Equity In Every Drop: Series Three, Episode Two

Series three includes six episodes focused on the issues and advocacy priorities of our Clean Water Defense campaign.

In this episode of Equity In Every Drop, host Thomas Hynes speaks with Captain Evan Clark of Three Rivers Waterkeeper and Eric Harder of Youghiogheny Riverkeeper. They discuss their efforts to protect waterways from  plastic pollution, specifically focusing on the pre-production pellets also known as nurdles. Later in the episode, Hynes speaks with Daru Setyorini, the Brantas River Waterkeeper in Indonesia. Daru shares the alarming impact of plastic pollution on the Brantas River, the health implications for those who live beside it, and the challenges faced by developing countries in receiving the rest of the world’s trash. She also highlights the significant role youth will play in this struggle, including the remarkable work of her daughter Nina, in environmental advocacy.

The conversation delves into Evan and Eric’s collaborative efforts on the Nurdle Patrol campaign, aimed at raising awareness about the plastic pellets, nurdles, that are becoming a significant pollutant in waterways. They highlight the challenges in enforcing regulations and the need for stronger regulatory frameworks to hold industries accountable. They also discuss the broader implications of fracking and plastic waste management, advocating for public involvement and systemic changes to address these issues.

In the second segment, Hynes interviews Daru Setyorini, the Brantas River Waterkeeper in Indonesia. Daru recounts her journey in environmental activism, which began during her university days and led to the creation of ECOTON, an NGO focused on wetland conservation. Daru describes the severe plastic pollution in the Brantas River, exacerbated by insufficient waste management infrastructure and global plastic production.

Daru speaks about the health impacts of plastic pollution, including endocrine disruption and contamination of the food chain, and stresses the need for global systematic approaches to reduce plastic production. Daru also shares how her environmental advocacy work has become a family affair, with her daughter Nina joining the fight against plastic waste. The episode concludes with a call for greater corporate responsibility and public awareness to drive meaningful change.

Stay tuned! New monthly episodes will be posted here and anywhere you get your podcasts. Click “Subscribe” in the episode widget above to access links to popular podcast apps.

Thank you for listening, sharing, and supporting our mission to ensure everyone’s right to clean water. Together, we demand equity in every drop.

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Transcript – S3 Ep1

Waterkeeper S3 EP.2 Evan and Eric

[00:00:00] Thomas Hynes: Our first guests today are Captain Evan Clark of Three Rivers Waterkeeper in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Eric Harder of Youghiogheny Riverkeeper also in Pennsylvania. 

Captain Evan Clark has spent more than 20 years focused on learning from living, with, working upon, and playing around rivers. As part of his work, he has led thousands of volunteers cleaning more than 180 miles of river banks in Allegheny County, collecting more than a million pounds of mostly plastic based garbage tires and human made debris. 

Eric’s job is focused on protecting the Yough [producer’s note: Yough is a nickname for the Youghiogheny River] by conducting water samples to track the source of pollution, monitoring permanent discharge points, speaking for the river and the communities that depended on it, and yes, picking up lots of tires from the river. Eric, Evan, thank you both so much for being here today.

Captain Evan Clarke: Glad to be here. 

Eric Harder: Thanks for having us on. Appreciate it. 

Thomas Hynes: Yeah. And I really appreciate you both being here and apologies to Eric and to all of his constituents for if I mispronounced the name of, what I’m sure is, a beautiful [00:01:00] river.

Guys, thank you so much for being here. And I, you know, our focus today is on plastic pollution. And I thought it would be interesting to start, if you could tell me a little bit about yourselves. The water bodies that you work in and why you got involved in this type of work. Eric, why don’t you go first and then we’ll hear from you, Evan.

Eric Harder: Sure. I’m actually not a local. [I’m] from around Southwestern Pennsylvania, but moved here with my wife. And we  met when I was a raft guide in South Carolina. And if you ever traveled to the Yough there’s a great section of whitewater in a town called Ohiopyle, and that’s where I live and kind of raise my family.

But I’ve always been pretty passionate about waterways and environmental health. And I actually started as an environmental consultant thinking I was gonna be getting to study water, monitor water quality, but it turned out to be involved with the fracking business and [00:02:00] permitting and pipeline routing.

And so when I was able to kind of look past that job and say, what do I really wanna do? This position came up as the Youghiogheny Riverkeeper. It just felt so perfect and almost like a dream job. So when I was able to get this job, I really came on with not only a lot of experience from the ‘oil and gas’ kind of world but also what I feel is a lot of passion for recreation on our and waterways. And, we have over a million visitors every year that go rafting or bike on the great Allegheny Passage Trail, which borders and parallels our river all the way until you hit Evan’s jurisdiction in [the] Pittsburgh region. 

Thomas Hynes: That’s great. And I hear that a lot, you know, like speaking to Waterkeepers is one of my favorite parts of this job.

And you do hear that like, oh my God, and this job was available, and it’s like, that’s the dream job. That’s the job I’ve been waiting for. [00:03:00] That’s really cool. Evan, tell us a little bit about yourself and your river and your work. And I will just say at the outset that Pittsburgh is one of my favorite places in the world, so I’m gonna be really biased. And, I don’t think our listeners can see this, but Captain Evan Clark has a great photograph of, I believe, is that the Roberto Clemente Bridge? Maybe? Is that it? 

Captain Evan Clarke: I think that one’s the Clemente Bridge. But we could lie and say it’s the Rachel Carson Bridge. Alright, fine. That’s much more appropriate for this podcast. 

Thomas Hynes: That’s great. I mean, but like a city with bridges named for great people.

I mean, gosh that’s, those are two my favorites right there. Right. We’ll go off topic if we keep doing this. Yeah. Tell me a little bit about yourself, your water bodies, and why you got involved in this work. 

Eric Harder: Yeah. Like Eric I didn’t grow up in the area either. Pittsburgh was a chosen city for me. I started building little houseboats and traveling on the big rivers around the states. In around 2000, built a little raft on the Missouri, flipped it, lost everything, and [00:04:00] immediately went back to build another boat. And after years and years of traveling I fell in love with Pittsburgh.

