Episode Details

What are microplastics doing to us? And how do we stop putting them into our water, and our bloodstreams, and our food?

That's today's big question, and my guest is Julia Yan. Julia is the co-founder and CEO at Baleena, a closed-loop, consumer-facing laundry startup working to tackle ocean microplastic pollution.

Julia is a recent graduate at UPenn, and with her two co-founders, some funding, including from our friends at 776 and a bunch of big name partners, they're trying to tackle one of the biggest microplastic inputs. Your washing machine.

Microplastics are not great. They're so prevalent that we have found them on the bottom of the ocean and on the top of mountains. We have found them in deserts, in our crops, in our soil. We have found them in adult bloodstreams and in unborn babies and placentas.

It is an enormous, wildly complicated problem and the implications are becoming more clear. The good news, like carbon emissions, we can choose to stop it.

It's just going to take an intentional systemic approach and people like Julia.

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INI Book Club:

• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

• Find all of our guest recommendations at the INI Book Club: https://bookshop.org/lists/important-not-important-book-club

Links:

• Join the waitlist to pre-order your Baleena product now

• Follow along with Baleena's journey on Instagram

• Read more about the 5 Gyres Microplastics Solutions sailing expedition

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• Edited by Anthony Luciani

• Produced by Willow Beck

• Intro/outro by Tim Blane: timblane.com

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