Beth Gardner

The bill never became law.

And, you know, this has happened in cities and states across the country.

There were, you know, a number of times over the decades Congress considered national bottle bill illegal.

The industry is always talking up the importance of recycling, but behind the scenes, they've fought very hard against this most effective way of actually making it happen.

You know, it's hard to totally go back, right?

Yeah.

There are, of course, many...

essential and even life-saving uses of plastic.

You know, I don't want to go into the hospital and not be able to have a sort of sterile and single-use throwaway syringe or IV tubing, right?

But that doesn't mean that there's not also a tremendous amount of really wasteful, unnecessary use.

Exactly.

I got one of those on a vacation at the beach about four or five years ago.

I bought this ice cream cone, but there was this little piece of plastic, clear plastic on the bottom that someone had decided was a product worth making and selling and presumably someone was making money off of.

And to me, that is the counterpoint to the medical equipment and the essentials that we have now.

We could certainly do just fine without those ice cream drip catchers and so much other plastic that's in our lives, too.

Like you, I had not understood the connection between fracking and plastic production.

But in fact, the American fracking boom, which has been going on for about nearly 20 years now, has also driven an American plastic production boom.

Because when you are pumping that methane gas, what we call natural gas, out of the ground, you also get byproducts, including a gas called ethane, which turns out to be really handy for producing polyethylene plastic.

Which is the most common type of plastic.

The world's most common plastic.