The Last Straw: Assessing Alternatives to Single-Use Plastics, with Shelie Miller

Top Quotes

• Reusable items need to be used often: “The big idea with reusables is that, in order for reusables to have environmental benefits, we actually need to reuse them. It sounds so simple, right? But it’s often a larger number of [uses] than people realize … If we’re just constantly buying reusable items and treating them more or less like single-use items, we’re increasing our environmental impact.” (7:54)
• Reusable alternatives aren’t necessarily better than plastic bags: “It turns out that … there is never a point that [silicone bags and beeswax wrap] break even with the single-use product. Silicone does break even on water consumption after 100 uses. But basically, if you’re talking about greenhouse gases or energy use, you never have a point at which beeswax wrap or silicone storage bags are going to be able to have environmental benefits over the plastic bag. That is highly disheartening to lots of folks.” (13:07)
• Don’t sweat the small stuff: “While it’s certainly great to pay attention to reusing your reusables, there are lots of other things that you can do. Don’t get too caught up in these details if you’re doing other things as far as trying to reduce your environmental impact. These are things that you can think about on sort of the margin. Overall, there are plenty of things that you can do beyond just the reusables.” (29:51)

Top of the Stack

• “Environmental payback periods of reusable alternatives to single-use plastic kitchenware products” by Hannah Fetner and Shelie A. Miller
• “Five Misperceptions Surrounding the Environmental Impacts of Single-Use Plastic” by Shelie A. Miller
• Green Porno with Isabella Rossellini

The Full Transcript

Daniel Raimi: Hello, and welcome to Resources Radio, a weekly podcast from Resources for the Future. I'm your host, Daniel Raimi. Today we talk with Shelie Miller, the Jonathan W. Bulkley Collegiate Professor of Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan School for the Environment and Sustainability. Shelie works on a wide range of topics, but today she's going to help us understand whether reusable products like straws and coffee cups are really more sustainable than their single-use counterparts.

Today's episode is really, really fun, and it’s very much news you can use, whether you're trying to decide if you should buy that reusable sandwich wrapper, straw, or take home that latest canvas bag from the latest conference you've attended. Stay with us.

Shelie Miller from the great University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, welcome to Resources Radio.

Shelie Miller: It's great to be here.

Daniel Raimi: Shelie, we are going to talk today about your work on reusable alternatives to single-use plastics, which is going to be really fun and interesting. But first, we always ask our guests about how they got interested in working on environmental issues, maybe as a kid or through other means. So, what drew you into working on this stuff?

Shelie Miller: I think I've always really been connected to the outdoors. I've always been a very dirty kid, playing in the mud, going on hikes, and so I've always loved being outdoors. I think where it really got me in a career mode was during high school or early college when I learned about the concept of hermaphroditic frogs; it was the first time I'd really understood this idea that pollution coming from people could actually affect the sex organs of animals in our ecosystems. It was this fascination with this idea that the chemicals that we're producing for different things can come in and really affect the reproductive capacity of species in a totally fundamental way. That just really got me, and so I decided to continue in an environmental career.

Daniel Raimi: That's so interesting. Were the frogs hermaphroditic because of the chemicals that they were ingesting? Or were they naturally hermaphroditic? What's the story there?

Shelie Miller: Well, there is a certain kind of pollution called endocrine disruptors. What it ends up doing is it interferes with the biological systems of frogs and other sensitive species—so, generally, amphibians—and it changes the biology in a very fundamental way. I thought that I was going to be going into the organic chemistry of all of that, but my path took a slightly different route. I can't tell you the exact mechanism, but it's truly fascinating to see just how much interference we cause.

Daniel Raimi: Wow, that's fascinating. I wouldn't understand it even if you could. I got a C in high school biology, and that was the end of my biology career. So, let's dive in now to our main topic of conversation. I think maybe we'll come back to hermaphroditic frogs later.

Shelie Miller: Sure.

Daniel Raimi: You've worked on tons of fascinating topics over the years. We're just going to really focus on one recent paper called “Environmental payback periods of reusable alternatives to single-use plastic kitchenware products.” It's a really fun paper. It's very much news you can use. Can you tell us the motivation behind doing the study and what types of questions you were trying to answer?

