Blue Whales and Plastic Pollution Impact

Transcribed by ESO, translated by I remember the first time I saw a picture of a blue whale, which was in a National Geographic magazine. A drawing of the whale and then a tiny human standing beside it. This thing was bigger than any dinosaur. And as an eight-year-old, I couldn't imagine that there was anything that big. I'd followed them since childhood with the absolute design to go and film them myself at some point. And that was 40 years later. Dr. Lindsay Porter is a cetacean expert and Ben Fogel is a UK adventurer. So Lindsay, just tell me what kind of whales in particular are we looking for? Today we're looking for the blue whale. There are two different types of blue whale we'll see in the area, the true blues and pygmy blues. And how do they differ? Pygmy blues are slightly... smaller than true blue whales. When you say slightly smaller, what size are we talking about here? 25 metres. Lindsay has such a depth of knowledge that she's my first go-to when I've got a question about a whale. come in they create this very productive front and this is why we think the animals that the whales feed here so when you say productive front I imagine krill food is being welled up Ben Fogle rode a boat across the Atlantic and that meant that he had a sense of adventure he was a risk taker From the very first day we saw them blowing, we knew they were there but they were very hard to reach. These animals can do up to 30 kilometres an hour underwater and they can stay underwater for a half an hour and go in any direction. When we saw them we'd follow them, try to get near them, wait for them to come up again and then just never see them again. Tell me what I should be listening out for. For whales, you need to listen for a low frequency monotone. And for dolphins... Oh, can you hear it right there? That, that, the... The high pitch... High-pitch whistling. That's dolphins. That's the group of dolphins we just passed, yeah. How far away do you think they are now? They'll still be within a kilometre. That's a long way for it to go. It is a long way, yeah. It's a big ocean. They've got to talk to each other over distance. Isn't that incredible? We travelled up and down, 50 miles off the coast, for two weeks, trying to get close to these animals. We ran out of time. We started heading back to port. Look, look! At 2 o'clock... BAM! Another blow for... And it looks like he's going to fluke up......and dive. So he'll probably be down for another 10 minutes or so. They look like freight trains. Like enormous spaceships that just travel effortlessly. Every piece of them looked like something I'd seen on a re-engineered on an aircraft or on a supercar. When they fluke, they arch like that, their tail comes up vertically and drops straight in the water and you can barely hear a sound. Wow look at that! Wow! That is just beautiful! It's the first time that we believe that anyone has ever filmed a juvenile pygmy blue whale underwater. What do you think it's from Alex? Is it from a ship? We were in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Sri Lanka where there hasn't been any commercial fishing because of the Civil War. The beaches have been closed for up to 30 years. We thought this was a relatively pristine environment. Floating on the surface the metre below was just this horrible, crappy, emulsified mess of oil and bits of... It's horrible. And looking through it you can see the tendrils of the net hanging down. That was certainly one of the most unpleasant dives I've ever done. I spent my childhood in the sea. Growing up in Grand Cayman, we didn't have organized sports after school. We didn't even have a TV until I was 13. So the sea was my playground. As a freediver, it was the place where I proved myself to myself by traveling to the absolute edge of myself. I need to put as much oxygen in my blood as possible so that I can hold my breath for the three and a half to four minutes that the dive is going to take me. 525 feet is beyond the crushing depth of Second World War submarines. In pushing so hard, I learned about limits. I got a fiery redhead and she redefines my limits every day. Finally, for me, it feels like there's a point to this bizarre gift I have of, quote, looking pretty and holding my breath. I have the opportunity to pay the sea back. But I'm learning on my feet. I didn't know that in the last 10 years we've made more plastic than we did in the century before that. Half of those plastic products are considered disposable. But think about it. How can a disposable product be made of a material that's indestructible? Where does it go? This is a Brutus whale. It's dying, taking its final breaths. It was found to have six square meters of plastic sheeting inside it. It couldn't eat and it died of malnourishment. Its digestive system was blocked and it died a terrible, painful death. It's got a hole in it. This is all some of the rubbish that we found in the floating jetsam and flotsam in the ocean. We'll get Ben to go through it but there's even a pack of unopened biscuits. You can see it's been there for some time with the mollusks that are growing off it. There's crabs. There's a crab in there. So quite extraordinary. Another one, another one. Another one here. The detritus that's built up in these areas where they don't have the benefit of getting rid of the rubbish. Well, we're about 20 miles offshore. It's been trapped... in the river mouth and now it's all been flushed out into the sea. This is one of the main areas where we're hunting for the blue whales to film so this is right in their environment. They feed by opening their mouth and just sucking up whatever's in their path. in hundreds of gallons of water, they express that water and they feed off the krill and tiny fish. But they can't tell the difference between krill and plastic. Disposable lighters. They just say, you know, this is never going to degrade. These are going to be floating there for a very long time. They'll break down to very small particles and that's if some large marine mammal doesn't come along and swallow them whole. It's got nowhere to go. This is where it lives now. It's hard to contrast. That area of affected ocean by those plastics with the virgin blue water that you find very close by Well, there's just no comparison the animals of the world deserve the blue ocean not that sort of shit I started to wonder what's happening in oceans elsewhere on the planet 63 billion gallons of oil are used every year just to supply the U.S. with plastic water bottles. The U.S. alone throws away 38 billion bottles every year. That's 2 million tons of plastic going into U.S. landfills. And that's only from water bottles. In this year alone, every single person on the planet will use and dispose about 300 pounds or 136 kilos of single-use plastic. Plastic is wonderful because it's durable and plastic is terrible because it is durable. Almost every piece of plastic ever made is still on the planet in some form or another. Plastic production globally this year is expected to be more than 300 million tonnes, half of which we'll use just once. and then throw away. By 2050, when the population explodes to almost 10 billion people, it's expected that plastic production will triple. The problem with that is, is that today only a fraction of the plastic that we produce is recycled. The rest ends up in our environment and it's coating our lands and our oceans like a disease. Tasmania smells like freshness. It smells like salt spray. Primitive. It just smells natural. It has the cleanest air and water measured anywhere on the planet. The ocean to me is my church, it's my temple, it's my synagogue, it's my mosque, it's where I feel the most spiritual, it's where I go to work, where I go for my enjoyment and where I go to think and it's also the environment that challenges me more than any other environment that I know. Growing up, my world was exploring the rock pools. Tiny little fish that I could catch and study and release a day later. My mother was very caring and very supportive of anything that we wanted to do. And she picked up very early on, I think, my fascination with wildlife. I'm fourth generation journalist. It is believed that he is heading to Moscow. We're on a truck taking rice down to Santa Fe. Okay, it's not live is it? Hang on, wait, wait. Further outside Kathmandu you travel, the worse it seems the damage becomes. Small villages like this one, Sangku, stood no chance against the moving earth. These rescue teams have been unable to access inside this city. The town that I grew up in was an industrial town. I remember coming out after training from the Surf Life Saving Club where I was a member with just stinging red eyes. So when I worked for the newspaper I wanted to investigate what was causing that. We started doing testing on the water in Emu Bay and what we found was that there were these heavy amounts of organochlorines and these contain dioxins which are cancer causing agents. I put this to the government of Tasmania and they admitted for the first time that these dioxins existed and that they were dangerous. Within 10 years all of those industries had closed and today the fish are back in the water. The water is blue again and it's a very beautiful city. We think that when we put something in the trash or when we just toss it from a boat or on a beach, it goes away. We're now free of the plastic. Over 80% of ocean plastic leaks from land-based sources. Even if you don't live near the ocean, chances are your plastic garbage has found its way to the sea. The Great Lakes in North America are a good example. 80% of the litter along the shorelines of these majestic lakes is plastic. What trash doesn't remain on the shoreline or sink into the lake sediment flows through the canals and river systems, through the St. Lawrence Seaway and into the Atlantic Ocean. These Great Lakes are just one example. This level of plastic debris is found all around the world. Thousands of years of agriculture and industry have made the Med one of the most polluted bodies of water on the planet. About 8 million tons of plastic is dumped into the world's oceans every year. More than 50% of marine debris, including plastic, sinks to the bottom of the ocean. Ahoy! Hello Mike! Hey Papa! We're going bald! Good to see you! I met up with filmmaker Mike Degree, a marine biologist and also an experienced submersible pilot. It'll be interesting to see just how far reaching it really is to be this far offshore and and see whether the plastic that we know is coming from that direction is winding up. Out in the depths out here, right? Yeah. I'm really looking forward to, of course, diving the sub, but diving the sub in the Med, a place that has more fishing impact than most bodies of water on the planet. Remora, Remora, for surface, we will have to evolve to deeper and we will continue to try to see if we can find plastics by going down a little. Well, welcome to the bottom of the ocean, Time Lab. I wish you were down here watching this. If you weren't hogging the sub, I would be down there. We're just under 400 meters now. About 1200 feet. And now we're starting to see a plastic bottle exactly. We're now starting to see more and more plastic, more and more tires and pieces of metal and just absolutely disregard for the bottom really. It's just junk everywhere. This in line is a really dangerous thing to see in a submarine. You can get entangled in it and stuck to the bottom. Not a good thing. Tanya, this is Rehora. We are right in front of a pretty good-sized bundle of plastic. Is there any chance that you can grab some of it with a manipulator? That's exactly what... It looks like a lift bag. What do you mean a lift bag? It's a what? It's a parachute. It's a system that picks up the things you don't have. We saw unexploded bombs, old parachutes and plenty of plastic rubbish. Our scientists commissioned a small, remotely operated vehicle to travel over a mile and a half down to the deep trenches. The ROV is coming down, which is kind of cool. Here, where the daylight never reaches, the eddies and currents have collected scores of plastic bottles. This plastic could remain here forever. Go down, you know, 350, 375 meters. Hit bottom, start moving around and immediately start seeing trash. Plastic. Plastic. Where in the world can you go anymore and not find plastic? Our oceans are driven by five major circular currents, or gyres. These are created by the Earth's rotation, and the result... predominant winds. Each continent is affected by these massive systems. They collect waste flowing from our rivers and coastlines and over time anything floating within the gyre will eventually move towards the center of the gyre. Our producer Joe Ruxton was familiar with the story about a huge floating island of garbage twice the size of Texas in the North Pacific. Jo joined Dr. Andrea Neal and her team on an expedition to this great Pacific garbage patch. So we're deploying the Manitral and we're going to look for fine particulates and debris. This mesh here is 333 microns which is in the size range of soil plankton. The Manitral captures material on the surface. It will take anything the size of a pinhead or larger. Looking out over the vast expanse of clear sparkling water, there is no plastic in sight. The contents of the trawl are emptied and floated. The tiny pieces of plastic then reveal themselves to Joe and Dr Neil. Scientists estimate that there are more than five trillion pieces of plastic afloat in our oceans worldwide. There is no floating island of plastic. What exists is far more insidious. What exists is a kind of plastic smog. These tiny pieces of plastic that are floating on the surface of the ocean come from larger pieces. Over time, the sun's ultraviolet light, ocean wave action and salt break it up into smaller pieces called microplastics. Microplastics have rough pitted surfaces. Waterborne chemicals from industry and agriculture stick to microplastics, making them toxic poison pills. There are five ocean gyres and the South Pacific is one of the least studied next to the Indian Ocean. I've been to three of the five gyres, so this will be my number four. So let's go fishing for plastic. Alright, let's do it. Our first study was done in the North Atlantic in 2009. We took a series of seven samples and by weight we then estimated that the North Atlantic had 3,440 metric tons of just microplastics. We're not even including the larger plastics. It seems really heavy. Maybe we caught a coconut! Wow, look at that! You can see how well this device