italian kitchen design san vicente
[craig] i remember the first timei saw a picture of a blue whale, which wasin a national geographic magazine. a drawing of the whale, and thena tiny human standing beside it. this thing was bigger than any dinosaur. and as an eight-year-old, i couldn't imagine thatthere was anything that big. i've followed them since childhoodwith the absolute design to go and film them myselfat some point. and that was 40 years later.
never had a slate before... [craig]dr. lindsay porter is a cetacean expert. and ben fogle is a u.k. adventurer. so, lindsay, just tell me,what kind of whales in particular are we looking for? today, we're looking for the blue whale. there are two different typesof blue whale we'll see in the area, - the true blues and pygmy blues.- and how do they differ? pygmy blues are slightly smallerthan true blue whales.
when you say "slightly smaller,"what size are we talking about here? - twenty-five meters.- [chuckles] [craig]lindsay has such a depth of knowledge that she's my first go-towhen i've got a question about a whale. so, as the currents and the waves come in,they create this very productive front, and this is why we think the animals...the whales, feed here. so, when you say "productive front," i imagine krill, food,is being welled up... [craig] ben fogle rowed a boatacross the atlantic.
and that meantthat he had a sense of adventure. he was a risk-taker. from the very first daywe saw them blowing, we knew they were there,but they were very hard to reach. [lindsay] and fluke up. oh, nice. [craig] these animals can doup to 30 kilometers an hour underwater, and they can stay underwaterfor a half an hour and go in any direction. when we saw them,we'd follow them, try to get near them,
wait for them to come up again,and then just never see them again. [craig] tell me whati should be listening out for. for whales, you need to listenfor a low-frequency monotone. and for dolphins... - oh, can you hear it right there? that?- [dolphin whistles] - [lindsay] the whistles?- [craig] the high-pitched whistles? the high-pitched whistling.that's dolphins. that's the group of dolphinswe just passed. - how far do you think they are?- they'll still be within a kilometer.
- that's a long way to go.- it's a long way. it's a big ocean. they've got to talk to each otherover distance. that's incredible. [craig] we traveled up and down,50 miles off the coast for two weeks trying to get close to these animals. we ran out of time.we started heading back to port... - oh, look, look.- [lindsay] at two o'clock... another blow. four. and it looks likehe's going to fluke up...
and dive. so, he'll probably be downfor another ten minutes or so. whoosh! [craig] they look like freight trains, like enormous spaceshipsthat just travel effortlessly. every piece of them lookedlike something i'd seen on a... reengineeredon an aircraft or on a supercar. when they fluke, they arch like that. their tail comes up verticallyand drops straight in the water,
and you can barely hear a sound. [craig] wow, look at that![laughs] wow! that is just beautiful! [whistles] [craig] it's the first timethat we believe that anyone has ever filmeda juvenile pygmy blue whale underwater. [craig] what do you think it's from, alex?is it from a ship? no, it came from a river. [craig] we were in the indian ocean,off the coast of sri lanka, where
there hasn't been any commercialfishing because of the civil war. the beaches have been closedfor up to 30 years. we thought this wasa relatively pristine environment. [man]floating on the surface and a meter belowwas just this horrible, crappy, emulsified mess of oil and bits of,you know... it's horrible, and looking through it, you could see the tendrilsof the net hanging down. that was certainly one of the mostunpleasant dives i've ever done.
[woman]i spent my childhood in the sea. growing up in grand cayman, we didn't haveorganized sports after school. we didn't even have a tv until i was 13,so the sea was my playground. as a free-diver,it was the place where... i proved myself to myself by travelingto the absolute edge of myself. [inhales] [exhales] [tanya] i need to put as much oxygenin my blood as possible
so that i can hold my breathfor the three-and-a-half to four minutes that the dive is gonna take me. [inhales air] [tanya] five-hundred andtwenty-five feet is beyond the crushing depthof second world war submarines. in pushing so hard,i learned about limits. i've got a fiery redhead,and she redefines my limits every day. [audience laughing] finally for me,
it feels like there's a pointto this bizarre gift i have of "looking prettyand holding my breath." i have the opportunityto pay the sea back... but i'm learning on my feet. i didn't know thatin the last ten years, we've made more plasticthan we did in the century before that. half of those plastic productsare considered "disposable." but think about it. how can a disposable product be madeof a material that's indestructible?
where does it go? [indistinct chatters] [tanya] this is a bryde's whale.it's dying, taking its final breaths. [woman] oh, my god. [tanya] it was found to have six squaremeters of plastic sheeting inside it. it couldn't eatand it died of malnourishment. its digestive system was blockedand it died a terrible, painful death. that's got a hole in it. this is all some of the rubbishthat we found
in the floating jetsamand flotsam in the ocean. we'll get ben to go through it, but there's even a packof unopened biscuits. you can see it's been there for some time,the mollusks that are growing off it. there's crabs.there's a crab in there, have a look. so, quite extraordinary. - [man 1] another one.- [man 2] another one. down here. [craig] the detritus that's built upin these areas where they don't have the benefitof getting rid of the rubbish.
