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This is the story of a new world,
a world that begins in the mysterious,
and invisible universe of atoms and molecules,
which combine countless numbers to form everything we see and touch.
It is the story of how man, investigating nature,
has learned from nature's examples
to join these same atoms and molecules to form substances
never before seen under the sun.
These new materials are the world of plastics.
The world that nature forgot.
We discovered these miracle materials.
We didn't ask the right questions. We just said, "Wow!
Look what this stuff can do. It's so cool."
And now we're realizing we made some big mistakes.
Microplastics are possibly the most serious type
of pollutant our society has ever created.
These invisible particles have been found
on the highest mountains, in the deepest ocean sediments,
and now we're finding microplastics
wherever we look in the human body.
And once these tiny particles are in our bodies,
they're oozing their toxic ingredients
on a minute-by-minute basis.
We know that the chemicals that are in plastics
could create health problems like obesity,
or diabetes, or heart disease, or fertility problems,
or possibly even cancer.
It's a conundrum we find ourselves in.
We got a figure out how to deal with that conundrum.
Every day, I start my day
by putting plastic in my eyes, and it's crazy,
because I literally see the world through a plastic lens.
I started investigating plastic about 15 years ago.
That's when people started looking at the Great Garbage Patch,
and then we started noticing that it was impacting animals.
One of the first things that we saw was the bird carcass.
It was shocking. There was probably as much plastic in the bird
as there were bones left in the bird.
So, for me, it was realizing
that a lot of plastic was disguised as food,
and a lot of animals have started eating a lot of those plastics.
But in fact, human beings have much more contact with plastics
than your average animal will.
I think about brushing my teeth with plastic bristles.
They're in the dust, so, we're actually breathing microplastics.
One study found that it's in about 83 percent of the drinking water
that comes out of our taps,
and of course, microplastics are in the food that we eat.
We are slowly turning into plastic people.
And scientists have been studying plastics
and the impacts of plastics on our environment,
on the planetary body.
But what we really need to start doing now
is looking at the impacts on the human body.
And that's what I'm going to do.
Plastic, plastic, plastic.
What are plastics?
Are they animal,
vegetable,
or mineral?
Plastic is by and large a derivative of petrochemicals,
so it's not a coincidence
that many of the big plastics companies in the world
are actually branch plants of big oil companies.
We pump the oil out of the ground.
We crack that oil into different types of chemicals.
Those chemicals are polymerized so that those molecules
are connected to create different types of plastic.
That whole process creates its own pollution,
including climate-warming gases.
Those many types of plastics are made into different products
that are shipped worldwide.
One of the things that's hard to wrap your brain around,
when it comes to the plastics industry,
is how astronomically huge the numbers are.
Over 1.5 billion plastic bottles
being bought around the planet every day.
Two million plastic bags
are used every minute on Earth.
The end result of this is about 400 million tons
of plastics that are created every year.
Almost half of all plastic produced
goes into single-use items.
Today, even the biggest oil companies in the world are admitting
that we're going to be using less oil in the years ahead.
And if you can't burn oil in cars,
if that market is disappearing
over the next few decades, what will you do with that product?
Well, increasing the plasticization of the human life
is where their oil is going to go.
Plastic companies are talking about tripling plastic use
in production over the next couple of decades.
So, it's a double whammy as a product
that is contributing to the global warming problem,
and creating this toxic exposure problem.
Some of the work that we're doing here, at the University of Minnesota,
is urban air sampling.
We're finding particles in our sampler with snow and rain.
Plastic is just everywhere,
and this is the evolution of this discipline
is that we started off looking at big things,
but now we've got these teeny, teeny, tiny little flakes.
And we're trying to understand how these materials flow
and then, yeah, where do they eventually come to rest?
And if they do, how long?
I mean, you look at something like a plastic bag,
the cereal bag,
and when you look really closely at it
under an electron microscope,
you can suddenly see all these little particles
that are just about ready to shed.
That's a little bit of the rolled-up adhesive.
Yeah. Imagine having that for breakfast.
- Hey! - Hey. Good to meet you. Hi!
- It's so good to meet you, too. - Yeah. At last.
- Yeah, come on in. - Thank you so much.
I'm looking forward to finding out
what you actually discovered in my home.
So, what we do is we take a sample
and we reduce the volume,
and then we stain it.
And that causes the synthetic polymers to fluoresce.
So this is from your house dust.
Some of these are fluorescing. They're pretty easy to...
- Spot. - To spot, yeah. And, so...
those are very likely synthetic polymers.
- And this is just a speck of dust. - I know.
So, if this is from one speck...
- How much is in the house? - I can't even begin to imagine
- how much is in the house. - Right, right.
I'm fortunate that I've been able to kind of test
some things just for fun.
- This is some dried mucus from... - Wow!
the nose of a small person
that I happen to live with. And...
- This is a... A booger. - Yes. Yeah.
Look at this. Look at all that. There's red threads in there,
that would definitely not be a human hair.
There are so many different kinds of contaminants
that are in consumer products.
We just assume that they've all been completely tested
and that they're completely safe, and we bring them into our homes,
and we just... We live alongside them.
And we think that they're doing us absolutely no harm,
when that isn't necessarily the case.
There's so little transparency.
- This is plastic. - Yeah, it's a dollhouse.
We are conducting an experiment,
and the entire population is involved.
We can try and kind of safeguard our home,
but it's a global commons issue. It's everywhere.
You go out into the world, and you're going to be exposed to it.
I've taken some samples of snow that's fallen in my backyard,
and found tiny fragments of plastic particles in it,
and when I came home, I told my children
to not catch snowflakes.
It's hard to wrap your head around, but virtually
every molecule of plastic ever created
still exists somewhere on Earth,
in some stage of degradation,
because this stuff never disappears.
It just goes from being larger pieces of litter
to tinier and tinier particles that become microscopic.
The definition is just, a piece of plastic
less than five millimeters in size.
So, a pencil eraser and smaller.
Somebody buys the bottle,
the bottle is used for a few minutes.
The bottle's discarded.
Once it's in the environment, it is broken down by sunlight,
by the action of waves, by the passing of time.
It starts to degrade into these tiny particles
that are so light,
and they come down in the rain, they accumulate in our food,
and we're absorbing them into our own bodies.
One of the largest sources of microplastics
into the environment is mismanaged waste.
Aside from large items breaking into smaller items,
one of the most common sources is paint from buildings and boats,
tire dust from cars, bikes, planes.
As we wear clothing that's increasingly plastic,
those fibers shed,
go down the drain,
wind up in the local lakes and rivers,
and those fibers are a big source of microplastics as well.
There are estimates that suggest that anywhere
from 10 to 20 million metric tons of plastic
are leaving our land and going out into the ocean each year.
Now, some of that will stay on the surface,
and float, and travel quite far.
Some of it, as it breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces,
can go up into the atmosphere and travel globally that way.
Some of it will sink to the bottom.
It is eaten by almost every level of the food chain,
and now we're starting to understand that microbes colonize it,
and so, in and of itself becomes this habitat.
So it's atmospheric currents, global dust cycles,
the water cycle, the carbon cycle.
It's sort of becomes part of these planetary cycles.
This part of the Mediterranean Sea is the most polluted part
in terms of plastic pollution.
There could be many different sources, but the first thing is...
dumping of the plastic waste into the Mediterranean Sea.
This beach receives
between 30 to 35 kilograms of plastics
per day per kilometer.
That's really high.
Global northern countries also responsible for this pollution.
Those countries have a clean environment,
exporting plastic waste
to countries like Turkey, Malaysia,
Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam.
We call it waste colonialism.
Here we can see the microplastics
on this sieve.
Anything we produce
is contaminated with plastic.
We are living on the plastisphere.
We are producing our food in the plasticulture way.
This is the starting point of the entrance,
the involvement of plastic inside the food chain.
So, as you see there, one layer, just covered soil.
Under this sheet, there is another plastic here.
This is for irrigation.
They use single-use pipe as we see here.
You see, this is from last year,
shredded because of the tractor.
The idea is making harvesting...
time shorter.
The cost of removal is really high,
so that's why they are just leaving it in the field, because no one cares.
There are no rules for this. There is no legislation.
This is soil or plastic? Plastisoil.
There is no way to clean this microplastic from the environment.
The world does not deserve...
single-use application because the world is not single-use.
We are producing poisonous food.
We are poisoning ourselves with our hand.
Okay, so, I'm just getting ready to go to Rochester,
because they want some samples
to test the microplastics in my body.
This...
is the shit that I do for science, literally.
I sent fecal samples
to you guys to test for microplastics,
and with bated breath,
I've been sort of wondering what the results were.
When we get a sample,
the first thing that we need to do is add hydrogen peroxide.
Hydrogen peroxide is going to eat away at the organics,
and leave the plastics.
So, once we get those off, we get them onto filters
so that we can look at them under an optical microscope,
to look for fragments, and fibers, and foams.
So we take it from there,
and use an IR microscope to positively identify,
what is the chemical makeup of the compounds.
What we're looking at is the optical microscope right now.
- So, you can see this grid. - Right.
And so, this grid is three millimeters in size.
So we get over here in the corner, this blackish-bluish type of fiber.
A fiber as well, another one.
Come into here, and we can see this... This very small fragment,
which we're talking about in the order of tens of microns.
It came up with a very clear fit to being polypropylene.
So, disposable masks.
Candy wrappers,
salad bags.
Polypropylene tends to be the more crinkly stuff.
So, this fiber that we saw here, it was cotton.
So we're seeing a number of cotton ones.
Come down here, and this is being rayon,
a semisynthetic type of fiber.
Come down further here, and we have polyester.
Synthetic clothing, any fleece.
It's pretty shocking because...
You know, I'm still processing the fact
that this stuff is really in my body.
- Yeah. - You know...
This came out, too, right, so there may be some that was retained,
- That's stuck. - that we're not measuring. Right.
Do you think everybody has microplastics?
- Yes. - Everybody.
- Yeah, no doubt. - No doubt?
No doubt, because it's everywhere.
So, every single person is exposed.
Right now, I'm going in for a mammogram,
and also going in for an ultrasound.
There's quite a bit of cancer in my family, unfortunately.
Three of my mom's sisters have had cancer.
My dad's brother had cancer.
My dad is currently getting tested for cancer,
and I get tested every year, because I'm in the high-risk category.
I don't think I'm different from very many people.
I remember growing up and cancer was this big,
scary “C word,” and now, just about everybody I know
has somebody with cancer in their family.
We don't actually know the exact causes.
It could be so many different things. It could be the pollutants in the air,
it could be the meat that people are eating.
It could be the plastics.
There are tens of thousands of chemicals in commerce,
many of which are used to make plastics.
And virtually none of these chemicals have been tested for safety.
We don't really know how many are present in a plastic item.
We don't know the types of chemicals that are present in a plastic,
because that's proprietary information for the business.
And so, these are all trade secrets
so that people don't get the recipe from another competitor
for what's in their plastic.
That's what we're working on right now. We're looking to see
if this particle ends up in this part of the body,
and we know that it has these kinds of chemicals with it,
how much of a dose will we get,
and what kind of impact would that be
if we're continually dosing ourselves with chemicals like that?
The study of toxicity of microplastics is in its infancy,
but we're beginning to learn
that they are a transport mechanism
for getting...
bad chemicals into people.
A key part of this story is the human endocrine system.
We have glands in us that make hormones.
And those hormones, they guide the development
of virtually everything,
how many fingers we have,
is our brain wired properly, can we reproduce?
There's an amplification process that can make one molecule
have a signal that's up to a hundred thousand,
if not a million times, bigger than the original signal.
And that means that very small doses
can have really big effects.
Some chemicals in plastics hack that signaling system.
So, there's any number of chemicals
that are deliberately put in different types of plastic
that we know are disruptive to our hormones.
Chemicals like phthalates, for instance,
which are very, very common in plastics. They're a softener.
Phthalates will take a rigid material, and they'll make it more flexible.
BPA is a very well-known chemical now, still very common.
We know now there's a link
between these chemicals and human disease
like breast cancer, prostate cancer.
We know that a lot of these chemicals trigger obesity.
Another condition that is now tied firmly
to chemicals leaching out of plastics,
is infertility.
If you simply take the data that they have gathered over sperm count
and how much it's declined,
and you just project it forward into the future,
by 2045,
a lot of young adult males
will not be able to reproduce the normal old-fashioned way.
But there's another twist to this, which is: the plastics that are used
during the process of artificial reproduction
interfere with artificial reproduction.
So, people should pay attention to this.
It's happening today.
He's beautiful.
He's truly beautiful.
He's got lots of hair.
The placenta has a fundamental function,
it is a temporary organ.
The organ is for the child, not for the mother.
Thanks.
We found women who gave us their placenta,
In these four placentas, we found 12 plastic pieces.
Some of these plastic particles were particles of polypropylene.
So we wondered, “if we found plastic in the placenta,
maybe we could find plastic in breast milk?”
34 mothers participated in our study,
we found plastic in 26 samples
Okay, we found plastic in the placenta.
But where, precisely?
We found out plastic was inside the cells.
The cell, the fundamental part of life,
is made of tiny structures.
We found out that when a microplastic
is inside these structures, it destroys them.
It is sad if this happens when a baby is forming
because plastic will alter the way DNA is expressed.
Plastic itself is not a problem. It's an extraordinary useful material.
We can do incredible things with plastic.
Heart prosthesis, hip prosthesis.
We couldn't live on this planet, without plastic.
The problem is how we use plastic,
how we use this wonderful resource?
We exploit it in stupid ways, like making
plastic bottles for soda or water.
If we see the world as a place...
full of resources we can exploit for profit,
we don't feel wonder anymore,
we don't see the beauty of this world.
We, too, become part of the technology.
And we are useful as far as we can do something
within the economic paradigm.
We must change the way we see the world.
That is, when Coca-Cola,
who produce trillions of dollars in profit,
and are aware of the damage they cause, they know the truth,
they destroy our world to enrich a few,
so we must revolt.
The main goal of our studies is rebellion, revolt.
I'm a physician.
I work in the emergency department in the hospital.
Today, I'm exactly 36 weeks.
This is our first child.
I don't know if it's because of the hormones, but...
sometimes I have periods where I would like, think,
"Is this the world where I want to bring up my child?”
And everything seems bad and bad for you.
And the choices that you are making.
Yes, it's sometimes a bit difficult.
I'm a frequently plastic user.
Like, I have my little plastic water bottle. It's handy.
But when I was really paying attention,
I was like, "We use a lot of plastic."
So what kind of effects that could have
on the developing of the child?
- So good to meet you. At last! - You, too. Welcome to Holland.
Thank you.
So you've got to tell me, how does a...
How does a pediatrician start studying microplastics?
As pediatricians, we are used to treating illnesses in children,
but we are also trained to prevent illness,
because prevention is always better than...
- Thank you. - Better than cure.
- Right. - And... And about 25 years ago,
we started doing research on dioxins, for instance, that...
That are formed with the incineration of plastics.
And dioxins can have an effect on, basically,
development of all sorts of organ systems in your body,
whether it be your brain, your teeth, your lungs.
We took a step further and we said,
"Hey, what about the plastics that are being used,
especially the hormone-disrupting chemicals?"
What we've seen in the last one to two generations
is a major increase in the number of breast cancers,
prostate cancers, testicular cancers,
even thyroid cancers.
So, what we've been seeing is the correlation
between the use of these,
and the production of the plastics,
and the increase in the cancers.
What concerns me is that a child
is not only being exposed like we are,
but a fetus is developing at a far greater rate.
And not only the organs, but all the tissue.
It's all developing. The consequences are far greater
because you've been born with a problem.
These babies are being born pre-polluted, in a sense.
Yes, we are a product of our environment.
Hi.
- Welcome. - Thank you.
- It's good to see you again. - Good to see you.
I think it's very important to realize that
you can't do anything about the fact that there are plastics in your body.
That's the society we live in.
Yeah. It's very difficult because I don't even know where to start.
Yeah. You do the best you can to live healthily,
to nurture your baby.
And more than that, you can't do.
And I think the next question is probably,
what are the effects of that on the health
and development of the child, or the fetus and the child?
Yes, yeah.
And I think that's a very pertinent question also,
and it's a question we don't have an answer to yet,
and we'll probably only get to know that in 10,
20, 30 years further,
when these children grow up.
- Good morning. - Good morning.
That's, unfortunately, the history of chemical exposures in people.
It's always reactive.
A lot of these effects, we'll only see many years later.
Boys that are born today will only know
if they have fertility problems when they start to have kids.
Are we willing to risk a generation
to see if it's there or not?
I think that's playing with fire.
Right now, the system is designed
to let the experiment play out...
on people,
and only once the signal becomes so big that you can't ignore it,
do they begin to ask questions. That's wrong.
We need to ask questions before something
becomes so valuable to the chemical industry
that they'll do anything they can to defend it,
and they will do close to anything to defend
one of their billion-dollar products.
At the nylon trade fair,
you can be sure there is something to suit all tastes.
On show for the first time at the fair
are nylon carpets and rugs.
Make the word nylon plural,
and even the dumbest of blondes will know what you mean.
What we do know of people that work in an environment
with high levels of nylon,
like people working in a nylon factory...
30 percent of these people have problems with their lungs.
So that's why we took this model of living mini-lungs.
And when you put these cells, lung cells into a culture dish,
we could see what would happen
if there were microplastics present.
Yeah, that's the control.
We take the cells that line
the airways, epithelial cells. We take these from a human.
- Wow. - Nice. Quite big ones.
- Yeah, they're huge. - Yeah.
Okay. So,
these big bubbles, those are structures that we call airways.
So these are pretty. There's no other word for it.
They're just nice.
And these are actually alive, right?
It's not a piece of tissue that you cut and then put under a microscope.
These... These are still living. They're still...
Well, they're not... They don't have a heart,
and they're not... There's not a beating heart,
but they're cells. They're trying to...
To form a structure.
But we also have nylon 6.6 particles.
Wow. It looks really different.
There is absolutely nothing here.
So, what is dramatic to me is that...
there are no pretty structures. There's nothing.
There are no bubbles. They're all gone.
All this gray moss that you see are nylon particles.
So, the chemical that is leaching out of nylon 6.6,
it causes this total lack of growth of mini-lungs.
That's a process that our lungs are really good at, is like,
when they get hurt, they repair themselves.
And if you have a lot of these fibers in your lungs,
you cannot repair.
I'm particularly worried about carpets,
because they cover a big surface, right?
And we walk on them all the time.
So it means that all these fibers
keep being released by it.
Just imagine lying on a carpet,
being close to these fibers and breathing them in.
Would you consider microplastics a form of air pollution?
Yes, definitely. They don't degrade.
So, because we keep on using more and more and more,
and it keeps on getting into an environment,
it means it's accumulating.
But, in 50 years, if we keep up this plastic use,
and we don't do anything about it,
we might then be reaching critical levels.
Plastics made possible the material world
that we live in now.
They are the bones, the skin, the connective tissue.
With the arrival of synthetic plastics,
we suddenly were able to sort of transcend...
what nature has been giving us for thousands of years.
This compregnated slab is strong enough
to bear the weight of a four-ton elephant, believe it or not.
And we transcended that basic problem
that natural resources have limited supplies.
One of the ones that was a major cause of concern was ivory.
In this London warehouse
where tusks have been coming in since the days of Charles II,
the latest consignments are cut up
for the first stage of their transformation
into ivory-backed brushes, mirrors, and combs.
Ivory was used for all sorts of things,
for buttons, for decorative items,
piano keys,
and for billiards.
John Wesley Hyatt, an amateur inventor,
came up with this material he called celluloid.
It was malleable, it was moldable,
it was mass producible.
It kind of leveled the playing field for consumption.
The next big move was Bakelite,
the first real synthetic molecule,
and it's a great electrical insulator.
It was the early 20th Century, and all across the country,
people are laying down electrical wire, and they need insulation for that wire.
And Bakelite becomes this very successful plastic.
It goes into industrial uses. It goes into consumer products.
Because it was machinable, because it was mass-producible,
you could use it to make all sorts of cool, curvy shapes.
It was a machine-age plastic,
automobile-age plastic.
In the '20s and '30s,
you had the rise of the petrochemical industry.
Petroleum companies and chemical companies
were aligning
and wanting to figure out something to do
with the waste products of processing of their products.
That became the groundwork for the modern plastics industry,
and the invention of most of the big plastics that we know today.
Companies like Dow or Mobil or DuPont
had teams of industrial chemists
who were just noodling around with chemicals,
trying to figure out cool stuff that they could do.
Coming up with materials
for which there was no immediate need or demand.
Except for nylons,
which people had been looking for, for a long time.
People had wanted a substitute for silk stockings
because they were expensive, and they didn't last very long.
It was indeed lucky for us
that the men of plastics had labored so long and well,
for suddenly we found ourselves at war.
Come World War II,
the military turns to that nascent industry.
Faced with a critical metal shortage,
and unprecedented production demands,
armament manufacturers
immediately turned to plastics for assistance.
And the kingdom of plastics
responded with remarkable speed and ingenuity.
Now, instead of nylons,
they turn all their production over to making parachutes.
Acrylic was being used to make bomb turrets.
So, during the war, plastics production
rose on the order of 3 to 400 percent.
The war ends. You have an industry that has vastly
ramped up production capacity,
and you have a consuming public
that is suddenly flush with money.
There's a lot of money being pumped into the economy.
Bring these two trends together, and one of the results
is you just get this explosion of plastic stuff.
The first place that plastics go are into durable goods.
They go into shoes, textiles.
Garments, seen and unseen, from head to toe,
a synthetic symphony from DuPont's magic pile of coal.
Suddenly we have fabrics that don't need to be ironed or washed,
with all these crazy names: Dacron, Orlon.
Appliances.
They go into things like vinyl records.
They go into Naugahyde furniture, cars.
And then in the late '40s, early '50s,
the plastics industry starts to realize
there's only so many cars they're going to build.
There's only so many kitchen counters they're going to put in.
So they start looking for new markets.
And one logical, potentially infinite growth opportunity,
is in disposables.
It was a very conscious strategy.
The editor of Modern Plastics Magazine
told plastics executives,
"Your future is in the garbage can."
So you get all of this packaging that's being developed
because the industry is getting better at processing this stuff,
and getting better at figuring out how to make it.
And from that point on, the plastics industry growth
is just a straight upward curve.
It is nonstop ascension.
At a certain point, you start to get single-use versions
of what had long been durable products.
It was a hard sell at first.
We haven't had the luxury of being able to throw away a lot of stuff.
When the first coffee vending machines came out,
people actually tended to reuse the plastic cups.
So they had to be taught that there is virtue
and convenience in throwing away.
Life Magazine ran this article, “Throwaway Living,”
and to illustrate it, they had this family who have thrown
all of these disposable things up in the air.
And Life calculated at the time that if this wasn't throwaway,
that it would've taken the wife, because of course it was the wife,
40 hours to clean all this stuff,
but, thanks to plastic,
and throwaway stuff, she didn't have to do it.
What Life ran was the picture of all the stuff in the air.
You don't see it all raining down onto the ground
and creating this mess that is kind of a metaphor
for the mess that we're dealing with today.
Well, I come from four generations of fisher-people.
My great-grandfather, my grandfather,
my dad, my brothers.
And your whole life is centered around the boats,
and the fish houses, and the water.
I have a strong connection to the water.
Water is alive.
It's real. And it's like family.
The chemical plants started coming in around late 1940s,
and now there are ten chemical plants, nylon plants,
fertilizer plants,
and they all dump, on the average,
five million gallons of toxic waste a day.
Formosa Plastics manufactures plastic pellets and powder.
And for 27 years,
Formosa has discharged right into this body of water.
Corporations do not have a conscience.
Their bottom line is production. Production at all costs.
Formosa never reported a single violation.
These are production plastics.
They're probably polyethylene, polypropylene pellets.
So, this is what has been out here,
and is embedded up on this bank. The fish, they're in their guts.
The oystermen, when they're shucking oysters,
they find them inside the oyster shell.
Every bit of this is illegal.
And that started in 1989.
I was 40 years old. I was running a fish house.
Formosa, they had managed to start discharging
without a permit. And up in the bay,
there was some sort of mutation going on with black drum.
The whole side of the drum was rotting out,
and their intestines were showing it.
When you're at the fish house, and you have fishermen who come
and want to get ice, and they said,
"The alligators are rolling. They're at the surface,
and they're just rolling in the water."
And then you have shrimpers who bring you shrimp,
and it looks like they've been stuffed with cotton.
And then you start to see where they can't even go out
and make a living anymore.
So, all their boats are tied up,
and then the fish houses, they shut down.
They destroyed the community here.
The community is no longer.
You talk to any shrimper and it's like,
"My kid is not going to do this."
And all you have are closed areas or shut down bays.
"Don't eat the crabs, don't eat the shrimp, don't eat the fish."
I work for the end of plastic, the age of plastic.
That's what I work for.
We came out here every day
for two-and-a-half years,
and we got 2,500 samples
of illegal discharges,
and we took them to court.
We eventually settled for 50 million dollars,
and we put it into
every environmental project in this community.
We put every penny back into the community to help them.
Some people have cynically referred to this as Cancer Alley,
the greatest concentration of chemical plants
in the Western Hemisphere.
It also has the greatest concentration of cancer deaths
in the nation.
And obviously the question of an association
has naturally been raised.
This is polyvinyl chloride,
a synthetic resinous material
converted from vinyl chloride gas,
and it's the basis for thousands of plastic products,
from food wrappers, to phonograph records.
During the manufacturing process, when the gas is being synthesized
and the resin is being formed, exposure can present a serious risk.
Back in '81 you were doing the...
I was doing maintenance work, building the plant.
Dale started when the plant first started,
back in 1981.
And so, he was exposed since day one.
And that was vinyl chloride, and all that EDC...
Vinyl chloride, ethylene chloride.
I started getting boils on my neck...
From here... You know, from here down.
I couldn't feel the bottom of my feet.
I would grab my leg so hard that I left bruises on myself.
I mean, it just...
I'd scream with pain,
and at one point, I lost my legs completely,
and I drug myself around with my elbows
probably for about a month, month and a half.
Yeah.
After they did all the testing,
the doctor came out, and she started naming off chemicals.
And she said, "Do you know these chemicals, Dale?"
I said, "Yeah."
I said, "I recognize every one of them that you're speaking of.”
There were five of them.
And she said, "Well, they're in your body."
And I asked the doctor, I said,
"How come I can't remember my child growing up?”
You know, I've lost it.
And...
She said, "Well, apparently,
that's when you got hit with high doses of benzene."
That's what the doctor told me.
What Formosa did to me is unspeakable.
It's...
They made my life a living hell for me and my family.
When you're on disability, you don't make money.
And health-wise, you don't mean anything.
They hire young people
that don't know any better.
Very little education.
And then when they run into major problems,
everybody scrambles, you know.
Hello!
- Do you want to just take some for us? - For sure.
- Cardigan off. - Okay.
- Okay. So you're here to take my blood? - Yeah.
I'm not a fainter, so you don't need to worry.
Good. Good to know.
We're taking a smaller sample
than you'd normally give at a blood donation,
and then, that will allow us to have a look,
and see what actually is in your blood sample
in terms of particles, shapes, sizes, that kind of thing.
Can I get the right angle?
Are you okay just holding the green bit for me?
- Sure. - Just so that doesn't move. Thank you.
We have 20 healthy donors.
It is a blind study.
We have completed nearly all of the 20 donors.
So, the next step is, it will undergo an enzyme digest,
so it's breaking down a lot of the biological material
that you would find in there. Then they go on, actually,
for a very long incubation at temperature
to help further reduce any of the material
in there that's not plastic.
And then once that's complete, we can filter it,
and then we can see what's actually in there
that's remaining.
