodies and in the bodies of fish and wildlife. And they are found all around us. They’ve been found at the top of Mount Everest. They’re in our rivers, our soils and our oceans, and they’re even on the sea floor. To help me get to the bottom of how this plastic pollution problem gets so out of hand and how we can move towards a plastic free world, we have Chelsea Rochman on the show. Dr. Chelsea Rochman is an assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto, and she and her team used microplastics to investigate the ecological implications of our trash and its impact on freshwater and marine ecosystems.

Jay Famiglietti:
Chelsea has presented her work to the UN General Assembly, and she has been called upon by provincial and federal governments to advise on the creation of plastics policy. She’s also the co-founder of the University of Toronto’s trash team, which works with the local community to increase waste literacy and reduce plastic pollution globally.

Jay Famiglietti:
Chelsea, thanks for talking trash with us today. Why are there tiny pieces of plastic in our water and how did they get there?

Chelsea Rochman:
Big picture, they’re there because plastic has become such a common part of our life. I’m sitting on a couch with plastic textiles, the glasses on my face, the computer I’m talking to you with. If you just look around your room, there’s plastic everywhere. It’s become such a common staple in our life. The way we manage that plastic isn’t super sustainable. Most of it goes to landfill, very little of it is actually recycled. So we don’t value the material. So it gets into the environment from poor waste management, which includes from wastewater, from agricultural runoff, from landfill and litter. But it also includes weird things you might not think of that aren’t necessarily garbage at the end of life. Like when I wash my clothes, little bits of my clothing come off in my washing machine. When I drive, little bits of tires go into our environment. So it’s a complex issue and there’s a lot of it out there and it comes from a lot of different sources.

Jay Famiglietti:
So I’m stunned by all this. And we know it’s bad for the environment. How have we allowed this to happen?

Chelsea Rochman:
Yeah, it’s a really good question. If you go back to the beginning of plastic, it was right after World War II, industry was starting to boom and plastic as a material was really hitting the market. It was seen as one of the next best things. It was this miracle material that was going to make our lives more convenient, that was going to make planes cheaper to fly because it’s lighter and cars also lighter, which means they need less fuel. We’d just found a million uses for it. And some uses you could say aren’t necessary. Think about the Amazon boxes that come to your house, where every little thing, although they’re trying to do less, is wrapped in plastic. Individual toilet paper rolls wrapped in plastic. We’re also over-packaging.

Chelsea Rochman:
So the amount of plastic we used to produce in 1950, when we started, was about a half a million tons per year. Today it’s nearly or just over 400 million tons per year. Almost half of that is used to make single use plastic products, which are used once and then often thrown away. And these are the materials that are sometimes getting into the environment. So I think we let this happen slowly over time. We didn’t think or see the large negative consequence that might ensue and change is hard.

Jay Famiglietti:
I think it’s becoming better known now to the general public that most of our plastic actually isn’t getting recycled. So this seems to me to be a big part of the problem, yes?

Chelsea Rochman:
Yes, yes. So let’s talk about recycling and let’s go and take one step back and say, if recycling is part of the solution, that means we’re trying to change to something that’s sounding a little bit like a buzzword is a circular economy. To switch to a circular economy means we need to value plastic. It’s made out of fossil fuels. It’s an important, valuable material that we shouldn’t be throwing away and wasting. In order to have it retain its value, we have to keep it in the system. So we have to close the loop means we make the plastic, we use the plastic and instead of wasting it, we put it back into the system to be recycled into a new material. Right now, 9% of all plastic that we’ve produced since the beginning of time has been mechanically recycled into another object.

Chelsea Rochman:
That’s crazy. 9%? in order to truly get to a circular economy, we actually have to recycle more. Some people say recycling has failed and I think what they mean by that isn’t that recycling is bad or that recycling isn’t possible, it’s that we haven’t set up the system for recycling to work. But unless we really force our current linear plastic economy and bend it into a circular plastic economy, we’re not going to get there. We’re not going to increase our recycling and we’re going to continue to make more and more plastic out of fossil fuels and letting it get wasted and put into our environment.

Jay Famiglietti:
I hate to admit this, but as a consumer and a homeowner, knowing that most of the plastic doesn’t make it into the recycling stream, it’s sort of a disincentive for me to be like a real conscientious recycler. Probably shouldn’t admit that, but it’s true. Do you think that’s common?