Ended up here after Hurricane Katrina down in New Orleans. And settled in and got a chance to not just be somebody traveling and enjoying rivers, but somebody giving back. And then as we started to get the legacy trash cleaned up off of the river banks in the area. And my back was getting sorer and sorer. I was looking around for next things to get into. I was asked to join Waterkeeper, which, you know, again, like Eric said it was this great job to be asked, ton of local knowledge, but I didn’t have the science or the legal background that a lot of Waterkeepers have had. And hopefully my curiosity about all of this [00:05:00] stuff is helping to make up for it and local knowledge. Spent the last three years with Waterkeeper. And I work on the Allegheny River and that’s where I live on my house boat.

It comes down from New York. We also work on the Monongahela River coming up from West Virginia up towards Pittsburgh. And then those two come together and form the Ohio River, which then, of course, you know, goes about 981 miles down to the Mississippi and out to the Gulf, catching the river a couple miles up above our point in Pittsburgh. 

Thomas Hynes: Very cool. And you two have worked together, correct? I mean, I know that you’re near one another geographically speaking, roughly. Have you done a lot of work together? 

Eric Harder: Yeah, absolutely. When we first, I guess, started our what we’re talking about today, our nurdle patrol campaign it was basically an effort to not only monitor plastic in our waterways, but [00:06:00] really start to focus in on the Shell cracker plant, the ethane cracker plant, which is a major pellet producer in our area. And prior to it being online I had really no experience with nurdles. I had seen trash obviously floating down waterways and in eddies and the issues that come with microplastics or nanoplastics. But really when we started to look at our area the ability for just one of our organizations to try to tackle the complexity and the magnitude of a new pellet producer in the region. We really, focused on working together both with our I guess our knowledge of the region and Three Rivers, Waterkeepers location being so close to the cracker plant. It just seemed like a perfect fit for us to get out there on the water, to raise awareness together and to try to educate both our member bases about these [00:07:00] issues.

Because they do extend into our hillsides and the watersheds and the headwaters. And we’ll probably get into that and how it’s all related to, you know, going from natural gas and fracking all the way to pellet production. 

Thomas Hynes: So for our listeners, and I only know a little bit about this, so for me too. Let’s talk a little bit more about nurdles, and where they fit in the lifecycle of plastic production, which I think, you kind of already touched on. But let’s just say for someone listening who’s never heard about them at all – what are they and why should they be concerned? And either one of you can answer this. I’ll leave that to the two of you to decide. 

Eric Harder: I think Evan’s really great at describing like the, pre-consumer plastics end of it. And I think I have a lot of experience with the fracking and unconventional drilling. So if Evan wants to start with describing what pre-consumer plastics really is and how it leads to single use plastics. And then if we want to get into the origin of how that product [00:08:00] is how the resources are used, you know, I guess extracted to be able to make that.

Captain Evan Clarke: Yeah. So, nurdles are a pre-production plastic. And when I say a pre-production plastic, I mean that these are the individual grains of plastic that a plastic producer in our case you know, this Shell ethane cracker plant will make. And you know, the nurdles are, you know, roughly, everybody says that they’re about the sizeable lens.

Solar, rain or rice or, you know, maybe a little bit bigger than a piece of nerds candy. And 

Thomas Hynes: now you’re speaking my language. 

Captain Evan Clarke: There we go. And this Shell ethane cracker plant was a really big deal, and that was kind of this thing that brought this partnership together. They were going to [00:09:00] go for a lot of superlatives, you know, making this nurdle production facility, this plastics production facility that was designed to have the largest potential output capacity, production capacity in the United States while it was being built. It was the largest construction projects going in the world for quite a number of years.

Unfortunately it was, you know, in our opinion, poorly cleaned up old industrial site that was you know, really problematic and they received a lot of money from the state to help subsidize this plant and to dig in one step further why it was really tough to see coming into our area.

Well, and personally, especially for me, who’s just spent the last 17 years cleaning up plastic, was the fact that the feedstock for this plant was one of the big reasons that Pennsylvania is [00:10:00] kind of still stuck in the Pennsylvania, West Virginia, maybe pieces of New York, are stuck in the bad old days.

The feedstock is fracked natural gas and for a little while it seemed like the value of that natural gas you know, had kind of saturated the market. There was less and less demand for new wells. And so these big massive projects like this ethene  racker plant or the new data farm, you know, gas powered plant really provide a sink for this fracking, that’s you know, destroying the land and water around us already. 

Thomas Hynes: And I know that nurdles have all the dangerous components of fully grown plastic, for lack of a better term and I’ve heard them described as lentil sized and grain of rice.

Is part of the problem, correct me if I’m wrong, that makes it harder to capture and clean up if there’s a spill, which of, and that it’s, makes it easier to spill because they’re harder to contain ’cause they’re so [00:11:00] small?

Captain Evan Clarke: Potentially. But, I think that the real problem that we have there around the spills is that they’re so cheap to make and the production controls are, you know, so loose that people just don’t care and hasn’t really been strongly regulated in the past. And so, a lot of people feel like plastics are just kind of this inert substance and what does it matter? And I mean obviously that’s not our take on it. 

Thomas Hynes: Yeah. It’s a very diplomatic way of putting it.

 Eric Harder: And I think when you look at the regions where pellets or nurdles are previously made. They’re typically in our marine coast where for us being an inland region, if you have a spill or a large dump of these into the waterway, they’re gonna be moving hundreds of miles. Right before they could potentially land on a riverbank and be, you know, [00:12:00] stable for a little while. And so if you follow other Waterkeeper groups, you know, there’s been ongoing settlements about, you know, the best management practices of how to clean these up or how to keep your facility clean. Not only that, but the chemicals that are involved with creating them and what they do and the neural or the pellet kind of deteriorates. But now, for our region and for the United States, there’s never really been a large plastic producer, a pellet, producer inland. So basically at the top of the Ohio River you’re having hundreds of miles of travel time and hundreds of communities that now can be impacted by this flowing water with nurdles involved.

I keep saying nurdles, but it’s kind of the too cute of a name. So I’ll try to stick with pellets.

And really when it comes to, you know, how are these formed? And Evan briefly touched on the natural gas [00:13:00] production. The fracking industry had a lot of these extra waste gasses that they were once called and so they’d be either flared off or, you know, they didn’t know what to do with them, so they’d be released into the atmosphere just ’cause they couldn’t do anything with them.

