Planet or Plastic? | Explorer's Fest

[Applause] Some of you may have seen or heard about that classic film called The Graduate, starring Dustin Hoffman. As a young graduate was advised by the crusty businessman, "The future, my boy, is plastics." Think 1960s, when plastics in our society were just beginning to become a part of our lives in a serious way. Now, synthetic materials go way back, and Bakelite, as one of the early forms of synthetic materials, entered our life early in the 20th century. But from Dustin Hoffman and The Graduate to the present time, just imagine how much plastic has become central to our lives.

So when you think about it, we should not be so surprised that this has happened, because like every other creature on the planet, we use the natural world to foster our prosperity. Birds break off twigs to make their nests. You think about those big, muddy nests that flamingos make. All creatures modify the world around them, use materials. But no creature has been more successful at transforming the nature of Earth to foster what we imagine to be her prosperity than humankind.

But imagine this: where we want to begin our origins, we might start maybe 10,000 years ago when civilization really first began to get up and running. Significantly, somehow, we did not rely on plastics to carry things around. Somehow, a thousand years ago, we managed to exist, but without plastics. I'm not sure how we did that, but a hundred years ago, during all preceding history, and yet today it seems that we are increasingly reliant on these miracle materials that do not exist in nature except, of course, in their basic ingredients.

It's when we really began to discover the magical properties of petrochemicals — not just for burning oil and gas, but for what we can make out of those basic materials, plastics. A lot of people think the biggest problem with the ocean is oil spills, and for sure that is a problem. But we are seeing another kind of oil spill. It's the oil spill translated into those many variations on the theme of things we call plastics now. Are all plastics banned? Are any plastics banned? Not the materials themselves, in theory.

We just saw that little ROV that David Lange brought, and it's mostly made of plastic. But for sure that's not going to wind up in a landfill or dumped out in the ocean somewhere. But how is it that we have become accustomed to the concept of "use something once, throw it away"? I think it's a business model that seemed like a good idea at the time: to have something that will always have a market, always have a market, "use it once, throw it away, use it once, throw it away." Whether it's a cup made of paper or a cup made of plastic, still that mentality is that somehow it's convenient.

But now we're seeing the major inconvenience of that illusion, that what we throw away does not go away. Here's the thing: in all of human history, never has there been a better time to be alive to solve this problem. This idea that we are the masters of the universe, we now know what we could not know when I first began exploring the ocean, before plastics were there, before we had lost so much of what we had taken out of the ocean, as well as what we’d put into the ocean. Armed with knowledge for the first time, we can see that there are limits.

You know, elephants can't notice dolphins and whales, as smart as they are, can't see what ten-year-old kids of today, no humans in the past could know either about what Earth looks like from afar. To be able to gather the knowledge and use the knowledge that we now have at our disposal, this truly is the most important time in history. We have a choice to use the knowledge we have to really find an enduring place for ourselves within the natural systems that keep us alive, to try to solve the problems now that we know that we’ve got them.

So glad to be here with you explorers to solve the problems going a few on into the future. And you're about to hear some from some real champions. Thank you. How about another massive round of applause? So while we are setting the stage for a new crop of panelists, I want to take a moment to introduce the one who will be introducing the panel. She's the deputy to the chief scientist and the vice president of operating programs for the National Geographic Society. So let's all give a very, very warm welcome to Valerie Craig.

[Applause] [Music] So as Sylvia just so clearly described, our planet is in trouble and we're reaching a crisis point when it comes to plastic pollution. It's a problem that's global, it's visible, and it's harmful, but it's also solvable. About a month ago, National Geographic launched a first-of-its-kind initiative to grab the public's attention, to raise awareness, and to meaningfully engage people to take action to address one of the greatest threats to the planet today. Planet or plastic is truly a one-brand initiative for National Geographic.

We will harness the full power of our media platforms and our international reach, and we're going to launch scientific expeditions to fill gaps in knowledge, to engage communities, and to accelerate innovation. The four absolutely incredible women that are going to join me on stage today are helping us get there. They're demonstrating the true power of science and storytelling to address this huge problem and to accelerate change and have a lasting impact.

So please help me welcome them to the stage: Dr. Jenna Jambeck, Imogen Napper, Lily Gullick, and Dr. Heather Koldewey. I am so psyched to be with this kick-ass team of women. It's amazing! I think we're the all-female panel, so we're gonna kick it off with Jenna. Jenna Jan Beck may be new to the National Geographic family, but she's been studying solid waste for about 20 years.

