Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now it is Earth Day, And as I told you
earlier in the show, I used to enjoy celebrating Earth
Day by going around the house and turning all my
lights on, you know, cause it used to be that
people did the opposite. Now with led bulbs, it doesn't
really do them much good to go turn all the
lights off, and it's not nearly as much fun for
(00:22):
me to turn all the lights on.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
And I didn't just do it to be contrarian.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
I did it to try to make a point that
nobody noticed, but I felt good about it myself in
my own form of virtue signaling. That isn't it amazing
that I can go hit a little piece of plastic
on my wall and the lights come on? In that
incredible that's what we should be celebrating. Anyway. There's a
lot of nonsense out there, not just on Earth Day
but every other day about environmental stuff, and there are
(00:49):
large organizations that make a lot of money by telling
us that the world is going to hell in a handbasket,
whether it's climate change or pollution or whatever. And one
of the sub segments that they really like to bash
is plastics. And my friend Christy Armott from Phantom Plastics
(01:10):
has been on the show many times, but I want
to have him in particular today because he's got a
new book out today called Shattering the Plastics Illusion, exposing
environmental miss so Christie Armitt his website phantomplastics dot com.
It's great to see you again. It's great to have
(01:31):
you back on the show. Thanks for being here, Thanks Ross,
thanks for covering.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to your listeners.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Yeah, very glad to do it now. By the way,
your your last book, which is also a great book,
was you you made available for free?
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Now?
Speaker 1 (01:47):
What are you doing with this book as far as
like how can people get it? And how much does
it cost? It's free too, This is free?
Speaker 2 (01:53):
How do you do that? Are you a billionaire? Are
you a secret billionaire? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (01:58):
I really wish I was. That'd be tremendous. If anybody
wants to make me a huge donation and go right ahead,
my pockets are empty.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (02:05):
The point is, I mean, the truth should be free,
and you should be suspicious of anyone telling you something
and then saying donate now. They tell you some giant
whopper and then say donate now. So what I rather
do is say the science should be for free. Here
it is, it's peer reviewed, and I'm not trying to
get any money out of you. So it's a lot
more genuine message when scientists are telling you something for
free compared to us, you said, and Geo's telling you
(02:25):
whoppers for money. So that's the point of it.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
Okay, just one last question along these lines, just for
kind of establishing credibility. Some people might be wondering, well,
you know, Chris is going to write this book that
you know says nice things about plastic is he just
funded by the plastics industry?
Speaker 2 (02:43):
So what do you want to tell us about that.
I'm glad you asked that. Ross.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Yeah, I get that question all the time, and mainly
it comes from people who'd rather not put in the
work of actually looking at the evidence, so they would
like to look for an excuse not to even look.
And the answer is no, I'm not funded by the
plastics industry. I haven't received a single penny for this.
I did this because my daughters were lied to at
school and that made me angry, and I started checking
in what are the teachers, you know, teaching my kids?
What are the facts behind this? And so I read
(03:09):
five thousand studies completely unfunded, and I disclose all of
my income sources on the website. And not only that,
everything I say is like literally verbatim from the studies
and peer reviewed. So none of these studies are mine, right,
This is all thousands and thousands of studies from other scientists,
independent ones all around the world. And not only that,
then I have a team of professors check it and
endorse it, which is on the website too, so you
(03:30):
can see that it's been checked by professors all around
the world. So this is totally independent, all right.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
And just one last thing again, just sort of establishing
you for listeners who who don't know you. Every once
in a while, I will see someone write a piece
about some scientific issue, and then when I go read
about them, it turns out that they are like comparative
literature majors who decided to become activists. Tell us just
briefly about your academic background that qualifies you to write
(03:54):
about plastics.
Speaker 3 (03:56):
Yeah, that's a great point. So I have a PhD
in plastics in chemistry and polymer science as we call it,
and I spent my whole career in the area, and
I don't sell or make or market plastics. I'm just
as a pure scientist who really understands materials. I'm a
Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, which is not
easy to get, and a fellow of the Institute for
Materials Mining and what's the other one, mining Materials Mining, and.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Get the idea.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
So yeah, so a well respected scientist. And that's a
good point, Ross, because imagine I wrote a book and
it was full of nonsense. Why would I send it
to leading professors all around the world. I'd be ashamed,
I'd be humiliated, and they would call me out right.