We're then able to place it in this spectroscopy equipment,
and there's a laser that's going to go through the sample,
and a spectra produced.
And Cat here has a sample of blood
from one of the healthy donors that we have.
This entire white object,
that's the nylon, that's the microplastic.
So that is nylon in human blood, most likely from,
I'm guessing, clothes or carpet or something like that...?
Textiles of some kind, probably.
So, what kind of polymers are you seeing right now?
The nylon that we've seen today, polystyrene,
polyethylene,
- polypropylene, - Yeah.
polyethylene terephthalate,
and then, quite a lot of additives as well.
So we have been finding some chemicals such as phthalates.
This entire thing here, all of this brown,
- Okay. - is the phthalate.
So for example, the non-stick
- that's added to your frying pans. - You found that as well?
Yeah, PTFE, the forever chemical. PFAS.
And so, what are you finding on average?
In every sample, we found microplastics.
- Every... - It ranges from maybe one or two, to...
like, 11, 12, 13. So, that's quite a lot.
11 microplastics in a quarter of the sample,
and you're only taking 10 milliliters.
That's a lot. That's a pretty big plastic burden.
I guess it's inevitable these days.
Microplastics as a contaminant type
are very different to other types of contaminants.
There's not just the physical side of their presence,
which is one issue, and there's potential
to trigger inflammation-type responses.
There's also the chemical and the leachate issue, as well.
Both the plastics and the additives can be genotoxic,
so, for example, they can change the DNA.
They can be epigenetic, causing higher vulnerability
to cancer development later in life
or even the next generation.
But in general, the particle toxicity can...
Causes inflammatory... Low-grade inflammatory responses.
In fact, we know that chronic inflammation
is one of the biggest killers,
because it's a prelude to other...
No, to many... To many chronic diseases.
It's worrying. It's alarming, because if it's in the blood,
that means it can be transported
to any other organ or tissue.
From your bone marrow, to your brain.
You would think that as we know this, that we would start...
making less plastic, but no.
Plastic's production continues to rise.
Part of that is the advent of fracking.
This technology that has suddenly released
all of this natural gas.
There's an oversupply,
and that incentivizes making more plastic.
That is an ethane... It's a steam cracker plant for taking
natural gas feedstock, and turning it into plastic pellets
that they ship overseas to make plastic.
I think they fired up in 2022,
and it's the biggest one in the world as of right now.
It's ExxonMobil, and a company called SABIC,
which is a Saudi-owned company.
It's a mile from our high school. It's a half mile from my house.
Three nights ago, it shook so bad that you'd feel it in the house,
and pictures on the wall were vibrating.
At certain times of the night when they're in full production,
you can come out here and read the newspaper.
They've got ground flares.
Those just roar like crazy.
It's phenomenal as a lay person to read what their...
What their permitting was,
the tons, thousands of tons of pollution
that they're going to let into the air every year.
Cancer is a real deal, and a lot of these things
that they're releasing are known carcinogens.
One of the products that they release in small amounts, is benzene.
The World Health Organization
determined the safe level of benzene is zero.
I have grandchildren, my grandson has asthma.
“Show us how good a neighbor you're going to be.
Put some fence-line monitoring." "No, no, we're not required to do that."
So, we put an air monitor in our backyard.
Of course, it's got a solar panel that keeps a battery in here charged.
There are some sensors in the bottom here
that pick up the fine particulate matter.
We have to have some arrows in our quiver,
because otherwise, you... You can't just say,
"Well, I smelled something," and they'll be,
"Well, what did you smell?" "Well, I don't know."
So, this at least analyzes it, and holds their feet
to the fire at some level.
I love capitalism,
because obviously, we all have to have money.
But I think there should be a balance.
People say, "Well, it's growth. It's growth, it's growth."
Growth is not always a good thing.
There's a lot of things that grow that aren't good.
You know, mildew, cancer tumors.
I use plastic.
You can't help but use plastic,
but do we really need more?
Trash is not a pretty subject, so most of us prefer
not to look at it or even think about it
after we've produced our individual share.
Ask most people how to get rid of it,
and they'll have an easy answer. Throw it away.
In the '70s,
there starts to be a concern that landfills are filling up,
and that plastic is a significant contributor
to that problem.
There's also growing awareness
that plastic is getting out into the environment.
One material we can't do much with is plastic.
It doesn't recycle easily.
In landfill, plastic bottles remain intact for decades,
contributing unwanted bulk to the layers
of the Earth garbage sandwich.
Plastic litter is a deadly insult to the landscape,
since it does not disintegrate.
And so, legislators are introducing bills
to try to ban certain kinds of plastic packaging
like the Styrofoam clamshells that used to be used for fast food.
And in response, the plastic industry starts pushing the idea of recycling.
They're just one of several companies
joining America's recycling craze.
Some, it seems, to improve their image.
They also helped create the famous
“chasing arrows” logo that you will now see
on the bottom of all sorts of plastic packaging
that identifies it as one of seven types of plastic.
And that leads people to believe that this thing is recyclable.
Although, in fact, most plastic is not.
You know, less than 10 percent of plastic worldwide
ever gets recycled.
Most of it either ends up in landfill
or it ends up out in the environment.
The plastics industry used communication tools
to make us think it worked.
They were brainwashing us into thinking
that recycling was sufficient, and they knew it.
They knew it wasn't enough to work.
The costs of the types of solutions
that they're proposing are too expensive to do at scale.
There's too much plastic.
It is predicated on constant growth.
It is endlessly adaptable. Whatever our current needs are,
you will find a plastic solution to that.
Plastic is like the embodiment of capitalism.
Remember The Graduate. "Plastic."
I just want to say one word to you.
Just one word.
Yes, sir.
- Are you listening? - Yes, sir, I am.