Shelie Miller: There's this fascination in the public eye right now about single-use plastics and the need to reduce our reliance on them. A lot of my work recently has been exploring this topic, trying to make sure that if we get rid of single-use plastics, we're doing it in the right ways. Part of the motivation for this work is really highlighting that, yes, we should be working on reducing single-use plastics, but in reducing single-use plastics as an end goal, there are potential tradeoffs there. The big motivation for this work is to say, "Yes, reusables, which we generally think of as incredibly environmentally friendly, do tend to have environmental benefits, but only if we reuse them responsibly."

The purpose of this work is to highlight some of those tradeoffs and to investigate the comparative environmental impacts of single-use products and multi-use products through this idea of an environmental payback period. What we call the environmental payback period is basically the idea that any sort of reusable product tends to be more durable than a single-use product. That requires a lot more material and energy to go into it, and so it needs to be reused a sufficient number of times to pay back the embedded material costs of the more durable item.

Daniel Raimi: That's so great. Can you now tell us what are some of the metrics that you use to estimate that environmental payback period? And then tell us what types of products you're looking at, trying to answer the question of whether the environmental payback period is one use or 50 uses or 100 uses, and so on and so forth.

Shelie Miller: Yeah, sure. When we say environmental impacts, there's not a single environmental impact; there are lots of different ways of measuring what is impactful. Our study looked at three different metrics: global warming potential, so, climate change emissions; the amount of water that gets consumed throughout the entire life of a product; and then the amount of energy that gets used and consumed. We used those three metrics—every product is different on each of those environmental impacts—and we looked at some fairly broad categories of reusable items that people use every day. We looked at reusable straws—which seem to be very popular these days as we're getting rid of single-use plastic—and also soft straws, sandwich wrappings, coffee cups, and forks. We chose those because they're all fairly simple products; there are not lots of different types of materials that go into those. For each of those categories, we had at least one single-use item, compared to multiple reusables that are available.

Daniel Raimi: Great, and we're going to talk about each one of those products in a couple of minutes. But first, one quick follow-up question on one of the environmental metrics that you mentioned, which is water consumption: I'm just curious how you measure it. Sometimes we use water to, let's say, wash something, but then the water gets recycled, it goes back into the sewer system, and it gets treated and reused, and that has energy implications. And so, I'm just curious, when you say water consumption, can you define that term a little bit more?

Shelie Miller: Sure. It's basically how much water is used through the process. It’s absolutely true that the water cycle reuses and recycles water. But it's basically any time we're taking water from a pretty high standard to a degraded standard in some way that it's going to have to be treated again. So, any water that ends up going to water treatment that has to be treated again would be considered water consumption.

Daniel Raimi: Got it. Okay. Thank you. That's really helpful. As I said, we're going to go item-by-item in a moment to talk about what you found. But first, are there any kind of high-level takeaways that you want us to keep in mind as we talk through the specific findings for each product?

Shelie Miller: Absolutely. The big idea with reusables is in order for reusables to have environmental benefits, we actually need to reuse them. It sounds so simple, right? But it's often a larger number of times than people realize. I think whenever we're thinking about reusable alternatives to single-use products, it's really important to say, "All right, if I'm buying this reusable bag or this reusable coffee cup, I’m actually committing to reusing it." Because if we're just constantly buying reusable items and treating them more or less like single-use items, we're increasing our environmental impact. That’s why it becomes really important to make sure that if you buy reusable straws, for example, that you're actually going to use those reusable straws.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah, for sure. I have to confess to being guilty of losing many mugs and reusable water bottles over the course of my life, so I am definitely guilty on some of these fronts.

Let's talk about what you found. First, number one in our round of reusables, let's talk about straws. What did you find? What was the driver of the variations in what you find?

Shelie Miller: Plastic straws are at the forefront of these single-use plastic bans. A lot of people are looking at reusable alternatives or other single-use alternatives. What we looked at were bamboo straws that are reusable, glass straws, metal straws, and silicone straws. One of the interesting findings we had is that the bamboo straws never broke even in any category.

Daniel Raimi: Wow.

Shelie Miller: That’s partially due to the lifetime of the bamboo straw, so it would actually degrade to the point where you wouldn't be able to use it after a certain number of uses, so it doesn't ever really break even. The other three materials do break even but after a pretty large number of uses. For example, for a glass straw, or a metal straw, you have to use those at least 150 times to break even on all three impact categories.

Daniel Raimi: Wow.

Shelie Miller: You have to be really dedicated to that metal straw as far as reusing that straw. Certainly, there are people who need straws in our society. But again, if you're really thinking through this plastic straw versus a metal straw, you're going to have to carry that metal straw with you for quite some time and be drinking a lot out of it.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah. And you account for things like washing the straw and cleaning the straw and things like that, right? Can you talk about that a little more?

Shelie Miller: Yeah. Dishwashing emissions actually end up being a big part of the reusable environmental impact. The field we're talking about is lifecycle assessment. What we're doing is we're measuring things throughout the entire life of these materials, from when they're extracted from the ground or grown in a forest, to when they're produced and manufactured, to when we interact with them and we wash them, and then also when we dispose or recycle of them.

What our group does—and I should say, Hannah Fetner is actually what I mean when I say “our group.” She's really the one who did all the work. Hannah Fetner is a master's student who just graduated—she's responsible for all of these data. What she did is go through and measure the environmental impacts through various databases of each of these materials throughout their entire lives. This idea of what we're measuring here—what often ends up being one of the big items—is dishwashing. So, heating water, soap, the electricity of washing the dish, whatever it happens to be. It’s both the amount of material that goes in—and metals are very environmentally intensive to produce—but you also have to wash reusable items and single-use items. And so, the dishwashing emissions actually tend to be fairly significant in these products.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah. That's fascinating. Of course, we're scratching the surface here for people who really want to dig into the details. They can check out the paper and the methods where everything is described. Of course, we'll have a link to that in the show notes, so people can do that.

Okay, so that's straws. Let's go to our next round of reusables, which is sandwich storage. Tell us about sandwich storage.

Shelie Miller: This is one that breaks a lot of people's hearts, I will say. So, sandwich storage: we looked at the very classic zip-top plastic bag. We compared them to the very durable silicone bags that you're seeing. I won't mention any brand names, but there are some very popular ones in the market. So, there’s the silicone ones and then also beeswax wrap, which is incredibly popular. This is one that actually surprised us.

It turns out that on most impact categories for both of these products, there is never a point that they break even with the single-use product. Silicone does break even on water consumption after 100 uses. But basically, if you're talking about greenhouse gases or energy use, you never have a point at which beeswax wrap or silicone storage bags are going to be able to have environmental benefits over the plastic bag. That is highly disheartening to lots of folks.

But the reason for it—and if you back away from it, it makes sense—is just that there's so little material in those thin-film plastic bags that the amount of material and energy that go into producing those plastic bags are so very small that it tends to be that the dishwashing of these alternatives is greater than the actual manufacturing of the plastic bag itself. It's not by any stretch of the imagination saying that these products are bad or harmful environmentally, it's just saying that there is so little material in these thin-film plastic bags that even dishwashing these other alternatives is more impactful.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah. That's so interesting. It’s funny: at my house, we got some of these beeswax wrappers a couple of years ago. I've always wondered whether it's actually doing any good. I'm just curious to learn a little bit more about the beeswax, maybe partly for selfish reasons. But I have no idea how those things are manufactured, what goes into them, or what the different environmental impacts are. Can you just talk us through the beeswax story a little bit more?

Shelie Miller: Sure. As I said, there’s not much environmental impact there. You are taking from honey production the comb of beehives, and you're making that into wax. I will admit I don't know the exact processing of how to take honeycomb into beeswax, but there are some processing steps there. They tend to be pretty minimal from an environmental standpoint. And then there's some sort of fiber. Depending on the company, there’s some sort of fabric associated, and you basically end up having a coated fiber material with this wax wrap. One of the things that we saw is that beeswax wrap doesn’t do well in the dishwasher, so it tends to have to be hand washed. Also interesting from the dishwashing perspective is that mechanical washing of dishes in a dishwasher—as long as you're doing it efficiently and effectively—tends to have fewer environmental impacts than when you hand wash. One of the reasons that beeswax wrap does tend to be a bit higher than the plastic bag emissions is the difference in these dishwasher emissions.

Daniel Raimi: That makes sense. And yeah, we definitely wash ours by hand because they seem like they're going to get torn up if they go on the dishwasher, which will again, defeat the purpose of reusing them.

Shelie Miller: Yes. I think it also goes to the lifetime of the beeswax wraps; they just don't stay around long enough to break even. I will say, as far as dishwashing goes, individual results vary. There're a lot of variances in these data, and as you said, we're just breaking the surface in the podcast. There's lots of data that goes into these, but if you have a highly efficient dishwasher and you're in a grid where you have a high percentage of renewable energy, you very well could see a breakeven point with these. So individual results vary.

Daniel Raimi: Right. For sure. And of course, this will change over time too: in 20 years, hopefully, we'll have a much cleaner grid and maybe more heating water with electricity and homes rather than natural gas, and so of course, this stuff could change over time.

Shelie Miller: Yes, absolutely. We do expect that these payback periods will reduce, as you say, as our grid becomes more efficient, as our houses become more efficient. Overall, we do expect these payback periods to be reduced.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah, great. So very important to keep in mind, even as we're having fun with our sort of current results and some of their unintuitive results, which are so much fun. Okay. Let's do two more. Next up, is coffee cups. Tell us about coffee cups.

Shelie Miller: We looked at coffee cups, and so, our single-use product is the very iconic paper cup with a plastic lid attached to it. We compared three major reusables here: the very classic, very popular metal travel mug; reusable plastic travel mugs; and then your very typical ceramic mug. What we found here, is that again, reuses varied. If you have a classic ceramic mug, you need to reuse that about 30 times for it to break even in all impact categories. Meanwhile, for the reusable plastic in the metals, you have to use upwards of 200 times to break even in all of them.

Again, if you love your metal coffee mug, make sure you commit to it, and, to your point earlier, to not leave it anywhere. You don’t want to take a metal coffee mug, which—let's face it, you don't want to lose them because they tend to be a little pricey sometimes—you don't want to leave them anywhere.

You also don't want to think, "Oh, changing with the seasons, let's get a new reusable mug." It really is like, “I have a great metal coffee mug that I bought years ago, and it is near and dear to my heart. I feel very confident that it is well past its payback period. I have reused that mug for pretty much every workday of my working life, five days a week for the past five years, and so that has paid itself back. I know very clearly that that is more environmentally beneficial than if I were to use single-use coffee containers.”

Daniel Raimi: That's great. Plus, you have the added benefit of if someone sees your coffee mug around the office, or around campus, they'll be like, "Oh, that's Shelie's mug. I’ve seen that mug every day for five years."

Shelie Miller: I know. It's getting beat up by now, but it's well worn and well-loved.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah. That's great. Can you tell us a little bit more about what's driving the need for that large number of reuses, for example, with the metal mugs? Is it dishwashing again, or kind of what are some of the big factors there?

Shelie Miller: With these products, there's a couple of things going on. One is just the total amount of material. In order to have the insulated sleeves so that you can have a comfortable holding experience, you use a pretty hefty amount of metal compared to what is, essentially, a very flimsy single-use product. One is the difference in overall materials used. Also, we're talking about manufacturing metal. When you actually look at the processing of, say, aluminum, from the mineral box site where it's coming from, you basically have to take rock and turn it into metal. As it turns out, that's pretty energy-intensive. You have to use a lot of energy to make metal. But the good news is that once you make it, you can recycle it very easily, and it ends up being a very durable product. But all of those manufacturing emissions have to be paid back over time. And it has to stay in consumption for a fairly long lifetime.

Daniel Raimi: Great. Okay. I will make sure not to buy a new pumpkin spice coffee mug every time pumpkin spice season rolls around. Mostly because that stuff is gross.

Shelie Miller: You look great with one though.

Daniel Raimi: Okay. So let's do one more. Tell us about forks.

Shelie Miller: Yeah. Forks are one of those that actually have pretty reasonable payback periods. Compared to your standard plastic fork, we looked at bamboo forks, reusable plastic forks, and metal forks. For the most part, these are all under 10 uses in order to pay back. There's a couple of variations. Bamboo has a bit higher water consumption because it takes a lot of water to grow bamboo. But overall, reusable plastic forks pay back all of the environmental impact categories in five uses. When you think about it, this makes sense. When you think about your standard plastic fork, it's actually pretty durable because they have to make it structurally sound. Otherwise, as you're eating your salad or whatever, it just bends and breaks. They actually have to use a good bit of plastic for the disposable item. So, it doesn't actually take that much more for things like reusable forks to be able to be competitive in that space.

