Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now, we'll observe Earth Day and, again, happy Earth Day, everybody, by inviting you to participate with us in an Earth Week experiment, and talking with former EPA official Judith Enck, who has devoted her post-government career to activism to reduce the amount of plastic we all consume and to point out its facts. Today, for example, she's testifying before the state legislature in Trenton to talk about some New Jersey initiatives. We'll get into those.

Another news hook to this. Last Thursday, on the New York side, the New York City Council passed a resolution calling on the state legislature to pass the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act. That bill aims to reduce plastic packaging by 50% over the course of 12 years. After those 12 years, all plastics and other recyclables must be made to be at least 70% recyclable. Some of the costs of that, as far as the bill puts it, would be offset by the companies that make plastic packaging themselves. I also see the New York State legislature is considering a ban on individually-wrapped cheese slices. How about that one?

Joining us now to break down these bills, why city council is challenging the state legislature to reduce the state's plastic consumption, and to help us introduce our own second Brian Lehrer Show Plastics Challenge, we did one five years ago with Judith Enck. We're going to get her take on how much has changed structurally in those five years, but we're going to do the same thing again in 2024 because not enough has changed. We'll explain. Judith Enck is founder of Beyond Plastics, an initiative that works on plastic pollution issues. She's also a professor at Bennington College and former EPA Region 2 administrator, meaning she ran the federal Environmental Protection Agency for the New York area. Judith, also Puerto Rico, which is also in Region 2, if I remember correctly, right?

Judith Enck: Oh, it's the best region in the country, Brian. Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands, New Jersey, New York, and eight Indian Nations in New York.

Brian Lehrer: There you go. Well, welcome back to WNYC.

Judith Enck: There's nowhere I'd rather be on Earth Day.

Brian Lehrer: Aw. You say to jump in somewhere that New York City has a solid waste problem and a big chunk of that is plastics. Can you give us the scope of the plastics issue in 2024?

Judith Enck: Well, it's a very serious problem and it's certainly linked to climate change because plastics are made from toxic chemicals and fossil fuels. I'm really pleased that both the New York City Council and Mayor Eric Adams and New York City Comptroller Brad Lander have all endorsed this important bill in Albany to reduce packaging. It's because waste is financially wasteful for New York City. New York City does not have an operating landfill and, thank goodness, not an operating incinerator.

New York City spends almost $500 million a year in tax dollars exporting waste to places like landfills in the beautiful Finger Lakes. New York City exports waste to a garbage incinerator in the Ironbound section of Newark, New Jersey, and environmental justice community. We need to do everything possible to reduce the amount of waste generated in New York City because not only is it very bad for the environment in our health, but it's also a waste of tax dollars. When I'm on the throughway going north, I almost always see a long-haul diesel truck packed with waste, making many hundred-mile trip to the Finger Lakes. That's not a good use of tax dollars.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. I see that this bill would also phase out some of the chemicals in packaging like PFAS. I'm going to ask you to describe that because I know more and more research is coming out about the dangers and the hidden presence of these very persistent chemicals that are showing up in people's bloodstream. It would phase out some of those chemicals and more than a dozen others. Can you tell us more about those and, in general, where plastics show up in the first place and why they're an issue?

Judith Enck: Well, about 16,000 chemical additives are used in various plastics. The bill pending in Albany by Assembly Member Deborah Glick and State Senator Pete Harckham would ban just 19 of the most toxic chemicals used in packaging. This includes food and beverage packaging, by the way. Currently, PFAS chemicals are used in packaging. Those are known as "forever chemicals" because they never degrade. They have been linked to a number of health problems ranging from testicular cancer, kidney cancer, thyroid disease, et cetera.

PFAS has been in the news a lot lately. It came on the scene actually when I was at the EPA. Hoosick Falls, New York, a small community in Upstate New York on the Vermont border, found high levels of PFAS in the drinking water. The Harckham-Glick bill would also prevent vinyl chloride PVC plastic from packaging the worst of the worst, heavy metals like lead, mercury, formaldehyde. I don't know about you, but I don't want any of those toxins in packaging. After the 19 are prohibited, then a process is set up for the state environmental agency to look at other chemicals that would be phased out in packaging.

Brian Lehrer: Can you give listeners a little bit of a consumer's guide to PFAS? Because some people know about this and already very vigilant when they go shopping. Others have a vague sense of threat but don't really know what to look for. When you talk about it being included in packaging in food and drinks, A, is there research that shows that this can really get from the packaging into the food, into our bloodstreams? Then, B, what are some of the most common examples of foods that are packaged that way?

Judith Enck: Sure, so PFAS is a large family of chemicals, the most commonly used are known as PFOA or PFAS. They basically are grease-resistant. That's how they're used in packaging. For instance, I no longer use microwavable popcorn because the inside of the bag has PFAS chemicals in it, which was very sad because I used to love microwaveable popcorn.

Here's the dilemma for careful shoppers. If you're a label reader, you can look up the sodium content of what you're buying, what are the various ingredients in the food and beverage, but there's no information on toxics in packaging. Nothing is going to say "PFAS." Nothing is going to say "lead." I don't want to go down the road of having to label everything that's in the packaging. I just want to spend our time getting the worst toxics out of packaging.

Brian Lehrer: Microwaveable popcorn is an interesting example because you actually heat it in the packaging. What about things where you don't, where you just pour it out or empty the contents, but the packaging is made with those plastics?

Judith Enck: Yes. Unfortunately, there is some leaching of the chemicals. With microplastics and nanoplastics, there is some shedding into the food and the chemicals can hitchhike onto the microplastics. Definitely never ever put anything plastic into the microwave. Heat and plastic do not belong together. There's also the problem. There was an important study at Columbia University in Rutgers a few months ago documenting large numbers of nanoplastics, really, really small pieces of plastic in a plastic water bottle.

People often will buy bottled water because they think it's safer than tap water, which is not the case. New York City has some of the cleanest drinking water in the world. Definitely a problem if you've got lead pipes. If you don't, you can drink New York City water with a high level of confidence. The researchers at Columbia have very sophisticated equipment in the lab. Microplastics are 5 millimeters or less, the size of a grain of salt. Nanoplastics are even smaller.

They looked at 1 liter of water and found thousands of nanoplastics in that bottled water. One theory is that when you turn the cap, little bits of nanoplastics fall into the beverage. The nanoplastics and the microplastics do get into our food. That means the chemicals can get into the food as well. I just want to add. Nothing tastes better in plastic. I've never heard anyone say, "Oh, this water, this beverage, this food, it tastes so good in plastic."

Brian Lehrer: When we see products packaged in plastic, including liquids like maybe water, soda, juice, whatever, and they say, "No--" I'm trying to remember what the particular plastic is.

Judith Enck: No BPA.

Brian Lehrer: That's it, BPA. No BPA. We should look past that and say, "Okay, no BPA," but it doesn't say one way or another about these thousands of other microplastics. Is that the takeaway here?

Judith Enck: Yes. As careful as a consumer as you are, it's virtually impossible to avoid plastics in all of the chemicals that go with plastics. That's why we are really pushing for systemic change. New Yorkers and people from other states can shop confidently and know that there are no PFAS chemicals in the packaging, that there's no lead or mercury in the packaging. There's only so much you can do as an individual to avoid plastics. There are some things you can do, but we need new laws and strong enforcement of those laws to protect our health and our environment.

Brian Lehrer: Judith Enck, founder of Beyond Plastics, an initiative that works on plastic pollution issues, with us here on Earth Day. We'll introduce our plastics challenge for Brian Lehrer Show listeners in just a second and take your calls on round one of your reporting on your own use of single-use plastics. By way of preview, we will have your report back on Friday after you monitor your use of single-use plastics over the course of this week. We'll have Judith help set that up in a minute.

