The Live Lightly Podcast

Jessica (00:01)
Hello friends, welcome to the very first episode of the Live Lightly podcast. Today, I'm grateful to bring you the director of Earth Day Organizations and Plastics Initiatives, Aidan Charone.

thank you so much, Aiden, for joining us. Welcome. I would love to start with hearing your story a little bit about what inspired you to work with Earth Day organization, and especially, this particular niche with plastic.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (00:27)
Yeah, sure thing. So thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate it. Yeah, my name is Aidan Charron I'm the director of End Plastic Initiatives. I got into the environmental field pretty early on from the Outer Banks of North Carolina originally. So I grew up right along the beach. My parents owned a restaurant, so we also relied pretty heavily on the tourism industry. And with that, on the Outer Banks, that means our beaches need to be clean. I started stupid diving when I was 12.

Jessica (00:32)
course.

Yes.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (00:56)
And then went off to college to do biology and a concentration in tertiary and freshwater studies, as well as a minor in geographic information systems. That's just a really fancy way of saying satellites and satellite imaging and GPS tracking. And then while in college, I also did education platforms with the aquarium at Pine Nile Shores, so the North Carolina Aquarium of Pine Nile Shores.

Jessica (01:10)
Okay. All right.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (01:23)
I was one of the people they would throw into the shark tank with a scuba helmet on and then I would talk to crowds about plastic pollution. Falling college, yeah, it was great. I really loved that experience. I wish I could continue doing it just on a volunteer basis, but the, yeah, just for fun, but it's a little far away. Yes, unfortunately, but after college I...

Jessica (01:26)
Okay.

I love that.

Just for fun. Yes. From where you currently reside. Yeah.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (01:50)
worked in wetland reclamation for a small engineering firm as well as with the North Carolina NRCS and the federal NRCS. And then from there, I moved up to DC to pursue teaching and kind of fell in love with teaching, but also wanted to get into the environmental field still and kind of stay in that realm. So I found Earth Day's climate education program, started working for them in 2022 as the Canopy Project and and Plastics manager.

And then last year I was promoted to the director of End -Plastic initiatives because of the focus with the global plastics treaty as well as the switch in our theme and just seeing that there needed to be more of a focus on plastics as a whole and just we needed to concentrate more manpower there.

Jessica (02:34)
Right.

Yeah, it's a thing in and of itself, right?

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (02:40)
Yeah, it's a very complex issue in and of itself. And it's just kind of a bummer issue, but also one that we have a lot of hope for.

Jessica (02:47)
Yeah, well, let's talk a little bit about why is it a bummer issue? think that people by now have kind of heard plastic is not good maybe don't understand completely why. I know seven years ago when I learned about it, I was like, wow, I didn't know why it was so bad. So if you could just speak to that particular point.

what it's made of and why it's so bad for us and for the planet.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (03:13)
Yeah, so what a lot of people don't realize is that plastic is made up of fossil fuels. So petroleum, the same thing that we're pumping into our cars.

Jessica (03:23)
Isn't that crazy that like we literally had no idea that it's made of that? Like, until you're told.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (03:27)
Yeah, I knew it was made of that, but I didn't realize how prevalent and then a lot of people don't realize that a lot of the fabrics and their clothing are also made up of plastic, just with a fancier name or synthetic material, nylon, polyester, it's spandex, it's all just pretty wild and then.

Jessica (03:35)
Right. Correct. Correct. Polyester. Yeah. Yeah. Spandex. Yeah.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (03:49)
You also look at it as it's made of these fossil fuels, but then there's also at least 16 ,000 different additive chemicals that they can introduce into plastic that give it different properties, whether it's the color, making it flame retardant, making it more malleable. And the issue with plastic is mainly those additive chemicals. That's one of the largest issues with them because we don't have regulations on those chemicals really. And we also don't really know or just starting to do the research.

Jessica (04:00)
Yeah.

Mm.

Mm -hmm.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (04:18)
There's been research out for 30 years now, but people are finally waking up to it and realizing there are these huge issues with it. Some of those issues include increased cancer rates for people in production sites, increased cancer rates for children, early onset puberty in children. And then all those are linked to something called endocrine disruption. Endocrine, the endocrine system.

Jessica (04:31)
Hmm.

