Roland Geyer is Professor at UCSB’s Bren School of Environmental Science and Management. Prior to joining the Bren School he held research positions in Germany, France, and the UK. Since 2000 he has worked with a wide range of governmental organization, trade associations, and companies on environmental sustainability issues. Roland has won multiple awards for his work, such as the International Statistic of the Year, and been featured widely in the media, like CBS 60 Minutes, CBS Sunday Morning, and PBS News Hour. He has a graduate degree in physics and a PhD in engineering. Learn more about Roland and his work on his website.
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Pennington: Almost every week it seems there’s a new story out about the horrors of plastic pollution. Sometimes focused on its impact on wildlife, others zeroing in on the ways we collectively contribute to some 8 million pieces of plastic that find their way into our oceans every single day. Plastic pollution is seen by many as a crisis with thinktanks, nonprofits and academics all searching for sustainable solutions to the problem. That’s the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories where we explore the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics. I’m Rosemary Pennington. Stats and Stories is a production of Miami University’s Departments of Statistics and Media, Journalism and Film, as well as the American Statistical Association. Joining me in the studio are regular panelists John Bailer, Chair of Miami Statistics Department, and Richard Campbell former Chair of Media, Journalism and Film. Our guest today is Roland Geyer. Geyer is professor at the Brynn school of environmental science and management at the university of California Santa Barbara. In his work Geyer focuses on issues related to environmental sustainability with a specific focus on pollution and pollution prevention strategies. Roland thank you so much for being here with us today.
Geyer: Glad to be here.
Pennington: Can you just explain a little bit how you got into this line of work?
Geyer: Right so my field is called industrial ecology, which sounds great but then typically people immediately ask me what it is. Industrial ecologists study material and energy flow in society in production and consumption activities. So I have a track record of studying metals like many of my colleagues, and then about ten years ago I started getting interested in plastics, and realizing that we didn’t really know that much about plastic, how much we make, how much we use, where it goes when we’re done with it, despite its ubiquity in daily life it’s really everywhere. If you look around you you probably have looked at half of the things you look at are made of plastic or contain plastic.
Bailer: Is there a particular surprising product where we encounter plastic and we may not think about that?
Geyer: I would say it’s really everywhere. I mean there are some interesting sort of statistics for example, I believe airplanes are now 50% by mass made of plastic, which is surprising. Cars I believe are made 30-40% of plastics these days. So, you know even though with airplanes we think of things like tin cans made of aluminum, and cars made out of steel, that’s no longer true, and another actually the second largest user of plastic is construction. So, buildings are full of plastic.
Campbell: So, how do we know that there have – there are 8.3 billion tons of plastic that have been produced since 1950? I think that’s the right number, so how do we even know that?
Geyer: So, the I mean I would say we don’t know for sure but it’s a fairly robust estimate and for those kinds of data we typically have to rely on industry statistics. So, the industries do typically create these production statistics themselves, or sometimes they commission consultants to conduct surveys and then extrapolate those numbers to give you a total. And it turns out that for global plastic production we- you know, there are production statistics reaching back all the way to at least 1950, which by many is sort of seen as the beginning of plastic mass production. So, we can actually- it’s relatively simple all we have to do is collect plastic production data for every single year starting in 1950 and then just add it all together and it turns out that it’s this 8.3 billion metric tons. That’s the number up to 2015. Since then we added another billion tons, believe it or not.
Bailer: I like how when you described that and were reporting it you used the idea that this would cover all of Argentina up to ankle deep in plastic. I thought that was a really nice way. What kind of led you to using that image?
Geyer: It’s – yeah I want to apologize to Argentina for that, I’m not proposing we’re doing this, but when we came up with the results, like even people that do this for a living- the technique is called material flow analysis, it’s sometimes hard to get your head around the significance and meaning of those figures. So we actually had a little internal competition and said who comes up with the best idea of visualizing 8.3 billion metric tons, and we came up with- we turned it into blue whales, and Eiffel towers, and elephants- it’s like one billion elephants worth of plastic, but then they were all kind of mass spaced and we thought they were not quite as intuitive as they could be, so my idea was to actually turn the mass into a volume, and then spread it out really thinly, like ankle deep, and see how much area I could cover. And it just turned out to be more or less exactly the size of Argentina which is the word’s 8th largest country.