Let me stay on the legislation, on the New York side, and we'll get to Trenton. On the New York side, one of the aims of the bill that you started out discussing is to put at least some of the onus of the packaging fee to be paid by companies. As far as you know, how will that assessment be made? Who's going to have to pay for what? Will a cereal brand have to pay a fee for the plastic liner in each box or produce companies have to pay for those individually-wrapped cucumbers or how might that work?

Judith Enck: Yes, you got it. Right now, you and I as taxpayers pay to get rid of all of this excess packaging. The Harckham-Glick bill includes something called an eco-modulated fee. If you have no packaging, so if you're just selling the cucumber without a plastic wrap, you don't pay a fee. If you're selling the cucumber with the plastic wrap and that is not recyclable, you will pay a higher fee.

No fee if you've eliminated the packaging or if it's refillable or reusable, modest fee if it's recyclable, high fee if you can't recycle it at all. Right now, these companies have no skin in the game. They sell us the product and then it's up to us as taxpayers to either burn or bury it at a landfill or incinerator or recycle it. We're shifting the economic responsibility, but we also know that fees alone do not drive change in the packaging world.

There's also a very specific requirement that plastic packaging be reduced gradually over the next 12 years, eventually getting to 50% reduction in packaging. We think this is going to prompt innovation in the packaging world. Companies like Amazon and others, they seem pretty innovative. They seem to be able to get you a package in record time. We want to make sure that the package is not adding to the environmental burden that it currently is.

Brian Lehrer: Honestly, Judith, I can't even believe we're still having the producer-pays discussion. For as long as I've been covering environmental issues, this has been one of the agenda items that just seems to make so much common sense but I guess has never been implemented in any kind of widespread way in public policy. For all kinds of things that we have to throw out, whether it's the packaging around items, it's largely about packaging around the items we buy and sometimes other things that because we pay for disposal.

The payment for that should not fall on the consumer, should not fall on the city or other local government that hires the sanitation workers. The burden for that should be paid for by the producers. Yes, that's going to increase the cost of things, but it 

means when you buy something that has a disposal cost that you're helping to pay for that. That's a more holistic way to price anything, but it just hasn't made it through legislatures, has it?

Judith Enck: No, and fiscal conservatives should like this approach. It makes sense because it's the producers that decide what products are packaged in. It's not an environmental regulator. It's Kraft Foods, it's McDonald's, it's Amazon, et cetera. What they've been doing for years is, quite frankly, lying to the public and saying, "Don't worry about all of this packaging. If it's plastic packaging, we can just recycle it," they say. There's only a 5% to 6% recycling rate in this country.

Plastics are fundamentally not recyclable, so we are finally seeing the truth come out and people recognizing that most plastics don't get recycled. A lot of it is exported to other countries that don't have the infrastructure to handle it. It's really, really important for producer responsibility, but they've gotten a free ride. They have a lot of lobbyists in Albany, so they are working ferociously to block this important bill. We only have until June 6th when the legislature adjourns to try to get it adopted in Albany.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting that you mentioned Kraft as an example because it reminds me of the other thing I wanted to ask you about regarding a bill in the New York State Legislature and a classic Kraft product, Kraft American cheese slices individually wrapped. Now, there's a bill that would ban individually-wrapped cheese slices per se. You familiar with that?

Judith Enck: Well, it's not a separate bill. It's Kraft going after this broader Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act. The first thing I want to say is, is it really cheese, those individually wrapped in plastic? It's a lot of oil as opposed to dairy product. I know we're making a little bit of progress when the New York Post starts publishing inaccurate information. They are focused this morning on the individually-wrapped cheese example.

I talked to them on Friday. I said it wasn't long ago that we could have sliced cheese that was not encased in plastic. If you really need that little separation between the sliced cheeses, you can use wax paper or some kind of paper product. They've latched onto the cheese example and it's just a teeny tiny part of this debate. It's entirely possible to have cheese that's not encased in plastic just like it's possible to buy lettuce that doesn't come in those plastic coffins. It wasn't long ago, you would just buy a head of lettuce.