Talk about that. Yeah, it's important. Mm -hmm.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (04:42)
is basically your hormone system in your body is the easiest way to put it. And most people think hormones puberty, but hormones control everything they're linked to. Yeah. And without that systems thrown out of whack, your whole body should be thrown out of whack.

Jessica (04:49)
Not just that, everything, every single system.

Totally.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (04:58)
And somebody described it as like, when plastic breaks down, it becomes microplastic. And that's when it starts to get truly, truly dangerous for human health in particular. Um, and they described it as, you know, plastic is the spaghetti and then the plasticizers and added chemicals are the sauce essentially. Um, while they're separated first, once you combine the two, they're inseparable altogether. And when they break down,

Jessica (05:08)
Mm -hmm.

Okay.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (05:27)
They're more easily ingestible by us.

Jessica (05:29)
Okay, yeah, so consuming it because, they're drinking out of a plastic water bottle or other ways too. Let's talk about that.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (05:36)
So that's kind of one of the larger issues. So yes, if you are drinking out of a plastic water bottle, you are going to be ingesting more plastic right there. I believe it's 250 ,000 particles of plastic in a single water bottle.

Jessica (05:46)
Yes.

Mm -hmm.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (05:52)
there's basically three kinds of plastic. There's macroplastic. So what you can see, I think I have a reusable water bottle. This is a macroplastic. I can see it. Microplastic is five millimeters down to the mic size. So pretty tiny. You can see those plates, those nurdles. And then you have nanoplastic, which is microscopic And then it continues to break down even further.

Jessica (06:02)
Okay, got it.

Yeah. Mm -hmm.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (06:20)
or not even break down, but just get smaller and smaller down to, we don't know when it stops yet. We just know that it just keeps getting to tinier and tinier pieces.

Jessica (06:25)
Right.

Yeah, and it doesn't ever go away, right? Is that what they're finding now?

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (06:33)
Yeah, so the, initially we thought it of like, oh, it's breaking down. It takes a lot of breakdown, but you know, it's disappearing eventually. Right. Whatever. We're not to worry about it. And then we started looking into the waterways and it was like, oh no, it's just dispersed more easily. Now it's not just broken down and just disappears. It's just disperses throughout. And that's kind of where we are ingesting it from.

Jessica (06:43)
Right. Yeah.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (07:00)
So while yeah, you are consuming some through water bottles and higher concentrations, it is also in all of our waterways and all of our food, which is a huge issue, as well as you're breathing it in constantly because it's small enough to be lifted up by the air and just floating around in our dust.

Jessica (07:05)
Mm -hmm.

I'm sure that they haven't even really scratched the surface as to, the science catching up with how plastics are involved with people's health issues. I mean, how much do you know about that?

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (07:29)
Yeah. Yeah. So there's been evidence of the health issues related to plastics since the early 1990s. You have Dr. Pete Myers, who's been studying the endocrine disruption issue for years now, but no one really cared. It was kind of the issue. And then also there's just a huge gap. You know,

Jessica (07:39)
Mm -hmm.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (07:54)
of knowledge. So you have scientists researching it, but how many people are going out and reading scientific journals or how many news media sites are going to pick up one scientific journal published by the University of Rhode Island, which is a great, you know, great school, great publication, but it's not, you know, a sexy material. It's not a sexy story to be like, look, hormone disruption caused by this material that we are forced to use in our everyday

Jessica (08:20)
yeah, exactly. And when you say forced to use, it's so true because everything we end up with in our hands as consumers is either plastic itself or it's a packaged, you know, something in plastic and yeah, so it's very unintentional. But we're contributing to the problem every day and it's not even part of our awareness that, it's,

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (08:21)
Yeah.

Jessica (08:47)
doing all of this damage to our own health and to the planet? And can we talk a little bit more about, what does that mean for the environment that all of this is ending up in the water? And what does that mean for the future of the planet? Really?

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (09:00)
Yeah, of course. So there's three parts to it. So there's something called the triple planetary crisis. We have pollution, biodiversity loss, and climate change. Plastic encompasses all three of those. So currently plastic only makes up 3 .2 % of global emissions every year of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. That's projected to at least triple by 2040.

Jessica (09:07)
Yeah.

Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Wow.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (09:30)
as we see a shift from the petrochemical producers and the fossil fuel companies from being like, look, we have this great fuel source for our cars, but as we switch to, you know, renewable materials, renewable energy sources, we're like, oh, well, our cars won't fuel it. So the petrochemical companies don't want to lose any money. So what they're doing is producing more plastic. So we're gonna have higher emissions there. And then with that, we're gonna have higher output of plastic, which is contributing to the pollution issue.

