Plastics: A Health Crisis in Plain Sight

ABOUT THE EVENT

A Health Crisis in Plain Sight: How plastics are poisoning our air, food, and bodies — and what we can do to protect our children’s future will bring together experts in three panel discussions focusing on the challenges and solutions surrounding plastics and our health. The morning will also feature three conversations with experts in the plastics and environmental fields and special guest Congresswoman Summer Lee.

Special attention will be given to understanding the unique vulnerability of babies, children, and adolescents to the impacts of plastics and petrochemical pollution. Together, we will identify crucial opportunities to shape a brighter future for younger generations.

• WHEN Thursday, April 3, 9:00 AM – 12:30 PM ET
• WHERE National Press Club in Washington, DC, and live-streamed for audiences globally
• WHO Moms, scientists, doctors, frontline community members, and government officials
• WHAT Panel discussions highlighting challenges and solutions for the plastic crisis and petrochemical pollution’s effect on children

PANELS AND CONVERSATIONS

The event will include three panels — including Sounding the Alarm on Plastics and Reproductive Health, What Everyday Plastics Exposure Does to Our Brains and Bodies, and Fighting False Solutions from the Plastics Industry — and in-depth conversations with Dr. Shanna Swann, Adam Met, and Rep. Summer Lee.

SPEAKERS

Congresswoman Summer Lee

Born and raised in the Mon Valley, Summer Lee is a dedicated organizer, attorney, and progressive state legislator. A proud alum of Woodland Hills public schools, Summer grew up in North Braddock and Swissvale before graduating from Penn State and Howard University School of Law, where she focused on civil rights and social justice advocacy. She worked as labor organizer, joining the Fight for $15 to increase the minimum wage, and lead voter mobilization efforts for the Pennsylvania Democratic Party. In 2017, after repeated incidents of violence from police and school administrators against local students, Summer spearheaded a successful write-in initiative that transformed the local school board.

In 2018, at the urging of her neighbors, Summer threw her hat in the ring for State House – taking on a 20-year incumbent, doubling voter turnout, and winning with over 67%of the vote. She also made history, becoming the first Black woman from Western Pennsylvania ever elected to the legislature. Throughout her time in office, Summer has been a voice for working families, and a champion for sustainable jobs, environmental justice, police accountability, reproductive rights, immigration rights, and gender and racial equity. She is a tireless advocate for workers’ rights, unions, the right to organize, and the fight for a liveable wage.

Summer has also brought millions back to her community for infrastructure upgrades and community revitalization. She has also continued to lead efforts to build a more reflective democracy. When corporate polluters pushed a dangerous fracking proposal in her home district, she organized in deep partnership with community leaders and frontline organizations – and won, stopping the proposal in its tracks. In 2019, she co-founded UNITE, a member-driven grassroots organization dedicated to building progressive electoral power up and down the ballot. Since its founding, UNITE has transformed regional politics, helping to expand the electorate, welcome emerging Democratic voters at scale, and elect slates of progressives – judges, magistrates, county councilors, school board members, and more, including Pittsburgh’s first Black mayor, Ed Gainey.

In 2022, Summer was elected to the US House of Representatives for Pennsylvania’s 12th District, becoming the first Black woman ever elected to Congress from Pennsylvania.

Dr. Shanna Swan

Dr. Shanna Swan is an environmental and reproductive epidemiologist. She is Professor of Environmental Medicine and Public Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, Adjunct Professor in Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of California San Francisco and Senior Scientist at Environmental Health Sciences.

Her work examines the impact of environmental exposures on reproductive health and neurodevelopment. Since 1998 Dr. Swan has conducted multi-center pregnancy cohort studies, which now include more than 1,500 mothers and their children, to better understand how prenatal and early childhood exposure to stressors can impact children’s health and development. In 2017 Dr. Swan and colleagues published “Temporal Trends in Sperm Count: a systematic review and meta-regression analysis”, which was updated in 2022. In 2021 Dr. Swan and co-author Stacey Colino published: Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Health, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race which has been translated into nine languages. Dr. Swan is committed to broadening the impact of this science in order to protect the health of all segments of society.

Adam Met

Adam Met, PhD, is a multifaceted musician, educator, and advocate. As the “A” in the multi-Platinum band AJR, he tours globally, playing indie-pop music to millions. Beyond the stage, Adam leverages his platform to champion social justice and build the global climate movement.