Campbell: You know the public when they get a number like that that’s so large it feels overwhelming and it feels so overwhelming sometimes, where do you even begin to tackle some problem like this? It’s almost like what can I do other than recycle and all of the little things that I think all of us try to do to do our share, I think you have a proposal for what we really need to do. But just sort of an overwhelming nature, that’s why I like the Argentina idea because at least I can think about that, I have looked at a map. I know how big Argentina is, so just the scales of something like this, how do you even approach something that’s this massive of a problem?
Geyer: I think for an individual, just like a concerned citizen, those things can be really overwhelming and I think its important and maybe that’s one of the outcomes of research like this- it’s like now what do we do about this? And I think as you’re saying quite literally the problem is too big to just leave it to consumers and households to figure it out. I think just the sheer magnitude of that issue makes it very clear that just appealing to households to throw more things into their blue bin or maybe change their consumption habits alone is not going to stem that ever-growing tide of plastics. So it will require everyone involved in the supply chain, in particular the companies that produce the plastics, the companies that use the plastic, but I think without good environmental policy on every level- municipal, state and hopefully one day federal, I think it will remain an almost irretractable program.
Campbell: in that guardian article I love this idea of the inaction hero, would you talk a little bit about what that means?
Geyer: Well thanks yeah, I sort of came up with that vision because as I noted there, I had so much response and everyone desperately no one who isn’t- who says it’s like I don’t mind having plastic in the ocean, you know like what’s the big deal there? Like literally everyone thinks that’s not a good thing and we don’t like that, and then there’s just so many people who want to do something about it, which is great, but then they want to go out and clean up the ocean. And the most famous example is Boyan Slat, the young Dutch man that builds these giant boom structures, which are ironically made out of plastic, and wants to put them in the middle of the Pacific and then clean up these great Pacific garbage patches in these ocean gyres, even though that scientifically there’s increasing agreement that the vast majority of plastics in the ocean is actually in the gyres, most of the plastic is plopped probably on the ocean floor. The average depth of the ocean is 14,000 feet, so I don’t think we’ll clean up the ocean floor any time soon. So that just leads me to the logical conclusion that if we’re serious about plastic in the ocean we need to rather than trying to clean up the ocean, we need to stop the tap we need to stop plastic from flowing into the ocean and obviously the easiest way to do that is just not produce and use plastic. So, for me that brings up this image of an inaction hero, someone who says you know I’m just going to buy less. And that is the best way I can help the oceans, rather than becoming this plastic ocean hero that goes out and maybe- I don’t know- does more damage than he or she does good or it’s just a futile… I just – I’m not sure that’s the best way we can spend the money we want to spend on solving this issue.
Bailer: I love the comment you made in one of your pieces is that no product is greener than the one we didn’t buy.
Geyer: That sort of sums it up.
Bailer: Well and you know even reading some of the ideas you have about action bias. I think those are some challenging ideas. How have those statements and ideas been received?
Geyer: You know what? I got mostly positive feedback on that Guardian op-ed, but other than that- mostly people tend to agree when I say we must like everyone remembers, well maybe not everyone, but you know most people would know about the waste management hierarchy, right? Reduce, reuse, recycle, but then somehow we always jump to the third one. And everyone wants to fix recycling so I just want to remind people that reduce is the top one for good reason, and it would be a much cheaper way to help tackle plastic pollution if we all could sort of get our heads together and agree that that’s the route we want to go down.
Campbell: You talk also in one of your academic articles about the circular economy rebound, and one of the dangers of some of the things we might be producing, that may actually be contributing more to the problem and I’m thinking here and I think one of your examples is a hybrid. Hybrid car for example, can you talk a little bit about what you mean by circular economy rebound?