Jessica (09:49)
Mm -hmm. Oh my gosh.

Yeah.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (10:00)
I guarantee the most common piece of trash you see on the ground is plastic. Cigarette butts are by piece, I believe the largest, you know, by count, the largest number of litter that you see. five trillion cigarette butts are introduced into the environment every year

Jessica (10:18)
people probably don't even know plastic is in that. Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (10:21)
Yes, it's made up of a natural sounding material called cellulose acetate. Cellulose acetate, oh look, cellulose, cell, must be made from a tree. That's what I thought for years.

Jessica (10:34)
Yeah, you hear that and that's what you think. It's very cleverly named.

Yes, one more reason.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (10:40)
I'm a wealth of terrible knowledge and I'm considered a bummer in the office because people are like, what funfacts did you pick up today?

Jessica (10:45)
Ha ha ha.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (10:47)
But the final point of the final contributing terribleness of plastic is the biodiversity loss. So the biodiversity loss in our environment. Everybody knows about the macroplastics that we see. So those are the pieces of plastic you can see, you can hold, you know, clogging up fish, clogging up seabirds.

Jessica (10:52)
Yes.

Yes.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (11:08)
Everybody's seen the picture of the turtle with a straw on its nose or a seahorse holding a plastic q -tip. So those are killing the animals, you know, straight out.

Jessica (11:11)
Mm -hmm. Right.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (11:19)
They also, when plastic is broken down, they tend to bioaccumulate. So when they are a microplastic or a nanoplastic, they'll be eaten by tiny, almost plankton -like things called dinoflagellates. It's basically just like, it looks like under a microplastic it looks like a pincer.

Jessica (11:19)
-hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Yeah.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (11:35)
and I'll eat just a small, nerdle of plastic, which is just a tiny little round piece of plastic. And then, you know, a fish comes through, eats a bunch of those. Those plastics are now clogging up the fish through its digestive system and throughout its muscle tissue. And then we come through, we eat the fish, ends up in us. We're also seeing die off rates due to fish consuming massive amounts of plastic. And we're, it's pretty difficult to analyze the actual health effects of fish.

Jessica (11:40)
Mm -hmm.

Yeah.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (12:05)
So I'm sure if we run a study around the health effects of fish, we're going to find that they're not as healthy as they used to be because of the amount of plastic they're consuming and the amount of chemicals they're consuming because of it. There's a recent thing and they're calling it plastiosis, I believe is the term to describe some condition in seabirds that were consuming large amounts of plastic being their mental state was just not the same as it used to be. They weren't able to concentrate, weren't able to fly as well. And they just had all these

Jessica (12:14)
Right.

Hmm.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (12:35)
underlying health issues that weren't around 80 years ago.

Jessica (12:39)
Wow, that's crazy. And so we're really scratching the surface on the effects in the environment and in us really is the bottom line. Right. And so in addition to all of these impacts, I'd like to discuss a little bit about the other environmental tolls that it takes to produce plastic, like the strain that it puts on other natural resources to produce it, to ship it, to get it

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (12:50)
Yeah.

Jessica (13:07)
to consumers.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (13:09)
Yeah, so I mean, you have the output during the production of your emitting these tots of chemicals into both the air and into the water that's next to these facilities. So the most affected communities, the ones we're seeing the first traces of these increased cancer rates is the frontline communities living right beside the production sites. They're typically black and brown, lower income communities as well that, you know, in the United States, especially, and I'm sure elsewhere can't afford.

health care as much so the death rates are also higher in these areas. I spoke to a colleague and a colleague spoke on a panel the other day about they she's from Detroit. She lived in Detroit and during COVID she saw an increase in death rates because COVID was ravishing the communities at the same time that their immune systems were falling apart because of the production of these chemicals in their areas.

Jessica (13:43)
Mm -hmm. Yeah.

So that's a contributing factor to the areas where it's produced in addition to the resources, it's also impacting human health in those communities. So yeah, that's, I think, something that isn't talked about nearly enough. There's not enough awareness around that. it's like one thing after another. It's layer upon layer upon layer.

when we as consumers end up with plastic and if we have the availability to recycle it, you know, let's talk about that because we're trying to be good citizens. But I know that it's not as recyclable as we were, we are being led to believe.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (14:38)
Okay.