Her seminal paper, published in Science in 2015, brought global awareness to the role that rivers play as conduits for conveying plastic waste from the land to the ocean. So people are always asking her about the role of waste in rivers and waste in the ocean, but amazingly she's a lot more at home in a landfill, and she even tells me that she fell in love in a landfill. So I hope you're gonna tell us a little bit more about that. Why don't you tell us a bit about your work? Thank you.

Alright, so when I was 40 years old, I kissed my husband, that I did meet — true story — at the landfill, and my two young sons goodbye and set off on a 28-day expedition sailing across the ocean with 13 other amazing women to promote women in underrepresented disciplines like science, technology, engineering, and math, as well as spread awareness and sample plastic in the ocean. In the middle of the Atlantic, the ocean looks like this blue, pristine, and beautiful, but when you pull the plankton net, or the manta trawl, that was described earlier through it, it tells a very different story.

Microplastic, plastic that's about the size of a pencil eraser or smaller, is what we found in that net. Plastic does not biodegrade over time; it simply fragments into these smaller and smaller pieces, and for all practical purposes, it exists on our planet forever. So before we went on this sailing trip, we went to this beach, this most amazing gorgeous beach, to do a beach cleanup. I walked to the ocean's edge as I often do — I can't go to a beach without saying hi to the ocean — and so I walked in, and the waves were lapping up on my legs, and I'm looking out, and then I looked down and I was shocked and saddened: there was microplastic.

This microplastic was washing up on the shore with every single wave. It was a really significant moment for me. I was like, "Our oceans are literally spitting this material back at us, saying this doesn't belong here." So we've heard about the animals that are impacted by plastic. Recently, we heard about a whale in Thailand; it died and had 80 plastic bags in its belly. We hear about the albatrosses feeding plastic to their chicks. We hear about the turtles eating plastic bags and the turtle with the straw stuck in its nose.

We know that seals play with large plastic debris, like derelict fishing gear. We know that the smallest animals in our food web are consuming plastic. When I heard about our trash ending up in the ocean, it was actually way back in 2001, and because I'm an environmental engineer who studies waste management, I immediately connected it to our activities on land. I thought, "If our trash is ending up in the ocean, we must be doing something wrong here for that to happen."

So I wanted to research it for my PhD. I met with some marine scientists, and I said, "I really want to work on this issue." And he replied, "Nobody cares about that." I was totally taken aback, not expecting that answer, and I said, "Why?" And he said, "Well, maybe if you're in Alaska where derelict fishing gear is an issue, or if you're in Hawaii where the plastic washes up on the shore, but I was in Florida, and he said nobody cares about that little Dino." He lit a big fire under me. I couldn't do the research for my PhD; I had to do something more relevant to my discipline.

But I started doing this research on the side, and ten years later that paid off when I was invited to be a part of an international working group where we did get to start to answer some of those questions that I really wanted to address. So we now know that globally we have produced 8.3 million metric tons of plastic since 1950; that's equal to 80 million blue whales. Because much of this plastic is used for packaging and single-use items, we've already produced 6.3 billion metric tons of plastic waste.

We've only recycled, on average, 9% of that globally. We've incinerated 12%, and that means 79% has ended up in our landfills or in our open environment. In 2015, we also estimated the quantity of plastic entering our oceans globally from 192 countries around the world from mismanaged waste. Our mid estimate was 8 million metric tons. These numbers are hard to imagine, so let me describe it for you. Imagine us standing hand to hand, covering the entire coastline of the world. We take up about a foot of space, and in front of each and every one of us would be five grocery-sized bags filled with plastic, and that's what's going into the ocean every single year.

How does this plastic get there? When we know that, it can be blown or washed directly into the ocean; or it can be blown or washed into a conduit — a river, a waterway like this one — and also reach the ocean. Finally, thinking about or researching the influencing factors: why was this happening? Why were we seeing this leakage of plastic? Where we saw was these middle-income countries with really rapidly developing economies, where the solid waste management infrastructure just could not keep up with the increase in waste generation and increase in plastic use that comes with this economic growth.

Also, there are millions of people around the world participating in informal, undocumented-based management that try to contribute to helping this issue. Finally, in high-income countries, we see even though we have robust waste management infrastructure, because we produce over double the amount of waste per person as people in many of these Southeast Asian countries, even a small bit of mismanaged waste through littering and a large coastline means we significantly impact this issue as well. So I'm happy to say I proved that naysayer wrong. I think people do care about this issue.

So what are we going to do about it? Well, you're going to hear some amazing stories and solutions here in a minute. But when I think about this, I think about an integrated approach. So all the way upstream, there are choices that you and I can make every day — those of us that have the luxury of these choices. Not everybody has access to clean water, but if you do, a reusable water bottle, a cloth bag, saying no to plastic straws — these choices sound boring, but honestly, our research shows that taken collectively and over time, these choices make a difference.

We need to think about redesigning our products, looking at material substitution. Can we actually meet people's needs and increase livelihood without producing waste, decoupling that waste generation rate from economic growth? And finally, we need culturally appropriate and context-sensitive, safe and sound waste management around the world. So we all have a role to play — our government, our industry, our private companies, academia, citizens — you and I collectively hold the solution to this in the palm of our hand; we can make a difference together.

Thank you. We won't let you get too depressed; there's always a silver lining in each of these talks. So a couple of months ago, Imogen Napper became one of the first Sky Ocean Rescue Scholars, which was a collaboration between National Geographic and Sky Media. So you just heard Jenna talk about how plastics can break down into small bits over time into a form that becomes really difficult to remove from the environment. But what about the trillions of bits of plastic — microscopic bits of plastic — that start out that small? What about those? Where do they come from?

Well, in about five minutes, I think all of you might be questioning your clothing choices. That'll be just a little clue. In addition to studying microplastics, Imogen is also a reserves officer in the Royal Navy. Yes, they are truly a kick-ass team of women up here, and she's just two weeks away from getting her PhD. This is a very exciting moment! Imogen, I've always had a really strong connection with the ocean. I'm from a really small seaside town called Clevedon, which is near Bristol in the United Kingdom. It's known for its fish and chips, its really long old Victorian pier, and we look over to our neighboring country of Wales.

I'm also connected to the ocean in a variety of different ways. As said, I'm an officer in the Royal Navy Reserves, and I specialize in mine warfare. I'm also a really keen surfer, and I'm really lucky to live near Kew, which is the California of the UK. But how am I here at the Explorers Festival as a marine scientist? It’s quite interesting to look back and connect the dots. I had no idea what I wanted to do after school — really no clue. I knew I really liked research, and I also really enjoyed science.

I hadn't had that passion; I didn't know what I wanted to study. I remember flicking through a prospectus of a university I wanted to go to and looking at all the science topics, and I picked biomedical science. So there I was. But during my undergraduate degree, I got really involved in surfing and beach cleans, and there's one beach that has stayed in my mind — it's the beach that I really surfed out as well.

So the eye, the surface looks really clean; there are no bottles, there are no bags. But when we started to dig through the sand, we found lots and lots of tiny microplastic pieces — plastic less than five millimeters in size. It really shocked me. It angered me. It also gave me a lot of curiosity: where are all those tiny bits of plastic coming from? There on my beaches, so this fueled my passion, and I guess you could say this gave me my research mojo. Skip forward another four years, and I'm at the end of my PhD — really, really, really close, about two weeks away hopefully — and I've been able to research just that: the sources and fates of plastic going into our oceans and ending up on our beaches.

When I started my PhD, I was thinking, “Well, plastic must come from landfills and from litter,” but it can also come from a variety of different sources that we wouldn't necessarily always think of. One of those being microbeads in facial scrubs. Microbeads in facial scrubs are tiny bits of plastic that are used as exfoliants to get the dead skin off, but they're completely unnecessary, because they can be replaced instead with salt or sugar.

We found out that three million tiny plastic pieces could be in one bottle. In one squirt of your hands, there could be more than 10,000. While we wash our faces, while we wash our bodies, these microplastic pieces will go down the sink, into the drains, and potentially through the sewage treatment works and into our oceans, making our oceans into a big plastic soup. This was my first research piece, and it was really exciting to see the development and courage of people banning these products from their lives.

Now governments around the world are banning the sale and production of microbeads, and that was all because of this little bit of research. The next bit of research that I did was looking at washing our clothes. Most of you sat here in the audience today — I'm sorry, but you're wearing plastic! This could be polyester, acrylic, or polyester cotton blend. In the mechanical nature of the washing machine, where our clothes are swishing and swirling around, tiny fibers can come off and, like the microbeads, go into our wastewater and potentially into our seas.

We did some research that showed up to 700,000 fibers could come off our clothes in one wash. All of this research gained a lot of media attention, and it was really exciting to see how research can change industry, government, and public perception. These were my first two research pieces, but my first two pieces into the large jigsaw that is solving marine litter. But we still have a really long way to go. I'm now excited to start the first bit of research after my PhD, which is looking again at washing our clothes, and this is in collaboration with Sky Ocean Rescue, of which I'm one of the scholars, and National Geographic, where we're going to be testing different inventions that are used in the washing machine to try and capture these fibers.