In 2020, Adam founded Planet Reimagined, a nonprofit dedicated to developing research and strategies for local and international change. Their Common Grounds initiative proposes co-locating renewable energy projects on existing oil and gas leases. This bipartisan effort aims to utilize up to 18 million acres of federal land for large-scale solar and wind power projects. In 2024, the Department of the Interior indicated, for the first time, that it would accept and encourage proposals. This landmark development led to the introduction of the Co-Location Energy Act in 2025.

Adam also serves as an adjunct professor at Columbia University, teaching climate policy and campaigning. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and TIME, where he frequently contributes insights on climate issues. He was recently named a Changemaker by the New York Times and was given the prestigious Earth Award by TIME Magazine.

Dr. Leo Trasande

Leonardo Trasande, MD, MPP is an internationally renowned leader in environmental health. His research focuses on identifying the role of environmental exposures in childhood obesity and cardiovascular risks, and documenting the economic costs for policy makers of failing to prevent diseases of environmental origin in children proactively. He also holds appointments in the Wagner School of Public Service and NYU’s College of Global Public Health.

He is perhaps best known for a series of studies that document disease costs due to endocrine disrupting chemicals in the US and Europe of $340 billion and €163 billion annually, respectively. Most recently, his team has documented $249 billion/year in disease costs in the US due to chemicals used in plastics. Dr. Trasande leads a cohort center in the National Institute of Health’s Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes program. He is Principal Investigator on numerous other NIH-funded projects. These include a study on preconceptual and prenatal and childhood phthalate and bisphenol exposures in a Dutch birth cohort to examine obesity and cardiovascular risks, a study of effects of glyphosate and other contaminants on kidney development and a study of epigenetic risks for liver disease. He is also Multiple Principal Investigator for a research project exposomic signatures of exposure in early life to the World Trade Center disaster.

He also directs a Collaborative Center in Children’s Environmental Health Translation funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, with Dr. Lorna Thorpe and Dr. Chau Trinh-Shevrin. He has served as a member of numerous scientific committees and expert panels, including: the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Executive Committee of the Council for Environmental Health; the Science and Technical Advisory Committee for the World Trade Center Health Program; the National Children’s Study Methodological Review Panel of the National Academy of Sciences; the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Steering Committee on a Global Outlook for Chemicals; and the Board of Scientific Counselors for the National Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). He represents the Endocrine Society as an observer to the Global Plastics Treaty negotiations, and is an author on the forthcoming World Health Organization/UNEP Second State of the Science Report on Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals. After receiving his bachelor, medical and public policy degrees from Harvard, he completed the Boston Combined Residency in Pediatrics and a legislative fellowship in the Office of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Jo Banner

Jo’s love for Louisiana was shaped in part by her grandparents, who passed down 10 generations of Afro-Creole folktales and history. These stories, including West African fables of Compere Lapin and Bouki, deepened her connection to tradition and nature’s role in liberation. With a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Communications, Jo founded The Descendants Project to challenge systems that have exploited the descendants of enslaved people. She is working to recognize burial grounds of the enslaved as sacred sites while protecting descendants from industrial degradation.

In 2023, she worked with legal teams to successfully overturn a 40-year illegal industrial zoning decision created to facilitate Formosa Plastics. Living in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley Jo advocates for environmental justice and is developing strategies to transform land for green spaces, helping communities thrive beyond pollution. She’s spoken at the United Nations and has observed all five sessions of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee to develop an international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution. Jo collaborates with industries like entertainment, tourism, and green jobs to offer alternatives to petrochemical work. Having experienced climate disasters like Hurricane Ida, she assisted with storm recovery and has created a Climate Resilience Hub to support her community after weather events.

Dr. Tracey Woodruff

Tracey Woodruff, PhD, MPH, is the Alison S. Carlson Endowed Professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences at UCSF and the Director of the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment. She is a recognized expert on environmental pollution exposures and impacts on health, with a focus on pregnancy, infancy and childhood, and her innovations in translating and communicating scientific findings for clinical and policy audiences. She was previously a senior scientist and policy advisor for the U.S. EPA’s Office of Policy.

Dr. Shannon Jones

Dr. Shannon Z. Jones is a graduate of Winston-Salem State University, where she earned a B.S. in Molecular Biology in 2006. She went on to earn a Ph.D. in Toxicology from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2012. After earning her Ph.D., she spent three additional years at UNC-Chapel Hill investigating the impact of air pollution on the innate immune system.

In 2015, she accepted the position as a Teaching Faculty member in the biology department at the University of Richmond (VA). In this position, she teaches a variety of courses, including an interdisciplinary course entitled Science, Math, and Research Training (SMART), as well as an advanced toxicology course entitled, the Science of Poisoning. She also teaches a general education science course entitled Toxic Communities, which explores how multiple communities in the U.S. and abroad are impacted by toxic exposures in the environment. She also mentors several undergraduate students in the research laboratory, as they investigate the immunotoxic effects of a variety of air pollutants. She is especially interested in understanding how one’s physical environment, nutrition, and diet can impact one’s immune system function and risk for infection. She is also passionate about issues related to environmental justice and pollution exposure in marginalized communities.

Osasenaga Idahor

Osasenaga Idahor grew up in Hyde Park, Boston, a neighborhood that has had hazardous chemicals polluting the nearby community for decades. In August 2022, Osasenaga started his podcast “The Climate Doctor (no MD),” to communicate to people who come from similar backgrounds the importance of this intricate link.

In 2023, Osasenaga worked with Moms Clean Air Force to work on “A Plastic People: Petrochemicals, Climate Change, and Our Health,” a capsule podcast he hosted as a Moms Clean Air Force intern. Over the course of five episodes, he worked with many special guests to take a deep dive into the way our plastic-filled world harms both our health and our climate. Following his time with Moms Clean Air Force, he authored a research paper at Harvard on the climate responsibility of the petrochemical industry based on their greenhouse gas emissions. Osasenaga is currently working on a capstone project focused on environmental health solutions for a community living near a contaminated waste site.

Osasenaga was honored with a role on the Environmental Protection Agency’s inaugural National Environmental Youth Advisory Council in 2024.

Rachel Meyer

Rachel Sica Meyer is the Ohio River Valley coordinator for Moms Clean Air Force. After moving to a Pennsylvania township riddled with oil and gas infrastructure, Rachel began researching and collaborating with nonprofits to organize locally and spread the word about the harmful effects of the industry. She took advantage of opportunities, including an ABC interview with Terry Moran, to speak out about the need for protections and alternatives and continued these efforts as a candidate for supervisor of her township. Rachel believes everyone deserves a future with healthy and sustainable jobs and with an end to the unacceptable pollution that has negatively impacted residents’ health for decades. Her work with Moms has been featured by The Intelligencer, the Pittsburgh Independent, Pittsburgh’s Action News 4, the Pittsburgh Union Progress, Public News Service, The Morning Journal, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Farm and Dairy, The Guardian, and the Beaver County Times. She has also written about her work for the Moms website.

Rachel is the mother of a young child and a certified teacher with a master’s degree in environmental education. She has taught all ages from preschool garden and nature classes through high school environmental science. Rachel has worked to empower students with the competencies and knowledge to actively address environmental challenges.

As the Ohio River Valley coordinator, Rachel addresses environmental challenges in her home state of Pennsylvania, in West Virginia, and in Ohio. She is particularly concerned with the threat of additional petrochemical buildout as companies use the region’s natural gas for the manufacturing of goods such as plastics. As an educator and a mom, Rachel cares greatly about the health of our children and is dedicated to work that repairs our relationship with the natural world so that they may have a better future.

Isaias Hernandez

Isaias Hernandez is an environmentalist, educator, and creative devoted to improving environmental literacy through content creation, storytelling, and public engagements. Isaias is more commonly known by his moniker, Queer Brown Vegan: the independent media platform he started to bring intersectional environmental education to all. His journey to deconstruct complex issues, while centering diversity and authenticity, has resonated with a worldwide audience. He also collaborates with other leaders from the private and public sectors to uplift and produce stories of change for his independent web series, Sustainable Jobs and Teaching Climate Together.

Isaias has been featured in several noteworthy publications, including Vogue, New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and Business Insider. His social media advocacy earned him recognition as a top climate creator by Harvard C-CHANGE. As a public speaker, he’s presented for New York Times, Nike, UC Berkeley, Billie Eilish’s Overheated Summit, Harvard University, and more. He recently co-founded the Symbiocene events company that operates worldwide. Isaias is based in Los Angeles & New York, working as a full-time content creator, public speaker, and dog parent.