Yeah, unfortunately, we were all convinced by industry members that, you know, recycling was to be the savior. Recycling was a great thing. And it's just not recycling is extremely difficult with plastic because of all of the different chemicals that we talked about. You can have, you recycle certain plastics that you know what's in them and that's it. If you don't know what's in them, you can't recycle them. And there's 16 ,000, at least different chemicals in plastic.

Jessica (15:12)
Mm -hmm. And that's it.

Mm -hmm.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (15:20)
And not many of them have been studied or observed. And then the majority of them cannot be processed or recycled in a traditional way that we think of.

Jessica (15:25)
Sure.

So those just end up in a landfill for God only knows how long

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (15:34)
incinerated

Jessica (15:35)
Yeah, so it's not easy to get rid of the hard stuff that can't go in your bin, the stuff that's going in your bin. There's a lot of news right now. Around 90 % of plastics are not being recycled and we're talking like single use stuff that, you know, I guess has that label that says you can put me in a bin.

Um, and so can we talk about that? Because I think that I know a lot of very well intentioned mothers who are cleaning it, doing all the right things, doing the things to get it into the bin and hopefully it's being recycled. And so I know we've talked a little bit about the myth of the recycling on one end, but now like it's in the news and it's, something that people are getting very frustrated about.

and they don't understand how is this happening? I'm putting it in my bins, getting picked up. what's the disconnect? How is this happening to the stuff that can be recycled?

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (16:28)
Yeah.

Yeah, and something I'd like to reiterate is it's not the consumer's fault. Like we were told, we were told forever. Yeah, it's not the consumer's fault. What we need is a call for more reusability and just more transparency. If we're to continue to use plastic, we need to cut down on the amount of chemicals used one because the majority of them are toxic. We need to transition away from plastic and single use plastic where we can, especially where we can, because if we just cut out.

Jessica (16:34)
No, absolutely not. We're trying our best, right? Yeah.

Right.

Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (16:58)
single use plastic, we can reduce our plastic production by 50%. Just not right. And 50 % of that 50%, so 50 % of single use plastic is packaging. That isn't necessary. I don't need an orange that is wrapped in plastic. But for all the parents that are really trying their best, like continue to try to recycle just make sure it's organized, but also just try to do more.

Jessica (17:02)
That's huge. That's huge.

Right.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (17:25)
reuse, just try to find materials that are more reusable, whether that's a glass bottle or just a reusable glass bottle that you can fill up with your cleaners

Jessica (17:26)
Mm -hmm.

and so I guess it's just a matter of now that we know more about why plastic is not good for us and our health and the health of the planet and the future health of the environment, which takes care of us because we don't get clean water and clean soil for growing food and clean air from plastic. We get it from...

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (17:59)
Right.

Jessica (18:00)
the planet from Mother Nature. the topic now to talk about is what do we do to avoid it? You know, like you said, reuse, but there's a whole, I think just hard, there's a lot of greenwashing happening and there's...

these refillable pouches for your cleaners and your shampoo and their plastic. And so you think you're doing something good by buying a refillable, but this thing has a lot in it and I'm gonna refill my shampoo or my soap or whatever four times with this one, which is better, but it's not eliminating use of plastics. So what...

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (18:26)
Yeah.

Jessica (18:47)
types of things do you do besides make your own cleaner and reuse that bottle and use a water bottle for your water? What types of things do you do?

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (18:57)
So the types of things we do is we try to do shopping for local farmers markets that aren't wrapping everything in plastic as much as we can. Grocery shopping is the most frustrating thing when you're trying to cut down on plastic because everything is wrapped in plastic. You'll open a container that didn't use a plastic, you open it up, well, it's pancake batter or something, and you'll be like, oh, now there's a plastic bag that doesn't need to be in there, hasn't been in there for 100 years. Why are they introducing it now?

Jessica (19:04)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yes.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (19:27)
So it is frustrating, but if you buy local and if you try to go shopping at a local farmer's market, if you can, that is one way. We also use, we try to use shampoo bars, which don't contain any plastic. So a lot of them will come in a cardboard wrapper rather than a plastic wrapper. So that cuts down on our plastic use there, as well as, you know, bars of soap. A lot of the times come in a cardboard container rather than a plastic container. A lot of the times they can be.

