Plastic Recycling Doesn’t Work and Will Never Work | Judith Enck

Judith Enck (0:00)

Yeah, it's really serious, you know, it's all the plastic in the world today will outlive you and I. We want to be honest with people, but we also need to give people hope. And the way I give people hope is by giving them things to do that make a difference.

Michael Gervais (0:18)

Thanks for.

Watching. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, and I'm excited to welcome Judith Enck. As our guest on this week's episode, she was appointed by President Obama as a Regional Administrator. Welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast.

As our guest on this week's episode, she was appointed by President Obama as a regional administrator of the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency. She's held several other top influential positions in state and federal government, where she advised on environmental policy. So now, Judith is the founder and the president of Beyond Plastics, which I want to encourage you to check out beyondplastics.org, which is an organization based out of Bennington College that is on a mission to end plastic pollution through education advocacy and institutional change. Judith, thanks for being here.

Judith Enck (1:12)

I am thrilled to be here. Thank you, Michael. Thanks for having me.

Michael Gervais (1:15)

I'm really excited for this conversation.

Your name came across our desk when we read an article about plastic recycling in the Atlantic earlier in the year. And I was fascinated, meat horrified by what you shared and how you shared the information surrounding recycle, recycling and the impact on the environment. And so that's obviously why I wanted to have you on. That being said, I can't think of a more important conversation to have about where we are right now. So I'm wondering if you could maybe start us off with like the state of the union for plastics in our planet.

Judith Enck (1:55)

Yeah, Michael, it's pretty grim. Americans and people worldwide care about the environment.

They are particularly concerned about the proliferation of plastic pollution, which is a greater threat in the global South because the United States and the EU export a lot of plastic to other countries that cannot be managed in our own countries, which I think is extraordinarily problematic. So there's this disconnect between what the public wants and then what's actually happening in commerce and in the world of politics. And the reason why I've spent the last 40 years working on environmental protection issues is I'm a big believer in do what you can where you are with what you have. So I am someone, just one person who cares about the environment in the United States. I'm not an international expert, but I certainly understand the implications internationally. But we've got a fundamental problem in the United States. The US is 4% of the world's population, but we use 17% of the world's energy. We gobble up 24% of the world's natural resources.

And then not surprisingly, we create 12% of the world's waste. This is not sustainable. And I think the plastic pollution problem illustrates the lack of sustainability more than almost anything.

Michael Gervais (3:39)

So when you think about a way through, I'm thinking about Leonard Cohen right now, one of the great singer songwriter poets that says, in everything, there's a crack. And it's in that crack where the light comes through. So it's dark. It's like not good. Where do you see the light? Because I'll share with you, like, this matters to me. I grew up in the ocean surfing.

I feel connected in that way to Mother Nature. And I get overwhelmed.

Like, I hear these stats, and I get overwhelmed. I'm like, OK, so in our family, we recycle. Our company here at Finding Mastery, we have had support from a company called Kalima, where we are carbon neutral. And so we're making small contributions. But then I get overwhelmed.

Like, the big companies that are like, I don't know, doing their thing and kind of being sloppy with the way that they take care of our resources is crazy making to me. And so where's the light? Where's the crack that we can find somewhere else?

Judith Enck (4:44)

Well, you're right, it's pretty grim. And by the end of the day, after spending the day looking at the connection between plastics and climate change, plastics and the ocean, plastics and environmental justice and in health, it can get overwhelming. So I will say at the end of my workday, I do kind of crawl to the finish line, but I wake up every morning actually excited and hopeful about change. And that's because I think we have the public on our side. People know something's off and they want to do something about it. And while I have met many climate change deniers, I've never met a plastic pollution denier because the evidence is everywhere. You go to a park, you see a plastic bag in the tree, you walk down a city street, you see people tossing cigarette butts all over the place. And those cigarette butts have little bits of plastic in them.