works. It collects everything. They look like they've just broken off something. Yeah, and they're super fragile. Michael, I think we found our first no-no. Okay, so this is the pre-production pellet. Those things float all around the world, don't they? That's right. What does it look like to you? It looks like a little egg. Sea at night is one of my favorite times. It's when the ocean truly comes alive and you can virtually see the food chain in action. Zooplankton feed on phytoplankton, small fish feed on zooplankton, squid feed on small fish, and so it goes on up and up the food chain. There's some Mactuffids in there. Well, should we get them on the table and open them up and have a look and see what's in there? We'll start with this guy That's something harder here. Oh, yeah, what's that? This is the very first sample we did and it was a nitrile so that we could catch lanternfish. After I dried the sample, I hand-picked the pieces of plastic. This is what we found. So what this means is the feeding that's occurring on the surface of the ocean. has these plastic fragments floating around and is actually intermixing in the food chain. You know that plastic doesn't degrade. And most of the time we say it breaks down, but that's probably not an accurate way to say it. It actually breaks up, so it's more prolific. proliferated and when it's proliferated there's more opportunities for plastics to be ingested. Many of the marine creatures eating this kind of plastic are in our food chain. Does that mean then that this plastic is getting inside of us? The problem is these plastics adsorb chemicals that are free-floating in the ocean. So when the fish eat the plastics, those toxins then migrate from the plastic into the muscles or the fats, the parts that we like to eat in fish. It's building up in the fish then as they eat more and more. And so that's the part we like to eat and that's where these chemicals migrate to. This is my level. Big crab. Nice. Mmm. The prawn, eh? I like to now more. Hello Rosie. Hi, I'm the mula. Hi, mula. Salota. Dinner, what are we cooking? We're having taro leaves with fish in coconut milk. That's a very traditional Fijian village dinner. Yes it is. It smells really good except for the... The smoke. Yeah. It's really making my eyes water in here. Did you light your fire using plastics for this fire? Always, yes. And you do that every time you cook food? Three times a day. Instead of buying kerosene, you use plastic because it's easier to burn. Much cheaper. Much more cheaper. Easier to find, it's free. Very much, and it's free. I'm feeling that in my eyes. Do you feel that that affects you in any way? You start having problems in breathing, and you have problems in coughing, and sometimes you can have headache. But we... It doesn't really bother us because, like, we've used that for a long time. So you're used to it. We're used to it. Yeah, whereas I'm not. I'm used to it. Which is why I'm crying right now. Yes, you're crying and I hope you're not crying because of me. There's no chance. I'm crying because I won't get to try this food. What I'd like to do is bring back a scientist if we can and do some measurements on the smoke and just see what kind of chemicals are being released from the plastics as you cook. Would you let us do that? Yes, of course. And then we can have a look at maybe some of the health implications of starting the fires with the plastics. Yes, I think that's a good idea. People misuse plastic for a lot of things, but for cooking, I mean, for me it's kind of very unusual circumstances. We want to have a baseline study to show what kind of chemicals are actually breathing in, because the lung is an interface between the two. that air would be breathing in plus the smell and our blood system and then so we get it in our systems. What did we find today then with the experiment that you did with this device? I'll show you. These filters are white when you put them in. That's brown. almost black yeah this is a mini lung this could be what this absorbing into their lung pretty much this can't be good for your health can it what we know from this specifically from this pH is and a combination of those is that there are cancer causing that's one thing but there are also maybe stylites in there which evaporating from plastics which have a large percentage of the stylites in there to give plastic properties If you breathe in them, they have hormone-changing properties, so-called endocrine-disrupting properties, and a lot of other health effects as well. Professor Sue Jobling is the editor of the recent World Health Organisation report on endocrine disruptors. Endocrine disruption is disruption of the normal functioning of the body's hormonal system. They fool the body into thinking... that they are hormones and then they either block or mimic the action or production of hormones. And in doing so they interfere with very many bodily processes, growth, metabolism, reproduction and critically early development. The majority of ocean plastic comes from just six countries. 48k news Billions of plastic pellets have spilled into Hong Kong's southern waters after several containers fell off a ship when typhoon Vicente battered Hong Kong Six containers full of nurdles all of them broke up in the storm and disgorged most of their plastic bags into the sea The vast majority broke open and the contents spilled out Just plastic pellets everywhere. Yeah, it looked like snow on the beach. On the neighbouring Lamra Island, they found tonnes of this stuff that had come ashore. It seems the company that made the nurdles has unwittingly put their signature on it. Sinopec, a giant Chinese oil company that makes nurdles for distribution worldwide. Close by are some of the sacks also ripped open. The vast majority of them would have been carried off by the typhoon to disperse their contents far and wide. Four of the six are here. So we got the one on the top here. It's the one we found at Beaufort Island. It's totally destroyed. It's a 40-foot container. We've been told it carries 1,000 sacks. Still one that hasn't been found. Still one out there. There's a million pellets plus in these bags, so every single bag saves thousands of marine species, so every bag counts at this point. Every day pellets are getting washed out and trying to get that sense of urgency across. We put a call to action out on Facebook. Facebook, go to your local beach, this is what you're looking for. These are the bags, these are the pellets. We came up with a rapid action plan, get a quick survey of the coast so we can see the bigger picture and from that then we isolated some hot spots. Which beach, Chengcheng, Moai Wo, needs more people to help? Beach number one. I set up a Facebook page, Plastic Disaster Hong Kong, and it went from 80 to 1,000 likes in a few hours, and it became... pretty much the one place where all the information was being posted by everybody and even the government were checking it. Sinopec were checking it. Sinopec sent down people from their head office. They had general managers on the beaches. They have been very responsible, they have been down, we had an emergency meeting about it. They're very concerned and they're offering all the assistance they can. Thanks for helping guys. There's some more concentrated pellets down the end there. Once you let people know what the problem is, people have their own ideas and can contribute their own ingenuity to help solve the problem. The people of Hong Kong realized the severity of the problem and just came out in their masses to help and that is something I will never ever forget. Yinghung. So this is what they found in the fish farm. The pellets like this floating in the sea and then they found the bags. We bought three fish, cut them open and each fish had five, six, seven pellets in it. Eat slowly. Eat slowly? Eat slowly. Because they can't ingest anything? They can't take in any more food? They buy a lot of fish. They can't buy any more fish in the streets. Even the supermarkets won't buy? So it's completely destroyed the local market. In a recent study published in Scientific Reports, UC Davis researchers examined 76 fish slated for human consumption in Indonesia and 64 in California. They found that in both groups, roughly one quarter had anthropogenic debris in their guts. The researchers found plastic in the Indonesian population and plastic and textile fibers in the American one. When sampling blue mussels at six locations along the coastlines of the Gulf of Mexico, France, Belgium and the Netherlands, microplastics were present in every single organism examined. When you eat shellfish you're often eating the entire animal, so you're more likely to eat plastic. Lord Howe Island is a World Heritage Site. and home to migratory seabirds like the shearwaters. Seabirds are incredibly helpful because they act like an army of scientists. They travel thousands of miles across the ocean. They pick up plastic off the surface of the ocean, they bring it back to their rookeries where they feed it to their chicks. And that provides an incredible amount of scientific data in terms of where the plastic comes from, its distribution, and how it breaks up on the ocean surface. Dr. Jennifer Lavers, she's devoted her life to studying the plight of seabirds. She-waters are incredible birds. They migrate thousands of miles, stopping only here to breed. All species of shearwater nest in the earth. Their parents return from their distant ocean feeding grounds by night to feed their chicks in their burrows. After 70 to 90 days, the chicks venture above ground for the first time. They stretch their wings and begin developing their flight muscles. We're going to put some ambient temperature salt water, just like he would normally be fed by his parents. And Ian's just going to hold the mouth open here. And I'm going to put the tube down into the stomach, if we can get him to cooperate for a moment. Have you ever received serious injury from one of these? Indeed, have I ever. More than I can possibly count. Depending on how full his stomach is, we could be here for a little while. Nope, still nothing. Still nothing. There we go. Whoa, look at that. Need to get some of the oil and stuff out of the way. Very slippery with all that oil, ain't it? That's a lot of plastic, isn't it? Yeah, and some interesting colours. The red is quite uncommon. It looks like we've got quite a few of the resin pellets, the nurdles, lots of microplastics. There's no way at 935 grams that he would be able to take to the air. Make a bit of a note, he's got some damage to his lower mandible. 41.7. Garbage thrown away in the United States can make its way to Antarctica. Plastic in our coastal waters is pulled into the center of massive wind-driven churning circular gyres. There are many other ocean currents also diverting the trash all around the surface of the ocean. In reality it's just one ocean with no boundaries. Yeah, the stomach is very, very full and if we look here, there's some very dark pieces, some very light white pieces and if you see, you know, as I push on this, it's absolutely rigid, completely, completely full of plastic all the way up. Oh, look at that. Absolutely no doubt that this bird died as a result of that plastic. That is literally a gutful of plastic. This is quite alarming, isn't it? Oh, it's awful. A range of plastic types and colours. We've got everything from the blues and the reds to the... Your stomach's just filled with it. Big pieces too. Big sharp pieces. Oh wow, look at the size of that big black piece. That is an enormous piece of plastic. Unbelievable. Look at the size of that. Jen, I counted 234 pieces of plastic out of that one bird. Is that a record? Not even close, unfortunately. So for this species, the record is 276 pieces of plastic inside of one 90-day... old chick. That plastic when we weighed it out accounted for 15% of that bird's body mass so that's a pretty scary statistic. If we translate that into human terms it gets even worse. That would be equivalent to you and I having somewhere around 6 or 8 kilos of plastic inside of your stomach. It's equivalent to about 12 pizzas worth of food inside of your stomach. Midway Island is miles away from any coastline, but it has one of the biggest populations of Laysan albatross in the world. Like the shearwater, their parents have travelled thousands of kilometres to find food. It's quite a bit of plastic for just one little bird. The parents were trying to do the right thing. There's a lot of squid beaks in here, and this purple color is evidence of the squid ink. It's just a shame that every now and then they got it wrong and got it wrong in a bad way. To try and wrap your mind around the condition of this animal and the quality of its life really is quite an overwhelming thing. I do have some pretty rough days, have to go home and really wrap my mind around where do we go from here. All week we've been cutting up birds and this is without a doubt the absolute worst one that I've come across. That is an incredible amount of plastic. I've come to Asinara, a small island off the northern tip of Sardinia, to meet with Christina Fossi, a professor of ecotoxicology at the University of Siena. The turtle rescue centre here has just received a loggerhead turtle. The animals come from Corsica, so from France, and they have identified the animals because they have problems with floating. So it was floating in a very... unusual way and then they have discovered that the causes is the presence of a large amount of plastic in the stomach. This plastic? This plastic they produce gas and then the animal are not more able to go down. Does he have to perform a surgery to remove this? No, no, he uses very simple stuff. One that was used to remove the gas from the intestinal tract. Then he used an antibiotic, a normal antibiotic, in order to save the animal from infection. And then the last point was to use a fat diet. Treat the gas, get everything moving. And... and get it out. So commonly, plastic bag that's floating on the surface can be misunderstood as a gel fish. And then they can eating days after days. Plastic bag or other pieces of plastic, obviously the consequence at the end can be lethal for the animals. Christina's name is well recognized around the world for her stand against the killing of whales and dolphins. We use the approach of the skin biopsy in order to identify the level of chemicals and the toxicological effect on these wild animals. Today we are moving on the Gulf of Hacinara, try to see some bottlenose dolphins, then we collect some microplastic samples. An increasing number of dolphins and turtles in the Mediterranean are turning up dead. Christina's focus is to get to the bottom of this mystery. And she has a very unusual way of getting the information she needs. Here they are! Look at the pressure! Go! They're galloping! They're galloping! They're galloping! They're going to be fine. The dart bounces off, taking a small piece of flesh with it, which the scientists use to conduct their research. It is very difficult. Argh! What's the pressure? It's very big, I don't know, but... So we can start to process the biopsy. It was collected with the darts. The species is bottlenose dachshund. It's one of the common species around the coast. And we suppose also one of the most polluted ones. You expect that you're finding derivatives from plastics in the blubber of these animals because they're consuming other animals that are directly consuming the plastics. Exactly. And so if the plastics are in the food chain for the dolphin, they're also in our food chain. Exactly. We have already very interesting results, but I would like to invite you to the lab. When animals eat plastic, they're also consuming the toxins attached to the plastic. Toxins pass into the bloodstream. There, they bioaccumulate in the fatty tissue and around the vital organs. When animals use the stored fat, the toxins circulate around the body, interfering with reproduction, metabolism, growth, kidney and liver function. As we have seen this day, there is clear evidence that plantain species and fin whale, for example, have a very high level of phthalate that we consider one of the plastic derivatives. But that data can represent a real warning signal of exposure to the Mediterranean environment, including humans, in a real toxicological risk. Smoky Mountain 1 operated as a 2 million metric ton waste dump for more than 40 years. It closed in 1995. This garbage tip contains so much methane, which was produced by the garbage within it, that when it reaches a certain temperature, it catches fire. That creates this smoke that comes out of the top of the pile and filters over the city of Manila. So sweet potatoes, corn, sugar cane, all growing on 40 years of garbage. You worked here as a 12 year old? I earn money to support my family needs. And what would you collect up here? Recyclables like bottles, cans and plastics. This local chap here is still harvesting the plastic that's in the ground. Yeah, the plastic. It's just everywhere. What's the most common disease here? Pulmonary. Pulmonary, such as tuberculosis? Yeah. Yes. Emphysema? Emphysema, yes. My father died of emphysema. No one knows how much plastic has accumulated in the sea in the last 50 years, but one thing is sure, the pace has picked up. The world of plastics is present everywhere, yet this presence is but a premonition of a future world. Our children will see a bit of that world, and our grandchildren will not see the end of it. The smell is almost indescribable. It's kind of like a cross between sewage and oil, and it's everywhere. The ground to within two inches above it is covered in flies. I could see a child flying a kite. You could see the kite was made from a plastic bag and he'd fashioned this himself and used straws as the... mainframe for the kite. If you got behind him and looked towards the sky, he could have been any child anywhere in the world. Every time it rains here, every time the wind blows offshore, the sludge, the plastic from all of that rubbish ends up straight in Manila Bay and I guess into the stomachs of whatever marine animals are still able to survive in the bay. A lot of plastic here. I guess a lot of this is brought in by the river. Yeah, it came from the Pasig River and also it's being washed up by the ocean during typhoons. And most of the people living here also throw their garbage in this area because there are... There's no garbage collectors coming in the area to collect the garbage. How much waste, plastic waste, is put into the waterways here? Do you have any idea? Around 1,500 tonnes daily. 1,500 tonnes every day? Yes. One more, one more! Ready? You go! Sup guys! 5, 2, 3, 4! Yeah! Thank you! Well I have to say, you're all much better basketballers than I am. I'm so bad. Again, again. I'm sorry. I'm no good at basketball. You're very good at basketball, this guy. Thank you! Very good. Do you all live here? Yeah. In Pier 18? We live, oh yes. And you play basketball all the time? Yeah. Do you go to school? Yes. No. No? Yes? You go to school? No. No? So what do you do during the day? I scavenge. Scavenge? Yeah. What do you scavenge for? The plastic. The plastic? Ah. And what do you do with the plastic? Go to the... Yeah? And what do they give you for the plastic? Money. Money? Is it good money? What kind of money? Very rough. $4.50. Yeah? Is that... For one day. For one day. Yeah. And what do you do with the money? I give my mother. Your mother? Yeah. Yes. And what does she do with the money? Buy the rice. The rice. Yeah. Right. So you can play, grow up, be healthy, play good basketball. Show me. Give me a shot. Most of the waste created by the individuals within each of these villages, towns and cities generally ends up on the streets or in their canals. It's easy to understand how these sorts of places become delivery systems for plastic into our oceans. I understand that this was 10 feet deep in plastic. Literally 10 feet of plastic that was pulled out of this canal. First we dredged, but when we realised that we were digging down to China, we stopped. What we did was to cover it up with good soil and garden soil and then we put up the coco pillows it's Made from coconut husk and then we spread it up until there. We vegetated it and the vetiver grass The plants take the rest of the waste out of the water. Yes. And now we've got fish swimming. And turtles. Wildlife. So it's clean enough for animals to live in now. Is it drinkable? Not yet. Not yet. Not yet. Working on that one. Working on that one. And so you're going to do this project now throughout the canals and river systems of Manila. Yes, with the same idea of putting bio-remediation and phytoremediation together. Do you think that will solve the plastic pollution problem here? The one that will solve the plastic solution is the behaviour of the people around the sterile. So maybe we'll start with that first and then we'll solve everything else afterwards. I'm off to visit the tiny isolated coral atoll of Tuvalu in the South Pacific near Fiji. As a mother, I care deeply about the effects of plastic on our health. Tuvalu gained its independence in 1978. It began importing foreign goods and food, and with that came plastic. I realized just how tiny this nation was when I flew in over the atoll. Tuvalu is a microcosm of the entire planet, and they have nowhere to put the plastic. During World War II, in order to build an... airstrip for the Allies in the Pacific Theater, large quantities of coral were dug up and carted off to be crushed and mixed for the tarmac. Gaping holes left behind are called burrow pits. They were never filled back in and are now used for refuse. How long have you lived in this Barrow Pit? 25 years. So you're 25 years old. In your 25 year lifetime, have you seen the amount of plastic in your surrounding community increase? Yeah, very increased. Before, in my early childhood, I don't see any plastic because we don't use to import our packaging plastic. Tell me what it was like growing up here as a child. We always swim with the barrel pit. We don't know that there is effectiveness to us. We just swim and then we go. We like fishing. You used to fish out of the barrel pit and eat the fish, but you don't do that anymore? No, we don't eat the fish. We just feed the pigs. You feed the fish to the pigs? Yeah. What kind of health problems are you seeing people suffer from? Low, some people they get cancer and then some people they don't get pregnant. People in the Barrow Pit are having problems conceiving? Mm-mm. If things don't change in the Barrow Pit, but the people stay here, what do you think will happen? I think they get disease and they don't want to leave. Like, this is a nice place, but because of that important packaging, they destroy our paradise. And I want a good future for my children, because I love my children. How does a US Navy aircraft carrier handle its waste? With about 4,500 sailors on board, just shy of half the population of Tuvalu, the amount of waste generated every day is enormous. The US Navy is looking for a way to deal with shipboard waste without having to go into port. The belly of the latest aircraft carrier will be fitted with a gleaming maze of steel pipes to devour the ship's waste. Pyrogenesis of Montreal was contracted by the US Navy to develop a green technology capable of processing the waste generated by these sailors. At the heart of this technology is a plasma torch that changes the molecular structure of whatever is put into it, transforming it back to its core elements. Better still it has no detrimental effect on the environment, it runs off its own energy and is affordable. If they could shrink the plant into the size of something that you can put into a shipping container, take to small islands like Tuvalu, set it up so that you can put in all of the rubbish that's existing on the island, and have it turn into inert or non-toxic substances, that's going to go a long way to help solving the problems that exist on islands in the Pacific. If an innovative workable solution like pyrogenesis is not implemented in places like Tuvalu, the quality of life will continue to decline. The island will eventually be choked by its own plastic waste. Combined with the rising sea level caused by climate change, Tuvalu's habitability is under serious threat. One of the kids we've befriended here, Dita, has developed a pretty bad lingering cough. We think his problems might be linked to a hobby he shares with his friends, making jewellery out of melted plastic. He's a bit of a grumpy boy. Tanya is extremely protective of her children. So she's incredibly engaged in their well-being, particularly where she has control. And she has control over her environment. This is Charlie, huh? Surprised he wasn't born with a face mask. Yeah, right? And a nose clip? It wasn't easy for me to conceive. I'm an older mum. I worked really hard for this. All the time trying to conceive, being really clean in my body. Went through my entire pregnancy without taking so much as a Tylenol. Throw the line in there, Tills. This is actually catfish corner. My kids make me really passionate about the subject. Annoyingly passionate. You know, ask my husband. He'll roll his eyes. He goes from this guy who is washing Ziploc bags... And I just think, oh, I'm winning. My husband is washing Ziploc bags. I see them drying in the sink, and I'm like, yes. But then he'll forget, and I see plastic wrap over a food. And I'm like, no. Now, you've had a a very healthy lifestyle. You haven't been able to control every aspect of it. So the likelihood is he may have plastic in his system. It's terrifying. It's awful. And it's made me question sometimes, gosh, is even having children the right thing to do? I'm still very, very motivated to obviously do the right thing by myself and my family, but also to try to incite change where I can as an environmentalist, as an activist. I'm optimistic because it beats the alternative. Austin is a very cool city. It's environmentally aware. It was the first city in Texas to ban the plastic bag. It's an oasis of eco-friendly people in a state that's headquarters for the largest oil companies and petrochemical plants. Plastipure is where we formulate and test plastics for their physical characteristics. On the Sertichem side, where we are here, we test plastics and other substances as well as individual chemicals. to see if they have estrogenic activity. A lot of plastics, perhaps the great majority probably, release chemicals that have estrogenic activity. Estrogenic activity or... EA happens when a chemical like BPA or phthalate leaches from plastic and enters the body where it mimics the hormone estrogen. 92.6% of Americans aged 6 and older have detectable levels of BPA in their bodies. The levels in children between 6 and 11 years of age are twice as high as those in older Americans. Are all of those chemicals not regulated? No, the FDA at present does not have any regulations for how many chemicals and what levels of chemicals having estrogenic activity can be released from plastics or from cosmetics or papers or silicones. So how is the general public protected from that kind of thing? Uh, they aren't. They aren't. From baby bottles to sippy cups to food can liners to water bottles, bottles hydrating the youngest athletes consumers have been exposed to a root chemical called bisphenol a or bpa an artificial sex hormone used as a core building block in close to 7 billion pounds of plastic on the market today because of its strength and resiliency this isn't a weak contaminant this is a powerful contaminant and it's trading right at the core of american public health when something says that it's bpa free is that something i can trust over 90 percent of all plastics that don't have BPA, nonetheless, release chemicals having estrogenic activity. So BPA is not the only bad guy that we need to be looking out for? BPA is only one bad guy. It's like saying, I've caught Al Capone. I just handled the criminal problem in the United States. We do quite a bit of this testing to see where the issues are, but we also use that data to help manufacturers make safer products. Right. The average consumer goes, Paliwadawada? You know, I don't get it. Just tell me what is the right one, what is safe, what isn't. When we look at baby balls, we have to look at the baby balls. at all the different components that come in contact with the milk or with the baby. All of the hard and clear materials that we've tested leach these estrogenic chemicals. Other things like the nipple are generally made from silicone or latex. Latex always From our test, it's come back positive for EA, and silicone generally is positive for estrogenic activity. And stainless steel is obviously, I thought, a better option. If it doesn't have a liner, stainless steel tends to be fine, and glass tends to be fine. to be fine. But colorants tend to leach a lot of chemicals, so we try to stay away from colorants when we can. When we can't, white and black tend to be the least. And we've started using a lot more foil in our house. rather than this stuff? Ful is a better option. We use ful in the lab because ful doesn't leach these chemicals. This, I know, styrofoam, is a personal pet peeve of mine. The likelihood is estrogenic chemicals will leach out of styrene products. Cold fluids, anything? Likely hot fluids would increase the amount of leaching, but it would still be leaching something. The majority of plastics increase the release of chemicals having estrogenic activity after they've been ex- exposed particularly sunlight how do you not consume it you can't go anywhere without seeing food wrapped in plastic you can't go to a restaurant without you know takeout boxes being in plastic hot foods going into plastic my answer there is well demand safer plastic all we're gonna do is go inside the restaurants and ask them about I will ask them for food and see what they can give it to us in a plastic container Hello, how are you doing? Good, how are you? I'm not too bad. Can I get the power plant? Can I get a small berry blast? Hello there, can I get an orange juice please? I'm getting the beer. A BLT. A BLT. Do you have anything not wrapped in plastic? I have nothing to do with the food. Do you have anything other than plastic to put it in? No, you can buy our giant little reusables. Yeah but that's still plastic. That's what I was going to get. Without the plastic lid's fine. Is that paper? Yes. It is. Great. Yeah. Do you have anything other than plastic? We have that one in a cold press. It's actually exposed to less oxygen, so it's a way better juice with twice the amount of vitamins and nutrients. That sounds really healthy. Yeah, it's the way to go for the balance. Yeah, that sounds great. Cool, man. But do you serve it in anything other than plastic containers? We have them made at our central kitchen every morning. Yeah. And they bring them to us on the cold press juicer. Yeah. So it's ready to go bottled for convenience. But that's in plastic. Do you have something not plastic? No. And you serve all your drinks in plastic cups as well? Yes. Keep the straw because that's plastic. I'll have to leave it then, I think. Yeah? Yeah. Okay, that's okay. Yeah? Okay. Well, thanks. very much yeah all right what can i get you yeah i felt like i was a bit of an eco warrior tell me what's my food wrapped in it's not plastic is it i'm going to die of something yeah but do you want to die early or late My boyfriend actually tells me every single day of my life to not be drinking water bottles from my car but if I'm thirsty, I'm thirsty. You know what, he's right and you've got that wrapped in paper, that's good. That's impressive for a takeaway place. I can make a salad and a stick of it like a few of these. That'd be better than sticking it in plastic. If you could put it maybe between two paper plates. It's just all the chemicals in this that get into the food. You've made such a great sandwich by the look of it. We gave in to the sales hype of the 50s that plastic was disposable. That we could throw it away. There is no away. It's so very hard as a parent, as a mum, as a woman, to feel like you can do the best thing, you know, that you can do the right thing anymore. Every day, you know, we're contributing potentially to a dreadful health problem later on down the line. Now, there's nothing else to put it in. What this white stuff is, is like the worst of the worst. Like a rubbish bin, the earth is filling up with the stuff. There is nowhere else to put it. That's why as much as possible, we choose foods and drinks that don't... have plastic around them. It starts with the individual and it starts with us. What do you do? You can't possibly filter out these tiny particles from the entire ocean. You can't filter the entire ocean. In fact, so much plastic is in the ocean now in a form that we really can't get to it that I feel the emphasis needs to immediately shift toward stop putting it in. My degree is right. But how do we get to the point where we can stop putting it in? Hi there. Speak to the man. That's me. I noticed when I came in here and ordered my sandwich and my drink, they both came in plastic containers. Our cups are 100% plant-based, so they can be composted. You're one of the first places in Austin that I've come to that... that has an alternative. Is that right? Best alternative option I've got for you today. That's perfect. I appreciate it. At least you've got an alternative. Exactly. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. You have a great weekend. You too. Find me some Gala apples that are not in plastic. Demand. Remind that your supermarket deliver your food products in paper or just as they come. They don't need to be wrapped in plastic. And if they are, take the plastic off and leave it with them. And say, you dispose of it and dispose of it properly. Because once it becomes their problem, you'll find that they will do something about it. Don't put your plastic rubbish in a dumpster where you know it's going to landfill. In 1991, Germany became the first country in the world to pass packaging laws forcing plastic manufacturers to be responsible for the recycling or disposal of any packaging material they sell. The industry set up a company to overhaul the packaging laws. of a sea plastic waste collection recognised by the green dot. When I was a kid, we used to run around the neighbourhood collecting glass bottles to take to the store to collect the five-cent refund that we'd get. Plastic packaging pretty much killed the bottle deposit system, but here in Germany they've reinstated it. You can take your plastic bottles to almost any supermarket and put them in this machine. And what it does is it reads a barcode, which tells the machine the kind of plastic that it is, that it's recyclable, and which retailer it comes from. So the consumer gets a $0.25 deposit off every bottle. The retailer gets the plastic, which they can sell to recyclers for a little bit more. a lucrative amount of money, and on the streets of Germany, you very rarely see these things anymore, because everybody recycles them. The Germans demonstrated that there is profit to be made. Today, recycling is a lucrative industry. Pressure your government. Tell them that you do not accept that plastic should be in the environment. The manufacturers of plastic have their own lobby groups and they'll lobby the government to get the best possible deal for them to get their products into the marketplace for the least cost. And the least cost means that they don't have to be responsible for it. If they manufacture it, they should be responsible for its collection and for its proper disposal. We will all be better off if less plastic is manufactured in the first place. Scientists are already calling for a new technology. calling for governments to reclassify plastic as a hazardous substance, because then existing laws about hazardous substances will already be in effect. Plastic bags and water bottles are the worst single-use offenders. What if we ban them outright to stop that vicious cycle? Rwanda is one of the very few countries that has banned plastic bags. Rwanda being an agricultural country, whereby we don't have a lot of industries, we have tried to assess the impact of plastic bags on our soil specifically and on our animals, specifically livestock. Then after the assessment we have decided why do we keep this when we know very well the negative impact of it. I think it's a shocking waste of valuable resources that these materials are being put in the landfill. They're so much more valuable. If you put them in a landfill, the cost in Europe is round about a minus £100 a tonne, $150. But as a useful plastic, it could be worth plus $1,200, $1,500 a ton. So it's a huge difference in value. We actually have the answers now to recycling most plastics. And the challenge really is to get everyone on board with those ideas and also to get the collection infrastructure going right so that we get big volumes coming concentrated in one place so that people can then have the confidence to invest in the recovery technology. One. Sorted recycled plastics are brought into factories like this where they can become part of a circular economy, cleaned of labels and processed into newborn nurdles ready to be sold once again. As recyclers we think governments could do more to encourage development of circular supply chains. A lot of recycled plastics can be used back as we say in closed loop, back in the same products and that's happening a lot with bottles and pots, tubs and trays from the packaging stream. But there are plenty of other outlets where a short life item like a piece of packaging can go into a long life application. For example in construction products, in automotive and in making cars and trains and aeroplanes and things like that. Where you can get the performance of the recycled polymer just as good as virgin material that's come out of the ground. You can take it from a bottle one day to a shirt the next day. From that shirt then it can become a component in a vehicle. It can become something that's sent to space. Through the plastic bank. We make plastic waste a currency so that people in developing countries can earn an income while preventing plastic from entering the ocean. David Katz and Sean Frankson founded the Plastic Bank. They established a social plastic recycling system in Haiti that exchanges plastic for solar cell phone charging, sustainable cook stoves and cash. It's like a fair trade plastic where it's ethically sourced. It's an above market rate income that they earn. The people in need can go and collect the plastic and create a micro economy around recycling and this is something that we can scale anywhere in the world. This is a self-sustaining social enterprise. All of the plastic collected through the plastic bank goes through the recycling process and is sold as social plastic to be used in manufacturing by values-aligned brands or it can be used to 3D print. They're using it instead of virgin plastics. If you're choosing between two products and one's made of social plastic and one's not, you're really choosing between do I help the planet or do I hurt the planet. Social plastic is really our way that we can create an organic global infrastructure. New technology means that waste can now be converted into energy. In Europe alone there are 15 million tons of end-of-life plastic going into landfill every year. Synar, a waste-to-fuel company. designed a machine that turns end-of-life plastic like candy wrappers and snack packets, which aren't usually recyclable, into diesel. Using a heating process called pyrolysis, it turns an environmental problem into a valuable commodity. Each machine can process about 20 tons of plastic daily, making about 18,000 liters of diesel or the equivalent of 113 barrels of oil a day. Islands like Lord Howe manage their plastic waste with solutions that match the way they live. There is no burning and there is no landfill on this island. Food waste, the garden waste, paper and cardboard gets composted. All the recyclables are baled and sent back to the mainland and currently the island's diverting 85% of all their waste from landfill. This is the recycling sorting facility. We can separate, we can bale everything. You can galvanise a community. to do amazing things. The whales are diving into a sea of plastic bottles and the bottles were collected from the Bristol 10k race. It was important to the artist Sue Lipscomb to make this sculpture out of sustainable materials. She used recycled plastics and locally grown willow. There are 70,000 bottles. That means in some way up to 70,000 people have contributed to this art. I kick off by telling the kids something about whales and the reaction is, it's just fantastic. They love hearing about how big they are, they really get it. They ask you all sorts of perceptive questions that an adult might not think about and I really just love the enthusiasm of the pupils. Wouldn't it be great if politicians 40 years down the line still had that same enthusiasm that school children show when they come here? Wouldn't the world be a different place? We've treated the ocean as a place to throw things, dispose of things that we did not want close to where we thought we lived. In 2015, natural history broadcaster Sir David Attenborough met with President Barack Obama. Obama, who spent his boyhood in the natural splendour of Hawaii, grew up watching Attenborough's films. What we're seeing is global trends. that depend on the entire world working together. Yes. My daughters, I find, Malia and Sasha, they're much more environmentally aware, this generation, than I think some previous generations. They think it's a... self-apparent that we've got a problem and that we should be doing something about it. I absolutely agree and the young people, they care, they know that this is the world that they're going to grow up in and they're going to spend the rest of their lives in. But I think it's more idealistic than that. They actually believe that humanity, human species has no right to destroy and despoil regardless. They actually feel that very powerfully. And the whole of the ecosystem. ecosystems of the world are based on healthy ocean and if that part of the planet Becomes dysfunctional it goes wrong Then the whole of life on this planet will suffer The whole planet is where we live There is no a way that you can put things and expect that they're really away This this phrase not in my backyard the ocean is everyone's backyard or front yard or living space. No matter how you look at it, this planet is governed by the blue part. The world truly is mostly a blue place. I'll be just as worried about Tilly and Charlie when they're in their 70s and 80s and I'm long gone. I still want them to be healthy and certainly not suffering the effects of any decisions that I made. I want to go back to where it all started. I want to go back to the whales. I want to go and find the juvenile that we first saw. If whales could talk to us, I imagine they would ask us, what were we thinking? Every other species on the planet works towards the benefit of the ecology and environment that it lives in. But us humans, we just seem like passengers on this earth. I want to say to the parents of the juvenile, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry on behalf of humanity for putting plastic into your home. And I want to say we'll share this story because from knowing comes caring and from caring comes change. The water is wide, I can't cross o'er, and neither have I wings to fly. Build me a boat that can carry two. And both shall roam, my love, horizon beckons us.

I'd followed them since childhood with the absolute design to go and film them myself at some point. And that was 40 years later. Dr. Lindsay Porter is a cetacean expert and Ben Fogel is a UK adventurer.

So Lindsay, just tell me what kind of whales in particular are we looking for? Today we're looking for the blue whale. There are two different types of blue whale we'll see in the area, the true blues and pygmy blues.

And how do they differ? Pygmy blues are slightly... smaller than true blue whales. When you say slightly smaller, what size are we talking about here? 25 metres.

Lindsay has such a depth of knowledge that she's my first go-to when I've got a question about a whale. come in they create this very productive front and this is why we think the animals that the whales feed here so when you say productive front I imagine krill food is being welled up Ben Fogle rode a boat across the Atlantic and that meant that he had a sense of adventure he was a risk taker From the very first day we saw them blowing, we knew they were there but they were very hard to reach. These animals can do up to 30 kilometres an hour underwater and they can stay underwater for a half an hour and go in any direction. When we saw them we'd follow them, try to get near them, wait for them to come up again and then just never see them again. Tell me what I should be listening out for.

For whales, you need to listen for a low frequency monotone. And for dolphins... Oh, can you hear it right there?

That, that, the... The high pitch... High-pitch whistling. That's dolphins. That's the group of dolphins we just passed, yeah.

How far away do you think they are now? They'll still be within a kilometre. That's a long way for it to go.

It is a long way, yeah. It's a big ocean. They've got to talk to each other over distance. Isn't that incredible? We travelled up and down, 50 miles off the coast, for two weeks, trying to get close to these animals.

We ran out of time. We started heading back to port. Look, look!

At 2 o'clock... BAM! Another blow for...

And it looks like he's going to fluke up......and dive. So he'll probably be down for another 10 minutes or so. They look like freight trains.

Like enormous spaceships that just travel effortlessly. Every piece of them looked like something I'd seen on a re-engineered on an aircraft or on a supercar. When they fluke, they arch like that, their tail comes up vertically and drops straight in the water and you can barely hear a sound. Wow look at that! Wow!

That is just beautiful! It's the first time that we believe that anyone has ever filmed a juvenile pygmy blue whale underwater. What do you think it's from Alex?

Is it from a ship? We were in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Sri Lanka where there hasn't been any commercial fishing because of the Civil War. The beaches have been closed for up to 30 years.

We thought this was a relatively pristine environment. Floating on the surface the metre below was just this horrible, crappy, emulsified mess of oil and bits of... It's horrible.

And looking through it you can see the tendrils of the net hanging down. That was certainly one of the most unpleasant dives I've ever done. I spent my childhood in the sea. Growing up in Grand Cayman, we didn't have organized sports after school.

We didn't even have a TV until I was 13. So the sea was my playground. As a freediver, it was the place where I proved myself to myself by traveling to the absolute edge of myself. I need to put as much oxygen in my blood as possible so that I can hold my breath for the three and a half to four minutes that the dive is going to take me. 525 feet is beyond the crushing depth of Second World War submarines.

In pushing so hard, I learned about limits. I got a fiery redhead and she redefines my limits every day. Finally, for me, it feels like there's a point to this bizarre gift I have of, quote, looking pretty and holding my breath. I have the opportunity to pay the sea back. But I'm learning on my feet.

I didn't know that in the last 10 years we've made more plastic than we did in the century before that. Half of those plastic products are considered disposable. But think about it.

How can a disposable product be made of a material that's indestructible? Where does it go? This is a Brutus whale.

It's dying, taking its final breaths. It was found to have six square meters of plastic sheeting inside it. It couldn't eat and it died of malnourishment.

Its digestive system was blocked and it died a terrible, painful death. It's got a hole in it. This is all some of the rubbish that we found in the floating jetsam and flotsam in the ocean.

We'll get Ben to go through it but there's even a pack of unopened biscuits. You can see it's been there for some time with the mollusks that are growing off it. There's crabs.

There's a crab in there. So quite extraordinary. Another one, another one. Another one here. The detritus that's built up in these areas where they don't have the benefit of getting rid of the rubbish.

Well, we're about 20 miles offshore. It's been trapped... in the river mouth and now it's all been flushed out into the sea. This is one of the main areas where we're hunting for the blue whales to film so this is right in their environment. They feed by opening their mouth and just sucking up whatever's in their path.

in hundreds of gallons of water, they express that water and they feed off the krill and tiny fish. But they can't tell the difference between krill and plastic. Disposable lighters.

They just say, you know, this is never going to degrade. These are going to be floating there for a very long time. They'll break down to very small particles and that's if some large marine mammal doesn't come along and swallow them whole.

It's got nowhere to go. This is where it lives now. It's hard to contrast. That area of affected ocean by those plastics with the virgin blue water that you find very close by Well, there's just no comparison the animals of the world deserve the blue ocean not that sort of shit I started to wonder what's happening in oceans elsewhere on the planet 63 billion gallons of oil are used every year just to supply the U.S. with plastic water bottles. The U.S. alone throws away 38 billion bottles every year.

That's 2 million tons of plastic going into U.S. landfills. And that's only from water bottles. In this year alone, every single person on the planet will use and dispose about 300 pounds or 136 kilos of single-use plastic.

Plastic is wonderful because it's durable and plastic is terrible because it is durable. Almost every piece of plastic ever made is still on the planet in some form or another. Plastic production globally this year is expected to be more than 300 million tonnes, half of which we'll use just once.

and then throw away. By 2050, when the population explodes to almost 10 billion people, it's expected that plastic production will triple. The problem with that is, is that today only a fraction of the plastic that we produce is recycled. The rest ends up in our environment and it's coating our lands and our oceans like a disease.

Tasmania smells like freshness. It smells like salt spray. Primitive. It just smells natural.

It has the cleanest air and water measured anywhere on the planet. The ocean to me is my church, it's my temple, it's my synagogue, it's my mosque, it's where I feel the most spiritual, it's where I go to work, where I go for my enjoyment and where I go to think and it's also the environment that challenges me more than any other environment that I know. Growing up, my world was exploring the rock pools. Tiny little fish that I could catch and study and release a day later. My mother was very caring and very supportive of anything that we wanted to do.

And she picked up very early on, I think, my fascination with wildlife. I'm fourth generation journalist. It is believed that he is heading to Moscow. We're on a truck taking rice down to Santa Fe.

Okay, it's not live is it? Hang on, wait, wait. Further outside Kathmandu you travel, the worse it seems the damage becomes. Small villages like this one, Sangku, stood no chance against the moving earth. These rescue teams have been unable to access inside this city.

The town that I grew up in was an industrial town. I remember coming out after training from the Surf Life Saving Club where I was a member with just stinging red eyes. So when I worked for the newspaper I wanted to investigate what was causing that. We started doing testing on the water in Emu Bay and what we found was that there were these heavy amounts of organochlorines and these contain dioxins which are cancer causing agents.

I put this to the government of Tasmania and they admitted for the first time that these dioxins existed and that they were dangerous. Within 10 years all of those industries had closed and today the fish are back in the water. The water is blue again and it's a very beautiful city. We think that when we put something in the trash or when we just toss it from a boat or on a beach, it goes away.

We're now free of the plastic. Over 80% of ocean plastic leaks from land-based sources. Even if you don't live near the ocean, chances are your plastic garbage has found its way to the sea.

The Great Lakes in North America are a good example. 80% of the litter along the shorelines of these majestic lakes is plastic. What trash doesn't remain on the shoreline or sink into the lake sediment flows through the canals and river systems, through the St. Lawrence Seaway and into the Atlantic Ocean. These Great Lakes are just one example.

This level of plastic debris is found all around the world. Thousands of years of agriculture and industry have made the Med one of the most polluted bodies of water on the planet. About 8 million tons of plastic is dumped into the world's oceans every year. More than 50% of marine debris, including plastic, sinks to the bottom of the ocean. Ahoy!

Hello Mike! Hey Papa! We're going bald!

Good to see you! I met up with filmmaker Mike Degree, a marine biologist and also an experienced submersible pilot. It'll be interesting to see just how far reaching it really is to be this far offshore and and see whether the plastic that we know is coming from that direction is winding up.

Out in the depths out here, right? Yeah. I'm really looking forward to, of course, diving the sub, but diving the sub in the Med, a place that has more fishing impact than most bodies of water on the planet.

Remora, Remora, for surface, we will have to evolve to deeper and we will continue to try to see if we can find plastics by going down a little. Well, welcome to the bottom of the ocean, Time Lab. I wish you were down here watching this.

If you weren't hogging the sub, I would be down there. We're just under 400 meters now. About 1200 feet.

And now we're starting to see a plastic bottle exactly. We're now starting to see more and more plastic, more and more tires and pieces of metal and just absolutely disregard for the bottom really. It's just junk everywhere. This in line is a really dangerous thing to see in a submarine.

You can get entangled in it and stuck to the bottom. Not a good thing. Tanya, this is Rehora.

We are right in front of a pretty good-sized bundle of plastic. Is there any chance that you can grab some of it with a manipulator? That's exactly what...

It looks like a lift bag. What do you mean a lift bag? It's a what? It's a parachute.

It's a system that picks up the things you don't have. We saw unexploded bombs, old parachutes and plenty of plastic rubbish. Our scientists commissioned a small, remotely operated vehicle to travel over a mile and a half down to the deep trenches. The ROV is coming down, which is kind of cool.

Here, where the daylight never reaches, the eddies and currents have collected scores of plastic bottles. This plastic could remain here forever. Go down, you know, 350, 375 meters.

Hit bottom, start moving around and immediately start seeing trash. Plastic. Plastic.

Where in the world can you go anymore and not find plastic? Our oceans are driven by five major circular currents, or gyres. These are created by the Earth's rotation, and the result...

predominant winds. Each continent is affected by these massive systems. They collect waste flowing from our rivers and coastlines and over time anything floating within the gyre will eventually move towards the center of the gyre. Our producer Joe Ruxton was familiar with the story about a huge floating island of garbage twice the size of Texas in the North Pacific.

Jo joined Dr. Andrea Neal and her team on an expedition to this great Pacific garbage patch. So we're deploying the Manitral and we're going to look for fine particulates and debris. This mesh here is 333 microns which is in the size range of soil plankton.

The Manitral captures material on the surface. It will take anything the size of a pinhead or larger. Looking out over the vast expanse of clear sparkling water, there is no plastic in sight.

The contents of the trawl are emptied and floated. The tiny pieces of plastic then reveal themselves to Joe and Dr Neil. Scientists estimate that there are more than five trillion pieces of plastic afloat in our oceans worldwide.

There is no floating island of plastic. What exists is far more insidious. What exists is a kind of plastic smog.

These tiny pieces of plastic that are floating on the surface of the ocean come from larger pieces. Over time, the sun's ultraviolet light, ocean wave action and salt break it up into smaller pieces called microplastics. Microplastics have rough pitted surfaces.

Waterborne chemicals from industry and agriculture stick to microplastics, making them toxic poison pills. There are five ocean gyres and the South Pacific is one of the least studied next to the Indian Ocean. I've been to three of the five gyres, so this will be my number four. So let's go fishing for plastic. Alright, let's do it.

Our first study was done in the North Atlantic in 2009. We took a series of seven samples and by weight we then estimated that the North Atlantic had 3,440 metric tons of just microplastics. We're not even including the larger plastics. It seems really heavy. Maybe we caught a coconut!

Wow, look at that! You can see how well this device works. It collects everything.

They look like they've just broken off something. Yeah, and they're super fragile. Michael, I think we found our first no-no.

Okay, so this is the pre-production pellet. Those things float all around the world, don't they? That's right. What does it look like to you?

It looks like a little egg. Sea at night is one of my favorite times. It's when the ocean truly comes alive and you can virtually see the food chain in action. Zooplankton feed on phytoplankton, small fish feed on zooplankton, squid feed on small fish, and so it goes on up and up the food chain. There's some Mactuffids in there.

