There Is No Away

We throw something into the trash, the truck takes it away, and it disappears from our lives. But there is no place called “away.”

In this episode of The Plastic Age, Dr. Elie follows plastic beyond the trash can, from landfills and recycling systems to rivers, oceans, agricultural soils, marine ecosystems, and eventually the food we eat. Along the way, we examine the startling reality of how little plastic is actually recycled, the enormous accumulation of plastic waste across the planet, and emerging research showing that microscopic plastic particles can interact with soil organisms and even enter food crops.

What begins as a story about waste ultimately becomes something far more personal. Because the environment is not separate from us. It is our air, our water, our soil, and our food.

There was never an away. There was only a journey, and eventually, that journey led back to us.

Transcript

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Welcome to Beyond Plastic, where science meets consciousness. I'm your host, Dr. Ellie, and here we explore the ideas that shape our health, our lives, and ultimately our humanity. Our first series, The Plastic Age, is a journey through the remarkable story of how plastic transformed our world, entered our bodies, and became one of the defining challenges of our time. In our last episode, we explored the material itself. We learned how chemists created synthetic polymers with properties nature had never assembled in quite the same way, and how those extraordinary properties, like durability, flexibility, lightness, resistance to water and decay, help plastic transform medicine, technology, transportation, food preservation, and nearly every aspect of modern life. But we ended with a contradiction that sits at the very heart of the plastic age. We created materials capable of surviving for decades, sometimes far longer, and then began using enormous quantities of them to make objects designed to serve us for mere minutes. Today I want to find out what happens next. Imagine something almost painfully ordinary. You buy a bottle of water, for example, you drink it over the course of 20 or 30 minutes, perhaps an hour, and when the bottle is empty, you drop it into a trash can. The next morning a truck arrives, the bag disappears from the curb, the kitchen is clean again, and as far as your daily life is concerned, the bottle is gone. Modern civilization has made this process so efficient that it has created one of the most powerful illusions of the industrial age. The idea that there is a place called away. According to the OECD's Global Plastics Outlook, humanity used approximately 460 million metric tons of plastic in 2019. That's tons, not pounds, and generated roughly 353 million metric tons of plastic waste. Almost two-thirds of that waste came from products with lifespans shorter than five years, especially packaging, consumer products and textiles. But here is the number that should stop us. Of those 353 million tons of plastic waste, only 33 million tons, which represents about 9%, were ultimately recycled. About 19% was incinerated, almost half went into sanitary landfills, and the remaining 22% was disposed of in uncontrolled dumpsters and dump sites, burned in open pits or otherwise just mismanaged. And you may notice something else, something curious about those numbers. If humanity used 460 million tons of plastic but generated 350 million tons of plastic waste in that one year, where did the rest go? Well, it didn't go anywhere. Much of it is simply hadn't come, hadn't become waste yet. It was still inside buildings, inside vehicles, appliances, electronics, pipes, flooring, insulation, and infrastructure. Some plastic products are discarded within minutes, and others remain in service for decades. Economists call this material in-use stock. But I think there is another way of understanding it. It is tomorrow's waste. The plastic has already been manufactured, its eventual disposal has simply been postponed. And that makes the recycling number even more important because for decades many of us have been taught to imagine plastic as part of a circular system. We see the familiar triangular symbol on the bottom of a container and assume, or we are reassured, that if we place it into the correct bin, the material will somehow make its way back around the circle. But a recycling symbol does not mean that an object will actually be recycled. Plastic recycling is enormously complicated. Different polymers must be identified and separated. Food residue and other contamination can make material unusable. Pigments, adhesives, and chemical additives interfere with the processing. Many packages combine layers of different materials that were never designed to be economically separated. And unlike metals or glass, many plastics lose quality when they are mechanically recycled. The OECD found that 55 million tons of plastic waste were collected for recycling in 2019. Yet 22 million tons of that collected material ultimately became recycling residue that still required disposal. What successfully emerged from the other end of that process of recycling was those 33 million tons, 55 minus 22, which is 9% of the total production. This isn't merely a