Trace Material Live: The Plastics Inferno

Over the course of this season, we’ve told stories of iconic plastic objects like Tupperware and Bakelite and looked at how this material has woven itself into our culture and our bodies. We’ve traced how we found ourselves in the plastics age, but what comes next?

To help us envision the future plastics, we invited Pete Myers to speak with us in our first ever live taping of Trace Material. Pete is the founder and chief scientist at Environmental Health Sciences (which publishes the famous Environmental Health News) and Adjunct Professor of Chemistry at Carnegie Mellon University. Pete has decades of experience in the chemistry of plastics, particularly with a class of chemicals called endocrine disruptors––a term he coined in the early 90s and explored in the best selling book he co-authored called “Our Stolen Future."

We know the 3 R’s (reduce, reuse, recycle) and explored the myth of plastics recycling in this season of the podcast. In this episode Pete makes his argument for a new set of R’s: rethink, redesign, reform.

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Trace Material is a project of Parsons Healthy Materials Lab at The New School. It is hosted and produced by Ava Robinson and Burgess Brown. Our project director is Alison Mears, and our research assistant is Olivia Hamilton. Trace Material was made possible by funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Our theme music is Rainbow Road by Cardioid. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions.