Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | RSS | Android
From WWII radars to Tupperware, LEGO, and even heart transplants, plastic permeates every facet of our lives. But how much of this was Big Oil’s “Plan B” strategy to triple production and keep profits high? Climate Curious gets the scoop on big plastic’s secret and shocking history from environmental journalist and TEDxLondon speaker Beth Gardiner. As Beth tells us, “it’s actually enraging rather than depressing” when you learn to see through the lies that CEOs have sold us – around individual blame and beach litter cleanups – versus the real solution: corporates cleaning up their own mess.
Read more in Beth Gardiner’s new book, ‘Plastic Inc.’: https://linktr.ee/plasticinc
Who do you want to hear from next on Climate Curious? Fill out our quick listener feedback survey: https://tedxlondon.typeform.com/climatecurious
Join the Climate Curious conversation on socials:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/climatecuriouspod/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@climatecuriouspod
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtF6xzNkVIczlDmVcH8FCMA
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/10996041/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TEDxLondon
Website: https://tedxlondon.com/podcast/
All other links: https://linktr.ee/climatecuriouspod
Created by TEDxLondon
Executive produced by Josie Colter
Produced by Ben Beheshty
Curated by Deesha Chandra
Hosted by Maryam Pasha and Ben Hurst
Communications by Tara Cooper and Issey Gladston
00:00 Introduction
01:03 Beth Gardener’s insight on plastic production
02:48 Fossil Fuel industry’s role in plastic production
05:44 The push for disposable culture
08:36 Solutions and regulatory measures
10:55 Conclusion
Introduction
[00:00:00] Ben Hurst: Welcome to Climate Quickies, bite-sized nuggets of Climate Goodness from our TEDx London experts in under 10 minutes in this week’s climate, curious, we are asking, is our plastic problem an accident [00:00:15] or a calculated strategy by the fossil fuel industry? To help us delve into how a byproduct of oil and gas production became a global revenue stream, we have journalist and author.
[00:00:29] Ben Hurst: [00:00:30] Beth Gardener, she reveals how our psyches were shifted to accept a world of single use waste and asks How come individuals are the ones picking up plastic bottles on beach litter pigs, when really it should be the [00:00:45] company’s cleaning up their own mess on why the rise of disposability is enraging rather than just depressing and what we can do about it.
[00:00:55] Ben Hurst: Here’s Beth Garden. Stay curious.[00:01:00]
Beth Gardener’s insight on plastic production
[00:01:03] Beth Gardiner: My name is Beth Gardner. I’m an environmental journalist and author of the new book Plastic Ink. One thing I really wanted to do with this book is to keep people’s gaze [00:01:15] and attention sort of focused on. Production, the producers and the users of plastic, meaning retailers and the companies that push it into our lives rather than our own consumption, which [00:01:30] the, which the attention has so often been focused on.
[00:01:32] Beth Gardiner: So at the start of every chapter, I sort of included a little. Moment in time, a landmark in the history of plastic, and I paired it with a statistic from the year that that landmark took [00:01:45] place. And the statistic is the amount of plastic that was produced back in the 1950s and in the early days of modern consumerism and of plastic, those two things are inextricably linked.
[00:01:56] Beth Gardiner: Earl Tupper came up with the idea of Tupperware. [00:02:00] These, you know. Little plastic food containers that are, are so ubiquitous in our lives now and began working with, uh, branding people. Though that term was not used back in those days to create these parties, social gatherings for women [00:02:15] to come together and buy and sell.
[00:02:18] Beth Gardiner: Tupperware. So, you know, it’s a really early glimpse at the way that plastic would sort of become intertwined with, with our lives, um, in so many ways in our homes, [00:02:30] in our kitchens, and even in that case, in our interactions with friends and neighbors. If you look back at, at the history of the last 60, 70 years, really since the end of World War ii, when this age of modern consumerism and plastic’s role and it started, [00:02:45] the trajectory has always been up and up and up.