So hold on, because in the future, I could be telling you the future of washing our clothes!

Thank you! Lily Tzedakah is a Fulbright National Geographic digital storyteller. She's documenting Taiwan's waste management system and innovations in recycling. She's working to transform the way people see trash, transforming it from just something we throw away to something that has value. She's also a one-woman demonstration of the power of an individual to have change. If you've seen her walking around campus this week, you might have noticed that she walks around with a little knapsack, which I've decided to think of as her plastic-free go-bag. Everything in it is what you would need to have a full day plastic-free anywhere, anytime—the bowl, the utensils, the bottle. It really is that easy.

Lily, tell us a little bit more about your work. I love Taiwanese milk tea. When I was 12 years old, I discovered the first teahouse near my father's old apartment. I walked through the glass doors straight up to the counter, ordered my first milk tea, and instantly fell in love. For the next ten years, I became a VIP at that teahouse, and every time I ordered, a table would shout, "Bing fang tai nai cha," which translates to "a large cup, minimal sugar, minimal ice milk tea."

When I graduated from college, I went back to that same teahouse, sat in that same orange chair facing the same window with my milk tea to ask that post-graduation quintessential question: "What the hell am I gonna do with my life?" And as I reached for my milk tea and brought it close to me, I paused. You see, prior to that moment, all I did was drink that sweet, sugary goodness and threw it in the trash can. It wasn't an accustomed habit; I didn't think much of it. But it was in that moment that I finally saw the plastic cup, and I finally saw the plastic straw, and I realized that every single time I drink the drink that I love, I'm destroying the environment that I love.

So this led me on a global mission to Taiwan to understand our global plastic supply chain, a waste management system, and people's perceptions of plastic. What I came to find is Taiwan is an incredible place. The island was formed by the collision of the Eurasian and Philippine plates. Two-thirds of it is covered in mountains, and 90% of the 23.5 million people live on the rolling plains of the western coast. It has to import 98% of its energy, 70% of its food, and in fact, it became one of the rising Asian Tigers as a result of one primary industry: plastics.

Taiwan has one of the most sophisticated plastics supply chains in the world, both upscale and downscale, and at the time, before the 1980s, they had no waste management system whatsoever. So there were lots of claims of illegal dumping and lots of chances of people throwing their trash haphazardly on the floor. Well, a group of housewives were sick and tired of having their kids walk through trash to school every single day. So in the late 1980s, they formed an organization called the United Homemakers Foundation, and they charged the EPA with creating the modern system that Taiwan has today.

Today, Taiwanese people now have to divide their trash into three categories: burnables, recyclables — which had 33 different subcategories — and kitchen waste, which goes towards their farms as fertilizer and for pig feed. Now this incredible system is also coupled with an interesting tension. While plastics pervade their society, the idea of a circular economy, of zero waste, of reusing your resources is on resurgence on the island.

In fact, there are many small and medium-sized businesses that are charging ahead, one of which is this team of two powerful women who started an organization called "For the Turtles," which sells glass straws on the market, and they're building an alliance with eco-friendly cafes across the island to revolutionize eco-friendly products inside the food industry. Then there are folks like Tao Wu, who is the CEO of Spring Pool Glass, and he takes your discarded mobile phones and the LCD glass to transform them into fireproof, lightweight bricks for construction.

So while the technological solutions are there, I realized that the problem is not technology; it is the perception of plastic. In Taiwan and in Japan, things that are wrapped in plastic are considered cleaner, fresher, of higher quality. This is inextricably linked to the fear of plastic in their supply chains. If they had better supply chains, then they could not rely on plastic, but they've had scares in the past about what happened to their food and their beverages.

So plastic has become the solution. In the United States, there are also other ways and reasons why we use plastic. Most of it is out of sight, out of mind; you kind of use your thing and you throw it away. You don't think about the environmental impact. Well, in order to transform the ways that we think about these things, we use storytelling. So what I did is I filmed and recorded sounds from Taipei's waste management system, transformed them into a track, and had Taipei’s dancers dance to it. I recorded the waste management system in that sound, and the idea was, you may not be able to see your trash, but you can't unhear it. So we can transform the way that we perceive waste; we can transform the way we interact with it.

But then we also realized that a lot of folks don't know really basic things about how to recycle or what is plastic or these processes. In fact, when you go to Starbucks, you may see that recycling sign on your Starbucks coffee cup, but the reality is you can't recycle it. That's because inside is a small layer of polyethylene plastic lining, and if you want to recycle it, you need to split the two materials, and if there's any sort of beverage or food residual in that recyclable when you throw it into that bin, it's going straight to landfill.

