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Am I the only one that is just, like, so fixated on microplastics?
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Microplastics are in everything now.
- Microplastics. - Hello?
We've all got microplastics in our body…
- There's microplastics in your balls now. - Right now?
Well, you just ruined my day.
There's plastic in everything, and you're consuming it all the time.
Literally, your toothbrush is getting plastic into your mouth.
Do you chew gum? That's made of plastic.
These clothes? This is polyester. That's made of plastic.
We don't know what these plastics are doing to us.
You and me and everyone you meet
has enough plastic in their ******* brain to make a spoon.
We're finding them all over the body, not just the brain.
The blood, the lungs, the heart, the arteries,
the gut, the liver, the kidneys,
breast milk.
Okay, I'm full of microplastics. Now what? What do you want me to do?
Huh? Huh? Huh? Tell me because I don't know.
I saw a gastro doctor today,
and she said she never drinks bottled water
because of the microplastics and their correlation to colon cancer.
Plastic also leaches out a crap-ton of chemicals.
I was pissed when I found out
that the toxic chemicals contained obesogens.
Do you know what obesogens are?
The more technology, the more plastic,
the more plastic in the bodies.
It's causing people's penises to shrink, balls to shrink,
sperm counts are lowering, and miscarriages to go up.
This is so crazy and alarming.
What do we do to try to keep the human race alive?
So what are the solutions to these problems?
We can start by looking inside our homes.
And now, tonight's very special guest,
the one and only Shanna fucking Swan.
Well, I have to say… I've never had an introduction like that.
In order to understand the impacts of chemicals in plastic,
you have to see the effect on reproduction.
Fertility worldwide is going down rapidly.
Your book, Count Down, says that the modern world
is threatening sperm counts and imperiling the future of the human race.
That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
And it is tightly linked to chemicals
that are commonly used in plastic.
I've been talking about these chemicals for about a quarter of a century.
More than ever, people are worried about
how all the chemicals we're exposed to are affecting our health.
At the same time, the use of testosterone has increased.
My audience has always been other scientists.
I published in scientific journals pretty much exclusively.
And what I realized was that that hasn't worked.
- Are human penises getting smaller? - Yeah.
Shanna, why didn't you start with that?
Now I am focused, I am honed in.
This is something that affects me directly, Shanna.
There's a lot of crises in the world right now.
I don't want to scare people, but I want to tell them
that this is also an important crisis.
This is also something we have to pay attention to.
And actually, in terms of our survival as a species,
it may be
one of the most important.
One way to understand the impacts of these chemicals
that can affect our bodies
is to look at couples who are having a lot of problems getting pregnant.
- Hi! - Hi! How are you?
- Are you Monique? - Yeah, I'm Monique.
- I'm Shanna. - Nice to meet you, Shanna.
We recruited six couples who are trying to conceive
but have not been able to.
And the question is, if we lower people's exposure to chemicals
that are in plastic, can we change their fertility?
- Hi. How are you? - Hi!
Can you just tell me a little bit about why you want to do this?
- For a baby. - Yeah.
That's what we've been working on for a long time now.
We've been trying to conceive for about 22 months this month.
After about a year, we said,
"It's kind of weird that nothing's happened."
We have been trying since we got married.
So that was about two years ago.
We have been trying to get pregnant for over ten years now.
Two and a half years, I guess? Yeah.
Having to, like, have sex all the time and, like, do these tests.
And it just becomes…
It's, like, it's no fun.
Say what you always call yourself.
Ah. I say, "You know, Julie, I'm not a human dildo."
And then we proceed to go ahead and do it, and I'm happy to be a human dildo.
But it is a dehumanizing thing.
- I'm really excited about answers. - That's wonderful.
- Wonderful, yes. - Yeah.
Wouldn't it be great if we can figure this out?
So let's turn to products.
- Okay. - Okay?
- There's plastic in here. - Mm.
This is a three-month intervention…
Why don't you read that?
…to look at the effect of lowering your exposure
to plastics and chemicals in plastic
on your fertility.
It's not a quote, unquote "scientific study."
We have no control group.
It's very small.
And all of these couples who are infertile but have unexplained infertility.
So nothing in their lifestyle was obviously causing this,
with the exception of chemicals in their environment.
These chemicals are ubiquitous.
They're everywhere in our daily lives.
In hard plastics.
In soft plastics.
They're in fabrics.
The kitchen is home to obvious examples.
From utensils and cutting boards
to tea bags and coffee pods
and any number of containers.
Food packaging is often made of plastic.
And when heated, these chemicals go into the things that we eat.
They're often in places you can't see,
like the linings of tin and aluminum cans
used for soup and beverages.
But that's just the tip of the iceberg.
They're in our closets.
In the fabrics and dyes of our clothing.
They're in our personal care products.
From brushes to shampoos to deodorants and lotions.
They're in fragrances.
And our children are absolutely inundated with plastics in their toys.
So we ingest them. We absorb them through our skin.
We inhale them.
Every which way that they can get into our bodies, they do.
And as they pass through our bodies,
they wreak all sorts of havoc.
We've done a lot of research at home
on chemicals in the environment.
But learning more about plastics,
it's opening my eyes to how much bigger it is.
- They're all plastics. - Oh, yeah.
It's a plastic kingdom, you know?
These things we use a lot too.
I know.
Now I cannot live without.
These do contain chemicals that are concerning.
And this is a problem. I use it every day.
I think we have a lot of products.
There have been more reports of plastics and microplastics,
but I never would have thought that they're in my body as well.
One of the first things we did, we threw away a cutting board.
So that felt good.
Thirty-five percent of the microplastics in the ocean
come from textiles.
- Oh my gosh. Here's another. - Oh!
So this room is like a chemical warfare room.
- Yeah. - Is what you're saying.
It's just for smells.
- It's the Latino cleaning product. - Oof!
When you actually look at your life and how much plastic is in your life,
it's everywhere, it's everywhere in my house.
I'm looking at something like, "I have to throw that away."
So beyond just removing obvious plastics from all over the house,
I asked the couples to try these changes.
Try to avoid food and beverage products that come in plastic packaging,
whether it's from the store or takeout.
Try to avoid fragrance products and perfumes.
Try to use only natural personal care products.
Avoid synthetic textiles and petrochemical dyes.
And avoid handling receipts.
Almost all receipts contain bisphenol A.
Would you mind tossing that for us?
- You don't want the receipt? - No.
I feel like right now we are in the movie The Matrix.
And they said, "Do you want the blue pill or the red pill?"
I guess I forgot which one's the one that enters…
The red pill is the one that he takes.
- And I think I just took the red pill. - Yeah.
What makes something interesting to me
is if it's a puzzle that I think I can help solve.
The question of, was sperm count declining?
And then if so, why?
And how do you show that?
That is a puzzle that I've been solving, you know, for 25 years.
How I got into this whole area is because I was appointed to a committee
of the National Academy of Sciences
to look at these newly emerging chemicals,
which they called "hormonally active agents in the environment."
