In the beginning of the quarter, I started listening to a podcast series on Spotify called the Age of Plastic. Episodes ranged from The Future of Food Packaging, Plastic Myths, Climate Change and COVID-19, and also covered interesting topics such as how wine helps protect the ocean. It’s been a great way to learn more about plastic and how we can do better when it comes to reducing our usage. One interesting episode that I enjoyed was Plastic Myths published on April 16 with Amy Nguyen who runs an Instagram account called @sustainableandsocial. She turns scholarly articles into Instagram posts that are much more digestible than reading hundreds of pages worth of research.
As an example, they discussed whether recycled synthetic fabric is the best sustainable choice and talked about how recycled polyester garments are thought of as the most sustainable garments, but in fact they can actually are more energy and water intensive. The belief is that they can be recycled as many times as possible, but in truth, most of the time they aren’t able to be recycled. Most of the times they aren’t able to decompose and can actually end up in the landfill anyway.
This particular episode is about 40 minutes long and is a great listen whether you’re driving home from work or school or playing it in the background. The series recently ended but there are plenty of episodes to tune into.