Daniel Raimi: That's really interesting. So I'm curious, is it common for people to bring their cutlery to restaurants? Do you bring your own cutlery when you go out to eat? I've never thought about doing that, but now maybe I will.

Shelie Miller: I don’t do it at restaurants because they generally have their own cutlery, so they're reusing them. Whether or not I bring a reusable one or I reuse theirs, that doesn't necessarily matter all that much. I’m in a school for environmental sustainability, and I can tell you that we promote bringing your own cutlery to any sort of eating event. We promote a culture in our school that says, “By all means, bring your own cutlery so we don't have to go through plastic forks.” Or even compostable disposables are fine, but certainly, reusables would be better.

Daniel Raimi: Right. Yeah. There're lots of events on campus that are zero-waste events. And I imagine this is definitely part of that story.

Shelie Miller: Oh, absolutely. I feel like cutlery is one where you can feel very confident promoting reusable items, and they'll pay themselves back pretty quickly.

Daniel Raimi: Great. Okay. So Shelie, we've gone through the four items that you focus on in the study that you recently published with your colleague, a student coauthor. But let's talk just for a minute about another topic that people are really interested in. I know you're generally aware of the literature on these topics. Can you tell us about reusable bags? Many of us use reusable bags when we go shopping, and we feel good about not using plastic bags. But what are some of the environmental tradeoffs associated with using reusable bags?

Shelie Miller: Yeah. I think this one has popped up a number of times in the news. There’s this very famous study out of Europe that looked at shopping bags and said, "Alright. Compared to single-use plastic shopping bags, what's this payback period?" When you think about a canvas tote or the reusable bags that you see in the grocery stores that you can purchase, those have to be better, right? This study came out and said, "Well, they can be, but again, they have to be reused a surprisingly large number of times."

I think where people get really surprised is how long it takes cotton bags to break even. As it turns out, from a lifecycle perspective, cotton is a pretty intensive material: it requires a lot of water, and it requires a lot of energy to produce. Because of that, the number of reuses for cotton bags is really high—in the hundreds. Again, if you're going to have a cotton tote and try to replace your single-use plastics, you have to really commit to that cotton tote and not say, "Oh, after 25 or 30 uses, it's getting a little raggedy, we'll replace it with something else." If you actually want to achieve the environmental benefit, you have to really commit to really reusing that bag a long number of times.

It’s the same thing with the less durable items, the ones that are often sold in grocery stores, the plastic kinds of ones that are slightly more durable plastics. Those do have a slightly lower payback period, but again, they have to be reused.

If you’re finding yourself in the situation where you're saying, "Hey, I want to do the right thing for the environment, but it turns out I can never remember to bring these bags,” and so you basically end up buying these reusable bags nearly every time you're going to the grocery store, you're not actually accruing an environmental benefit, you're actually better off with a single-use item on the basis of things like greenhouse gases and energy use. What you're essentially doing is taking a reusable item and turning it into not a single-use item, but a very-few-use item. If you're someone that finds yourself with a closet full of reusable bags, maybe just stick with the ones that you have.

Daniel Raimi: Oh, that's totally me.

Shelie Miller: It's all of us. Yes.

Daniel Raimi: We have this cabinet near the door where we keep our reusable bags to take them out. It seems like the number of bags just keeps growing over time. A lot of it isn't because we buy them, but people give them to you as swag when you go to a conference or when you go to an event or something like that. When you're at conferences or events, and you're offered a bag, do you take it?

Shelie Miller: I generally don't. We’ve got some other work that's exploring consumer perceptions of single-use items. We did a paper called, “Five Misperceptions for Single-Use Plastic.” You can imagine that a lot of people were not very happy about it because it does explore some of these misperceptions. One of the misperceptions we talked about is that zero-waste events are not always lower impact because of these ideas.

If you’re planning a zero-waste event, you could have the greatest of intentions, but you really have to think through some potential unintended consequences of what you're are doing. If you are, for example, giving away freebies that are intended to be reusable but are not actually of a very high quality, your participants are likely not going to reuse those a large number of times.