And so you have to be confident in your work
that it's accurate before you share it with people, and
make sure it's peer reviewed.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
Well that's so, you know, that's easy for you to say,
and I'm glad you said it, But there are lots
of people who feel no shame and do right big
books that claim to show some expertise and and NGOs
do this all the time. All right, So let's let's
get into the book a little bit, and again we're
talking with Chris d Armitt. Checkout phantomplastics dot com and
(04:58):
if you've got a question about plastics.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
I know this is it's super nerdy, right, but I'm
a nerd.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
So if you've got a question for Chris about plastics,
text it to us at five six six nine zero.
As always, I do not promise to ask every question
that gets sent in, but I will ask the good ones.
I'm going to do this in no particular order. I'm
gonna have a guest on the show sometime soon. We're
actually gonna be talking about fluoride and water. But in
one of his talks I saw him claim then this
(05:24):
actually makes me wonder whether I should have him. But
I saw him claim something that you then bring up
in your book, the claim that there is or soon
will be more plastics in the ocean than fish.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
Yeah, that's a great one that really captured people's imaginations.
It went all around the world, and funnily enough, the
people who first made that claim, the scientists that they quoted.
He cited some studies. Those scientists said, no, you can't
make that claim from our work. It's completely bogus. And
so the people who originally made that claim have stopped
claiming it. They never retracted it, but they don't have
it up anymore in their annual report.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
For example.
Speaker 3 (05:56):
So even the people who made that claim realize that
it's not true. I call that out in the book,
that more plastic than fish is just complete fiction. But
that's the kind of thing. My kids were taught that
very thing last week ross at school. They came home
and said, Dad, you'll never believe it. Our teachers told
us there'll be more plastic than fish, and that is
just outright fiction.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
So you do what are you doing about that, about
your kids being told that at school?
Speaker 2 (06:17):
Did you contact the teacher?
Speaker 3 (06:20):
Yeah, that's why I wrote the first book, and then
I went and gave a presentation at the school. I've
given presentations all around the world at University of Cincinnati
and so forth, making sure people have a chance to
see the science. If you look at ocean plastic, it's
thousands of times less than originally claimed. That's a number
of the ocean's choking and plastic that was made up
by somebody called Jenna Jambeck, and she literally just took
a guess based on no data. She just literally made
(06:43):
up a number and said ten million tons of going
into the ocean. And then other scientists spent ten years
looking for this alleged plastic and they couldn't find it.
They went up and down, they sailed millions of miles
around the world with nets looking for this plastic and
it's not there. Well, because it was a guest and
it never was there.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Okay, So two things I want to findow up there.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
First, I want you to just, very specifically, what are
you going to do about the fact that your kids
were lied to again at school just a week ago?
Speaker 2 (07:10):
What are you doing about it?
Speaker 3 (07:12):
The last thing I did was I offered to talk.
So I talked to the principle. I cornered him at
one of the school events and said, hey, I want
to present this to the class, and he wasn't interested.
He didn't really get it, maybe had his mind on
other things. But I'm going to keep going because they're
at a new school now, because they're a bit older,
and so I'm going to approach the teachers and the
principal at that school and say, hey, give me a
chance to get in front of the kids and show
(07:32):
them the science and to de brainwash them.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
Unbelievable. Okay.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
So you know with the more plastic than fish, you said,
it's nonsense, that was just made up.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
I have a feeling.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
This next thing falls into that exact same category.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
But many of us have.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Heard about the giant Texas sized island of trash in
the ocean, right, So what about that?
Speaker 3 (07:55):
Yeah, that's a myth. That's actually a whole PhD thesis
by Kim de Wolf about how that myth came to be.
So Originally, a German article said that there was a
carpet of material on the ocean, and that was translated
into Russian by Pravda, the Russian magazine, and they translated
carpet into mountain, and they put a cartoon of a
mountain of plastic in the ocean, and everyone else picked
up on that, you know, the New York Times and
(08:15):
the Washington Post and everyone spread this complete mistranslation around
the world. And the funny thing is, you can see
a cigarette package from a satellite image, right, that's the
resolution of a satellite image. And there's not a single
image of this floating island the size of Texas because
it isn't there. It doesn't exist. And for even more funny,
ross journalists go to that guy, Captain Moore I think
is his name, who discovered the gyre the areas with
(08:36):
a little bit more material in it because of the
way the water swirls. And they say, take me in
your ship, take me out there. I want to take
my photographer and take pictures of this thing. There's never
been a picture of this gyre in the whole history
of the world because all you see is ocean. There's
nothing to see there. You can even swim through it
and not know that you're in it because there's so
little material there.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
Wow. All right, So.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
I will say, and the plural of anecdote is not data,
and I do not think the world is coming to
an end. But I will say as a guy, I've
been to India three times, I've been to I've been
to I've been to sixty something countries, a lot of
them in Asia, only a little bit in Africa, but
especially in Asia. The amount of plastic trash that you
(09:21):
see there is really shocking. And this is not a
complaint about plastics, right, but these folks in these poor countries,
I mean, and I actually think you talk about this
in the book.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Maybe they just don't have very many trash cans.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
And that's not like sarcasm, but also maybe poor people
just don't care. They don't own anything. They have no
real sense of private property and all this. But dude,
when you get near you know, I was by the
mouth of the Ganges in Bangladesh and you see the
plastic trash around. Again, I don't think it's an existential
planetary threat, but it does make me sad.
Speaker 3 (09:57):
Yes, it does. Yeah, those images are really visceral, aren't
they When you see those things and you see the pollution.
And scientists have studied that. So trashy is dropped by
people intentionally, and people are like, oh, how can you
blame the people? It's like, well, because science and the
legal system both agree that it's you know, litter is
is dropped by people, caused by people, and the solutions
to that once you realize that it's human behavior are education,
(10:18):
deposits and fines. And we know that that works because
there are places in the world with no litter. There's
like Japan is incredibly clean, Singapore is incredibly clean. The
developed nations are pretty good. But you're right, some countries
haven't caught up yet. And it's not that they're bad people,
they just haven't got their waste management under control yet.
And we can kind of show them how we did
it and help them catch up. So the litter is
a real thing. Pot plastic is a part of it,
(10:39):
but it's not due to materials. And sometimes I ask
people to do this. Go to your garden, take a
chip package or something or candy wrapper and drop it
on the floor in your garden, and then blame that
candy rapper for what you just did. And see what
a fool you feel. And that will hit home to
you how ridiculous it is to drop litter and then
blame the litter for what you just did. So people
need to take responsibility for and some people are further
(11:01):
behind than others.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
We're talking with Christy Armott. He's a PhD.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
Polymer scientists read plastic and his new book is called
Shattering the Plastics Illusion, Exposing Environmental Myths, and you can
get it for free at phantomplastics dot com. Now I
have a lot of other questions for you, but I'm
actually getting because I have a smart and nerdy audience,
(11:29):
a lot of listener questions, so I'm gonna and some
of them i'm sure.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
Will overlap with my questions.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
So I'm going to just switch for a few minutes
here to some listener questions and a whole bunch of
people are asking the same thing, and this is something
that I wanted to ask. We hear all this talk
these days about so called microplastics. I saw a story
in the Denver Post we found microplastics in the snow
in the Rocky Mountains. So what are microplastics? Where do
(11:59):
they come from? And how do they get wherever they go?
And should we be concerned about it?
Speaker 3 (12:05):
Yeah, I'm glad you asked that. So so far, I've
read more than five hundred peer reviewed studies on microplastics,
and that's probably the biggest review ever. And I've never
seen a single credible study showing any evidence of harm.
And there's a couple things to think about. One is perspective. Right,
have you heard about micro wood or microglass or micrometal. No,
(12:25):
it's just called dust, right, All of these other particles,
we just call it dust, and we're used to it
and we don't give it a second thought. Even though
some of that dust is actually toxic, some of it
even causes cancer, but we're not interested in it because
we just call it dust. As soon as it comes
to plastics, the environmental people did a very clever thing.
They took plastic dust. It's just a very very small
part of dust, and they gave it a special name
(12:45):
to make it sound unknown and scary. So we have
to realize plastic is about one hundred thousandth of the
toxic of the well, sorry, one hundred thousandth of the
particles we ingest, and it's non toxic. And that's according
to and this is the public thing. This is some
kind of new, like unstudied area. We have fifty years
of studies, hundreds and hundreds of studies showing no toxicity.
(13:08):
They even fed plastic microparticles to rats. They've fed them
five percent plastic microparticles for three months and nothing happened.
That's how non toxic it is. It says non toxic
as cellulose, which is what plants are made of. So yeah,
they've made a big fuss and they've made hundreds of
millions of dollars by telling us lies and scaring us
about one hundred thousandth of the safe part of dust.
And meanwhile, what else is in dust? It includes quartz,
(13:31):
which causes cancer. It includes wood dust, which amazingly causes
cancer too, So we're totally ignoring the actual toxic stuff.
That's there in large amounts and focusing on a tiny
fraction of the non toxic part. And that's just stupid
because it doesn't help anybody. It just makes people scared
for no reason.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
See, I'm just kind of you know.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
Scrolling through the listener questions, eighty percent of them were microplastics,
is very interesting. Let's just do one or two more questions.
Is there any way to truly recycle plastic? I'm guessing
the answer has I'm guessing the answer can differ depending
on the kind of plastic, because there are many kinds.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
Yeah, so about ninety percent of plastics, you can just
put it in a coffee grinder. I'm simplifying here. You
wash it, put it in through something a lot like
a coffee grinder, and then you just melt it and
make a new part. That's called mechanical recycling. That works
for most plastic. It works just fine. It's cheap, it's safe,
and it uses equipment we already have, so the investment
costs are really really low. And that's the thing that
(14:29):
is mostly done and makes most sense, and I cover
that in the book. The thing to know about recycling
is the way that it's presented to the public is
that we need recycling to make plastic green. If you
look at the life cycle study, plastic has the least
impact of all the alternatives nine times out of ten.
So nine times out of ten, if you replace plastic,
you're increasing greenhouse gas, you're increasing waste, increasing with litter,
(14:52):
and that's not a good idea. And that's even with
zero recycling. It's the lowest impact solution, even without recycling.
And when you recycling, you make it seventy or eighty
percent greener than it already was because you're not having
to make the material this time, you're just grinding up
material you already had. So yeah, recycling works, and it's
done on large scale. It's not that easy to make
money doing it, though, because plastics so cheap, So that's
(15:14):
part of the problem. That it does work. Technically, you
can make money doing it, but it's not that easy
to do.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
Okay, last thing for you, and I've only got about
a minute here, and this isn't the most important story
just in terms of earthshakingness, but I love it as
an example of the kind of nonsense that gets out
there in the world that so many people come to
believe we talked earlier about more plastics than than fish
(15:40):
in the ocean. But I just I want to leave
on this story as a cautionary tale for listeners to
be very very careful what you believe. Chris tell us
the story about benzene in water after forest fires.
Speaker 3 (15:56):
Yeah, that's the most amazing thing. So there's there's some
groups who are literally paid to criticize plastic even if
the stuff is nonsense. They keep coming up and they
have huge budgets and professional marketing people. And one of
the things that they like to say is that after
a forest fire that benzine's going to come out of
these plastic pipes and poison you. And it's complete nonsense. Right,
scientists have studied this. First of all, if my house
(16:17):
had just burned down in a forest fire, I'm not
going to run to my house, grab a smoldering pipe
and start sucking water out of it.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
Right.
Speaker 3 (16:22):
The whole idea of it is preposterous. And then they
say they have no evidence that this benzine came from
the pipes, right, they just make it up, just completely
out of fiction. And then this is the funny thing.
What do you get when you burn trees in a
forest fire, and the answer is benzine. So it never occurred,
apparently to these genius scientists, that you've got one hundred
thousand trees burning around you generating benzine endure. That may
(16:45):
be where the benzine's coming from. You get a gigantic
amount of benzine when you burn the trees, and that's
where it's coming from. That's what the real scientists showed.
And these charlatans are trying to blame it on plastic
pipes because they're funded by the metals industry. It's really
shocking to see how low some people will stoop to
get funding.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
Okay, I got just a few seconds.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
I'll I hadn't heard you say that before, and I
was wondering who funds these people who hate plastics so much,
because I know there are just radical environmentalist groups who
hate everything. They hate energy, they hate absolutely everything that
makes life easy and good. But so you're saying that
at least some of the anti plastic rhetoric comes from
metals companies that want to people that have to use
(17:27):
metal instead of plastic.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
I've been told the metal, paper, and glass industries are
all attacking plastics because they're much bigger than plastics are,
and they've got the funds to do it. The plastics
the new kid on the block, and so of course
they all get together and try and grab their market
share back again. And there are other people. There are
billionaires like Michael Boomberg has said that he's funding the
anti plastics campaign. And this is the funny thing. He
sees plastic as part of the oil industry, and actually
(17:50):
plastic reduces oil consumption. So this billionaire is spending millions
of dollars to campaign against his own wishes. And that's
so ironic. And that's in the book too.
Speaker 2 (17:58):
Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
Christie Armitt's fabulous new book, which you can get for
free at phantom plastics dot com, is called Shattering the
Plastics Illusion. Chris, fabulous book, fabulous conversation.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
As always, I'm grateful.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
I think I'm your first interview since the book's officially
released today, So that's really cool for me.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
Thanks for being.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
That's right, I lost to here with you, Ross, and
thanks for being curious. You do your readers and your
listeners a real service to not just go with a
regular narrative but dig a bit deeper and look and
see what the facts are, so I really respect that.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
Thanks Chris, appreciated very much.