Well, should we get them on the table and open them up and have a look and see what's in there? We'll start with this guy That's something harder here. Oh, yeah, what's that?

This is the very first sample we did and it was a nitrile so that we could catch lanternfish. After I dried the sample, I hand-picked the pieces of plastic. This is what we found.

So what this means is the feeding that's occurring on the surface of the ocean. has these plastic fragments floating around and is actually intermixing in the food chain. You know that plastic doesn't degrade. And most of the time we say it breaks down, but that's probably not an accurate way to say it. It actually breaks up, so it's more prolific.

proliferated and when it's proliferated there's more opportunities for plastics to be ingested. Many of the marine creatures eating this kind of plastic are in our food chain. Does that mean then that this plastic is getting inside of us? The problem is these plastics adsorb chemicals that are free-floating in the ocean.

So when the fish eat the plastics, those toxins then migrate from the plastic into the muscles or the fats, the parts that we like to eat in fish. It's building up in the fish then as they eat more and more. And so that's the part we like to eat and that's where these chemicals migrate to. This is my level.

Big crab. Nice. Mmm. The prawn, eh?

I like to now more. Hello Rosie. Hi, I'm the mula. Hi, mula.

Salota. Dinner, what are we cooking? We're having taro leaves with fish in coconut milk.

That's a very traditional Fijian village dinner. Yes it is. It smells really good except for the... The smoke.

Yeah. It's really making my eyes water in here. Did you light your fire using plastics for this fire?

Always, yes. And you do that every time you cook food? Three times a day.

Instead of buying kerosene, you use plastic because it's easier to burn. Much cheaper. Much more cheaper.

Easier to find, it's free. Very much, and it's free. I'm feeling that in my eyes.

Do you feel that that affects you in any way? You start having problems in breathing, and you have problems in coughing, and sometimes you can have headache. But we...

It doesn't really bother us because, like, we've used that for a long time. So you're used to it. We're used to it.

Yeah, whereas I'm not. I'm used to it. Which is why I'm crying right now. Yes, you're crying and I hope you're not crying because of me.

There's no chance. I'm crying because I won't get to try this food. What I'd like to do is bring back a scientist if we can and do some measurements on the smoke and just see what kind of chemicals are being released from the plastics as you cook.

Would you let us do that? Yes, of course. And then we can have a look at maybe some of the health implications of starting the fires with the plastics.

Yes, I think that's a good idea. People misuse plastic for a lot of things, but for cooking, I mean, for me it's kind of very unusual circumstances. We want to have a baseline study to show what kind of chemicals are actually breathing in, because the lung is an interface between the two.

that air would be breathing in plus the smell and our blood system and then so we get it in our systems. What did we find today then with the experiment that you did with this device? I'll show you. These filters are white when you put them in. That's brown.

almost black yeah this is a mini lung this could be what this absorbing into their lung pretty much this can't be good for your health can it what we know from this specifically from this pH is and a combination of those is that there are cancer causing that's one thing but there are also maybe stylites in there which evaporating from plastics which have a large percentage of the stylites in there to give plastic properties If you breathe in them, they have hormone-changing properties, so-called endocrine-disrupting properties, and a lot of other health effects as well. Professor Sue Jobling is the editor of the recent World Health Organisation report on endocrine disruptors. Endocrine disruption is disruption of the normal functioning of the body's hormonal system. They fool the body into thinking... that they are hormones and then they either block or mimic the action or production of hormones.

And in doing so they interfere with very many bodily processes, growth, metabolism, reproduction and critically early development. The majority of ocean plastic comes from just six countries. 48k news Billions of plastic pellets have spilled into Hong Kong's southern waters after several containers fell off a ship when typhoon Vicente battered Hong Kong Six containers full of nurdles all of them broke up in the storm and disgorged most of their plastic bags into the sea The vast majority broke open and the contents spilled out Just plastic pellets everywhere.

Yeah, it looked like snow on the beach. On the neighbouring Lamra Island, they found tonnes of this stuff that had come ashore. It seems the company that made the nurdles has unwittingly put their signature on it.

Sinopec, a giant Chinese oil company that makes nurdles for distribution worldwide. Close by are some of the sacks also ripped open. The vast majority of them would have been carried off by the typhoon to disperse their contents far and wide.

Four of the six are here. So we got the one on the top here. It's the one we found at Beaufort Island. It's totally destroyed. It's a 40-foot container.

We've been told it carries 1,000 sacks. Still one that hasn't been found. Still one out there.

There's a million pellets plus in these bags, so every single bag saves thousands of marine species, so every bag counts at this point. Every day pellets are getting washed out and trying to get that sense of urgency across. We put a call to action out on Facebook. Facebook, go to your local beach, this is what you're looking for.

These are the bags, these are the pellets. We came up with a rapid action plan, get a quick survey of the coast so we can see the bigger picture and from that then we isolated some hot spots. Which beach, Chengcheng, Moai Wo, needs more people to help?

Beach number one. I set up a Facebook page, Plastic Disaster Hong Kong, and it went from 80 to 1,000 likes in a few hours, and it became... pretty much the one place where all the information was being posted by everybody and even the government were checking it. Sinopec were checking it. Sinopec sent down people from their head office.

They had general managers on the beaches. They have been very responsible, they have been down, we had an emergency meeting about it. They're very concerned and they're offering all the assistance they can. Thanks for helping guys. There's some more concentrated pellets down the end there.

Once you let people know what the problem is, people have their own ideas and can contribute their own ingenuity to help solve the problem. The people of Hong Kong realized the severity of the problem and just came out in their masses to help and that is something I will never ever forget. Yinghung.

So this is what they found in the fish farm. The pellets like this floating in the sea and then they found the bags. We bought three fish, cut them open and each fish had five, six, seven pellets in it.

Eat slowly. Eat slowly? Eat slowly.

Because they can't ingest anything? They can't take in any more food? They buy a lot of fish.

They can't buy any more fish in the streets. Even the supermarkets won't buy? So it's completely destroyed the local market.

In a recent study published in Scientific Reports, UC Davis researchers examined 76 fish slated for human consumption in Indonesia and 64 in California. They found that in both groups, roughly one quarter had anthropogenic debris in their guts. The researchers found plastic in the Indonesian population and plastic and textile fibers in the American one. When sampling blue mussels at six locations along the coastlines of the Gulf of Mexico, France, Belgium and the Netherlands, microplastics were present in every single organism examined. When you eat shellfish you're often eating the entire animal, so you're more likely to eat plastic.

Lord Howe Island is a World Heritage Site. and home to migratory seabirds like the shearwaters. Seabirds are incredibly helpful because they act like an army of scientists.

They travel thousands of miles across the ocean. They pick up plastic off the surface of the ocean, they bring it back to their rookeries where they feed it to their chicks. And that provides an incredible amount of scientific data in terms of where the plastic comes from, its distribution, and how it breaks up on the ocean surface.

Dr. Jennifer Lavers, she's devoted her life to studying the plight of seabirds. She-waters are incredible birds. They migrate thousands of miles, stopping only here to breed.

All species of shearwater nest in the earth. Their parents return from their distant ocean feeding grounds by night to feed their chicks in their burrows. After 70 to 90 days, the chicks venture above ground for the first time.

They stretch their wings and begin developing their flight muscles. We're going to put some ambient temperature salt water, just like he would normally be fed by his parents. And Ian's just going to hold the mouth open here.

And I'm going to put the tube down into the stomach, if we can get him to cooperate for a moment. Have you ever received serious injury from one of these? Indeed, have I ever. More than I can possibly count.

Depending on how full his stomach is, we could be here for a little while. Nope, still nothing. Still nothing.

There we go. Whoa, look at that. Need to get some of the oil and stuff out of the way. Very slippery with all that oil, ain't it? That's a lot of plastic, isn't it?

Yeah, and some interesting colours. The red is quite uncommon. It looks like we've got quite a few of the resin pellets, the nurdles, lots of microplastics. There's no way at 935 grams that he would be able to take to the air. Make a bit of a note, he's got some damage to his lower mandible.

41.7. Garbage thrown away in the United States can make its way to Antarctica. Plastic in our coastal waters is pulled into the center of massive wind-driven churning circular gyres. There are many other ocean currents also diverting the trash all around the surface of the ocean. In reality it's just one ocean with no boundaries.

Yeah, the stomach is very, very full and if we look here, there's some very dark pieces, some very light white pieces and if you see, you know, as I push on this, it's absolutely rigid, completely, completely full of plastic all the way up. Oh, look at that. Absolutely no doubt that this bird died as a result of that plastic. That is literally a gutful of plastic. This is quite alarming, isn't it?

Oh, it's awful. A range of plastic types and colours. We've got everything from the blues and the reds to the...

Your stomach's just filled with it. Big pieces too. Big sharp pieces. Oh wow, look at the size of that big black piece. That is an enormous piece of plastic.

Unbelievable. Look at the size of that. Jen, I counted 234 pieces of plastic out of that one bird.

Is that a record? Not even close, unfortunately. So for this species, the record is 276 pieces of plastic inside of one 90-day...

old chick. That plastic when we weighed it out accounted for 15% of that bird's body mass so that's a pretty scary statistic. If we translate that into human terms it gets even worse. That would be equivalent to you and I having somewhere around 6 or 8 kilos of plastic inside of your stomach.

It's equivalent to about 12 pizzas worth of food inside of your stomach. Midway Island is miles away from any coastline, but it has one of the biggest populations of Laysan albatross in the world. Like the shearwater, their parents have travelled thousands of kilometres to find food. It's quite a bit of plastic for just one little bird.

The parents were trying to do the right thing. There's a lot of squid beaks in here, and this purple color is evidence of the squid ink. It's just a shame that every now and then they got it wrong and got it wrong in a bad way. To try and wrap your mind around the condition of this animal and the quality of its life really is quite an overwhelming thing.

I do have some pretty rough days, have to go home and really wrap my mind around where do we go from here. All week we've been cutting up birds and this is without a doubt the absolute worst one that I've come across. That is an incredible amount of plastic. I've come to Asinara, a small island off the northern tip of Sardinia, to meet with Christina Fossi, a professor of ecotoxicology at the University of Siena. The turtle rescue centre here has just received a loggerhead turtle.

The animals come from Corsica, so from France, and they have identified the animals because they have problems with floating. So it was floating in a very... unusual way and then they have discovered that the causes is the presence of a large amount of plastic in the stomach. This plastic?

This plastic they produce gas and then the animal are not more able to go down. Does he have to perform a surgery to remove this? No, no, he uses very simple stuff. One that was used to remove the gas from the intestinal tract.

Then he used an antibiotic, a normal antibiotic, in order to save the animal from infection. And then the last point was to use a fat diet. Treat the gas, get everything moving. And...

and get it out. So commonly, plastic bag that's floating on the surface can be misunderstood as a gel fish. And then they can eating days after days.

Plastic bag or other pieces of plastic, obviously the consequence at the end can be lethal for the animals. Christina's name is well recognized around the world for her stand against the killing of whales and dolphins. We use the approach of the skin biopsy in order to identify the level of chemicals and the toxicological effect on these wild animals.

Today we are moving on the Gulf of Hacinara, try to see some bottlenose dolphins, then we collect some microplastic samples. An increasing number of dolphins and turtles in the Mediterranean are turning up dead. Christina's focus is to get to the bottom of this mystery.

And she has a very unusual way of getting the information she needs. Here they are! Look at the pressure! Go! They're galloping!

They're galloping! They're galloping! They're going to be fine.

The dart bounces off, taking a small piece of flesh with it, which the scientists use to conduct their research. It is very difficult. Argh! What's the pressure?

It's very big, I don't know, but... So we can start to process the biopsy. It was collected with the darts. The species is bottlenose dachshund. It's one of the common species around the coast.

And we suppose also one of the most polluted ones. You expect that you're finding derivatives from plastics in the blubber of these animals because they're consuming other animals that are directly consuming the plastics. Exactly.

And so if the plastics are in the food chain for the dolphin, they're also in our food chain. Exactly. We have already very interesting results, but I would like to invite you to the lab. When animals eat plastic, they're also consuming the toxins attached to the plastic. Toxins pass into the bloodstream.

There, they bioaccumulate in the fatty tissue and around the vital organs. When animals use the stored fat, the toxins circulate around the body, interfering with reproduction, metabolism, growth, kidney and liver function. As we have seen this day, there is clear evidence that plantain species and fin whale, for example, have a very high level of phthalate that we consider one of the plastic derivatives.

But that data can represent a real warning signal of exposure to the Mediterranean environment, including humans, in a real toxicological risk. Smoky Mountain 1 operated as a 2 million metric ton waste dump for more than 40 years. It closed in 1995. This garbage tip contains so much methane, which was produced by the garbage within it, that when it reaches a certain temperature, it catches fire. That creates this smoke that comes out of the top of the pile and filters over the city of Manila.

So sweet potatoes, corn, sugar cane, all growing on 40 years of garbage. You worked here as a 12 year old? I earn money to support my family needs.

And what would you collect up here? Recyclables like bottles, cans and plastics. This local chap here is still harvesting the plastic that's in the ground. Yeah, the plastic. It's just everywhere.

What's the most common disease here? Pulmonary. Pulmonary, such as tuberculosis?

Yeah. Yes. Emphysema? Emphysema, yes. My father died of emphysema.

No one knows how much plastic has accumulated in the sea in the last 50 years, but one thing is sure, the pace has picked up. The world of plastics is present everywhere, yet this presence is but a premonition of a future world. Our children will see a bit of that world, and our grandchildren will not see the end of it.

The smell is almost indescribable. It's kind of like a cross between sewage and oil, and it's everywhere. The ground to within two inches above it is covered in flies. I could see a child flying a kite.

You could see the kite was made from a plastic bag and he'd fashioned this himself and used straws as the... mainframe for the kite. If you got behind him and looked towards the sky, he could have been any child anywhere in the world.

Every time it rains here, every time the wind blows offshore, the sludge, the plastic from all of that rubbish ends up straight in Manila Bay and I guess into the stomachs of whatever marine animals are still able to survive in the bay. A lot of plastic here. I guess a lot of this is brought in by the river.

Yeah, it came from the Pasig River and also it's being washed up by the ocean during typhoons. And most of the people living here also throw their garbage in this area because there are... There's no garbage collectors coming in the area to collect the garbage. How much waste, plastic waste, is put into the waterways here? Do you have any idea?

Around 1,500 tonnes daily. 1,500 tonnes every day? Yes.

One more, one more! Ready? You go!

Sup guys! 5, 2, 3, 4! Yeah!

Thank you! Well I have to say, you're all much better basketballers than I am. I'm so bad. Again, again.

I'm sorry. I'm no good at basketball. You're very good at basketball, this guy.

Thank you! Very good. Do you all live here?

Yeah. In Pier 18? We live, oh yes.

And you play basketball all the time? Yeah. Do you go to school?

Yes. No. No?

Yes? You go to school? No. No? So what do you do during the day?

I scavenge. Scavenge? Yeah. What do you scavenge for?

The plastic. The plastic? Ah.

And what do you do with the plastic? Go to the... Yeah? And what do they give you for the plastic?

Money. Money? Is it good money? What kind of money? Very rough.

$4.50. Yeah? Is that... For one day. For one day.

Yeah. And what do you do with the money? I give my mother.

Your mother? Yeah. Yes.

And what does she do with the money? Buy the rice. The rice.

Yeah. Right. So you can play, grow up, be healthy, play good basketball. Show me. Give me a shot.

Most of the waste created by the individuals within each of these villages, towns and cities generally ends up on the streets or in their canals. It's easy to understand how these sorts of places become delivery systems for plastic into our oceans. I understand that this was 10 feet deep in plastic. Literally 10 feet of plastic that was pulled out of this canal.

First we dredged, but when we realised that we were digging down to China, we stopped. What we did was to cover it up with good soil and garden soil and then we put up the coco pillows it's Made from coconut husk and then we spread it up until there. We vegetated it and the vetiver grass The plants take the rest of the waste out of the water. Yes.

And now we've got fish swimming. And turtles. Wildlife.

So it's clean enough for animals to live in now. Is it drinkable? Not yet. Not yet. Not yet.

Working on that one. Working on that one. And so you're going to do this project now throughout the canals and river systems of Manila. Yes, with the same idea of putting bio-remediation and phytoremediation together. Do you think that will solve the plastic pollution problem here?

The one that will solve the plastic solution is the behaviour of the people around the sterile. So maybe we'll start with that first and then we'll solve everything else afterwards. I'm off to visit the tiny isolated coral atoll of Tuvalu in the South Pacific near Fiji. As a mother, I care deeply about the effects of plastic on our health. Tuvalu gained its independence in 1978. It began importing foreign goods and food, and with that came plastic.

I realized just how tiny this nation was when I flew in over the atoll. Tuvalu is a microcosm of the entire planet, and they have nowhere to put the plastic. During World War II, in order to build an...

airstrip for the Allies in the Pacific Theater, large quantities of coral were dug up and carted off to be crushed and mixed for the tarmac. Gaping holes left behind are called burrow pits. They were never filled back in and are now used for refuse.

How long have you lived in this Barrow Pit? 25 years. So you're 25 years old. In your 25 year lifetime, have you seen the amount of plastic in your surrounding community increase?

Yeah, very increased. Before, in my early childhood, I don't see any plastic because we don't use to import our packaging plastic. Tell me what it was like growing up here as a child.

We always swim with the barrel pit. We don't know that there is effectiveness to us. We just swim and then we go.

We like fishing. You used to fish out of the barrel pit and eat the fish, but you don't do that anymore? No, we don't eat the fish.

We just feed the pigs. You feed the fish to the pigs? Yeah.

What kind of health problems are you seeing people suffer from? Low, some people they get cancer and then some people they don't get pregnant. People in the Barrow Pit are having problems conceiving?

Mm-mm. If things don't change in the Barrow Pit, but the people stay here, what do you think will happen? I think they get disease and they don't want to leave.

Like, this is a nice place, but because of that important packaging, they destroy our paradise. And I want a good future for my children, because I love my children. How does a US Navy aircraft carrier handle its waste?

With about 4,500 sailors on board, just shy of half the population of Tuvalu, the amount of waste generated every day is enormous. The US Navy is looking for a way to deal with shipboard waste without having to go into port. The belly of the latest aircraft carrier will be fitted with a gleaming maze of steel pipes to devour the ship's waste.

Pyrogenesis of Montreal was contracted by the US Navy to develop a green technology capable of processing the waste generated by these sailors. At the heart of this technology is a plasma torch that changes the molecular structure of whatever is put into it, transforming it back to its core elements. Better still it has no detrimental effect on the environment, it runs off its own energy and is affordable. If they could shrink the plant into the size of something that you can put into a shipping container, take to small islands like Tuvalu, set it up so that you can put in all of the rubbish that's existing on the island, and have it turn into inert or non-toxic substances, that's going to go a long way to help solving the problems that exist on islands in the Pacific.

If an innovative workable solution like pyrogenesis is not implemented in places like Tuvalu, the quality of life will continue to decline. The island will eventually be choked by its own plastic waste. Combined with the rising sea level caused by climate change, Tuvalu's habitability is under serious threat. One of the kids we've befriended here, Dita, has developed a pretty bad lingering cough. We think his problems might be linked to a hobby he shares with his friends, making jewellery out of melted plastic.

He's a bit of a grumpy boy. Tanya is extremely protective of her children. So she's incredibly engaged in their well-being, particularly where she has control.

And she has control over her environment. This is Charlie, huh? Surprised he wasn't born with a face mask. Yeah, right? And a nose clip?

It wasn't easy for me to conceive. I'm an older mum. I worked really hard for this. All the time trying to conceive, being really clean in my body.

Went through my entire pregnancy without taking so much as a Tylenol. Throw the line in there, Tills. This is actually catfish corner. My kids make me really passionate about the subject.

Annoyingly passionate. You know, ask my husband. He'll roll his eyes. He goes from this guy who is washing Ziploc bags... And I just think, oh, I'm winning.

My husband is washing Ziploc bags. I see them drying in the sink, and I'm like, yes. But then he'll forget, and I see plastic wrap over a food.

And I'm like, no. Now, you've had a a very healthy lifestyle. You haven't been able to control every aspect of it.

So the likelihood is he may have plastic in his system. It's terrifying. It's awful. And it's made me question sometimes, gosh, is even having children the right thing to do?

I'm still very, very motivated to obviously do the right thing by myself and my family, but also to try to incite change where I can as an environmentalist, as an activist. I'm optimistic because it beats the alternative. Austin is a very cool city. It's environmentally aware. It was the first city in Texas to ban the plastic bag.

It's an oasis of eco-friendly people in a state that's headquarters for the largest oil companies and petrochemical plants. Plastipure is where we formulate and test plastics for their physical characteristics. On the Sertichem side, where we are here, we test plastics and other substances as well as individual chemicals. to see if they have estrogenic activity. A lot of plastics, perhaps the great majority probably, release chemicals that have estrogenic activity.

Estrogenic activity or... EA happens when a chemical like BPA or phthalate leaches from plastic and enters the body where it mimics the hormone estrogen. 92.6% of Americans aged 6 and older have detectable levels of BPA in their bodies.

The levels in children between 6 and 11 years of age are twice as high as those in older Americans. Are all of those chemicals not regulated? No, the FDA at present does not have any regulations for how many chemicals and what levels of chemicals having estrogenic activity can be released from plastics or from cosmetics or papers or silicones. So how is the general public protected from that kind of thing? Uh, they aren't.

They aren't. From baby bottles to sippy cups to food can liners to water bottles, bottles hydrating the youngest athletes consumers have been exposed to a root chemical called bisphenol a or bpa an artificial sex hormone used as a core building block in close to 7 billion pounds of plastic on the market today because of its strength and resiliency this isn't a weak contaminant this is a powerful contaminant and it's trading right at the core of american public health when something says that it's bpa free is that something i can trust over 90 percent of all plastics that don't have BPA, nonetheless, release chemicals having estrogenic activity. So BPA is not the only bad guy that we need to be looking out for? BPA is only one bad guy.

It's like saying, I've caught Al Capone. I just handled the criminal problem in the United States. We do quite a bit of this testing to see where the issues are, but we also use that data to help manufacturers make safer products. Right. The average consumer goes, Paliwadawada?

You know, I don't get it. Just tell me what is the right one, what is safe, what isn't. When we look at baby balls, we have to look at the baby balls. at all the different components that come in contact with the milk or with the baby.

All of the hard and clear materials that we've tested leach these estrogenic chemicals. Other things like the nipple are generally made from silicone or latex. Latex always From our test, it's come back positive for EA, and silicone generally is positive for estrogenic activity. And stainless steel is obviously, I thought, a better option.

If it doesn't have a liner, stainless steel tends to be fine, and glass tends to be fine. to be fine. But colorants tend to leach a lot of chemicals, so we try to stay away from colorants when we can. When we can't, white and black tend to be the least.

And we've started using a lot more foil in our house. rather than this stuff? Ful is a better option. We use ful in the lab because ful doesn't leach these chemicals. This, I know, styrofoam, is a personal pet peeve of mine.

The likelihood is estrogenic chemicals will leach out of styrene products. Cold fluids, anything? Likely hot fluids would increase the amount of leaching, but it would still be leaching something.

The majority of plastics increase the release of chemicals having estrogenic activity after they've been ex- exposed particularly sunlight how do you not consume it you can't go anywhere without seeing food wrapped in plastic you can't go to a restaurant without you know takeout boxes being in plastic hot foods going into plastic my answer there is well demand safer plastic all we're gonna do is go inside the restaurants and ask them about I will ask them for food and see what they can give it to us in a plastic container Hello, how are you doing? Good, how are you? I'm not too bad. Can I get the power plant?

Can I get a small berry blast? Hello there, can I get an orange juice please? I'm getting the beer. A BLT. A BLT.

Do you have anything not wrapped in plastic? I have nothing to do with the food. Do you have anything other than plastic to put it in? No, you can buy our giant little reusables. Yeah but that's still plastic.

That's what I was going to get. Without the plastic lid's fine. Is that paper? Yes.

It is. Great. Yeah. Do you have anything other than plastic?

We have that one in a cold press. It's actually exposed to less oxygen, so it's a way better juice with twice the amount of vitamins and nutrients. That sounds really healthy. Yeah, it's the way to go for the balance. Yeah, that sounds great.

Cool, man. But do you serve it in anything other than plastic containers? We have them made at our central kitchen every morning.

Yeah. And they bring them to us on the cold press juicer. Yeah. So it's ready to go bottled for convenience.

But that's in plastic. Do you have something not plastic? No. And you serve all your drinks in plastic cups as well? Yes.

Keep the straw because that's plastic. I'll have to leave it then, I think. Yeah? Yeah. Okay, that's okay.

Yeah? Okay. Well, thanks.

very much yeah all right what can i get you yeah i felt like i was a bit of an eco warrior tell me what's my food wrapped in it's not plastic is it i'm going to die of something yeah but do you want to die early or late My boyfriend actually tells me every single day of my life to not be drinking water bottles from my car but if I'm thirsty, I'm thirsty. You know what, he's right and you've got that wrapped in paper, that's good. That's impressive for a takeaway place. I can make a salad and a stick of it like a few of these.

That'd be better than sticking it in plastic. If you could put it maybe between two paper plates. It's just all the chemicals in this that get into the food. You've made such a great sandwich by the look of it. We gave in to the sales hype of the 50s that plastic was disposable.

That we could throw it away. There is no away. It's so very hard as a parent, as a mum, as a woman, to feel like you can do the best thing, you know, that you can do the right thing anymore. Every day, you know, we're contributing potentially to a dreadful health problem later on down the line.

Now, there's nothing else to put it in. What this white stuff is, is like the worst of the worst. Like a rubbish bin, the earth is filling up with the stuff.

There is nowhere else to put it. That's why as much as possible, we choose foods and drinks that don't... have plastic around them. It starts with the individual and it starts with us.

What do you do? You can't possibly filter out these tiny particles from the entire ocean. You can't filter the entire ocean.

In fact, so much plastic is in the ocean now in a form that we really can't get to it that I feel the emphasis needs to immediately shift toward stop putting it in. My degree is right. But how do we get to the point where we can stop putting it in?

Hi there. Speak to the man. That's me.

I noticed when I came in here and ordered my sandwich and my drink, they both came in plastic containers. Our cups are 100% plant-based, so they can be composted. You're one of the first places in Austin that I've come to that... that has an alternative. Is that right?

Best alternative option I've got for you today. That's perfect. I appreciate it.

At least you've got an alternative. Exactly. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

You have a great weekend. You too. Find me some Gala apples that are not in plastic.

Demand. Remind that your supermarket deliver your food products in paper or just as they come. They don't need to be wrapped in plastic.

And if they are, take the plastic off and leave it with them. And say, you dispose of it and dispose of it properly. Because once it becomes their problem, you'll find that they will do something about it.

Don't put your plastic rubbish in a dumpster where you know it's going to landfill. In 1991, Germany became the first country in the world to pass packaging laws forcing plastic manufacturers to be responsible for the recycling or disposal of any packaging material they sell. The industry set up a company to overhaul the packaging laws.

of a sea plastic waste collection recognised by the green dot. When I was a kid, we used to run around the neighbourhood collecting glass bottles to take to the store to collect the five-cent refund that we'd get. Plastic packaging pretty much killed the bottle deposit system, but here in Germany they've reinstated it. You can take your plastic bottles to almost any supermarket and put them in this machine.

And what it does is it reads a barcode, which tells the machine the kind of plastic that it is, that it's recyclable, and which retailer it comes from. So the consumer gets a $0.25 deposit off every bottle. The retailer gets the plastic, which they can sell to recyclers for a little bit more.

a lucrative amount of money, and on the streets of Germany, you very rarely see these things anymore, because everybody recycles them. The Germans demonstrated that there is profit to be made. Today, recycling is a lucrative industry.

Pressure your government. Tell them that you do not accept that plastic should be in the environment. The manufacturers of plastic have their own lobby groups and they'll lobby the government to get the best possible deal for them to get their products into the marketplace for the least cost. And the least cost means that they don't have to be responsible for it. If they manufacture it, they should be responsible for its collection and for its proper disposal.

We will all be better off if less plastic is manufactured in the first place. Scientists are already calling for a new technology. calling for governments to reclassify plastic as a hazardous substance, because then existing laws about hazardous substances will already be in effect. Plastic bags and water bottles are the worst single-use offenders. What if we ban them outright to stop that vicious cycle?

Rwanda is one of the very few countries that has banned plastic bags. Rwanda being an agricultural country, whereby we don't have a lot of industries, we have tried to assess the impact of plastic bags on our soil specifically and on our animals, specifically livestock. Then after the assessment we have decided why do we keep this when we know very well the negative impact of it. I think it's a shocking waste of valuable resources that these materials are being put in the landfill. They're so much more valuable.

If you put them in a landfill, the cost in Europe is round about a minus £100 a tonne, $150. But as a useful plastic, it could be worth plus $1,200, $1,500 a ton. So it's a huge difference in value. We actually have the answers now to recycling most plastics.

And the challenge really is to get everyone on board with those ideas and also to get the collection infrastructure going right so that we get big volumes coming concentrated in one place so that people can then have the confidence to invest in the recovery technology. One. Sorted recycled plastics are brought into factories like this where they can become part of a circular economy, cleaned of labels and processed into newborn nurdles ready to be sold once again. As recyclers we think governments could do more to encourage development of circular supply chains. A lot of recycled plastics can be used back as we say in closed loop, back in the same products and that's happening a lot with bottles and pots, tubs and trays from the packaging stream.

But there are plenty of other outlets where a short life item like a piece of packaging can go into a long life application. For example in construction products, in automotive and in making cars and trains and aeroplanes and things like that. Where you can get the performance of the recycled polymer just as good as virgin material that's come out of the ground.

You can take it from a bottle one day to a shirt the next day. From that shirt then it can become a component in a vehicle. It can become something that's sent to space. Through the plastic bank. We make plastic waste a currency so that people in developing countries can earn an income while preventing plastic from entering the ocean.

David Katz and Sean Frankson founded the Plastic Bank. They established a social plastic recycling system in Haiti that exchanges plastic for solar cell phone charging, sustainable cook stoves and cash. It's like a fair trade plastic where it's ethically sourced. It's an above market rate income that they earn. The people in need can go and collect the plastic and create a micro economy around recycling and this is something that we can scale anywhere in the world.

This is a self-sustaining social enterprise. All of the plastic collected through the plastic bank goes through the recycling process and is sold as social plastic to be used in manufacturing by values-aligned brands or it can be used to 3D print. They're using it instead of virgin plastics.

If you're choosing between two products and one's made of social plastic and one's not, you're really choosing between do I help the planet or do I hurt the planet. Social plastic is really our way that we can create an organic global infrastructure. New technology means that waste can now be converted into energy.

In Europe alone there are 15 million tons of end-of-life plastic going into landfill every year. Synar, a waste-to-fuel company. designed a machine that turns end-of-life plastic like candy wrappers and snack packets, which aren't usually recyclable, into diesel.

Using a heating process called pyrolysis, it turns an environmental problem into a valuable commodity. Each machine can process about 20 tons of plastic daily, making about 18,000 liters of diesel or the equivalent of 113 barrels of oil a day. Islands like Lord Howe manage their plastic waste with solutions that match the way they live. There is no burning and there is no landfill on this island. Food waste, the garden waste, paper and cardboard gets composted.

All the recyclables are baled and sent back to the mainland and currently the island's diverting 85% of all their waste from landfill. This is the recycling sorting facility. We can separate, we can bale everything.

You can galvanise a community. to do amazing things. The whales are diving into a sea of plastic bottles and the bottles were collected from the Bristol 10k race. It was important to the artist Sue Lipscomb to make this sculpture out of sustainable materials. She used recycled plastics and locally grown willow.

There are 70,000 bottles. That means in some way up to 70,000 people have contributed to this art. I kick off by telling the kids something about whales and the reaction is, it's just fantastic.

They love hearing about how big they are, they really get it. They ask you all sorts of perceptive questions that an adult might not think about and I really just love the enthusiasm of the pupils. Wouldn't it be great if politicians 40 years down the line still had that same enthusiasm that school children show when they come here? Wouldn't the world be a different place?

We've treated the ocean as a place to throw things, dispose of things that we did not want close to where we thought we lived. In 2015, natural history broadcaster Sir David Attenborough met with President Barack Obama. Obama, who spent his boyhood in the natural splendour of Hawaii, grew up watching Attenborough's films.

What we're seeing is global trends. that depend on the entire world working together. Yes. My daughters, I find, Malia and Sasha, they're much more environmentally aware, this generation, than I think some previous generations.

They think it's a... self-apparent that we've got a problem and that we should be doing something about it. I absolutely agree and the young people, they care, they know that this is the world that they're going to grow up in and they're going to spend the rest of their lives in.

But I think it's more idealistic than that. They actually believe that humanity, human species has no right to destroy and despoil regardless. They actually feel that very powerfully. And the whole of the ecosystem. ecosystems of the world are based on healthy ocean and if that part of the planet Becomes dysfunctional it goes wrong Then the whole of life on this planet will suffer The whole planet is where we live There is no a way that you can put things and expect that they're really away This this phrase not in my backyard the ocean is everyone's backyard or front yard or living space.

No matter how you look at it, this planet is governed by the blue part. The world truly is mostly a blue place. I'll be just as worried about Tilly and Charlie when they're in their 70s and 80s and I'm long gone. I still want them to be healthy and certainly not suffering the effects of any decisions that I made. I want to go back to where it all started.

I want to go back to the whales. I want to go and find the juvenile that we first saw. If whales could talk to us, I imagine they would ask us, what were we thinking?

Every other species on the planet works towards the benefit of the ecology and environment that it lives in. But us humans, we just seem like passengers on this earth. I want to say to the parents of the juvenile, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry on behalf of humanity for putting plastic into your home. And I want to say we'll share this story because from knowing comes caring and from caring comes change.

The water is wide, I can't cross o'er, and neither have I wings to fly. Build me a boat that can carry two. And both shall roam, my love, horizon beckons us.

Transcript for:Blue Whales and Plastic Pollution Impact

Transcript for:
Blue Whales and Plastic Pollution Impact