Jessica (19:33)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Right. You don't have to have the soap that's coming out of a squeeze plastic bottle that's liquid. Yes, little things like that can be huge.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (19:58)
Yeah, same thing with body soaps. Yeah, little things like that can be huge. They can also save you some money because you're just getting more bang for your buck, which is I know is always what I focus on rather than using, you know, plastic wrap to cover your food up. You can use beeswax wraps or even tin foil. Tin foil is better or aluminum. I just use aluminum foil. I always say tin foil. I don't know the exact difference. I'm sure there's some generational thing

Jessica (20:06)
Yeah, totally.

Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Ha ha ha.

Yeah. And also, I've used parchment paper as well to wrap things. It's totally fine. I cut a lemon in half, don't need the other half. You can just wrap it in that with a rubber band around it. It's, yep, super easy. But it's like, you have to learn. You have to really like think about it. And there's like a learning to it. I'd say

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (20:40)
Exactly, yeah.

Jessica (20:50)
it's taken me seven years since learning about it and trying really hard and doing research and like trial and error to get my household plastic dependence down to nearly zero. I mean, I'm not perfect and it happens. at one point we were pretty close to zero waste and I was like, Oh, wow. There's a lot of things we're not eating.

because it's in plastic packaging, but we kind of need to eat. So yeah, that's the hardest part, I think, is food. And everything else is hard because it just takes time to get past some of that misleading labeling that's out there. And also, I'm looking at ingredients that are chemical -free and...

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (21:13)
Right.

Yeah, yeah.

Jessica (21:38)
good for the planet and sustainable as well as sustainable sourcing, you know, for the people who are making the products for us. So I look at a lot of different layers now and it started with chemicals, then it went to plastic packaging or materials, and now it's like all of that. It's kind of overwhelming and a little confusing. Can you talk a little bit about green washing that you have encountered?

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (22:03)
Yeah, so it is confusing and it is frustrating and it can be a little bit of a pain, especially when you're first starting out and being like, oh, I want to be good. I want to live better. I don't want to use palm oil. I don't want to use all these other things. You know, Oreos had palm oil in them. Something stupid like that. And it's just greenwashing has become so prevalent and it's something we worry about, you know, as Earthday .org too is corporations taking over Earthday and saying we're doing all these great things.

Jessica (22:18)
Right, everything.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (22:32)
where these sustainable companies were celebrating Earth Day. And you don't talk to them, you're like, all right, what are you doing to celebrate Earth Day? Like, are you cutting your carbon emissions? Like, are you not using plastic in your facilities? Like, we just said we're celebrating Earth Day. What do you, what else do you want us to do? We're like, it's not the point of Earth Day. But a lot of the frustrated greenwashing comes down to that little triangle you mentioned earlier, the little recycling triangle. That's thrown on every piece of plastic now.

Jessica (22:52)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (23:02)
even if it's not recyclable. The other big one we see is when something says it's compostable, especially bioplastics, they are compostable in a very certain set of conditions at an industrial site, not that you can just throw it away into a normal trash can and it'll break down in the landfill. It has to go to a certain spot and that's where it can be broken down in a proper way.

Jessica (23:02)
Hmm. Hmm.

Yeah. Mm -hmm.

Sure.

Mm -hmm.

when you were speaking, I was thinking Earth Day is coming up and it's planet versus plastics.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (23:36)
Yes.

Jessica (23:37)
And tell us a little bit about what your particular initiative and what you do as director of the end plastics initiative of Earth Day organization, because it's a year long job. It's not just one day of the year.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (23:56)
Yeah, so we picked our theme very deliberately this year. One, because Placid is a huge issue. And two, we're currently going through negotiations for what's called the UN Plastic Treaty or the Global Plastic Treaty, depending on how lawyer -y you want to talk about it. I'm not a lawyer. I'm not a scientist. I'm just a person that's good at communicating these issues to the general public. So part of my job is to go to these UN negotiating meetings and just figure out...

Jessica (24:01)
Yeah.

Okay.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (24:26)
what they're talking about and then made suggestions on the different options to have the most comprehensive treaty that we can get. So I hear from people all over the world. I hear from people in my local community about like, what do you want to see? Do you want to see a reduction in production of plastic? And in the US or in the world, it's like 82 % do and then they, 87 % of people want to see a ban on single use plastic. So, you know, majority of people want to see this happening.