There’s no place to go. So now that we can produce plastic pellets out of ’em, it really gives the industry another avenue to make some kind of money off of fracking. And when it comes to the community impacts of nurdle production, you really can’t just look at the plastic pellet.

You have to look at what happens to get that feedstock to the plant via pipelines, but also the extraction process and then also the waste products that are created during the fracking industry and what happens with those. And honestly, that could be a whole nother podcast about fracking.

And it’s really [00:14:00] disheartening to see people just throw a plastic bottle out the window. One thing is littering, which is hard to imagine doing, but you know, the people that are impacted by the entire loop of fracking pellet production. The littering, the plastic breaking down really touches a lot of people in a lot of communities.

And what we really look at in our watershed is most of those frack wells are not in highly populated areas. They’re in rural communities. And so we’re forcing and pushing these industrial activities outside of the normal boundaries, which we see close to urban centers or urbanized areas, and really getting into headwater streams in rural communities, places that maybe have less of a voice when it comes to protecting their own community. And as a good Pennsylvania member or citizen, they’re [00:15:00] loyal to industry and they have been since coal mining started here, since logging has been here. So people really take this as a moment of prosperity or possible economic gain for the region, which has been going up and down with these different levels of industrial renaissance and production and stuff like that. 

Captain Evan Clarke: You made a couple good points I wanted to touch on too, that the bottles out the window thing. It’s really frustrating when we see that happen when, like on a consumer plastics end, but you know, when we see that sort of waste happening on an industrial scale and it’s the equivalent of tossing truckloads of bottles directly into the river. And then when we’ve asked for enforcement around that, because it’s a clear Clean Water Act violation and haven’t seen the sort of enforcement we’ve needed.

That, you know, gets really frustrating. But at the same time it’s [00:16:00] been, I’ve started to realize it’s a great place to be able to work. You know, here we are working on plastic pellets, which are the industrial product and we’re not then getting stuck and getting confused by this red herring of, oh, if the consumers just did this, oh, if it was just recycled, you know, this is direct.

Yeah. Industry malfeasance. And we can directly work against that without being confused by all these other issues that tend to throw people who don’t spend all their time thinking about this sort of thing off track. 

Thomas Hynes: I really appreciate that. Well, I appreciate the work that both of you do, but I really appreciate what you just said.

Both of you said things that stuck out to me. Eric what you said about, you know, this is, it’s understandable to see, I think we can safely say like, an area that used to be a little bit more economically vital than it once was. And now this miracle technology is gonna recreate some of that [00:17:00] prosperity, like that’s very alluring and understandable. And so I understand that loyalty to industry and to jobs and to people’s livelihoods. Like I get that. 

And I listen, I am an avid recycler. I compost. I recycle my food stuffs like, I’m like, I’m all about my personal responsibility. But, it’s the corporations who are wrong anyway. Yeah. And I think what’s interesting about the nurdles, and it also you’re right, Eric, I think you said this a deceptively cute name. A deceptively adorable innocent sounding name with a lot of damage.

And Evan, I really like what you were saying, how like that even though this is a truckload of plastic bottles being dumped directly into the river, you see this as an opportunity to kind of [00:18:00] really frame the conversation as like pure corporate malfeasance. It’s not me taking a plastic bag at the grocery store is not like having a hand in this problem.

And also I just wanna understand this, so, when there’s the fracking byproduct that can’t be sold as energy. And so that has led to this sort of glut of product that has been turned into plastic into nurdles. Is that correct? 

Eric Harder: Yeah, absolutely. And I just briefly touched on the word, the F word flaring, and you’ll see that word related to all types of production of products, whether it’s power, plastics, or anything related to natural gases, there’s always maybe too much coming in at one time or maybe it’s not the right mixture.

And for good reason, they’re not just allowed to send it off into the atmosphere. ’cause it’s very detrimental. And obviously climate change is one of our main focuses as a Waterkeeper member but, you know, the word flaring just [00:19:00] means they’re lighting it on fire. And now they have a place to force this product. And the only way to get it there is by pipeline. And when you look at the nation’s pipeline, I guess web, they’re not just for natural gas for either export or use as utility. There are also these natural gas liquids, which the one that we’re concerned about here is ethane.

And they’re shipping it straight to this Shell factory called the ethane cracker plant, where they’re using basically straight ethane and other byproducts of natural gas fracking to produce these little plastic pills. And that’s when you get large regions that are able to expand. When it comes to fracking the landowners who are compensated have probably been farmers or landowners for lots and lots of years and really have [00:20:00] no way of making a good size amount of money from their farmland, whether it’s corn or beef or, you know, milk production. And then all of a sudden a large company comes in and says, oh, we’re gonna give you a million dollars.

That I’m sure is hard to say no, especially when it’s coming at such a rate where your neighbor’s doing it. If we put a well over there, you’re not gonna be compensated the same. And so there’s these booms, fracking booms that happen where either a new technology or the price of natural gas wanes and people really jump on the timing to get these land leases.

And if you talk to people who have frack wells nearby. They’re not pleasant to be by. There’s not only industrial pollution that’s made from these fracking sites but the noise and the nuisance that comes with it. The increased amount of truck traffic construction processes, but [00:21:00] also we can extend that arm all the way to gravel production.

You know, people look at quarries like, oh yeah, everyone needs gravel, but these facilities need, you know, thousands and thousands of tons and truckloads of gravel for their access roads for their working pads. And then there’s the frack sand and where does it come from? Then there’s the water, which obviously Waterkeepers should be in tuned about.

And everyone else should be aware of how much water is used at a fracking site, and then what exactly happens to that water. So now we’re not just moving from the construction side, but now it feels like the general public may have heard of brine water or produced water, but what exactly is there and how do places like our state of Pennsylvania regulate that?

And it’s really hard to regulate it because it’s a whole new science for a lot of places, and a lot of people are unaware of what the dangers are of that product. 

Thomas Hynes: That brings me to my next [00:22:00] question. I think we have a pretty clear understanding of what the problem is here and how pernicious and dangerous, so, what can be done about this? Is it a matter of public education? Is it a matter of enforcement? Is it both? What would you like to see done more of or what’s not being done enough?  

Captain Evan Clarke: Well, we started off, um, monitoring the issue and working to wrap our head around it. Both you know, looking at waste that could be coming from this Shell cracker plant. And looking at realizing actually through doing that, that there was a much larger problem that was already existing. And that realization, I think, came in a couple of forms. One of ’em was a neighbor of Shells that we identified right away was already losing incredible amount of these nurdles, they’re a raw styrofoam manufacturer. So they were kind of making the grains of what we’ll call like [00:23:00] unpopped styrofoam. And at one point Eric and James, another person from Mountain Watershed and I were out on Raccoon Creek next to Shell and just found the plants on the riverbank around there covered in these plastic pellets.

And then as soon as we started running our nets in the water, you know, our nets were filling up with these, really tiny little grains of plastics, which we then later realized that some of them would float for a short amount of time. But when I went down to the bottom of the creek and scooped up a bunch of mud, I found that they’d been also sinking and embedding themselves in the mud.

So this whole area around this facility is, you know, literally just covered in plastic waste already. So we saw that as well as seeing you know, we had another horrible great day on the river when we found a lot of plastic pellets. These were just [00:24:00] nurdles on the riverbank in a drift pile and went, okay, this is way more than we usually see here. Is Shell losing these? What’s going on? We delineated about I think it was a 12 square foot area, scraped all of the debris off of that area and took it back to the offices. Our two organizations got some volunteers and staff members to sit down with us and sort through this debris and we found about 700-something pellets and about 11 square feet.

And what we realized though, that was even more interesting, or maybe problematic, was that these nurdles weren’t coming from a single source. We’re seeing really old nurdles, we’re seeing really new nurdles, you know, all sorts of different colors, shapes, and sizes. And we really realized that, it looks to us like all the small [00:25:00] manufacturers all through our region are all losing nurdles upstream and they’re washing into these drift piles. And it started to highlight for us that it’s not just this primary production that we have an issue with, but they’re being lost everywhere. 

Thomas Hynes: Yeah. And I’m angered by, or outraged by when you said earlier that the problem is not necessarily that they’re so small and they get lost of packages, that people just don’t care because it’s so cheap.

Like, who cares if you lose some? And that like makes my blood boil. 

Captain Evan Clarke: I wanna just kind of summarize one of the things that Eric said that I think you know, leans into what you’re talking about is every one of those nurdles represents a vast amount of waste. You know, waste and transportation, waste of sand, waste of water. I mean, all of these farmers that Eric’s talking about are kind of Guinea pigs in a long term experiment.

We’ll see what happens, you know, to their [00:26:00] lands. What happens in the long run, you know, there’s a truck in the transportation and, all of this, you move it all the way forward to the fact that all of this stuff is clearly single use you know, I’m gonna turn into single use plastics. It’s just each one of those tiny grains represents a massive waste on a massive scale. 

Eric Harder: Just to further what Evan was saying, and, you know, maybe just a bit of our monitoring efforts and how we started looking at nurdles in the waterway of the Ohio River.

And two moments, kind of on the opposite end of the spectrum really stand out to me. And it was one prior to Shell’s ethane cracker plant going online, we knew that we wanted to get baseline data. And as a Waterkeeper group, you know, science is really the starting point for a lot of our organizations and a lot of where the members really like to start too, is making sure the science is there.

So we had come up with a pretty [00:27:00] simple monitoring program, and it does follow. If you look at the nurdlepatrol.org they have a good volunteer effort and tracking and database of nurdles that have been found all over the United States and probably overseas. But two memories that I have is when I first found the very first nurdle that I’ve ever found on the Ohio, and it was in a bunch of sticks across the river from where Shell was being made.

And I said, okay, now all I gotta do is find the closest plastic pellet user and we’ll be able to get them to say, oh yeah, we lost some. Sorry about that, and maybe we can get a clean water violation applied to it. And we looked at the closest one and on their website they produced plastic baggies, Ziploc baggies.

And I was like, oh, that’s a no brainer. Let’s see what we can do to get a violation put [00:28:00] on their facility. And then that’s when, as Evan mentioned before, the Clean Water Act specifically talks about floating debris and how that’s a violation of the Clean Water Act. But it’s really been a struggle for us to say, oh yeah, that is against the law and this is what you need to do. And when you talk to the permitting department of our Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Environmental Protection for Pennsylvania, they have a wide variety of interpretations of that law.

Then when you get to enforcement and you get to water quality standards, every one of those silos at DEP has a different version of what they think is actually the problem. And so no one is being cited for a nurdle violation, and we’re waiting for that moment to really come forward.

And then on the other end of the spectrum is, Evan called me up and he is like, “hey, we had a train derailment.” [00:29:00] And obviously that can bring in all kinds of issues and I don’t want to, you know, belittle any other train derailment or any other kind of problem, ’cause we’ve obviously heard from recent news about the exponentially bigger and badder problems than just a couple of nurdles. But when we took the drone up and saw the banks completely covered in what looked like a white foamy substance, and it turned out just to be millions and millions of nurdles that are now in the waterway and no violation was ever applied to the spills or any kind of cleanup activities were not really

followed up in a very meticulous way. So, from that first nurdle that was found to this grand spill. All the nurdles that fall in the waterway in between those, and nothing is ever really done about it. And so it’s rather frustrating. And then we got to what Evan was just talking about. It [00:30:00] was the Styro pet case where the pellets were coming out of a permitted discharge.

And at that point, Three Rivers Waterkeepers, like, this is a no-brainer for us. We’re gonna, litigate against this and how could any other department say that it’s not a problem. And I think from there, it’s now a regulatory change that we need to button down at an EPA level, at a federal level, saying that nurdles are, basically a criteria in water quality standards. And right now that’s still dragging its feet and I don’t see any progress from my point of view of that changing in the nearby future.  

Thomas Hynes: You guys are painting this picture of like a clear violation of the Clean Water Act and it seems like an easy enforcement. Make me understand how, this is like, not a slam dunk case, what can be done?

Captain Evan Clarke: Well, it’s turning into the specific Styro pack case that we’ve been working on. We, immediately, like [00:31:00] Eric was saying, you know, issued an intent to sue. And since then I’ve been in a couple of years of legal wrangling back and forth and haven’t, yet reached a settlement.

You know, I hope that within that couple of weeks we do reach that point. We’re getting really close to something that we are really excited about. One of the things that still hangs in the well actually I’m gonna pause on that ’cause there’s details I can’t talk about, obviously, you know, until the settlement’s done.

But I can say that, right away, our Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection joined us on that lawsuit. And if they stay with us through the lawsuit and through the settlement that has the potential of becoming a precedent setting settlement because this would be in the first time that we’re aware of that an enforcement [00:32:00] agency has been involved in enforcing a Clean Water Act violation suing for a Clean Water Act violation. So far it’s been Waterkeepers and other groups that have had many of the wins over the years standing alone without enforcement agencies joining them.

So we’re hoping that the Styro pack case will be precedent setting, and we’re hoping it really can set some really strong precedents because again, of these enforcement agencies working with us. 

Thomas Hynes: I know what you are doing and what other Waterkeepers are doing, where regulatory and state actions and government actions are kind of falling. We have this great Waterkeeper force, for lack of a better term, kind of stepping in and being a voice for the river. And that’s what this organization’s all about.

So that’s not really a surprise to anyone listening to this, but for anyone listening what can someone do about this? 

Captain Evan Clarke: In my opinion anything that has the end goal of [00:33:00] helping people realize the true cost or promoting you know, the fact that we should be paying true cost on plastics and that it’s just incredibly falsely cheap is huge. Yeah. And there’s a couple of things that you know, that I think about that I’m really excited about that are coming up.

US Waterkeepers, Waterkeeper Alliance is gonna be participating in this international plastic pellet count. 

And what this international plastic pellet count will do is, you know, have people all over the world – a lot of different organizations working to quantify these pellets.

Captain Evan Clarke: And all that data will go back to the second thing that I wanted to re-mention again. Eric already talked about it earlier. We’ll go back to these nurdle patrol.org websites that maps, plastic nurdles around the world and is incredible fount of resources in finding those. And it’s useful in that it was set up as a [00:34:00] way to have citizen science be useful in a courtroom. It was set up as something that can be brought in as evidence.

Captain Evan Clarke: And the work that they’ve done there for years and years is, you know, something I wanna spend a lot of time giving credit to. 

Thomas Hynes: A thing that I’m really interested in is extended producer responsibility.

Basically the notion that like, you made this toxic thing and then you just set it loose and then you’re like, well, don’t use straws buddy. Like, how do we stick it to them for lack of a better term? How do we like make them responsible for the destruction that they’re causing, 

Eric Harder: The only thing that I wanna kind of continue to talk about is the science that’s related to each individual nurdle. And when that breaks down, you know what happens. And I think that’s where the general public will really get involved and you’re saying, what can we do?

And it’s hard for the general public to have [00:35:00] any kind of feelings about this when we really don’t know what a deteriorated nurdle does on a single base or what happens to 10,000 of them, and are those toxins impacting our water resources, the fisheries, the macro invertebrates, the wildlife.

We see photos of say, some kind of bird on a waterway that has plastic whether it’s chunks of plastic or microplastic in there. Floodways or their ingested material. But wait until science has a good idea of what happens when these nurdles break down and the different chemicals and heavy metals that are used to make these and how they contribute to the detriment and the impact to wildlife.

And I think that’s where unfortunately, you’re gonna have the biggest public uprising is when you have living organisms besides ourselves that get impacted. [00:36:00] And those are the, I think, avenues that will get the normal person to be excited. But if you are a normal individual, you know, this is something that you should be bringing up to your local watershed group or your local Waterkeeper and say, Hey, is there anything in our watershed that has to do with nurdles. And if they say no, you know, encourage that group to say well maybe you should look a little bit further into it. Yeah. Or maybe we could help by going to volunteer to go look for these nurdles. And so advocating to do more looking into this problem is a great way to start because it is so.

So kind of new to the normal person. Maybe your normal watershed group isn’t as strong an advocate as we would like them to be. So get out there and encourage them to make a statement. Sign on to comment letters, talk to their elected officials. But that’s [00:37:00] really the only way to hold these large companies accountable is to have the awareness, make others educated, and that includes our elected officials. And it’s that time old phrase is speak to your elected officials, but that’s really the only way that you’re gonna educate a good body of the general public about this issue. 

Captain Evan Clarke: I’m gonna lean into where you were going with that producer responsibility. And, you know, kind of tie it into that true cost. You know, if Shell wasn’t given a record breaking amount of money from Pennsylvania in the form of tax breaks, because they promised to bring all of these benefits to the region that they’ve been shown not to have.

I was thinking of, well, Eric was talking about some of the problems around the fracking, is that, this fracking waste has been classified as a nonhazardous waste. Even though very much like, well the same as coal you know, coal [00:38:00] residuals, coal ash. It’s incredibly dangerous and it’s right.

You know, and it’s handing, in essence, free money to these industries, to produce these products that are amazingly false costs right. And then, you know, same old story. We, the planet, get stuck with the products of that extraction.

Thomas Hynes: Right, and you’re talking about the cost, and the subsidies and tax breaks, and then they’re not paying for the cleanup, like we’re paying for that.  

Captain Evan Clarke: Yeah, I worked for an environmental nonprofit for 17 years cleaning up plastic waste off of the river banks and we weren’t getting that money from plastic producers, you know?

It was coming from individuals, it was coming from foundations and it’s doing that to drag on the economy. 

Thomas Hynes: Absolutely. 

Well, I want to thank you both for being here today.

It’s a very frustrating situation. I find it very frustrating. It’s a maddening and destructive situation and I wanna see accountability, but I wanna see clean [00:39:00] water bodies more than anything, I wanna see a future of clean rivers and I know that you both deal as well ’cause you’ve been working your careers towards that goal.

So, on behalf of our listeners and on behalf of people who use water bodies, which is pretty much everybody, I wanna say thank you both for being here today. 

Eric Harder: Happy to be here and appreciate the invite. 

Thomas Hynes: Absolutely. 

Captain Evan Clarke: Yeah, thank you. And you know, it sometimes sounds a little overblown, but you know, I kind of feel like it’s an honor to be able to work on these big problems and get the support that we get doing it.

And, your podcast is one of those forms of support. So thanks so much.  

Thomas Hynes: My next guest today is Daru Setyorini, the Brantas Riverkeeper in Indonesia. Daru studied biology at university where she also met her husband. They both shared a love of activism and together created ECOTON, the Ecological Observation in Wetlands Conservation, the non-governmental organization that would eventually house Brantas Riverkeeper since 2013.

Daru, it’s so good to see you again. Thank you so much for being here today. 

Daru Setyorini: Thank you for having me, Tom. So good to see you again here. 

Thomas Hynes: Yeah, I was thinking that before we came on the line today that I’ve been with this organization for, this is my fifth year, and you were one of the first Waterkeepers that I met.

And it was such a good introduction to this movement and to this line of work and this advocacy and was so inspiring to meet you then. And in preparing for today, I kind of went back and read the thing that I wrote about you back in 2021 and refamiliarized myself with your [00:01:00] work and your family and watched some videos and some talks that you’ve given.

And it’s just, it continues to be very inspiring and I’m so glad for myself and for our listeners that we get to have you today. 

So Daru, tell me a little bit about how you got involved with this work, why you chose to fight for, and advocate for the Brantas River, and some of the threats that you’re seeing in your work to the health of the river and the community. 

Daru Setyorini: Yeah. I’m so excited when I get information or get invitation to join Waterkeeper Alliance. Because back in 2011 when my husband Prigi received Goldman Environmental Prize, the Goldman Foundation connect us with the Waterkeeper Alliance. And I also read about how Waterkeeper works globally and they are very dedicated, committed group of people who fight for, right to clean water – swimmable, drinkable, fishable water. So that’s really in line with what we are doing in Brantas River. And I started this movement together with my colleague friends. In year 2000, we established an NGO called ECTON or Ecological Observation in Wildland Conservation. Because when we studied in biology department in the university in Suraya, we know that the environment is so rich.

Yeah, Indonesian rivers ecosystems are very rich , but also fragile and threatened by the exploitation, pollution. But, very little people aware about that. And the government also don’t have enough concern or attention to protect the environment. So we think that we have to represent the environment.

So we want to protect the environment for our future, for our health , for our sustainable livelihood because, especially the water is very important and we think that as a young generation, we have to fight to get our right to clean water. Because at the time in the year 2000, Brantas River is heavily polluted, you know, because industrial waste discharge untreated into the river, while the river also used as a drinking water supply for the city.

So more than 5 million people depends on the drinking water from the state company, a portable water company that use the river water from Brantas. So, we also learned at that time about the biodiversity along the river from the upstream to the estuary. We studied mangrove forest that grow along the coast of Brantas Delta.

So, that’s become our motivation here. To learn more about the pollution in the Brantas River and find the sources along the river.

Thomas Hynes: Yeah, so, Daru, I want to ask you about plastic pollution and how that impacts the Brantas River. I remember when we spoke in 2021, you had told me that an estimated 85 million pounds of plastic pollution flows from the Brantas River to the sea every year, which is such a staggering, almost incomprehensible figure.

Is that still the case? Is that worse? Is that better? Tell me how plastic pollution is impacting the Brandas River? 

Daru Setyorini: Yeah. Plastic pollution become more severely polluting Brantas River, I think in the around after 2005 and until now. Yeah, because previously, like, when we did research in mangrove area we didn’t see as much as plastic covering the mangrove.

At the time, in year ‘96 until 2000, but after 2005, then until now, it’s become more and more plastic accumulated in the mangrove ecosystem. And that condition, I think it’s getting worse than the condition in 2021 when we first talk about the plastic pollution in Brantas. Because the improvement in the government service for the waste management system is not significantly improving. But, the production or the generation of  plastic waste per capita or by household in the Brantas basin is, yeah, significantly increasing. 

Thomas Hynes: And that’s that. That tracks with, I mean, that sounds right because it’s, it seems as though plastic production is only going up. And you had mentioned that sort of before 2005 it wasn’t so bad, but now it’s really ramping up.

And even since, in the four years since we last spoke, it sounds like that huge number of 85 million pounds annually is going up as well. And that is, that’s a lot of things. It’s first of all, very tragic, but it tracks because I think, you know, like we said, plastic pollution, plastic production is going up.

What’s not going up is any kind of effort to rein that in or recycle it or dispose of it properly. So of course the pollution is going up in step with the production. Yeah, that’s, this was a thing that we talked about when we spoke in 2021 and in watching some documentaries and some talks you were giving I’ve seen that. Can you tell me how that plastic pollution, you know, obviously it’s not good for a free flowing river to be clogged up with anything artificial. But, can you tell me how plastics is impacting the quality of the river or even the quality of food or the, basically the life of the people who live along the river? 

Daru Setyorini: Yeah. Maybe people, common people think plastic is very convenient. It’s cheap [00:10:00] because we can get it for free, like plastic bag or packaging. It’s very cheap. But most people probably still don’t know that plastic is made from oil. And it contain more than 16,000 chemical additives in plastic production.

And about only 30% of those chemicals that has been tested for the safety for the human health. So, plastic pollution is very dangerous or very harming our health because most of the plastic chemicals have endocrine disrupting impact to our health. So will disturb our hormonal system, that means that plastic chemicals can disturb our reproductive system.

Many of our bodies, our organ systems, are controlled by hormones. So, there is a study from the U.S. scientist, I think her name was Dr. Swan, that [examines] plastic chemicals like phthalate. 

It’s the additive that used to make plastic flexible, like, how to call it elastic. So, that has proven to have impact on the male reproductive system. It can reduce the fertility when the mother during pregnancy was exposed to a lot of phthalate compounds.

It can be from the food, the package in plastic, or when people eat from the food that heat in microwave. Yeah. And also drinks in the plastic packaging like milk or juice or other drinks that package in plastic. That become the source of the plastic chemicals can enter or interfere with the development of the male reproductive system.

And there are also many other chemicals that polluting our river like PFAS. It is also kind of chemicals used in the like plastic textile to make it waterproof. So like a raincoat or other textile, to make it waterproof. And PFAS has has been found in most of the river water in, in many country, like in U.S. and in UK. But in Indonesia, because we don’t have the laboratory to analyze certain plastic chemicals, what ECOTON do, or Brantas River Waterkeeper do, to monitor the impact of plastic. We did a lot of studies on microplastics. So, we collect sample of river water and analyze the microplastic in the water and also in the seafood and in the air. 

Yeah. Not only in water. Yeah. Because plastic also in Indonesia is very common. People do open burning to get rid of their waste. So, plastic burning also release microplastic into the air. And also the microplastic can discharge from the wastewater, from the plastic recycling and paper recycling industry, where Brantas River is also one of the center of the recycling industry in [00:14:00] Indonesia.

So plastic pollution has been impacted the whole ecosystem like, polluting the water with microplastic and also contaminating our food chain with microplastic. And we also check the polymer. When we collect the microplastic. We can analyze the polymer using the, we call it FTIR, analyzing in the laboratory, and we can identify what kind of polymer we found there is a PET PPE also other plastic polymer.

So, yeah, plastic has been threatening our drinking water source, contaminating our food chain and also impacting the human health. 

Thomas Hynes: That’s a long list of reasons.

The impacts are so staggering and so many and it’s just, it’s awful. And there’s a few things I want to just pull out there, that when we were talking about it. We were talking about recycling facilities and when we were talking just a moment ago, we were saying how plastic production has gone up. But recycling is not, rates are not keeping pace.

Right. And so, this kind of leads me to my next question, which is you know, we understand that the river is being choked with plastic pollution. We understand that the river is sending plastic pollution out into the open sea at staggering rates. And we understand the awful and many health impacts you’re talking about miscarriages. And it’s tragic and just you’re talking about people’s lives and their hopes to start a family are being literally choked out by this toxic chemical. And it’s really very heartbreaking. With that said, I’m stuck on this sort of recycling notion, but what is being done? What can be done? What would you like to see be done to turn the tide of this onslaught of plastic pollution? 

Daru Setyorini: Yeah. I think the plastic pollution become a global problem. I can say that no country in the world is able to solve this problem because we are flooded with too much plastic.

So the problem is caused by overproduction of plastic, especially the single use plastic and packaging. Because 60% of the plastic waste is from the single use plastic packaging. So if we really want to solve this plastic tsunami we have to change our way of consumption. 

We have to shift from disposable lifestyle back into our tradition, maybe like in the year 1970s or 1980s. We still shopping with our own containers, our own bags. And in Asia, especially in the traditional market, we still can find a lot of plant-based material packaging like banana leaf, bamboo and other kind of plant that can be used to wrap or to pack food or any product we can use in the house. 

Thomas Hynes: And I’ll go a step further. Because I appreciate what you’re saying that the individual needs to change their behavior, but I would, I mean, this is maybe not something you and I can solve right here, but what I would like to see, and I’ve been sort of stuck on this for a couple years.

In the states we call it extended producer responsibility or EPR, and what it means ultimately is if you make this product that can’t be recycled, that is poisoning women and men and children and leading to all these terrible health outcomes. and can’t be recycled. Well, then you need to pay to take care of it.

And I understand that I could do better going to the market by bringing a reusable bag, but that’s a drop in the ocean to, I guess use an apt metaphor. But, you know, where’s their responsibility in this? And again, I’m not asking you to answer that, it’s more of a rhetorical question, but I think that needs to be part of the conversation, is that you and I, and our listeners can do more.

Of course, you know, we can make better choices and make healthier and smarter and more sustainable choices. But it won’t make a difference unless these producers are either compelled by government or marketplace or something, to change their production and to change that paradigm. Because as long as production is ramping up and recycling is going down this problem is simply not gonna go away. I want to just come back to, you know, because I don’t want to I think we’re all very aware, this is a huge problem, but I think what might be valuable here is to talk a little bit more about any other, you know, solutions or highlight any campaigns or successes that you might have.

Daru Setyorini: Yeah. I agree with you. 

The individual action will not solve, it’s not enough. We are too small if we only do individually that what we need is really a systematic approach. Yeah. And it should be at the global level because plastic production is traded globally.

Daru Setyorini: And the corporate that should be held accountable is the oil producers country. And in the global negotiation, like in the INC, where the state delegates try to make agreement how to solve the plastic pollution. There is strong lobby of this oil producers company or states so they can keep, increase the production, and move away the solution to the end of pipe solution.

While we will never solve this plastic pollution, because there is not enough capacity in every country to deal with the amount of plastic we already produce right now. If it’s still increasing, then yeah the problem will become worse. We also doing lobby to the FMCG that produce a lot of product that package in single use plastic, especially in Asia. They sell in the small sachets. Multilayer  sachets that is non-recyclable and very difficult to collect when it’s already dispersed into the environment because the size is very small. 

So when we do river cleanup, beach cleanup, we not only collect the trash, but we also identify the brand of this trash. And then right, we make a ranking of the worst polluter of the beach or the river. And then we do campaign to the company. Sometimes, we return the trash we collected from the river or from the sea to their office. 

Thomas Hynes: Oh, good. Give it right back to them.

Daru Setyorini: Yeah. And we demand them to stop selling the sachet, because no recycling company can process because it’s multilayer. When they recycling, they have to segregate into monopolymers. So when it’s multilayer like diapers or sachets or low grade plastic, that easily broken or degraded, it cannot be recycled and there is no circularity of plastic. Circular economy is not reality. It’s a fiction because plastic can only be recycled maximum two times. And when we collect the trash that already polluting or leak into the environment, it’s too dirty to be recycled.  

Thomas Hynes: Yep. I completely agree with you about the recycling paradigm or just the lack of recycling and the lie that this can be recycled. And it goes back to that individual responsibility. Oh, well just recycle it. Just put in the right, put in the right trash bin, and it’s solved.

It’s not solved. It’s a fallacy. It’s a lie, and it’s a dangerous lie that we’ve been sold. We have toyed around with calling plastic pollution a slow motion oil spill because that’s what it is. And you’re right, a lot of people don’t realize that this is fossil fuels and this is a terribly toxic problem.

And I do just wanna say once more. I kind of got very excited when you mentioned this, and I probably spoke over you. I love the idea of returning the plastic pollution to the producer and leaving it at their doorstep. I think that’s just that is right up my alley. That speaks to the teenager in me and just, I think that’s just really great.

And I like that symbolically, but I think we should literally do that. I mean, this is their problem. This is what the extended producer responsibility is talking about. You made this mess, you created this toxic product. What are you gonna do with it? Why should I be responsible for it?

I don’t, you know. Anyway, I digress. I’ll get all worked up and upset about this if I keep talking about it, but tell me, what would you like to see the plastic industry do? What could they do? What would you like to see done differently? Less of, more of.