What you want to be very careful of is that if you do choose to do some free giveaways, or say, put out reusable mugs with the intention that people will reuse them, that you are fairly certain that they actually will be reused. I think it's a great idea to have sort of these reusable items in there, but what we don't want to have is just people accruing reusable items in replacement of single-use products. Because that actually doesn't result in environmental benefit if every time we go to a conference, we get more reusable items that have more embodied environmental impact.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah, absolutely. Well, Shelie, this has been so much fun and edifying—and in some ways, disheartening as you say—but the purpose here is to educate us as consumers and make sure we have the best information when we're making decisions and really being mindful about what we use and when we use it.

Shelie Miller: Absolutely. Just one thing I will say, I know that this is one of those things where people get really caught up in some of these comparisons, but all of these things are so small in terms of our environmental impact. There are lots of things we can do as consumers that have much more of an impact on our environmental footprint. Yes, while it’s certainly great to pay attention to reusing your reusables, there are lots of other things that you can do. Don’t get too caught up in these details if you're doing other things as far as trying to reduce your environmental impact. These are things that you can think about on sort of the margin. Overall, there are plenty of things that you can do beyond just the reusables.

Daniel Raimi: Right. We only have a couple of minutes left, but can you highlight some really important ones that you think of, that rise to the top of the list, whether it's vehicle purchases, decisions about flying, decisions about what you eat. What are some of the things that come to the top of the list for you?

Shelie Miller: Well, you got them all right there. I always say there are three big bins: there's thinking about our transportation miles, so, how much we transport ourselves and by what mode; thinking about our houses, in terms of how we power our houses, if we are able to participate in any renewable energy purchasing programs, or not, and how much energy we use in our houses; and then of course, our diets and what we eat and how both environmentally-intensive our food choices are, and certainly, meat and dairy tend to be much more environmentally-intensive than vegetables and grains, but also how much food we waste. Thinking through those things tends to have a much larger contribution to our environmental footprint than something like a straw.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah, absolutely. But talking about straws is fun too.

Shelie Miller: Straws are a lot of fun.

Daniel Raimi: This has been really fun, Shelie. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Shelie Miller from the University of Michigan School for the Environment and Sustainability.

Let's close it out with our last question that we ask everybody: what's at the top of your literal or metaphorical reading stack?

Shelie Miller: Yes. There are lots of really great books out there right now that range from inspiring to depressing. I will say that one of the things that I go back to—and they're fairly classic at this point, if you've never seen them—there are these short pieces by Isabella Rossellini. She has a number of them that are out that are live-action where she acts out various mating and nurturing rituals of various species. She has a number of them: Mammas, Seduce Me—which, you can imagine what that's all about—and then my personal favorite is Green Porno. These go through the various mating habits and various oddities of different species in a really fun and exciting way. I love them. If you've never seen them, a couple of them have been around for a while. I highly recommend them. They're great procrastination devices, where I will say, "All right, if I can just get through this stack of papers, I can watch a Green Porno afterward." They’re a ton of fun.

Daniel Raimi: That is amazing. Okay. We started with hermaphrodite frogs, now we're ending with Green Porno. I think this has been one of the most successful episodes we've had to date. This has been so much fun.

Shelie Miller: I don't know what that says about me actually, because ... Well, anyway.

Daniel Raimi: It says you have a wide range of interests, and we appreciate that.

Shelie Miller: We'll go with it.

Daniel Raimi: Great. So Shelie Miller from the University of Michigan. Thank you so much for coming on to the show today and sharing all of this really fascinating information. We really appreciate it.

Shelie Miller: Thanks so much, Daniel.

Daniel Raimi: You’ve been listening to Resources Radio. Learn how to support Resources for the Future at rff.org/support. If you have a minute, we'd really appreciate you leaving us a rating or a comment on your podcast platform of choice. Also, feel free to send us your suggestions for future episodes. Resources Radio is a podcast from Resources for the Future.

RFF is an independent, nonprofit research institution in Washington, DC. Our mission is to improve environmental, energy, and natural resource decisions through impartial economic research and policy engagement. The views expressed on this podcast are solely those of the podcast guests and may differ from those of RFF experts, its officers, or its directors. RFF does not take positions on specific legislative proposals. Resources Radio is produced by Elizabeth Wason, with music by me, Daniel Raimi. Join us next week for another episode.