The committee brought this paper to me, which came out of Denmark in 1992.
They reported 50% decline in 50 years in sperm count.
That's huge.
When I first saw it, I was skeptical.
I thought other factors could explain that decline.
We reanalyzed the data.
And to my surprise, nothing had changed.
The sperm count had declined by more than 50%.
That was a big wake-up call for me.
In fact, in 2023,
we found that the trend was accelerating dramatically.
The decline was more than twice as fast as we had reported previously.
What could cause this?
This was too fast to be genetic.
Then it's environment.
- Can we talk about these tests? - Oh, yeah.
- I'm super excited about that. - Yeah.
At the beginning of the study, we get measures
of their body burden of environmental chemicals
by looking in their urine.
So we asked them for a urine sample.
How do you pronounce the…
"Phlalatates"?
- Phthalates? - Phthalates.
Do you have a preference where we start?
Let's start with Jesse.
- In case mine upset me. - Here we go.
And I cry.
The first page says that you have high phthalates.
- High phthalates. - That's gonna come up afterwards.
- You have high phthalates? - Wouldn't you know it?
This is exciting.
I was shocked.
It was really frightening to see we had accumulated so many chemicals.
It's clearly showing us the things we're doing right now
are absolutely contributing to what I would say
are pretty unacceptable levels of these chemicals.
I can share your frustration, I mean…
And then we look at measures of semen quality by asking for a sperm sample.
We go to concentration.
That's the number that most people think about.
- Okay. Mm-hm. - Like, when I study sperm decline.
So the calculated total motile count,
23 is the value.
Reference should be greater than or equal to 40.
Um, we're gonna go over…
When Shanna talked about the results of my sperm test,
it definitely was a very, very weird feeling.
I don't think most men are running around getting sperm tests until it's…
right up against the deadline of when you need to know this,
which is normally after you want to get pregnant and something hasn't worked.
Below this point, which is maybe 48…
It's the first time I had really had explained to me
why that count wasn't optimal,
or really had anything explained to me.
You are technically sub-fertile,
infertile, depending on how you…
- So that's kind of scary, right? - Yes.
It's like, well, are you less of a man because of it or anything?
Is something wrong with you?
But I was thinking, I have to stare at this and look at this
and I have to deal with this in order to try to make this baby.
When I talk about their test results,
I want to reassure them that this does not mean
that they cannot get pregnant.
You are making sperm all the time.
It takes 70 days to create a new sperm.
And that's why we chose this three-month window
for your intervention.
So I think the message is,
"It doesn't look great right now."
"It can change, and you can help with the change."
We will also look at changes in their body mass index
because these chemicals not only affect your fertility,
they also have other health consequences,
such as increased obesity.
Here's a care package for you.
Then we give them a packet of products
that will help them lower their exposure.
Because the good news is there are fantastic alternatives out there.
You can replace most of the plastic in your kitchen with metal,
glass, ceramics, or bamboo.
You can use brushes and floss made from bamboo
and find personal care products without scent.
And then at the end of the three-month period,
we measure everything again and…
we'll see if this lowers their exposure and maybe even…
they get pregnant.
I'm excited for the next 90 days.
I am bound and determined to get those numbers down
for the plastics or chemicals in our bodies.
And I live by the motto, "Happy wife, happy life."
So I'll follow her suggestions and do everything as well.
I like the cardboard container there.
- Yeah, looks great. - Looks pretty good.
It's 100% plastic-free.
I hope that we get pregnant.
- That would be fantastic. - Yeah.
- A baby, yeah. - A baby would be amazing.
- They don't look spongy. - So it's like loofah.
Will we get pregnant because of it? I have no idea.
I think with infertility, at least for us,
it's been like, what the hell do we do?
And this is something to do.
And so I'd like to see those things down in three months.
Hopefully, they are down.
- Hopefully help you. - Yeah.
I don't think anyone has actually done this experiment
to see the effect on conception
and hopefully live birth.
It's not straightforward. It's not easy.
But it's super important.
Plastics are a huge class of man-made materials.
But unfortunately, many of the chemicals added to plastic are toxic.
Including phthalates
and bisphenols.
Phthalates make plastic soft and flexible.
On the other hand, the bisphenols, like BPA, make plastic hard,
like a baby bottle or a water bottle.
These are chemicals that we call endocrine-disrupting chemicals.
When talking about endocrine, we're referring to hormones.
Hormones are our natural signaling molecules.
They're like text messages that we send
from the brain to the heart or the kidney.
Endocrine-disrupting chemicals are known to hack these molecular signals.
We have a robust body of evidence
that these chemicals can contribute to early heart attacks and stroke.
You can have small shifts in normal thyroid hormone function
in the developing brains of young children
that can produce autism,
attention deficit disorder, as well as cognitive deficits.
At least 50 or so synthetic chemicals are obesogens.
Chemicals that literally make us fatter.
Studies have shown that bisphenol A
can actually reprogram the epigenome
such that mice will get bigger.
Those signals get passed on four or even five generations
down the family tree.
If a pregnant mother is exposed to a toxic chemical,
she is exposing the reproductive organs of three generations.
So the mother is obviously exposing herself.
Then the toxic chemical goes through to her baby.
That's two generations.
And then in the female child,
the eggs are already forming in the infant's ovaries even before birth.
And therefore, the reproductive cells of the third generation
are exposed to the toxic chemical.
You could describe this as toxic trespass.
The thing about endocrine-disrupting chemicals
is not just that they alter hormones,
but they also have carcinogenic principles.
They are promoting the cell to divide.
The faster your cells are proliferating,
the faster and the more precise and quick
your DNA repair system needs to be to correct that.
Sometimes, things don't get fixed.
Now you have a mutation
that has created the ability of that cell to be carcinogenic.
So now we're seeing this rise in breast cancer,
ovarian cancer,
endometrial cancer, uterine cancer,
and even prostate cancer.
So it's important to understand
you are disrupting your natural balance
when you have these outside exposures
that can "mimic" your own hormones.
I feel very strongly that it's a basic human right
to have a child if you choose to.
It's always been extremely important to me.
I had my first child at 27, then I had my son three years later.
And then there was a gap.
I began trying to conceive at an older age
and had several miscarriages, which were extremely painful.
I was close to giving up, but I kept on.
And at 42, I gave birth again.
So I have three wonderful children and six grandchildren
and one great-grandchild.
Having the privilege to know her
and see that continuity and see our family in her
and the joy that she brings to all of us is just--
I can't tell you. I'm almost in tears.
It's so wonderful for me.
And so it's important to me to help people whose fertility is impaired.
I think it is unethical, criminal,
that chemicals in their environment or other factors beyond their control
can interfere with that right.
We've always known that we want children.
Though we've created a lot of problems here on this Earth,
I do think kids are the future
and they are kind of the answer and the solution
to a lot of these problems.
I think there is a harmony to be struck there.
My hope for them
would be they would live with minimal impact on the planet
and caring for other people.
We are trying to get pregnant for about two years now.