Fossil Fuel industry’s role in plastic production
[00:02:48] Beth Gardiner: And that’s because plastic is a way for these huge. Fossil fuel companies to get an additional revenue stream from the oil and the gas that they’re drilling. Right? [00:03:00] Because you, you use part of the, the sort of barrel as they call it, for fuel, and then you can use the rest, which often is, is sort of substances that would’ve gone to waste or just had to be.
[00:03:11] Beth Gardiner: Like burned off and disposed of. You can instead [00:03:15] monetize those by turning them into plastic. So that’s the background and that’s why we have seen the trajectory. If you look at, you know, a graph, you will see it goes absolutely straight up and up and up. From 1950 to today, the amount of plastic that is produced.
[00:03:28] Beth Gardiner: Annually and when you look [00:03:30] forward what these companies can see, the Exxons and the Shells and the the Saudi Aramcos, these huge oil companies even, they understand that not only are there climate imperatives that are very likely. [00:03:45] Although it’s going too slowly, going to push down the demand for oil and gas, but actually clean energy is now undercutting them.
[00:03:54] Beth Gardiner: Even economically, solar and wind are cheaper than oil and gas. You know, almost [00:04:00] everywhere in the world people are shifting to electric vehicles and that is just a, a trend that is probably not gonna be stopped even by. Donald Trump and his, um, fossil fuel friendly administration in the United States. Um, so [00:04:15] these huge oil companies can see where the world is going.
[00:04:19] Beth Gardiner: And that is a, a, a shift, you know, slowly, too slowly, but it is, uh, a sort of inexorable shift away from burning oil and gas as fuels. And [00:04:30] that is obviously a huge threat to their bottom line, to their profits. And what they are doing is ramping up to make even more plastic than ever in the years to come to continue that upward trajectory that we have seen.
[00:04:43] Beth Gardiner: If you look all the way back to [00:04:45] 1950, you know, to, to just keep it going. It’s a way of. Enabling the continued drilling, the perpetuation of this, this business model of the fossil fuel companies, which has been [00:05:00] so very profitable for them, but so very catastrophic for the rest of us, and is now totally unnecessary since we are, are now in a world where we have clean energy as a, as a cheap and affordable alternative.
[00:05:14] Beth Gardiner: We [00:05:15] have electric cars. Buses and trucks. So that is a huge threat to big oil. They would very much rather keep drilling, keep us addicted to fossil fuels, and if they can’t get us to burn those fossil fuels in our [00:05:30] cars and our power plants, then they’re perfectly happy to turn them into plastic instead and, and push them out as packaging and, and other throwaway items.
The push for disposable culture
[00:05:44] Beth Gardiner: The [00:05:45] most shocking thing to me really is just sort of the relentlessness with which the industry has always pushed plastic into our lives. Um, and the deliberateness, right? There was a, a speech [00:06:00] given at, um, an industry conference back in the sixties, a plastic industry conference. Someone actually stood up in the, in the front of all these executives and said, you know, if we can replace.
[00:06:11] Beth Gardiner: Reusable bottles because back in those days, you [00:06:15] know, Coke for example, Coca-Cola had this huge network of reuse where the, they would collect, or they, they had sort of contractors who collected back the bottles, brought, trucked them back to the bottling plant. Refilled them and reuse [00:06:30] them and one bottle could be reused 50, 60, 70 times.
[00:06:33] Beth Gardiner: Right? And this guy actually stood up in front of a a conference and said, there is money to be made in disposability if we can stop [00:06:45] this system of reuse that people are so familiar with. End it. Dismantle it and replace it with throwaway bottles. We will make money from every throwaway bottle because we’re the ones making and selling the bottles.
[00:06:58] Beth Gardiner: Reusability was not as [00:07:00] profitable. Disposability was more profitable. They dismantled systems of reuse that had existed for many, many years and. Very intentionally tried to sort of, one, one writer called it, you know, teach us to waste [00:07:15] people of, of the, the wartime generation and before, you know, had, had lived for their entire lives with this ethos of make do and mend right.
