In 2018, Jessica Oublié left Paris and moved to her family’s home in Guadeloupe. Days later, she learned the island was contaminated by chlordecone — a pesticide used on banana plantations that will linger in the soil for an estimated 700 years. Today, roughly 90% of adults on the islands carry traces of the pesticide in their blood. The islands have among the highest prostate cancer rates in the world. And no one has been held accountable.

Jessica spent the next few years conducting over 130 interviews, tracing how the chemical got there — from the factory floors of Virginia, where it was first manufactured and banned, to the banana fields of the Caribbean, where France kept authorizing its use for decades. The result is Toxic Tropics: A Horror Story of Environmental Injustice, a work of comics journalism that blends documentary investigation with illustration and photography. The English translation, by Irène Vázquez, is out now from Street Noise Books.

In this episode, Jessica walks us through what it's like to live on poisoned land, why she chose the graphic novel form to tell this story, and what would happen to the price of a banana if it reflected the true ecological damage behind it.

🎧 New episodes every other week.

🌐 Full episode page, transcript, and resources: talkingtrashpod.com

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CREDITS:

Host & Show Creator: Matt King

Art Director: Frances Miller

Every night, while the rest of us sleep, plastic injection molding machines keep running — and somebody has to run them. For a decade, that somebody was Matthew Rice: a poet from Belfast working 12-hour night shifts in the factories that make the plastic parts inside almost everything you own.

His new book, plastic: A Poem (Fitzcarraldo Editions / Soft Skull Press), compresses those years into a single shift, clock-in to clock-out — a night of urban legends, skull-and-crossbones warnings on bags of molding material, a hidden copy of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the strange things that happen to the mind at 3 a.m.

Matthew talks about the toll of working nights, the fumes nobody was protected from, why factory labor almost never appears in Irish poetry, the famous poet who became his first reader — and the moment at 30,000 feet when he realized he was sitting on his own handiwork.

🎧 New episodes every other week.

🌐 Full episode page, transcript, and resources: talkingtrashpod.com

📱 Follow us:

Instagram: @_talkingtrashpod

TikTok: @talkingtrashpod

YouTube: @talkingtrashpod

CREDITS:

Host & Show Creator: Matt King

Art Director: Frances Miller

Some things our economy discards aren't waste objects or toxic substances. They're buildings. Businesses. And the people who ran them.

In 2003, a group of laid-off workers broke a single padlock, slipped into an abandoned five-star hotel in Buenos Aires, and reopened it themselves — no owners, no bosses. They ran the 22-story Hotel Bauen as a worker cooperative for nearly two decades. Everyone rotated through every job, from the front desk to the trash tunnels beneath the lobby. Everyone was paid the same.

Our guide to this story is ethnographer Dr. Katherine Sobering, who didn't just study the Bauen — she worked there, rotating through departments and drinking more yerba mate than any person should. Her book, The People's Hotel, calls it an "equality project": a deliberate, imperfect attempt to build a fairer workplace from the inside.

The Bauen is one story, but its question is landing closer to home. As many American downtowns struggle, a generation of baby-boomer-owned small businesses — worth trillions — faces a change of ownership. This presents a rare opening: when the boss walks away, can the people who built the value, shift after shift, finally own it?

TALKING TRASH is a new podcast about the hidden waste systems upstream from your bin.

🎧 New episodes every other week.

🌐 Full episode page, transcript, and resources: talkingtrashpod.com

📱 Follow us:

Instagram: @_talkingtrashpod

TikTok: @talkingtrashpod

YouTube: @talkingtrashpod

CREDITS:

Host & Show Creator: Matt King

Art Director: Frances Miller

Photography: Martin Barzilai

https://martin-barzilai.com/