Geyer: Yes, absolutely so that name has been inspired by energy efficiency rebound- that’s a well-known concept. Actually, the idea that becoming more energy efficient might actually increase energy consumption so that goes back to the 18th century, believe it or not. The original idea has been called Jevons’ paradox and this British gentleman Jevons observed that when James Watt dramatically increased the efficiency of the steam engine, coal – the fuel that powers steam engine- coal consumption did not go down it actualy went up. So that’s the idea, and so the modern version is called energy rebound. And probably the best known example is that you know, if you make a car more fuel efficient most people would assume that if you double the fuel efficiency of a car, fuel consumption will just go down by 50%, but that is very very unlikely because doubling the fuel efficiency of a car just means that now driving costs half for the owner of the car. So, they will A use some of the money to just drive longer distances and also use some of the savings to spend on other goods and services that also have energy footprints. So that’s called the energy rebound, and I just noted that I think there’s a big danger and lack of research surrounding the notion that recycling material can do the exact same thing on a material level, where recycling material and having the secondary- the recycled material be cheaper than virgin material- that most people say that’s absolutely necessary, that that will just make us consume more material over all, rather than to reduce virgin material consumption, and that’s what we call circular economy rebound. And that actually introduces a really puzzling big statistical problem that I’m trying to get my head around – I know that we have statisticians in the room- I’m not one of them I have to admit, and that’s the idea is that how do we prove that recycling has reduced virgin material consumption? Because the logic behind it is counterfactual, because we have recycled – so the counterfactual is unobserved- we don’t know what would have happened if we had not recycled. The only thing we do know is that despite all our recycling efforts – virgin material production keeps going up year after year, and that’s true of basically all materials, not just plastic. Plastic, all the metals, you know every single material despite our recycling efforts, primary virgin material production keeps growing.
Bailer: You know, one thing that comes to mind as you’re talking about these ideas and these cycles is also this issue of life cycle assessment. And I don’t think that people often consider when they’re purchasing something that there is essentially this life cycle of what’s associated with the good with some product can you talk a little bit about what life cycle assessment means?
Geyer: Yeah absolutely so yeah I think you’re right actually and I would call it something like life cycle awareness, that would be a wonderful thing to foster in the public at large, and that’s the idea that if you have a product in your hands it already had a whole history right? And that’s the production history, so what was involved in making that product? How much waste was being generated in making that product? What kind of emissions were being generated in making the product and transporting it, delivering to you in your home, so that’s sort of the upstream life cycle of the product and then of course there’s a downstream history. Which is once we’re done using that product and would like to get rid of it what’s going to happen to it? So that’s the inspiration behind that Guardian comic, and maybe for me to get into that kind of research even as a child I was kind of puzzled by where does all that solid waste go? Does it just disappear? Does it pile up somewhere? So that would be the downstream life cycle story of that product, and I think if everyone was more conscious and more aware of the life cycle story of everything they buy, I think there’s- it gives me reason to think that they might make different choices in the future.
Pennington: Roland, before we wrap up I just wanted to ask if you had recommendations for students who maybe want to consider working in this area. What do you think they need to do in order to be prepared to do the kind of work you’re doing, or even what that’s going to be in 10-20 years from now?
Geyer: Oh that’s a – well, I don’t know to what extent my story is unique – my training was in physics, so actually a trained physicist, and of all things my thesis was in theoretical astrophysics, you know like how much more non applied can it get in practical. And then I just realized I did not want to spend my working life studying stellar objects that no one cares about, including increasingly myself, so I just decided in an ideal world I would marry my personal interests with my professional life, and that’s just what I pursued. And some people were discouraging and then others were encouraging, and I just kept going. And I would say it took me about ten years to achieve that and in retrospect ten years feels very short when you’re embarking on a journey, you know ten years is a really long time and maybe that’s what I – you know, my advice for people at the beginning of careers or just story of considering the future careers, I would say that everyone overestimates what they can achieve in a year but over estimates what they can achieve ten years, so be willing to pay a slightly longer game than you may want to.
Pennington: Well that’s great that’s all the time we have for todays episode of Stats and stories Roland thank you so much for being here.
Bailer: Thank you Roland.
Geyer: Well it’s been great chatting with you thank you.
Pennington: Stats and Stories is a production of the Miami university’s Departments of Statistics and Media, Journalism and Film, and the American Statistical Association. You can follow us on Twitter or Apple podcasts or other places you can find podcasts. To share your thoughts on the program send your email to statsandstories@miamioh.edu or check us out on statsandstories.net and be sure to listen for future editions of Stats and Stories where we discuss the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics