The opening ceremony of the 2024 Summer Olympics is two short days away. As over 10,000 athletes gather in Paris, France, anticipation builds. But that anticipation is not just for the next 19 days of fierce competition, it’s also for the Seine. The Seine River is set to host events including the 10 kilometer marathon swim and the triathlon, but as the Games approached, much of the testing showed that the Seine was still teeming with dangerous levels of E. coli and other bacteria. And a lot of people are asking, "why is this river so dirty?" In today’s episode, we’re going to get into the interesting history of how people have dealt with sewage, from Mesopotamia times to today, and how the Seine, as well as a river Sam knows well — the Potomac — are trying to clean up their acts. We'll dive into questions like, 'Will it ever be legal to swim in the Potomac?' 'Did Thomas Crapper actually invent the cra... um, toilet?' 'How do you clean up dilapidated old mines that are poisoning a river?' and more.
Transcript of this Episode
Deboki Chakravarti: If you’re listening to this episode right when it comes out, then the opening ceremony of the 2024 Summer Olympics is two short days away. Over 10,000 athletes from across the globe have already gathered in Paris, France for what should be an incredible 19 days of competition. As always, there’s so much anticipation surrounding the Summer Games. But this year there’s also anticipation about something else: the Seine.
The Seine River is 483 miles long and runs through northern France, including Paris. As of when we’re recording this episode, it’s set to host events including the 10 kilometer marathon swim and the triathlon.
Sam Jones: But as the Games approach, the Seine is still teeming with dangerous levels of E. coli and other bacteria. So… is swimming in the Seine really gonna happen? And why is this river so dirty?
Welcome to Tiny Matters. I’m Sam Jones and I’m joined by my co-host Deboki Chakravarti. You probably know the answer to “is swimming in the Seine really gonna happen?” by the time you listen to this episode, at least I hope so. But the second question — why a river like the Seine is so dirty — is something we’re going to explore.
Deboki: And we’re going to get into the really interesting history of how people have dealt with sewage, from Mesopotamia times to today, and how the Seine, as well as a river Sam knows well — the Potomac — are trying to clean up their acts. And before we dive in — pun intended — we wanted to give a quick shout out to listener Liz from Somerville, who many months ago suggested an episode about efforts to clean up the Seine before the Olympics. Thank you Liz.
Sam: Swimming in the Seine has been banned for over a century because of pollution. But Paris is by no means the only place where you see a swimming ban. I live in Washington, DC, and swimming in the Potomac has been illegal for over 50 years.
The Potomac River flows from West Virginia to the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. It’s a bit shorter than the Seine at 405 miles. Native peoples began living along the shores of the Potomac around 14,000 years ago. The Native name for the river is Patawomeck, which European colonizers then adapted to Potomac. The Potomac is sometimes referred to as “the nation’s river.” Not only has it been an important route for trade throughout history, but during the American Civil War it served as the border between the Union and Confederacy.
Betsy Nicholas: It is an enormous river system, contributes a massive percentage of the freshwater to the Chesapeake Bay, which is the nation's largest estuary.
Deboki: That’s Betsy Nicholas, an environmental lawyer with a background in botany. She’s Vice President of Litigation and Programs for the Potomac Riverkeeper Network. Riverkeepers are people who will continuously survey the waters and keep tabs on river health and any changes both good and bad.
Betsy Nicholas: We have three riverkeepers, the upper Potomac, the main stem Potomac, and then the Shenandoah riverkeeper. And they're advocacy leads. They're the folks who are on the ground, know the rivers inside and out. I manage the river keepers, but it's more that I provide them what they need in order to be the voice for the river and take the action necessary. So whether that's something in the legal realm, in the policy realm, we work together to find those solutions to problems that we discover — pollution issues, water quality concerns, public community concerns about the river or health.
Deboki: Most of this episode will focus on human waste and sewage systems, but I do want to point out that in the case of the Potomac, and many other rivers, industrial waste is also a concern. Betsy told us that industrial waste typically isn’t a big threat to swimmers or kayakers, but if you were consuming fish out of the Potomac or drinking water directly from the river, it would be.
Betsy Nicholas: In the Upper Potomac area, which is largely in West Virginia, but it hits Western Maryland and tiny bit of Pennsylvania as well, it was a lot of extractive mining that harmed the river. But there were also these big pockets of industry, coal burning power plants, chemical factories, things like that, that have largely gone away. But as you have these sort of changes in industry, a lot of the going away is going bankrupt and leaving your pollution and facilities in place.
Sam: Those pollutants include metals like aluminum, manganese, and iron, as well as mercury. And in coal mines, when sulfides such as pyrite are exposed to water, that water becomes acidic and leaches heavy metals from rocks it comes in contact with. This highly acidic water rich in heavy metals is called acid mine drainage.
Betsy Nicholas: Some of those old mining sites, when water gets into them, you get this big rush of highly acidic water coming out, which will kill all the fish, all the grasses and bacteria and all the things that keep it a healthy living system.
Sam: In the case of acid mine drainage, the Potomac Riverkeeper Network is constantly monitoring the pH of water near those sites. And when the pH drops and the water becomes too acidic, the riverkeepers add lime or other alkaline materials to neutralize the acidity. And, depending on the site, there are other approaches.
Betsy Nicholas: You can block wherever the water was getting into the site so it doesn't leak out. So sometimes they're filled with concrete. These old mining sites for things like mercury, a lot of them were in waste pits, so sort of early landfills before there were requirements for things like a lining. So anytime it gets wet, it leaches out into the waterways. Some of those were Superfund remediation projects where they just come in and dig up the contaminated material and put it into a hazardous waste disposal site… Of course, we have our new threats too, unfortunately, like forever chemicals, the PFAS and microplastics.
Sam: For a deep dive on PFAS and microplastics, check out episode 29 of Tiny Matters, which was published back in March 2023. Like Deboki said, although industrial waste is an issue, our focus this episode is sewage, which mostly means poop. Because poop plays a big role in why it’s still illegal to swim in both the Seine and the Potomac.
Betsy Nicholas: The decline in health of the river is directly in line with the growth of the population in the area. And one of the things that was really the first health problem on the Potomac was sewage. So building a sewer system is good for the people in their homes, of course, but at the time, back in the 1890s, I believe when they first put the sewer system in, it just was raw discharge untreated into the Potomac River.
Deboki: Untreated sewage just making its way into the Potomac is gross but, as you’ll learn throughout this episode, not all that unique. Feces is teeming with bacteria, maybe most notoriously E. coli. Not all strains are dangerous, but some E. coli bacteria stick to your cells and release toxins that can damage the lining of your small intestine.
This can lead to awful stomach cramps, vomiting, and diarrhea, which then of course can cause severe dehydration. Every year, tens of thousands of people die from E. coli infections, including a few thousand people in the United States. E. coli is not something to mess with.
Betsy Nicholas: There were federal laws starting back in the 1930s dealing with water pollution control that were steps in the right direction. There was also, around the 1930s, the Interstate Commission for the Potomac River Basin was formed. So it's a multi-state agency looking to protect the river because of its importance for commerce, public health, all of the different things, wildlife.
Sam: But this step forward still wasn’t enough. Fecal bacteria remained out of control. On August 3, 1971, the District of Columbia’s City Council voted to prohibit water-contact sports, which includes swimming, in District water bodies. This was a time when a mix of sewage and other waste was quite literally piling up in the Potomac. It was more or less a dumping ground. And there are photos to prove it.
Betsy Nicholas: You see just abandoned cars, piles of waste, black disgusting things dripping out of pipes.
Sam: But here’s the good news: Over the last 15 years, the health of the Potomac has dramatically improved, and we’re going to get into why. But first, let’s go back — way, way back — to the beginnings of how humans dealt with our waste. We’ll do that with the help of Chelsea Wald, a science and environmental journalist who's the author of Pipe Dreams: The Urgent Global Quest to Transform the Toilet.
Deboki: In 2013, Chelsea received a couple of assignments that had her take a look at sanitation systems in new ways. While writing those stories she began interviewing innovators working to transform our sanitation systems, and soon learned that there was a whole lot to fix. That led her to write Pipe Dreams.
Chelsea told us that handling waste likely started with some sort of spot outside of a village or camp where people would go to, you know, go. That helped keep the stench and the mess away from everyone. But slowly, things began to advance.
Chelsea Wald: One of the earliest finds of a sort of sophisticated system that people had was in the late fourth millennium, BCE. So there was a settlement in modern day Syria, which is ancient Mesopotamia. They had clay pipes there that probably would've carried toilet waste away with rainwater and washing water… But what the archeologists found was that there doesn't have seem to have been much attention paid to where all of that mess from the pipes would've ended up, it would've just pooled where the pipes ended and become a stinky mess outside of the settlement.
Sam: So it was something, kind of… but still not great and absolutely the grounds for a public health issue. In the early third millennium BCE, pit latrines became more common. These are deep holes, kind of like what you see with an outhouse.
Chelsea Wald: And these had linings of perforated ceramic rings. The perforated ceramic rings would've allowed the liquid to seep into the soil around, and it would've contained the solids inside.
So that's pretty good. But strangely, these were uncommon in the cities where they were found. So it wasn't a comprehensive system, not everybody had one of these in their homes. It's not really clear why some people had them and some people didn't, but many people might've preferred some pots that they had indoors that they then would have carried outside and dumped somewhere. And one reason people might've preferred that is that pit latrines can stink.
Sam: Later in the third millennium BCE, in today's Pakistan, archaeologists have uncovered signs of open sewers — channels that would've carried wastewater away to soak pits, that would have allowed water or liquid to slowly soak back into the ground while containing solid waste.
Chelsea Wald: But I think when people think of early systems, they think of ancient Rome. Most people might've heard about the sewers of ancient Rome. And still, you can see today the outfall of some sewers that some of them still work today actually in modern day Rome, some of those ancient sewers are still there and still working.
One thing that I learned though was that I assumed that those were something like our sewers, but there was a big difference is that archeologists now believe that those sewers were not really meant for excrement, although there might've been some excrement in there, but they were mostly for draining the city of stormwater.
Deboki: And there’s a reason that they probably were not intended for human waste. See, in our toilets today, there’s something called a trap, where the pipe leading from the toilet to the sewer has a sharp curve in it. That curve holds water but also creates a very important barrier between the toilet bowl and the waste pipe. Ancient Roman toilets did not have a trap.
Chelsea Wald: It would've just been a direct connection to this underground channel that would've had all kinds of critters in it. It would've had all sort of insects in there, and rodents and a toilet would've been a doorway to your home for anything that could have been in the sewer. There's even some potentially apocryphal story about an octopus coming from a sewer into somebody's home and eating from their pantry. So the sewer wasn't a place you really wanted connected to your home, but it did serve a purpose for stormwater.
Deboki: So fast forward about a thousand years, to the 16th century in London. Actual sewage systems: still not a thing. But there is someone trying to deal with the stench that comes from pooping in chamber pots. His name was Sir John Harrington. He was an inventor and well-connected nobleman, and he noticed that his house and the houses of his friends stunk.
Chelsea Wald: He came up with the idea for a toilet that used water to stop the stench. And the way it worked was that there was a cistern filled with water that would then fill up an oval bowl, just like our toilet bowl, and then you'd unscrew an opening in the bottom of the bowl to empty it, and then the bowl would fill up with clean water, and that clean water would form a seal to prevent odors from coming back up through the opening into the house.
Deboki: Harrington even installed one of these into one of the houses of his godmother…who just happened to be Queen Elizabeth I. But still, the design didn’t really catch on and it remained rare for people to have this early flush toilet. That didn’t happen until much later, in 1775.
Chelsea Wald: There was a London watchmaker called Alexander Cummings or sometimes Cumming, and he came up with an improvement on this design… there was a bent pipe underneath the bowl that holds the water to make the seal. And then there were some improvements then over the coming years by different inventors. And then there was some clever marketing by people including the famous Thomas Crapper.
Sam: OK, we need to stop here for just a second because, I mean c’mon we’re talking about toilets and one of the people involved was named Thomas Crapper. If you aren’t aware, a lewd term for the toilet is ‘the crapper’. So this guy must have been the inspiration, right? Well yes and no.
The word “crap” being used for “poop” actually existed before Thomas Crapper was born. But he did become a sanitary engineer and ultimately created Thomas Crapper & Co. in 1861. This is a fun example of nominative determinism, where people pursue interests or jobs that relate to their name in some way. But there is also I guess you could say a legend that in World War I, American soldiers in the UK would have seen his name, “Crapper,” on toilets, thought it was funny, and brought it back to the U.S. as a replacement for the word ‘toilet.’
Deboki: Alright, we got a bit off topic there, although I love a fun tangent. Anyway…. just because we have a widely available flush toilet starting around the mid-1800s does not mean that there were sparkly new sewer systems to match it. In fact, in London things were getting really messy.
Chelsea Wald: The problem was that they were flushing all these toilets, but that water coming out of the toilets didn't really have anywhere to go or nowhere specific to go. So there was just all this nasty water watching out of homes. There were old cesspools, but they were really used to having, more or less, water in them. So they filled up really quickly and they would overflow. And then there were these channels, like creeks and gutters and stuff. And this dirty water was overwhelming London, and it would all kind of eventually make its way to the Thames.
Deboki: And this wasn’t just gross, it was dangerous. Dirty, bacteria-infected feces water was causing cholera and typhoid outbreaks throughout the city. In 1858, things got really bad. In July and August, hot weather exacerbated the smells of excrement on the banks of the River Thames. People referred to it as “The Great Stink.”
Chelsea Wald: The smell got really out of control, and people reported fainting from it, and the legislators in parliament fled. And this convinced, at least the legislators, to fund what had been discussed, but was going to be really expensive, which was a comprehensive sewer system to deal with all of this wastewater coming out of the toilets and out of the homes and buildings of the city. And that was really the public health intervention — what we would call a public health intervention — that did lead to health gains. And then eventually, on top of that later, there were treatment plants that were also added to the system at the end of the pipe so that the water wasn't dumped directly into the Thames, but instead it was treated and cleaned, so that relatively clean water went back into the river.
Sam: And since then everything has been perfect. Just kidding! Like with many sewer systems, London’s has faced its issues as city populations have boomed and the climate continues to change. One example of a less than perfect sewer incident: the 2017 fatberg, sometimes called the White Chapel Fatberg or Fatty McFatberg.
When people put fats including oils and grease down the sink and they interact with wet wipes and other non-biodegradable things that have been flushed, it can form a rock-like mass of waste that grows large enough to block a sewer.
Chelsea Wald: I mean, really block it because it becomes super solid, kind of calcified into almost a rock. And this one, Fatty McFatberg weighed as much as 19 elephants, and it took nine weeks to clean it out, and the workers had to use pickaxes and saws in some places to get it out. And power washers and all of this stuff mean this is really difficult work, not particularly safe work by these sewer workers. And some of this fatberg went on display at the Museum of London, and they put it in this clear box. It was almost like it was alive. It changed as it was on display. It would sweat. It stank. It hatched flies. Huge numbers of people went to the Museum of London to see this. I think their visitor numbers doubled during this because people really wanted to see what this was.
Deboki: In addition to its gross entertainment value, Chelsea told us that Fatty McFatberg did raise some sewer awareness among the public to not put grease or oils down the drain, and never flush baby wipes or anything other than toilet paper. And, depending on the sewer system, you might not even flush toilet paper.
A lot of Chelsea’s book focuses on London, but she told us that Paris's sanitation system had a similar trajectory. Before the mid-1800s, when Paris invested in a large sewer system, most of the excrement in the city was collected by night soil men and taken to farmers or to dumps. Night soil was another term for human excrement.
Chelsea Wald: And there was a very popular high level philosophical conversation about the value of human excreta. And in particular, the idea that's very valuable, that is monetary value. And if you read the unabridged version of Victor Hugo's Le Miserable, he spent a lot of time talking about this and about the sewers there. So there was a lot of interest in this topic. But they didn't really go that route of circularity either, even though there were some who realized how valuable that would be.
It was also in the mid 19th century, like in London, that Paris built gigantic sewers. They were beautiful. They were huge. The really big ones were cleaned by these kind of boats that pushed debris out of them into the Seine. And there were siphons that were cleaned by these giant balls that went through them. And they were so clean and beautiful, impressive that upper class tourists and foreign dignitaries and women in fine clothing would visit them and go for rides on these boats in the sewers. It was a popular destination, the sewer. But I think one of the reasons that this was really possible is that at first these sewers didn't collect human waste.
Sam: Eventually these sewers did collect human waste which meant that a lot of it would end up in the Seine.
Chelsea Wald: Wastewater treatment plants were added. But one of the problems with all of these old systems is that there was really a single pipe system... and all of the wastewater would go to the same pipe. And that also included storm water.
Sam: So when it would rain, tons of water, including feces-filled wastewater, would flow through these pipes. The wastewater treatment plants would reach beyond capacity and the overflow would go out into the Seine. Or, in the case of Washington, DC, into the Potomac. Today, a number of cities are building enormous underground basins that hold rainwater until a storm has passed, so that they can more slowly send that rainwater and sewage to a treatment plant, preventing overflow.
In Paris, it’s the Austerlitz basin. France’s government has spent around 1.5 billion dollars fixing old pipes and building this basin, speeding things along in hopes of being ready for the Paris Olympics. In Washington, D.C. storage basins are also being built, and the Potomac River Tunnel project, which began this year, is aiming to create a number of structures and diversion facilities as well as a large-diameter deep sewer tunnel to capture sewer overflows along the river. The project is projected to finish in 2030. But already, because of work over the last few decades to reduce industrial and agricultural runoff, Betsy told us the Potomac is in much better shape than it was.
Betsy Nicholas: We do water quality monitoring and sampling in the river weekly in the warm months, so from May through September. And we find that in most locations in the river, not all that it would be safe to swim about 85% of the time. So some locations are even higher than that. They're up in the nineties percentile, and they'll only tick a little bit off after maybe a really big storm. There are a few areas, of course, where the upgrades haven't been completed, and those sometimes are more like 60% of the time where we see that it would be safe there.
Deboki: For the rare special swimming event, the District Department of Energy and the Environment may grant an exception to the swimming prohibition in the Potomac but the event organizer must of course show that the bacteria and other pollutant levels are within water quality standards.
Although these are some big exciting steps forward for the Potomac as well as the Seine, as cities grow and our climate continues to change, it might mean digging bigger and bigger underground basins or larger treatment plants. And even that might not be enough. So there are people out there looking for other solutions to make our sewage systems less wasteful and more circular, saving energy and protecting our health and the health of the environment.
Betsy Nicholas: Seeing cities starting to take back their river systems, make it part of pride and joy of the city, of the community. If we can adopt this kind of viewpoint that these are resources for everyone in our community, think how beautiful it could be that every community has these walkable riverfronts that people can go swimming, get in the water, and the basics of children learning to swim, having a place to do that. Water is life. It has been recognized as so good for our mental health in addition to all of the physical benefits to it, and environmental benefits that we get from having that relationship with water and allowing everyone equal access to it, not just the people who have boats and extra privileges.
Sam: I really look forward to a day where we can hang out in the Potomac. There are these incredible photos from the 1920s of people in their bathing suits, lounging in the river, the Washington Monument in the near distance. How nice would that be?
I'll go first for Tiny Show and Tell today because, I think, it's my turn. This is super-duper-relevant. It's actually something I came across in the very beginning of my research for this episode.
Deboki: Awesome.
Sam: It's an opinion piece in the Washington Post that is titled We Might Be Able to Swim at the Potomac Soon, Really. Then, the subtitle is DC's Rivers are Not Perfect, But They Become Much Cleaner and Safer in Recent Years. This opinion piece was written by Ana Little-Saña. Ana Little-Saña is a marathon swimmer who lives in DC.
I just thought that this was really cool because it's a first-person perspective on the hope of swimming in the Potomac. She has this line where she says, "Whenever I walk along the Potomac and Anacostia waterfronts, I picture myself floating out there on the water, taking in the city lights. As summer begins, the dream gets stronger but also broader." She includes some historical stuff, some of the things that we talked about in the episode, but then really talking about her experience as a distant swimmer, her enthusiasm for making this reality, her argument that it should be very soon, or, in some areas, it should already be legal. Like Betsy mentioned, there are places that have really good health grades in the Potomac.
It's tricky. Rain can affect things, of course. There are changes in bacteria levels that are somewhat unpredictable at times, but a lot of it is more predictable now. There's graphs in there. She's really going for it. Included some historical photos. This is more, I guess, a suggestion. I'll link to it in the episode description, but I thought it was just the perfect op-ed to highlight.
Deboki: Yeah. I assume you've never swum in the Potomac?
Sam: I have not. I've gone out on the Potomac. I went out sailing at one point. I've gone out on a couple of boats, of course, walked along the Potomac, but I've never swum in it. There have been a couple of open water events, like one of those special events since I moved to D.C. I was a little hesitant. But I don't know. Doing research for this article/reading this op-ed, I'm less hesitant than I was before. Who knows? If there's an event in the future, it's very possible that I'll get out there.
Deboki: Yeah. I mean, it's interesting because I've lived in cities. Now, I live in a more rural ish area where there are rivers that people do just swim in. But it's very different, just the interaction of the area with the river compared to when I lived in Boston where the idea of swimming in the Charles is-
Sam: Yeah.
Deboki: ...gross.
Sam: Yeah. I actually grew up on a river, which I guess is an important detail. It's obviously so much smaller than Potomac. There were a lot of issues. Like with most rivers, there were a lot of issues with its health. But it improved a ton. When I was a kid, my dad was actually the director of the watershed. I knew a lot about the river. Spent a lot of time on the river and have swum in it many times. There's something really cool about having a river... Growing up, I literally had it in my backyard, but having a river in your metaphorical backyard that you can just hop into, walk around, wade into on a hot day. I'm really hopeful. We'll see.
Deboki: Cool. Well, my Tiny Show and Tell for today is an article in Nature that is based on a pre-print. The title of the article is Western Scientists More Likely to Get Rejected Papers Published and Do It Faster. But again, just note that this is all based on a pre-print. This is a meta-article about scientific publishing that is also still going to have to go through the review process.
This paper is looking at what happens during the scientific publishing process. Particularly, when a scientist submits a paper to a journal, there's a whole process that happens from there. The editor will take a look at it/decide if they're going to send it to reviewers. Reviewers who are people usually in the field are going to then look at the paper and decide whether or not they think it's good/whether they think it should be accepted into the journal. They'll give feedback about what they like or don't like about the paper and that kind of thing. At that point, Sam, you and I... We both probably experienced, sometimes things get rejected. Sometimes things get accepted. But if your paper gets rejected, it's not the end of the world. You can just resubmit it to other journals.
This paper is looking at what happens when people resubmit their rejected papers to other journals and, more specifically, whether or not the country that the corresponding author in the paper is from correlates to the outcome of the resubmission process. They focused on 203,000 manuscripts that were submitted between 2018 and 2022. 62% of those were rejected. The researchers found that scientists based in Western countries were around 5.7% more likely to eventually get their paper accepted and published somewhere compared to people based in other parts of the world. They were also able to do this faster.
It's not like something where they could really attribute it to a specific reason for why this might be happening. But there are a few possible things. One might just be that if you are from the same country, it's the journals that you're trying to publish in. You might have some advantage in the procedural knowledge of how to deal with the bad reviews and how to improve upon them and also how to navigate that resubmission process.
Another potential aspect is also familiarity with English and whether or not that affects the likelihood of a paper being accepted. I think it would be interesting to see if it's something that points to something that we should improve on in the publication process. Is this creating a bias towards particular universities or that kind of thing? I feel like those questions are always important to keep track of in publication.
Sam: Yeah. Absolutely. It's not surprising to me, but with things like this, it's important to actually have data. Without the data, it's like, "Do we know that for sure?" But it appears we do. I mean, granted, if this goes through peer review and doesn't get rejected.
Deboki: Yeah. Yeah.
Sam: They're like, "Sorry. We're rejecting your paper on rejections."
Deboki: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The authors acknowledged that in this article, too. They were talking about the weirdness of going through the process of submitting this paper…
Sam: About submitting papers.
Deboki: Thanks for tuning in to this week’s episode of Tiny Matters, a production of the American Chemical Society. This week’s script was written by Sam, who is also our executive producer, and was edited by me and by Michael David. It was fact-checked by Michelle Boucher. The Tiny Matters theme and episode sound design is by Michael Simonelli and the Charts & Leisure team.
Sam: Thanks so much to Betsy Nicholas and Chelsea Wald for joining us. To be featured in our bonus series, “Tiny Show and Tell Us,” write in to tinymatters@acs.org with science news you’re itching to share, a science factoid you love telling friends about, or maybe even a personal science story. We want to hear about it! Also, we have a newsletter now! Which hopefully you saw our announcement about a few weeks ago, but if not — subscribe! I left a link in the episode description. You can find me on social at samjscience.
Deboki: And you can find me at okidokiboki. Usually, this is where I say, “see you next time,” but this is my last full-length episode for a few months because I’m going to be on maternity leave! But never fear, Tiny Matters is still happening! Sam has some exciting episodes and guests lined up, and I’m very excited to listen to them all while I’m out. So Sam will see you all next time, and I will see you all again soon.
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