Plastic Rap

Uncanny Valley | WIRED

WIRED

Technology

4.1 • 572 Ratings

🗓️ 22 December 2022

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Plastic waste never really breaks down. It just splits into tinier and tinier pieces until it becomes trillions of microscopic bits scattered across the world. Microplastics are everywhere: In the air we breathe and the water we drink, atop the highest mountains and in the deepest parts of the ocean. Microplastics are even coursing through our bloodstreams and sitting in our digestive systems. It's a problem we have only recently begun to understand, and are still trying to figure out how to solve.

This week on Gadget Lab, Matt Simon, WIRED climate writer and author of the new book A Poison Like No Other, joins us to talk about how microplastics became such a scourge and what—if anything—we can do about it.

Show Notes

Matt’s book A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies is out now. Read an excerpt of the book on WIRED. You can also find other Matt Simon stories about microplastics and the climate by browsing his author page.

Recommendations

Matt recommends Derry Girls on Netflix. Lauren recommends a plastic or metal water bottle that you can use over and over again. She likes the 32-ounce narrow mouth Nalgene bottle. Mike recommends bringing back Follow Friday on Twitter.

Matt Simon can be found on Twitter @mrMattSimon. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

This episode originally aired on October 27, 2022. Read the transcript.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everyone, we're off this week for the holidays. So instead of taping a brand new episode,
0:06.0	we're going to play a recent episode that we really enjoyed, even if the subject matter is a
0:11.0	little bit hard to swallow. Actually, it's pretty easy to swallow. On this show, we're going to be
0:16.4	talking about microplastics, those tainty tiny little bits of plastic waste that end up in your food
0:23.2	and in your water without you even realizing it. Microplastics are a byproduct of our plastic
0:28.5	dependent world and they are absolutely everywhere on the planet. That's why we asked wired
0:33.4	doomsday reporter Matt Simon to come on to the show and talk about the problem because he wrote a book about it.
0:38.7	So the subject may be a little bit depressing, but still we managed to have fun.
0:43.6	Yeah, sure.
0:44.5	And it'll probably make you look a little bit differently at all of the packaging and the products you're about to unwrap this week.
0:51.9	So enjoy the show and we'll be back next week with a brand new episode of
0:55.9	Gadget Lab.
1:00.4	Lauren.
1:01.1	Mike.
1:01.7	Lauren, would you care to guess how much plastic is in your digestive system right now?
1:06.8	No, I would not care to.
1:08.4	Why does it scary to think about it?
1:09.8	Yeah, it does. Also, I feel like it's probably unquantifiable. I'll tell you how much plastic is under my kitchen sink right now because a sign of adulthood is that you just collect like 42 plastic bags and stuff them in other plastic bags. Right. You should stop using those plastic bags. You should just never run out of plastic bags. Well, eventually they break down and they end up
1:28.2	in your body. This is the scary part. It really is. I have a feeling this is what we're going to talk
1:32.7	about on this week's show. It is what we're going to talk about. So buckle up. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I am Michael Collory. I'm a senior editor at Wired. And I'm
1:48.6	Lauren Good. I'm a senior writer at Wired. We're also joined by Wired science writer, Matt Simon. Welcome
1:53.7	back, Matt. Thank you. Good to be back to ruin everything for you, per the usual. Yeah.
	...

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