When we met, it was hard because I was getting divorced.
This weekend?
I didn't want Cecilia to grow up alone.
And I think now we are with the right time,
with the right person.
It's just like a dream for both of us.
And then Cecilia started asking all the time, brother or sister.
And we got the first dog.
It was not enough, and she asked for the other dog.
And hopefully, we have a baby before the third dog.
Baptism proclaims the faith of the Church.
I baptize you in the name of the Father…
And he doesn't like it.
…of the Son,
and of the Holy Spirit.
Sorry.
I've always wanted to have a family of my own
that's really peaceful and wonderful.
I had amazing grandparents and an amazing mother.
Um, and there's a piece of that that's kind of missing,
and always was missing, so I want it to be that for this child.
And I think that's why I'll be so disappointed
if we never have a baby.
Just-- I want to see a little version of you.
I think it'd be so cool.
I think you'd be the best mom ever. And I really want to see that for you.
- Like, I really want to see that for you. - Sorry.
You know?
Yeah. Okay, I'm good.
Yeah, I'm good.
My fertility routines have really grown over the last two years.
We want to get pregnant, and I will do what I can do.
So you take all of these every day?
- Every morning. - Every morning?
Yeah, actually.
We have unexplained infertility. There's nothing "wrong with me."
I check my pH every morning…
I've been looking at what's right for my body
based on blood testing and hormone testing.
- What is this? - To make sure my body's healthy.
So this is when I would have ovulated, released the egg,
and then they're looking for my progesterone to rise
four to five days after.
It's a really nice way to be able to track my hormones every day.
Many of the specialists we've seen
have had very narrow scopes of practice, um, so they're not interested.
And when I tell them, "Oh, I'm trying to mitigate my endocrine disruption,"
they say, "What does that mean?"
"Here, take this time-release capsule."
Right? And time-release capsules have plastics in them.
Do you use that to time your intercourse?
Um, we just have sex all the time, Shanna.
To know that there's these environmental factors
that are in the world that are harming my chances
and taking away my choice for parenthood is, um…
- It's so overwhelming. - Yeah, you don't really get a choice.
I don't think anyone does anymore.
- No. - Because it's in the water.
It's in the air. It's in the soil.
I mean, is it daunting and overwhelming? Absolutely.
So how did we get to this place
where we're all surrounded by toxic chemicals in our homes,
in our stores,
and all throughout the environment?
How does that even happen?
120, 130 years ago,
most plastics were plant-based.
And then in the early 1900s,
the petroleum industry discovered polyethylene, polypropylene,
polyethylene terephthalamide, polystyrene.
Reactors and fractionating columns
crack and reform the oil's molecules,
turning them into new liquids, gases, granules.
When you pump the oil out of the ground,
they separate it into a whole bunch of different components.
One of those components turns into what we now see
as the petroleum-based plastics.
These inexpensive, lightweight materials were so ubiquitous
that people just went crazy inventing all different things to do with it.
It's a remarkable new polyester film called Mylar.
Can you tear it?
It's almost impossible.
Scientists could do no harm, right?
It was a love affair with plastic.
And it wasn't till quite a lot later
that we realized there was a cost to this.
Global manufacturing of chemicals and plastics
is increasing very rapidly,
about three to three and a half percent per year,
which means if we continue on the present course,
we will have twice as much plastic in the world by 2040 or 2050
as we have today.
And at the same time,
we live in a world that is awash in manufactured chemicals.
Since about 1950,
at least 100,000 manufactured chemicals have been developed.
In many cases, they've never been tested for toxicity,
and so we don't know what they're doing.
It means that we're conducting a vast toxicological experiment
in which our children and our children's children
are the subjects without their consent.
It's really scary
because we don't even know the extent of this exposure.
How does that get there? And what is it doing?
We're finding out, and it doesn't look good.
Recently, the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA,
put phthalates on a list of chemicals that,
"may present a risk to the environment or human health."
Congress came under pressure to act because of a study by Dr. Shanna Swan.
Dr. Swan compared the levels of phthalates in a group of pregnant women
with the health of the baby boys they gave birth to.
Did you find that the higher the level of phthalates
in the mother's urine during pregnancy,
the greater the problems in the young boys?
- Yes. - What did you find in the babies?
We found that the baby boys were,
in several subtle ways, less completely masculine.
The male genital tract requires testosterone in this critical window
at a certain amount
to kick off what we call the differentiation
of the male and female reproductive tract.
What would be the ovaries in the female
becomes, for example, the testes in the male.
When phthalates come in there, that testosterone is damped down,
and that male fetus doesn't get that signal at the right time.
Consequently, he doesn't develop the male typical genitals,
or maybe not quite.
That is what's known as the phthalate syndrome.
It's pretty special
because there aren't other syndromes named after chemicals.
Okay.
So anogenital distance is a distance from the anus to the genitals.
And we measure it with these calipers.
Now, Willy is much more agreeable than a lot of babies…
…so it's very easy.
Doing this with real babies is more challenging.
So what we do is we pull their knees back,
which actually, um, stretches the area a little bit.
And what we do is we just find the anus.
Right? We'll put one side…
Oh my God.
That is so great.
This number in a female would be 50 to 100 percent less.
And why is that?
Look at the stuff that has to go in here.
The equipment, yeah.
Yeah, all the equipment in there. It is amaz--
This measurement is the…
what we call the anal scrotal.
This is the scrotum.
We're measuring gooches. We're doing science.
Boys who had symptoms of the phthalate syndrome
had a shorter anogenital distance,
which means the male was somewhat less masculine
or perhaps more feminized.
So they have a somewhat smaller penis, more likely to have undescended testicles.
It was quite striking seeing the effect
of powerful endocrine-disrupting chemicals
on the development of male genitals.
And then the question becomes,
does it matter for his health?
That's the key question here.
And, by the way, is it related to his later function?
For example, his production of sperm or his fertility?
What we found was a direct linear relationship.
Longer anogenital distance, higher sperm count. Very clear.
This was really important because it says those little changes
that you hardly see at birth actually play out during your lifespan
in terms of your reproductive success.
There's something which is very key to my research,
which is something you might know by the name of the taint.
That's not really a technical term, is it?
Or the gooch or the grundle.
- The gooch? I've never-- - Also known as the gooch.
- You know about the gooch? - Yeah.
Most scientific findings are lost to the general public.
There's a little bit of news about it, and they're gone.
It's got to be pretty disturbing to be the--
You're the Paul Revere of tiny testicles and taints.
Penis sizes are shrinking, which you might have seen from headlines…
There's been a huge decline in fertility rates among men.
We may have a future where men do not have enough sperm to reproduce.
Did you know phthalates found in fragrances…
What surprised me was the reception of the media
and the public to the message I was putting out.
It's so sad because so many people don't know
that these products and toxins are harming them.
People were really kind of hungry for this information.
Babies are being exposed to microplastics in utero.
I think in part because phthalates are in everybody.
This is not just an American problem.
