The Great Recycling Scam: How Big Plastic Fooled America | Julia Cohen

In 2015, a rare piece of federal legislation passed: the Microbead-Free Waters Act, banning tiny plastic beads from personal care products. The reason? Dentists were finding microplastics lodged under people's gums. That discovery, Julia Cohen explains, is just one small window into a much larger problem. Cohen is the co-founder and executive director of the Plastic Pollution Coalition, and she joined Alex Clark on Culture Apothecary to lay out the full, unsettling story of how plastic got into nearly everything—and why the recycling symbol on the bottom of your water bottle is essentially a corporate mirage.

The Body as a Sink

The most disturbing development in the last five years, Cohen says, is the explosion of research on microplastics and nanoplastics—particles smaller than five millimeters and particles invisible to the human eye, respectively. Scientists have now found these particles in "pretty much every part of the body that scientists have looked": the vasculature, the brain, the heart, the placenta (on both the mother's and baby's side), breast milk, testes, and feces. When Clark asks how a plastic fork ends up in a human brain, Cohen explains that the entire supply chain sheds particles. "You're drinking it. It's in the air. You're breathing it. You're putting things on your body, your body is absorbing it. You're eating with a plastic utensil, you are eati