The world has created more than 8 billion tons of plastic, and 91% of it likely goes unrecycled. We could even be ingesting an estimated credit card’s worth of plastic every week—and our marine life is consuming it, too. It’s symptomatic of our current time, which some have dubbed the “Plasticene” era.

A significant problem is single-use plastics, those items we buy once and discard. Most are synthetic plastics, made from fossil fuels, which then stick around in the environment. Even many bioplastics, those made from organic sources, are nonbiodegradable. It is possible to engineer bioplastics that do break down—but companies also need to rethink production to make sustainability central from the very start.

In the cleaning products industry, single use products are often a given. But on today’s episode of the World Changing Ideas podcast, after a quick explainer on plastic manufacturing, we turn to a company that’s phased plastics out of its goods from the start. Founder of Blueland, Sarah Paiji Yoo, shares her story, from the initial reaction from the industry, which “categorically thought we were crazy,” to today, where she estimates that Blueland has helped to eliminate a billion plastic cleaning bottles from landfills and oceans.

It started with the realization that more than 90% of a cleaning product is water. “It doesn’t make sense that we are not only buying a new plastic bottle every time we run out of cleaning solution, we’re also paying for all this water,” Paiji Yoo says. She had a vision to create a cleaning product in dry tablet form, to which consumers would add water themselves. “It seemed like a good idea to just sell what the consumer needs,” she says.

After pushback from industry traditionalists, who told her, “[We’re] not sure how you guys plan to somehow magically convert these liquid ingredients into dry products,” she recruited chemical engineer Syed Naqvi, who became chief innovation officer. They developed a line of products, including hand soaps, cleaning sprays, and dish soaps, that generate the same “rich foam” experience and comparable prices, but with environmental benefits.

Paper packaging that protected the tablets was another obstacle, adding another year to their development. “You can’t just use plain old paper,” Paiji Yoo says, because the wrapping must preserve the contents from fluctuating conditions like high heat and humidity. “We actually thought that that was going to derail the entire concept.” B Corp and Climate Neutral-certified Blueland is now one of many cleaning product companies with this shared mission, including Grove Collaborative, CleanPath, and CleanCult.

Tune in to hear Blueland’s story—and their experience securing a deal on Shark Tank. “It’s definitely one of the most stressful experiences I’ve ever been through,” Paiji Yoo says. “You feel like the end goal of the folks on the other side of the table is to just rip you apart and make for good TV.”

You can listen and subscribe to World Changing Ideas on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. 

Plastic pollution has become a global problem, clogging up our rivers and flowing into our oceans, and breaking down into microplastics that reach far-flung corners of the world, from protected lands in national parks to the top of Mount Everest. Microplastics have even been found to fall out of the sky with snow in the Arctic—a once pristine wilderness that is now seeing certain areas fill up with plastic, with potentially devastating impacts for the climate and for Arctic species.

In a new review study published by the Alfred Wegener Institute, which carries out research in the Arctic and Antarctic, experts drew on nearly 200 studies to paint a picture of plastic pollution in the Arctic. “We saw that we reached a critical level,” says Melanie Bergmann, a senior scientist with the institute, “and the main take-home message is really that plastic pollution is very present in all spheres of the Arctic—no nice, white wilderness anymore.”

There are five major plastic accumulation areas around the world, akin to garbage patches that are associated with rotating ocean currents. Previous models have predicted that the Arctic could become a sixth accumulation area, and though the challenges of doing fieldwork make it difficult to pinpoint the state of plastic pollution there, researchers have found high concentrations of plastics in sea ice and on the deep sea floor. Even in this remote part of the world, Bergmann adds, there’s so much pollution that “it may even be that we’re seeing an accumulation area.”

