Just One Word: Microplastics, with Matt Simon

Put on your best polyester pants, grab a bunch of gleaming mylar balloons, and crack open a case of bottled water. In today's episode, we're entering the plastic world of plastic pollution in all its glorious plasticity. We're on the hunt for microplastics – and we won’t have to go very far, as they're present everywhere – in the soil, in the water, in the air, and in our bodies. We'll be looking for systemic solutions and talking with Matt Simon, author of the book A Poison Like No Other. 

Originally recorded on 7/10/25.

Warning: This podcast occasionally uses spicy language.

Sources/Links/Notes:

• Matt Simon, A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies, Island Press, October 27, 2022.
• Katie Okamoto, "Microplastics Are Everywhere. Here’s How to Avoid Eating Them." New York Times, April 21, 2025.
• Ocean Cleanup (large organization with a popular, but frustrating, ecomodernist approach to plastic pollution).
• Jen Fela, "Global Plastics Treaty Delayed, but Not Defeated," Earth Island Journal, December 11, 2024.

Related episode(s) of Crazy Town:

• Episode 84, "Escaping Technologyism"

Transcript

Asher Miller  
I'm Asher Miller.

Rob Dietz  
I'm Rob Dietz.

Jason Bradford  
And I'm Jason Bradford. Welcome to Crazy Town, where every married couple is entitled to an AI-powered plastic robot child, as plastics drive sperm counts to zero.

Rob Dietz  
Put on your best polyester pants, grab a bunch of gleaming mylar balloons and crack open a case of bottled water in today's episode, we're entering the plastic world of plastic pollution and all its glorious plasticity. We're on the hunt for microplastics, and we won't have to go very far as it's present everywhere: in the soil, in the water, in the air and in our bodies. We'll be looking for systemic solutions, and we'll be talking with Matt Simon, author of the book, "A Poison Like No Other."

Rob Dietz  
Hey Jason, Asher, usually I'm the more lighthearted one among us, but I think I've now fully entered your camp with a broken brain as I've done a deep dive into plastics, plastic pollution and microplastics. 

Asher Miller  
You're just ingesting it? Is that 

Rob Dietz  
I was in a ball bath at the Chuck E Cheese's.

Asher Miller  
Just swallowing  

Rob Dietz  
Plastic balls, yeah.

Asher Miller  
Just taking bites out of them?

Jason Bradford  
I would never know this, giving your opening. I just listened to your opening, and you sound like you're on the stage of an Up with People concert. 

Asher Miller  
Guess what? We get to talk about plastics today!

Rob Dietz  
I host shows like an act, even when I'm triggered and upset. 

Jason Bradford  
Okay. Well, good for you.

Rob Dietz  
Yeah. What actually got me going is I read a New York Times article with the title, "Microplastics are everywhere. Here's how to avoid eating them."

Asher Miller  
Okay, I have two comments before you dive into this. Okay? The first is, it wasn't just New York Times. This is Wire Cutter, right? Which is very like consumer advice area of the New York Times. And the second is, I'm starting to wonder if they're going to get on to us because we are constantly shitting on the New York Times. Have you noticed this? 

Jason Bradford  
Yes.

Asher Miller  
Like, here we have a subscription New York Times. We read it regularly but we're always shitting on them.

Rob Dietz  
 Well, I'm just being strategic, because I want them to buy us.

Asher Miller  
Oh, okay. Yeah, they're going to buy us.

Jason Bradford  
Yeah, it'll be like after this Daily episode, listen to Crazy Town.

Rob Dietz  
It'll probably be like when the auto companies and the oil companies bought the trolleys and dismantled them.

Jason Bradford
Yeah. Well, I want to be positioned between Daily and Modern Love. That's where I want our slot to be.

Asher Miller  
Yeah, they could put us out on a Saturday night at 11:30pm. That's the slot.

Jason Bradford  
Okay. 

Rob Dietz  
Well, the article, you're right, it's in the Wire Cutter. That's one of the frustrating things. But what's really frustrating is when you you read into it and I think they have two main ways to avoid microplastics, or to avoid eating them as they say. The first thing that they put out there is, take care of your general health. Get plenty of sleep and exercise, eat a balanced diet, lower your stress, and seek preventative care, right?

Jason Bradford  
I can say that about anything. 

Rob Dietz  
I know.

Asher Miller  
And that's not about avoiding plastics. 

Rob Dietz  
No, I know.

Asher Miller  
 This is just about, like, take care of yourself.

Rob Dietz  
So I don't even know why they got that detail. They should have just said, be healthy.

Asher Miller  
Right. 

Jason Bradford  
Well it might be like, okay, plastics are gonna remove five years from your life. Here's how to maybe add one back.

Rob Dietz  
Well, not surprisingly, as you pointed out, Asher, this appeared in the Wire Cutter. I don't even know why it's called that, but they give you a bunch of personal consumption choices that can help you get plastic out. Like get a NSF certified water filter. Don't store your food in plastic, or, in other words, buy a bunch of glass storage containers. Buy better cutting boards. I think that was what really got to me. I was just kind of like, really? This is how we're going to deal with the microsplastic is we're going to get better cutting boards? Because there's nothing in there, in this article about reversing the flow of plastic. It's all on you as an individual consumer. 

