Equity In Every Drop - A Waterkeeper Alliance Podcast

Waterkeeper - S2 Ep. 3 Sean Dixon
Thomas Hynes: [00:00:00] Our guest today is Sean Dixon of Puget Soundkeeper in Seattle, Washington. Before joining Puget Soundkeeper. Sean worked at Hudson Riverkeeper in New York State, the US Environmental Protection Agency as an adjunct professor at Pace University and for a sustainable seafood company in New York City. Sean, it's great to see you again. Thank you so much for being here today.

Sean Dixon: Thanks for having me.

Thomas Hynes: And , I was saying earlier we spoke last summer. We've met at a couple conferences and I'm just, I feel like I'm only getting half of your very interesting and incredible career, but we do have somewhat of a time limit on here, so I can't go through your full resume as impressive as it is.
And I feel like I'm leaving out like half of the amazing and cool things that you've done over the years.
So I guess a good place to start is to tell me about your work at Puget Soundkeeper. What the team out there does and you know, what brought you there.

Sean Dixon: Yeah, thanks. Well, Puget Soundkeeper, member of the Waterkeeper Alliance founding member, actually years ago. We've been going on 41 years now, working in Puget Sound, [00:01:00] just like all of our sister organizations across the alliance fighting for clean water healthy communities in a vibrant ecosystem here throughout our watershed. Puget Sound and Soundkeeper have a long history of , needing help in stormwater advocacy, clean water advocacy, but also getting people to water.
A lot of folks that come and visit Seattle see the water everywhere. And that's one of the most amazing things when people land in Seattle. And then they get out into our watershed and they head up into the Olympics or the Cascades, or they get on a whale watching boat or go over to Bainbridge Island and water is everywhere. But one of the things that we don't actually have a lot of is access to that water, especially in the areas that are some of the most critically impacted from pollution. So, at Soundkeeper , we try to spend a lot of time getting people to the water helping do cleanups restoration events, getting youth out there exposed to water quality science and watershed management issues. As well as, you know, a good host of litigation and legal and lobbying advocacy to try to make sure that our systems [00:02:00] protecting water quality are modernized are doing what they need to be doing and are well enforced and that the industries are complying with them. So tons and tons of work for a small, you know, 12 person, small but mighty team at Puget Soundkeeper. We're on the water every day and we're stopping pollution every week.

Thomas Hynes: That's amazing. Yeah. No you all celebrated your 40th anniversary. Was it last? I guess that would've been last year. One now. Yeah. That's awesome. And I, I guess I didn't realize you were a founding group, you know, one of my favorite things when I tell people where I work, I'm like, there's a Puget Soundkeeper, there's a long answer. There's a Hudson River keeper. I mean, it's like, think of a body of water that's iconic and we've got somebody out there protecting it. Now I know there's a lot of threats to Puget Sound, and I know there's a lot of, there's a lot of work , that you and the team do, and I don't wanna overlook all that. But for today we want to talk about 6PPD which was something I had no idea about until about a year ago. And then learned a lot more when we spoke. [00:03:00] So, you know, let me have you take it away and tell us what 6PPD is, how it makes its way into the ecosystem and why we should be worried.

Sean Dixon: Yeah, that's a great question and something that we love hearing that people had no idea about this thing and then now they do, and now they can't get it outta their heads. That's literally what our job is every day is to get people thinking that way and is to poke and prod at government agencies so that they say, ah, gosh, that's that thing, right? Ah, you told me about that. Now I can't get it outta my head and I hear it everywhere. That's so, so mission accomplished for us that you can't get it outta your head, but 6PPD, you know, generally jumping right in is actually part of what we identify as the number one threat to Puget Sound right now, which is toxic stormwater pollution. So for years, that's been the biggest threat to the sound, and so it's always been a core piece of our advocacy. Our campaigns here at soundkeeper we've always been looking at and monitoring industrial stormwater pollution stuff running off of streets combined sewer discharges like a lot [00:04:00] of old cities. Throughout the country. We have several combined sewer systems in our major urbanized areas throughout the sound. And from that kind of toxic soup of stormwater and combined discharges, we've seen a lot of places where we need to answer new questions. Places we saw impacts to the ecosystem that kind of were out of proportion to the norm.
And one of those areas For years, starting in the late eighties and early nineties we were, you know, small volunteer run organization for the first several years, but we were making a lot of noise. And some of that noise was in conjunction with researchers at NOAA, national Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U-S-C-P-A who were monitoring salmon declines around the sound, specifically COHO salmon
that were dying before they could spawn. It was called pre spawn mortality. And obviously you want fish to spawn before they die so that their eggs can turn into the next generation ideally. Yeah.
Yeah. No, that's kind of the way things should [00:05:00] work. And , for every 3000 eggs , we usually say that or we hear from the fishery scientists that two salmon will return.
Sean Dixon: So you need a lot of eggs for a healthy salmon stock. Yeah. It's a pretty stark kind of eggs into the system fish coming back to the system ratio. So why were they dying from especially COHO Salmon? Why were they dying before they could spawned? That started in earnest, that research in the nineties.
NOAA researchers and early Puget Soundkeeper volunteers, especially in a place called Longfellow Creek, which is in West Seattle. It's a creek that runs up from it, kind of, it enters the, it's Elliot Bay, in the main stem of the Duwamish waterway, right at Harbor Island, which is a completely manmade shipyard in the middle of South Seattle. And , that creek isn't that long. It isn't that big, but it sustains coho and chum salmon runs, but the coho are all dying. And it took 20 years for researchers and the government and the states at University of Washington, at Washington State College to start [00:06:00] pinpointing why and how they were dying. And those two questions landed in, I think 2011. There was a paper done by some researchers saying this has to do with streets. So it's not something with industrial sites, it's not, you know, something coming from the sky. It's not leaded aviation fuel raining down lead from nearby King County Airport. Which leaded aviation fuel, by the way, is still allowed. It's not yet stopped, which is crazy to me. But, you know, so they identified it coming from roads and then eventually 2011 turned into 2021 and researchers discovered, came out with a or 2020. They came out with a paper in December, 2020. Saying that they had discovered a brand new chemical called 6PPDQ. And they had discovered this chemical based on looking at all of the things that go into road based and parking lot based stormwater runoff, and one of the chemicals and tires called 6PPD, which is used to prevent degradation of the rubber when it's exposed to ozone in the air and sunlight. [00:07:00] That chemical nobody had pinpointed. Although chemists will tell you that 6PPD’s always transformed into this other thing, but nobody had really looked at this chemical called 6PPDQ before 6PPD-quinone. So it was a newly, kind of quasi discovered chemical that hadn't been talked about, published about you know, described before and 6 PPDQ was discovered to be the chemical agent killing COHO salmon acutely. And in fact, it was discovered that it's the second most toxic substance to aquatic life known to science. And we only discovered it in December, 2020. And by say we, I mean the scientists that, that published all these papers on this. And so, you know, this chemical coming directly from tire was discovered to be the cause of pres spawn mortality, or as we'd been calling it for the last 15 or 20 years, urban runoff mortality syndrome. Where these coho when they, whenever they're exposed to this at the parts per trillion level, like 7, 8, 9 parts per trillion level [00:08:00] turn into zombie fish their blood brain barrier starts leaking. They swim around in circles, they just die. And so they die before they can spawn. And individuals, you know, were found dying of this chemical across anywhere we looked basically. And Longfellow Creek had long been a place for community science that had, we've been doing here at Puget Soundkeeper in partnership with some of these federal agencies. We've been sending salmon survey volunteers there continuously for about the last 10 to 12 years. Measuring every salmon that comes up during salmon season making sure that, , if we see a dead salmon, we determine if it died pre or post spawning. Taking all the biological data , on those fish and sharing that information with the government and really just tracking at this small creek in this one neighborhood in Seattle. Kind of this mystery that's been affecting coho salmon. You know, since the fifties when 6PPD apparently started being used in tires worldwide. So, it was a mystery. There's hours of history as to how it was solved and hundreds of people [00:09:00] responsible for solving it. We helped raise the red flag about the issue for years, and we helped you know, champion the scientists doing this work, celebrate the agency's investing in community-based research to figure out some of these most pressing problems. And now, you know, it's really turning to what the heck do we do about this problem? Because 6PPD is an anti degradent. It's one to 3% by weight of the rubber used in tires of every tire worldwide. Bike tires, bus tires, , car tires, cyber truck tires, you know, it is the number one anti degradate in use. There is no other effective anti degradent that will protect tire rubber safety as it's worn down and it's in every tire on the whole planet. And since this discovery was made by researchers in 2020 or was published in 2020 other species have been shown to be not as acutely impacted by this, but certainly very acutely impacted, such as rainbow trout or steelhead and lake trout and brook [00:10:00] trout, also chinook salmons a lot less so like an order of magnitude less so, but still affected. And so we're looking at endangered species. We're looking at commercially important species. We're looking at recreationally important species, ecologically important species across the, you know, the entire North American continent really are affected by this chemical. So anywhere there's a road, a boat ramp, a parking lot, that direct discharges storm water into the waterways, you've got salmon vitality problems.

Thomas Hynes: That was a great answer. And I,

Sean Dixon: that was like nine answers

Thomas Hynes: you stole my line. I was like, I heard it was the second most toxic chemical ever observed.
I heard that from you originally, so I can't really , take credit for that. So that's really very scary and so this has been in every tire and even a cyber truck, you say, 'cause I was under the impression that those were gonna save the world. No, but but so they're on every tire produced since the sixties.

Thomas Hynes: So for 40 years, no, sorry, 60 years. My math major. Every single car in the world. [00:11:00] Every bike, every tire has been shedding 6PPD. It mixes with oxygen, becomes 6PPDQ and has been poisoning. If that gets washed into the away with storm water, which , I would imagine most roads do, discharge, stormwater. So this has been a problem sort of blindly for 60 years.

