Episode Details

Two garbage trucks of plastic hit the ocean every minute. Microplastics are in your brain. Recycling doesn’t work. What the plastic industry never told you.

In this WhoWhatWhy podcast, former EPA Regional Administrator Judith Enck pulls back the curtain on an industry built on deception. Her new book, The Problem with Plastic, connects dots most people miss — between fracking booms and plastic floods, between what you’re told to recycle and what actually happens, between industry promises and courtroom battles that reveal decades of lies.

You think you know about plastic pollution. You’ve heard about ocean gyres, you recycle diligently, maybe you switched to a reusable water bottle. But here’s what they haven’t told you: Two garbage trucks worth of plastic enter the ocean every minute. Recycling? It’s a lie — only 5-6 percent of plastic actually gets recycled, and the industry has known this since the 1970s.

Chemical recycling, the new salvation, doesn’t work. And those microplastics aren’t just in fish anymore — they’re in your brain, your heart arteries, your kidneys, with no known way to get them out.