We're seeing these issues all across the world.
I chose to be an obstetrician because everything begins at birth.
Every time a child is born,
it's a new world that opens up on the horizon.
Ciao.
Push hard.
Very good, very good. Very good.
The moment when you see your son or daughter
for the first time,
all the neurotransmitters inside your head, inside your body,
in fraction of a second, when you see your child, they change.
It's an explosion.
My God.
Congrats, Vane.
My love.
He looks like his father, once again.
Everything is concluded in a single word.
Ciao. Hey.
Joy.
Yes, love. Hello.
When I first saw plastic inside the human placenta,
I didn't feel joy.
Quite the opposite.
We asked mothers to donate their placentas,
being careful not to corrupt them with plastic.
- Can you show me? - Of course.
Yes. We have some good results.
In my opinion, we found something interesting.
We found this object.
We see that it has multiple layers,
like other microplastics described.
We analyzed the samples
and in some of them we found microplastics.
And we found various types of plastics.
Polypropylene, polyethylene and so on.
Have a seat.
We thought, "If microplastics are in the placenta,
perhaps they are in other places as well."
The movement is this and this.
We asked mothers to donate milk.
Excellent.
And we saw that in many of these samples,
there are plastics.
Plastics are in everybody.
I mean, that's really scary.
I would say the approach of industry is to ignore the problem,
to make more of these chemicals,
to put more of them into plastic, and increase production.
No company is going to change making a product willingly
if it's going to affect their bottom line.
That's the reality.
So just as I won't stop talking about the harms that I see,
they are not going to stop following what they feel is their duty,
which is, I guess, to protect the value of their stocks.
We have different goals.
After a decade of planning and construction,
Shell's cracker plant in Beaver County is finally about to open.
In the course of a year,
the plant will produce 3.5 billion pounds of plastic pellets.
In its short span of operations,
the multibillion-dollar Shell cracker plant
has been beset with problems.
According to Shell's own data,
the malfunction resulted in elevated levels of benzene,
a colorless chemical that can cause cancer.
The EPA knows that toxic petrochemical facilities
are some of the most toxic polluting facilities in the world…
I'm trying to give you the floor.
…and are killing Black people throughout Louisiana.
Everything you have,
your clothes, your glasses, the car you got here on,
your phone, everything you've got is petrochemical products.
What would you do with that?
To know how people are making chemicals with absolutely no regard
to their impact on human health,
it makes me extremely angry
and want to fight, and that's why I'm fighting.
Tell me some of the changes you've made,
both what you eat and how you handle food.
- We do eat out a lot less than we were. - Oh, yeah.
The study can feel daunting.
Plastics are so pervasive. They're everywhere.
And the question then becomes, "Well…
boy, can I even make any changes that are going to make a difference?"
So, like…
But I think having Shanna here has been great
because she's been able to guide as far as what are some alternatives we can do?
And maybe we can't get rid of everything, but here are a few key areas that we can.
At least reduce and see if that'll make a difference.
Of course, we'll always be a little sad if nothing comes of it,
but you don't know until you try.
You've got to give it a shot, see what happens.
One way that I've tried to reduce my plastics exposure
is by wearing more sustainable clothing with natural fibers.
That's really hard to find.
I saw the paper, and I was really excited.
I thought they had plastic-free shipping materials.
But they don't. These are all wrapped in plastic.
"95% micromodal, 5% elastane."
I have no idea what any of that means.
"88% polyester recycled, 12% elastane."
So, yeah.
This is cotton, 100% organic cotton.
So yay, um, one out of three.
Yay, let's try it.
Your skin is your largest organ,
and it can absorb over 60% of the chemicals that are put on it.
These toxins that are part of our dye and our fabric
are being absorbed into our skin,
so it's going to shorten our lives and our fertility.
I am a natural fashion designer,
and I began in the fashion industry as a fashion model.
I did a lot of street wear, body wear, beauty.
It definitely taught me something.
Everything is about the drape of the fabric and the fit of the garment.
So as a model, I actually knew how a garment should fit
before I ended up working in the industry for designers.
I worked with Calvin Klein and Jones New York, Perry Ellis America.
Then I moved into private label design.
Those large department stores would love the designs that we would create,
but then they would say it's way too expensive.
A lot of companies are skimping on quality.
And so we would have to pull pennies
out of every step of the supply chain
so that we could meet their prices.
At prices like these, it can be more expensive to clean your clothes
than it is to throw away your dirty clothes and buy all new ones.
We would substitute acrylic for wool, polyester for cotton,
nylon for silk, and spandex for rubber.
And what I didn't realize then was that all those substitute fibers
are plastic and endocrine disruptors.
By 2030, 70% of all fibers and therefore fabrics
are projected to be from plastic.
When I was raising my two kids
and weaning my second off of breastfeeding,
I discovered a lump, and it was breast cancer.
I was told it was a rapidly growing, pretty aggressive cancer.
It was very difficult for me to accept taking chemotherapy, which is a toxin.
But I did it.
They then told me I had to do a heavy round of radiation.
So I asked if I could just do a double mastectomy instead.
So…
um, yeah, the cancer took my breasts and my fertility.
A few years later, I founded this company and did a photo shoot.
There were nine women,
and one had just done a topless photo for us.
Across her chest it said, "Fuck breast cancer."
I said, "Well, I had breast cancer."
We realized that out of nine women, three of us had breast cancer.
That was a little bit of a flame underneath me.
I thought if we create healthy clothing,
maybe we can heal, in some way, the industry.
Hello, and welcome back to my channel. We're doing another "best of."
I'm going to be sharing my top ten hair care favorites.
Because, yes, I have found the secret.
We have routines as humans,
and routines create routine exposures.
Have you ever walked around the personal care section of a store
and looked at the ingredients in the products you put on your skin
and on your body every day?
Personal care products
and makeup contain endocrine-disruptor chemicals.
Formaldehyde, PFASs,
which are also used in flame retardants,
phthalates, xenoestrogens, sulfates,
triclosan, EDTA, parabens…
All of these chemicals are added to enhance the product.
You see phthalates added in hairspray
because it helps with the flexibility of the hair.
It's also added because it helps the product smell good.
It's part of the ingredients for scent.
But these chemicals that are added to enhance the product,
actually adversely affect our health.
My research found that the earlier age
that women started using hair products,
the earlier the age they had their period.
Girls in America are reaching puberty earlier.
The percentage of girls getting their period before the age of 11
almost doubled from about eight and a half to fifteen and a half.
Having your period early
is a risk factor for breast cancer.
Increased risk of breast cancer, uterine cancer,
again, because there's more time that they're subjected to the hormone estrogen.
The fact of the matter is that certain populations
are more exposed to environmental toxins.
Research shows that Black girls are more than twice as likely as white girls
to start their puberty early.
Black women have the highest rate of breast cancer,
fibroids, obesity.
This correlation has been linked to toxic ingredients
in their beauty products that they use.
Some groups are more exposed than others,
but we're all exposed.