Chelsea Rochman:
I think it’s very common, and this is where in some ways you could say one of the examples of how recycling has failed. We have to know as a consumer, our favorite word for this. So yes, I do research on plastic pollution. I run a lab at the University of Toronto. I also co-founded an organization called the U of T Trash Team. Our mission is to increase waste literacy. The reason for that is that I want you to go to bed at night knowing every material that you buy, which bin it goes in in your house and feel confident about where that bin goes. But if we recycle wrong and put the wrong materials into the bin, then sometimes that whole bin goes into the landfill. And so having a contaminated recycle bin is part of the problem, but it’s a systemic problem.

Chelsea Rochman:
Because that started because you didn’t trust the system and you knew that a lot wasn’t getting recycled. So we really have to fix this at several levels, which starts at what we’re producing then goes to building the waste management system, educating the public and changing behavior. So this is why I say it’s hard. I totally agree it’s possible and I have confidence and hope, but it’s a lot of work.

Jay Famiglietti:
You know, it sounds like a transformation and it reminds me of being on different university campuses. And sometimes you go there and there will be six different wastebins. And sometimes even a student there to tell you which bin to put your waste in, which I think is awesome. And so if we can simplify that and bring that into the home and bring that information and the work that you’re doing with the U of T Trash Team, that could be really transformational.

Jay Famiglietti:
So I read a couple of your papers that are review papers in science and the one in, I think it was environmental toxicology and chemistry, and so I think you paint this really important picture that most people think about plastics. And they think about the ocean gyres and the big plastic patch in the ocean. But you’ve sort of said that the community is sort of turning around and looking upstream, literally. And looking on land and tracking all these sources like you’ve been talking about. So is that more recent?

Chelsea Rochman:
Yeah, I would say research on plastic started in the middle of the ocean with the garbage patches right in about, well, 1996 in some ways, but 2000, early 2000s it really started to become well-known. At that point, we realized the majority of the plastic in the ocean when we went out to these garbage patches were not big pieces of things floating around, at least not by count. They were small bits of plastic, the size of a pencil eraser or smaller. And a lot of them looked like just this colorful confetti. When you think about that, you think, “Well, how in the world am I going to clean this up? I can’t go take a big machine and go clean up the big plastics because they’re actually quite small and if I try to net it out, I might be harming organisms.” So then it brought us back to land to say, “Okay, we’ve got to cut it off at the source.”

Chelsea Rochman:
So we started doing work on land. And when we started doing work closer than when we started seeing different types of microplastics. Different shapes, different sizes, different chemistries, and really, really diverse.

Jay Famiglietti:
So my background’s in geology and I sort of think of plastic as this sort of Anthropocene, anthro-geologic material like a rock, like it just gets out there in the environment and then it becomes part of the earth system. It erodes, it breaks down, it’s in the water, the particles get really small, they get transported, they end up in the ocean. Is that crazy?

Chelsea Rochman:
No, it’s not crazy. I think the question that you ask is a fun one in that what we’re really starting to learn right now when it comes to microplastics are all of the ecosystem processes that it, or I guess the cycles, there are a lot of different fundamental cycles on our planet that we know are important and we’re starting to understand how plastic interacts with them. It’s not just something that we put in the environment anymore.

Chelsea Rochman:
When it comes to geology, it is they think going to be the marker of the Anthropocene in that it’s going to be this material that it’s going to be there for a while. When it comes to the water cycle, we know it’s being lifted out of the ocean and into the atmosphere and then it’s following, with global dust cycles, sometimes to far away locations. When it comes to the carbon cycle, we’re starting to see evidence of dissolved organic carbon from plastics being implemented into the food chain. So we’re starting to see that it’s not just this material that’s being put into the environment that we can take out, it’s becoming part of these fundamental planetary cycles. Which in one way is daunting, but it’s also fascinating scientifically.

Jay Famiglietti:
Oh, absolutely. Thinking about a couple of million years from now, what are those layers going to look like? Interestingly, I had friend whose father was a chemist, a research chemist, and was working on the development of plastics for most of his early part of his career. And at some point maybe about halfway through his career, he said something like, “I spent the first half of my research career figuring out how to make these indestructible plastics and the second half figuring out how to break them down.”

Jay Famiglietti:
So tell us about the life cycle. I mean, are these things around forever? I know we’re talking about how they break down and there’s the primary particles that are originally small, there’s the stuff that degrades from all the other plastic that we use. How long has this stuff going to be around for? Are we literally talking about forever and millions of years from now and seeing it in geologic layers?

Chelsea Rochman:
Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s a clean answer to that question. Plastic goes out into the environment. We know that sunlight and mechanical processes like waves and sediment hitting it, as well as biological processes, that it will degrade and fragment into more pieces. How long it lasts, whether it’s decades, hundreds of years, thousands of years, millions of years, we don’t know. And I think that’s what a lot of people are trying to understand right now is like, how are organisms evolving? Are you able to use this as a carbon source? Does that mean it’s going “away?” When it buries in the sediment and isn’t available maybe to some of those organisms, does it lasts longer?

Chelsea Rochman:
So these are all questions we’re trying to understand, but I can tell you that in areas like the Tijuana River Valley, where plastics are entering this area and sediment is continuously washing it in that area, you dig and there are layers of plastic. And it’s hard to imagine hundreds of years or thousands of years from now that that would be gone.

Jay Famiglietti:
That’s pretty frightening stuff, but that’s what we’re doing. That’s going to be our mark in the geologic record, which is pretty scary. I always thought of it in terms of like concrete and buildings and stuff like that. But those things will probably degrade compared to the plastic.

Jay Famiglietti:
Anyway, let’s talk about the implications for microplastics in the environment. Are they detrimental or are they just taking up space?

Chelsea Rochman:
With microplastic, the easiest way to study it and understand harm is laboratory experiments. We know that microplastics can cause harm at certain concentrations to animals, just like pesticides. We know that the toxicity differs by microplastic type, just like it differs by different types of pesticides. So yes, these can have detrimental effects. There’s some evidence via risk assessment that in areas where the concentrations are high, an example would be the Great Lakes or the Mediterranean Sea. It’s hard when you have something like a tiny particle that you’re trying to tie to harm in the environment because you have to correlate versus see the causation of harm. We don’t see a fish washed up with a belly full of microplastic and say, “Oh, hey.”

Jay Famiglietti:
Yeah, that’s difficult work. So I want to kind of pivot some policy and solution stuff, and you’ve been talking about some of that, but let me start by saying, I’m struck by the fact that microplastics are not just one thing. It’s a whole family of different sizes of particles and different shapes and textures, and they’re from different sources and they have all kinds of different results. So for example, policy things, do you pick one? Let me just throw it to you. I mean, I’m a little overwhelmed by the scope of the problem.

Chelsea Rochman:
Fair enough. I think a lot of people are overwhelmed by the scope of the problem, and there’s not one solution. There’s no one size fits all solution. There’s not, I can’t even name one that say, “Well, that’s better than the other.” I think the reality is we need to implement a lot of things at the same time. If I were King of the worlds, or queen, there’s a few things that I would do. I would get rid of some of the unnecessary single use plastics that aren’t needed. And for those that are needed, I would make sure that they’re made into something that’s reusable or at least if they have to be single use that they are truly recyclable.

Chelsea Rochman:
I would implement better and increased waste management, to have places all around the world where your litter is collected curbside, or at least you have a place to put your waste at the end of the day and have it go to a facility that manages it, ideally in a way that recycles and reuses it. No matter what, I would still have cleanup implemented. Maybe trash traps in waterways and rivers. I think it’s really important in order to, I will say, force a circular economy is to incentivize recycled plastics. Right now, it is cheaper for industry to buy virgin plastic than it is recycled content. We need to stop incentivizing fossil fuels so that those materials aren’t cheaper and we need to incentivize recycled content.

Chelsea Rochman:
The way Canada is doing that, well, I think they’re still figuring out how they’re going to do this, but they’re going to have a standard that says all products made after X year made out of plastic have to be made out of X percent of recycled content. That’s one way to try to help kind of bend that curve.

Jay Famiglietti:
Yeah. I was going to ask you how we can reduce our use of plastic, but you’ve kind of already addressed that. It’s on the supply side, it’s on the demand side and we’ve got a very complicated relationship with plastic and then industries involved. And like we were just talking about before, sort of optimized in one of your articles, I think it was the environmental toxicology and chemistry article talking about the family of microplastics. But in you’re a research team, do you have a preferred size of particle, are there specialists in like different size ranges?

Chelsea Rochman:
Yeah. There are sort of specialists in different size ranges. I would say that we specialize in particles that are 45 micron to five millimeter, because we struggle to measure anything smaller. So we are trying to be able to get down to the one to 10 micron range. We would like to be able to quantify nanoplastics, the small, small stuff. Right now, I’d say most labs specialize in the same size range we do because the technology and the methodologies, in order to get smaller, are either not there or incredibly specialized. So Alfred Wegener Institute, which is amazing in Germany, they do quite well down to one micron, but most labs can’t because we don’t have the equipment and technology that they do. So yes, but it’s not for any good reason that we specialize in a certain size range.

Jay Famiglietti:
No, I understand. I understand the challenges. Are there any lab techniques that would involve like oven drying or something like that? I’m sorry, I’m a hydrologist I’m thinking about like wet soil and we do. So like, if we want to measure the moisture content, we can weigh the wet sample and then we dry it out and then we could weigh the dry sample or anything like that?

Chelsea Rochman:
I think the tricky part is [inaudible 00:18:41] solution. So a dye that binds organic material. The issue is the dye skin cells and other organic materials. So finding something that’s really specific to that diversity of microplastics right now is difficult. One thing I’ve heard though, that I kind of quite like is, let’s say, in the state of California, they now have legislation that says they have to quantify their microplastics in drinking water. And that is a big task for a drinking water treatment plant to do if they have to count every particle. So they say, what if they just instead have like a total suspended solid load? If your total amount of microplastic that would cause a threshold and could toxic effect is this many particulates per liter, what if you just count all of your suspended solids and as long as you’re under that, you assume your microplastic is under that too. That’s great.

Chelsea Rochman:
Now, if you’re suspended solids are over that, then now you’ve got to actually count the microplastics. One thing I think could be really good as pyrolysis GCMS, so you can take the mass concentration of plastics and that’s much easier. You don’t have to count and pick, you don’t know shape and size, but you do at least know type and concentration, which might be enough at least for a size range for drinking water.

Jay Famiglietti:
Again, as a hydrologist, I hear about all these tiny particles moving through the environment and moving through the water environment. What is the possibility that contaminants attach themselves to these particles?

Chelsea Rochman:
When I first got interested in this issue, few papers at the time existed on the topic. And there are a few out of Japan from Dr. Shige Takata who was looking at the chemicals that accumulated on plastics and using plastics as a surrogate passive sampler, where if he takes plastics off the coastlines all over the world, he could use it to figure out how much PCB was in their environment. And so people were using them as passive samplers. And then I was thinking, “Oh my goodness does this make microplastic in the ocean more toxic? Because they have all these chemicals accumulated on them.” So that was the question for my PhD that I was obsessed with.

Jay Famiglietti:
That’s depressing. And so I’m going to need you to lift my spirits and maybe the spirits of our listeners. What’s your level of optimism about the future? Can we resolve our plastic addiction? Can we make the world a cleaner, less plastic place?

Chelsea Rochman:
So my optimism and hope are probably higher than one would think because the answer of can we? Yeah, it’s not rocket science. We just need to use less of the material. There’s lots of plastic items we interact with where you could imagine not interacting with them on a day to day basis. Do I think we need to ban all plastics always forever? No, I really don’t. I just think we need to use the material maybe less. We need to use it in a more sustainable way and what we have to do is possible. Shifting to a circular economy, a lot of these technologies exist. Switching to materials that are recyclable, it exists, you just don’t make a multi plastic lining. You make a bag that’s recyclable made out of one thing. So it’s just changing the economy, changing people’s behavior, changing the government. That’s the hard part. So the question isn’t can we, we absolutely can. The question is will we and how soon?

Jay Famiglietti:
It’s that will. It’s that will to change, which is so common in all of these environmental problems. Chelsea, thank you so much for joining me today.

Chelsea Rochman:
Oh, thank you. It was fun. Fun to be here.

Jay Famiglietti:
Dr. Chelsea Rochman is an assistant professor in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Toronto and a co-founder of the U of T Trash Team.

Jay Famiglietti:
Seemingly harmless, ubiquitous in nature, now we know the truth. That’s how you end a podcast with a haiku.

Jay Famiglietti:
Let’s Talk About Water is produced by the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan and the Walrus lab. I’m your host, Jay Famiglietti. Thanks to everyone who helped put the show together, including Mark Ferguson, Laura McFarlan, Amy Hergott, Jesse Witow, John Ahmed, Nikky Manfredi, Stacy Dumanski and our producer, Sean Prpick. As always, special thanks to Linda Lilienfeld.

Jay Famiglietti:
Don’t miss what we have in store down the line when we talked to my friend and colleague Felicia Marcus, former waters czar for the state of California. You don’t want to miss that or other upcoming podcasts, just set an alert so you’ll know the moment a new episode drops. Remember, we’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and many other quality podcasting platforms. You can also stream us on Facebook at Let’s Talk About Water Podcast or follow us on Twitter @LTAWPodcast. See you in a couple of weeks,

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