Plastics.
Exactly how do you mean?
There's a great future in plastics.
Plastic changed a lot of the ways that we live.
It has enabled all sorts of fast industries.
Fast food,
fast building,
fast fashion.
It gets widely used because it's cheap.
It's allowed a kind of material abundance, health, cleanliness
that is unprecedented.
But it also is a sort of proxy
for what is the worst aspects of a capitalist system,
where you can buy, and consume, and have no regard
for the consequences of what you're buying.
You can discard something,
and not think about the consequences of where it goes.
If it ends up at a waste dump with people picking through,
trying to sort out usable bits.
We don't have to think about that.
This community is one of the low income communities in Manila City,
and there are lots of plastics
because that's the only thing that people can buy.
- Hello. - Hello.
Every little thing.
So everything here comes in little packages, right?
Yes. They need to break it down in small amounts
because that's the amount that people can actually buy. And with the...
- Because it's cheaper, right? - It's cheaper, yes.
If it's in small amount. So you'll see here,
usually you can buy this one in large, in bulk,
but then they would have to put it in small packets.
And it's always sad whenever people just put it like,
“It's the consumer's fault.”
Where, in fact, they're just actually victims
of what is happening at the global scale,
at the national scale.
It's a very difficult situation for the country
because we don't have the capacity
and we have limited recycling facilities.
We can't even manage the waste
that we're already generating in the country,
so we can't really accommodate waste
coming from other countries.
Even if Palawan is a perfect paradise
compared to more populated cities like Manila,
there are areas where plastics would be everywhere.
What kind of plastics are you finding in this area?
They're usually the single-use plastics,
the ones that are easy to use and then just throw away after.
- And then they break down in the sun. - Yes.
And that's why we're trying to look at, how much plastics
are in here on the water's surface.
- And let's see what we got from the net. - Okay.
Well, I've never gone fishing for microplastics.
- Okay. I've got this. - I'm going to get a glass jar.
- There you go. - Okay.
What we do with the water sample is, we send it to a lab.
- Okay. - And then,
we try to identify what types of plastic
or if they are really plastics,
but based on their characteristics,
they're floating, they're translucent.
Visually, those are what you expect to see
if microplastics get concentrated in this net.
- That's so brutal. - Yeah. These are the ones that
the fish eat, too.
These are mussels that we bought from the local market site.
There's plastic.
It looks like a shedding of polyethylene bag.
When you digest the tissue of this mussel,
you see microplastics float out, and you see the blue fragment there?
- My goodness. - That's plastic.
So the average mussel contains how much microplastic?
Roughly about one to three pieces,
particles of microplastics.
And we've been seeing that
shellfish that ingest microplastics,
they have reduced growth rates, so they don't grow big,
and then, they also don't settle that nicely in the settlement areas.
There's only one health.
It's not only the health of us, people,
the health of the animals, of the environment, the plants.
And that means that if one of these components
is affected by microplastics,
like in this case, the ocean,
it has also an effect on the health of humans.
Today, we will remove the anterior part
of the frontal lobe, including the tumor.
That's the only way to increase the survival rate.
So...
Here is a lesion,
and these parts are the brain tissue,
which still has a normal blood-brain barrier.
The blood-brain barrier is a kind of evolutionary barrier,
which is protecting the brain and our neurons
from any kind of substance,
which is already in the blood
because neurons should work under very...
ideal conditions.
If those conditions are disrupted,
then basically the neurons stop working.
If we find microplastics in the brain,
then there are a lot of other questions.
Does the microplastic cause the neuroinflammation?
Does the microplastic cause any effect on the neurons,
which disrupts their working capabilities?
If microplastics are accumulating in the brain tissue,
at some point they should cause some kind of
neurodegenerative disease
like Alzheimer's or dementia.
We already have a couple of samples from last week.
We will get those samples to Sedat.
- Hi, Ziya. How are you? - At long last.
- Good to finally meet you. - Yeah, yeah. Good to see you.
So, if you find microplastics in the brain,
are you going to be scared?
Yes. Because...
if microplastics can transfer from blood to brain,
it means it can transfer from everywhere to everywhere.
So there is no barrier. There is no limitation for plastic.
Is there the potential of it staying in the brain?
Yeah. There is no other way, you know. It will accumulate there,
because it is the endpoint of the human body.
There is no other place to go.
The brain is kind of a pure environment, you know.
The plastics are not native for the brain.
So, it will definitely...
make some change in the brain.
We lost our connection with nature.
So we are living in a synthetic world,
made from... Mostly made from plastic, made from oil and gas.
The current situation with those amounts of plastic
that we generate as a waste and as a pollutant,
makes us Homo plasticus.
It's not a Homo sapiens anymore.
This is normal brain tissue. So...
it's like a space.
Nothing, just some nebula.
Yeah. Look.
- You see? - What is that?
- Do you see the shape? - Yeah. Yeah.
It's red, right?
- It's reddish. Yeah. Reddish purple. - Yeah. Here.
So we can take the spectrum.
So it went rectangular,
and then it means it's really focused.
Okay, here we go.
Okay.
Look, this is the first spectrum.
So is that plastic?
Most probably. We should take more...
- Samples, more scans? - More scans, yeah, to be sure.
Because I will continue to investigate after you...
- Yeah, after I leave. - Yeah.
Are you surprised by what we just found already?
Yeah, because it's not something...
- That should be there. - Yeah.
Shouldn't be there.
You know, it's a bit tragic.
You are transferring microplastics, plastics,
nanoplastics, and chemicals to your unborn generation.
Sedat, good to see you again.
Yeah, good to see you. How are you?
I'm good, thank you. So it's been a little while.
I just kind of wanted to get an update from you.
What have you found?
Yeah, but there are some good and bad news.
It's good for... In a scientific manner,
but in the reality, it's not really good news.
In the tumor-brain-tissue that we analyzed,
we found six particles. Two of them are blue pigments,
and those pigments are used for production of plastics,
specifically, PVC plastics.
So, those pigments are kind of additives.
Because plastics have many chemicals inside,
it's like a chemical cocktail.
One of the elements of this cocktail is pigment.
It's really scary, but it's not surprising.
We're made of the world around us.
Everybody knows that we're made of stardust.
I think the strange thing is that we're starting to be made up of
a little bit of microplastic dust as well.
We can't divorce plastic.
It's too knit into every aspect, every pore of modern life.
That's a kind of addiction.
That's a kind of unhealthy dependence.
That's a toxic relationship.
And so, I think the question now is,
how do we manage and reset the terms of this relationship?
Right now, there's nothing legally binding
at any level, not national,
not regional, not international that requires producers
to actually disclose how much plastic is being produced.
They don't offer any kind of transparency.
We don't know if these materials are safe.
We don't know how many of them there are.
We don't know where they're being traded.
So, countries all around the world,
but led by Rwanda and Peru,
initiated this discussion to say we need something that addresses
the full life cycle of plastics from production
all the way through to design, use, and end of life,
and also leakage into the environment.
Rwanda, with beating plastic pollution, has come a long way.
Plastic pollution was heading to a very bad situation,
and the government of Rwanda
decided they were going to do away with plastic carry bags in 2004.
By 2008,
we had our very first law against polythene bags.
We saw a tremendous change.
We saw cleanliness all of a sudden,
we saw clogging of water channels
stopping because plastics naturally clog the waterways.
But we also saw development of businesses
that brought to the market alternatives
to plastic carry bags.
So the dependence was broken slowly,
gradually, but consistently.
But other single-use plastic items
now showed up on the market.
Plastic straws, disposable cups, plates, cutlery.
And changing the market to alternatives of plastics
with such a small population is not possible.
You need some critical mass of countries
that are banning the use of single-use plastics
to attract research, to attract the industry.
This is when Rwanda thought it was necessary to engage
with other countries to discuss this at a global arena.
Plastic production has far surpassed sustainable levels.
The quantities being produced today,
and projected in the future, are simply unmanageable.
The language we are using here is "restrain" and "reduce"
the primary polymers.
And this is not an easy job, but we have to rise to the task.
There's a lot of questions that need to be answered
in order to inform solutions,
which include different practices by industry.
Also, cleanup and policies to reduce or change our plastics economy.
The Experimental Lakes Area Project
is how we really, really hope to answer that.
This is the first of its kind microplastic experiment,
and it's a massive project. We decided to use plastic
that was similar to consumer product fragments.
They are among the most common things we see
in really heavily urbanized areas.
So it's polyethylene, this is polystyrene,
and this is PET or polyethylene terephthalate.
This is what they use to make water bottles.
This is what they use to make a SOLO cup.
And then this is actually what they use to make a kayak.
So we wet it, we release it underwater.
Yes, we got plastic.
And the purpose for that is, it's meant to be in the lake,
not flying up into the air.
We'll do the addition for three years,
and we'll continue to follow it as long as we have to.
And so, I hope that by doing this research,
we can inform some of those solutions
to actually remediate it,
or to monitor it, or to prevent it from getting into our water.
We started this process 15 years ago
and we became the first plastic-free community
for North America.
We started with a water bottle,
and this little unit, which has 5,500 fills of water.
And we translate that into
5,500 water bottles that weren't purchased.
It's been so encouraging for us to see the buy-in
by the citizens and the local businesses.
Well, 90 percent of them have committed to doing their very best
to becoming plastics-free.
These people are on board, too.
You can see our sticker on the window, there.
Plastic-free business. Yeah.
And what we were able to do,
is to convince 142 community groups,
not politicians, community groups,
to get out there and do what we did.
It's happening, and it's a groundswell.
Today we're going to go to Hansen's. And we've done this event in the past.
We're going to bring in these reusable produce bags here.
Last spring we handed out over 300 bags, so that was really good.
We're just handing out some free, reusable,
- produce bags, if you're interested. - Awesome. Yeah, for sure.
- Would you like to take one? - Thank you.
So they're to use instead of the single-use plastic bags
- currently in the produce department. - Right on.
I'll give you the medium one, there.
- Thank you very much. It's awesome. - No worries. Have a good day.
We're starting to get people to understand
that it's a responsibility now.
This isn't just an idea.
This isn't just something that we can be doing.
It's something that we should be doing.
So, you're one of the establishments here
- that has gone plastic-free. - Yes, we are.
It was difficult to get supply.
It was costly, but over the years it's gotten better and better.
A lot more variety, and different items we can use.
And we're at about 90 percent plastic free,
which, for a takeout place, is pretty good.
There you go. Brussel sprouts tacos.
- Thank you so much. - Enjoy.
- Plastic-free tacos. My favorite kind. - Plastic-free tacos.
We need to turn off the tap.
I think we need to dramatically reduce
the amount of virgin plastic that gets produced.
We need to redesign hazardous chemicals
in ways that reduce their toxicity.
We know enough now to do that.
Knowledge is power,
and having literacy or understanding of an issue
allows us to act upon it.
We didn't get here overnight. We got here kind of one piece at a time,
and we can sort of turn back the clock, one piece at a time.
We know that our society can solve pollution problems.
Our grandparents were exposed to pollutants
that don't exist anymore
because the human health effects became clear.
Those chemicals were then banned,
and the population was healthier as a result.
We know what the problem is. It's not rocket science.
So we need to get on with solving that problem
in the same way the previous generations
solved their pollution problems.