Who Pays for Plastic? Inside the Law Quietly Shifting the Bill to Producers
Release Date: 09/11/2026
The Fish That Feed Your Fish: What Farmed Salmon Really Eat
How To Protect The Ocean
The family behind the world’s largest salmon farming company built a global industry. Now one of its members is asking how it can be sustainable to grind up fish from poorer countries, ship them across the world, and feed them to salmon sold to wealthier shoppers. In episode 2048, Andrew Lewin follows farmed fish from your plate back to the fishmeal boat to answer him. More than half the seafood eaten worldwide now comes from farms, and most of it is fed. Andrew breaks down what fishmeal and fish oil are made of, why roughly a fifth of the global wild catch ends up as feed, and how forage...
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What Your Farmed Salmon Ate: Inside a Five-Year Fishmeal Investigation
How To Protect The Ocean
More than half the seafood eaten on Earth now comes from fish farms, and most of those farmed fish are raised on fishmeal made from wild-caught fish. Maya Martin, deputy editor at The Outlaw Ocean Project, joins Andrew Lewin to unpack Food for Feed, a five-year investigation that traced fishmeal from the ships that catch it, through the plants that grind it, to the farmed fish on your plate. Maya explains how forage fish like sardinella and anchoveta are pulled from waters off West Africa, Peru and Southeast Asia, often from stocks that are already overexploited and from communities that...
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How to Read the Seafood Counter Like a Marine Biologist
How To Protect The Ocean
Picture a big sign over the seafood counter promising sustainable fishing, with a fish every independent guide says to avoid sitting on ice right below it. In most countries nobody broke a rule, because the word "sustainable" on seafood has no legal definition. In this final episode of our sustainable seafood week, Andrew Lewin walks you through how to see past that sign and choose seafood you can feel good about. You'll learn how to use the eco-labels and seafood guides that have already done the research for you, including the Marine Stewardship Council's blue tick for wild seafood, the...
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Is Bottom Trawling Always Bad? It Depends Where
How To Protect The Ocean
Off the south coast of England, about 100 kilometres out, sits Haig Fras, a granite reef covered in jewel anemones and cup corals. For years it was protected on paper, yet heavy fishing gear could still drag across it. In March 2024, that finally changed. In this episode, Andrew Lewin explains why where we fish matters as much as how much we fish, and what it takes to turn a line on a map into real protection. Andrew breaks down the difference between midwater and bottom trawls and puts the damage shown in the recent Ocean documentary into context. Bottom trawling lands about a quarter of the...
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The Trapdoor That Saves Sea Turtles From Shrimp Nets
How To Protect The Ocean
A Kemp’s ridley sea turtle, the most endangered sea turtle on Earth, gets swept into a shrimp trawl. It hits a metal grid, slides out through a flap in the net, and swims away. That small trapdoor, the turtle excluder device, is one of the biggest success stories in fisheries management, and in late August 2026 a US federal appeals court upheld the rule extending it to skimmer trawl boats 40 feet and longer. In this episode, marine biologist Andrew Lewin walks through the bycatch fixes that are working and the fights still underway. You’ll hear why North Atlantic right whales get tangled...
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The Cod Came Back: What a Fishery Collapse Teaches Us About Overfishing
How To Protect The Ocean
Five centuries ago, explorers off Newfoundland described cod so plentiful that a weighted basket lowered into the sea came back full. By July 2, 1992, so few remained that Canada shut the northern cod fishery overnight. About 30,000 people lost their work in what became the largest single layoff in Canadian history. In this first episode of a week-long sustainable seafood series, Andrew tells the story of how the collapse happened and how slowly the cod came back. Andrew then breaks down the words that cause the most confusion in fisheries headlines: overfishing, overfished, depleted, and...
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How to Choose Sustainable Seafood
How To Protect The Ocean
You want to eat seafood the right way. Then you hit the seafood counter and face a wall of labels, a sign promising “sustainable practices,” and an employee who has no idea where the tuna came from. Add documentaries like Seaspiracy telling you to quit fish entirely, and it’s tempting to give up and buy whatever looks good. Unsustainable fishing is the biggest threat to marine biodiversity, so those choices carry real weight. In this episode, Andrew’s good friend Dr. David Shiffman joins the show to talk about his new book, Why Sustainable Seafood Matters. David spent two years on the...
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Slow Down for Whales: How Global Shipping Learned to Share the Ocean
How To Protect The Ocean
Blue whales can’t dodge ships. When scientists tracked blue whales alongside cargo ships off Southern California, the whales responded in just over half the encounters, and every response was the same: a slow, shallow dive. Not once did a whale move sideways out of the ship’s path. Models suggest ships kill around 18 blue whales a year off the U.S. West Coast, nearly eight times what the population can lose and still recover. The good news is in the data. Most blue whale strike deaths happen in a small slice of ocean, and that’s where ports, air quality agencies, marine sanctuaries, and...
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When Whale Food Moves: Climate Change, Crab Traps, and Pop-Up Gear
How To Protect The Ocean
In 2014, a patch of unusually warm water nicknamed "the blob" settled off the west coast of North America. The cold, food-rich water that normally stretches far offshore shrank into a narrow strip along the coast, and hungry humpback whales followed their food straight into the waters where Dungeness crabbers had set thousands of traps, each tied to a vertical rope. Entanglements jumped from about 10 a year to 53 in 2015 and 55 in 2016. In this episode, Andrew traces the line from warmer water to a specific whale in a specific rope. You'll learn why lunge-feeding whales depend on dense patches...
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The Whale Heart That Beats Twice a Minute
How To Protect The Ocean
Fill your hands with cold water, hold your breath, and press your face in. Your heart slows within seconds. That reflex lives in every whale in the ocean too, and in a blue whale it is pushed so far that the largest heart on Earth can drop to two beats a minute on a deep dive. In this episode, Andrew walks through the first heart rate recording from a wild blue whale, led by Jeremy Goldbogen's team at Stanford, and a study by Terrie Williams of UC Santa Cruz that tracked narwhals fleeing after release from nets in East Greenland. The narwhals swam as hard as they could while their hearts fell...
info_outlineFor decades, the honest answer to "who pays to deal with plastic packaging once it leaves the shelf" was taxpayers, quietly, through municipal budgets that funded garbage trucks and recycling plants running at a loss, whether or not the packaging actually got recycled. That's the system extended producer responsibility (EPR) is built to replace: a legal requirement that the companies making and selling packaging fund what happens to it after a customer buys the product, not the city that collects it afterward. Seven US states have now passed packaging EPR laws. Oregon has been charging producer fees since July 2025, Colorado's fees started in January 2026, and California, Maine, Minnesota, Maryland, and Washington are all phasing in requirements through 2030.
California's SB 54 is the biggest and most closely watched of these laws, and it's a useful case study for how the system actually works underneath the headline. Producers pay eco-modulated fees that scale with how toxic or hard-to-recycle their packaging is, which is the built-in incentive to redesign packaging in the first place. Starting in 2027, the law is expected to generate roughly $500 million a year for a decade for a plastic pollution mitigation fund, with 60% of that earmarked for the communities most directly affected by plastic pollution. Almost as soon as California finalized its rules, the law got sued from two completely opposite directions: environmental groups arguing the regulations are too weak, and a coalition of states plus a wholesaler trade group arguing the law goes too far and violates the US Constitution. Neither suit has stopped the law so far, though a nearly identical fight in Oregon just produced a real answer: a federal court upheld Oregon's law against the same kind of constitutional challenge in August 2026.
The same fight is quietly playing out here in Canada, on two tracks. Canada's federal single-use plastics ban survived a legal rollercoaster, struck down by a federal court in late 2023, kept in effect on appeal the whole time, then upheld by the Federal Court of Appeal in January 2026. But the bigger, more direct parallel to what's happening in California is provincial: British Columbia has run a producer-funded packaging program since 2014, and Ontario just completed its own full transition on January 1, 2026, a shift the province says is already saving municipalities more than $200 million. Andrew closes out the week's plastics and microfiber arc by asking the question underneath every other episode: who actually pays, and is the answer finally starting to change for the better.
Takeaways:
- Extended producer responsibility (EPR) shifts the cost of dealing with packaging waste from taxpayers and municipal budgets to the companies that make and sell the packaging, paid up front rather than absorbed quietly later.
- Seven US states have passed packaging EPR laws (Maine, Oregon, Colorado, California, Minnesota, Maryland, Washington), with Oregon and Colorado already collecting producer fees.
- California's SB 54 is being sued from two opposite directions at once: environmental groups say the final regulations are too weak, while a coalition of states and a wholesaler trade group say the law itself is unconstitutional.
- A near-identical constitutional challenge in Oregon was already resolved: a federal court upheld Oregon's EPR law in full in August 2026, a signal for how the California lawsuits might eventually land.
- Ontario completed its own full transition to producer-funded recycling on January 1, 2026, which the province says is saving municipalities more than $200 million, though whether that savings is reaching taxpayers directly is still an open question.
- Canada's federal single-use plastics ban survived a multi-year legal fight, struck down by a federal court in 2023 and upheld on appeal in January 2026, with a possible further appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada still pending.
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