So I understand that we also live in a time where it's a "to-go" culture. We don't have much time to do anything; you grab and you go. But our choices are what's driving this system. So what I did, I did a 12-day zero plastic waste challenge, and while I couldn't get to zero, the reality is there are choices that we can make in our day-to-day lives to make this change. As was stated earlier, you can bring your own cup, you can bring your own utensils, you can bring your own straw; you can even bring an alpaca with you and have a wonderful journey in your eco-waste time. That's what I do — her name is Anastasia.

Ultimately, it is our choices that ignite change, but our choices are based upon our perceptions. If we can transform our perceptions of waste, then we have a solution for the future. Thank you! Heather Koldewey is a kitesurfer with a soft spot for seahorses, but she's also a National Geographic fellow and she's head of marine and freshwater conservation at the Zoological Society of London. As you saw from the intro video to this session, for the last few years, Heather's been working in small island communities — the people that are at the front lines of plastic pollution.

Working together with these communities to develop innovative approaches to tackling the problem. And back in London, she and her team have also been coming up with creative ways to engage the public and transform the way London approaches drinking water. Heather.

So I'm a marine biologist passionate about seahorses, and this image summarizes my journey from seahorses to plastic today. If you're a marine biologist, you come across plastic whether you want to or not. My journey with seahorses, about 20 years ago, took me to the Philippines — one of the richest areas of marine biodiversity on the planet — but it is where ocean population, poverty, and plastic collide.

In communities just like this, the pressure on marine resources has resulted in overfishing, which threatens local livelihoods of very poor people. That leads to more and more fishing nets catching fewer and fewer fish, and those nets are made of plastic. Globally, we estimate that 640,000 tons of discarded fishing nets enter the ocean every year, where they degrade and are left catching and entangling wildlife. These nets last anywhere between 650 years and forever. It's not just nets; these communities have no kind of waste management system.

So we're dealing with all kinds of plastic accumulating and entering the ocean. We took one kind of plastic — these discarded fishing nets — and developed an inclusive business approach to dealing with it. We looked at collecting those discarded nets out of the ocean, cleaning those nets, and gathering them off the beaches where they were laying, bailing the nets using innovative engineering based on a wine press, aggregating the nets from different communities, and transporting them in efficient bales to be exported because these nets are a very high-grade nylon that has significant value in the recycling market. An Aqua Fill in Slovenia recycles this to nylon yarn, which is then made into beautiful carpet tiles by Interface.

So here we have a system of solving a problem; it's powered by community banks, self-help means of finance that brings much-needed financial mechanisms to these communities, but also mechanisms for buying and selling the nets and organizing that to happen. The end result of this work is cleaner beaches. The nets are now removed; we know we reduce dependence on fishing and increase well-being.

So we have an economic model that works environmentally and socially. To date, we've collected 167,000 tons of nets — sorry, hundreds of tons of nets, which is enough to go around the world four times as a functional fishing net. Sixty-four thousand people have benefited from this approach by having cleaner environments and greater income. We’ve linked this to bigger and better marine protected areas. So we actually have a lot more fish and a lot less plastic.

But we only have one ocean, and as you've heard, plastic is everywhere. We've tried to think about this approach by taking the single-use plastic water bottle as a flagship species for the ocean plastic issue. One city where I'm based — London — Londoners use 1.2 billion single-use plastic water bottles a year. That's 175 per person — it's slightly higher in the States. And it's not just remote islands in developing countries where we see piles of plastic; this is the River Thames in London.

We're looking at changing an entire system from one dominated by a disposable, single-use plastic culture, a throwaway society, to one that's dominated by refill. We've developed a really innovative collaboration with lots of different skill sets to achieve that. We've had to look at everything from behavior, business case, infrastructure design, policy, and social norms. This is an issue for everybody, not just greenie tree huggers like me. We're making amazing progress, partly helped by the great interest and attention on this issue.

We've piloted drinking fountains, new solutions like a refill scheme, because it turns out that Brits will carry a refillable bottle but are too embarrassed to ask to have it refilled. So by putting a sticker in stores with a refill scheme by a group called City to See, it breaks down that barrier to make it okay to go and ask. We're doing the science to make the change and getting great traction with policy commitments from the Mayor in his environment strategy, and with Surfers Against Sewage, we now have commitment for a plastic-free Parliament. What we do with the plastic, what we do with a bottle — it's our choice.