Speaker 3 (18:33):
Talk to you, Thank you all right.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
That's Christie Armitt Phantom plastics dot com
Now it is Earth Day, And as I told you
earlier in the show, I used to enjoy celebrating Earth
Day by going around the house and turning all my
lights on, you know, cause it used to be that
people did the opposite. Now with led bulbs, it doesn't
really do them much good to go turn all the
lights off, and it's not nearly as much fun for
(00:22):
me to turn all the lights on.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
And I didn't just do it to be contrarian.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
I did it to try to make a point that
nobody noticed, but I felt good about it myself in
my own form of virtue signaling. That isn't it amazing
that I can go hit a little piece of plastic
on my wall and the lights come on? In that
incredible that's what we should be celebrating. Anyway. There's a
lot of nonsense out there, not just on Earth Day
but every other day about environmental stuff, and there are
(00:49):
large organizations that make a lot of money by telling
us that the world is going to hell in a handbasket,
whether it's climate change or pollution or whatever. And one
of the sub segments that they really like to bash
is plastics. And my friend Christy Armott from Phantom Plastics
(01:10):
has been on the show many times, but I want
to have him in particular today because he's got a
new book out today called Shattering the Plastics Illusion, exposing
environmental miss so Christie Armitt his website phantomplastics dot com.
It's great to see you again. It's great to have
(01:31):
you back on the show. Thanks for being here, Thanks Ross,
thanks for covering.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to your listeners.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Yeah, very glad to do it now. By the way,
your your last book, which is also a great book,
was you you made available for free?
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Now?
Speaker 1 (01:47):
What are you doing with this book as far as
like how can people get it? And how much does
it cost? It's free too, This is free?
Speaker 2 (01:53):
How do you do that? Are you a billionaire? Are
you a secret billionaire? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (01:58):
I really wish I was. That'd be tremendous. If anybody
wants to make me a huge donation and go right ahead,
my pockets are empty.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (02:05):
The point is, I mean, the truth should be free,
and you should be suspicious of anyone telling you something
and then saying donate now. They tell you some giant
whopper and then say donate now. So what I rather
do is say the science should be for free. Here
it is, it's peer reviewed, and I'm not trying to
get any money out of you. So it's a lot
more genuine message when scientists are telling you something for
free compared to us, you said, and Geo's telling you
(02:25):
whoppers for money. So that's the point of it.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
Okay, just one last question along these lines, just for
kind of establishing credibility. Some people might be wondering, well,
you know, Chris is going to write this book that
you know says nice things about plastic is he just
funded by the plastics industry?
Speaker 2 (02:43):
So what do you want to tell us about that.
I'm glad you asked that. Ross.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Yeah, I get that question all the time, and mainly
it comes from people who'd rather not put in the
work of actually looking at the evidence, so they would
like to look for an excuse not to even look.
And the answer is no, I'm not funded by the
plastics industry. I haven't received a single penny for this.
I did this because my daughters were lied to at
school and that made me angry, and I started checking
in what are the teachers, you know, teaching my kids?
What are the facts behind this? And so I read
(03:09):
five thousand studies completely unfunded, and I disclose all of
my income sources on the website. And not only that,
everything I say is like literally verbatim from the studies
and peer reviewed. So none of these studies are mine, right,
This is all thousands and thousands of studies from other scientists,
independent ones all around the world. And not only that,
then I have a team of professors check it and
endorse it, which is on the website too, so you
(03:30):
can see that it's been checked by professors all around
the world. So this is totally independent, all right.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
And just one last thing again, just sort of establishing
you for listeners who who don't know you. Every once
in a while, I will see someone write a piece
about some scientific issue, and then when I go read
about them, it turns out that they are like comparative
literature majors who decided to become activists. Tell us just
briefly about your academic background that qualifies you to write
(03:54):
about plastics.
Speaker 3 (03:56):
Yeah, that's a great point. So I have a PhD
in plastics in chemistry and polymer science as we call it,
and I spent my whole career in the area, and
I don't sell or make or market plastics. I'm just
as a pure scientist who really understands materials. I'm a
Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, which is not
easy to get, and a fellow of the Institute for
Materials Mining and what's the other one, mining Materials Mining, and.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Get the idea.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
So yeah, so a well respected scientist. And that's a
good point, Ross, because imagine I wrote a book and
it was full of nonsense. Why would I send it
to leading professors all around the world. I'd be ashamed,
I'd be humiliated, and they would call me out right.
And so you have to be confident in your work
that it's accurate before you share it with people, and
make sure it's peer reviewed.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
Well that's so, you know, that's easy for you to say,
and I'm glad you said it, But there are lots
of people who feel no shame and do right big
books that claim to show some expertise and and NGOs
do this all the time. All right, So let's let's
get into the book a little bit, and again we're
talking with Chris d Armitt. Checkout phantomplastics dot com and
(04:58):
if you've got a question about plastics.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
I know this is it's super nerdy, right, but I'm
a nerd.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
So if you've got a question for Chris about plastics,
text it to us at five six six nine zero.
As always, I do not promise to ask every question
that gets sent in, but I will ask the good ones.
I'm going to do this in no particular order. I'm
gonna have a guest on the show sometime soon. We're
actually gonna be talking about fluoride and water. But in
one of his talks I saw him claim then this
(05:24):
actually makes me wonder whether I should have him. But
I saw him claim something that you then bring up
in your book, the claim that there is or soon
will be more plastics in the ocean than fish.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
Yeah, that's a great one that really captured people's imaginations.
It went all around the world, and funnily enough, the
people who first made that claim, the scientists that they quoted.
He cited some studies. Those scientists said, no, you can't
make that claim from our work. It's completely bogus. And
so the people who originally made that claim have stopped
claiming it. They never retracted it, but they don't have
it up anymore in their annual report.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
For example.
Speaker 3 (05:56):
So even the people who made that claim realize that
it's not true. I call that out in the book,
that more plastic than fish is just complete fiction. But
that's the kind of thing. My kids were taught that
very thing last week ross at school. They came home
and said, Dad, you'll never believe it. Our teachers told
us there'll be more plastic than fish, and that is
just outright fiction.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
So you do what are you doing about that, about
your kids being told that at school?
Speaker 2 (06:17):
Did you contact the teacher?
Speaker 3 (06:20):
Yeah, that's why I wrote the first book, and then
I went and gave a presentation at the school. I've
given presentations all around the world at University of Cincinnati
and so forth, making sure people have a chance to
see the science. If you look at ocean plastic, it's
thousands of times less than originally claimed. That's a number
of the ocean's choking and plastic that was made up
by somebody called Jenna Jambeck, and she literally just took
a guess based on no data. She just literally made
(06:43):
up a number and said ten million tons of going
into the ocean. And then other scientists spent ten years
looking for this alleged plastic and they couldn't find it.
They went up and down, they sailed millions of miles
around the world with nets looking for this plastic and
it's not there. Well, because it was a guest and
it never was there.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Okay, So two things I want to findow up there.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
First, I want you to just, very specifically, what are
you going to do about the fact that your kids
were lied to again at school just a week ago?
Speaker 2 (07:10):
What are you doing about it?
Speaker 3 (07:12):
The last thing I did was I offered to talk.
So I talked to the principle. I cornered him at
one of the school events and said, hey, I want
to present this to the class, and he wasn't interested.
He didn't really get it, maybe had his mind on
other things. But I'm going to keep going because they're
at a new school now, because they're a bit older,
and so I'm going to approach the teachers and the
principal at that school and say, hey, give me a
chance to get in front of the kids and show
(07:32):
them the science and to de brainwash them.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
Unbelievable. Okay.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
So you know with the more plastic than fish, you said,
it's nonsense, that was just made up.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
I have a feeling.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
This next thing falls into that exact same category.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
But many of us have.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Heard about the giant Texas sized island of trash in
the ocean, right, So what about that?
Speaker 3 (07:55):
Yeah, that's a myth. That's actually a whole PhD thesis
by Kim de Wolf about how that myth came to be.
So Originally, a German article said that there was a
carpet of material on the ocean, and that was translated
into Russian by Pravda, the Russian magazine, and they translated
carpet into mountain, and they put a cartoon of a
mountain of plastic in the ocean, and everyone else picked
up on that, you know, the New York Times and
(08:15):
the Washington Post and everyone spread this complete mistranslation around
the world. And the funny thing is, you can see
a cigarette package from a satellite image, right, that's the
resolution of a satellite image. And there's not a single
image of this floating island the size of Texas because
it isn't there. It doesn't exist. And for even more funny,
ross journalists go to that guy, Captain Moore I think
is his name, who discovered the gyre the areas with
(08:36):
a little bit more material in it because of the
way the water swirls. And they say, take me in
your ship, take me out there. I want to take
my photographer and take pictures of this thing. There's never
been a picture of this gyre in the whole history
of the world because all you see is ocean. There's
nothing to see there. You can even swim through it
and not know that you're in it because there's so
little material there.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
Wow. All right, So.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
I will say, and the plural of anecdote is not data,
and I do not think the world is coming to
an end. But I will say as a guy, I've
been to India three times, I've been to I've been
to I've been to sixty something countries, a lot of
them in Asia, only a little bit in Africa, but
especially in Asia. The amount of plastic trash that you
(09:21):
see there is really shocking. And this is not a
complaint about plastics, right, but these folks in these poor countries,
I mean, and I actually think you talk about this
in the book.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Maybe they just don't have very many trash cans.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
And that's not like sarcasm, but also maybe poor people
just don't care. They don't own anything. They have no
real sense of private property and all this. But dude,
when you get near you know, I was by the
mouth of the Ganges in Bangladesh and you see the
plastic trash around. Again, I don't think it's an existential
planetary threat, but it does make me sad.