Jessica (24:46)
Yeah.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (24:53)
Um, so my job is to go with teams of lawyers and scientists and then go, not argue, but push country delegates to propose the most comprehensive and the best treaty for everybody in the world. Um, and then my job after that or during those meetings is to then take everything I absorbed through those 14 hour days of just sitting in a room and listening to people argue over the meaning of source or the meaning of what rule means.

Jessica (25:08)
Hmm.

Oh my gosh. No.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (25:23)
It could be really fascinating, it could be really cool, all the lawyers really deep down because they're like, wow, the way she's arguing is great and I'm like, are we gonna talk about substance at all today? Are we gonna argue over the words again? And then I take that and I condense it down and just make it so like, hey, these are the updates, these are what's going on, this is why you should care, especially.

Jessica (25:36)
Oh my gosh. Yeah.

So how is that going?

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (25:49)
It's going. It's going. We're hopeful.

Jessica (25:53)
Yeah, I'm sure it's an ongoing battle that's going to be going and going. Now, why are there so many lawyers that need to be involved in this if 83 % of the world wants this? let's speak a little bit about that.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (26:10)
So, yeah, 83 % of the world does want it. 83 % of the world does not control the money, unfortunately. So what happens is we get a lot of industry people coming in now and pushing certain countries, certain plastic -producing countries, certain petroleum -producing countries to be like, hey, plastic's great. Look how much money your country's making from it. Look how wealthy this class is because of...

Jessica (26:18)
Unfortunately, yes. Yeah.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (26:39)
fossil fuels and because of the plastic from fossil fuels. Like, don't you want to make sure that that doesn't hurt your bottom line as a country? Don't you want to like, you know this works, you know this is your moneymaker, why move away from it? So the lawyers come in and the scientists come in to be like, look, there's all this evidence that it's, you know, costing us in the US alone, it costs us $250 billion on our healthcare system, just on our healthcare system a year.

because of the issues arise from plastic. That's in the US, that is just healthcare. That doesn't include the cleanups, that doesn't include the recycling facilities, that doesn't include the landfills, strictly just healthcare. So globally, it's a trillion dollar issue, trillions of dollars of an issue annually. So the.

Jessica (27:19)
Mmm.

And so it seems as though it should be an easy decision to make.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (27:27)
should be, but with anything, it's just super complex. So the lawyers come in and they make sure the language is A, you know, gonna cover what it's one to cover and B, to hold those country delegates and those other industry and lobbyists accountable for what they're doing and just be like, hey, I'm calling you on it. Like you're saying that it's gonna save us money, but in reality it's gonna do this. And they also write out the framework for, you know, financial mechanisms.

Jessica (27:31)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (27:55)
as well as the general rules behind it. You know, they looked and made sure that everybody's included in the conversation. So we have informal waste pickers is a huge, huge, huge part of our waste system. And a lot of people aren't aware of that. So informal waste pickers are people that are essentially coming and picking up trash and selling it to the landfills or they're just organizing the trash to make sure that it's going in the proper places, but they don't get, you know, any benefits from it. That's just.

They have to do it. It's their living. It's what they do to make money.

Jessica (28:30)
And you're talking in other countries or our country as well. Okay.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (28:33)
Yeah, our country as well. So that's another issue is people aren't realizing like, this isn't just a international issue. Like the United States isn't exempted from this. Like we have waste pickers in the United States that go through and they pick up trash and then they try to sell the trash to landfills and that's how they make their money. And they're on the front lines of absorbing these chemicals and they're digging through other people's waste to do this.

Jessica (28:47)
Mm -hmm.

Okay.

Yeah.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (29:02)
I talked to a woman from Portland named Barbie and she's like every time I see her at one of these negotiations, she's like, you need to make sure that, you know, waste pickers and informal waste pickers are mentioned in this treaty. It's extremely important that they're there. Like we are a huge sector of people that no one talks about.

Jessica (29:19)
I guess there's just so many layers to it. It sounds like your job is going to be secure for many years to come. I mean, unfortunately, right? Yeah, there's a lot to be done still and it sounds like, the bottom line is money is king and everything else doesn't matter. People's health doesn't matter, the health of the planet

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (29:28)
Unfortunately.

