Shelly Miller

Could you maybe say your name and what you do? Sure. I'm Shelly Miller. I'm a professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan.

Oh, Shelly is totally fine.

Yeah, so first off, I'll just say this is such a great question.

Things like this are a great way of starting to think about sustainability questions and analysis and, you know, really getting into the details of, all right, when we're trying to figure out environmental impacts of something, how do we even start going about doing that, knowing that there's lots of different environmental impacts and, you know, lots of different trade-offs to consider?

So for someone like me who really studies these things in a very systematic way, the first thing we do is try to figure out, well, what environmental impacts are we talking about?

Plastic causes environmental impacts throughout its entire life cycle. So plastics are made from natural gas byproducts. Making and manufacturing plastic has environmental impacts and air quality and also climate change emissions.

And so we know for a fact that plastics cause environmental impact. And sometimes other materials are even worse.

We need to take a broader look of saying, all right, well, it's not plastics, then what? And are those materials actually better than plastic?

Yeah, so what we do is we really look at the entire supply chain of a material. And so when it comes to plastic, one of the things that, you know, plastic is really good technically because it has some pretty fantastic technical characteristics that other materials don't have.

You know, so I will say that there are social scientists who can answer this question far better than I can as far as the psychology of perception and how people understand and perceive risk and impact.

I think one of the things that is largely driving the conversation with plastic is that we can really see the impact of plastic in a way that we can't see the environmental impact of other materials.

And so if we are able to take a picture of a beach that's strewn in microplastics, if we can take a picture of an animal that's entangled in some sort of plastic, or we see the carcass of a dead seabird whose stomach is filled with plastic, those are all heart-wrenching images.

And not only that, we can make the direct connection between what we see in those environmental damaging photographs and our lifestyles. we can see our own little consumption in those environmental impacts.

It's really hard to capture climate change in a picture. We have many, many photos of a polar bear on an ice shelf, but that doesn't give us the same connection as the stuff we see in our recycling bin every day.

Yeah, so consumers often think that plastic has the greatest environmental impact of any other material. It turns out that particularly if we're looking at a climate perspective on the amount of carbon emissions that materials have, plastic generally has a lower carbon footprint than other packaging materials.

So I would say that if we're just talking about yogurt, it would be buying yogurt in bulk that you're going to eat in a plastic container. And so that both reduces the total amount of plastic per serving of yogurt and has a lower packaging impact.

When we think about things that have the greatest environmental impact, we often focus on packaging. And so that's the stuff we throw out at the end of the day. And we tend to say, oh, look at all this packaging. And that's the biggest environmental impact that I have because I have to throw out all this packaging.

What people don't realize is it's the thing inside the package that has a much greater environmental impact than the package itself. Certainly in the case of food, the food that we're eating has a much greater environmental impact than the packaging it comes in.

No, it is an absolutely fantastic question. And you guys are asking exactly the right questions.