Here in Louisiana, they let industry, in particular the fossil fuel industry,
just build there and build and build and build and build.
You have these communities that are completely surrounded
by the fossil fuel industry.
A stretch of land in Louisiana
that used to be known as plantation country,
residents whose ancestors have lived here for generations
are now fighting for clean air.
Community after community, all surrounded by industrial plants.
Petrochemical industry impacts people of color
from a location standpoint.
In this country, 68% of Black people
live within 30 miles of a coal-fired power plant.
And then on top of that, within plastics and petrochemicals here in Louisiana,
they're living literally within just miles.
The term "fenceline community"
literally means that there's a fence between your backyard,
your swing set, and petrochemical facilities.
There is a region within Louisiana
from Baton Rouge to New Orleans,
and that is "Cancer Alley."
One of my co-workers, she died with cancer.
Right there in that house.
When you go straight, my uncle and his wife both have cancer.
My neighbor on one side of me, she had stage four cancer.
Went in hospital, I ain't never seen her no more. She died.
After the plants came here, start polluting, Oliver died.
Oliver got sick and died. And I know because I was dating him.
And my friend Matt just died.
Matt told me to fight.
And I'm gonna fight for Matt.
Miss Sharon, we done drove just about a mile…
Mm-hm.
…and you called about 40 people who died.
Yes.
It hurts that I know all these people, and they're dying.
Everybody got cancer. What's wrong?
I mean, you ain't gotta go far.
- No. - You got the home right here.
Right there.
Got the fossil fuel industry right there.
That's right.
- And the cemetery right here. - That's right.
I mean, we all gonna die.
We just want to… We don't want to die too quick.
- Too quick. That's right. - And not for someone else's greed.
That's right.
It's heartbreaking.
- But we gotta fight. - Mm.
Their business plan
is a death sentence for our communities.
I mean, they're making money and profit off of the deaths of people,
like, to make plastic?
Like, to make plastic,
they're killing us.
All right. So update here.
We're in, uh, January,
about a month into the plastic study thus far. Um…
Last month, we did, uh, get pregnant,
um, but it ended up being an early miscarriage.
It's a little bit hard with family and everything
and trying to stay positive during the holidays
and not being able to talk to anybody
about it. Um…
So, yeah.
Uh, seems it brought us some hope, though.
It's definitely a good sign, I think. Um…
It's a good sign that my body can get pregnant.
You know, we've been really careful with our plastic consumption,
really diligent about the study.
Um, and we have seen the best results as far as pregnancy goes so far.
So hopefully, by the end of the study,
we can check back in with better news.
Plastic is only possible because of chemistry.
And chemists don't want to poison and destroy the world.
Companies know if you kill your customer, that's going to be bad for sales.
So it's not a revolution to say,
"Gee whiz, we should have nontoxic, safe things."
But if you look at the education of chemists,
you'll be shocked to find there is no fundamental classes
that teach people how to anticipate the negative impacts
on human health and the environment.
They don't know the mechanisms of toxicity.
They don't know the mechanisms of biodegradation.
It seemed to me, shouldn't that be the first thing a chemist learns,
you know, is how not to hurt people?
But the fact that it's absent from the curriculum is shocking.
I actually am not someone who grew up wanting to be a chemist.
Had anyone told me that I was gonna end up being an industrial chemist,
I would have laughed at them.
But when I realized that scientists created,
scientists designed, scientists imagined,
I saw chemistry as an artistic expression.
So I went, and I became a medicinal chemist.
I published five papers before I was 21,
and I went to graduate school, to Princeton.
And by the time I was 25,
I had 25 publications.
I worked on an anti-cancer drug that's now called Alimta.
And I went to work in industry for Polaroid.
And before very long, I had dozens of patents,
inventions, products, awards, prizes.
And then disaster hit.
My son John was born with a disease called biliary atresia.
It's a disease where his liver's detached from his intestines,
and he can't metabolize water and soluble nutrients.
He was given a surgery at birth,
and at two years old, we lost him.
We never really acknowledged he was terminally ill until the end.
We always kind of had hope.
But yeah, it's, uh… it's difficult.
Lying in bed the night of my son's funeral,
staring at the ceiling, I asked myself,
"I wonder if something I touched in the chemistry lab
caused my son's birth defect?"
I'd say, "Why?"
"Why would anybody invent something hazardous?"
"But wait a minute."
"If it's not part of their education to recognize and anticipate it,
how could they not?"
Good, okay.
Is it?
Oh, yeah. Wow, that has a lot more--
You dissected that away from the yolk of one?
Yeah, from right here.
Me and my students, we look at various different chemicals,
ranging from BPA compounds and phthalates,
and we look at the effects on developmental pathways
going from very, very early in development
that sort of mimic the time that a human embryo in a womb
would be exposed to some of these chemicals.
We use animal models like the chick embryo.
It's really easy to do.
We micro-inject, using little micropipettes,
various doses of the compounds.
We incubate them, and then on day 12, we analyze them under the microscope.
You don't have to be a scientist to even figure it out.
You can just look at the control embryos versus the phthalate-treated embryos.
And the differences are quite stark.
All right, so this is classic phthalate exposure.
So all those characteristic things that we've been seeing,
we see decreased pigmentation across the whole body,
decreased pigmentation in the eye and the retina and the iris.
And then in this case, especially,
we see an opening up of the abdominal wall,
some of the internal organs actually coming out,
protruding outside of the body wall.
So a lot of these, uh, deformities or malformations
that are very characteristic of phthalate exposure.
We took some representative pictures of all of the embryos
that were treated with, in this case, it was BPA,
even at the low doses,
and then going to the intermediate-to-high doses.
There are extreme embryonic defects, cranial facial disruptions.
The size of the body in this case
is a third of that of the control situation.
Organs protruding outside of the body.
Some embryos that are just completely malformed that they stop developing.
These are reminiscent of many common human birth defects.
And we see that with these very low doses of phthalates and BPA compounds.
Unfortunately,
many of us have been taught that only the dose makes a thing a poison.
It's common sense.
Like, everything in moderation, if you will.
But the reality is that even the smallest levels of exposure
can have profound effects,
particularly when we're talking about our hormones.
It takes only a tiny amount of a chemical to alter the behavior of genes.
That's what endocrine disruption is all about.
So that as a fetus is developing,
the wrong gene gets turned on at the wrong time,
and development goes along the wrong path.
Now we know that parts per billion can be harmful,
and that seems like a really little amount.
But if you have a drop of water
in which there is one part per billion of bisphenol A,
how many molecules of bisphenol A
do you think are in that one drop of water?
2.65 trillion molecules.
And one of them can cause harm.
That's a problem.
And we're only now reaching the state of science that we understand that.
So, first of all, it's good to see you.
Should we talk about your results?
- I think-- - Yeah.
Well, Darby, your BPA at the beginning was really high.
And in the follow-up, they dropped a lot.
- That's amazing. - Wow.
Jesse, you've really dropped in your BPA.
- Really? - Wow.
