dannyhennesy posted a photo:
...as I said earlier I missed out on the Fright Knight theme, I started frequenting cafés, pubs and clubs... but a small AFOL was still around in me when I visited friends with Lego I was always ready to play with their kids (and their Lego...
Peace and Noise!
/Mushroombrain from the brick-block
Each year, over 11 million metric tons of plastic end up in the ocean, which is like dumping a garbage truck full of plastic every minute. For years, we’ve known that marine animals eat this debris, but no one had measured exactly how much plastic it takes to kill them. Dr. Erin Murphy, who leads ocean plastics research at the Ocean Conservancy, is the principal author of a major study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Her team analyzed more than 10,000 necropsies from 95 species of seabirds, sea turtles, and marine mammals worldwide. Earth911’s summary describes this critical study, which found lethal plastic thresholds that could change how we view the plastic crisis.
The study measured how deadly different types of plastic are to sea life, which makes the results especially useful for policymakers. Each finding suggests a clear policy action, such as banning balloon releases like Florida has done, banning plastic bags as in California’s SB 54, or improving how fishing gear is marked and recovered. Still, Erin points out that focusing only on certain plastics is not enough. Her team found that even small amounts of any plastic can be dangerous. As she says, “At the end of the day, there is too much plastic in the ocean,” and we need big changes at every stage of the plastics life cycle, from production to disposal.
There’s encouraging evidence that interventions work. Communities in Hawaii conducted large-scale beach cleanups and saw the Hawaiian monk seal population rebound. A study published in Science confirmed that bag bans reduce plastic on beaches by 25 to 47%. And Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup, now in its 40th year, removed more than a million plastic bags from beaches last year. These actions address a parallel crisis in human health that is building from the same pollution source. Most of the microplastics now found in humans and around the world began as the same macroplastics that are killing puffins and turtles. As Erin puts it, “I do view this all as part of the same crisis.”
You can read the full study at pnas.org and learn more about Ocean Conservancy’s work at oceanconservancy.org.
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Editor’s Note: This episode originally aired on February 9, 2026.
Mitch Ratcliffe 0:00
Hello, good morning, good afternoon or good evening, wherever you are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society, and I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation today.
We’re going to talk about ocean plastics. Every year, more than 11 million metric tons of plastic enters the ocean. That’s the equivalent of dumping a garbage truck worth of plastic every minute. And we’ve known for decades that marine animals eat this debris. But until recently, no one had systematically quantified how much plastic it actually takes to kill them.
And the answer is, it turns out, disturbing. Less than three sugar cubes worth of plastic increases an Atlantic puffin’s risk of dying by 90%. A loggerhead turtle reaches the same threshold at about two baseballs worth, and for a harbor porpoise, a mass of plastic roughly the size of a soccer ball can kill. More concerning, at the 50% mortality level — that is, where half the animals who consume the plastic die — the volumes that kill them shrink to less than one sugar cube for a puffin and half a baseball for a loggerhead turtle.
Our guest today, Dr. Erin Murphy, is the manager of ocean plastics research at the Ocean Conservancy, and lead author of the study that produced these findings, published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Her team’s research analyzed more than 10,000 necroscopies across 95 species of seabirds, sea turtles, and marine mammals worldwide. It’s the most comprehensive assessment yet of how different plastic types — soft film like bags, hard fragments, synthetic rubber from balloons, and abandoned fishing gear — translate into mortality across marine life.
The findings matter beyond ocean conservation. A 2024 study in the New England Journal of Medicine found microplastics embedded in human arterial plaque of cardiovascular surgery patients, and those with detectable plastics were 4.5 times more likely to suffer a heart attack, stroke, or death in the following three years. The same polymers killing seabirds and sea turtles — polyethylene, PVC, and their chemical additives — are found in human blood, lungs, liver, and placenta.
Dr. Murphy’s research offers policymakers what they’ve been asking for: science-based data to inform decisions about which plastics to regulate and how aggressively to act. Nearly half the animals in her study that had ingested plastics were threatened or endangered species, and with global negotiations on a binding plastic treaty continuing and extended producer responsibility programs expanding across the United States, the timing of this research could not be more relevant.
So we’ll talk with Erin about what her team found, why balloon fragments are amongst the deadliest items for seabirds, how fishing gear became the leading killer of marine animals, and what her research means for the humans who share a planet and a body burden with these species. You can read the full study at pnas.org and find Ocean Conservancy’s work at oceanconservancy.org. Ocean Conservancy is all one word, no space, no dash. Oceanconservancy.org.
So how much plastic is too much for wildlife and for humans? Let’s find out right after this brief commercial break.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Welcome to the show, Erin. How you doing today?
Erin Murphy 3:44
I’m doing well. Thank you so much for having me.
Mitch Ratcliffe 3:46
Well, thank you for joining me, and for this really important research. It was a fascinating read. We wrote it up, and I’m really pleased that you would join us to talk about it today. So can you explain what made this study different from previous attempts to quantify plastics’ lethality to marine life?
Erin Murphy 4:01
Yeah. So first, I’ll specify that we focus specifically on macroplastics, which are just plastics that are bigger than five millimeters in length. There’s more research on how microplastics, which are these smaller plastics, can harm animals, because scientists can study these in laboratory settings. Of course, it’s not feasible or ethical to feed animals like whales, sea turtles, or seabirds large plastic items and study what happens to them in the lab. And so as scientists, we really have to depend on opportunistically collecting dead animals in the environment and looking at what’s inside them to understand what’s happening with these bigger plastics.
And so previous research has looked at these sorts of threats as well, but they focused on fewer species, on smaller geographic areas, and they didn’t differentiate by plastic type, like hard plastics versus soft plastics. So they were really important for laying the groundwork for our larger study. But we were actually able to look globally and look at a broader set of species, and also differentiate by these different plastic types and by species size as well, which allowed us to get at some of these species-level understandings.
Mitch Ratcliffe 5:13
So the unfortunate truth is, we are feeding these animals this material by throwing it all away. That is a stark way of starting this conversation. And you use a lot of illustrative examples, like three sugar cubes worth of macroplastic can kill a puffin. How did you arrive at those kind of volume-based comparisons, and why is translating your data into those relatable measures important?
Erin Murphy 5:37
Yeah, so when we did this in the study, we actually looked at the influence of volume based on the animal’s body length. So we reported all of this as a deadly volume per centimeter of body length. But telling people 0.098 centimeters cubed per centimeter doesn’t really mean anything to them. And honestly, when I first got those centimeter-based thresholds, it didn’t mean that much to me.
And so we thought that choosing some iconic species that people could picture would help, but still saying, you know, three centimeters cubed of plastic kills a puffin, or 220 centimeters cubed of plastic kills a loggerhead, doesn’t really paint a picture in people’s heads, and three sugar cubes or a baseball are much easier to picture.
So we chose to do this because I think when people can picture these items, they can really understand that volume, and people do use plastic every single day, and so having volumes like that to compare to allows them to think about how little plastic can kill animals, especially when we compare it to how much we produce or use globally.
Mitch Ratcliffe 6:42
Can you put in context how long it takes for a puffin, for instance, to eat that much plastic? What do they eat in a day or a week generally?
Erin Murphy 6:52
Yeah, that’s a great question, and it’s actually the next step in our research. So to estimate the risk that something poses to wildlife, we have to understand two things. One is your question: how likely are they to be exposed to this threat? The second is, if they are exposed to it, how likely is it to harm them? And so this research really focused entirely on that second piece.
But to fully understand risk, we have to dig deeper into the first part, and that’s what we call likelihood of exposure. And so for puffins specifically, there’s not a lot of research, but we do know a lot about what species are eating, and we know that different species are more or less likely to eat plastic based on where they live, what they eat, and how they feed. So we’re really excited to be working with some really amazing researchers over the next few years to think about how we can connect exposure for these animals to the lethality and understand risk in a more comprehensive way.
Mitch Ratcliffe 7:48
I want to get a sense of what you found. You mentioned in the study that one whale can have a three-gallon bucket in its stomach. What’s the range of objects that you encountered as you were doing the research?
Erin Murphy 8:00
Yeah, this was pretty unbelievable to me, actually, some of the things that we saw in animals, and I’ll just give a few items that stood out to me. But there’s many more. Part of an oar handle from a plastic — or a plastic belt, webbing from the back of a lawn chair, a koozie, rubber pencil topper, fake Easter grass, ice cream tubs, single-use coffee pods, bungee cords, tons of different types of gear, ropes, nets, fishing line.