And that's not to say some countries aren't trying. Some countries are trying extremely hard to, you know, have the most comprehensive treaty and to make sure that it's truly benefiting their people. You have, you know, the group of African countries are trying really hard. The countries that are Pacific Island developing states are trying their hardest because they're the ones taking in the majority of this plastic that's floating around in our oceans, as well as countries in Latin America that are, you know, trying to...

Jessica (30:02)
Yes.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (30:09)
do the best they can to mitigate their plastic problem while also caring about their citizens. The bigger issue is that, like I said, money has so much influence and, you know, petroleum is just liquid gold. So it's impossible for them to see past that.

Jessica (30:24)
Yeah.

Yeah, it's unfortunate, but now that we know, we can feel a little bit more empowered to make different choices as consumers because we can. And that there are enough things out there to be able to choose from, luckily. There's a lot of amazing people out there who are doing right by their company and their products in every way,

these choices empower you, so don't do it from a place of fear or worry. That's a place where I was at in the beginning, worried about health and fearful about.

the health of my son. so that was sort of the place it came from. But then I realized that that's a very unhealthy place to live. That stress that it causes is not good. That, you know, constantly stressing about the plastic is not good for your health either. So I really had to take a moment to take a deep breath and step back and just be like, okay, I can do what I can do when I end up with it. I'm not going to stress about it. Rather,

the reason I'm doing it is for the health of the planet and for the future of the environment that supports our health and wellness and life. So I really just had to shift focus so that it wouldn't be a very like heavy gloom and doom like, you know, stressful situation because it can get that way I think, especially when.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (31:43)
Yeah.

Jessica (31:50)
it's just so hard to, you know, it's like everything you do and everything you buy as a consumer is in plastic or made of plastic. And it can get that way very quickly if you are worried and fearful about it. And so that's one reason why I decided to make this podcast is to not only raise awareness about these issues and speak with.

wonderful people like you who are out there, boots on the ground, doing this work for us, for the planet, and to raise awareness amongst everyone as to why these problems that we are hearing about are important and

I want to just empower people to be able to make good choices without the stress and without the worry and the fear, I also am going to be interviewing so many people who are...

making products that you can buy with ease and just know that they're good for everybody. So that's what I'm doing on my end to combat the plastic that I think we as consumers just don't want anymore.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (32:58)
Yeah. Yeah. And that's, that's kind of what the best thing, one of the easiest things that consumers can do is just kind of like, I don't want to spend money on this and then just go force the companies to transition away from it. I'm tired of using all this packaging, I'm no longer to buy your product. Eventually it may seem small, but you get enough people together and you get enough people to kind of boycott that product. They're going to stop buying it.

Jessica (33:19)
Right. And it took a village to get to this point where it's this big of a huge problem. And even though it was unintentional on our behalf as consumers who are just now finding out it's not good, And now that we know, we can make new choices, I think. So moving forward, do you have any things that you would like to share?

about Earth Day and how they can support Earth Day organization or your end plastics initiative.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (33:53)
Yeah, just be sure to go to Earth Day .org and kind of look into our toolkits as well as reports we're releasing. We have a map that lays out all the activities going on all over the world. So if you're looking for a tree plant in your local area or you're planning a tree plant in your local area, you can add it to our map. If you want to do a cleanup, we have the Great Global Cleanup Volunteer Program. So that can hook you up with a local cleanup, the cleanup people are some of the friendliest people in the world. So I doubt they'll say no to another volunteer coming along. And just...

Jessica (34:21)
Awesome.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (34:22)
doing small things like that, just get outside for Earth Day as well.

Jessica (34:27)
Yes, be outside and in nature and talk about it. I think also just talking about it with your friends and your family is a really good way to raise awareness and get the word out.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (34:41)
Yeah, I like to think that my dad was the first person I converted to not using single -use plastic bottles, because I bought him a reusable water bottle, and he's been using it ever since. And he was like, I got down on my plastic use quite a bit. I was like, good, good.

Jessica (34:55)
Yeah, it saves a lot of money in the long run. People don't even realize that they're spending so much money on these things, you know, and you really don't need to be. Well, thank you very much, Aiden, for joining us and for all of your wisdom, sharing everything that you know and all of the research that you've done. I really appreciate your time.

Aidan Charron - EARTHDAY.ORG (34:57)
Yeah.

Thank you so much for having me and I really appreciate it. Happy Earth Day.

Jessica (35:21)
Happy Earth Day.