E106 - Chris De Armitt from Phantom Plastics LLC

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Welcome back to the Green Element Podcast, where we feature business leaders and innovators transforming their operations to be more environmentally and socially sustainable. I'm your host, Will Richardson, and I can't wait to meet our guest today and help you on your journey of sustainability. Chris, thank you so much for coming along to the podcast today. We are really looking forward to speaking to you. Dr. Chris Diamitz, scientist.

Yes.

And I'm just so excited about talking to you about plastics and breaking down the myths. And I think so many people don't understand the subjects. And I watched your video you kindly sent me on LinkedIn, and it was music to my ears, if I'm being honest. It was brilliant. And I just would like to delve into your research and what you have found out really, and how you dispel the myths. And we've got a series of topics to talk about. Thank you very much for being on the show.

Thank you, Will. Thanks for sharing your platform so we can get some truth and science to replace the fiction that people believe now.

I think that's it, isn't it? I think that's— and that's really, really important. I guess, should we start off with straws?

Sure.

It's the 9-year-old boy, Milo Kress, that— and I actually didn't know anything about him. But so I think that's really interesting. So a little boy, 9-year-old, came up with 500 million straws that were being used every day in the US. And could you tell us a bit of background about this and how you found out about this and what What's been—

I guess as a scientist, whenever I see something, I always go that extra step and look for the source, right? So if somebody says anything, I go and check, right? Well, where is this coming from? Is— do they cite any science? Is this credible? Most people just believe the headline, but as a scientist, that's not really professional for me to do that, right? Before I believe something and repeat it to my friends, I want to check on it. So I checked on the source for the straws, and it turns out that the New York Times and the Washington Post and Everybody else repeated this number that Americans are using 500 million straws a day, but it was just made up by a 9-year-old schoolboy and there was no credible source. So everyone repeated this thing because it was sensational without checking the facts.

And how many straws are used every day?

Nobody has a really good number, but I have seen some numbers and they're far lower than that one. So nobody has an absolute number, but it's half that amount or less.

When we were recruiting for a new job recently, we always ask people, what's the most— what's the environmental campaign that you've seen recently that you're most impressed with and most unimpressed with? Just to get to grips with how people perceive companies and organizations, and it gets us to understand where they're coming from. McDonald's comes up a lot with regards to plastic straws.

Right.

Do you sit in that camp that McDonald's went going down the paper straw route, it was a good thing or a bad thing?

Well, from what I read, they reversed their decisions because they found out that the paper straws were not recyclable anyway. So a lot of these things are started with good intentions but misinformation. So if you take a paper straw, it weighs 2 grams and the plastic straw weighs 1 gram, right? So it's double the waste and it turned out not to be recyclable and it's less green than the plastic straw. If you add up, if you do a lifecycle analysis, you find out that paper's worse for the environment than plastic. So you've taken something which nobody needed in the first place. Let's be honest, right? I don't take a straw. That's being green, is just don't take a straw. The solution is not to demonize plastics, replace it with something that's known to be worse for the environment, and then feel good about yourself. So that's what's happening. McDonald's and other large companies are forced to make changes because of customer outcry, and then they find out that those changes are actually harming the environment. They're aware that they're harming the environment, but that's what the customers are asking for.

And I think this starts to go into, you talk about in your book and the video about you can recycle a plastic, is it 13,000 times? I'm trying to remember now, but almost infinite once you've— because you can recycle it and then you chemically recycle it and that actually brings it completely ongoing through recycling, which is something you can't do with paper. And actually, quite honestly, paper that's been used as a straw is— you can't recycle that anyway.

That's right.

Because it's been food damaged. I know there's a better expression than that.

Well, I would say a fair number for plastics would be 10 to 20 times, just simply remelting and making a new part. That would be a realistic number to take for a normal plastic. And then after that, you could chemically recycle it by taking it back to its starting materials and making new plastic from it. So yeah, the plastic straw, my daughter used one 100 times in a row. She used it for 3 months and just rinsed it, and that was fine. But you can't do that with a paper straw. So the green solution is just to stop being so wasteful and taking things you don't need. But in the case of plastics, people are being driven away from plastics just because they're being demonized and not for any good technical reason.

I think that's really important too. I know that a few people that I know also were very much of the, there are some people that actually do need straws.

Right.

And therefore you are demonizing them in some respects as well. And I think it's a really important point to make. And I think that's where it epitomizes a lot of the stuff that you seem to be talking about. It is, let's talk about the source. Let's talk about where we are coming from and what the reasons why we are looking at plastic in the first place.

Right. It's good to care about the environment, but if we don't get the facts, then we end up making crazy decisions that do more harm than good.

Microplastics is something that you talk about, and microplastics are found in lots of different items now. I mean, a lot of clothing has microplastics in. So when we wash our clothes, we are told all the time that plastics come out of the clothes into the washing machine and then through washing machine into the sewers and then found out into the sea. What have you found out about microplastics?

Yeah, microplastics is a tricky subject. So I read a lot of articles and that's one of the cases where you do see people reporting clear harm. You see, okay, there's scientific articles saying microplastics are there and microplastics are bad. And I was horrified myself. So I started reading these articles and being a scientist, I always check the article. You can't just believe something at face value, right? You have to read how did the scientists do the experiment, was it done properly, and all that kind of thing. So what I found was microplastics is probably the biggest scam area in everything that I read. There are people either willfully faking their results and being busted for it and having to retract what they've said. That's actually happened. And there's a lot of other people who are basically making the results look scary just so they can continue to get funding and frighten people and get their name in the newspaper. So For example, it's very rare for scientists to criticize other scientists, but in the microplastics area, scientists have come out and said, please be professional and do your work properly because this is just not credible how you're doing your science. So let me give you examples. So the microplastics you really find in the ocean are polyethylene and polypropylene mainly. So those are like Tupperware containers, plastic Ziploc bags. These are safe plastics that we eat food out of. But the experiments that the scientists are doing are not on those plastics. They're doing experiments on plastics which aren't even in the ocean. They're taking polystyrene beads which don't exist in the ocean because you can buy those off the shelf, right? That's very easy for them. They buy those from a scientific supply store and they use this type of plastic which doesn't exist at all in the ocean. So that already invalidates their experiment. And then they've also been criticized for using a million or even 10 million times too high a concentration in their experiments, right? So if you want to tell us something's toxic, You can't use a million times too much of it and then say, oh, the fish weren't happy. The problem, it's all dose-related. It's the same as oxygen. If you breathe 20% oxygen like we do every day, you're healthy. If you breathe 100%, you feel good for 3 minutes, then you die. So toxicity is concentration dependent. So virtually everything they did in those experiments in most of the papers is just shockingly bad and they should be thrown right in the rubbish bin. That's how bad the science is. in most of those microplastic publications you see.

That's really hard to hear because you kind of, you do rely on that academic research, don't you? I mean, if I'm being honest, I would read an article and I wouldn't question it if it was a journal article or even if a journalist had quoted a journal article, I wouldn't question that journalist either. Maybe I should. And I agree that that's possibly— but you would hope that— and most people don't in reality. And do you think that's where it starts to—

Well, let me give you specific examples, right? A few weeks ago, there was an article that every piece of fruit and vegetable contains 100,000 pieces of microplastic, right? And I thought, holy moly, that's a big number, right? Just the number sounds ridiculously high, right? So I went and read the article and I checked the experimental section, which is Nobody else is doing this, right? Nobody's checking to see if the science was done properly. And do you know what they did? They took fruit and vegetable, dissolved it in concentrated acid, and then any particle that they found, they assumed it was plastic. Nowhere in the whole article did they actually detect plastic. So the newspapers are covering there's 100,000 pieces of microplastic in all fruit and vegetables, but this scientific article that they're citing never ever detected plastic. I mean, isn't that shocking? These things are being picked up. And because the shocking news— studies have been done on this too— if you've got something that's really shocking, it travels fast and it travels far, and the truth will never catch up because the truth is much more boring, right? So that's the shocking thing that we're fighting. I can never win this battle to get the truth out because the fiction is so much more exciting.

I've just drawn an analogy with Back in the early 2000s, the newspapers and the media used to talk about how bad wind turbines were. And I don't know if you remember, they used to— you used to see these weird depicted pictures of a wind turbine next door to a skyscraper and say, Right. Do you want a wind turbine on your doorstep? This is what it will look like. It will destroy your view and the noise is horrendous. They would, and it was all just shock media because they knew that if they put it on the front page that's about that, then people would pick up that newspaper. If you went, actually, studies have shown that birds do fly around wind turbines. More birds are killed, I think, through, I think, airplanes or like per, etc., etc. And actually, Wind turbines aren't that bad.

Well, that's what my story is about. It's A, checking the facts, and B, giving some perspective, right? So let's say Winston Churchill famously said, democracy is the worst form of government apart from all the other ones we've tried. And that's exactly where you come out when it comes to plastic. Plastic and every material causes harm, but when you check the science, you find that plastic is causing the least harm of all the materials. So why would you demonize the material which is absolutely categorically proven to be the greenest option in most cases? That's crazy. But I want to clarify about the microplastics. I don't— I'm not in favor of anything being in the ocean. There are things there. They have been detected. It is real. It's luckily a lot of safe plastic like polyethylene and polypropylene, which don't cause any harm. So there are credible scientific studies showing no harm, but I'm not in favor of pollution of any kind. All I'm saying is let's really make sure that we have the facts before we go off, you know, demonizing the material that turns out to be more of a savior than a problem.

Because we're told about— we're told fish ingesting plastics, aren't we? And we're— we are educated, in inverted commas, quite a lot about this. And that's something that's bad for us to be eating the fish that has the plastics in.

Yeah. So let me talk about that. So that's another area where they've basically— well, it's just shocking how the science has been done, right? So what they do is they— so the correct papers, as I was mentioning, they take the correct plastic, right? They take polyethylene and polypropylene, because that's what you really find in the oceans. 80 to 90% tends to be that. So they take the correct plastic, they check it on the fish, and the fish are happy. There's no toxicity because this is Tupperware and Ziploc bags. These are plastics that we're used to eating out of. There's no effect. But they're not content with this result. So what they do is they take the plastic, they soak it in poison for like a month, then they feed the poison-soaked plastic to the fish and say, oh, look, the fish are sick. I'm like, well, you could have done that with anything. You could have dipped a sock in poison and put it in the aquarium. You could have just poured the poison in the aquarium. So the headline reads, plastics release toxins and poison fish. I'm like, well, of course they release the toxin that you've just soaked them with. But they weren't— but the initial experiment before you soaked them with toxic toxins, they were totally safe. So this is how far people are prepared to go to get an exciting headline and get more funding and shock people. They're literally prepared to soak They save plastic in poison just to make the fish unhealthy.

It's the— we're told a lot about the ocean, that the Pacific has this island, this plastic island. And I've got to say, I Googled it. I actually really did try to find— and I think in my mind I knew what it looked like. Because I'd been told about it so many times. And so therefore I knew what I was looking for. And I did Google Pacific Plastic Island and quite a lot of stuff came up. You could see that different camera angles were used and it was— I didn't actually find a picture of this plastic island. And I'm kind of saying it slowly like that because I don't want— I didn't spend hours and hours trawling Google, I've got to admit. So therefore I'm I'm kind of caveating myself, but you do talk about there isn't enough plastic in there. And why, why have we funded, you know, there's these mega waste boats that we funded millions and millions of dollars on cleaning up the ocean. What is that about if it doesn't exist?

Well, that's the funny thing. So scientists have been studying this plastic in the ocean for decades, right? They go back and forth with their ships and they have nets on the back and they collect everything and they weigh it and they know for every year for decades, they know exactly how much plastic, how big is it, what kind of plastic. This is not a new thing. So you can say with absolute certainty how much plastic is in there. And I have a webpage up which gives the data. And this is not one guy, right? This is multiple research groups for decades. So this is a collection of all the data. The average amount in the ocean is like one small piece, like your little fingernail per 130 bathtubs of water. That's how much plastic you can expect to find in the ocean. And if you take these gyres, you can swim through them. You can swim through them and you don't even know you're in one. You can sail through one, you don't see anything. There is no, there is no island. There is no floating island. There's nothing to be seen. There's no— you can't find them by— if you look from a satellite, for example, if there was a huge floating island the size of Texas, which is what they tell us, you would see it, but there's nothing there. So people have made this up. This is a— this is an industry. Is the industry is basically trying to shock people into emptying your pockets, right? So you, you're trying to hoodwink the very best, most kind-hearted people into emptying their pockets to fund things like this nonsensical Ocean Cleanup that you just mentioned. I mean, the NOAA calculated the— that's the National Oceanographic whatever association— they calculated if you had, I think it was 100 ships going up and down for a year, you could clean up 1% of the plastic. And of course that would do more environmental damage than the cleanup because you'd have all the diesel burning in 100 ships for a year going up and down. So these things that they're trying to get us to fund don't make sense. We shouldn't be putting plastic in the ocean, but we shouldn't be making up imaginary patches. They call it a soup, and scientists have literally come out and said there is no patch and there is no soup. This is— that would be the worst soup you've ever bought, right? Imagine being at a restaurant and you ordered a soup and they brought you 1,000 bowls of soup and it was just water. You'd say, well, where's my soup, right? There isn't any soup. So all the data's up on my website about this. It's just fiction. I mean, there is plastic in the ocean that shouldn't be there. That's true. It's coming from 10 rivers in Asia and Africa. But we shouldn't make up fictional islands because I did exactly what you did. I picture a floating island of nets and all kinds of nasty things, which simply isn't there.

There is actually one picture that's ridiculous. It's basically, it looks like an iceberg and it's just plastic bottles. And you do just think, seriously, how does that fit together? Like suddenly they just climbed on top of each other. I don't know, I just kind of looked at it and went, okay, yeah, that's good.

That's what's shocking about this whole thing. I don't mind, I'm a scientist, right? I'm not even mad about the environment, right? I'm just the same as everyone else. I care about the environment the same as everyone, but what I am passionate about is the truth. And I can't stand it that this all began when I found out my children were being taught clear scientific lies at school, things which were absolutely 100% disproven. And I thought, that's not a good way for us to proceed. If we teach the children lies, they'll be voting for things that make no sense. And we'll end up with a crazy future.

And I think it's interesting because you and I come, come from different places but have come to the same conclusions. I have always thought that oil is a finite resource. I don't understand why we literally burn through it like no tomorrow. I would like our great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren, etc., etc., to be able to have the luxury of being able to use oil. I've always thought that that's, for me, a sustainable way to live. It's not to go through it really quickly. And I've always viewed plastics as a really good way to hold whatever, as a receptacle, because it can be recycled over and over. It's nice that you've got a slide, you have a slide about what's the what's the greenest item? And you actually say that wood is, and then plastic after that. But it— and it just makes so much sense. Why are we just discarding all of this plastic? And I think the crux of it is that we are lazy. We don't want to do something that's hard, and it's much easier to blame others.

Yeah, that's right. Nobody wants to look in the mirror and blame themselves. Yeah.

And that's the problem that we have with plastic. And I think that's where it all comes from.

When it comes to plastic and oil, there are some misconceptions because about 4 or 5% of oil is used to make plastic. And what people don't realize is that you end up saving more oil than you used because plastics make our cars lighter. So you use over the lifetime of the car, use a small amount of plastic to make the car, and you save a huge amount of petrol, which is oil, over the lifetime of the car. The same thing happens with the house insulation. Use a little bit of plastic to insulate your house. With Styrofoam or polyurethane in the walls. And then you gain back way more than that because you're not heating your house with coal and oil over the lifetime of it. So people don't realize that plastics only use 4 or 5% of oil and they actually save more than that 4 or 5%. People are obsessed with the fact that because plastic is made of oil, it must be using more oil, but it's not true. If you were to switch from plastic to steel or glass, you would be using way more oil and coal. Because you have to heat those things up to 2,000 degrees to make them, whereas plastic is processed at a much lower temperature. So just because steel and glass are not made of oil doesn't mean that they're not using oil. They're using way more oil than the plastic ever would.

Yeah, I hadn't actually thought about it at all like that. I wasn't thinking of the— I was thinking of the process that it goes through and how many times it goes through. And I know there's so much research on, for example, steel and using renewables to make steel, which is an incredibly hard process to get it up to. To get renewables up to 2,000 degrees is difficult, to say the least. Well, think of the plastic case, right?

You start with oil in a very clean process. You can eat your dinner off of these factories. I've been to factories where they make plastic. It's very, very clean. So they make the plastic from the oil, They use all the oil, right? All of it's used. There's no waste or anything coming out of it. And then you use that piece of polyethylene 20 times. And at the end of it, you can burn it and you get the exact same amount of energy out of it as you had in the oil to start with. The exact same amount of heat comes out. So now you've taken some oil, you used it 10 or 20 times, maybe over a period of decades, and now you burn it and it's as good a fuel as the oil that came out of the ground. So this is an incredibly clean and green process when you look at the whole energy cycle of it.

Yeah, it's a life cycle analysis of plastic and I think that's what we haven't done. We haven't actually really thought about everything holistically, have we? I mean, plastic bags is something to— the plastic bags tax. What are your thoughts on the plastic bags tax?

Well, this is where my journey really began because the first thing I did when I was wondering about what lies have we been told about plastics, because my children have been taught clear lies and I thought, well, let's check some of these other things that we all hear in the media. So the first thing I did was type in LCA, life cycle analysis, plastic bag into Google and I got hits. I got life cycle analyses telling us that of all the grocery bags you could have, plastics are the greenest. So there's been about 15 life cycle analyses done. Denmark, America, Sweden, Canada, all around the world, Australia. Every single life cycle analysis ever done, not by the plastics industry, by governments and by the supermarkets, has found that plastics are the greenest solution for bags, far greener than paper or cotton. They win every single one. In fact, the regular plastic bag is greener than a biodegradable plastic bag, right? So plastic bags that we use now are the absolute greenest, unequivocally best solution. Like for example, if you go to the supermarket, the plastic bag where I live is 6 grams and the paper bag from the same place is 60 grams. So would you rather go for a material that uses more energy, more water, more pollution, and generates 10 times as much waste? That's the paper bag. Or would you rather have the plastic bag? And ironically, as you just said, the supermarket is trying to ban the plastic bags. They're proposing to remove them. And I want to meet the president and shake him and say, what are you doing? You're harming the environment by banning the proven greenest solution. And there are other unintended side effects of banning plastic bags. So people have studied this. Every time you ban a plastic bag, sales of plastic overall go rocketing up because people reuse their plastic bags as bin liners. Right? So when you ban the plastic bag, they don't have a bin liner. So they have to go to the shop, buy bin liners, and those are like 3 times thicker than the normal plastic bag. So you end up selling more plastic because you ban the plastic bag. So you're harming the environment and you're actually increasing plastic sales when you do that. It's not helping anybody. It's terrible.

No, no, no. It's, yeah, it's just not joined up thinking. It's emotional.

Right.

It's emotional.

That's what you do. You post a scary picture of a turtle or something like that and you rely on people's outrage and their gut reaction. But these people who are well-meaning end up harming the environment and that's the shocking part of it all. And unfortunately some of them, it's turned into almost a religion, right? So people are programmed to hate plastics because they've been told this load of nonsense over the last 10 years. So even when you present them with the truth, it's easier for them to just rebel back and attack me than it is to absorb the the scientifically proven facts and reprogram themselves.

So I don't— I'm not a company, a large soft drink company. I actually don't really care about, and I'm not trying to badmouth any names actually, but some of them get a bad reputation for they're not a water company, they're a plastic bottle-making company. Now, how do we get out of the cycle? Because there is— and I will defend, I will actually defend the— we shouldn't be using so many plastic bottles for water because we don't need to.

Right.

I think that it's wrong that we are putting so much normal tap water into plastic bottles when, especially in the first world—

I couldn't agree more. I think that we're buying products that we don't need and then criticizing the bottle when it's thrown away. It's crazy. I mean, just don't take the straw and don't buy bottled water unless you absolutely need it. Yeah, I agree with you.

Yeah. And I think that's— and it's such a tricky one to communicate though, isn't it? Because Yeah, I don't know. Do you remember Coca-Cola bottling tap water in Kent about 15 years ago? And they got, I can't remember what they called the water company, and they got massively criticized and they didn't do very well for obvious reasons really. People would be like, why are you selling me tap water?

I always find it odd though, because people blame the manufacturer. But as you just said, they proposed a product that doesn't work, nobody bought it and it disappeared. And it's the same with Coke, right? If you don't want the bottle, don't buy the Coke. It's that simple. It seems very strange to me that people take the straw, they take the Coke, they buy the cigarette, they throw the stuff on the floor, and rather than look in the mirror and see where the problem is, they blame Nestlé or whoever made the Coke bottle. To me, it's childish. It's very naive and counterproductive thinking to blame the person that you bought the product from. That doesn't make sense to me. We don't do it in any other industry.

Yeah.

If somebody leaves a car by the side of the road, they don't expect Ford to come and pick it up. Right. What's going on? Ford, somebody's left your car by the side of the road. Come and get it. I mean, if I've finished with my Levi's, I don't drop them on the floor on my doorstep and expect Levi Strauss to come and collect them from my porch and take them away and recycle them. The whole idea is preposterous. But you can drop a candy wrapper on the floor and suddenly you expect Nestlé to come running out of a bush and pick it up like it's their fault. And it's just not true.

People are funny creatures. And I don't think— so Tesco's was going to open up a supermarket in Bristol about 10, 15 years ago, and there were massive boycotts. We don't want Tesco's here. We want local shops. We want this. And there were petitions online, and Tesco's was given a huge amount of grief for building this Tesco's. And I did read And I don't know if this is true, but it was their most profitable supermarket to date when they had built it. And it doesn't really matter if it was the most profitable or whatever. In theory, it should have gone bankrupt with the amount of people that were anti it. And the fact that it's still around today means that actually people wanted that Tesco's there. So they were—

Well, you reminded me of 2 things when you said that. One is their recent survey of British supermarket executives showed that they know that by replacing plastic, they're actually harming the environment. Because I always think, how can they do this? They're smart people, they have teams researching. So apparently these executives know that they're harming the environment by replacing plastic with greener alternatives, but they have to do it because their customers demand it. And then they find when they put it on the shelf, nobody buys it. Because this is coming back to your point, people like to think of themselves as better people than they really are. A lot of this, I'm against plastic or global warming or whatever it is people are campaigning for, what they're really doing is saying to their friends, look what a great person I am. What a wonderful person I am. I'm against this thing. Look how virtuous I am. So it's virtue signaling. They don't actually believe in any of these causes, and they certainly wouldn't open their wallets to pay for any of this stuff, but they want to look good to their friends. So that's why you find that people demand things and you put it on the shelf and they don't buy it, or they protest against the supermarket and then you put up the supermarket and they go right there and buy their shopping. So a lot of that is very misleading, that what people say and what they really believe in are two different things.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm not trying to solve that problem.

It's actually in the book about that virtue signaling. It's been studied and how people are out there trying to look good to their friends rather than really protect the environment. I mean, there are genuine people, but—

Oh, really?

But many people are not.

Yeah, I can see that. That makes a lot of sense. That does make a lot of sense. And finally, I guess what would be quite— what are your views on the— and this is kind of plastic, kind of not. We were sending a lot of waste to China, for example, and China turned around and said, no, we don't want your waste anymore. And I think we're probably sending it to Thailand now or Indonesia, I would imagine. We'll just divert it. But, and amongst that waste is plastics that we should be like, what are we doing right and wrong? You must have thoughts on this.

That's one area that I haven't really looked into. I know it does happen. I don't know to the extent to which it happens. I know it's being regulated against now. So you see a lot of crackdowns. People are not accepting this waste. And to me, I'm surprised that it's economical to send waste anywhere. You have to pay a shipping charge. I mean, you're lucky if you can import raw materials and pay the shipping and afford to pay it, let alone paying to ship away your waste when it can just go in a landfill. So I'm not quite sure. That's an area— I'm a scientist, so I'm not lobbying for anybody. I'm not going to defend plastics. That's not my role. And in an area where I'm not sure, I'll just say I haven't looked into that enough to really have an opinion.

Yeah, fair enough. I've just reminded myself of another statistic that you 13% of the household waste is plastic in the US. And why would you spend 99% of your time— this is in your words— 99% of your time lobbying to get rid of 13%? I just, I think, and you have that and you have a pie chart with all the other waste and you do just think, yeah.