Asher Miller  
Rob, you can't sell products and in an article like that and get a commission on the links, you know, on the click throughs. 

Rob Dietz  
This is true. 

Jason Bradford  
Oh, I like that they wanted you to have, like, an air filter or something like that. It's like you've got to be scared of breathing in your own home now.

Rob Dietz  
Yup yup. Well, you know, I interviewed Matt Simon for this episode. He wrote a book called, "A Poison Like No Other," and he talks about that issue. And it is scary. In the New York Times -- It's funny, that article asked, how worried should you be about microplastics? So, you know, they're kind of exploring this question.

Jason Bradford
You know what really upsets me is how whenever I see somebody has like glitter in their hair or glitter in their makeup, I instantly can't stand that person. Like I instantly am judging that person as maybe the worst person that is walking the face of the earth. 

Asher Miller  
This is confessional time, huh? 

Jason Bradford  
No, and I feel terrible because they just may not know how bad they are being. But they're probably -- maybe deep down they're not horrible but when I see glitter, it like just glistens at me that this person is ignorant as fuck.

Rob Dietz  
Well I mean . . . 

Jason Bradford  
It's very upsetting. 

Rob Dietz  
You're not gonna like me because I don't put you glitter on my --

Asher Miller  
He wears glitter all the time. 

Rob Dietz  
Well I don't put it on my face or hair but I just go to the ocean and dump it straight in. Well you know they ask you how worried you should be and then it mentions all these links between microplastics and colon cancer, respiratory disease, endocrine disruption, higher risk of heart attack, strokes and death. And then just kind of leaves it there. So go get yourself a cutting board made out of wood or whatever. Don't get any plastic lacquer on it. It's basically a complete lack of systems thinking. And that's why we wanted to talk to Matt Simon. I gotta say, you know, I said I was very triggered by the whole plastics pollution. If you start reading about this, you have to steel yourself to read his book. It's tough.

Jason Bradford  
Well, at least steel is not plastic.

Asher Miller  
Exactly. 

Rob Dietz  
Right. 

Jason Bradford  
Now I just have to make a call back to Episode 84: Escaping Technologism is what we called it. This was our escape season. I don't remember which number it was, but there's a lot in here that's like, the New York Times sort of drips Ecomodernism every chance they get. And that's why we keep you know --

Asher Miller  
Harshing on them.

Jason Bradford  
Harshing on them. Because they're awful.

Rob Dietz  
And let's remind our listeners what we mean by Ecomodernism.

Jason Bradford
Ecomodernism is this idea that the best way to solve the problems of today is through some new, advanced technology. It's about innovating our way out of a problem.

Asher Miller  
The best way to solve the problems of modernity is to double down on modernity.

Jason Bradford
Yes. So we have a technology called plastics. That technology is essentially, you know, making our baby batter of poor quality and everything else with the colon and stuff you were saying. 

Rob Dietz  
Right. Heart attack, strokes. 

Jason Bradford  
But what we need then is a new technology to essentially deal with the technology of the past that screwed everything up. And every time we do this, we usually create a new problem with technology. And the Ecomodernists have some sort of faith that they will be a technical solution.

Asher Miller  
It's a constant growth industry to solve the problems of your past, attempt to solve problems.

Jason Bradford
And so we dealt with this in that Episode 84: Escaping Technologyism with this nonprofit called Ocean Cleanup. And I'm not, I don't want to harsh on these people because they're trying to actually deal with the downstream effects.

Rob Dietz  
They're idealists who take booms out in the ocean and try to collect the plastic garbage.

Asher Miller  
I think oceans and where rivers --

Jason Bradford
Where rivers meet the ocean. So I don't want to, you know, I don't want to trash what they're doing.

Asher Miller  
Puns today. Haha. 

Jason Bradford  
But do you know how many employees that they have?

Rob Dietz  
They've got to have at least as many as the Post Carbon Institute. We're at about eight, nine employees. 

Jason Bradford  
They have a wonderful website.

Rob Dietz  
Not eighty nine. Eight or nine.

Asher Miller  
Which one is it? You're like eight or nine. It just depends on the day. It depnds how well my brain is functioning.

Rob Dietz  
I'm just thinking of part time.

Jason Bradford  
Yeah. Anyway, you can count, you can go across, you can go down, and you do some multiplication. It's 138 who are pictured, at least, on their website currently. 

Asher Miller  
Employees? 

Jason Bradford  
Employees. All with a beautiful blue backdrop and they all look smiley at nice.

Asher Miller  
Is it plastic background? 

Rob Dietz  
Think how much plastic they have to pick up. I mean you need a lot of people for that.

Jason Bradford  
No it's true. I guess. I'd rather have, I wish they had a million employees, honestly, I guess. But what about handling the problem in the first place so that they don't have to clean up the mess? So would that be more efficient? 

Asher Miller  
That would put them out of business and Wire Cutter couldn't, you know, get commissions off of selling products. It doesn't work that way, Jason.

Rob Dietz  
Let's talk to Matt because as painful as some of the stats and the problems of plastic pollution that he presents in his book and in the interview that I did with him, he's a big time systems thinker and tries to say that you know, he's an advocate of going farther and farther upstream. We have to deal with it the way you're talking about, Jason.

Jason Bradford  
Thank goodness someone is sane.

Rob Dietz  
Alright Asher, Jason, this is the best part of the podcast. We get to talk about our sponsor. 

Jason Bradford  
Love our sponsors. Thank you sponsors.

Rob Dietz  
And this time, it's the Plastic Wrapping Alliance. 

Jason Bradford  
Incredible people there. 

Rob Dietz  
Yeah, do you know about that company? It's just unbelievable what they do. They're all about efficiency. 

Jason Bradford  
That's right. 

Asher Miller  
Totally. 

Rob Dietz  
So, you know, typically plastic wrapping, you wrap a product, you give it to the consumer, consumer uses it, throws it away, somehow it ends up in the ocean. 

Jason Bradford  
Yeah. 

Rob Dietz  
Well, Plastic Wrapping Alliance just eliminates the middle man. Totally efficient. They take the plastic wrapping and they just fly it to the ocean and drop it in.

Jason Bradford  
The Pacific Gyre, I think, is their target right now. 

Asher Miller  
It was amazing. They actually took me up on one of their flights to drop. It was incredible looking down on all that plastic.

Rob Dietz  
Oh it brings a tear to the eye. 

Jason Bradford  
Yeah, I think you can see it from like -- 

Asher Miller  
You can see it from space. 

Jason Bradford  
The space thing they got up there. 

Rob Dietz  
Oh like if you're riding in a Tesla that Elon Musk launched up there. 

Jason Bradford  
A flying Tesla.

Asher Miller  
Well eventually that's gonna come back and then be part of the plastic shit gyre.

Rob Dietz  
Oh, it's awesome. The people at Plastic Wrapping Alliance are so good that they even go further. So rather than just dumping it in the ocean, they'll actually take some of it and wrap it around whales and dolphins and sea turtles. So you know, it's getting it to that final spot. 

Jason Bradford  
Wow. 

Asher Miller  
Incredible. I mean, if that's where it's gonna end up anyway, let's do it as efficiently, and as quickly, and as cheaply as possible. 

Jason Bradford  
That's right. That's right. 

Asher Miller  
These guys are geniuses. 

Rob Dietz  
Yeah, eliminate the middle man. 

Jason Bradford  
Thank you Plastic Wrapping Alliance. 

Rob Dietz  
Plastic Wrapping Alliance. What more could you say about them? 

Jason Bradford  
We love you. That's what we can say.

Rob Dietz  
Matt Simon is a science journalist and a senior writer at Grist, covering climate solutions. He spent over a decade at Wired Magazine writing about the environment, biology and robotics. He's the author of three books, most recently, the one that we're diving into today, " A Poison Like No Other: How microplastics corrupted our planet and our bodies." Matt, welcome to Crazy Town. 

Matt Simon  
And thank you for having me. 

Rob Dietz  
Look I really appreciate your book, "A Poison Like No Other," and I hope our listeners will check it out. You probably don't need to hear from me that you're an outstanding writer. You're building a career there, but really well done. And I gotta say the very first words struck me. It's your dedication right in the very beginning. It's short and sweet. It says, "To planet earth. Sorry about the mess." That's a unique way to open a book. What inspired you to write that dedication?

Matt Simon  
I think it might have been to some extent delirium. I was brilliant enough to write this book in the depths of the pandemic. I don't know why. So I had been writing for Wired, as you have mentioned, for a number of years, covering microplastics here and there as these studies were coming out. But noticed the pandemic when I had very little else to do during lockdown, nobody had really done a popular science book, sort of distilling the research to this point down to something that was actually digestible. Digestible is not the right word because we do not want to be eating microplastics. But something that was understandable for the general public as to the extent of this problem and what we can do about it. So the education was, I think, my partially sick sense of humor, but also maybe a little bit of pandemic era delirium thrown in too. But also, I'm very sorry on behalf of human rights in general that we have really done a number on this planet. 

Rob Dietz  
Yeah, well, you're in the right place for sick sense of humor so yeah, it really struck me. I appreciate that. I was wondering if you can retell the story that you have in the book about the invention of plastic which has to do with billiard balls, elephants, $10,000, and the risk of bursting into flames.

Rob Dietz  
It feels like you could have had a dual military operation there, right? Like the military is interested in plastic, it's explosive, perfect.

Matt Simon  
Yeah, yeah. A gathering of really interesting factors here when it comes to the invention of material that is ubiquitous in our lives now. So back in the 1800s, billiards in the United States became a phenomenon. Everybody wanted to play pool, and there was a very famous billiards player who noticed that we have a bit of a problem here, and that the billiard falls are made out of ivory in this era. I don't think it was out of any sort of concern for the elephants involved, but he realized that if we lose these elephants, we lose our game. So he put out this $10,000 prize for somebody, somewhere, to come up with some sort of synthetic solution, a replacement for ivory. And this went out and plastics were invented because of this call to action by this billiards player. I think there was some question whether he actually paid out the $10,000. I think he might not have to the person who invented this. But this was a very, very early plastic that was not very easily mass producible. That came decades later. And then when you get up into the World War II era, the United States military is desperate for materials that they are not able to meet with natural means. So rubber for one of them. You don't have enough rubber trees, and this is still true to this day, to provide enough material for all the tires that you need. So the military went all in on plastics. And then after World War II, which was this sort of booming economy for everybody in the United States, that's when it started creeping little by little into our lives and production really, really ramped up. So it started with billiard balls. I didn't get the explosions part. It's very important. This very early form of plastic was highly explosive. So sometimes when they were playing billiards with these synthetic "ivory," quote unquote, balls, they would explode. Like it's a percussion.

Matt Simon  
You could have just dropped billiard balls from airplanes and left it at that. Yeah, so that's just the very weird story of how plastics crept into our lives, which was this bizarre story of good intentions, maybe not specifically looking out for elephants, but trying to be more sustainable, at least in the billiards industry. And it really set us on this path to absolute addiction to plastics in the wider society.

Rob Dietz  
Yeah, really amazing. I mean who knows. If it wasn't the billiard balls, there probably would have been something else that came along. But I love just the strange, the oddities of history that lead us down these paths. Amazing. Yeah, we actually did a whole season on watershed moments in history that have put us in this kind of overshoot predicament. This would have been a really good one for that season, but I wasn't aware of it till I read your book. I want to talk about, in a roundabout sort of way, systems thinking. We really prize systems thinking on this show, and I get from your book that you are a systems thinker. That's probably not surprising with how much you look into ecology and environmental issues. But something really struck me in your book that has a very systems flavor to it. And I'm going to read you back a quote of something that you wrote. You said, "like the invention of agriculture made our species dependent on crops to survive, and like the Industrial Revolution hooked civilization on fossil fuels, so too has plastic set humanity down an ostensibly prosperous path that belies the reality of environmental defilement. Without plastic, we'd have no modern medicine or gadgets or wire insulation to keep our homes from burning down. But with plastic, we've contaminated every corner of Earth and our own bodies, the consequences of which scientists are now desperate to understand." So I like how you've juxtaposed those three things and I was wondering if you can talk more about that comparison of plastics versus the founding of agriculture versus the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

Matt Simon  
Yeah, I mean agriculture, modern agriculture, is a sort of a miracle of technology and science in that we can feed 8 billion people with smaller amounts of land because we have synthetic fertilizers and machinery these sorts of things. But 10,000 years ago, somebody invented that. It wasn't a like one person decided, hey, we're doing agriculture. We're all agriculturalists now. We're all farmers, get used to it. There was just sort of this movement back and forth. People were hunting and gathering, maybe doing a little bit of farming. But then there was a sort of switch that flipped where these sorts of sedentary cultures settled down and then became fully dependent on agriculture. That set us on this path where we are now dependent on that food source that is not super great for us. Like we shouldn't be just eating bread products and drinking beer from from those grains, but it made us prosperous, right? You could store vast amounts of this grain for times of want, droughts and things like that, famines. But it made us very dependent on this sort of system, and we have been doing that for 10,000 years. There, of course, have still been people hunting and gathering, for sure. And they have their own problems, but we are now faced with a system of agriculture that is very vulnerable to climate change. We're stuck with this, right? We can, of course, now grow many, many more things than we used to, just with grains that fills out our diet to make it much more healthy. But I'm now in the book comparing what happened with plastic. So we invented plastic over a century ago to deal with billiard balls, and we have become fully dependent on this material as a modern society. We didn't want to, you and I as consumers, didn't ask for this. Modern medicine, of course, you need things made out of plastic to keep that going, IVs and things like that. But now we're at a point where we have to consider the extreme toxicity of plastic and all of its forms is probably not doing great things for human health in general because microplastics are getting into our bodies, but also because we're building our healthcare system around this material. So we're dependent so much on it, not just in packaging and medicine, but also like planes couldn't fly, right, if they were made out of metal. Cars would be much less fuel efficient if they weren't built so much out of plastic at least in the interiors. But this has set us on this path, like we did with agriculture, where we're now stuck with this material like we were stuck with agriculture as a system that allowed our population, of course, to grow to 8 billion people and put tremendous pressures on planet earth because of that population growth. So now we have to reckon with how do we get out of this plastic problem? How do we replace it, perhaps, with other materials knowing more and more about the, again, extreme toxicity of this material in all of its forms.

Rob Dietz  
Yeah. Well, we're going to get more into that towards the end of our interview because I'm really interested to find out. We know that there's a problem, right? We know that there's too much plastic and too much plastic pollution. And I don't think our listeners are going to need a lot of convincing of that, but I do want to get into that a little bit before we turn to yeah, how do we get out of this trap, this systemic trap that you just described? With the plastic pollution, I guess the piece of it that I want to hit is the exponential nature of it. I'm a fan of the late physicist Albert Bartlett, and he has this quote. He says, "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." And I think in a lot of ways, he's right. We don't understand when we get on the steep part of a curve and how that's going to keep going. And from my reading of your book, "A Poison Like No Other," humanity has gotten onto that steep part of the exponential curve when it comes to the invention, the production, the consumption, and the disposal of plastic. And you share all of these just jaw dropping hard to take statistics. You talk about how in 1950 the plastics industry produced 4.4 billion pounds of resins and synthetic fibers. That sounds like an awful lot. But by 2015, that had increased to 838 billion, from 4.4 to 838 billion. And we're talking billion with a B. And you know, you also wrote that microplastic concentrations have been doubling every 15 years, and more than half the plastic ever produced has come in the last two decades. So what's your take on the exponential rise of plastics and where we're going with that.