Robin Morris Collin

Robin Morris Collin is a nationally recognized leader in Environmental Justice, Sustainability, and Energy policy. Throughout her career, she has worked to ensure that vulnerable communities, particularly communities of color, are not disproportionately impacted by pollution and environmental degradation. She has led efforts at all levels of government to restore land, air, and water while fostering resilient communities. She has played a pivotal role in shaping environmental policy, serving as Co-Chair of the Environment and Equity Committee of Oregon’s Governor’s Racial Justice Council, founding Chair of the Oregon Environmental Justice Task Force, and Chair of both the Oregon Commission for Women and the Oregon Commission for Black Affairs. A dedicated educator for 38 years, she is Professor Emerita of Law, having taught at Tulane, McGeorge, the University of Oregon, and Willamette Law Schools.

Ms. Collin has authored influential works, including the Encyclopedia of Sustainability and Energy Choices: How to Power the Future. She has received numerous honors, including the EPA Environmental Justice Achievement Award and the David Brower Lifetime Achievement Award. Most recently, she served as Senior Advisor for Environmental Justice to the EPA Administrator. She is the founder of Romoco LLC, a consulting firm specializing in equitable organizational development and cumulative impact assessment.

Dominique Browning

Ten years ago, Dominique Browning convened a series of conversations with women who had expertise in climate policy, regulatory and legal clean air issues, marketing, and business to discuss how to engage and mobilize people—and specifically mothers—to fight climate pollution. Moms Clean Air Force was formed of those conversations, with the mission of changing the focus of our national conversation about global warming from polar bears to people. Over the next decade, Moms Clean Air Force has grown to become a national organization of over a million mothers, with over a dozen state chapters, uniting to protect our children’s health and well-being by making sure our clean air, toxic chemicals, and climate rules and laws are as strong as they can be.

Previous to joining Environmental Defense Fund, Browning spent decades in the magazine world, where she worked as an editor at Esquire, Texas Monthly, and House & Garden. At the Washington Post’s Newsweek in the 1980s, she broke the glass ceiling in becoming the first woman assistant managing editor of any of the U.S. newsmagazines. She is the author of several books and has contributed regularly to Time.com and The New York Times.

Browning is a recipient of the Audubon Women in Conservation’s prestigious Rachel Carson Award and was recently honored with an Advocates Award from Environmental Advocates of New York. She was also awarded the “BreatheLife Voice” honor by the World Health Organization. As a BreatheLife Voice, she joins an international contingent of leaders who use their platforms to call attention to the dangers of air pollution—and drive solutions. 

Thoughts of the disruption and devastation ahead for humanity on our rapidly warming planet keep Browning up at night. Running Moms Clean Air Force is a way to be able to look her two sons, and her grandchild, in the eye, and tell them she is doing everything she can to protect the future for all children.

Alice Park

Park is a senior health correspondent at TIME. She covers the COVID-19 pandemic, new drug developments in cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, mental health, HIV, CRISPR, and advances in gene therapy, among other issues in health and science. She also covers the Olympics and co-chaired TIME’s inaugural TIME 100 Health Summit in 2019. Her work has won awards from the New York Press Club and recognition from the Deadline Club. In addition, she is the author of The Stem Cell Hope: How Stem Cell Medicine Can Change Our Lives.

Shamieka Preston

Shamieka Preston is a dedicated community organizer based in Howard County, Maryland. She is a leader in Columbia for Clean Air, a grassroots initiative formed by local residents to protect the community from a proposed pyrolysis incinerator. When the opportunity arose, Shamieka stepped up alongside her neighbors to take action. As a mom, wife, and active community member, she is driven by a desire to safeguard the health of families, especially children, and ensure a healthier future for generations to come. Through Columbia for Clean Air, Shamieka and other concerned residents have been working tirelessly to raise awareness, hold community meetings, and collaborate with elected officials and environmental organizations to challenge the proposed plant. Her efforts have been central in uniting the community against the project, amplifying their collective voice, and advocating for a healthier, safer environment.

Cynthia Palmer

Cynthia Palmer serves as the senior analyst for petrochemicals at Moms Clean Air Force. She is keenly interested in ways to shift the world away from plastics and other petrochemicals. Cynthia trained at the intersection of law and environmental and occupational health. She received her AB, MPH, and JD from Harvard University.

Her prior positions include directing the pesticides division for a nonprofit; helping to draft global toxic chemicals treaties; protecting workers from radiation, beryllium, and other dangerous exposures in the nuclear weapons complex; and editing an environmental health and climate news service. For many years she served on the EPA federal advisory committee on pesticides. She has worked in Africa, Asia, South America, and Europe. Cynthia’s work with Moms has been featured in MSN, Oil and Gas Watch, the Texas Tribune, the American Bar Association’s Human Rights Magazine, Common Dreams, Inside EPA, Forbes, ExxonKnews, Grist, and the New York Times.

At the local level, Cynthia chairs the Bicycle Advisory Committee in her county, in close coordination with pedestrian and children’s safety advocates. She is an all-season bicycle commuter and transportation runner. She is blessed with two daughters.

Lynn Anderson

In 2011, when we began fighting fracking and injection wells, our research showed that the Utica Shale gas would be used to produce plastics. The oil and gas industry propaganda said the prices at the gas pump and home heating costs would fall. As part of Frackfree Mahoning I volunteered from then until 2019. Initially we asked elected and appointed officials to protect our community. Alas, all of them were paid off by the fracking industry. So, we educated the public and canvassed extensively for elector signatures to place the Youngstown Community Water Protection Bill of Rights on the ballot. Overwhelmingly, the people at the doors were for it, but Koch brothers money sabotaged NINE elections! Teresa Mills of Buckeye Environmental Network contacted me when she read I been organizing residents since November 2021 to fight SOBE Thermal Energy’s attempt to locate a plastics pyrolysis plant in Youngstown. January 2023 she obtained a grant for SOBE Concerned Citizens and we used it to get billboards and yard signs, a website and hold town halls. Beyond Petrochemicals saw our work and granted us funds in 2024. We have now succeeded in getting a Moratorium Ordinance on gasification and pyrolysis in Youngstown!

Isabel González Whitaker

Isabel González Whitaker was the Chief Operating Officer of All in Together, a leading nonprofit dedicated to advancing women’s leadership through civic participation. Previously she was Principal Advisor, Executive Strategic Communications, for ALSAC, the $2B+ annual fundraising and awareness organization for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital headquartered in Memphis. Isabel was also the Deputy Editor of Billboard and a Features Editor at InStyle, and wrote for Time, the New York Times, the Hollywood Reporter, the Washington Post, Harper’s Bazaar, and Refinery29.

Isabel was the Scholar in Residence at Rhodes College 2018-2019, is currently a CoGenerate senior fellow, and in 2023 gave a TedXAtlanta Talk on the power of civic engagement to improve community and sustain democracy. She is also the co-author of the cookbook Latin Chic: Entertaining With Style and Sass (HarperCollins) and executive producer of the documentary short “Women in Music: Inspiring a Generation” featuring former First Lady Michelle Obama. In 2019, she co-edited the anthology and contributed the essay “Finding La Reina in Queen Bey” to Queen Bey: A Celebration of the Power and Creativity of Beyoncé Knowles-Carter (St. Martin’s Press). In 2024, Isabel was named one of People En Espanol’s “Top 20 Most Powerful Latinos Fighting Climate Change.”

Almeta Cooper

Almeta E. Cooper lends her expertise in health equity and environmental justice to all aspects of Moms Clean Air Force’s work, with a special focus on climate, children’s health, and health equity under the umbrella of the Community Health Equity program. Her work on clean air and climate justice issues for Moms is a natural progression of her 30-year career as an executive, attorney, and advocate for organizations focused on health care, health equity, and women and girls.

Almeta formerly served as Moms’ Georgia field organizer in Atlanta before becoming the National Manager for Health Justice and relocating to Washington, DC. Prior to joining to Moms Clean Air Force, she served as the general counsel and corporate secretary for Morehouse School of Medicine (MSM), where she managed MSM’s legal affairs, served on the executive leadership team, and served as the corporate secretary for the Board of Trustees.

Almeta has lived, worked, and served communities in the Midwest, East Coast, and Southeast. Since 2019, she has offered executive consulting services to nonprofit organizations, small businesses, executives, attorneys, and corporations. In 2022, she was named to join the Multisector Partner Group of the Association of American Medical Colleges, AAMC Center for Health Justice. Almeta’s work with Moms Clean Air Force has been featured by the Today Show, The Weather Channel, Word In Black, Capital News Service, the Washington Informer, Forbes, WUGA, and numerous other outlets.

Almeta believes in being actively engaged with her community. She serves on a health care system board in Akron, Ohio, and volunteers with civic groups, all between staying connected with family and friends across the country and yoga sessions.