Daru Setyorini: Yeah, I think the plastic pollution can only be solved if this plastic industry put a cap of the plastic production. So they have to reduce their plastic production to adjust the capacity of the government capacity to manage the waste. Right nowm like in Indonesia or in developing country, maybe the government capacity only can handle 30% of the waste that generated.

So the plastic production should be reduced to balance the capacity of the waste management infrastructure, and the virgin plastic should become more expensive than the recycled plastic because right now the recycling industry cannot survive because the price of the recycled pellet is more expensive than the virgin plastic.

So the plastic industry prefer to buy the virgin plastic instead of recycled because the quality is also lower. And the recycling industry, like in Europe, in U.S., many of the company already stop operation or bankrupt. So more waste will be exported to developing country for recycling like Indonesia. Even the best country that claim to have best management waste system like probably Germany, Japan, U.S., or Europe, they do collect the plastic trash, segregate the plastic, but then they claim they already recycle. While the recycling actually only ship the waste to the other country like Africa or Asia. 

So it’s a waste colonialism happening here when the developing country have to suffer more to handle the waste from developed country while we already cannot handle our own domestic waste.

So the only solution is the plastic production should be significantly reduced. Probably in the next 10 years or next five years, there should be significant reduction, maybe 30% to 50% of plastic production. So, the developed countries should also recycle their own trash in the home country.

They should stop shipping the waste to other country for recycling, you know, because recycling is very expensive if it’s done really properly. Indonesia and other developing country still accept recycling because the labor, which is very cheap and there is no health protection for the worker.

And it should be stronger designed so it can be reused over and over again. And if it’s already end of its lifetime, it can be easily recycled or degraded naturally if it can be made from the plant-based or organic material. So we have to stop single, use plastic as much as we can in the industry side.

They have to redesign and the government should put high tax, on the virgin plastic. So the recycled plastic industry will be growing and it should be run by its country. Stop shipping their waste for recycling.  

Thomas Hynes: I fully agree. And I think you make another list of great points and I think it feels similar to the extended producer responsibility. If, you know, if Canada and its companies are making this plastic, then Canada should deal with its trash. If America is dealing, is making this plastic, America should deal with this trash.

It’s yeah, I think you said you used the word colonialism in there and it definitely smacks of that. It definitely sounds very much like that 

I do wanna just move our conversation along a little bit when we first spoke I was so, drawn to this. You know, I speak to a lot of Waterkeepers and there’s a lot of commonality about the work and everything.

So what really stands out to me about you is that this is really a family affair. You started this organization with your husband, who’s a Goldman Prize winner. And your daughter is now involved in advocacy work, correct. Nina, we did a story in our newsletter may have been last year, about her calling on Canada to stop sending plastic waste abroad, which is a great, another great tactic by the way, I think is really great to get in [00:30:00] front of these exporters of trash and saying, Hey, what are you doing? He’s coming to my house. So tell me a little bit about how this has become a family enterprise of sorts. 

Daru Setyorini: Yeah, actually, me and my husband is the friend since we were studying in university. We are in the same class in biology and we establish ECOTON together with some other colleagues.

But until now me and my husband still running this organization. So yeah, it’s become a family business because after we got married, we still work in the same organization and we have to bring along our children, when we do our field work, when we visit the river, when we check the industrial discharge or go to the forest, to the water spring to the mangrove forest.

So, our children get early exposure to this environmental thing. Yeah. I think that’s also become one of the main motivation for them. And they also understand that not many people care about the environmental issue. And Nina actually, my youngest daughter, so she start doing her advocacy, joining our advocacy, after there was growing of illegal downside of plastic trash along the river bank, in our neighborhood, in a village that close to the paper mills not far from our house. So at that time, we a bit confused what happened? Why there were more dumping of plastic in our neighborhood?

And then we knew that there is a new policy in China that they closed the import of plastic waste and paper waste because China used to be the receiver of the global plastic trash for recycling. But then I read in the news also that China suffer a lot of environmental pollution and more people there get cancer.

So then finally they try to stop this to become the recycler of the global plastic waste. But, Indonesia become the next destination because we also have a growing plastic and paper recycling industry, so they need continued supply of plastic and waste paper.

And in Brantas River there are about 15 paper mills that use the waste paper. But unfortunately this paper that imported not only paper, there is contaminant of the plastic trash inside and the percentage can be as high as 30%. So that’s big amount of plastic, because plastic is very light, even though the tonnage is maybe little, but the volume will be so big because it’s very light. Yeah. Right. So, Nina at the time was in the sixth grade of elementary school and ECOTON planned to hold a demonstration at the U.S. Consulate in Surabaya because we found from the data that U.S. is the biggest exporter of the paper waste to Indonesia. 

And on the ground, on the dump side, we also found a lot of packaging from the US. So, my husband offering Nina, can you write a letter for the president of United States? So Nina is very enthusiastic and she was excited to join and to write the letter, and we didn’t expect that after Nina wrote this letter, a lot of media attention. Yeah. Interested to interview her. So we think that the youth voice, the children’s voice have a strong influence yeah. And get more attention than our voice. So Nina, then continue her advocacy until now. 

Thomas Hynes: Well, that’s so great. And I, you know, I fully agree with you about the importance of youth working on these issues because it’s their future. Right, and to that end, I want to thank you for being here today for a number of reasons and I’m thinking of this as I’m talking to you.

Here’s this woman Daru working in Indonesia and working tirelessly to clean her river and her ecosystem and educate her community. But you’re also leaving behind great children. You know, it’s not just the work you’re doing today. Clearly great parents and and it’s, you know, I have babies who are not doing anything but crying.

But it’s very inspiring as a parent to say, gosh, you could raise these children to take on this work and to take up the mantle of this important cause and fight for their own futures, but they clearly learned it from you and your husband. So, on behalf of everyone, thank you for your work, and thank you for the way you raise your kids because I think we’re all better for it. 

Daru Setyorini: Thank you, Tom, for talking with me. And it’s wonderful to talk with you about my work. I’m so happy that I can share my story here with you, with all of our Waterkeeper and yeah, I hope we can learn from each other through this podcast. 

Thomas Hynes: Absolutely. Thank you so much.