[Music] there's a dead bird over there see if there's anything in there Oh oh my gosh oh we see a piece of plastic there oh there's a bigger piece of plastic coming out he really have a bird that was alive potentially yesterday and you look inside and it's just like night and day and this is an average amount of plastic in this chip [Music] plastic plastic plastic something new the resin which can be molded by heat and pressure to initiate at the dawn of the 20th century science invented synthetic plastics in the world would never be the same today everywhere we go we are surrounded by plastic we drink from it eat from it wear it and use it in almost every part of our daily lives this miraculous invention and its evolution have created a new era of cheap convenient and disposable products that have transformed the way we live and it's hard to imagine what we would do without them Plastics is too firmly embedded in modern life but plastic is unlike any other substance on earth for one very specific reason it never goes away what happens plastic when it gets thrown away where do you think it goes when you throw it away no word never goes away do you know what plastic is made out of cloth no we melt it down from something any guesses what plastic weighed out yes Debra ball animal kingdom vegetable kingdom no just got along the mineral it's not a matter later maybe this little thermo belongs to a kingdom all of its own the fourth kingdom the kingdom of plastic because plastic is such a perfect creation it's virtually indestructible which means that almost every molecule of plastic ever created is still somewhere on this planet so if it never deteriorates where does it go have you heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch no the Great Pacific Garbage what [Music] my name is Angela Sun I've never been much of an environmentalist or what some may call crunchy or granola but ever since I was a kid I've been fascinated by the ocean and everything in it a group on the beaches of California swimming snorkeling then surfing and scuba diving with new technology you can pretty much surf anywhere when I got into media and journalism I was always interested in telling stories that involve the water [Applause] so a few years ago when I heard people talking about this supposed island of garbage floating somewhere out in the Pacific I was immediately intrigued I mean I was used to seeing trash on the beaches and sometimes even floating in the waves but an island despite the fact that there were a few articles that mentioned this island they were conflicting reports about what it was where it was and how big it was even people who had heard of it seem to have different ideas about it I know it exists I know a little bit about it but I don't know its origins if garbage island was indeed real I wanted to see it for myself as I did more research I found that there is a tiny piece of land in one of the most remote places on earth that held the key it's a difficult place to get to and even though it's in the middle of nowhere the area is controlled by the US government and access to it is restricted but I wasn't going to give up so I applied for the necessary permits and permissions getting through all the red tape was a process that took nearly three years and just when I thought all hope was lost everything came together [Music] [Applause] right now we are in a private Airport in Honolulu and we are about to get on board and fly for hours on a private charter flight to Midway Atoll right here which is literally in the middle of the Pacific Ocean midway point from the west coast of the US and the east coast of Japan only one government plane flies out there every couple of weeks carrying supplies along with researchers and maintenance workers I feel like I'm in a dark sauna no cars are allowed here so transportation is by foot or golf cart as we drove to our accommodations I realized right away that getting around this place is harder than it seems everywhere or trying to dodge them in the dark Midway is best known for its instrumental role in world war two [Music] On June 7th 1942 the Allied forces defeated the Japanese and gain control of the Pacific turning the tide of war located at the top of papahanaumokuakea marine monument it is home to a vast array of wildlife more than 2 million albatross nest here for part of the year that's about 70 percent of all the Laysan albatross in the world there's no one in sight except for me and you and the albatross and a whole lot of plastic in this small remote place with very few people tens of thousands of pounds of garbage wash up on our beaches every year clean it up so this will be just the accumulation at all months time what is this it's like a melted piece of plastic it looks like plastic spaghetti [Music] what the heck is a computer monitor doing floating in the ocean in the middle of the Pacific check it out it's got Korean writing on it and mixed into all of this stuff is bird feathers and bird bones [Music] we've seen debris it comes from North America from Asia from lighters to bottle caps to propane tanks to truck tires I can't vote that garbage is coming from the big population snares of the world and it is definitely collecting here in the middle of the Pacific [Music] it turns out the truth behind garbage island is stranger than the myth the request is always for a picture of the island of garbage the trash island and there is no such island the debris is dispersed I mean let's talk about the largest single feature on our planet which is the North Pacific Ocean captain charles moore discovered the Garbage Patch in the late 1990s and founded the algalita marine research organization to study it while ocean basins are like a bathtub you can think of them that way the oceans currents in the Pacific move in a giant circle known as a gyre kind of like a slow-motion whirlpool or toilet flushing so over time all of the debris that washes into the sea from the coasts of economic giants North America and Asia or from ships collect in a centralized zone from somewhere around twice the size of Texas to the size of the entire continental United States the reason why there aren't any pictures of it is because it's basically invisible you have to sail through it with a net to know it's there most of the debris is found beneath the surface [Music] whatever compared plastic in the ocean to the available food lying near the western edge of the patch Midway and the Northwest Hawaiian Islands are situated like a fine toothed comb in the path of the currents continually collecting huge quantities of plastic and other trash that passed through when I first got here I was amazed that there was so much washing up on the beach I thought it was just a hoax because you never could really find pictures of it you hear something like yeah it's a gut it's a plastic - two times the size of Texas and you think there's no way you know but then you actually see all this plastic washer when you walk through the sand the majority of it is plastic it's not coral it's not organic things its plastic pieces the future will bring plastic fabrics wondrously fine shoes more glamorous than Cinderella's homes throughout will be bright with color with many contributions of the kingdom of plastics dreams like this and many more will become reality seeing all of this plastic in front of me I wondered how did plastic become so pervasive in our daily lives and how did the world become so dependent on it wasn't until the late 1930s the plastics came into their roll all the wealth of the undies was in enemy hands German a well aware of difficulties in obtaining raw materials auditor scientists to develop substitutes a peaceful America shaken from its message Eve took off its coat rolled up its leaves and left to work but war is a greedy monster soldiers must be fed clothed housed and equipped but how our most promising man-made replacement plastic the plastics industry grew from producing a modest 20 million pounds in 1927 to a total of 650 million pounds by 1943 that's an increase of over 3000 percent which exceeded that of any other industry 85 percent of that production was devoted to war the next statement was eerily foreshadowing plastics will play a larger role in peace as they do in war here at the Visitor Center they have some of the pieces that have been found on the beach this is Rocksteady from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles so whoever owned this obviously grew up in the 80s you know it brings you down memory lane to see all of these objects but it's sad to see that the stuff that I threw out might have ended up here and these toys don't go away [Music] you were gone a bit no not so far while beachcombing earlier that day a 12 year old visiting Midway stumbled upon a most interesting find I was beachcombing looking for plastics and stuff in it so this bottle and what do you know but there's a letter inside dear finder what country are you from when you get this letter please write back to me Mark Twain elementary school miss Duncan third grade Long Beach California 1999 can I bring that back for you since I live in LA here and I'll try to find that person for you it's just a testament of how old this stuff is that Louis could find a message in a bottle written over 10 years ago and how it goes full circle producers have kept putting out more and more of this stuff and expecting that we as taxpayers are going to pick up the cost of cleaning it up they're not really talking about what the product actually costs at the twenty five million dollars of the taxpayers they spend every year to clean up the plastic bags and to clean up the mess our plastic comes from oil and gas five of the six most profitable corporations in the world are oil and gas companies their plan is to make more money as we're finding out it's a material that can harm nature it's just if you're gonna make it and you're gonna sell it should have some plan we can legislate that we have it for four good reasons because it you make more money when you're not responsible for the waste they can't just make it and say goodbye they have to create an infrastructure to take it back if a business model is working if it produces billions of revenue there has to be an incentive for the industry to change to get out of this mode the United States alone will produce a hundred and fifteen billion pounds of new plastic this year most of this will be used to make single-use products a lot of people seem to be telling me that it's all up to us as consumers mostly consumers responsibility the world is going to produce the goods that consumers demand if you don't buy it they won't make it [Music] but there's a chef people are waking up and going alone it's not all our fault the whole concept of litter bug is a very convenient you know terminology to put the problem on to the consumer for example with single-use plastic bags is they blow it get in Wimborne so even if you do throw it in your trash can or even if it does go in the landfill there's a chance for them to get into the apart any ways when it goes into the water it's a cost to society to clean it up that's a cost to the environment that's a cost of future generations but that's not being reflected in the producer's income statement there is just thousands of birds like as far as I can see and it just just boggles my mind that we are in the middle of nowhere in the Pacific Ocean with the largest colony of Laysan albatross on the planet [Applause] not all of the plastic ends up on the beaches fishing nets used to be made of wool or silk but today most of them are made from nylon which is a strong and cheap form of thermoplastic so when they are lost or discarded they don't disintegrate they just stick around and litter the ocean floor killing marine animals plastic has invaded all levels in the ocean from the tiniest plankton to the largest cetaceans or whales the larger animals and even some of the smaller ones get tangled up in plastic and can't feed can't move strangle died hundreds of thousands of mammals millions of fish and seabirds die every year from entanglement of plastic [Music] I wanted to see how these plastic fishing nuts were affecting Midway's coral reef systems so I hopped aboard a research boat headed out to collect data and its really shallow so that bothers them in that snag on live coral tear them off they get caught up in the net and they keep rolling and rolling over this shallow reef so basically I was like a giant tumbleweed in the sea right just rolls along gravity coral so why are coral reefs so important they are the second most diverse ecosystem on this planet reefs provide coastal protection food for millions of people and life-saving drugs like one for childhood leukemia there are thousands and thousands of species on reefs and each species has a different level in the food chain that network is supporting all of the life in the sea and ultimately is helping to support human life reefs have seen a tremendous decline in the last 25 years the team started to collect data from the site examining the damaged coral but while we were still underwater a radio call comes in that another massive new net was sighted in the area small four seven nine the big net is up here this is really big one looks like it's been a purposely discarded net can you tell where it's from unfortunately no that's too big this boat will sink it's probably close to a ton I would guess just that one or more so ladies are swimming around it right now kind of figure out where the entanglement is and what we see on the surface there might be a lot more underneath there you go [Music] [Applause] [Music] we saw a number of coral heads broken off they were still alive but they were broken off they're not going to be live for long so this is a perfect example of what I was talking about and snag now on one or two live coral heads it'll break those off and it'll continue across the at all breaking coral heads as it goes you just can't leave it behind you know you really want to get it in as soon as you can and stop that from happening it's too dangerous to leave it out there these are some researchers from University of Santa Cruz that are out here studying the reef as well these guys were working nearby and offered to come over and put it in their go I never realized until I had to physically pull up a giant fishing net made of plastic materials just how destructive it could be the net was so big and so heavy we thought we would never get it into the boat we're trying to get most of it up there rigged it with ropes to hold it in place pretty damn heavy next wonder where the guys are all ladies on that boat we got it came back to the shore Gillis spray it's happening on such a large scale we've removed up to 123 tonnes in a matter of four months just seeing the destruction of one multiply that times a couple thousand and then get an idea in fact the UN did a study in 2009 and found that there are an estimated 640 thousand tons of discarded fishing nets in the oceans worldwide and that number is increasing every day if reefs are in trouble the oceans are in trouble if the oceans are in trouble we humans are in trouble nobody really knows what would happen if we lost all the reefs the problem of plastics is twofold there's the macro plastics which are the big pieces and then there's also the micro plastics the smaller the plastic is it actually means that it's older so this could have been plastic from the 60s and the 70s these bits and pieces are actually more harmful than the large macro pieces because what happens is the plastic will break down from the sunlight it photo degrades and these little pieces get digested by the fish and they move up the food chain what I'm holding right here is less sand and more plastic and then there's this whole phenomenon a persistent organic pollutants being absorbed of the plastic so what's a persistent organic pollutant basically its chemical waste that gets absorbed by pieces of plastic and accumulates in the tissues of animals that eat it so they become this transport mechanism for toxic sin the environment if you look at the the tissues of marine mammals or mahi-mahi and swordfish and tuna you find pollutants in them the same pollutants on plastic we're beginning to make those connections fish that we see on our tables that a restaurant fare are now being affected by plastic so isolate this fish think you're going to eat it here's what I found it's full of plastic dr. Marcus Eriksen is an activist and researcher he and his colleagues built a raft out of plastic bottles and floated from LA to Hawaii to draw attention to the plastic debris in the ocean the plastic isn't benign the fish won't pass it the plastic is full of persistent organic pollutants things like PCBs DDT PAHs things that are known human carcinogens and endocrine disruptors things you don't want your body but they're in the fish that we eat I don't want plastic my sushi Marcus and his wife Anna founded the organization 5 gyres to study and document the world's garbage patches they've sailed all over the globe to prove that the other ocean gyres also contain high concentrations of plastic we collected a bunch of small fish and we're finding increasingly that they're feeding on plastic even the one two and a half inch long fish we found 83 pieces of plastic not only are we beginning to find connections between plastic and our food supply these harmful chemical additives are capable of leaching out into whatever it comes into contact with one chemical that's been in the news a lot lately is bisphenol A or BPA BPA is a compound used to manufacture many kinds of plastic such as baby bottles water bottles sports equipment the lining of canned food in household electronics bisphenol A was discovered seven decades back and it was already known that it has some endocrine-disrupting properties endocrine disruptors are basically chemicals that can mess up your body's internal signaling system they make hormones go haywire and can cause all kinds of problems from diabetes to brain disorders and cancer every day we add estrogen like chemicals to our body through plastics bisphenol A for example was originally designed to be birth-control it was originally designed for as a hormonal therapy for women it wasn't quite strong enough for that so it was put on the shelf then some various scientists and formulators figured out that bisphenol A actually could make plastic hard nobody asks the question what will happen when we give this phenol aid to people through this plastic 93% of Americans are walking around with this phenol a in their bodies professor Fred Baum Saul is one of the leading experts on BPA he has been studying its harmful effects for over 15 years he's found that receipt paper even though it's not plastic is coated with high amounts of BPA we're going to do a study to determine whether bisphenol A comes out of thermal paper off the surface of thermal paper under your hand and can get through the skin of your hand into your body so I volunteered to be one of his first guinea pigs no one's ever done this we know that a lot of the bisphenol A gets off the paper onto your skin what we don't know is how much of it goes through your skin into your body that's what we want to find out we're going to collect your blood and we're going to determine how much bisphenol A was in your body when you came into the laboratory there will be a total of 20 cc's move to do - we do - oh my gosh oh my gosh that's a lot of blood then what we're going to do is have you hold a piece of thermal paper for a couple minutes okay so go ahead there you go this is what I normally do with my receipts let me get them from the stock and think about how many times you touch a receipt this is BPM I shouldn't have to worry about touching our receipt paper you know because plastics are in every facet of our lives we are exposed to these things and everybody is exposed to them it's like we're all in the midst of a giant uncontrolled experiment without your permission you are being polluted is that okay with you I think it's just the question of why weren't we told it bothers me and it kind of it makes me angry [Music] this is really not fun after three pokes and a lot of resistance from me this is my blood before and after and this combined with the urine sample is gonna go to the lab and then we're gonna get the results in a couple weeks recent studies have shown that BPA can now be found in all of the world's oceans [Music] we have well over a million albatross at Midway they're incredible fliers each one of the adults will fly thousands of miles for each foraging trip for their chick which is every 7 to 10 days and so if you add up the number of miles that they're flying in one breeding season it definitely is many times circling the world they always come back to the same spot to nest and they're monogamous so they typically have the same mate so they'll wait for their mate to show up and then they lay their egg and then the cycle of life continues they can pack lighters and plastic along to the check the US Fish and Wildlife Service does what it can to monitor the trash situation John leads teams of volunteers to different parts of the atoll to measure and classify the debris and to clean some of it up I headed out to one of the beaches with them to size up the situation [Music] [Applause] every piece of plastic you see on the island was brought engineer by either an adult albatross and fed to its chick or it was fed to the chick and they died in place and then they decayed and then you're left with the plastic so all this plastic was brought in by an albatross in fact we estimate that about five tons of plastic each year are brought to the hole at all by adult albatross and fed chicks so it's really significant dead bird yep we could take a quick look just in case and cut it open those actually have some stuff in oh my gosh oh my God look at that big piece of class oh my goodness what do you think that is it almost looks like a cap to a permanent marketer something like that Oh a lot more fishing line coming out there Wow this is average yep this is probably just an average about we see bellies full of plastic could that be an indicator of our future it's not a city yeah unfortunately yes these birds release their parents they Forge on a global scale Forge throughout the Pacific so they're like our thermometer for the health of the Pacific which ultimately affects people not only albatross so really to see this albatross tells us that the Pacific Ocean is probably the oceans in our world in general are in trouble when we see this kind of plastic that's so pervasive in this seemingly natural environment and this is just an albatross just think about every fish on the ocean might have some level of plastic maybe you can't see it but at the microscopic scale you could detect it and then of course we're feeding on marine life the earth is covered by over 75% water with all this plastic and toxins in the oceans I wondered what could we do you know my first reaction was very much like a lot of other people's first reaction and that was oh my god we've got to go clean this thing up I frankly haven't seen a decent proposal for how to viably do that without spending a lot of money a lot of fuel diesel and killing a lot of ocean life if we're talking about little bits of plastic broken down into tiny tiny bits what are we gonna do strain the entire ocean no amount of all the ships in the world carrying all the nets in the world going out there pulling stuff up is going to save the sea only the sea yourself can spit it out and she'll never get a chance to do that if we keep putting it in frankly this whole idea that we take all this intended disposable stuff that we use and put it somewhere away there is no away we need to turn off the faucet we need to turn off the tap and stop this stuff from flowing into the ocean but what about recycling if everyone just throws their plastic away in the right bin won't that help a lot recycling is is a bit of a myth we really only recover very very small percent of consumer plastics in this country only certain types of plastic are recyclable mainly the PE t polyethylene terephthalate mark number one or HDPE labeled number two high-density polyethylene most plastic doesn't truly get recycled it gets down cycle unlike glass or metal which can be used over and over again plastic consumer products are usually converted to a lower grade material and used for things like park benches and plastic decking a lot of this process takes place overseas we ship a lot of our plastics to China and we heard this from several recycling centers here in California in fact according to the US International Trade Commission the fastest growing and now number one category of American exports to China is scrap and trash if only about 30 percent of the bag comes from recycled content that means you're still going to need 70% virgin material let's recognize that recycling isn't going to really offset production of virgin plastic and it's going to take more than recycling to really deal with the kind of plastic pollution that we face just to be clear plastic is not evil but it's what we do with it how much we produce of it and how we dispose of it that makes all the difference it's the plastic that was made to last forever but designed to be used once that is the biggest problem the two most common items we throw away are plastic bags and plastic bottles it's estimated that on this planet we use a whopping 1 million plastic bags a minute if everyone in the United States tied their annual consumption of plastic bags together in a giant chain that chain would reach around the earth's equator 776 times National Geographic estimates that we use 85 million bottles on this planet every 3 minutes since you sat down to watch this 935 million bottles have been consumed and do we really need them the answer is very simple let's stop it at the source start thinking about areas to avoid plastic buying in bulk buying locally shopping at your farmers market avoiding excess packaging and really just being mindful of the things that you buy every day because everything is gonna go somewhere I think a lot of times we as consumers individuals we underestimate the power we really have it's a choice that we can all make to say I don't need that lid on a coffee cup for two minutes and I don't need that plastic bag to carry three things all of which are already individually packaged wanting to influence others is such a or such a can of worms you know it's like really at the end of the day you can't be telling anyone what to do you know it's people have to discover things themselves it's been a couple months now since I've done the BPA test and we have professor bumps all here on skype to tell me the results hi how are you what our study is showing is that you definitely get exposed to bisphenol A by touching it it definitely goes through the skin and substantial amounts of it do so very rapidly and it is going to your brain it is going to other organs in the body and you are getting absolutely massive amounts on your hand when you touch thermal paper since World War two we've had a dramatic increase of breast cancer we've had a dramatic increase or decrease in the age of puberty girls are going into puberty earlier now we're seeing breast budding and girls at five six seven eight years old that stimulated by estrogen and estrogen like chemicals if you could have sat down and designed the most horrible chemical that would damage everything that it got near this is what you would make to know that it had transferred pretty rapidly into my system it's like why weren't we told like why did I not know about this the Flintstone have been brought to you by winston america by selling but feasting filters cigarette you can ask the same question of the tobacco industry why didn't we know that tobacco was carcinogenic earlier and the reason is because it's not in the interest of the tobacco companies to show that their product is harmful then only winter them headed up front where it comes there's a economic reason for us not finding out it's a strategy that is taken straight from the tobacco industry you look at the names of the people the lobbyists who were involved the PR agencies that are involved it's the same it's the same organizations it's incredibly important the way images that are used to make people feel like company is it really cares you can put a little green leaf on a plastic bottle and call it an eco bottle to create an illusion it's the same sort of ridiculous distribution of water in plastic most people they look at it in this L as a green leaf it must be eco of course they wouldn't lie industry is known since the you know the 50s that stuff leeches out of different plastics the industry continues to maintain that BPA and many other plastic additives are safe may have created PR campaigns in support of BPA and have successfully lobbied against legislation to ban it even in baby bottles in children's toys the first phase is to deny the problem to cover it up and then to delay after you know invented plastic and we're finding it where it shouldn't be in our blood and inside the wildest animals you got to say let's let's do something about this a few cities in the US and countries around the world have passed legislation taxing or banning single-use plastic bags California uses 120,000 tons of plastic bags every year this estimated that 80% of all marine debris is plastic California's in trouble and what are some Sacramento politicians focused on grocery bags the ACC came out in incredible force blasting and running a bunch of PSAs that were negative and untruthful higher taxes fewer jobs more bureaucrats people who have been in the legislature for a very long time have said they have never seen a lobbying effort like this one so who makes the plastic in the United States the producers of plastic resin such as Dow Chemical DuPont and Exxon Mobil are represented by an umbrella organization called the American Chemistry Council or the ACC the many manufacturers that make products out of this resin are represented by the society of plastic industries or SBI in the plastics industry is the third largest industry in this country behind steel and cars it's responsible for close to 400 billion dollars in shipments it's a big big big industry the ACC was about to co-sponsor an international conference on the subject of marine debris and they said they would be glad to talk to me I know I've sent to you a couple emails I know you're probably really busy but a representative from the ACCC had finally gotten back to me and decided not to contribute to the documentary so I went to the conference anyways to see if I could speak with them in person [Applause] [Music] but they seem to avoid me and did not wish to comment I don't think I'm not scary I like a short asian girl what do you want from me I am just looking for some answers why would the American Chemistry Council sponsor a conference focused on the environmental damage caused from the plastic they create I don't know I don't know what it is accomplished my world was enough talking if we're not seeing action it's another one of those blahblah gathering but I was determined to get someone from the plastics industry to talk to me so we just sided buy ticket craze on out here see if we can talk to these people face-to-face and get some answers so I headed to an SPI convention this could be a very quick shoot it's the first annual processors conference there's a guy from the FDA talkin a guy from coca-cola that from Merck [Music] [Applause] [Music] how do you think the plastic industry is tackling reports about bpa and toxins with stuff I think there were a lot of stuff the new mini size the artemon I feel like for me I look at the materials to make sure whatever we're using is safe to be contact with food so like what do you think about the whole BPA thing yeah so you guys didn't touch down the VPN oh and what is your fine you're not worried about it how safe is a food that's wrapped in plastic you I mean you test it regulate it are you dying from anything plastic yes so there you go BPA is found in 93% of like humans doesn't that freak you out the secret is out responsible industry its people self-regulated really well every trade organization wants to grow their business find out what are the obstacles to growing the business and those of regulatory part of it is that why they're very like protective of the conferences because there's a lot of people with alternative agendas and what do you think about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch have you heard of it or like that thing that why size of Texas people think is an island but what strokes of it now the Great Pacific Garbage Patch roughly the size effect of three four five months this could be a guy in his underwear in the basement writing this so why do I believe this don't you think that if the industry's making 150 million pounds of resin a year brand-new that they should also take responsibility from the beginning to the end it's hard to say I'm just wondering like what you think from what well it's a bird with plastic in its belly that's not good I know so I was ready don't bird shouldn't be even questioning I went to Midway at all like in the middle of the Pacific that's what I found like that that what I mean what do you say that my family's been in business for a hundred years we put 1,800 people around the world jobs so I'm not going to sit here and tell you this plastics are for Ponyville I can't ok so here's another picture I really don't like I'd really oh sorry these are overdue yeah the proper 800k get you back on property law happy [Music] laughter so how do we get people's attention this is Andy Keller hey there it all started when I was at the local landfill in my community about a hundred thousand people and I was there at the end of the day with you know my trash and it just hit me like a ton of bricks I'm like no this is so unnecessary why am I using these are you environmentalist don't you know I'm convenient I created the bag monster as I wanted to communicate to people at how many plastic bags they use in a year how many bags do you have onion this is between this is what the average American uses in a year the estimates are somewhere between 300 700 by every American a lot of people are just in this robot mode and they're just like you know how many times have you bought a drink and a snack and they put it in a bag I found if you could approach it in a way that's funny and humorous but also raises awareness that you know people can actually then take action and not close down hey I'm Gretchen Bleiler I'm a professional snowboarder and an Olympian but I'm also an advocate for the environment I feel like it's my duty to talk about this it can be very simple and it's just about taking a little shift so it's all about leading by example and encouraging your friends to do the same personally I live in Hawaii which if you go to the east shore of any of the islands a lot of features it is a wall of plastic trash you know and so I just know the reality of how harmful single-use plastics are you know with all the 20 something-year-old coming to the shows and different people who are still kind of figuring out the way they're gonna be in the world we just saw the opportunity to have these nonprofit groups in every town that we play I think for me personally just the way I was brought up and everything it's I feel a personal responsibility but you know I just like to use that to kind of turn kids on to the idea of these environmental groups and what they're doing so the Albatross they are consuming all this plastic debris or they fire floating on the ocean kids have a natural sense of justice when we show them what our plastic trash is doing to animals out in the middle of the ocean they get really angry and they want to do something about it they get that it's not what they want in their world in one of his early experiments professor vom saal found that BPA could cause reproductive harm in mice at levels 25,000 times lower than previously thought and when we published that I got a conference call and there were about five people on it and they told me how disturbed so they were from DuPont thou shalt all the major manufacturers of bisphenol A and the exact quote is can we reach a mutually beneficial outcome where you withdraw this paper and do not publish it until it proved to do so by the chemical industry we're here at the American Chemistry Council near Washington DC these are the guys that spend millions of dollars all across the country suing cities who try to put bans or fees on plastic bags what I've done essentially is I've made myself a target on the Advocate out there and so I don't know how to say this but being sued now by the plastics industry basically the three main plastic bag manufacturers like the largest most basically the advocates on the other side you know have filed a lawsuit against me they are able to as a business to say well you're harming our business by talking about our product but me it's like I'm just I'm just a guy's small business you know California entrepreneur you know against this huge mammoth of the industry with these big companies you know with millions of millions of millions of dollars I from I'm a little fly on their wall there's like but will more awareness of the problem and efforts like this really make a difference for the air that we breathe sixty percent of it comes from the ocean the oxygen that the ocean has the ability to come back quickly it's like a rubber band if you push a rubber band it'll snap back pretty quickly that's where we're in an app but if you push it too far it'll break by 2050 worldwide plastic production is projected to quadruple reaching nearly two trillion pounds per year so where will we be in 30 years what will our future look like it's all choice and I don't want to play that game and see you well how far can it take this is a moment that is unlike any other moment in history the options are fewer than there were 20 years ago [Music] so with my knowledge and head in my reusable bag in hand I realized that it's not that hard to make simple changes and it's not that hard to say no to unnecessary plastic oh no that's okay I'll just take it yeah it's taken us a long time to learn that what we throw away doesn't really go away when you get this letter please write back miss Duncan third grade Long Beach California bar between elementary that's what we're looking for [Music] it's funny that I would go halfway around the world to find a letter that would remove me like 20 miles away from my house back at home [Music] sincerely number 16 it's pretty amazing this just shows them this is proof but sometimes we don't think that far in advance but the impact things happen [Music] there's no solution to marine debris except reddit source and so the story has to be told because the solution doesn't lie with the people here [Music] what's happening on Midway is like the canary in the coal mine the debris that's washing up on our beaches that that patch of garbage in the Pacific is growing and right now it's having a huge impact on the Midway a huge impact on the species that call Midway home the issue of plastic pollution in the ocean is more timely than ever many experts are predicting that debris from the March 2011 tsunami that devastated Japan is now headed on a direct course to hit Midway Atoll in the west coast of North America in the upcoming months and years people are an apex predator we're eating fish out of these oceans and if plastics are prevalent and if their toxins are attracting are working their way up the food chain that has an impact on us and it's gonna start affecting animals and people not just on remote places like Midway but in the entire world from Los Angeles to Hong Kong it is not one country's problem over another but we as mankind are all intertwined this world of the molecule belongs to us all it is yours to explore your new prompt ear [Music] whoo dust off your thinking caps solar power with plastic plans pretty pictures of things we ate we are only what we put in the long run we have found silent films are full of sound in not doubly free [Music] slow down everyone you're moving too fast frames can't get you in your moving back better another phone melodies of narration of strategies unobtrusive tones help to notice nothing but relevancy everyone yo new face frames can't hate you and you're moving my bed [Music] we'll pay those cave is full of freaks demanding refunds for the things they've seen I wish they could believe in all the things and never maybe spring and just slow down everyone yo boo boo bang frames can't get you when you're moving back down everyone you're moving too fast frames can too [Music] you