That's what I said about bringing perspective. I mean, I don't mind. We should all be reducing our material. We shouldn't be so wasteful. We shouldn't take a plastic bottle or a straw. That's all fine. I agree with all of that. But it does mystify me. If everyone's goal was truly to save the planet, they wouldn't be focusing 99% of their effort and their money on 13% of the problem, especially when you find that plastic is actually usually the greenest solution and proven to dramatically reduce waste. Why would you be focusing all of your effort on the material which is such a minority and one of the greenest selections you could make? And I sometimes wonder if the paper industry has borrowed Harry Potter's invisibility cloak because nobody talks about them. They generate double the waste. They use more water, more CO2, more energy, more more everything, more pollution. It's just terrific. It's double the amount of waste of plastic. 25% of all waste is paper and cardboard. And I've never heard a mention of it in the media. Glass is up there at, I don't know the number, 10 or 15%. The same with metal. Nobody talks about it. There's literally billions of tons. The number's in the book, so don't quote me on this, but I think it's billions of tons of munitions and nerve gas in the ocean. I've never heard anyone talk about it. So you can Google it. You can find that people Literally sank ships. They sank billions of tons of bombs and things in the ocean and nerve gas, toxic weapons, all this kind of stuff in the ocean. And they say, look at this, it's a lovely natural reef for the fish. They treat it like it's okay. And that's because it all sinks. What we have to remember is the glass and the metal and the poison and all of that stuff sinks and the plastic's the only thing left floating on the top. So that's all we talk about. So it's kind of an optical illusion. It's fooling us. I want to say one more point to your thing about microplastics and fish, which I forgot. And that is when the fish eat the microplastics— so this is how you should do the experiment, right? There are toxins in the ocean, right? So now you put microplastics in the ocean together with the water and the toxins, right? The toxins get soaked up by the microplastic, right? That really happens because they want to be in there. They're soluble in the plastic. And now the fish eats that and they've studied this, right? And what happens is that that piece of plastic goes right through the fish and the toxin stays in the plastic. So if you look at the whole picture, the plastic is ironically protecting the fish from poison, right? The fish was swimming around in poisonous water, the plastic soaked it all up, and even if the fish were to eat that plastic, it would just pass right through and the toxin remains in the plastic protecting the fish. That's the story nobody ever talks about. And that's all peer-reviewed. proven that that's what really happens. So I mean, I'm not suggesting we sprinkle plastic in the ocean to soak up toxins. That would be kind of going too far. But the irony is that the headline says toxins released from plastic are poisoning fish, and it's the exact opposite.

And it's actually the fishing— it is the fishing industry that's—

Yeah, 50% of all of the plastic in the ocean is coming from the fishing industry. It's all nets that have been abandoned.

Yeah. And we see a lot of whales beached. We find— and I live just north of Edinburgh and we've, we had a whale beached in Fife recently and it was because of the fishing industry and it's just because they've got big nets.

Yeah, they leave the nets just abandoned. A bit shocking. I think there should be a £50,000 fine if you come back without your net. That would be the end of that problem.

Yeah, yeah. Or if we could put research into GPS, micro GPS things on all fish, and that means that you could— you knew where the fishing nets were.

Everyone would be micro-tacked with that bit chain stuff, so blockchain stuff, so that you can track who had the net. The other thing is that you find a plastic net that, you know, killed a whale or whatever, and you blame it on the plastic, ironically, and it should be blamed on the fishermen. And you ask yourself, well, wasn't this happening before the nets were plastic? I mean, it's not the material itself, right? It's the fact that somebody abandoned a net. It's not It's not the material that the net's made of that's the root cause.

Yeah. Maybe stop eating fish would actually be better for plastic and the environment.

Maybe. I don't know. I haven't looked into that. It could be. But I know that 50% of all of the plastic in the ocean, it's coming from 10 rivers in Asia and Africa, and the rest of it comes from the fishing industry. So That's another thing that people in the Western world are being made to feel bad. So this is how the environmentalists are running a business. They come to us, they make us feel guilty, they ask us to empty our pockets. And when you look at the waste mismanagement, none of it's coming from the developed world, let's call it. None of it's coming from the UK or Europe or America. They generate more waste than anyone else, but they're managing it properly. You buy a candy, a piece of candy or a Coke, and you pay a tax on that. And that tax is partially used to collect To put out trash cans, to collect the litter, to process it responsibly. So the amount of waste that's coming from us is negligible, but the green people come after us because we're the ones with the deep pockets and the guilty conscience. So they make us feel bad so they can get our money. But the problem isn't coming from us, it's coming from other countries which haven't learned to handle their waste properly.

Yeah. I think you have a picture of a beach that is full of plastic. And we've seen them. Possibly many people have read the story about the Indian guy who spent years cleaning up a beach in his local town. But it does just come— that waste—

They've done studies on that. This is the irony of it, Will. If you go to an isolated beach, meaning a beach that people can't get to, it's pretty clean. I mean, there's hardly anything there. And if you do find something, it'll be one of these fishing nets, right? So this has been studied. You might find one or two bits of household stuff, but in general, they're very, very clean and they've got mainly fishing gear on them. But these beaches, ironically, are the ones we never see, right? By definition, they can't be reached by people. So we don't— you and I would never see a beach like that, right? But scientists study them. On the other hand, the beaches that we see are the ones we see in Greece or wherever, where we go on holiday and we see all this rubbish on the beach and we think this is shocking, this is coming from the ocean, but it isn't. It's coming from those people on the beach, the tourists on the beach, and that's been studied as well. And you can tell that because there are specific places in Greece where they use a lot of kebab sticks, right? So they find tons of kebab sticks on this beach that you wouldn't find in general and you wouldn't find anywhere else. They're coming from people on that beach. And this is what people do. They go to a beach until it's ugly and then they move off to another pristine beach and ruin that one. So people are blaming plastic in the ocean, but it isn't. It's coming from those tourists and that's been proven.