But I’ll just illustrate kind of how dramatic this can look with one example that really stood out to me, on a sperm whale that researchers in Spain reported on. Sperm whales feed very deep in the ocean, and they use echolocation to find their food. So it may be particularly hard for them to tell plastic from prey. And in this case, it seems like an entire greenhouse washed into the ocean, and this sperm whale happened upon it. It had plastic film cover material for a greenhouse in its stomach, along with a flower pot, a piece of a hose, a plastic burlap sack, plastic craft, and plastic spray bottle, and even fake plastic mulch in its stomach. And unfortunately, this was one of the individuals that did lose its life to plastic ingestion.
Mitch Ratcliffe 9:23
That’s — I mean, that’s shocking in so many ways. You found that one in five animals had plastic in their digestive tract when they died. Was this percentage higher or lower, and in the context of your previous answer, more or less shocking than you expected?
Erin Murphy 9:45
Yeah, I think, you know, it was higher than I expected. And it’s funny, because all of our research was based on previous research. It was a meta-analysis. So we collected data from existing literature. And I’d seen some, you know, similar numbers then reported at more local scales. But I think it still really shocked me to look at so many studies and see, you know, for sea turtles, that was one in two. Sea turtles had plastic in their gut. And for seabirds, one in three.
And when thinking about that at a global scale, that felt higher to me than it should be, and I suppose it’s because it is higher than it should be. These really are high ingestion rates. And for some of these individuals, the bulk amount of plastic in their gut, like that sperm whale, is particularly shocking.
Mitch Ratcliffe 10:35
I want to step back just for a second and talk about how long this kind of research has been going on. Because when I was a child, oceanography was very much in its infancy. How aggressively are we trying to understand what we’re doing to the ocean environment at this point, and where do you think we are in terms of the long arc of beginning to reach that understanding?
Erin Murphy 10:58
Yeah, I don’t know if we’ll ever fully understand it, which is one of the things that makes studying the ocean so interesting. It’s so complex and vast. But, you know, we’ve come a long way, and for plastic pollution in particular, the ’70s was really when we started seeing those first reports of animals eating plastics. You know, and it’s been 50 years since then. Now we have evidence of plastic ingestion in more than 1,300 species, and we’re starting to be able to get at these really more complicated analyses that help us understand like the potential quantity that kills an animal, like this one, or what does that mean possibly for populations.
I think the thing that’s been really impressive in the last decade, though, is how much research has been done on plastics. In particular, 10 years ago, roughly, the first study came out by Jambeck et al. that gave us an idea of the amount of plastic that was getting into the environment. And since then, we have learned so much as a scientific community, and people are working really hard to try to understand what these vast amounts of ocean plastic mean for ecosystems, for human health, for fishing industries and other marine industries that really depend on a healthy ocean, and we’ve been doing a lot of research on how to address it. So I don’t think we’ll ever fully understand everything that we’re doing to the ocean, but I think we’re working hard as a scientific community to get there.
Mitch Ratcliffe 12:38
It’s really disturbing to think about, because plastic in the 1970s was really only — was 10 years into widespread use, and widespread compared to today is nothing, since half the plastic we’ve manufactured in history has been made since 2002. So it sounds like what we’re really delving into now is a real-time accounting of the damage that we’re doing. How do you as a scientist think about what your goal is in terms of bringing the consequences of our decisions back to the public so we can think about it?
Erin Murphy 13:11
Yeah, that’s why I feel very lucky to work with an organization like Ocean Conservancy. We conduct research that we know governments and decision makers need to help address these problems, and we have a policy team and a communications team that are really well trained on helping us bring this research to the decision makers.
And the type of research we’re doing here, in particular on risk assessments, is something that governments are really craving. They want to set science-based targets as they try to address plastic pollution, and part of that is understanding environmental thresholds that we should be aiming for to better protect marine wildlife, to better protect marine ecosystems.
And so when we do research like this, a big part is getting it into the literature, in this sense to the scientific community, but it’s also working with our policy team and our communications team to make sure the public hears about it, and to make sure that decision makers nationally and abroad hear about the work that we’re doing, and can use this to help inform science-based targets that they’re setting right now.
Mitch Ratcliffe 14:22
So one of the materials that you found was most dangerous is rubber, particularly from balloons. It emerged as especially deadly for seabirds, where you estimated that just six pea-sized pieces could create a 90% mortality rate. What’s happening physiologically with balloon fragments that make them so lethal?
Erin Murphy 14:45
Yeah, so if you think about the design of a balloon, they’re super stretchy, and they’re long and they’re thin, and even the fragments seem to have this shape. And so they get stuck at those junctures in the gastrointestinal tract, like between the stomach and the intestine. And the gut moves things along through these wave-like contractions. And it seems like these stretchy materials just kind of stretch with it, and so the gut just isn’t able to move them through as easily. And we see similar things for those plastic bags as well.
Mitch Ratcliffe 15:20
Well, you also point out that sea turtles appear to mistake plastic bags for jellyfish. Is there anything we could do in terms of the chemistry of soft plastics or the appearance of soft plastics to make them less attractive to sea life?
Erin Murphy 15:35
Yeah, I don’t know if there’s a way that we can make them less attractive that I know of. And it’s unfortunate, because we know there are a lot of plastic bags in the environment compared to other plastics. Every year, Ocean Conservancy organizes the International Coastal Cleanup, and plastic bags are consistently in the top 10 items we see most frequently.
That being said, we do know ways of keeping plastic bags out of the ocean and protecting turtles in that way. And so every year — or in this last year, during our Coastal Cleanup — we collected, or our partner organizations collected, more than 1 million bags off our beaches. So this is really important for helping protect ocean animals, because those bags are already very close to their environment, and by removing them from beaches, we prevent them from getting into the ocean.
We also know that plastic bag bans, like the policy that California just implemented, are very effective in reducing the threat that plastic bags pose to marine wildlife, and help by preventing them from getting into the environment in the first place. So there was a recent study published in Science that actually showed that communities that implement bag bans, whether that’s a city, a state, or a country, do meaningfully reduce the amount of plastic bags that end up on beaches by 25 to 47%. So that’s a really significant reduction, and just provides further evidence that we know how to address some of these threats. We have ways of measuring if policies are effective, and it’s really about preventing these bags from getting into the environment in the first place.
Mitch Ratcliffe 17:18
Another example of really short-term human thinking is the impact of fishing gear pollution. Can you talk a little about what you found in terms of what’s being tossed overboard by the boats that are hoping to treat the ocean as an ongoing resource and source of living?
Erin Murphy 17:36
Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of the fishing gear that’s lost is lost on accident. Fishing gear can be really expensive for fishermen. Like crab pots can cost thousands of dollars. And so these are very valuable resources for fishers, and they’re expensive to replace.
But unfortunately, one of the challenges with fishing in turbid and wavy environments around storms, especially with things that are set, is that some gear does get lost. And we did see interactions and ingestion of fishing gear by many of these animals. And partially that’s because gear attracts prey species. So we know that for some animals, they’re more likely to interact with fishing gear, and this isn’t just ingestion, but also being entangled in fishing gear, because, you know, that gear is still fishing. And for a lot of these bigger species, fish are their prey, and so they’re also being drawn to these devices, or this lost gear that might have their food in it.
Mitch Ratcliffe 18:44
And your study didn’t look at the external plastic lethality, it was only that which was consumed. So we don’t really fully understand what the consequences of, say, for instance, a net lost at sea is for the ocean yet? Or do we?
Erin Murphy 19:01
Yeah, we have — there’s some studies that have looked at this, but this is actually another study we’re working on. So one of the next papers we’re working on right now is looking at entanglement lethality, and that really will be important for understanding the impacts of plastic pollution together, because ingestion and entanglement, when we talk about these bigger plastics, are the two main threats that we see.
Mitch Ratcliffe 19:24
I feel like we’ve got our bearings and can have a really productive conversation. But folks, we’re going to take a quick commercial break. We’ll be right back.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Now, let’s get back to my discussion with the Ocean Conservancy’s Dr. Erin Murphy, who led a groundbreaking study about the lethal effects of macroplastics in sea life. Erin, nearly half the animals that you studied that had ingested plastics were already listed as threatened. Is plastic pollution accelerating extinction risk, and what species do you feel are most endangered?
Erin Murphy 20:03
Yeah, that’s a great question. Right now, there’s not a lot of research yet on population-level effects of plastic pollution, and our study is really helping build that information out. But it’s just very difficult to understand what’s happening to populations that often we have trouble studying in the first place.
Still, for many marine species, the IUCN Red List notes plastic pollution as a significant threat. Six out of seven sea turtle species are threatened. We saw really high ingestion rates for sea turtles. We know that 5% of the turtles in our data set died from plastic ingestion.
So I think there is a lot of evidence suggesting that this could be contributing to extinction risk. And there are some studies that look at very specific populations that we know are vulnerable, like the Hawaiian monk seal, that have found that plastic pollution is contributing to extinction risk.
And the hopeful piece in the Hawaiian monk seal case was actually that as communities started doing large-scale cleanup efforts in the Hawaiian Islands, they actually saw a rebound of that population. So again, just a reminder that even though we know that this is something that is posing a threat to marine species we really care about, it’s also evidence that targeted and effective intervention strategies can be really important in helping some of these species rebound.
Mitch Ratcliffe 21:34
That’s encouraging. So it isn’t as though we’re doomed, or that nature is doomed. We can intervene in our behavior today and make a change for the better in the future. How does the Ocean Conservancy encourage people to do that?
Erin Murphy 21:49
Yeah, so there was a study that we — some of us co-authored, and the Ocean Conservancy supported — that came out in 2020 that looked at what we would really need to do on a global scale to reduce plastic pollution in the ocean meaningfully enough to hit some of our potential targets. And in this case, we were thinking about just returning to 2010 annual leakage rates into the environment.
And what we found is that we really need sweeping change to our relationship with plastic and our waste management systems. And so we found that to achieve this goal, we would need a 40% reduction in plastic production globally. We would need waste management to reach levels of 98 to 99%, depending on the income of the country. And we would need, annually, 40% of waste that gets into the environment to then be cleaned up.
And at Ocean Conservancy, we really work on policy efforts in all three of those big buckets. And so we have the International Coastal Cleanup, but we also work on upstream policies with our policy teams at the sub-national, national, and international levels to try to work towards some of those goals of reducing plastic production and better managing the plastic waste that we do use.
Mitch Ratcliffe 23:10
You used the phrase “our relationship with plastic,” which is an interesting concept. In 2024, the New England Journal of Medicine reported that microplastics were found in human arterial plaque, and that resulted in much higher risk for cardiovascular events. Do you see what you’re studying as a parallel crisis, or the same crisis, just in a different species?
Erin Murphy 23:35
Yeah, I view that — you know, so they were looking specifically at microplastics, and we focused on macroplastics in this study. That being said, most microplastics that are in the environment are breaking off of these larger macroplastics. So in that sense, I do view this all as part of the same crisis, and I think we need to think about all of the harms that plastic materials are causing to human health, to animal health, and to sociocultural outcomes like our marine and terrestrial industries that are affected by plastic pollution, and we need to think about comprehensive policies that are addressing all of those harms.
Mitch Ratcliffe 24:17
Are there studies that are showing the same types of impacts from plastic in human and non-human species that we can use to start to tell the story in that same illustrative way that you did with the sugar cube analogy, so that people really take this seriously? I mean, the problem with our society is that we’re accustomed to throwing everything away.
Erin Murphy 24:40
Yeah, so there’s a lot of really great research that’s being done on microplastic exposure in other marine and aquatic organisms, and those are more similar to what’s happening in humans. But that human research, and the research on sort of sub-lethal microplastic risks — like the risks to cardiovascular systems, nervous system, gastrointestinal tracts — those are all pretty new, and so this body of research is really building, and I think we’re going to learn a lot in the next decade.
Mitch Ratcliffe 25:14
Do you see an acceleration of your ability to make those kinds of conclusions — well-grounded conclusions — emerging as a result of the advent of something like artificial intelligence? Are we at the dawn of a scientific revolution?
Erin Murphy 25:33
You know, that’s a good question. I don’t know in what ways AI will change the way that we’re doing research. Definitely, the rate at which we are producing research has increased. There’s more people working on these issues, and the scientific process is really just about iterating as a community and building on what we know. And so I think what we’re seeing here is a large-scale interest in this plastics issue and a big concern by the scientific community and by the public.
And as we learn more, we can answer more complicated questions. And so I was only able to do my work because over the last five decades, people have been studying what plastic is in the animals and reporting on that, and we have thousands of published papers now that tell us about what animals are consuming. And each one of those papers is really important in producing this bigger picture. And as we have, you know, similarly more studies on these sort of individual systems and humans, using model organisms like mice, we will be able to do the same sort of thing of painting this bigger picture for humans as well.
Mitch Ratcliffe 26:48
So as we get this higher-resolution view of what we’re doing, both to the planet and to ourselves, how does Ocean Conservancy potentially use those storytelling opportunities to get us to think about things like plastic bans, or the impact of extended producer responsibility on not just what ends up in the environment, but what we design so that it doesn’t end up in the environment in the future? It’s a big, complicated, multifaceted story. Where are we going?
Erin Murphy 27:17
Yeah, that is true, and I am not the policy expert at Ocean Conservancy, but the work that they do is amazing. And they, you know, they go and they talk to the public about these issues and educate the public through blogs and other resources to make sure that people understand the scale of the problem. And they work really closely with local decision makers who are interested in addressing these problems and help them develop bills, help them build support for bills. And, you know, we’ll meet with legislators and other leaders to help them kind of understand the reason that these policies are useful.
So Ocean Conservancy in the last 10 years has done a lot of work on state bills, like helping to push forward California’s SB 54, or specific bills that are targeting problematic plastics. Like recently, Florida passed a balloon release ban. Ocean Conservancy was also really involved in pushing that.
And I think we have seen with plastic pollution — what, for me, one of the things that’s most comforting in studying plastic pollution is actually that people do really seem to care about this issue and do seem willing to make change. So when people find out what I research — strangers — they always tell me about what they’re doing to reduce their plastic footprint, and I think that’s just a sign that there is appetite for change, and people want to understand how to do it. And as an organization, we’re just trying to leverage that passion and that stewardship that does kind of inherently exist in people, especially when they see the plastics that they’re using, and use that and sound science to help develop policies that can actually make a change on this issue.
Mitch Ratcliffe 29:06
Building on what you mentioned a moment ago, based on your findings about which plastics are the most lethal, it sounds like it’s a blend. But should policymakers prioritize specific materials, or just look at broad categories? No more of this type.
Erin Murphy 29:23
I think we need to do both. So we did find that different plastics pose different levels of risk, and I think there’s policies that are smaller and easier to implement, like balloon release bans and bag bans, that are effective in targeting some of these problematic plastics specifically. You know, using that Hawaiian monk seal example as well, having very targeted and strategic cleanups can be really important for protecting animals at sea turtle nesting beaches or seabird nesting areas. There’s these areas that we know are of particular importance for animals.
But still, the total plastic thresholds that we found were also low, and we see all types of plastics in these animals. So at the end of the day, there is too much plastic in the ocean, and we do need sweeping reforms along the entire plastics life cycle, from production to management to disposal, to meaningfully address this issue and protect our oceans.
And it takes longer to implement these policies because it does require some pretty extensive system-wide changes. But I think policies like California’s SB 54, which aims to reduce 25% of single-use plastics used, that’s really a step in the right direction. And so our policy team is on the front lines of making sure that that bill is fully implemented and that we understand the benefits of that policy by monitoring outcomes and effectiveness of it.
Mitch Ratcliffe 30:56
You mentioned earlier that on the International Coastal Cleanup Day, which is a distributed event all over the world but a day, they collected more than a million plastic bags last year. Is the goal in the long term to no longer need to do those cleanups? Or do you anticipate that we’re always going to be needing to do those cleanups?
Erin Murphy 31:18
Yeah, I think unfortunately, at this point, it’s hard to imagine a world where cleanups aren’t necessary. I think when we did that study in 2020, that was led by Lau et al., it was pretty alarming to see how much we would have to reduce plastic production and how well we would have to manage waste to no longer need cleanups at all, and we really did find that cleanups needed to be an important part of this solution.
And there’s already a lot of legacy plastics in the ocean. So I think as far as we can look forward, cleanups will always be an important part of the suite of solutions that we use.
They’re also really effective for monitoring what’s happening in our ocean. So I mentioned earlier that study that was published in Science that showed that plastic bag bans are effective. We were really excited to see that they actually used Ocean Conservancy International Coastal Cleanup data to do that analysis, and it really just emphasizes the value of citizen science. When you go out and collect data during a cleanup on your beach, we can see what changes occur through time in terms of what debris you’re seeing, and that helps us better understand whether it’s targeted policies or these broader policies, if they’re being effective or not.
Mitch Ratcliffe 32:42
What does the Ocean Conservancy do to help people do citizen science beyond the International Coastal Cleanup?