[00:07:24] Beth Gardiner: Reuse, um, the industry understood that they could make more money [00:07:30] by, uh, in a, under a model of throwaway packaging and that people had to sort of be. You know, weaned off of this idea of reuse and taught to waste, taught to throw away. It was very [00:07:45] intentional. They understood what the consequences might be.
[00:07:47] Beth Gardiner: There’s also sort of, um, you know, industry conferences, uh, decades ago where people expressed these warnings and worries about what, what it would mean for waste if everything came in a throwaway [00:08:00] package. But they also saw they could make money for it. They saw that they could persuade customers to.
[00:08:06] Beth Gardiner: Embrace it or at least accept it, and they very intentionally pushed that. Onto us. So the, the idea of disposability was [00:08:15] really something that was invented and created. You know, I think we tend to sort of look at the world around us and think, well, this is just the way it is. You know, we can’t get by without disposable packaging.
[00:08:26] Beth Gardiner: But it was, it was built and, and created in a [00:08:30] very intentional way. Like all those systems that we live in, it didn’t happen by accident and someone’s making a lot of money off it.
Solutions and regulatory measures
[00:08:36] Beth Gardiner: I’m a journalist. I’m not a policy expert, but I have interviewed a lot of, um, activists and, and other people who work in this field.
[00:08:44] Beth Gardiner: I do think [00:08:45] that it’s important to start with an accurate diagnosis, right? If you talk to people who work in this field, the sort of holy grail of addressing this problem they talk about is something called extended producer responsibility. That could be done through. Through law and the [00:09:00] idea of extended producer responsibility is to make the producer, the manufacturer, whether that’s the big oil or the food and drink company or the consumer products company, that they should be the ones responsible for the, the [00:09:15] mess that is being created by.
[00:09:17] Beth Gardiner: All the plastic that we’re throwing away, rather than us, the taxpayers being responsible for, you know, paying for our, our local council or our regional government to clean it up and dispose of the waste and [00:09:30] recycle the recycling. Tell our political representatives that we want this to change, right? We want more regulation on these companies.
[00:09:37] Beth Gardiner: We want better laws that maybe somewhere down the line, a moratorium on the construction of new. Um, new plastic production [00:09:45] plants. There’s so much plastic already. Why do we need more? There are sort of legislative and, and regulatory ways of doing this. Governments can also mandate that companies making plastic use healthier materials.
[00:09:57] Beth Gardiner: There’s a lot of chemicals in there that are really, [00:10:00] really damaging to our health. When we, you know, drink the, the water or the milk or the juice outta that bottle or eat the food that was. Held in a plastic container. So that’s an important area for regulation too. I don’t think that we need another book about, you know, all the, the [00:10:15] straws in the, the turtle’s noses and the microplastics and what they’re doing to the fish, right?
[00:10:19] Beth Gardiner: What I wanted to write was a book that would help us understand who is causing this problem, not more, what the impacts are, and. That’s why I think that it is, [00:10:30] is actually enraging rather than depressing. Because when you look at the actors behind this and the money that they’re making off of the plastic that they’re pushing onto us, and the deliberateness and intentionality with which they [00:10:45] have always done that, and which, which they are continuing to do it in the, in the future, you know that, that to me is infuriating rather than.
[00:10:54] Beth Gardiner: Depressing.
Conclusion
[00:10:55] Beth Gardiner: And that’s why the, the subtitle that we landed on for this book is, you know, the, the big oil, big Money, and the Plan to Trash Our Future because that is what they’re doing, and it is ultimately at the end of the day about the bottom line.
[00:11:09] Ben Hurst: Thanks for listening to this quickie.
[00:11:11] Maryam Pasha: This episode was created by our superstar podcast team at TEDx [00:11:15] London.
[00:11:15] Maryam Pasha: Until next time,
[00:11:16] Ben Hurst: stay curious.