Matt Simon  
Yeah. This again, was something that really took off after World War II. You can plot the exponential increase in the production of plastic starting then, and it is extreme. Especially in the past couple of decades it has been going up basically vertically. You mentioned that we have increased production to basically a trillion pounds of this stuff a year. That's expected to triple in 2050 because the industry, by that, I mean the fossil fuel industry, because plastics are made out of fossil fuels, knows that we're going to be using less, hopefully, hopefully using less fossil fuels as fuels. They want us to use more fossil fuels as plastics. So given the opportunity, they're going to continue this extreme upward trend as much as they possibly can. At the same time, microplastics researchers can go out in the environment and plot the exponential increase of microplastic pollution in the environment over the same timeframe. So for example, there was a good study that came out a number of years ago that went through sediments off the coast of Southern California. Sediments are great because they come down to layers year after year after year. You can dig down into that and dig through it and see all the microplastics in there and count them up and see how that has changed over the years. They counted all of those microplastics, plotted it year by year on a graph, and the exponential increase in the amount of microplastics overlaps perfectly with the production of plastic in general. There was another study that did this with fishes in a museum collection in the Midwest from the Great Lakes that they had been collecting fish for decades. They got permission, of course, to dissect these fishes and pluck out all the microplastics they found. They found the same exponential perfectly mapped with the production of plastic, the same exponential proliferation of microplastic pollution in the environment. It is a very, very clear signal. That's the terrifying bit, is that if we let the industry keep doing this over the next couple of decades, that this is only going to get worse and worse. There's also like a shred of hope here, which is that we know that if you bring down the production of plastics generally, you get less microplastic in the environment. That is very clear now. So we know fully well how to stop microplastic pollution. It's just going to be a matter of the political will to rein these companies in because given the opportunity, they know this is where their profits are going to be in the decades to come.

Rob Dietz  
Yeah. Gosh, that's rough. It seems like for people that eat fish or like sushi, your best bet is to consume museum, you know, the ones that have been kept in a museum collection from years past, rather than to actually go out to the ocean.

Matt Simon  
Get one from like 1920 maybe and I think you'll be safe.

Rob Dietz  
I mean, this is the infuriating part, right? One insult or degradation that's related to plastic pollution seems worse than the next. I mean, your book is littered with these, you know, like micro plastics in the ocean. It's like, here it is. It's in the deepest part of the ocean. Our car tires shed little plastic bits everywhere. Sometimes I take my daughter out to play soccer and we're on a plastic field that's covered in tire bits. You know, there's plastic culture in agriculture. There's this place that you talk about called the Mar de Plastico that contains miles of plastic drenched greenhouses on the coast of Spain. You got plastic in baby formula. It's in the oceans, the land, the air, our bodies. What do you make of the ubiquity of this problem? How do you wrap your head around it and not just walk through the world going, well, there's plastic, there's plastic. Oh my God, plastic. Gahh.

Matt Simon  
Therapy helps. You know, I recommend that to those who are fortunate enough to afford it. Yeah. So you know, you're mentioning all these sources of plastic in the environment. There are so many that people just don't think of. That I fully didn't understand until I sat down and wrote this book. Car tires, you had mentioned, because they're no longer made out of pure rubber. They're made out of synthetic rubber. The little bits that come off the tire as they wear down are microplastics, and they flow into gutters and then out to the ocean. Ships in the ocean are painted with plastic based paints that chip off and enter the ocean that way. There was a study actually a number of years ago that went into seas around Europe and tallied up the amount of plastic from paint in those oceans and found that ships are leaving essentially skid marks of plastic as they're traveling along in the ocean. That's how much of this paint is chipping off. Think about all the bridges. I'm in San Francisco. We have the Golden Gate Bridge here that is famously painted constantly because so much of it is chipping off in our awful weather in San Francisco. Anyway, all this infrastructure is constantly releasing microplastics into the oceans, another one being cigarette butts. Cigarette butts are consistently the number one found piece of plastic trash on ocean beach cleanup walks. It's not bottles and bags, it's cigarette butts. Those are made out of synthetic fibers. Those are extremely toxic because they are not only made out of plastic, they are loaded with all the smoke chemicals that people suck through them as they're smoking. By the way, we should ban cigarette butts, these filters, they don't make smoking safer by any means, and they just contribute to a bunch of pollution in the environment. So putting all this together, that's half of it. But then thinking about the repercussions here. It's not just that the stuff is swirling through the ocean. It's not just that it's kind of tumbling around on land. It is fully atmospheric. So our atmosphere is absolutely loaded with microplastics and nanoplastics. We haven't spoken about nanoplastics yet. Nanoplastics are even smaller. They're smaller than a millionth of a meter, so almost imperceptibly small. This is a fundamental component of our atmosphere now, which means that microplastics and nanoplastics have gotten literally everywhere on the planet. You could be an uncontacted tribe in South America, and you're breathing microplastics because it's falling out of the sky. It's falling on the Arctic. There have been a number of studies that found that car tire particles are accumulating on Arctic sea ice where there are no cars. They're blowing up from Europe and falling on Antarctica. So that's the devastating part about this is that there's no place left on the planet that is untouched. Ask any microplastic scientist, is there anywhere that is pure from microplastics? And they will tell you no. Everywhere is corrupted, unfortunately.