Plastic comes to the Arctic both from local settlements—which bring pollution like fishing nets and wastewater, the latter of which can carry microplastic fibers shed from washing clothes—and from distant regions, the study found. When traveling from farther away, the plastic pollution is carried to the Arctic from ocean currents, rivers, and even “atmospheric transport,” traveling by wind, sea spray, and other atmospheric circulation patterns. Debris has been found in the Arctic from nearby Russia and Norway, but also from as far as the United States, Spain, Argentina, and Brazil. “In a way, the Arctic is kind of the perfect sink,” Bergmann says, “because you get pollutants through the water and through the air from a lot of different directions.”

Initial research indicates that microplastics could make the surface of the snow and ice darker, making it absorb more energy from the sun and potentially speed up its melting. When that snow and ice melt, it means the exposure of more dark surface areas, which could become a feedback loop, increasing warming and melting even further. Microplastics could also potentially change weather patterns, forming droplets in the air that could affect cloud formation, and consequently snow and rain patterns. Plastic is also affecting animals, having “infiltrated all levels of the Arctic food web,” per the study; fish, birds and mammals in the Arctic have both ingested plastic and gotten entangled in plastic litter.

Even if manufacturers stop producing new plastic, existing plastic pollution will continue to break down into microplastics and continue to harm Arctic ecosystems, per the study. But plastic production isn’t expected to stop any time soon. It’s actually expected to increase, both in terms of millions of tons produced and in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.

This Alfred Wegener Institute study tells the story of what we know about plastic pollution in the Arctic now, and notes that without an effort to mitigate this waste, the situation could get even worse.”I hope people see this as a warning sign,” Bergmann says, “and that it creates pressure for this UN plastic treaty being negotiated.” That treaty needs to include reduction targets, and countries need to reduce their plastic output, she adds. “Research has shown that recycling and improved waste management are important, they are part of the toolbox that we need, but they alone will not help us to tackle this problem. We need more than that.”

In the middle of the Sahara desert on the western border of Algeria, refugee camps hosting tens of thousands of people rely completely on humanitarian aid: Water, food, and other basic supplies come in on trucks. Trash, on the other hand, doesn’t really leave; until recently, all the waste from the camps was dumped nearby in the desert into an ever-growing pile of plastic. But at a new recycling center at one of the camps, refugees are now turning that plastic trash into furniture and other products that they can use.

Precious Plastic, an organization with a DIY recycling system developed by a Dutch designer who wanted to make recycling more accessible, helped set up the center after the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, put out a call for solutions to help with the waste challenge at the camps.

“They were looking for a way to solve two problems,” says Joseph Klatt, managing director at Precious Plastic. “One, they have a large refugee population there with a high unemployment rate. Everything is brought into the camps, so there’s not a lot of economic activity going on. And secondarily, there’s a lot of waste in the camp. They were looking for a solution to create a new business from processing the plastic waste and providing some economic activity for the refugees.”

In late 2021, a U.N. team built a new building to house the recycling center, and Precious Plastic built all the necessary equipment, packed it into a shipping container, and sent it off to Algeria. One machine shreds the plastic into tiny pieces. Other machines wash and dry them. Then the plastic pieces can be melted down and shaped into new objects. In another approach, the plastic pieces can be spread out on a table, arranged into a pattern, and pressed into flat sheets used to make furniture.

After some training, refugees at the camp quickly started sorting and processing plastic and making products that they needed, including school desks, benches and chairs, and serving sets for tea.

“We had a few design sessions where we talked about what’s possible and how to use this plastic material,” Klatt says. “And then they were just super stoked on coming up with ideas that made sense to them—furniture styles that they’re used to, and different ideas they had.”

The U.N. is paying a group of refugees to work at the recycling center for the first year of its operation; thereafter, refugees will become part owners in the facility. The first products will be sold to nongovernmental organizations who support infrastructure, like schools at the camps, and have the means to buy the furniture.

It’s not clear when refugees will ever be able to leave the area; Sahrawi people first fled from Moroccan troops in the 1970s, and many people have lived in the camps their entire lives. But the project is one small attempt to improve life in the area. The same system could be used at other refugee camps.

“It’s almost like an island context—a somewhat closed ecosystem,” Klatt says. “There’s an opportunity to try to create a circular economy within that community.”