And here we have the luxury of choice. We choose planet or plastic. My choice is planet, and I hope yours is too. Thank you! This is great, and since we have a team who stuck to timing, we're gonna get a good robust discussion going. So I'm just gonna start the conversation, but I know that this is a hot topic, so I want to turn it over to all of you very quickly. But I first want to step back from the issue for a minute and take advantage of the four of you being here — women in different stages of your careers, doing different kinds of work, certainly having faced different obstacles along the way.

So I want to take a little bit of advantage and dig into your backgrounds a little bit. So thinking about your journey to today, particularly in the context of being women in male-dominated fields or working in cultures or communities, were there unique challenges for women? I'm going to start with Jenna and Heather. So think for a second: if you could go back to the beginning of your career, if you could go back and talk to yourself at that point, what advice would you give to yourself?

Maybe I'll start with you, Heather. Well, I feel pretty lucky sitting here as a National Geographic fellow with an amazing group of people around me, so I wouldn't say do too much differently. It was okay. I think possibly less angst about the need for a career plan and making a lot of random choices along the journey. My PhD is in the population genetics of Welsh trout, and I'm here as a National Geographic expert fellow on plastic — so either they got it wrong or I changed along the way.

So I think it has been that. Being open to different opportunities, looking for support networks. I think looking back at the time, it's been quite a lonely place, and actually finding your people in all walks of life, whether that's at work or outside work — it's finding a place where you can vent or find support when things are tough. Possibly I was a bit too independently charging ahead on my own, and there are amazing support networks wherever you look. Sometimes it's just being humble enough to ask for help, so I didn't.

I'm gonna go with the women's perspective of it. I didn't see myself as different than men and didn't think that, you know, I could do anything they could do, but I think maybe there was a bit of naivety. I would maybe tell myself that bias is real; implicit bias happens. To value myself and even be a better advocate for myself, because once you sort of let that bar slide, it's much harder to come back to sort of prove equality later. I guess if you're not aware of that, then you may not work towards that from the first place.

But I'm gonna say one more thing: I felt like I haven't fit into very many boxes, but I feel like I fit in here with explorers. Maybe a lot because nobody's in a box here. So I'm really happy to be here, and I feel very welcomed. I think hearing from you in conversations that we've had over the last couple of weeks, I particularly wanted to have this conversation hearing that as a world-renowned scientist, you're working in a department where you might get an email that says, "Gentlemen, here's what's happening in our department," that seems wholly unacceptable, and that that could still be happening today.

So I think it's still a relevant conversation that we need to keep having, and Imogen, you're in a really different place in your career, just kicking off, but you've been working in a research lab with very famous people. And I just want to get a little bit of your perspective. What are you, where do you see great opportunity, and where might there still be some challenges that you're sensing?

I think I've been really lucky that I've never faced any obstacles, and if I did, then I purposely do something to prove a point that I could do it. In my office, we have a really good support network — you're saying before, and most of the PhD people are women, but we're surrounded by professors and all but one are men. So looking to the future and seeing the leadership within my own department is quite difficult, and also looking to the future, I know some of my colleagues are worried that when they start having a family, is it going to be hard to get back into research?

So I think there's a lot of unknowns in my career, but I'm excited for the future. That's great. You know, I did a little bit of digging in the last couple of days and was really surprised to learn that Taiwan ranks incredibly high on measures of gender equality. And then I also found a lot of people talking about, you know, they have a female prime minister and president and female leadership in the country, yet there is serious gender bias that still exists culturally in Taiwan.

You've just spent nine months there as a woman running around alone, digging into waste systems. An interesting thing — so what was your experience been like? You know, I find that sometimes being a woman is actually a really wonderful thing. You can be traveling around with your backpack — and I was serious about my alpaca; she sticks out of the back of my backpack — and you'll just walk on the street and you'll look somebody in the eye and you'll smile at them, and they'll smile back. Especially the older women, they love smiling back at you, and you realize that that human connection is so beautiful and it's so real, and that's what we're missing a lot today in our society.

I think I have an advantage as a woman because, you know, you smile at a lot of grannies, and she smiles back; you have that connection. You know, I found that traveling alone was not an issue. It was more so that in Taiwan, they're Taiwanese, and then there's white people — people from the outside. And I don't look like Taiwanese at all. I make a joke that my parents come from Iran, and they have a little place called Ilan, so in Chinese, Iran is "a la Iran." So I call them "Are you Taiwanese?" and it's like, "No, I don't come from — I come from Iran."

So it's kind of funny, but I find that being a human being, regardless of your gender, you can make it work. And being a white person and connecting with local people is really important, because it shares your shared humanity. That's great. Okay, I'll bring us back now, back to plastics. I want to talk about the magazine because it was incredible — it's incredible, and hopefully everybody has seen the biggest poster in all of Washington, D.C., across the street.

And if I could get the picture of the cover of the magazine, please. So Jenna, you had a lot to do with the content. Laura Parker was the author behind the feature story, and I know she spent quite a bit of time with you in Georgia. This particular choice that was settled on for the cover has been interesting in how much conversation it's been sparking, more than I actually expected it to. And as somebody who's been working really in this space with waste for a long time, I just love to get your perspective on the notion of the iceberg and what you think that that actually means.

Yeah, so I feel like it has two meanings. The first is a bit more literal in that, you know, we calculated the quantity of plastic entering the ocean every year, and what we have quantified in terms of the floating plastic is a standing stock, and that is only a fraction of what we see going in every year. And so in that way, it begs the question: where is the missing plastic? That is just the tip of the iceberg — what we see floating out there.

And then a bit more figuratively, thinking about this issue as a whole, it's fairly new in terms of the science, although it has ramped up really quickly. You know, I feel like we just have the tip of the iceberg of what we know about it, of what we understand the impacts to be. And so there's much more out there to be discovered and to learn — really understand what the implications are of plastic everywhere.

That's great, and I do want to ask Heather you one question before I turn it over as I promised I would. The work that you've been doing with networks has been really impressive, and the piece of it that I find almost most interesting of all of it is how much you're drawing from different sectors and different disciplines. You're learning from other areas that have done things well, like the finance mechanisms and pulling from the development community or using something like a wine press to bail your nets. Where do you see great potential moving forward?

We do have a theme this year around collaborating to ignite change. So where are some of those collaborations that you might look to moving forward? It's definitely a case of breaking down the barriers, and I think the fascinating thing about the plastic topic — it is completely in all sectors we need involved. So obviously, there's very diverse expertise across this panel, but also it requires design, market product design, marketing, engineers, all sorts of different sectors to come together to actually solve it. I think that's the challenge and the opportunity in terms of looking at networks.

I think it's quite hard, particularly in science, because you specialize so quickly that it's even hard to keep up with other scientific disciplines that are related. Thinking about how can I talk to business, or how do I talk to a marketing agency to get my science message across becomes more challenging, but these are the areas we have to break down. We were very fortunate to be invited to a workshop by Interface, who are looking at this topic around their very ambitious sustainability strategy because of our scientific expertise — one of my colleagues, in particular, and that started this process going.

And for me in conservation, what was particularly interesting is we tend to think in business about how do we get business doing less harm? Actually, the ambition set by Interface was way ahead of our thinking, and actually, the businesses bring expertise, or our collaboration with Selfridges has really transformed our ability to communicate marine conservation to completely new audiences and to stop talking to ourselves, which we tend to do a lot. So I think it is thinking out of the box and then also being bold enough to try and make contact with those sectors that we actually don't have easy links with now.

And often that comes from social circles and others or attending unusual meetings or events that you wouldn't normally as a marine biologist, and not being afraid to have conversations looking for solutions. That's great! Your turn. Oh! I see lots of hands. Okay, let's start right here up front, please. And just wait for the mic.

This is absolutely wonderful, and I've got a general question based on my personal life experiences with the Zabaleen garbage pickers of Cairo, whom I lived among and then brought home to my own home. And Lily, you talked about changing the perception of garbage, and we have a special relationship because they were in the mentor-mentee program. So it's great to see you up on stage.

The Zabaleen ethic is that plastic is so valuable that you would never let it go in the ocean because there's so many things you can do with it, and when I took that message from living with them home, this idea that microplastics are sites for bacterial biofilm growth that can cause methyl mercury, for example, or that washing our clothes can put microfibers into the ocean.

In our home based on the Zabaleen ethic, we're scavenging constantly in the bio digester in aquaponics fields for urban plastic garbage to put into our bio digesters for biofilm growth to enhance their production rates to put into our aquaponics to do denitrification to enhance the fish growth. And so when we wash our clothes, now all of the fibers go into our household bio digester and then into the aquaponic system, and so our plastic never leaves our home in our off-grid experience in Florida.

So my question is general: if the Zabaleen in Cairo and the other trash-picking peoples that we visited in the world know this value, why can't we get a policy going saying, "You can't let it leave your home or your community. You're stuck with it,"? There's no way because enough of us has done it in the world to show that there is no way and that we like that we want our plastic to stay at home. So can we get that consciousness or why can't we?

I'll take your first time. So policy — I'm not a policymaker by any means; I'm a storyteller. But what I understand is the way we understand things affects the choices that we make, and those choices often become policy. I think the elephant in the room that we have to address formally is the economics — the tight economics. You know, for a lot of people in the world, they use plastic in these small satchels because they can't afford to buy in bulk.

There’s no cost — go to rural India, right? You can only afford a little bit. It must hide your economics. You know, in America, we have a system where we have ultimate choice; we have lots of choices, we have an abundance of choices, and those choices come from the fact that a lot of our supplies are shipped from many different places around the world. The reason plastic became such a big thing is because it's cheaper to make, and it's easier to transport.

A lot of people thought that this plastic beam was so wonderful because, not only were we not taking away from natural resources because man had created his own resource, but it was also the notion that these objects could transform our lives. So I think what it really requires is a government to get behind and realize what we're seeing in the U.K., especially in places like Taiwan, that they are our resources. Our government is yet to address that issue, and it's one of my goals when I go back home is to bring it to the forefront of my local municipality in San Diego to do something about it.

But it starts with people caring. And when you care, then you make a difference. Another question, Sylvia? So I think we're letting the fishing industry and those who consume ocean wildlife off the hook a bit with our focus primarily on domestic plastic bags, straws, cosmetics when we know that much of what is clogging the ocean comes from the new lightweight, relatively inexpensive gear that has been introduced into the sea since the 1950s.

Before that time, every net, every line was treasured, handmade out of products that you fixed the net if it got torn. Today, if a net gets torn, it's economically attractive just to throw it away. But the idea that there's a business model built on these lightweight materials, primarily from the industrial fishers, but the big problems are the industrial scale fishers that supply 90% of the so-called seafood — sea life to this country and around the world. It's this large-scale extraction of wildlife from the sea, made possible because of these wonderful new materials that did not exist a few decades ago, that, coupled with our appetite and our ignorance about the real consequences of what a tuna fish sandwich really costs when you think about where it comes from, how it was caught.

Where is that, Gary? I'd love to hear your insights into this major issue that is getting fairly light attention, because I guess it's because of our appetite for the wildlife that we like to consume, and yet when you think about what it takes to get them to your plate, you might choose — you might think again. So I'd love to very quickly, Heather, if you have a quick response on nets, and maybe Jenna, if you'd like to talk about just what the value proposition means when it changes from heavier-duty plastics to lighter-weight plastics.

So we could have a whole panel, obviously, on sustainable fisheries and reducing our impact on the ocean, so I'm not going to touch on that. I think the bit that's missing that I had insight from working with the recycling business is why isn't that part of the conversation? So why isn't there a circular economy around nets? Why isn't that factored into when nets are designed, and why isn't that part of the certification of sustainable fisheries — is what happens to the net at end of life?

At the moment, there's a big disincentive to bring your net back to port where you may have to pay for it to go to landfill. Commercial nets also go to Aqua Fill, so there are solutions for some types of nets, and there are some great initiatives happening, but we need to factor that into the whole conversation about sustainable fisheries, and nets need to be designed for disaggregation and as part of the circular economy and the materials they're made of and how they're made.

Okay, so quickly, I think what we've seen with plastic is that because it’s so lightweight and inexpensive, and people have used it for the large transport of goods, and even the nets weigh less than — and they think we're conserving resources — ironically, that is what leads to what leads to these materials being low value at their end of life, and so they're not recovered because there's not as much plastic there.

So it's sort of this dichotomy and tension there, because it maybe saves on one end, but it actually, in terms of a lifecycle, how do you quantify the impact of killing these sea creatures within that system? And so low value means it's very likely to be leaked, and that's what we see into the ocean. So I'm gonna take the liberty of the last question to Imogen, and how soon until we have some kind of tool to actually capture microfibers from our washing machine?

Wait for the end of my research! We're gonna be testing different inventions and, you know, bright ideas. Some are going to be more successful than others, but it’s all part of innovation. I think looking into the future, this is where we need to be; we need to be looking at these bright ideas and changing the way that — and our behaviors, especially in the washing system.

So hopefully, wait maybe a year, in two years, and I'll come back with a top answer! That's great! So if you want to hear more about solutions, we are also going to have quite a bit of that on Saturday. So definitely come back for the public sessions where you'll hear a little bit more from Heather, and we'll also have some other National Geographic explorers on stage talking about solutions in plastics.

And don't leave your seat because I know there's something exciting coming up next. Thank you very much! Please give the panel a great warm thank you all so very much! And now it's time for a very special performance to end the day. This is going to be so exciting! The Hot Khanna Art and Music Project teaches tropical earth ecosystems of Colombia to all of us through songs and through illustrated booklets for children.

So here to play for us is gonna be incredible, is Johnny Benavidez! Let's welcome her!