Rob Dietz  
Yeah. It is really hard to, I don't know. It's hard to deal with that kind of information. You know it's similar in some ways to climate, right? It's like this problem that is caused by everyone everywhere, and it affects the entire planet, including the places who aren't responsible for it, right? I just want to also add, as if the cigarette industry tobacco needed another villainous turn, but there you go. I totally agree with you. I thought you were even going to say we should just ban cigarettes, which I'd be totally in favor of.

Matt Simon  
I mean, that would've been great, but yeah. 

Rob Dietz  
Well, while we're on the subject of villains, I found five candidates for the biggest villain when I was reading your book. You didn't really couch it that way, but I thought I would throw it at you and see what your thinking is on who's the biggest villain when it comes to plastic pollution. And the five candidates are the fossil fuel companies. Then you've got the Plastic Industry Association, American Chemistry Council and other sort of plastic industry organizations. Then there's the big retail companies that package and ship everything, like Amazon and Walmart. Then you have the manufacturers of things like tires or fast fashion or cigarettes. And then you've got the consumers who buy all of the plastic crap out there. So I don't know if you can choose one candidate, but maybe just talk about who you see winning this race or maybe the dynamics of those villains.

Matt Simon  
I think I'll actually flip it and say I can choose one that is definitely not the villain, and I hope I make this clear in the book. I think I do. It's not the consumer, it's not you and I. We never asked for this. Like we didn't ask for cucumbers in the supermarket to be wrapped in single use plastic. That's insane. Cucumbers have skins of their own, by the way. I'm not sure of the biology of cucumbers, but they're doing perfectly fine on their own. You and me as consumers never asked for this deluge of plastic. And consistently you will find in public polling that this is a bipartisan issue, like one of the very rare bipartisan issues. Something like 80% of Americans across the aisle agree that this is out of control and that we need to do something to rein in plastic pollution. So if it's not the consumer, if it's not you and me, that means that you and I are not responsible for cleaning up this mess. Like yeah, I try to tell people, do the best you can to get plastic out of your life because that's just less of this toxic material that you're exposed to. But there's only so much that you and I can do because of the ubiquity of this material. So the issue then becomes, it's the people producing this. It is first of all the corporations that drove this demand. So the only reason they switch from, say, glass bottles or aluminum cans to plastic is that it is first of all, cheaper, and it's lighter. So it increases their bottom line on shipping costs if it's lighte. So it was only ever a profitability thing for them. It was never really a safety thing. Like they'll say plastics makes food safer. Well no it doesn't because it's loading foods with all sorts of microplastics and the chemicals that leach out of the plastic itself into the food, especially if you're microwaving. By the way, do not ever under any circumstances microwave any kind of plastic. That is a surefire way to load your food with all sorts of nasty stuff. So we know the issue here. If we find that the amount of microplastic in the environment perfectly maps with the production of plastic, we know that if we bring down the production of plastic, we stop this pollution. We are fighting, of course, against corporations, both the companies like Coca Cola, Walmart, these sorts of things that are using plastic and want to keep using plastic because it increases their bottom lines, as well as the fossil fuel companies that are producing plastics. By the way, it's like fossil fuel companies have divisions that do plastics. Plastics, 99% of them, are still made out of fossil fuels. And even when you hear something like bio-based plastics, which is a whole other thing that is extremely problematic in its own right, they still have a bunch of chemicals that are petroleum based as well. So it's' the same crap. Yeah. So we know what we're up against. These are very large, powerful corporations, but we also have very good data to show that if we do bring down that production, we fix this problem at its core.

Rob Dietz  
Yeah. Well, I really appreciate that you de villainized the individual in this. You know, I look around my office right hee, and I'm holding a piece of plastic, this mouse in my hand. I've got, whatever. Everybody can do this, look around the room and see dozens of things made of plastic and how it's invaded your life. And at least I'm going to take what you said and stop being so self-loathing. And when I go shopping at the grocery store and come home with, who knows, by weight, you know, a quarter of what I bought is pieces of plastic. So I do, though, want to get into more, what the hell to do about all of this. And as I went through your book, I kind of categorized. My brain tends to do this. I sort of categorized things into three kinds of solutions. And I wanted to go through each one individually and maybe talk about the pros and cons, or, you know, some of the good things about them, but also some of the difficulties. And the first one, I lump under the category of mitigation of all this plastic that's flowing out into the world. So this is about reusing, recycling, or otherwise capturing the plastic and trying to dispose of it safely. So this is stuff like the tire collective, which is a company that can sort of almost like a magnet to plastic particles, suck up the tire bits before they're just left out on the street. You have things like filtration systems at wastewater treatment plants that can collect microfibers. You've got these trash wheel barges that sit out in harbors like in Baltimore and collect all the stuff that's, you know, kind of flowing out into the waterway. You even mentioned some kind of more ecologically based ones like rain gardens, you know, where you've got plantings, preferably with native plants that, you know, collect the water and tend to trap the plastics and fibers. So I wonder if you could talk about that mitigation as a strategy, and you know what's working with it and what is maybe problematic about it.