So all of those efforts have paid off.
- That's crazy. - Wow.
I was extremely happy with the results of the intervention.
After six weeks,
almost everybody dropped their bisphenol A to non-detectable.
They also dropped their phthalate levels.
And interestingly,
the man and the woman in the couple had values which traveled in parallel,
which meant they reflected changes in their shared environment.
I wouldn't say I was surprised that our participants reduced their exposures.
What was less clear is how this would affect their sperm counts.
And to be honest, after six weeks,
we didn't see much change.
I was really sad when I got those results.
I was like, "Dude, what is this?" Like, I was so upset.
This was, of course, disappointing to the participants.
But we have to remember, it takes 70 days to produce new sperm.
So it's likely that we won't see improvement
until our final samples.
We're all trying to do a hard thing.
And, um, I think we have to relax a little bit
and, if we can, give it a little more time.
I come to you as a sperm to ask for your help.
We sperm are becoming an endangered species.
But this is a problem we can fix.
Please join me in welcoming one of the people
who really is saving our sperm and our future,
John Warner.
You may be thinking it's strange to be introduced by a sperm.
But if you really think about it,
you all were.
After I lost my two-year-old son to a birth defect,
I realized that there was a missing element to my education.
And I realized that no university
teaches a chemist anything about what makes a molecule toxic.
I realized that the world didn't need a social movement.
The world didn't need a politic.
The world needed a new science.
A science that taught a chemist how to anticipate these negative impacts.
And that is the birth of the field of green chemistry.
Paul Anastas and I wrote the book on green chemistry back in the 1990s.
You do any science, any chemistry you normally would,
but you put a layer of interpreting,
"What if this actually succeeds?"
"What if instead of it just being a publication in a journal,
some company actually starts making
thousands and thousands of kilotons of it?"
"What impact are my decisions
on that first day of my invention going to have in the future?"
That's green chemistry.
At last count, I think I've been to over 65 countries
meeting presidents and prime ministers
and cutting ribbons and giving talks, that it's starting to be a movement.
And almost 100 universities globally have signed this commitment
saying we will bring green chemistry into the required curriculum.
But everyone in society needs to understand
things don't have to be toxic.
We can learn to do it other ways.
Just everywhere you look, you have plastic.
We are really dependent on it.
It'd be hard to think about a plastic-free world.
But plastic in and of itself is not the evil.
It is the chemicals in it
that have the ability to alter our hormones.
Many people think the government takes care of us.
They would not let us be exposed to things that would harm us.
But we're not protected against the chemicals in our everyday products.
In terms of regulating these chemicals in the United States,
very few chemicals are actually banned.
And most chemicals haven't even been tested.
Time and again,
we have come to realize that chemicals on the market for years
were causing toxicity.
With DDT.
Pesticides may indeed represent a grave threat to mankind.
With asbestos.
Today, the Environmental Protection Agency finalized a ban
on the only type of asbestos still used in the United States.
Lead in the gasoline was causing brain damage to children.
Leaded gasoline caused half of the population to develop a lower IQ.
When we took lead out of gasoline,
we reduced children's blood levels by 95%.
We raised the average IQ of a generation of children by about five IQ points.
And those more intelligent, more highly creative children
have put billions of dollars back into the economy.
So it's a huge success story.
I think a big question right now is, what are we gonna do about plastics?
The media has reported that the federal government's reluctance to regulate
these chemicals is based on the reliance of biased studies
from the chemical industry itself.
Senator, at FDA,
all of our products that we approve
are based on data that are prepared and conducted in studies
by that particular manufacturer.
But doesn't that bother you? That's my point.
You don't seem to see the connection here.
We got here because the scientific understanding of endocrine disruption
did not exist when plastics first came onto the market.
Our genes actually are being turned on and off trillions of times a second
every day of our life, every second of our life.
And things like phthalates and bisphenol A affect
that process of turning genes on and off.
The FDA and EPA and the CDCs,
their science currently ignores molecular genetics.
Over the last 30 years,
the science has gotten a lot stronger.
If anything, we underestimated the scale of the problem.
The plastics industry grew to be a behemoth,
and we let that get ahead of us and out of control.
Many chemicals leaching out of plastics are EDCs.
That links them to a wide array
of today's epidemics of noncommunicable diseases,
like breast cancer, prostate cancer,
testicular cancer, infertility,
immune disorders, and brain impediments.
Unfortunately, in the United States,
regulatory toxicology,
it's stalled because the chemical industry has too much influence on Congress.
Period.
Stable supply chains are imperative.
Producing plastic in America is a good thing.
We now are here on a plantation site
where my ancestors were extracted from Africa
and brought here to be enslaved people.
The memory of that is still real.
And now the fossil fuel industry here in Louisiana,
they are literally looking to build plants
on former plantation sites,
knowing how painful
that history is for everyone.
It's heartbreaking because they take the same mentality
that was used on plantations
to not only extract from Mother Earth,
but to then harm those same people.
This shows how they don't care about humanity.
We're here to announce that Formosa will be investing $9.4 billion.
So I'm delighted to announce all this extraordinary capital investment,
job creation, right here in St. James Parish,
just about two miles from the foot of the Sunshine Bridge.
The Formosa plant was a plant that they wanted to build
on a former plantation site.
And this isn't just any plant.
It's being called the largest facility in the state.
And people like Sharon Lavigne
who were pushing back an international mega corporation,
literally off their kitchen table.
This is a David and Goliath story
if there ever was one.
A multibillion-dollar chemical company
was all set to build a massive new plant there.
That is, until they encountered Miss Sharon Lavigne and Rise St. James.
Formosa Plastics was proposed to be built two miles from my home.
And I said, "Dear Lord, this land cannot be for Formosa. We live here."
I had no intentions on becoming an activist.
All I know was Formosa Plastics kept ringing in my ear.
- First of all, we went to God first. - Mm-hm.
- I know I went to God. - Come on.
And I sat on my porch, and I prayed.
And I asked God, and if God would have told me to move,
I wouldn't be in this fight today.
But God told me to fight.
I was told that,
"The governor approved this plant, and you can't stop it."
I said, "Tell the governor to build it in his community."
He thinks the people in St. James are stupid
and they're gonna just put another industry on us, and we have 12?
No.
That dog is not gonna hunt.
We rallied.
We gave marches.
We went to the parish council meetings.
If Formosa come into St. James,
we will not be able to live.
We are Rise St. James, and we're gonna stand up for St. James Parish.
Formosa has a fight on their hands.
So let me talk to you about what your last results are.
What's dramatic is, for me, Katie,
that your phthalates went up a lot.
And here you are at a time that you were lowering all your exposures.
There's something hidden then. I'm like, "What's hidden that I'm…?"
Is it something at work? You know, like, who knows?
Tim, your sperm numbers are not great, right?
- Right. - Yeah.
Your concentration actually went down a little bit.
Okay.
It doesn't look like there's been a significant improvement,
I would have to say, honestly.
What's heartbreaking in these studies is that not everyone is going to improve.
