Plastics are a pretty new material, in the scheme of things. They only started showing up in consumer products in the last 80 years or so. Before that, we made stuff that was designed to last and was meant to be reused over and over, then passed along to others. It was called the heirloom society.

But today, disposable, single-use plastic is everywher. We make an estimated 400 million metric tons of new plastic every year – to get your mind around that number, it’s 880 billion pounds of plastic, the equivalent weight of 73 million elephants, or 144 million pickup trucks. Every year.

And most of that plastic isn’t recycled. It’s thrown away, into landfills and other dump sites, where it degrades into smaller and smaller pieces. And over time, a lot of that plastic ends up getting washed into creeks and storm drains, and ultimately into our lakes, rivers and oceans. Which means there’s plastic in our drinking water sources, and in the fish and other marine animals that occupy those habitats.

What are the consequences, and what can we do about it? That’s where our guest comes in.

Dr. Marcus Eriksen is an interesting guy, and as you’ll hear, he’s got some very interesting ideas about how we ought to be approaching the plastic pollution problem. He’s an educator, author, researcher, adventurer and activist, particularly focusing on water-borne plastic pollution.

He came to those roles later in life. A New Orleans native, he joined the Marines straight out of high school and served in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. He returned home disillusioned by that experience, and for a while struggled to find direction and meaning. He decided to journey the full length of the Mississippi River on a homemade raft, earned his Ph.D. in science education and found his passion in environmental justice causes.

In 2008, he and a colleague spent 88 days and risked their lives to sail from California to Hawaii on a raft made of an airplane fuselage and 15,000 plastic bottles, to call attention to the plastic pollution problem.

He and his wife, environmentalist Anna Cummins, then co-founded the 5 Gyres Institute to research plastic pollution and seek solutions. A gyre is an ocean current, by the way. The organization’s expeditions have documented plastic pollution in the world’s oceans and in the Great Lakes, where they found significant and previously unknown levels of plastic microbeads, which are used in products like facial scrubs. That discovery helped spur a federal ban on microbeads in personal care products.

Our interview with Dr. Eriksen took place via Skype.