Hello and welcome to Money Talks.

I'm your host, Elizabeth Spires, and today I'm joined by Beth Gardner, and we're here to talk about our new book, Plastic Inc, the secret history and shocking future of Big Oil's biggest bet. So, Beth, introduce

yourself and tell us a little bit about your book. Hi, Elizabeth. Yes. My name is Beth Gardner. I'm a journalist.

The book is called Plastic Ink. And it is, I think, an effort on my part to sort of reframe the conversation and reframe our understanding of plastic

around a sort of perspective of where comes from rather than where it ends up. You know,

I think plastic is one of those issues that a lot of people are really concerned about,

even if they're not sort of super connected to environmental issues or necessarily involved in that

world. It's something that is so present in our everyday lives. And I just sort of observe

anecdotally from people I know that a lot of people just like feel bad about it. They they hate how

much plastic they throw out all the time, all the, you know, the single-use

packaging and the utensils and all of that that kind of comes into your life and then it

very quickly goes out.

And I hear also a lot of guilt being expressed by people I know about the amount of plastic

that they throw out.

And it just sort of struck me when I started

to like dig in and learn a little bit about this industry that, you know, all of that concern,

all of that focus on plastic feels like it either tends to focus on kind of where it ends up,

you know, these terrible pictures that we've all seen of the beaches covered with trash or

the turtle tangled up in a bag or

whatever. And there's very little focus on where it comes from, which is, of course, the fossil

fuel industry and its petrochemical subsidiaries. So that is sort of where I've tried to turn

the lens in this book on where plastic comes from. Well, it's,

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