Sean Dixon: Yeah, it's so the history of this chemical is as far as I've been taught it, is that our rubber tires didn't use to last very long. And so it, you know, became an issue of supplying new durable rubber tires in World War ii, became a supply challenge that was investigated and turns out when synthetic rubbers are exposed to air, especially ozone O three, it degrades the rubber. And so something needed to hold them together. So you'll see, you know, a rubber tire without 6PPD in it or another degradent just sitting there is gonna kind of crumble after a while in the sun with ozone and air and sunlight. [00:12:00] So this is absolutely vital chemical to road safety to car safety, to vehicle safety, to bike safety.

Sean Dixon: And there just doesn't happen to be an alternative identified right now, even if there were. I've heard estimates that rolling out pardon the vehicle pun. An alternative would take decades. Who knows? I know that everybody that works on tires is now looking into this problem. It's one of those things where once identified it's been, oh my gosh, what do we what do we do now? 'cause this is really bad. It's so toxic to coho and a whole bunch of other species. . The good news is that one of the papers that was published alongside the identification of 6PPDQ. Also identified a solution to this problem, which is green stormwater infrastructure. And it's this you know, there's unique properties of this molecule, 6PPDQ. This derivation of 6PPD that when it's filtered through organic media and there's some organic media that are better at this than others. You know, things like rain gardens all depend on [00:13:00] what mixture of soils and compost and peat and sand are used. But generally speaking, if you filter this stormwater with 6PPDQ through something that's alive, soils are alive. Then the 6PPD actually gloms onto organics and solely breaks down.
So it actually, you know, as one of the researchers often has been saying is, if we run storm water through a bioswale or other, you know, rain garden first, and then dump it into a box with coho salmon that coho live, and if we don't, they die. So it's a pretty, it's a pretty great solution to this problem. Unfortunately, if you look at every road parking lot, parking garage, parking facility shoulder and and lot in the planet. We're gonna need, , trillions of dollars of green infrastructure. So it's a massive kind of problem for our ecosystems, whether you're looking at it from the chemical replacement in tires or the solution on the ground, if you will, which is filtering, finally getting a good reason to filter all of our collective stormwater, [00:14:00] which is crazy.

Thomas Hynes: You bring up some really good points. Like obviously like we want our tires to be stable. We're driving ourselves, our family, we're biking ourselves, our family around, like, we don't want our tires blowing out. That's a good thing. But to replace every single tire, and that's not even, that's like a big's a huge expensive proposition, but it's still just an if, right?
I mean that technology doesn't exist to replace it yet, but they're working on it. And when you say they're working on it, you mean the tire companies, right?

Sean Dixon: I have to imagine. I mean, I've been told directly that they're looking into it. I know that California and a couple other states are requiring alternatives, assessments.
I know Washington State has a whole 6PPD action plan here. There's a lot being invested in Washington State trying to find solutions both on the chemical side as well as the green infrastructure side also not all PPDs, not all the class of PPDs are kind of created equal or are more or less safe.
Think of the PFAS crisis. You know, every, we switch out PFOA with PFAS and PFOX. You [00:15:00] may be switching one chemical for another one that's worse in some ways, or even though it's better than others. , It all, it needs to be looked at holistically as an issue as opposed to just, oh, let's get an eight PPD.
Doesn't that do a good enough job? You know, like, oh sure, you could say that. Yeah, but it's, you know, we need to be more intentional about it than that. But it's an interesting kind of issue that generates a ton of questions because, how can a chemical in tires get into stormwater? Well, a couple different ways. One is, you know, the sidewall of a tire as the air hits it, it actually can pull the 6PPD from deeper in the rubber towards the edge where it's needed, kind of like a, you know, a vapo transpiration out of a leaf. And so it's, , just the sidewall of a tire could have exposed 6PPDQ that runs off in a rainstorm or as your tire's driving down a street and it is slowly eroding away the tire, not the street, well, I guess both. But your tire is slowly creating what are called tire and road wear particles or tire particles or tire and [00:16:00] rota particles that are microplastics. They're tiny little pieces of tire rubber or road wear particles.
And in each of those is a micro dose of a whole bunch of chemicals, including 6PPD. But with smaller particles comes increased surface area. And so there's more opportunity for quicker conversion of 6PPD with ozone to 6PPDQ with the tinier particles that have more surface area. So it's, , the tire dust that's created that's in a lot of hazy, smoky days.
It's not just exhaust causing a lot of the particulate matter pollution in cities. It's tire particles, you know, coming off of tires flying around. And so those can float according to some research I believe out of China that those can flow at a kilometer away from a roadway depending on the wind conditions.
And so you could be breathing in tire wear particle microplastics if you're just walking down the side of a street. getting a dose of 6PPD or 6PPDQ and some other stuff into your system. So looking [00:17:00] at human health issues of this, talking about air quality and roads and all of a sudden we're right back to this man.
We have a crystal clear problem. 6PPDQ kills salmon, a whole bunch of types of salmon coho most acutely. And it's causing us to talk about, well, maybe we should have roadside bioswales and street trees to like, you know, stop all this particulate stuff. And this, these are conversations we've been having for years in the abstract or generally or and now there's a very specific chemical pathway conversation that's happening.
It's a, what's old is new again kind of thing.

Thomas Hynes: I'm not even joking when I say this, but people who know me know I love Bioswales and Rain Gardens. Like, I think they're a hugely underutilized solution to a lot of things. And I, I wish we had more of them in New York. But just to play devil's advocate here, you and I didn't know that about the the opportunity for these to get airborne, so that can't be solved. Or maybe I just don't know enough.

Sean Dixon: Well, absolutely can be. Yeah. Yeah. If we have trees , things like that, there's, [00:18:00] yeah, there's co benefits to having, you know, a functioning, balanced ecosystem.
And, you know, it's okay. It's one of the same things we always say in most, well, how do we have. , Urban areas and high density and industrial sites and parking lots and you know, we need giant garbage trucks that create lots of, , roadway particles. And we need parking lots where there's, people are going to work.
We can't just all walk everywhere. And that's 100% absolutely true. But we can have a functioning ecosystem that, that takes kind of the best ideas as to how all of these things can coexist. But that's gonna cost a lot of money and take a long time.
But it's probably more reasonable than changing out every tire with a new tire technology that doesn't yet exist. It would just be nice to have a bunch of trees anyway. It might be nice to just have a bunch of rain gardens. I mean, there's other benefits that would give you as well.
Oh yeah, it's, for me it's an and conversation, I think it's there's pollinators and air quality and quality of [00:19:00] life.

Sean Dixon: There's innumerable benefits to, having green infrastructure everywhere and stormwater management. Think of any sci-fi movie of, you know, 50, a hundred years from now, they're still driving places. They still have garbage. Life is creating stuff and moving stuff, and there's population density. And so we're gonna have things, but they have like, you know, vines hanging off the sides of skyscrapers and there's, , parks everywhere. And so , we know we need to get there and we know that there's benefits.
It's just who and how much and where first and where last and why. And largely who's gonna pay for a lot of it, but it's a hundred percent doable. And we need new tires. With a chemical that doesn't kill coho because it's gonna take a while. And because why wouldn't we wanna have a better tire given that

Sean Dixon: we have cars that are EVs driving on the same tires that we've had for 70 years, but the cars have gone from not having seat belts, safety glass, you know, automatic locks, automatic doors, . Blinkers, windshield wipers to having all of those things and more, and touchscreens and, you know, zoom devices and stuff [00:20:00] embedded into microphones, embedded into the lights so that you could, you know, always have your conference calls no matter where you are on the planet.
But we still have the same tires. So of course we need the new tires, the ones that are made out of bamboo or built, designed by NASA for Mars, whatever that is. We need all of these things

Thomas Hynes: one other thing that I thought was I'm hopeful about the Rain Garden Bioswale, I think you called it organic media originally.
I always say like, oh, , as people are getting more literacy on PFAS, like 6PPD is like the new thing to worry about, but it's not a forever thing. It sounds like it can break down, , it can be more managed. So in a way it's scarier, but in a way it's, yeah, it's more manageable.
And I will just say, 'cause this is my own, like soapbox thing. Like, as they stand, electric cars are not gonna save us. Like they're definitely an improvement, but they're not clean if they're still working on this like, 70-year-old tire technology that is producing this huge threat to to coho salmon.
Is there anything else to worry about for the ecosystem, for human health [00:21:00] that we should be concerned about? As with regards to 6PPD.

Sean Dixon: It's a great question and I'll harp for one second on, on what you said, which is we know enough to do something, right?
So it's one of those things where, of course, the second most lethal aquatic life risking chemical, you know, killing coho salmon, which are endangered in most of their range. Also a whole bunch of other things. You know, think of fly fishing in Pennsylvania or really, , great lake trout, , fish fries in, in the Great Lakes.
These are all things that are affected by 6PPD in an absurdly horrible way based on parking lots roads and tires, you know, being near our waterways and all by and large across North America, the industrial sites of our continent are along waterways and usually at pinch points where there's, , a lot of fish if they're migrating or swimming through, need to move through narrow channels heavily burdened by a toxic stormwater.
So a hundred percent we know enough that we need to do something now. But the answer is also yes. And there's other reasons. You know, [00:22:00] there's other reasons that we should look at this. Unfortunately, a lot of the science, because this 6PPDQ was only discovered couple years ago now. It's still not in its infancy, but still is a growing body of research.
So, you know, it's 6PPD has been found in drinking water supplies. It has also not been found in drinking water supplies. I think some research on human health levels and bloodstreams have shown that it's found in much higher levels in pregnant women than women that aren't pregnant or children or men.
It's a open question as to why that might be. 6PPD and 6PPDQ have been found in athletes, especially those that play on crumb rubber fields,
and a research project just on the use of tires in recreational facilities, I think from several years ago, showed that, you know, 40,000 tires might be what, it's, what it takes to fill up one European soccer pitch or football pitch.
And then as the rubber degrades with rain and with use and people running on it, it could take 1000 to 2000 new tires to be shredded up into crumb [00:23:00] rubber each year to maintain the springiness of some of those of soccer fields. So, you know, the, there there's a lot of places where tires are used.
There's tire reefs, there's tire bulkheads. We have here in Seattle, there's a whole stretch of the Duwamish Green Duwamish River that the Army Corps of Engineers and others put in huge walls of tires as bulkheads. 'Cause they were reusing a waste product, which was a good idea at the time. And so we have thousands of tires just lining our river banks that are used by five species of migrating salmon every year.
So it's a pretty you know, huge problem. And we only just started looking at where do tires go? Some states haven't ever looked at that. And we just got the state of Washington here some money in the last state budget. And they're almost done with the research project showing like, well it's, you know, did like 30% of our tires get exported to Oregon for burning.
40% of 'em get reused, 20% of 'em get landfilled. Who knows? Let's figure those numbers out. 'cause before we, , you know, once we [00:24:00] find a new alternative, we're gonna have a whole bunch of waste tires that have to go somewhere. And right now we don't know where that end of life goes.
And who's responsible for it? And what's the circular economy of that? So this is a, this is an opportunity. I like to, you know, relay back to the Montreal protocol in the ozone hole. And so in the eighties, we were hit with this idea of a hole in the ozone layer being created by, , HDFCs and a select few other air pollutants, hazardous air pollutants that were made for a limited number of uses by a limited number of companies and countries.
But they were so ubiquitous and so bad , that the nations of the world came together and phased them out, figured out alternatives, stopped them. And now the hole in the ozone layer's been closing for years and years. And we have here a chemical that is being, that is one chemical being used by a select limited number of companies for one specific use.
Tires, largely tires. There's other places where it's been used, it's used currently too, but largely tires, planet wide. And it's bad. So it's a kind of a, [00:25:00] an ideal opportunity to to come together and find an alternative, get it out, get all the historic legacy contamination out of our system and figure out a pathway forward.

Thomas Hynes: Yeah. And I want to ask about that pathway forward, but also just shout out to the ozone. That was a thing. We, that was a like a blaring problem when I was, when we were growing up in the eighties and nineties. And I, and you don't hear much about like, yeah, we solved that, we came together, we figured it out.
And now it's improving. And I think that's just I don't, I'm not trying to be overly optimistic, but I just, I think there's so much to worry about and there's so much to legitimately be scared about. It's good to remember that coordinated effort and action actually can improve things.
So with that in mind what can be done about 6PPD? I know we all filled out my dive into democracy last summer, but what else can be done about, this threat?

Sean Dixon: Yeah, , because this is such a ubiquitous problem and has to do with literally the makeup of the tires on your car.

Sean Dixon: You can't right now go to your, [00:26:00] you know, local tire store. And I was about to name a couple brand names and you told me don't name any brand names unless it's Waterkeeper Alliance. So anyway, so I didn't name any brand names. But you can't go to your local auto tire store. Yeah. And, you know, get a 6PPD free tire at the moment.
It's just not there. We're not there yet. You also, you know, can't necessarily just put in a bioswale at the base of your driveway, nor is that the most strategic place to put one for 6PPD, you know, getting the most impact for your investment. What we're talking about is the giant 7,000 car parking lot.
That's right along that downtown river in the middle of your downtown area of your local city. And that parking lot, where does that parking lot storm water go. Because every day cars are twisting and turning and as cars go left and right and hit an edge and a curb and go over a pothole, there's more and more of that tire wear and road wear particle creation which just gets dust into the storm drain.
And then it rains and it's 6PPDQ. But is it also salmon migration season? Do you have lake [00:27:00] trout? Do you have coho? Do you have brook trout there? So there's so much mapping and planning and coordination that's needed. , Really the answer is folding this consideration immediately into every decision that a whole host of aspects of our governance structure deal with , on a day-to-day basis.
And in my mind it's kind of the equivalent of saying like, all right, now you have to have recycling everywhere. It's like, all right, well each jurisdiction's gonna have a different approach to what that means. But we all kind of need to have recycling. In some places it's gonna do it better and less, but the more recycling we have, the better. And let's get, you know, stuff outta landfills and it's gonna be, some places it's gonna be used differently and the end use markets are gonna be different. But we just, our wholesale adding a new thing that we need to worry about and think about, and that's important. And that's gonna be, , it's something that we have to do as whatever entity we are. A private entity owning a parking lot or a municipality that's, , governing how stadiums operate. When you add something like , new fire codes or new recycling requirements. Those kind of things take a while to fold [00:28:00] in, but it's vital that we do it as quickly as possible. And so that's kind of what we need to do for 6PPD.
Every aspect of governance of our systems, public and private, needs to have this folded into considerations. I'm definitely the fish water quality planet nerd That's like stormwater management is key. You know, stormwater management 1 0 1. But I didn't know that I, you know, tell my 10-year-old self that I'd be talking about stormwater every day. And I didn't know that I'd, I knew I'd be talking about fish every day. Just not stormwater, and sometimes that's a lot more difficult to accomplish, but it's absolutely vitally necessary. And , other little tiny things. It's. You know, I never wanna necessarily place a chemical that's been put into the world's economy and the world's ecosystems intentionally I don't ever wanna put its management on the individual, but it's a pretty darn good point that, don't do donuts and have street racing. And it's a good point that if you drive over a curb, you're creating a lot more tire wear particles, and you're just like shaving off a whole bunch of your, you know, [00:29:00] tire and it's going straight into the right next to the curb. It's going right into the storm drain. That those are all like absolutely true things.
Don't dump tires. If you see a tire dump, , call somebody and they'll get it out. These are things we're doing right now, we're doing tire turnout events with with business improvement districts and chambers of commerce. 'cause a lot of places have tires and they don't know what to do with it.
One of the most benign things that we're waving the flag about is so many places have dumpsters for their garbage. And , even if you're in an industrial site that manages your dumpster , or you've got , a giant condo tower and there's tons of units in there and you've got a, you know, dumpster where you bring in your household garbage or waste or recycling. Those tires, man, there's always a tire next to one because it's so heavy. And so like, who lifts up the dumpster and then like lifts up a tire to throw it in there. So , they're always laying right next to the thing. And that's bad. 'cause every time it rains, it's washing off all the 6PPD and other stuff into the storm drain. So even just something as benign as we need to figure out a way, like, is there a lower door on a dumpster we can start building into them. So there's just, every [00:30:00] day it's the same thing that we've been harping on. Like, you see something, say something or do something and we just can't have tires and just direct storm water discharge into our waterways anymore.

Thomas Hynes: So one of the things is what you were suggesting, like folding and into regulations. So what you're saying is like. Okay, you built a new stadium and you've got this 7,000 car lot. So like, now you also need to, we need to change the regulations. Like, all right, well how are you gonna manage that storm?
Which we should be doing anyway. But this is like underlining that point. Like we need to capture that in the new codes and in the new regulations and in the new construction, like when we build new construction.

Sean Dixon: It is an all hands on deck regulation approach but it's worth somberly. You know, taking a moment to point out that I mentioned earlier, [00:32:00] there's a lot of places where coho are endangered
and these are endangered for vital reasons for, you know, to that we could spend another hour and a half going into right here. So there are requirements, there are federal law, public environmental required endangered Species Act protections and mitigation measures, and required assessments.
And not just that, there's also prohibitions in Clean Water Act regulations and storm water management permits industrial and municipal that require you to protect against toxic pollution discharges affecting downstream water quality. There are a whole host of reasons and places that need to address this because it's illegal not to, because it's against their permits, because it's against federal law, state law, not to.
And so it really is something that that runs into I think a lot of, you know, problems with the complexity of the issues facing our waterfronts, it's a completely legitimate point that says, well, this is one of 70 things. I'm making that number up, [00:33:00] you know, 50, 70 things. we have to worry about for this waterway.
But it is the most acutely toxic thing that you have to worry about. And it's coming from a very ubiquitous place, which are tires and roads and parking lots. And so, you know, yeah, we do. You do need to do something about this right now, or years ago but in a lot of other places it's where we don't usually, where we don't have regulations, there's whole gaps in our regulatory system that, you know, nobody's telling somebody who's putting in a parking lot in front of a. , A small, home or alongside a road or at like a roadside attraction. Nobody's, you know, getting a permit for that place. And yet there might be a rainbow trout stream directly behind that facility that now all the stormwater's being discharged into. And , it's an interesting chemical because it's not necessarily, just the big urban areas where we're worried about, you know, giant, totally paved over a hundred percent industrial and environmental justice communities and, there isn't a green space to, to blink at within [00:34:00] a half mile this water. You know, it's not just those places because you could be talking about some pristine stream in a rural part of a watershed way far away from the city. But it's a very important run of one of the affected species of fish, like a coho or a rainbow trout run. And it's a pinch point and it's a 50 car parking lot, , where there's a bridge where there's lots of fishing that goes on. 'cause it's such an important fishing, recreational fishing area. But that 50 car parking lot, right in migration season, all discharges right down into the water where basically you're creating a toxic curtain of 6PPDQ for these fish to be swimming through. There are so many distributed parts of this problem across all of our watersheds that there are some places that are required by law to be doing something now and aren't. There are some places that are, and there's some places that we don't have the proper permits and regulations in effect. Whether that's land use zoning low impact development, stormwater management, or endangered species related.

Thomas Hynes: And the toxic [00:35:00] curtain is really great use of language, but just like a really sad and sort of tragic imagery there that it's sort of this inevitable inescapable contamination.

Sean Dixon: The upside of that is, is to bring it back to like the availability of solutions is. Those might be the easiest places to throw in a rain garden so you can go visit and if you've got the space and the interest and the awareness in the community of this problem, then I think that's probably the cheapest, easiest place to throw in some some really great bioswales that treat the water before it discharges at, you know, probably some really great interest by local organizations and governments to try to protect those amazing recreational fisheries and public places with this added benefit of grain infrastructure.
So that could actually be the easiest thing that we tackle, even though it is the kind of saddest imagery of the day's chat.

Thomas Hynes: Yeah. Well, and you know, it's funny 'cause when I talk about this, I'm always like, well, you know, the electric car's not gonna save us.
But like, neither is the bike it sounds like. I'm a big biker. And I'm like, well, that's a problem too. And I also [00:36:00] echo what you were saying earlier about , I'm not trying to put the onus too much on the individual. When I think there are larger systems that can act more effectively and more decisively.
But yeah, I mean, I don't know. It seems like maybe even choosing to walk, but that's not really available. I'm saying that in Brooklyn, New York. I'm like, just walk to the grocery store. And that's not really available to everyone. But I think that what you're touching on in these smaller , not urban spaces where you're like, this could have a real impact and you'll like the rain garden, you'll like, the green infrastructure.
And I think tying it back to just people who like to fish, , people , who care about that recreationally, maybe not even professionally, even though that's very important too. And making that connection between the tires, the gardens, and the fish are three things that you may not think are related at all.
And, what we're doing here is sort of sounding the alarm on this and it's what you've been doing for even longer at Puget Soundkeeper. But to me, I know in our world we know it, but I don't think 90% of the people out there know that their tires [00:37:00] are doing this.
And also, I will just say, don't do donuts. Don't drive like an idiot generally for a number of reasons, but we can add the health of salmon, to the list of reasons not to drive like an idiot.

Sean Dixon: Yeah. It's you know, good driver educational programs are vital here. And I think it's it's worth saying though, that this is, you know, we started talking about puget sound and water quality and how this kind of issue emerged from the general advocacy that we needed to do surrounding kind of the improvement of our entire watershed.
So it's worth kind of bringing back to that everything's interconnected point. We have salmon streams here in the Pacific Northwest and it's kind of a daily part of life where we're thinking about salmon and salmon streams and our connection to Puget Sound and the Pacific Ocean.
And, you know, those waterways are affected by stormwater, toxic stormwater, but also culverts and dams and obstructions to migration, as well as temperature issues. Their water is too hot. Like here in Seattle, we're right near Lake Union. The water is too hot for fish. [00:38:00] They use all their energy just getting through the first two miles of the system, not getting up the last 50.
And so there's myriad issues, myriad problems and , what we need is a more resilient system. And almost all aspects of what we do here at Puget Soundkeeper are aimed at creating a more resilient system. From getting people aware of issues and getting out there and picking up pieces of plastic or hearing about 6PPD.
And now we have people that say, ever since we went kayaking with you, we see tires everywhere on waterfronts. And you know, of course they do. And so, , we want awareness that's part of the resilient system as if people are aware. We want more green infrastructure so that we can start pumping some rain into the groundwater to create cooling up swells from underneath rivers and streams to combat the heat that they're getting from exposed shorelines.
We want resilient fisheries. We want them to be able to get as far as they need to go without blockages and culverts and dams in the way where they need to expend, you know, energies not on defense of their biology, but in [00:39:00] instead just swimming forward. And we need to get the toxic pollution out.
And so all of these things kind of are. Are part of our approach to solving this problem. But none of them require no more tires. None of them require no more industries, no more waterfronts, no more towns, no more cities, , no more, , prohibitions on specific consumer behavior, telling you can't bike to work anymore.
You can only walk 'cause you know, like none of that is needed if our system is resilient, we can absorb the things that are thrown at us, but we need to get to that resilient place first so that our whole system can be sustainable. 'cause right now it's like playing whack-a-mole. We discover one thing and another thing pops up, or we solve one issue.
We here in, in Washington state are investing a lot of money in removing dams, culverts, and barriers in a lot of these small salmon streams. After a huge tribal court victory led to a lot of investment in that area. But now we're finding this toxic pollution and temperature issues are popping up.
And so what we need to go back towards is that whole ecosystem, whole [00:40:00] watershed approach where everyone's in it for the, you know, positive outcomes that we're all gonna see if we start tackling these things in earnest just about everywhere a little bit at a time. 'cause what's not gonna, , suffice is if we just wait on any one of these things until we until the problem is so dire that we invest all at once.
'cause that's just never gonna do it. It's gonna get more and more expensive every year we wait. And other problems are gonna make it harder to bounce back. You know, if we solve the dams issue, but everything is toxic. It's not gonna bring the salmon back and we're gonna feel like we wasted all this money on getting dams out.
So it's a whole system-wide consideration, even though this is one brand new, horrible, ubiquitous planet wide in every tire, on every vehicle on the planet problem that nobody knew existed, really, or nobody knew why it existed until 2020. And even so, even with that, even with this kind of Montreal, this is, oh, this is killing the ozone layer.
Maybe we shouldn't do that one thing. Yeah. This is that one thing we should probably move away from. But we, it's gonna be so hard and so [00:41:00] complicated and it needs to be done in so many different ways that it's gotta be, you know, what we'd need to have is this kind of system-wide approach to everything.
So as always, it's a watershed wide consideration for us, even though it's it's a one issue kind of conversation we usually have these days about 6PPD.

Thomas Hynes: So Sean, I first learned about this issue through Puget Soundkeeper and from talking to you, tell me a little bit more about what's actively going on with Puget Soundkeeper in combating 6PPD and its effects.

Sean Dixon: yeah, I mean it's it's another great question. And that's another kind of, it's as complicated as the ecosystem we're trying to solve. And so in some places we've sent in really amazing, wonderful, thorough comments to federal regulators about permits that are upcoming , you know, are getting reviewed currently to see if we can include some 6PPD and green infrastructure and and all sorts of, kind of modernization of our awareness of this issue into the, into permits for stormwater.
We're also suing some folks as Waterkeeper [00:42:00] Alliance members are, are want to do often. So we're in some, some court battles on this issue
Where we believe that there's there's a legal requirement to be dealing with 6PPDQ and it's not being met. There's a lot of partnership work that we're up to as well.
So, that often, you know, turns into advocacy campaigns or efforts to bring awareness to state legislatures or federal elected officials on this issue. In support of a lot of our tribal nations here and tribes in Washington state that are working on this issue every day because of how much it affects their tribal members.
And then it's a lot of community engagement and cleanup events. I mean, we're pulling tires out. , We're looking to places where there's illegal dumps and we're bringing state attention and volunteerism to get tires out, and we find waiters and shopping carts, and we find, you know, bumpers from cars and we find bags of garbage and bottles of liquids that we keep sealed and we, you know, put in the garbage bags and get outta the system.
So it's really an excuse to get out into some of the hardest hit areas of our waterfronts that are covered in trash and really bring community [00:43:00] attention to multifaceted issues that we're facing throughout the sound. So cleanups engagement with a lot of commercial entities and tire trade-in events and conversations about like, the lifecycle of at Tire because it's, you know, a lot of municipalities are wondering about their contract for a new sports field that they just signed, and , should they do something different than Chrome rubber?
So we're getting out there, we're talking, we're cleaning up, we're connecting people, we're showing people, we're suing people, we're yelling at people, and we're talking quietly with people. And that's kind of what we do every day on just about every issue. And I think Waterkeeper Alliance has been such a great partner in that across the planet, the conversations on salmon protection and green infrastructure have just been fantastic to be part of with our alliance partners around the world.
And then here in the United States, you know, the Waterkeeper Alliance staff at headquarters have been fantastic within their engagement in Washington DC with our federal agencies. You know, talking to folks like the Department of Defense on [00:44:00] what the DOD impact can be on this problem, but also in convening waterkeepers.
And, you know, we talked about the recreational and commercial and tribal impacts of a lot of these affected fisheries. And so there are senators and there are waterkeeper organizations, and there are local recreational nonprofits that are all interested in this, in every watershed in the country.
And so just being able to work with the other 180 Waterkeeper Alliance organizations in the US and 300 worldwide that have some of these affected species in there to help them talk to their networks, so that we're all kind of in this together has been a fantastic adventure to be on for the last couple years.
And it's one of the things that I love the most about Waterkeeper Alliance.

Thomas Hynes: Yeah, I mean it's really from where I'm sitting the work of Puget Soundkeeper has been just remarkable, in raising this issue. And I know that you're gonna say that it was all these other groups and there was the federal investigations and everything else, but like, I had never heard about this until I started talking to you guys.
And you guys have really been on the forefront of that. And [00:45:00] so I'm just gonna tell our listeners, if you wanna learn more about this go to puget soundkeeper.org. And if you wanna support this work, go to puget soundkeeper.org/donate. Sean, it has been so great to speak with you. I could speak to you for another hour, but I know we've got other places to be.
Thank you so much for being here, and just generally, I say this to a lot of our guests, but I really mean it with you as just a citizen of the planet. Thank you so much for all you do. Thank you for your passion and your hard work. And it was just again, so great speaking to you again.

Sean Dixon: Yeah, thank you. It's an honor to be able to join you here today. And thanks. I couldn't be here without all of our members and supporters, but, and you know, I think I want to shout out our staff at Puget Soundkeeper and our boards who've been the ones that taught me about this issue when I got here.
So, it, it takes a village and it's such a great village to be part of, and thanks for having me.