Erin Murphy 32:49
So that program has been going on for 40 years, and that’s really, in terms of citizen science, our main body of work. But we are interested in having citizens engage in other ways. So we often have — you can sign up for our newsletter and get information about opportunities to call your senators or write your senators or legislators about important ocean issues that are coming up.
And we also just have a lot of educational material so that people can start their own cleanup events, or find cleanup events to participate in, so that individuals can be engaged in being part of the solution.
Mitch Ratcliffe 33:31
You’ve mentioned a couple of items of research that you are beginning to pursue now. But if you had unlimited resources for the remainder of your career, what would you like to investigate and build on those findings with?
Erin Murphy 33:44
Yeah, it’s pretty hard to imagine unlimited resources, especially now, I know. But yeah, you know, we already started working on answering some of these next questions that are remaining for us, and I’m really excited about the work that we’re going to be doing over the next three to five years. And I will not be surprised if, you know, this body of work, trying to understand what’s happening to ocean animals, becomes a career-long question for me.
But in the short term, the things we’re really trying to get at is, first, that entanglement piece, which you mentioned — what is the lethality of plastic entanglement. And we also just launched a working group with scientists from all over the world to take what we have learned about the lethality of plastic ingestion and to build out, include what we are learning right now in our research about entanglement, and then bring in that exposure piece.
So that question you asked earlier about how much plastic is a puffin eating, how often does it have a lethal dose — that’s really what we want to get at. We want to know if we have an idea of what’s in the environment, how likely is that to have population-level effects for species? How likely are they to eat a lethal dose? How likely are they to die? And are we worried about populations because of this?
And right now, governments around the world are really trying to determine how to effectively address plastic pollution, and these sorts of comprehensive risk assessments are really helpful in setting targets. And so that’s really what I want to keep getting at: How can we take everything we know and help decision makers better understand, you know, a reasonable goal? Because a perfect goal is an ocean with no plastic, and I think we have to keep working towards that collectively. But it’s also really important to understand what species are being adversely affected and what we can do to immediately protect them now.
Mitch Ratcliffe 35:46
Well, it’s a multi-generational challenge, and I really applaud the work that you’re doing. How can folks keep up with the work that you’re undertaking?
Erin Murphy 35:55
Yeah, we have a brand new website at oceanconservancy.org, and we have a lot of information there, you know, specifically on what our plastics team is doing, but on what our entire organization is doing in terms of bills that we’re working on. They can also sign up for our newsletter to get information about what the organization is working on, and that will give them ample opportunities to participate in being part of the solution to the plastics crisis.
Mitch Ratcliffe 36:20
Erin, thanks so much for your time today. It’s been a fascinating conversation and an encouraging one.
Erin Murphy 36:26
Thank you. It was great to be here.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Mitch Ratcliffe 36:34
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Dr. Erin Murphy, manager of ocean plastics research at the Ocean Conservancy, and she’s the lead author of the recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that quantifies, for the first time at this scale, how much plastic it takes to kill seabirds, sea turtles, and marine mammals.
You can explore the Ocean Conservancy’s wide-ranging work and sign up for a beach cleanup event at oceanconservancy.org. Ocean Conservancy is all one word, no space, no dash. Oceanconservancy.org.
The numbers Erin and her colleagues reported should stop us in our tracks. The volumes we heard about are disturbing, but imagine — one in five animals had plastic in their gut when they died. For sea turtles, it was one in two. What makes that study especially useful for policymakers is its differentiation by plastic type. Rubber fragments can be targeted because balloons are the deadliest material for seabirds. Soft plastics like bags are the top killer for sea turtles. Ghost fishing gear poses the greatest risk to marine mammals like whales. And each of these findings points to a specific, actionable policy lever: balloon release bans like Florida’s recent legislation, bag bans like California’s, and better gear-marking and recovery programs for the fishing industry.
But the targeted approach is only part of the answer. As Erin emphasized, the total plastic thresholds her team found were low across the board, meaning that every type of plastic poses a threat. “At the end of the day,” she said, “there is too much plastic in the ocean, and we need to do sweeping reforms along the entire plastics life cycle, from production to management to disposal.” That’s a very important quote. Keep it in mind.
A 2020 Ocean Conservancy-backed study quantified what “sweeping” means: a 40% reduction in global plastic production, waste management reaching 98 to 99% effectiveness in its collection and processing of plastic so it doesn’t reach nature, and annual cleanups of the 40% of plastic that still escapes into the environment — and that’s just to return to the 2010 leakage rates.
So that brings us to the elephant in the room — or maybe more to the point, the sperm whale with an entire greenhouse in its stomach — the global plastics treaty negotiations. Which were supposed to deliver a binding international agreement, collapsed in August 2025 in Geneva after oil-producing nations blocked provisions that called for production caps and toxic chemical phase-outs. More than 100 countries in the group known as the High Ambition Coalition were pushing for full life-cycle regulation for plastics, but the requirement that the negotiations reach a consensus gave a handful of petrochemical states an effective veto power. And effective it was.
So between the Busan round in late 2024 and the end of the Geneva talks in 2025, an estimated 7.4 million more metric tons of plastic entered the ocean. The world currently produces more than 460 million metric tons of plastic annually, and only 9% of that is being recycled. Every day, the equivalent of 2,000 garbage trucks of plastic is dumped into our oceans, rivers, and lakes.
However, the collapse of the treaty talks does not mean the end of progress. Erin pointed to evidence that targeted interventions can work. For example, communities in Hawaii conducted large beach cleanups and saw the Hawaiian monk seal population rebound. A study published in Science confirms that bag bans reduce plastic on beaches by between 25 and 47%. California’s SB 54 law aims to cut single-use plastics by 25%. And Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup, which is now in its 40th year, removed more than a million plastic bags from beaches last year. That cleanup data, collected by citizen scientists worldwide, is a research tool providing the time-series evidence that tells us whether policies are working.
So here’s what I want you to leave with from this conversation. Erin’s research focuses exclusively on acute mortality from ingested macroplastics — that’s obstruction, perforation, and torsion of the digestive tract. It does not capture the chronic effects of plastic and chemical exposure or entanglement, which her team will study next. That means the lethal thresholds that she reported likely underestimate the total harm plastic inflicts on marine life.
And the parallel crisis in human health is building from the same source of pollution, which has scattered microscopic shards of plastic across the planet, from the seas to the highest peaks. Most of these microplastics began as macroplastics, like those that are killing puffins and turtles. They break down in the environment into fragments small enough to enter our bloodstream, lungs, liver, and even women’s placentas. As Erin put it, it is all a part of the same crisis.
So one of the most encouraging things that Erin said was also the simplest. When strangers learn about what she studies, they stop and they tell her what they are doing to reduce their plastic footprint. That instinct to environmental stewardship is a real and powerful phenomenon, even if it’s currently being actively suppressed by governments. And the public’s will to protect nature is the foundation that policy, science, and investment will ultimately build on.
The ocean doesn’t need our sympathy. It needs a 40% cut in plastic production, waste systems that actually work, and the political will to treat a binding plastics agreement as a matter of human survival rather than an inconvenience for a few petrochemical companies. Until international negotiations deliver that agreement, the work continues at every other level: state legislatures, coastal cleanups, citizen science, and research programs like Erin’s that give decision makers the evidence-based targets that they’ve been asking for.
So stay tuned, folks, for more conversations about the solutions that can still turn this crisis around. And I hope you’ll take a moment to take a look at any of the more than 540 episodes of Sustainability In Your Ear in our archives. Take the time to share just one of them with your friends or your family. Writing a review on your favorite podcast platform will help your neighbors find us. Folks, you’re the amplifiers that can spread more ideas to create less waste. So please tell your friends, family, and co-workers they can find Sustainability In Your Ear on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or whatever purveyor of podcast goodness they prefer.
Thank you all for your support. I’m Mitch Ratcliffe. This is Sustainability In Your Ear, and we will be back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, take care of yourself, take care of one another, and let’s all take care of this beautiful planet and its oceans. Have a green day.
The post Best of Sustainability In Your Ear: The Ocean Conservancy’s Dr. Erin Murphy Documents the Lethality of Ocean Plastics appeared first on Earth911.