Matt Simon  
Yeah, so when plastic scientists and activists talk about fixing this problem, they want us to go as far upstream as possible. So the farthest upstream you could possibly get is, as I mentioned, reducing the production of plastic. That's the gold standard here. But there are also ways that you have mentioned here to capture those microplastics before they get out into the wider environment. So you mentioned the trash wheel. The trash wheel is one of my favorite pieces of technology of all time. I absolutely love it. It's so simple and adorable. It's in Baltimore Harbor. It is literally just a barge with great big googly eyes on it, which is super cute. It has a sort of boom that extends out into the river, and it sort of funnels the floating macro plastics, big stuff, the bottles and bags, into a conveyor belt, and it goes into the barge. Somebody comes, picks it up, and takes that trash away. Think of a bottle or a bag in the environment as pre-microplastic. It is going to break down over time. It's going to explode into smaller and smaller bits. It will never go away entirely. I mean, it'll disappear, but it will just be tiny, tiny bits of itself out in the ocean. So Mr. Trash wheel in Baltimore Harbor does a great job of catching that before that happens. That should be, honestly, that should be in every river around the world. Because this is a problem in so many rivers everywhere in Baltimore or otherwise. We also have things like you mentioned, rain gardens. I think maybe my second favorite piece of technology of all time. Super simple. It is a roadside piece of greenery that captures water coming off of that road, water that is loaded with the microplastics from fires. You grow plants there, you capture those microplastics, ou provide habitat for pollinators, you improve mental health of people in the neighborhood, you lower urban temperatures because that vegetation is sort of sweating to cool the surrounding air. Fantastic piece of technology. But while these are very powerful things, they are absolutely no substitute for what we must do at the very farthest upstream point, which is reducing that production. 

Rob Dietz  
Well, that's an excellent segue to the second category of solutions that you talk about in the book, and that is the systemic, or the upstream, as you're calling them, which is about quit making and then obviously consuming plastic. You've got things you could do like ban the product obsolescence, you know, and ban, you know, single use plastics. You can tax the hell out of it. I like, you mentioned a systems-based solution, which is better public transportation. You don't really think of that as a solution to the plastics problem. But you're very clear, as you've said just now, and in the book, you say that the farthest upstream we can go is to curtail the production and that's how we fix this crisis, full stop. That was when I really became a fan of you, by the way. I was like, Oh, thank God. Not another Ecomodernist who just is going to go with the technology and we can just keep consuming, growing, producing, and so I really appreciate that. But I wonder, yeah, can you talk about those farthest upstream and how we get there.

Matt Simon  
Yeah, I guess I spent over a decade at Wired and at that time realized that very rarely does one technology solve all the problems if you're not cutting off the problem at the source. Yeah, so I really think that this is going to be a number of things working in concert. It's not going to be the rain garden or the trash wheel, but as you have mentioned, the tire collective as well, that attaches to the back of your car tire. It collects like -- these are all little things that can work at once to reduce the amount of microplastic flowing into the ocean. But at the end of the day, if we are still producing this plastic and it's still inevitably escaping into the environment, then we still have a problem. This comes back to me harping on this not being a problem that you and I are responsible for cleaning up. The issue at the end of the day isn't that we aren't recycling more. I mean recycling, we could probably get into recycling.the industry always knew it was a false solution and it never worked, but they pushed it anyway which gave them the leeway to produce more plastic. So yeah, I'm a big proponent of lots of different things working at the same time, but never the onus being on the public. Recycling systems, I think, have a purpose to a certain degree, but they should be funded by the industry. We should be taxing them and using that money to fund recycling programs. But then again, we can't lean back on recycling because it's never going to be the thing that solves this problem. At the end of the day, we just had to stop producing as much of the stuff as we're doing now. It's just, it's crazy. And you had mentioned the political side of things as well. I think that there's a growing realization, again, with that bipartisan support for this sort of stuff, that this is only going to be fixed on a political level, which is the plastics review that you had mentioned, currently under negotiations. Are we going to get a cap, like an international cap, on production? Probably not. I'm hopeful, but the United States has pulled back its ambition. Even under Biden administration, they decided we don't really want that just because our entire government is captured by fossil fuel interest.

Rob Dietz  
Well, yeah, let me fill in the listeners on the state of what's going on there. Late in 2024, delegates from 170, or more than 170 countries got together in South Korea for this United Nations meeting with a goal of finalizing a global plastics treaty. It ended poorly, and they walked away empty handed. Talks failed over contentious issues about whether to impose caps on plastic production. And apparently the meeting was kind of invaded by fossil fuel marketing people, chemical lobbyists, petrostate delegates, and not great. Soon after we air this, there's going to be another meeting, August 5th to 14th in Geneva, Switzerland. And you know, yeah I don't know. Do you do you think, Matt, that there's any chance that we get to an internationally supported ban or at least, I can't say a ban on plastics, but at least a ramping down and better rules in that there's some kind of teeth to enforce something like that?