It's a difficult thing to remove all the contaminants in your life.
Endocrine disruptors are so pervasive,
you're being exposed even when you least expect it.
But that doesn't make it easier to give bad news.
I mean, you guys have tried for a long time, right?
Mm-hm.
- Yeah. Over ten years. - Yeah.
I mean, I'm really glad that the intervention
has been helpful to your life.
Yeah.
But I don't see any signs here that you're going to imminently,
you know, gonna get pregnant.
- For sure. - Right.
- And that's okay, like… - Yes.
We, you know…
We know it's going to take a miracle, so…
It's been really hard not being able to conceive.
In all honesty, there definitely have been moments
when I have felt pretty jaded about it.
Difficult part that has actually gotten more difficult each year,
at least for me, is, um…
like Father's Day and Mother's Day.
Something that I always thought I'd be celebrating.
But that's not who we are.
It just makes you think,
"Wow, our lives are so much different than what I expected them to be."
But I'm never going to let go of this hope that I have
that we could still possibly have kids one day.
California's top cop subpoenas ExxonMobil…
Attorney General Rob Bonta says fossil fuel and petrochemical companies
have been overstating the role of recycling and curbing the problem.
The fossil fuel and petrochemical industries
have engaged in a half-century campaign of deception.
The work I do is official in conduct, but it's also personal.
My oldest daughter has told me, "Dad, I love my family."
"I want to have a family of my own someday."
"But I don't think it's responsible to bring a child onto this dying planet."
"So I'm not planning on having a family right now."
That's wrong.
We shouldn't steal the dreams of our--
Of the next generation because of our mistakes,
of our failure, uh, to be responsible.
In pursuit of what? Endless profit?
The entire plastics industry is built on a lie.
The only reason that plastics today are ubiquitous
is because people were told that this product can be recycled.
People start pollution.
People can stop it.
The organization that produced that ad,
Keep America Beautiful,
was funded in part by a plastics industry trade group
and composed of leading beverage and packaging corporations,
which might seem odd until you realize that the underlying message there is,
"It's up to you, the consumer, to stop pollution."
People would not have purchased plastics
and relied on plastics and consumed plastics
knowing that it was destroying the planet as we did so.
The California Department of Justice
launched an investigation into ExxonMobil.
We became aware of internal communications that said things like
recyclability at scale is not financially viable.
Yet they were continuing to sell the myth of recyclability of plastics.
Making recycling work was a way to keep their products in the marketplace.
- It was a way to sell plastic. - Yes.
It's a win-win situation.
Today, only 9% of plastics are recycled.
It's shocking.
And the reason is because
the big plastic companies won't profit from it.
It costs too much to recycle.
And we are making so much plastic,
we're overwhelming the capacity of the system
to even recycle itself in the first place.
But after decades as the dumping ground
for more than half of the world's trash,
China has banned most types of low-grade recycling products.
What appears to be happening is that China is tired of importing our trash.
If plastic products are not recyclable,
then it needs to be stated as such.
There needs to be a truth in advertising.
Oh, Tracy, look, she's going for the bin.
The fact that, you know, this myth was allowed to occur
for decades and decades, it's shocking.
It's not unlike tobacco.
When you have big corporations that are lying to the public
and fueling a global plastics pollution crisis, it needs to end.
And I'm not gonna wish or hope it into existence, I'm gonna do it.
When I was diagnosed with cancer,
I had been teaching sustainable fashion,
and I realized that it was no longer about sustainability.
It was about eliminating all petrochemicals.
Textiles are the single largest source of microplastics in the environment.
But at California Cloth Foundry,
the fibers are cotton, linen, hemp, flax,
viscose from trees.
The most toxic process in the textile supply chain are the dyes,
and those are from petrochemicals.
So many of our ingredients can be found in the kitchen,
like chestnuts and iron.
Those are the main ingredients in our North Face and Levi's program.
Another would be elderberries,
one of the colorants we use for Gisele's Gaia hoodie.
But it's expensive.
So to really change fashion from a highly toxic, high-volume industry,
we have to scale green chemistry.
Fashion is so unnecessary,
and still it plays a big role in society.
Most of my adult life, I worked as a designer,
and it was mainly about inventing new products.
And at some point, I realized that I'm actually the one
that is creating all these environmental issues we are facing.
As a designer, you convince people to buy, to spend, to waste.
But ten years ago, I realized that people like me
can decide if a company is harmful,
or establish a totally new way of doing business.
So in 2015, we tried to convince corporations
to use recycled materials instead of making more of it.
We created sneakers out of fishing nets.
But plastic stays plastic, even if you recycle it.
So plastic needs to go.
Next up, I would like to invite Cyrill Gutsch.
Hey, hey. What's up, Paris?
Now is the time to invent new materials that are made from nature.
This is the first jacket designed by Dior, Kim Jones, to support us
in this process of making Bananatex a new technology.
The concept of a plastic doesn't have to come from a petroleum-based material.
There's no laws of physics that say it has to be these materials.
They just happen to be the ones we're using now.
Let's open our eyes, embrace nature,
and learn, "How does nature make something transparent?"
"How does nature make something strong but flexible?"
Everything that you could use to define what a plastic or a polymer does,
nature does.
And if we can learn from nature,
we can make things that are less toxic and more environmentally responsible.
At Sway, we use seaweed to replace really pervasive plastics,
mainly thin films.
This shoe is 100% plastic-free,
so the whole product can be put into the compost.
After seven to ten weeks, there's nothing left but nutrients.
We make the world's first performance pigment
that's 100% plant-based.
And we're looking to replace all the traditional dyes, toxins.
We mimic the same principles that give butterflies their natural color.
So we can make any color on the visible spectrum.
We are in the midst of what we call a material revolution.
This is the biggest and the most exciting challenge we humans ever had.
We fight for our own survival by redesigning, by recreating,
by redefining the foundation of our society,
how things are being made.
Someday, imagine when we say, "The world has now nontoxic,
safe polymers and plastics and materials."
Someday, we need to look people in the eye and say, "We did it."
Not, "We want to do it," but, "We did it."
That's gonna take great risk, trial and error and hard work.
Even though the couples reduced their exposures dramatically
at the midpoint of the study,
I was interested to see if they would be able to maintain that vigilance.
Let's look at some of your graphs.
- Shall we? - Yeah, let's do it.
So this is Darby, and this is BPA.
- Okay. - Mm-hm.
You have this drop at midpoint.
These were your high molecular weight phthalates.
You remember those are the ones in soft tubing
and, you know, soft water bottles.
Your values just plummeted.
- So I would say that's a success. - That's great.
So, Jesse, this is your BPA, and this was in the beginning.
You did a miracle and you went down, and you stayed down morning and evening.
- And that's just phenomenal. - That's great.
The high molecular weight, you were also quite high when you started,
and then you brought it down, and you stayed down.
- That's great. - So you're a star.
- How'd you do that? - Well, uh…
Our couples were able to keep their bisphenols down,
many to undetectable levels, which is amazing.