Brian Lehrer: I didn't even know they still make individually-wrapped cheese food slices, but I guess they do. That just reflects my own eating habits. I know after you leave us in a few minutes, you're going to get ready to go testify in Trenton about a plastics-related bill. What's happening on the New Jersey side?

Judith Enck: Well, in Trenton, the chair of the Environmental Committee, Senator Bob Smith, who has a long and effective career on environmental protection, is starting to tackle the plastics issue. He's convening hearing this morning on plastics and health. I'm going to be talking about how microplastics have been found in air, in drinking water. Unfortunately, we now have peer-reviewed science documenting the presence of microplastics in human blood, lungs, breast milk, the human placenta, both the fetal side and the maternal side.

Last month, The New England Journal of Medicine published an article documenting the presence of microplastics in the human heart and specifically found that the microplastics were attached to plaque in your heart. It increased the incidence of heart attack, stroke, and premature death. Senator Smith wants to do a detailed discussion about plastics and health. We'll deal with those direct issues of plastics in our body. I'm also going to broaden the conversation to talk about plastics and climate change because climate change obviously is a health issue and plastic production is plan B for the fossil fuel industry.

Little mom-and-pop companies like ExxonMobil and Shell are building gigantic plastic production plants called "ethane cracker facilities," where they produce the little, tiny nurdles, they're called like little, tiny, tiny marbles of plastic to be sent all over the world. It's because the fossil fuel companies know that we're finally making a shift away from using so much fossil fuel for electricity generation and transportation. We're finally seeing more renewable energy projects or electric vehicles. They have shifted to plastic production as their growth area, which means more climate change.

Brian Lehrer: To wrap this up, we're going to ask you to introduce and help tell people how they can participate in the fifth anniversary Brian Lehrer Show Plastics Challenge. We first did this five years ago in 2019 with you Judith as you recall. I know you're going to come back on Friday at the end of this and help debrief it, but we really appreciate that you, with all your knowledge about plastics, have been a part of this.

As a reminder to listeners, here's what we're doing. It's an Earth Week challenge that we'll all try to participate in. I'm going to do it. I hope everybody listening right now will do it. It should be easy. It's just to notice and keep a little log of, even if it's just a mental log, the single-use plastics we encounter in one week. Really, just four days. One business week, Monday through Friday this week.

Listeners, you can keep a log in your head. You can keep a log by writing them down or even physically hold on to each piece of plastic as a souvenir. Maybe you'll take a photograph or two and submit them to us or somehow describe how the individual single-use plastics that you use in your life tend to pile up one by one without quite noticing it most of the time. Judith, tell people what they're likely to encounter if they start noticing the single-use plastics in their lives. What are the most common ones?

Judith Enck: Well, what I urge people to do is what you just said. Look at what you're using the most of. Don't get too fixated on the condiment, the ketchup bottle, unless you're using ketchup every day. Look at what's most prevalent in your consumer habits, reusable shopping bags. Look at your use of plastic utensils for takeout food. If you stop at a coffee shop every day, are you getting a single-use coffee cup or can you bring your own cup to the coffee shop?

If you're a parent or a grandparent, take a close look at the baby food aisle in the supermarket. It used to be little glass jars of baby food. Now, it is dominated by non-recyclable pouches of plastic. Ironically, often with organic food in it. I urge people. You're not going to be perfect. You can be the imperfect environmentalist. You can look at what you're using the most. Are there reusable, refillable alternatives?

There are some soap products, for instance, that are important. I never ever, ever buy plastic pods for the dishwasher or the washing machine because those pods, you feel it in your hand, and you're like, "Oh, is this a little plastic skin on the soap?" It is and it contains polyvinyl alcohol polymer, PVA, plastic. In fact, there's a bill in the New York City Council by Council Member Gennaro to prohibit that plastic pod covering, so definitely--

Brian Lehrer: Does that wind up on your dishes, on your sparkling clean dishes?

Judith Enck: Well, yes, possibly. Also, it goes down the drain. You've got microplastics going into the sewer system. Even if you're using an eco-friendly product, if it's the plastic pod, it's a problem. My guess is people are using a lot of pods because we all have to do laundry and wash our dishes. I just use powder with no plastic covering at all. Take a look at what you're mostly using.

Particularly, I didn't give you a lot of examples here, but your food and your beverages. For goodness sakes, never ever put any plastic packaging into the microwave, which if you go to the frozen food section of the supermarket, there's lots of food that's frozen. They recommend that you put it in the microwave to be served. Remember when we used to do that and you tasted the plastic and the food? That's a telltale sign that it's a problem.

Brian Lehrer: Just before you go, last question before we open up the phones for the pretest part one of people's reporting on single-use plastics in their lives, have we made progress at a policy level or just a consumer behavior level over the last five years since you and I first did this together in 2019?

Judith Enck: Yes, we have made progress, but not enough. New York City has adopted something called Skip the Stuff. When you order takeout food, you're not automatically given all of the utensils and condiments and straws. New York State, following the lead of New York City, has banned polystyrene foam packaging for restaurant food. We do have a plastic-bag ban in effect in New York and New Jersey, although I will say that the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and the Attorney General's Office need to do a much better job enforcing it in New York City. If we can pass the Glick-Harckham bill in Albany this year, that will be the most comprehensive plastic packaging reduction law in the country. All eyes are in Albany for the next six weeks.

Brian Lehrer: Judith Enck, thank you for joining us from our other local state capital, Trenton. Judith Enck is founder of Beyond Plastics, an initiative that works on plastic pollution issues. She's also a professor at Bennington College and the former EPA Region 2 administrator, which covers New York and other places as we said at the

beginning of the segment. Thanks so much for coming on and helping us launch our 2024 Brian Lehrer Show Plastics Challenge. We'll talk to you again to debrief on Friday.

Judith Enck: Sounds great. Thanks for doing this.

Brian Lehrer: Judith Enck on both the New York and New Jersey sides with her work today as you've been hearing. Now, listeners, we invite you to call in and help launch our fifth-anniversary Earth Week experiment, our Brian Lehrer Show Plastics Challenge. A lot of people are already calling in, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. We'll take a few minutes of calls today just to get some examples on the table and then we'll do a longer call-in segment when Judith comes back on Friday.

You get the idea that we laid out that the challenge itself is just to notice how many times you encounter single-use plastics between now and Friday and which one do you think would be the easiest or hardest to avoid. Judith gave some common examples. We'll take a few calls right now from those of you already paying attention to this. Call in and just name one or a few of the single-use plastics that you either can't avoid or successfully avoid in your life already and anything you have changed personally at any time or have trouble changing. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Megan in Williamsburg, you're on WNYC. Hello, Megan. What you got?

Megan: I obviously, like everyone else, noticed for every trip to the grocery store, I was bringing everything home in plastic, whether it's vegetables, even broccoli, sometimes wrapped in plastic, tofu, my grains, you can get rice in plastic. Everything's in a ton of packaging. Maison Jar in Greenpoint is a refillery where you just bring back-- It's a grocer and refillery. You bring back your jars, whether it's your shampoo, your unused or used shampoo bottle. You can go and you can just refill everything from toothpaste to grains to beans. It's been really amazing and better for the environment.

Brian Lehrer: A problem where you encounter in and a good Brooklyn tip. Megan, thank you very much. Jeanette in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Jeanette.

Jeanette: Hi. Brian, I notice every day, the plastics from vitamins and prescriptions. I recently bought from Procter & Gamble, Align Probiotics. It was in a large box. Number one, I open up the box. The box only had the container, which was half the size of the box. Open up the 28 capsules, which was only filled halfway. Every prescription I get from CVS or Duane Reade has these huge bottles.

I had four pills in this huge bottle. What do you do with the plastic bottle afterwards? You throw it away. CVS or Duane Reade, whatever anybody gets their prescription from should have some sort of recycling, I think. The same thing with Procter & Gamble and all these other companies making vitamins and only filling the bottle halfway full. That's ridiculous. Something has to be done about that.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, those are really good examples. Do look on the bottom of those for the recycling insignias with the recycling numbers. Some of them are recyclable. At least there's that, even though Judith was talking about the limits of recycling and

what it actually accomplishes with respect to plastics, but do check for those. That's a good idea about the stores taking them back. I know some electronic stores, Staples, others will take back electronics for recycling when you're done with them. Maybe that should be part of the legislative push too to make pharmacies take back those bottles that you were discussing. Thank you for that. Adam in North Bergen, you're on WNYC. Adam, can you hear me?

Adam: Hi.

Brian Lehrer: Hi.

Adam: Yes, I can. I just wanted to ask the professor. My family has a supermarket here and we used to use plastic bags. Now, we use those cloth bags. I was wondering if there has to be changes more on the national level where big institutions stop using plastics or do you think there would be any effects really on a consumer level? We sent $20 billion to Israel to commit a genocide and we're not doing anything about plastic. There should be legislation on that.

Brian Lehrer: Adam, thank you very much. Managed to get a Gaza reference in there, I think. Whatever side people are on of that or what words they choose to use or not use, we acknowledge. National legislation, tough to get on something like that. Judith and I were talking off the air about the plastic-bag bans and what's replacing them. She said her impression is that, yes, a lot of people really are bringing our own cloth bags and other bags to go shopping with now. We were discussing how a lot of places will still sell very cheap.

One of my local supermarkets, I noticed they'll sell little bags that look like they're cloth, but they're really plastic at checkout for 25¢. For a lot of people who don't bring their own bags and think, "Oh, a quarter, what's the big deal? If I know I can do this, maybe I'll just spend the quarter each time." I thought those particular bags at this particular supermarket were very thin cloth and said, "No, those are plastic too." Just a little anecdote on that. How about Rob in Randolph? You're on WNYC. Hi, Rob.

Rob: Good morning, Brian. I'm sitting here in my car with my single-use Dunkin Donuts coffee cup and plastic straw and listening to the program. One thing that Professor Enck said that really threw a chill through me was not using plastic inside the microwave. I buy these green beans that come in a heat-in bag. I'm wondering how bad that really is and how much damage I'm doing to my health and the health of my family.

Brian Lehrer: I don't want to pretend to be more of a science expert than I am. Judith had to go for her testimony in Trenton, but she raised the category. She raised the alarm on that category. I think, Rob, you should just look into it more. Start googling it and see about those kinds of vegetables that are steam-in-the-bag vegetables, very common these days, and see what science so far has to say about the microplastics in those and how much they can get into your food. A good thing for everybody to do under these circumstances and with more science on that kind of thing coming out. One more. Jack in Astoria, you're on WNYC. Hi, Jack.

Brian Lehrer: Good suggestion. Jack, thank you very much. All right. Listeners, there's a little sampling. Now, we invite you to notice all this week from now until Friday show, the single-use plastics that you encounter in your life. Just from that little sampling of phone callers, we had people who've been noticing this for a long time and are super conscious of it. We had a few who just, as we heard in our second-to-last caller, for example, on the microwaveable coffee and vegetables.

Never thought about it quite like this before. Judith Enck put some maybe fear in them or at least a little more consciousness. Take that consciousness, folks. Notice your single plastics use between now and Friday. Judith is going to come back on Friday's show and take your calls on what you have noticed that you may not have realized before the fifth anniversary because we did it in 2019, Brian Lehrer Show Plastics Challenge, so go forth and log your plastics.

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