Matt Simon  
I mean, I really hope we do because the broad agreement among plastic scientists is this is the only way. The issue with national level bans on the production of plastic is that, okay, you ban it in the United States, which I mean given our fossil fuel interest would probably never happen. The industry just picks up and goes to another country and produces more plastic there. That's why we need this treaty to sort of mandate across the world that we just produce less plastic. I think even in the absence of that, there is a growing realization that this is a extremely toxic material, and politicians are seeing that their constituents are extremely worried about this. Again, like 80% of Americans think that we have a problem here. I think as terrifying as the microplastic and nanoplastic research is when it comes to the human health side of thing, that's actually going to help move the needle more so, I think, than like the couple years ago, there was that turtle that got a straw stuck up its nose and it became like this big riparian call for for banning straws, which is, I mean, good in certain ways in that it raises awareness as to the extent of the problem. But, you know, it's a drop in the bucket as far as plastics production is concerned. But when it comes to the human health side, when we're talking about especially young people being very vulnerable to the endocrine disrupting chemicals in plastics, of which there are many. I think, on a state level, like California, where I am, is trying to reduce single use plastics. Maybe that won't happen in every state, maybe it won't happen in every country, but I think there's going to be this sort of gallery momentum beyond the plastics treaty, which we absolutely need. But beyond that, on a state level, city level, maybe there will be more movement when it comes to the realization that this is just a very, very bad material that we don't want in circulation.

Rob Dietz  
Well, I think you're giving a really good runway into the third and maybe most important solution that you talk about in the book, and it's getting angry. You have this quote in there. You say, "Psychologists may question the healthiness of getting angry, but that's the most impactful thing that you can do right now." So yeah, I wonder if you can talk about that. Obviously, it's not just about going out and being mad all the time, but it's about channeling that into something useful.

Matt Simon  
Yeah. I mean, all along the plastics industry has pushed this material as something that's perfectly safe. Not only is it perfectly safe, it makes other things safe. Like plastic packaging makes food resistant to decay, that sort of thing. But all along, this was a very toxic thing to have, especially in contact with food. And for many decades now, the industry has been pushing recycling as a way to fix this problem, which is that you and I are responsible for this because we're not recycling enough. It's our fault. Well done poisoning the world with this material, even though we as consumers never asked for everything to be wrapped in plastic. So in the book I talk about how, you know, you as an individual might feel powerless, but there's a lot you could do in your own personal life to get rid as much plastic as possible. That's if you can afford it. That's a whole other side of this, which is the equity angle. It's oftentimes very expensive to get rid of plastic in your life. So Tupperware made out of glass is more expensive than Tupperware made out of plastic, these sorts of things. But if you do that, maybe your friends and family see that, that spreads to them, they take these preventative actions. But if you're getting angry and you're volunteering time with plastics groups that are, by the way, in the room negotiating this treaty along with the lobbyists from the plastics industry, that then amplifies the power of the individual. So while in the book I tried to make it very clear that I don't want people to feel responsible for this at all, there are ways that you can remove this material from real life, not fully by any means, because it's just so ubiquitous. But there are also ways you can amplify your voice to you know, lend it to these sorts of groups that are actually in the rooms, setting these sorts of policies.

Rob Dietz  
Yeah, I kind of want to finish with bit of an open-ended question for you, which is, you know, you've gone into this topic of plastic pollution in a very in-depth way. And it's been a couple of years since your book came out, and so you've had time to sit with it too and do these kinds of interviews like you're doing with me right now, and I'm wondering, you know, what's your biggest "Aha" or "Whoa," or takeaway or something that you you just want everybody to know from having had this experience.

Matt Simon  
It's the indoor air, unfortunately. I'm going to freak people out. I really don't mean to, but there's something that people should know. A few studies have shown that indoor air is probably six or seven times more polluted with microplastics and nanoplastics than outdoor air is just because of the ubiquity of these materials in our lives. So if you have carpeting, probably made out of plastic material. Hardwood floors, like vinyl, that's plastic. Even if it's luxury vinyl, it's still plastic. Like if you could afford your hardwood floors, good on you, but the rest of us have to stick with these synthetic materials. Everything around us is shedding these microplastics. The clothing that we wear, by one estimate, shed a billion microfibers made out of plastic from our clothes each year, per person, just by moving around. This has absolutely loaded indoor air with microplastics. So when people ask me, like, what, what can I do? For one, vacuum religiously, but also be careful how you dispose of that dust. You don't want it just like kicking you back up into the air. If you can afford to have like a HEPA filter, it would go a long way. But there's, unfortunately, when it comes to indoor air, there's only a certain amount that we can do other than, again, getting angry at these companies and forcing the shift away from this material into healthier materials. We unfortunately have no choice but to breathe it all the time. Like if you're in a restaurant surrounded by people, 100 people that are all wearing microfibers like this, there's no escaping this. So we first of all desperately need more studies into the human health side. But the early ones are indicating that this is a very bad thing for human health. But we also need more options for switching, like cheaper options to switch away from from plastic.

Rob Dietz  
Well, it also points to another solution that we love here in Crazy Town, which is get outside. Spend more time communing with nature, less time rolling around in your plastic. Well Matt, thank you so much. Matt Simon is the author of "A Poison Like No Other," and I also encourage everyone to catch up with your stories that you put out regularly on Grist. Thank you for the work that you do, for letting people know about what's going on and for offering different pathways. Really appreciate that. Really appreciate all the research thought, and thanks for joining us here in Crazy Town. 

Matt Simon  
Yeah, thank you for having me. 

Rob Dietz  
Alright. Take care, Matt.

Matt Simon  
You too.

Melody Allison  
That's our show. Thanks for listening. If you like what you heard, and you want others to consider these issues, then please share Crazy Town with your friends. Hit that share button in your podcast app, or just tell them face to face. Maybe you can start some much needed conversations and do some things together to get us out of Crazy Town. Thanks again for listening and sharing.