And while phthalates were more stubborn,
we did see a meaningful reduction in the average.
And couples, first of all, stuck with it,
liked it, and want to continue these changes going forward.
I think what we gave up mostly was going out to eat.
We saved a lot of money, and we spent more time together cooking.
So it's been a positive for you.
- Yes, definitely. - Absolutely.
And once you know, you kind of can't go back.
So that's the only downside to learning more about plastics.
Do you feel that?
- You feel you can't go back? - Yeah.
It was not that hard, uh, as we thought
because it was just like one week,
let's do this, and another week, let's do that.
I think what's stuck has been those habits you develop.
You know, you get in the pattern of not using, or using the replacement.
Like changing how we prepare food and how we store food.
The biggest thing is fragrances.
You know, laundry detergent, for example.
We would smell it literally 24/7 and it'd be like,
"Oh my gosh, I can't stop smelling this."
If we're gonna buy a blanket or something,
we try to buy 100% cotton.
- Yeah. - Like, we're now more aware.
I've since become an evangelist of this, by the way.
I think people start to care
once they start to realize that it's affecting them.
People fight against all odds.
Truly, David versus Goliath.
But they got a strong faith and a strong spirit that is unbelievable.
On this land in St. James,
as it's the proposed site for the $9.4 billion
Formosa petrochemical plant.
And the land that the plant is built on
is causing an uproar after the discovery of unmarked graves of enslaved people.
The legislation that we have now in Louisiana
says you can't build on graveyards.
What's crazy about that is that that's actually how people are now winning.
The ancestors who are buried in many unmarked graves
is now stopping the fossil fuel plants.
It's almost like those ancestors are reaching back
and saying, "Enough."
- We're gonna stand together. - Right.
- And fight Formosa. - Right.
We will not allow them to take our ancestors out of this ground
and put them somewhere else.
Judge Trudy White ruled in our favor
and told Formosa to vacate the property.
Because we have the right to breathe clean air.
Sharon Lavigne is a true force of nature.
She is to be reckoned with.
I know that if we come together,
we win.
I've said it, organized people beats organized money every single time.
The impediments to controlling exposures
to toxic chemicals are not, for the most part, scientific.
And what's required to deal with the problem is courage,
vision, political will.
No country is doing a perfect job in regulating toxic chemicals and plastic.
But the European Union is the world leader.
They have chemical legislation called REACH,
which actually requires that chemicals be tested
for safety and toxicity before they come to market.
There are nine chemicals that are banned
from personal care products in the United States.
And over 1,100 that are banned in the EU.
You can see that's two orders of magnitude.
New EU rules proposed by the European Commission
will target ten single-use plastic products.
These products won't disappear.
They will just be made with different materials.
We have an opportunity.
There's an international global plastics treaty
being negotiated by the UN.
This conference is about far more
than drafting an international treaty.
It is about humanity rising to meet an existential challenge.
We're finally seeing some traction on banning bisphenol A, or BPA,
and other lookalike bisphenols, which cause the same harms.
These chemicals disrupt hormones, including increasing estrogen.
In fact, BPA was studied in the 1930s
for its potential use in hormone regulation,
including birth control.
In 2025, the EU said enough is enough.
As of Monday, the European Union has prohibited the use
of this endocrine disruptor in food containers.
If we really incorporate a health mindset,
we will get past a model that focuses on what we see on our beaches,
in our oceans.
We need to think about what's getting into human bodies, ultimately.
Did you change anything in your work environment
that might have decreased your exposure?
I changed a lot. For me, I changed a lot.
After I met Bruno,
I was worried that he would not be able
to lower his exposures or improve his sperm count.
He is a construction worker,
had a lot of exposures from construction materials.
I was wrong.
You have four semen analyses, right?
Three of them are really good, and the last one is really good.
The pattern overall is that you have gotten greatly improved.
Yeah.
We were not expecting at all.
We thought, "What?"
If we look at your concentration,
it was 44.
And then it was 60.
I did see some sperm results from you, and they got a lot better.
Ooh, good.
Your total motile count increased 50%.
- Gosh. - Yeah.
- So that's huge. - That's awesome.
- Whoo-hoo! - Yeah.
The numbers were… We were talking about that… quite high.
- Concentration is way up. - I know!
It's just incredible.
You've turned into Superman.
I have results here.
I think the most exciting to me, and probably to you,
is that your total sperm count is way high.
The cutoff for fertile is about 40.
You were originally below that, and now you're at 77,
which is awesome!
Thank you.
I was really pleased with the results of the sperm analysis.
Of the six men in the study,
five improved their semen quality on multiple parameters.
- So, how do you feel about that? - I feel great.
- Yeah? - Um, yeah.
It feels really good that the intervention actually worked.
And I went from being sub or not fertile to normal.
Another really positive takeaway from this intervention
is that it seemed to improve their lives in many ways that we had not expected.
When we cut everything out, I went from,
I think I was like at 212 when we did the measurement,
down to like 198.
And now I'm back around 202.
So ten pounds you lost.
I wake up way less at night, and I sleep, like, deeper.
A third of the participants lowered their body mass index.
Over 60% reported increased energy levels,
80% reported increased sleep quality,
and 86% reported they plan to keep these lifestyle changes.
I feel like I'm able to focus for longer.
There's not the fog that used to be there.
I just feel better, and I enjoy life more.
So why the hell would I not continue to do this?
It's true that to understand patterns of disease,
you need a large population.
So these results will be used
to support an application for a larger study
with government funding.
So I think we're pioneers.
Well, today I decided to take a pregnancy test, another one,
and I'm going to share with you.
We never know, right?
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
What does it mean?
It's not a joke, is it?
It's not a joke, right? This can't be.
There are two.
I'm not trusting this test.
Okay, hold it here. I'll use another one now.
Oh, my love.
Oh!
Oh, my love.
I love you.
So since we last spoke, uh, life has changed quite a bit.
Right now, I'm 15 weeks pregnant.
And we already know it's a boy,
so we can't name the baby Shanna, really.
Yeah, I know. We were planning on Shanna.
Okay, this is Bobby. Those are feet.
After the study, we found out we were expecting.
Yeah! We're…
Yeah, we're pregnant.
- Yeah. - It's amazing.
- Mostly I'm pregnant, but we are pregnant. - Well, it's the way they say it, right?
Initially, my introduction to all the participants was on paper.
But I was continually surprised what a pleasure it was to meet them,
to interact with them, to get to know them.
It looks great.
- Oh! - Did you see it moving?
Oh, it's moving, honey.
I feel connected with each of them.
And it's very surprising because it's unusual for a study
that you would have that.
Knock, knock.
- Hi! - Hi!
Look what you did.
- We did. - We did.
If you want to have a child,
I believe it is a fundamental human right to be able to do so.
I think I'm now more optimistic about solving the fertility problem.
But it's going to be a fight,
and that's why I'm fighting, and that's why I'm talking to you.
- You are perfect. - Yeah.