Speaker 3 (09:57):
Yes, it does. Yeah, those images are really visceral, aren't
they When you see those things and you see the pollution.
And scientists have studied that. So trashy is dropped by
people intentionally, and people are like, oh, how can you
blame the people? It's like, well, because science and the
legal system both agree that it's you know, litter is
is dropped by people, caused by people, and the solutions
to that once you realize that it's human behavior are education,
(10:18):
deposits and fines. And we know that that works because
there are places in the world with no litter. There's
like Japan is incredibly clean, Singapore is incredibly clean. The
developed nations are pretty good. But you're right, some countries
haven't caught up yet. And it's not that they're bad people,
they just haven't got their waste management under control yet.
And we can kind of show them how we did
it and help them catch up. So the litter is
a real thing. Pot plastic is a part of it,
(10:39):
but it's not due to materials. And sometimes I ask
people to do this. Go to your garden, take a
chip package or something or candy wrapper and drop it
on the floor in your garden, and then blame that
candy rapper for what you just did. And see what
a fool you feel. And that will hit home to
you how ridiculous it is to drop litter and then
blame the litter for what you just did. So people
need to take responsibility for and some people are further
(11:01):
behind than others.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
We're talking with Christy Armott. He's a PhD.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
Polymer scientists read plastic and his new book is called
Shattering the Plastics Illusion, Exposing Environmental Myths, and you can
get it for free at phantomplastics dot com. Now I
have a lot of other questions for you, but I'm
actually getting because I have a smart and nerdy audience,
(11:29):
a lot of listener questions, so I'm gonna and some
of them i'm sure.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
Will overlap with my questions.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
So I'm going to just switch for a few minutes
here to some listener questions and a whole bunch of
people are asking the same thing, and this is something
that I wanted to ask. We hear all this talk
these days about so called microplastics. I saw a story
in the Denver Post we found microplastics in the snow
in the Rocky Mountains. So what are microplastics? Where do
(11:59):
they come from? And how do they get wherever they go?
And should we be concerned about it?
Speaker 3 (12:05):
Yeah, I'm glad you asked that. So so far, I've
read more than five hundred peer reviewed studies on microplastics,
and that's probably the biggest review ever. And I've never
seen a single credible study showing any evidence of harm.
And there's a couple things to think about. One is perspective. Right,
have you heard about micro wood or microglass or micrometal. No,
(12:25):
it's just called dust, right, All of these other particles,
we just call it dust, and we're used to it
and we don't give it a second thought. Even though
some of that dust is actually toxic, some of it
even causes cancer, but we're not interested in it because
we just call it dust. As soon as it comes
to plastics, the environmental people did a very clever thing.
They took plastic dust. It's just a very very small
part of dust, and they gave it a special name
(12:45):
to make it sound unknown and scary. So we have
to realize plastic is about one hundred thousandth of the
toxic of the well, sorry, one hundred thousandth of the
particles we ingest, and it's non toxic. And that's according
to and this is the public thing. This is some
kind of new, like unstudied area. We have fifty years
of studies, hundreds and hundreds of studies showing no toxicity.
(13:08):
They even fed plastic microparticles to rats. They've fed them
five percent plastic microparticles for three months and nothing happened.
That's how non toxic it is. It says non toxic
as cellulose, which is what plants are made of. So yeah,
they've made a big fuss and they've made hundreds of
millions of dollars by telling us lies and scaring us
about one hundred thousandth of the safe part of dust.
And meanwhile, what else is in dust? It includes quartz,
(13:31):
which causes cancer. It includes wood dust, which amazingly causes
cancer too, So we're totally ignoring the actual toxic stuff.
That's there in large amounts and focusing on a tiny
fraction of the non toxic part. And that's just stupid
because it doesn't help anybody. It just makes people scared
for no reason.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
See, I'm just kind of you know.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
Scrolling through the listener questions, eighty percent of them were microplastics,
is very interesting. Let's just do one or two more questions.
Is there any way to truly recycle plastic? I'm guessing
the answer has I'm guessing the answer can differ depending
on the kind of plastic, because there are many kinds.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
Yeah, so about ninety percent of plastics, you can just
put it in a coffee grinder. I'm simplifying here. You
wash it, put it in through something a lot like
a coffee grinder, and then you just melt it and
make a new part. That's called mechanical recycling. That works
for most plastic. It works just fine. It's cheap, it's safe,
and it uses equipment we already have, so the investment
costs are really really low. And that's the thing that
(14:29):
is mostly done and makes most sense, and I cover
that in the book. The thing to know about recycling
is the way that it's presented to the public is
that we need recycling to make plastic green. If you
look at the life cycle study, plastic has the least
impact of all the alternatives nine times out of ten.
So nine times out of ten, if you replace plastic,
you're increasing greenhouse gas, you're increasing waste, increasing with litter,
(14:52):
and that's not a good idea. And that's even with
zero recycling. It's the lowest impact solution, even without recycling.
And when you recycling, you make it seventy or eighty
percent greener than it already was because you're not having
to make the material this time, you're just grinding up
material you already had. So yeah, recycling works, and it's
done on large scale. It's not that easy to make
money doing it, though, because plastics so cheap, So that's
(15:14):
part of the problem. That it does work. Technically, you
can make money doing it, but it's not that easy
to do.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
Okay, last thing for you, and I've only got about
a minute here, and this isn't the most important story
just in terms of earthshakingness, but I love it as
an example of the kind of nonsense that gets out
there in the world that so many people come to
believe we talked earlier about more plastics than than fish
(15:40):
in the ocean. But I just I want to leave
on this story as a cautionary tale for listeners to
be very very careful what you believe. Chris tell us
the story about benzene in water after forest fires.
Speaker 3 (15:56):
Yeah, that's the most amazing thing. So there's there's some
groups who are literally paid to criticize plastic even if
the stuff is nonsense. They keep coming up and they
have huge budgets and professional marketing people. And one of
the things that they like to say is that after
a forest fire that benzine's going to come out of
these plastic pipes and poison you. And it's complete nonsense. Right,
scientists have studied this. First of all, if my house
(16:17):
had just burned down in a forest fire, I'm not
going to run to my house, grab a smoldering pipe
and start sucking water out of it.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
Right.
Speaker 3 (16:22):
The whole idea of it is preposterous. And then they
say they have no evidence that this benzine came from
the pipes, right, they just make it up, just completely
out of fiction. And then this is the funny thing.
What do you get when you burn trees in a
forest fire, and the answer is benzine. So it never occurred,
apparently to these genius scientists, that you've got one hundred
thousand trees burning around you generating benzine endure. That may
(16:45):
be where the benzine's coming from. You get a gigantic
amount of benzine when you burn the trees, and that's
where it's coming from. That's what the real scientists showed.
And these charlatans are trying to blame it on plastic
pipes because they're funded by the metals industry. It's really
shocking to see how low some people will stoop to
get funding.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
Okay, I got just a few seconds.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
I'll I hadn't heard you say that before, and I
was wondering who funds these people who hate plastics so much,
because I know there are just radical environmentalist groups who
hate everything. They hate energy, they hate absolutely everything that
makes life easy and good. But so you're saying that
at least some of the anti plastic rhetoric comes from
metals companies that want to people that have to use
(17:27):
metal instead of plastic.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
I've been told the metal, paper, and glass industries are
all attacking plastics because they're much bigger than plastics are,
and they've got the funds to do it. The plastics
the new kid on the block, and so of course
they all get together and try and grab their market
share back again. And there are other people. There are
billionaires like Michael Boomberg has said that he's funding the
anti plastics campaign. And this is the funny thing. He
sees plastic as part of the oil industry, and actually
(17:50):
plastic reduces oil consumption. So this billionaire is spending millions
of dollars to campaign against his own wishes. And that's
so ironic. And that's in the book too.
Speaker 2 (17:58):
Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
Christie Armitt's fabulous new book, which you can get for
free at phantom plastics dot com, is called Shattering the
Plastics Illusion. Chris, fabulous book, fabulous conversation.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
As always, I'm grateful.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
I think I'm your first interview since the book's officially
released today, So that's really cool for me.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
Thanks for being.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
That's right, I lost to here with you, Ross, and
thanks for being curious. You do your readers and your
listeners a real service to not just go with a
regular narrative but dig a bit deeper and look and
see what the facts are, so I really respect that.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
Thanks Chris, appreciated very much.
Speaker 3 (18:33):
Talk to you, Thank you all right.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
That's Christie Armitt Phantom plastics dot com
The Ross Kaminsky Show News
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