But the whole thing comes back to how we manage our waste and how we manage plastic and how we manage it all. And that's what we should be addressing, right?

Well, that's the thing. If we start off with all of these misconceptions and outright lies, we're never going to find a solution. And that's the problem. We've seen that governments and supermarkets are being forced to make changes because of an enraged public. But the public's been misinformed. They're fighting for things which are actually counterproductive and harm the environment. And that's the biggest irony of this all. You can be against plastics or you can be for the environment, but you can't be both. Those two things are— No.

Well, I am. I'm for plastic and I have actually spent pretty much my whole life in environmental management. So I can put my hand up and say I'm for plastic.

You know what? I wouldn't even say I'm for plastic. I'm just for what makes sense, right? I mean, I don't mind. I'm kind of agnostic, but in the cases—

Yeah, no, I get it.

I mean, I clearly say in the book, I've studied more lifecycle analyses I think than anyone. I just sent a package of 350 megabytes of them to an expert to analyze. And what I found was that plastic's usually the greenest solution, but where it isn't, I highlighted that in the book. If it comes to wooden decking or siding or something, wood beats plastic. I'm a scientist and that's the truth and so I report it. I'm not here to defend plastic. I'm just here to get some facts out because what we're doing now is really crazy. The more passionate and the more kindhearted you are, the more damage you're doing because you're fighting against the greenest material, and that's not where we want to be.

And you very kindly allowed our listeners to download your full book for free on the website, and I think we're going to have a limited time period.

From whenever you see this, you'll have a week to read that, and I'm only putting the time period on because if you don't give people a time period, then they tend to not get around to doing things. So I'm happy to give free access to the book. And the book, as you know, was written without any funding of any kind. All of this work was done on my own. I'm taking a giant loss. And the reason that I'm providing the book for free is just because I want people to see the truth so we can start making smart choices. I don't have all the answers and I don't actually want to present them, but what I want to do is present the facts that smart people can use to get to the right answers.

I think it's really, really healthy to have you doing this, I think. And I just think it's so refreshing to listen to someone that is not speaking emotionally and speaking factually. And I think we do need more of it. And so thank you so much for doing what you've done. You've invested a lot of time.

And yes, it's been horrible, to be honest. I mean, I only started because I told you my kids were being lied to at school. If I'd have ever known how much work and time this is going to take, I never would have done it. But I'm glad I've done it now because it's, it's changing some people's lives. I see, I see a shift now online that people are starting to get behind this now that they've opened their eyes and seen the facts. We're starting to make some progress. So thank you for the opportunity, Will. I really appreciate it.

Brilliant, brilliant. Thank you, Chris. Thank you. And what we'll do is we'll be putting that link up on the website. We'll be putting how we can connect with you or our listeners can connect with you. on our website alongside the video that I was referring to.

And people will see every time I say something in the video or in the book, it's always with scientific references, right? So that's what's lacking from the other side. They're always presenting things with zero scientific proof. And I'm a scientist, so every time I present something, you can go and check it yourself. So thanks a lot, Will.

Brilliant. Brilliant. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening today. It was brilliant, wasn't it? I learned loads about plastics. And I think what my biggest takeaway from this podcast was, we need to really take control of our own actions and think about what it is that we're buying Do we need to buy that plastic bottle of water? And what do we do when we dispose of it? We need to be really trying to educate ourselves around the use of plastics and really thinking about the recycling of all aspects of our waste and what is it that can be recycled and should we be using things more And think pragmatically about what it is that we use. I think Dr. Chris Diamandis was phenomenal. And on that note, I know that there will be a number of people, if not many of you, that have a number of questions that you would've liked to put towards Chris. Please email podcast@willrichardson.com. at greenelement.co.uk with those questions because we are going to do a follow-up and we are going to ask all of those questions to Chris. So be a part of our plastic journey, be a part of the podcast and ask those questions. We are here to ask questions of people. We are here to try and learn and understand how to be more sustainable. So thank you for listening and thank you so much for being a part of this journey and trying to understand more about sustainability. Thank you. Bye.