Americans throw away nearly 5 million tons of film and flexible plastic packaging every year, and less than 1% of it gets recycled, according to The Recycling Partnership. The salad bag, the potato bag, the pallet wrap behind every grocery store — all of it is technically recyclable, almost none of it actually is, and food contact applications make the math even harder, because the FDA requires rigorous migration testing before a single recycled pellet can touch what we eat. Kevin Kelly, CEO of Emerald Packaging, the largest supplier of retail flexible packaging to the U.S. produce industry, has spent decades on that problem from inside the industry. In December 2025, his Union City, California–based, third-generation family business announced that it had eliminated more than 1 million pounds of virgin polyethylene over the previous year by replacing it with post-consumer recycled (PCR) material, including, in partnership with Walmart, Idaho Package, and Wada Farms, the first 30% PCR potato bag approved for direct food contact. On this episode of Sustainability In Your Ear, Kevin walks through what it actually took to get that bag on a Walmart shelf, why most flexible packaging companies still won’t try, and why the most ambitious recycling law in the country may push the industry in the wrong direction.
Food-grade PCR is a different animal from the recycled plastic in a milk crate or a contractor bag. To pass FDA scrutiny, the feedstock has to be traceable from a known, food-adjacent source. For Emerald, that mostly means pallet wrap collected from Walmart distribution centers, washed, dried, and repelletized by suppliers like Dow Chemical’s Circulus mechanical recycling business and Canada’s Nova Chemicals. Variation in any given load of recyclable plastic causes carbon buildup on Emerald’s extrusion lines, forcing a shutdown every eight hours for cleaning, and waste rates are higher than with virgin resin. The company has had to audit its own suppliers in person, push back on competitors who hide non-food-grade PCR in the middle layer of multilayer films and call it sustainable, and walk produce buyers through what “food-grade” actually means before they sign on. Kevin describes Emerald as “the canary in the coal mine” for food-grade PCR — he can’t find another bag in the store that’s labeled the same way.
The harder argument Kevin makes is about policy. California’s SB 54, the most ambitious extended producer responsibility (EPR) law in the country, with a 65% recycling rate target and a 25% source reduction mandate by 2032, was supposed to drive exactly the kind of work Emerald is doing. But Kevin says the rulemaking went the other way. The pound-for-pound PCR credit that would have rewarded companies for replacing virgin resin with recycled content was stripped out, and the fees are low enough that producers can hit early reduction targets through agricultural film and other low-hanging fruit without ever switching to food-grade PCR. The deeper structural problem Kevin lays out is the capital story. Family-owned manufacturers freed from quarterly returns pressure, Kevin argues, are doing more to push food-grade PCR forward today than the capital pools that are theoretically supposed to fund the energy and sustainability transition.
To find out more about Emerald Packaging, visit empack.com.
Mitch Ratcliffe (0:09)
Hello, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society, and I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation today.
Every year, Americans buy roughly 5 billion pounds of fresh produce that’s packaged in flexible plastic — that’s salads, carrots, potatoes, lots of produce. That packaging extends shelf life, reducing food waste, but most of it is made from virgin polyethylene refined from fossil fuels, and almost none of it gets recycled.
My guest today is Kevin Kelly, CEO of Emerald Packaging, the largest supplier of retail flexible packaging for the U.S. produce industry. And on December 11 of 2025, Emerald announced a significant milestone: that over the previous year, the company had replaced more than 1 million pounds of virgin polyethylene with post-consumer recycled material, or PCR, as you’ll probably hear it in this discussion.
That shift — granted that it’s only a million fewer pounds of plastic packaging in a vast sea of it — is a suggestion of what’s possible in food packaging. However, getting recycled plastic approved for direct food contact isn’t simple. Produce packaging is especially demanding, because shelf life and food safety are not negotiable. The FDA requires rigorous testing to ensure that no contaminants from that PCR migrate into food, and for years, the industry defaulted to virgin plastic because recycled content couldn’t meet those standards reliably at scale.
Emerald is working to change that equation. In collaboration with Walmart, Idaho Package, and Wada Farms, amongst others, they’ve introduced the first 30% post-consumer recycled materials potato bag approved for food contact, and Emerald’s initiative supports Walmart’s Project Gigaton, which aims to eliminate 1 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions from the retailer’s supply chain by 2030. Emerald has also partnered with D’Arrigo, the company behind Andy Boy produce, to introduce another 30% PCR bag for romaine lettuce hearts — and that’s a shift that has removed over 600,000 pounds of virgin plastic from the supply chain between June 2023 and 2025.
Emerald is a third-generation, family-owned company based in Union City, California. Kevin brings the perspective of an organization that has operated through six decades of rapid, often revolutionary changes in how Americans buy and consume food. He’s led the company through its evolution from a regional bag manufacturer to becoming an industry leader, pushing the boundaries of sustainable, flexible packaging.
So we’re going to talk with Kevin about what it took to get recycled content into food contact packaging at scale, whether grocery customers are willing to pay more for sustainable options, how California’s recent SB 54 packaging law is reshaping the industry, and whether flexible packaging can ever become truly circular when most curbside programs still don’t accept it. You can learn more about Emerald Packaging at empack.com — that’s all one word, no space, no dash. Empack.com.
Can recycled content packaging go from future milestone to mainstream reality? Let’s find out, right after this. Welcome to the show, Kevin. How you doing today?
Kevin Kelly (3:33)
I’m doing great. How are you?
Mitch Ratcliffe (3:35)
I’m well, I’m well. Thanks for asking, and thanks for joining us. We’ve been working to get together for a few months now, and I’m glad that we actually now have the opportunity to complete the conversation. I’ve shared a summary of Emerald Packaging’s recent activity in my introduction, but could you share the backstory? When did your grandfather start the company?
Kevin Kelly (3:52)
It was actually my father. He started it in 1963 with three partners. They were based in Berkeley, California, and they mainly made — not produce packaging, which is what we specialize in now — they were making bread bags, because they were in the bread district. They were unionized by the bread workers’ union. It was a very different company when they started out. It also had one printing press and two bag machines.
Today, we have 32 bag-making machines, seven printing presses, and I don’t know how many other machines, and about 250 employees. It became a family business in ’93, and then gradually the other siblings retired, and I’m the last one here. So we’ve got a wonderful staff behind us — very creative, very technical, and best of all, they’re very detailed, which I’m not, which is why we’ve been having problems getting together for a couple of months.
Mitch Ratcliffe (4:52)
Tell me, how has the company changed since you’ve been involved with it? Obviously you just described a massive transition. But why the sustainability focus? When did that take hold?
Kevin Kelly (5:05)
Well, I started worrying about sustainability and packaging back in 2000, believe it or not, when the California Integrated Waste Management Board did a study of what was in landfills, and it turned out that plastic was a lot of what was in landfills, especially the ground covering that the agricultural industry uses in their growing operations. And so we started, with a bunch of California companies back then, having a conversation with the American Chemistry Council, which I can’t stand — I’m just going to be upfront about it — about creating a recycling system in California, because you could tell in the early 2000s this moment was coming. I mean, maybe it was a distant moment, but it was coming.
And the ACC told us absolutely not. The resin companies wanted nothing to do with fees. So really, back then, a bunch of small plastics companies in California couldn’t do anything if the ACC wouldn’t let us do anything. They had that much influence amongst both parties, the Democrats and the Republicans.
And so from there, I was sort of an orphan for a long time, you know — trying this, trying that. Worked with potato-based films, worked with PLA, polylactic acid. Tried different approaches. And then finally, a few years ago, post-consumer recycled resin became, I think, more affordable. It’s still about three times, four times the cost of virgin resin, but blended with virgin resin, I thought it was an affordable option now.
Trying to get people to buy anything that they can’t pass on — what a lot of people don’t know is that CPGs have year-long contracts with retailers, and there’s no causes for price increases, including acts of war, acts of God, supply disruption. So a lot of these companies are getting killed right now, but that’s another story for another day. They have no way to really pass on increases. And Walmart’s always said, we want sustainable packaging — we want it for free. They don’t say free; they say we want it for the same price as what we’re paying right now, which I take to mean free. They’ve gotten a little bit better in that stance, by the way, but there was really no way to pass things on.
So finally, in 2023, I just said, damn it. I’ve been working on this issue in one form or another for most of my career in packaging. I’m just going to do it. And so we convinced a customer to take their entire line and put 30% PCR in it, and we ate the cost of it. That was about 400,000 pounds of PCR right there. And from there, we attracted the interest of other companies. Some companies have taken surcharges, but PCR has really become our thrust at this point.
We’re still working with a lot of compostable options — in other words, experimenting — because at 5x, 6x, 7x, 10x, it’s still a very difficult proposition for most companies to take on. Companies with big margins, or specialty companies that don’t have year-long contracts, they have a little bit more leeway in this area, I think. But compostables remain — I’m not going to call it a pipe dream, because I’m feeling like the extended producer responsibility programs are making it more feasible — but they’re just not there yet.
Mitch Ratcliffe (8:39)
You’ve removed more than a million pounds of virgin plastic from your supply chain so far with recycled material, and that’s just within the last couple of years. How did you have to change the company to embrace the PCR process and address customer concerns about food safety?
Kevin Kelly (8:57)
Well, those are two great questions. I’ll break it down on a couple of different levels. Internally, when you’re the CEO of a family-run business and you say, hey, let’s go do this, people tend to start going and doing it. And there was a great deal of enthusiasm amongst the troops anyway about taking on a real project and commercializing it. So within the company, there wasn’t much opposition.
Now, Kevin walking into a room and saying, hey, there’s this really great technology — there’s a company, Circulus, that’s got an operation out in the Central Valley of California, about two hours away — let’s start working with them. Well, then my poor Director of Operations, Michael Rincon, has to make it happen. And PCR is an animal all its own. In terms of production runs, there’s a lot of variation within loads, for instance — not just between loads, but within. It causes a lot of carbon buildup on the extrusion lines, and so you have to shut down and clean them every eight hours. There’s much greater waste because of the variation within the loads, and so on and so forth. So we had a lot of learning on the production side in order to make this happen. We’re still learning.
But the other piece there has been the inconsistency amongst suppliers. Everybody talks about recycling and packaging, and yet you go to recycling conferences, and all you hear and all you really read about are the financial problems of recycling companies. The end markets really still aren’t there for them. In the case of PET, they’re competing with overseas supply that’s much cheaper. And so getting a consistent source as one company after the other goes out of business has been tough. So that’s been a challenge.
Our customers — they took us at our word that it was safe. They wanted to see what the process for ensuring that it was food-grade PCR was, you know — what were our certifications, what were the certifications of our suppliers, and then how did we trace within loads? Because the last thing you want is food-grade mixing with non-food-grade.
Mitch Ratcliffe (11:18)
You make this point already, and it was a question I wanted to dig into a bit, which is: with PCR, the sources are very mixed. Where does the feedstock come from? Is it from previously used film, or are we talking about other sources as well?
Kevin Kelly (11:33)
No, you’re talking, in the case of food-grade — you’re talking previously sourced film for, you know, plastic wrap around pallets. It’s not the salad bag that’s being brought back to the store and the store drop-off thing.
Mitch Ratcliffe (11:51)
And so this is largely a procurement management issue for you. And do you do a lot of testing of the material you get, or is this something that you take as certified? And is there a certification that you can rely on?
Kevin Kelly (12:04)
Well, I think that’s been one of the problems. You have this sort of nebulous process where a company that is making food-grade PCR — it’s nebulous. It just sounds strange. It’s not what I’m used to. When I’m used to certifications, they go to the FDA, they submit samples, they submit their process, and the FDA will come back and say — give you what’s called a letter of no objection, which hardly sounds like an endorsement, a stamp of approval. It’s like, we got no objection. So I think that process really actually has to be cleaned up.
There has to be some way — the Biodegradable Products Institute, there has to be some way of certifying companies and periodic testing that goes beyond us testing our incoming material. We’re a $90 million company. We have the ability to do some testing, and we do, but really we’re relying on Dow Chemical and Nova Chemicals to do what they say they’re doing, which is sourcing pallet wrap, washing it, washing it again, drying it, repelletizing it, drying it again, to drive out any impurities. So it is a difficult process. We have to have possession from them of the chain going all the way back to the source, but that’s a lot of documentation, and I think that’s where companies have come to rely on mass balance. But mass balance doesn’t tell you anything about food-grade, non-food-grade, and it’s also, of course, been manipulated by companies in ways that have undermined a process that could otherwise be helpful.
Mitch Ratcliffe (13:58)
Thinking about what you just said — is a transparency movement needed in order for PCR materials to be truly understood, both by the manufacturer who’s going to use the material and the consumer in the long run? Do we need that kind of full life cycle accounting to be available to say this plastic has gone through these steps, so people have confidence about the food safety issues?
Kevin Kelly (14:22)
I think so. I’m trying to imagine in my head how we would do that. That’s why there’s people smarter and greater than I involved in these things. But I think some way of tracing back, or some way of testing, or more periodic testing. Or, for instance, you could say, Emerald Packaging, you have to test your material 10, 15 times a year, submit, and it has to be done. You know, actually, that doesn’t work. I’m trying to think of a way you could possibly do it, you know, so that it’s absolutely ironclad. I’m going to say, I don’t quite know how you would do it, but I would frankly prefer that, because I know I’m making all efforts to use food-grade PCR, right? We’re documenting, we’re maintaining all of our documentation, and we’re working only with suppliers that we’ve gone and visited and certified ourselves.
There are other companies, especially at the beginning when we came out, who were saying — you can make a plastic that has three to five layers in it, right? You’re using one plastic on the surface, something in the middle, and another plastic on the surface. And they would say, well, we’re using PCR; it doesn’t have to be food-grade, because we’re putting it in the middle. You know, that protects it. And the company buying — particularly, say, in the produce industry — who aren’t educated in these things might think that that sounds reasonable. It’s not, of course, because whatever you put in the middle migrates to the surface. So if you’ve got contaminants in the damn thing, you know they’re going to get out of the middle eventually and end up on the surface, and then end up on the food.
And so we had to do a lot of customer education about what they had to get from their supplier in order for them to be reasonably certain that they were using food-grade PCR versus just any old derelict PCR that came from materials that are fine in a garbage bag, but not fine touching food. That education process largely then fell on us. I think we’re so early in this — I, you know, frankly, haven’t been able to find another bag or package in the store that says it uses food-grade PCR. We’re sort of like the canary in the coal mine. A lot of what one might hope would be coming from an industry organization, or the FDA, or a California certifying government body, or a government body that would be checking, you know, whether things were food-grade or not — randomly off the store shelf — all that’s fallen on us.
Mitch Ratcliffe (17:18)
That’s a huge undertaking, and I can understand now why it’s three or four times more expensive to use this material. How did you make the case to Wada Farms or D’Arrigo that this was a good choice? Was it a sustainable, moral suasion argument, or was it a consumers-are-going-to-love-you-for-this? How did you bring them on board?
Kevin Kelly (17:39)
For me, it starts with: this is a great way to make your packaging more sustainable. It starts with the moral argument that I always begin with — that, because that’s where I come from. I know one should be thinking about these things as huge marketing opportunities, and they are, I suppose. But for me, it’s really about: what can packaging do to move the needle on becoming more environmentally friendly? You know, I guess that just comes out of familial commitment, having to look your kids in the eye and tell them you’re actually doing something versus not. And so I always begin the conversation there.
And then I go to the marketing question — consumers will love it. And, oh, by the way, you know, Walmart has a program — that they’ve revised somewhat — but they have a program really emphasizing post-consumer resin in Walmart brand. And so this is something that will please Walmart, especially if the upcharge is very small or there’s no upcharge at all. And in the case of Wada Farms, that’s the sale they really took to Walmart. And whoever the purchasing person at Walmart on the other end was knew about the Walmart program, was committed to the Walmart program, and so jumped on the opportunity. That doesn’t always happen, but they did, and they saw it both, I think, as an internal possibility to fulfill an internal commitment to the environment, but also a way to market potatoes to consumers using packaging that was more environmentally friendly.
Mitch Ratcliffe (19:27)
If we don’t make this transition, what’s the outcome for the economy in the long term? Do we essentially choke ourselves on our waste? How do you envision the benefits of the sustainable packaging movement alleviating the crisis that we’re entering?
Kevin Kelly (19:45)
I think that the crisis operates on many different levels, right? So let’s sort of back up a little bit. You have the greenhouse gas crisis, you have the waste crisis, and they intersect, obviously, but they’re two distinct things.
And so in the case of some packaging, I believe there’s an argument to be made that it actually does reduce food waste and therefore greenhouse gas. The State of Oregon looked at that question in 2017 in a little-known study that came back and said, in the balance, produce packaging, for instance, reduces greenhouse gas through reduction of food waste, food preservation, shelf life extension, more than it actually contributes to greenhouse gas in the production thereof. So there’s this single study floating out there that says that. It’s not true in the case of every kind of packaging.
You can certainly ask yourself — and I’m not going to get into this debate — whether we need Ho Hos and Twinkies or not, and whether we need them wrapped, therefore, to get them. So, you know, there is this question on the store shelves of where is packaging beneficial and where it isn’t.
I think PCR moves the needle a little. I think it tells you where we are in this process. When one turn of this is close to being circular, right? Maybe we’ve, like, rounded the bend — one of the hundreds of bends to go to actually form a complete circle. But it’s a start. I mean, which is the way, I guess, we sort of have to look at it.
If you’re over in my world, the thing about sustainable packaging, and I think this has been true for the last 20 years, is that the technologies exist today to take the entire packaging world into compostable packaging. We’d then be choking on compostable packaging. But, you know, we’d need a lot of home compost, obviously, to deal with billions of pounds of compostable packaging. I mean, the infrastructure doesn’t exist, so on and so forth. The point I’m making here is the technology has been there. The question throughout has been, who’s going to pay for it?
Mitch Ratcliffe (22:22)
I think this is an absolutely critical question, and one we hear about with the green premium. I want to dig into this, but we’re going to take a quick commercial break, folks. We’ll be right back. Stay tuned.
Mitch Ratcliffe (22:37)
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Let’s continue talking with Kevin Kelly. He is the CEO of Emerald Packaging in Union City, California, and we’re talking about the company’s investments in developing more sustainable food packaging options. Kevin, you mentioned that the flexible packaging recycling infrastructure in the United States is, let’s just say, still very limited. Most curbside programs don’t accept it. As you look at the material flow in your industry, are there new business opportunities in collection and processing that you see people missing, that they should be stepping into?
Kevin Kelly (23:12)
Well, I think you’re being generous when you say it’s limited. It’s virtually nonexistent, right? I mean, let’s be — the store drop-back, drop-off program is a nice — I don’t know, it’s nice, but imagine if everybody took their bags back to the store and Safeway became a solid waste dump. You know, it’d be a wake-up call to everybody.
But at any rate, I think there’s a big business opportunity in recycling, period. The issue has been on that end of things — the end markets. Okay? So you have recycled material. Where does it go? In a free market economy, you’re dealing with virgin material that’s cheaper than its recycled cousin. How do you create markets — not just create markets so that you attract capital into the recycling business, especially now where so many recyclers are going belly up because the end markets don’t exist and there’s too much competition for materials that can actually be used and resold? Which is true in the food-grade PCR business as well. I mean, how many loads of pallet wrap can you get out of a Walmart distribution center? There’s a lot of competition for what are called clean bales. They’re super expensive, and then you have to be able to turn around and sell that at a profit.
The perfect example is Circulus, which was a company that was created to make PCR, including food-grade PCR. They put a gorgeous facility in the Central Valley — some of the most sophisticated machinery I’ve ever seen in my life. And I love manufacturing lines. They put another one in Ardmore, Oklahoma, and they were going to put one in Georgia that I think they’re finally going ahead with. Was backed by venture capital — backed by a group out of Texas. And I think they looked at it as, wow, look at these EPR programs. There’s going to be a real opportunity here. And I’d say three years ago, I would have thought the same. They lasted about 18 months. And venture capital, private equity — which would be one source of capital in order to build out, you know, a private recycling system — recognized that they weren’t going to make any money soon. I always said I wanted to be the second or third owner of Circulus, because I was convinced, you know, within a few months of getting to know the market, that they were going to not make it, and that the private equity, which wants to see instantaneous returns, wasn’t going to be able to put up with the ups and downs of the current recycling system.
So they ended up selling out to Dow Chemical. You know, Dow Chemical has kept the operation going. They’ve put some money into it. They closed — I should say they closed the facility in central California. They kept the Ardmore facility going. They’re building the facility in Georgia. How much money will Dow put in to expand it? You know, they haven’t shown a great appetite to do so. The resin company that has probably put the most money in is Nova Chemicals, up in Canada, which sort of makes sense, because you have well-developed EPR programs in Canada, right? You have mandates around recycled material use in some provinces, and so Nova’s got a pretty good market just there in order to be able to sell the material.
Again, I think — you know, businesses sometimes don’t like to hear this, but the word “mandate” is going to be probably the savior of recycling in the United States, because governments mandating post-consumer resin use will drive a market and a viable one, because companies will have to actually use the material in order to hit the mandate.
Mitch Ratcliffe (27:35)
So with EPR laws taking off across the country — but particularly California’s SB 54, that requires a 65% reduction in single-use plastic waste by 2032 (so six years from now), and it has minimum recycled content thresholds in law as well. How has that changed the game? Are we moving in the right direction? Do you see that policy starting to come into place to put the weight behind the spear?
Kevin Kelly (28:02)
Good question. I think that SB 54 might actually do the opposite. Why? Because, in the original regulations, if a company used PCR, they were given a pound-for-pound credit against their fees. That got wiped out. And now, the overall program — if you get the mandate — is to reduce plastic use by 10%, the use of virgin plastic, by a certain date. I think it’s 2028. The low-hanging fruit there is, say, agricultural film, or something that is using a lot of plastic where you can use non-food-grade material all day long, and it doesn’t have to be widely used across the supply chain. 8% or 10% is an easy number to hit.
The fees themselves are small enough — believe it or not, even at, say, 60 cents a pound or 80 cents a pound for the worst sort of materials, mixed materials — that it doesn’t make sense to switch to food-grade PCR, which is still, you know — the differential before we went into the war was around $1.30 a pound between it and virgin material.
And so I think the regulation writers have to be more cognizant about the economics and the financial incentives that are being set, both within the fees and within the regulations themselves, in terms of using PCR or compostables as an offset. And one of the problems there — I think you get to the crux of this — is that there’s not a lot of conversation between all parties. The regulators aren’t talking — we’re just now starting, and, you know, it’s shame on both parties. We’re just now starting to talk to CAA, and we’re just now starting to talk to CalRecycle, and we’re really just now beginning to explain the economics of PCR within the structure of an EPR system. And I wish we had had these conversations a year, a year or two ago. It’s hard for CalRecycle to find us. It’s hard for us to find them in the mix. We’re small. I think we’ve come to more prominence because of the food-grade PCR use, and the fact that we’re one of the few doing it, and so folks have begun approaching us.
But in general, you know, having conversation with the packaging industry has been not that fruitful for regulators for decades, and so it isn’t a conversation that most have sought out. You know, even if there’s one or two of us out there who would like to genuinely have it and like to genuinely engage, it’s hard to find us in the mix of “nos” that the American Chemistry Council throws out there for every proposal for reform. So that’s a — I don’t know if the answer is discombobulated or not, but I’m finding that there’s not an easy answer to any of these questions. There has to be a thoughtful answer. To be thoughtful, you have to understand the packaging and the market and the prices within the market, and folks are very often unwilling to talk about prices and where they are today, and where they might be if we actually scale a proper recycling system, with proper PCR manufacturing, and then a proper end market. Those are the kind of conversations I think that need to be had in every state across the country that’s developing an EPR program.
Mitch Ratcliffe (32:07)
Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. I’m surprised to hear that those conversations didn’t happen as we were preparing for SB 54 to go through the legislative process. But let me ask this: if, in fact, all the pieces fall into place — regulatory, there’s demand, and so forth — can you get past 30% PCR in this packaging? Is this a technical limit or a supply limit at this point?
Kevin Kelly (32:34)
It’s a technical limit.
Mitch Ratcliffe (32:36)
It’s a technical limit. So where can we go?
Kevin Kelly (32:39)
Right now, we’ve pushed to 50%. So we’re not at 100, and that’ll take, you know, some time. I think that would take several years, just given variations inside loads. But I think 50% is possible. It’s not the best-looking plastic on Earth, you know, but it’s certainly a reduction in virgin resin, and it is technically possible with the right company producing low-variation, high-grade PCR. And there are some out there who do that. So we found you can push it along.
I wouldn’t want to stake a claim and say all my packaging is going to be 50% PCR today, because I don’t think we could find enough consistent material, you know, to come up with 20 million pounds of PCR capable of creating 50% PCR packaging. I just wouldn’t want to do it. I think 30% is comfortable, and frankly, above what most companies are willing to attempt, which is around 20.
Mitch Ratcliffe (33:52)
Why is that?
Kevin Kelly (33:54)
It’s — I think this is where we get into, as a smaller, family-owned business, we can de-emphasize profit a little bit and say, okay, we’re going to push this to the technical limit that we’re comfortable with, and we’re going to accept more downtime for cleaning and dealing with loads that might require a lot more babysitting through the production process. We’re willing to do that. I think a lot of companies — once you, you know, if you’re owned by private equity, if you’re publicly owned, it’s a different calculus than the calculus we make. And I think that’s one of the benefits of smaller family-owned businesses. You know, if the family has a sense of social responsibility.
Mitch Ratcliffe (34:44)
Do you think that, in the private equity-dominated world that we’re in right now, we lack the sufficient patient capital to achieve a circular economy in the long term? Or are enough sources of capital starting to migrate toward this in response to things like the war and onshoring our supply chains and so forth, to get us there sometime within our lifetimes —
Kevin Kelly (35:08)
Yours and mine?
Mitch Ratcliffe (35:09)
Yeah, recognizing we’re both of a certain age.
Kevin Kelly (35:12)
My children’s, sure. You know, I’m 65. I don’t see it, unfortunately, happening in my lifetime. Now, I didn’t think I’d see an American Pope in my lifetime either, so there are surprises in the world.
Mitch Ratcliffe (35:30)
Miracles do happen.
Kevin Kelly (35:31)
They do. So I think, all things being possible, I would feel very comfortable saying my 25-year-old kids will live in a very, very different economy than the one I do today. And, you know, I think we do have to get past the private equity mindset. In fact, you know, the problem with where the social goals of society have gone, and where private equity has gone, has really shifted things far more, as you allude to, you know — getting returns within five years and flipping the company and, you know, doing this and doing this and doing this. It’s not worried, really at all, about social responsibility. So that’s where state mandates, I think, come into play, because you impose those upon companies that might not otherwise wish to engage them.
Mitch Ratcliffe (36:27)
When you imagine a grocery shopper picking up a bag of potatoes or romaine hearts, and they see that it’s made with PCR — what do you want them to understand about what that actually means to them and their health and the environment?
Kevin Kelly (36:42)
Well, I want them to know that it doesn’t affect their health in any particularly bad way. So we want them to feel comfortable that the recycled material is, in fact, food-grade, and what’s touching the food isn’t going to somehow, you know, introduce cadmium into their bodies, something like that. So you’d certainly want that — the bare minimum.
Then, I think, you next want them to know that this is a nice step along the road to a better, environmentally friendly packaging world, and that by buying this packaging and not that packaging, they’re choosing to support it. You see that most clearly in the experiment that Taylor Farms is doing at certain grocery stores with the fiber tray, fiber clamshell. You can choose the all-plastic one, or you can pay 10 cents more and actually get a little bit less spinach. Which one are you going to choose? And the consumer actually has been going for that fiber tray.
Mitch Ratcliffe (37:50)
All the data says that the consumers want those kinds of things.
Kevin Kelly (37:54)
They’re willing to pay a little bit more, or they’re willing to take a little bit less for themselves to participate, right? I mean, they feel like, okay, I’m shopping, but I’m actually making a statement in buying this and not that. So I think that allowing consumers to participate in building the world that they would like to build is important messaging that companies should be creating and making, in terms of marketing, what they’re trying to sell. Because you do want consumers to feel good about what they’re buying, but you want them also to be supporting the world they want, and the world we’d all like to see — which is a far more environmentally friendly one than the one we’re in today.
Mitch Ratcliffe (38:42)
Well, we can hope and we can work. As Jane Goodall said, hope is an active verb. It’s not something you sit back and wait for the results of.
Kevin Kelly (38:49)
That’s good.
Mitch Ratcliffe (38:51)
How can our listeners follow Emerald Packaging’s progress? Where should they tune in?
Kevin Kelly (38:56)
Well, I think we keep updates going on our website. I do a lot of interviews, and as we make progress, I tend to write about it or talk about it. Most of the articles about us, or information about us, eventually turns up in our news, the news part of our website. Or I started to use LinkedIn — we’re not a big company, so we’re not, you know, doing advertising on social media, or advertising on television, or anything like that. But we do try to get the word out there about what we’re doing and what we see as possible, both when it comes to PCR, when it comes to EPR laws, and when it comes to compostable materials.
Mitch Ratcliffe (39:43)
Well, Kevin, I hope that talking today helped spread the story, and I really appreciate it. It’s been a fascinating conversation. Thanks very much.
Kevin Kelly (39:50)
Oh, I thank you, and thanks for putting up with the complexities of the conversation. I think we captured that pretty well.
Mitch Ratcliffe (40:02)
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Kevin Kelly, CEO of Emerald Packaging, the largest supplier of flexible packaging to the U.S. produce industry, and the company that has now replaced more than 1 million pounds of virgin polyethylene with post-consumer recycled material, or PCR, in food contact bags that you can buy at Walmart through Wada Farms, and Andy Boy romaine hearts packages. You can learn more about Emerald and Kevin’s work at empack.com — that’s all one word, no space, no dash. Emeraldpackaging.com.
The headline here isn’t that million pounds, even though that’s an encouraging piece of news. The headline is that Kevin started having this conversation in 2000, when the California Integrated Waste Management Board first measured plastic in landfills and asked the American Chemistry Council whether the industry might participate in a recycling system. And of course, the answer from the industry was no. Now, 26 years later, Kevin’s family-owned bag maker has become, in his own words, the canary in the coal mine for food-grade PCR — because no industry body, no FDA process beyond that letter of no objection we heard about, and no California regulator has built the certification, testing, or chain-of-custody infrastructure this circular economy needs to scale.
Emerald is doing the customer education itself, walking produce companies through the difference between food-grade PCR and what Kevin colorfully called “any old derelict PCR,” which can be kind of gray. You’ve seen this in some Coke bottles, for instance. That gap between what is technically possible and corporate aspirations is the real story behind the million pounds of diverted plastic waste.
Emerald Packaging’s home state, California, can teach the rest of the country. You may remember my recent conversation with Zena Harris of Green Spark Group, in which California’s climate disclosure law is forcing a digital nervous system into being across Hollywood’s supply chain — and that regulation is doing what regulation is supposed to do. But, as Kevin said, SB 54 may do the opposite. The law mandates a 65% reduction in single-use plastic waste by 2032 and sets a minimum PCR threshold. But Kevin pointed out that a pound-for-pound PCR credit, which would have encouraged people to replace virgin polyethylene with PCR, was wiped out of the rulemaking, so the fees are low enough that companies can hit early reduction targets through agricultural film collection and other low-hanging fruit, without actually addressing food-grade PCR. And yet, several years after the law was passed, conversations are just starting between CalRecycle, the California Air Resources Board, and packaging makers.
A mandate without the right price levers doesn’t drive the necessary transition. It delivers the cheapest path to compliance. And that’s a useful warning for every other state currently writing extended producer responsibility laws — including California, Colorado, Maine, and Minnesota — where the design choices are being made right now that will determine whether or not food-grade PCR ever becomes economical at scale, or stays stuck in the boutique end of the market.
And a third point is the one that I’m going to be pondering after this conversation, and that is about Circulus. It’s a PCR plant in California’s Central Valley that was backed by Texas private equity and was supposed to be the supply-side answer to food-grade PCR, and it lasted only 18 months before Dow Chemical bought what remained, closed the California facility, while keeping an Oklahoma one running and moving slowly on a third site in Georgia. Kevin’s argument is that family-owned manufacturers, who can de-emphasize quarterly profit, are doing more to push PCR forward today than the capital pools that are theoretically supposed to fund our energy and sustainability transition.
That maps closely to the lessons from my recent conversation with Disney Petit at LiquiDonate — circular infrastructure works when there is an immediate economic pull, as her platform creates by saving retailers money the day they sign up, and it stalls when investors are asked to wait for a market that requires a mandate, a law, to exist. So the case for patient capital is also a case for mandates designed well enough to create the demand that patience requires.
The billions of pounds of produce packaging that are shipped each year is not a problem one bag maker, one retailer, or one state can solve. And the 25-year arc of Kevin’s career argues that we’ve been waiting for the wrong thing. The technology has existed. It does exist now. The willing operators have existed — a few of them. But what’s been missing is the policy architecture, the certification backbone, and the capital structure that would let these operators do at scale what one family-owned company has now proven is possible at 30% PCR levels in produce packaging. The next legislative cycle in every EPR state is where that may be decided, and we’ll be tracking it on the show.
So stay tuned, folks. And if this conversation moved you, could you do one thing for the show this week? Pick a single episode from the archive of more than 550 interviews and send it to just one person who hasn’t heard us yet. A short review on your favorite podcast platform is the other way to help, because folks, you’re the amplifiers that can spread more ideas to create less waste. So please tell your friends, your family, your co-workers, the people you meet on the street, that they can find Sustainability In Your Ear on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or whatever purveyor of podcast goodness they prefer.
Thank you for your support. I’m Mitch Ratcliffe. This is Sustainability In Your Ear, and we’ll be back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, folks, take care of yourself, take care of one another, and let’s all take care of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a Green Day.
The post Sustainability In Your Ear: Emerald Packaging CEO Kevin Kelly Delivers Recycled Produce Packaging appeared first on Earth911.
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