failure of individual consumers to sort their garbage correctly, it is evidence of something much larger. We built an economy capable of manufacturing plastic on an extraordinary scale without building an equally effective system for dealing with what remained after we were finished with it. And this problem has been accumulating for generations. In one of the most important attempts to reconstruct the history of plastic, researchers, Roland Geyer and Jenna Jambek and Kara Lavender estimated that by 2015 humanity had produced approximately 8.3 billion metric tons of virgin plastic. About 6.3 billion tons had already become waste. Of that accumulated waste, only about 9% had been recycled and 12% incinerated. The remaining 79% of that 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic had accumulated in landfills or the natural environment. So when we ask where plastic goes, the first answer is actually not the ocean, it is our land. That distinction matters because the ocean has understandably become the public face of plastic pollution. We have all seen the photographs, the bottles washing onto the beaches, we've seen the turtles entangled in fishing lines, seabirds with stomachs filled with plastic. But beneath our feet, another enormous experiment has been unfolding far more quietly. Landfills, uncontrolled dumps, sewage sludge, agricultural films, synthetic textile fibers, tire wear, road markings, litter, and atmospheric fallout are steadily transferring plastic into terrestrial environments. A landfill may look like the end of the journey just because the waste has been buried and removed from our site, but burial does not transform plastic back into nature. It simply changes its address, its zip code. Over time, heat, pressure, water, oxidation, and physical abrasion continue to act upon these materials. Larger objects crack and fragment. Chemical additives can migrate and smaller particles can enter soil, sediments, and water. And once plastic escapes controlled waste systems, its journey becomes even less predictable. A wrapper, for example, dropped onto a street, may be carried by wind into a storm drain. Rain moves it into a canal and the canal into a river, the river towards the sea. For years, scientists assumed that a relatively small number of enormous rivers were responsible for most of the plastic entering the world's oceans. However, more detailed modeling published in Science Advances revealed something much more complex. More than 1,000 rivers may collectively account for roughly 80% of global riverine plastic emissions into the ocean, many of them smaller urban rivers close to densely populated coastlines. And once plastic reaches the ocean, human borders become meaningless. The currents carry it across nations. Waves and sunlight, they weather it, sand abrades it, and organisms grow across its surface. Some pieces remain buoyant while others change density and sink through the water column toward the seafloor. Larger objects fragment into smaller ones, and those fragments continue their journey through an ecosystem that was never designed to receive them. Some are eventually drawn into enormous rotating ocean currents known as gyres. Between California and Hawaii lies perhaps the most famous example of a gyre, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The name can be misleading. It is not a floating island of trash that you could stand upon. It is something much more unsettling. It is a vast region of ocean where currents concentrate enormous quantities of plastic debris across the water. It's a plastic soup estimated to be twice the size of the state of Texas, and that's just one of them. In 2018, researchers combined ship surveys, surface trolls, and aircraft observations to estimate its scale. The region covered approximately 1.6 million square kilometers and contained an estimated 79,000 metric tons of plastic. Within it, researchers estimated approximately 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic. A trillion is one of those numbers the human mind struggles to comprehend. I certainly do. So consider this. 1.3 or 1.8 trillion pieces would amount to well over 200 pieces of plastic for every human being alive on earth today, concentrated in one region of one ocean. And yet, even the Great Pacific Garbage Patch represents only part of the marine story, because much of the plastic entering the ocean does not remain floating at the surface where we can see it. Some sinks, some washes back onto shore, some fragments, some is eaten. A landmark study led by Jenna Jambek estimated that between 4.8 and 12.7 million metric tons of land-generated plastic waste entered the ocean in one year, 2010, that one year alone. More recent assessments suggest that millions of tons continue entering aquatic ecosystems every single year. But numbers alone cannot tell us what that means to a living ocean. For an animal, plastic does not arrive with a warning label, right? It can resemble food or shelter, even vegetation, or even a prey. So a sea turtle does not understand the chemical distinction between a floating translucent bag and the jellyfish it evolved to eat. Likewise, a seabird does not know that the brightly colored fragment floating on the surface contains no nutrition. Fish, shellfish, and zooplankton encounter particles whose size increasingly overlaps with the organisms and organic material they normally consume. Sometimes the damage is brutally physical. Plastic can obstruct a gastrointestinal tract. It can create a false sensation of fullness, injuring internal tissues or reducing the amount of free food an animal consumes. Discarded nets, ropes, and fishing lines can entangle marine mammals, turtles, birds, restricting movement, interfering with feeding or slowly cutting into growing tissue. Researchers studying sea turtles found a relationship between the amount of plastic ingested and the probability of death. In one analysis of hundreds of stranded necropsy turtles, the researchers estimated that ingestion of approximately fourteen pieces of plastic corresponded to a fifty percent probability of mortality. Not fourteen pounds of plastic, fourteen pieces. And that's fifty-five zero percent probability of mortality. And the damage is not confined to animals that accidentally swallow something recognizable as garbage. Consider coral. A coral reef may look almost geological, like an underwater landscape carved from stone, but it is alive. Corals are colonies of animals living in extraordinarily delicate partnership with microorganisms, and entire marine ecosystems depend upon the architecture they create. In a major published study in science, researchers examined more than 124,000 reef-building corals across the Asia-Pacific region. When corals were not in contact with plastic debris, signs of disease were found only in 4% of them. However, when plastic was present, disease prevalence rose from 4% to 89%. The plastic can scrape delicate coral tissue, reduce light, it can create surfaces where microorganisms colonize. Experimental research has also shown that microplastic exposure can interfere with coral feeding, increase mucus production, it can even alter gene expression and disturb the microbial communities upon which coral health depends. Plastic pollution, in other words, does not simply make nature uglier. It can change how ecosystems function. And nowhere may the realization be more important than the ecosystem beneath our own feet. Soil. We tend to think of soil as dirt, an inert substance that plants happen to grow in. But healthy soil is one of the most complex living systems on earth. A handful can contain billions of microorganisms along with fungi, microscopic animals, organic matter, minerals, air and water, all interacting with an intricate physical architecture. That architecture determines how water is retained, how oxygen penetrates, how nutrients circulate, and how roots develop and how carbon moves between the atmosphere and the earth. And modern agriculture has been steadily introducing plastic into that system. Greenhouse films, irrigation tubing, seedling trays, protective coverings, and enormous sheets of plastic mulch are now common features of agriculture around the world. A 2023 analysis estimated that agriculture uses approximately twelve and a half million metric tons of plastic products every single year. Some are recovered, others tear, they weather, they fragment directly in the fields where our food is grown. There is another pathway that most of us never see. Wastewater treatment plants capture enormous quantities of fibers and particles that wash down our drains from synthetic clothing, household products, and countless other sources. Much of that material becomes concentrated in sewage sludge. When treated sludge or biosolids is subsequently applied to agricultural land as fertilizer, some of those captured plastics can be transferred directly back into soil. And once they arrive, they do not necessarily just sit there harmlessly. Experiments have found that microplastics can alter soil aggregation, porosity, and water dynamics. They can influence microbial communities, enzyme activity, and nutrient cycling. The magnitude and even the direction of these effects depend on the polymer, the particle size, its shape and concentration, which is why the science requires some caution. But one of the most revealing ways to understand what may be happening is to look at an animal almost nobody thinks about. The earthworm. Charles Darwin spent decades studying earthworms because he understood something most of us overlook. Earthworms are engineers of the soil. As they burrow, eat, and excrete, they mix organic material, create channels for water and oxygen, and help maintain the structure upon which plants depend. If you disrupt the earthworm, you are potentially disrupting the machinery of the soil itself. A growing body of lab research now shows that microscopic exposure can affect earthworm physiology, which affects varying bipolymer and concentration. Studies have documented oxidative stress, metabolic disturbances, tissue injury, and impaired reproduction under some exposure conditions. Recent meta-analysis found overall reductions in earthworm survival and growth and alterations in oxidative stress biomarkers and gut microbial diversity. This does not mean that every plastic fragment in a field is killing earthworms, and it would be scientifically irresponsible to suggest that it does. It means something subtler and perhaps more important. The plastic is participating in the biology of the soil. It is no longer simply garbage sitting on top of the earth. And then scientists began asking a question that moved this story into an entirely new territory. If microplastic plastic particles are accumulating in agricultural soils, what happens when they encounter the roots of the plants we eat? For many years, plant roots were assumed to provide an effective barrier. Water and dissolved nutrients could cross into the root, but solid synthetic particles were expected largely to remain outside. Then the researchers began looking more closely, and in 2020, scientists publishing in Nature Sustainability exposed wheat and lettuce to submicrometer and micrometer sized plastic particles. They demonstrated that sufficiently small particles could enter through microscopic openings associated with the emergence of lateral roots, penetrate into the central vascular tissue, and subsequently move upward from the roots toward the shoots. The mechanism was particularly fascinating because the particles appear to exploit one of the plant's own essential biological processes. As water evaporates from leaves, it creates a transpirational pull that helps draw water upward from the roots. The plastic particles could now be carried along with it. Two years later, investigators publishing in Nature Nanotechnology developed a more sophisticated tracing technique to quantify the uptake of 200 nanometer polystyrene particles in wheat and lettuce. Once again, the particles did not simply remain outside the plant, they entered and they moved through living tissue. We need to be careful here because detecting and measuring extremely small plastic particles in real-world foods remains technically difficult. And some early studies reporting specific concentrations in fruits and vegetables have methodological limitations. But the fundamental biological question is becoming much harder to dismiss. Can sufficiently small synthetic plastic particles cross the boundary between contaminated soil and a food crop? Under experimental condition? The answer is yes. And that changes the meaning of environmental pollution. Follow the journey we began with. A bottle is manufactured from carbon that may have spent millions of years beneath the earth. We use that bottle for perhaps 20 minutes and throw it away. A truck carries it somewhere we never see, perhaps it is buried, perhaps it is burned, perhaps it escapes into a river and reaches the ocean. Perhaps another piece of plastic becomes embedded in agricultural soil. With sunlight, heat, friction, waves, and time, those elements begin breaking these materials into smaller pieces. Those pieces interact with plankton, fish, coral, microorganisms, earthworms, and plant roots. And gradually the line between the environment and us begins to disappear. Because the environment is not somewhere else. It is the water that becomes our blood. It is the air that enters our lungs thousands of times every day. It is the soil that grows our food. It is the ocean from which we eat. The human body is not separate from nature. Every atom within us was borrowed from the world around us. And so perhaps it should not have surprised us that when scientists finally began looking carefully enough, they started finding evidence that the material we had scattered across the planet was completing the journey back to its creator. Plastic particles were reported in drinking water and food. They were detected in indoor and outdoor air and household dust. Then researchers began looking inside human beings. They found microplastics in stool, then lung tissue, then blood. And eventually came discoveries that would have sounded almost unimaginable when the first synthetic plastics were created little more than a century ago. Plastic particles reported in human reproductive tissues, in the placenta, and other biological compartments intimately connected with the beginning of life. At some point during that journey, the plastic age crossed an invisible threshold. This was no longer simply a story about litter. It was no longer only about turtles, coral reefs, landfills, polluted rivers, oceans, or distant patches of debris floating across the Pacific? An environmental contaminant had become a human exposure. And now the questions become much more personal. How is plastic getting inside us? How much of it are we breathing? How much are we eating and drinking? What happens when we heat food and plastic? Drink from plastic bottles? What happened when we wear synthetic clothing or live surrounded by plastic-filled household dust? Which particles can cross the intestine or the lungs? Can the smallest particles enter the brain? And once they do, can they enter other organs? Where can they travel? Those are the questions we will begin investigating in our next episode. Because after spending more than a century transforming the planet with plastic, we are discovering something extraordinary and deeply unsettling. There was never a way, there was only a journey, and eventually that journey led plastic right back to us. If this episode changed the way you see the world, please share with someone you care about. Awareness is where transformation begins. Until next time, thank you for listening.