well, we're about 20 miles offshore. it's been trapped in the river mouthand now it's all flushed out into sea. this is one of the main areas where we're huntingfor the blue whales to film, so this is right in their environment. they feed by opening their mouth and just sucking upwhatever's in their path. they take inhundreds of gallons of water, they express that water, andthey feed off the krill and tiny fish.
but they can't tell the differencebetween krill and plastic. disposable lighters. just... you know,this is never gonna degrade. these are gonna be floating there for...a very long time. they'll break downto very small particles, and that's if some large marine mammaldoesn't come along and swallow them whole. it's got nowhere to go.this is where it lives now. well, to contrast that areaof affected ocean by those plastics with the virgin blue waterthat you find very close by,
well, there's just no comparison. the animals of the world deservethe blue ocean, not that sort of shit. [craig] i started to wonderwhat's happening in oceans elsewhere on the planet. [tanya] sixty-three billion gallonsof oil are used every year just to supply the u.s.with plastic water bottles. the u.s. alone throws away38 billion bottles every year. that's two million tons of plasticgoing into u.s. landfills, and that's only from water bottles.
in this year alone,every single person on the planet will use and dispose about 300 poundsor 136 kilos, of single-use plastic. [craig] plastic is wonderfulbecause it's durable and plastic is terriblebecause it is durable. almost every piece of plastic ever made is still on the planetin some form or another. plastic production globally this year is expected to bemore than 300 million tons. half of which we'll use just onceand then throw away.
by 2050, when the population explodesto almost ten billion people, it's expected that plastic productionwill triple. the problem with that is...is that today, only a fraction of the plastic that we produceis recycled. the rest ends up in our environment and it's coating our land and our oceanslike a disease. [craig] tasmania smells like freshness.it smells like salt spray. primitive. it just smells natural. it has the cleanest air and watermeasured anywhere on the planet.
the ocean to me, is my church,it's my temple, it's my synagogue, it's my mosque. it's where i feel the most spiritual. it's where i go to work,where i go for my enjoyment, and where i go to think. and it's also the environmentthat challenges me more than any other environmentthat i know. growing up, my world was... exploring the rock pools...
tiny little fish that i could catchand study and release a day later. my mother was very caringand very supportive of anything that we wanted to do. and she picked up very early on,i think, my fascination with wildlife. i'm fourth-generation journalist. it's believed he's heading to moscow. we're on a trucktaking rice down to santa fe. okay, it's not live, is it?hang on, wait, wait! whoa! further outside katmandu you travelthe worse it seems the damage becomes.
small villages like this one, sankhustood no chance against the moving earth. these rescue teams have been unableto access inside this city. [craig] the town that i grew up inwas an industrial town. i remember coming out after trainingfrom the surf lifesaving club, where i was a member,with just stinging red eyes. so, when i worked for the newspaper, i wanted to investigatewhat was causing that. we started doing testingon the water in emu bay and what we found was that there werethese heavy amounts of organochlorines
and these contain dioxinswhich are cancer-causing agents. - [helicopter whirs]- i put this to the government of tasmania and they admitted for the first timethat these dioxins existed, and that they were dangerous. within ten years,all of those industries had closed, and today the fish are back in the water. the water is blue again,and it's a very beautiful city. we think that when we putsomething in the trash or when we just toss it from a boator on a beach, that it "goes away."
ah! [stammers]we're now free of the plastic. [tanya] over 80 percent of ocean plasticleaks from land-based sources. even if you don't live near the ocean, chances are your plastic garbagehas found its way to the sea. the great lakes in north americaare a good example. eighty percent of the litteralong the shorelines of these majestic lakes is plastic. what trash doesn't remain on the shorelineor sink into the lake sediment flows through the canalsand river system
through the st. lawrence seawayand into the atlantic ocean. these great lakes are just one example. this level of plastic debrisis found all around the world. thousands of yearsof agriculture and industry have made the med one of the mostpolluted bodies of water on the planet. about eight million tons of plasticis dumped into the world's oceans every year. more than 50 percent of marine debris,including plastic, sinks to the bottom of the ocean.
- ahoy!- hello, mike! - hey, popov.- welcome aboard. - good to see you.- yeah. [tanya] i met up with filmmaker,mike degruy, a marine biologist and also an experiencedsubmersible pilot. [tanya] it'll be interesting to seejust how far-reaching it really is. to be this far offshore and see whether the plastic that we knowis coming from that direction is winding up outin the depths out here, right?
i'm really looking forward to,of course diving the sub in the med, a place that has more fishing impactthan most bodies of water on the planet. [squeaks] [speaks in french] hey, mike, it's tanya. can you tell mewhat you're seeing down there? [mike] you turn the light on, and you're descendingthrough these particles. well, welcome to the bottomof the ocean, tanya. [mike] i wish you were down herewatching this operation.
if you weren't hogging the sub,i would be down there. [submarine whirs] so, we're just under five meters now. almost 1200... about 1200 feet. - and a plastic bottle.- you see a plastic bottle. exactly. we're now starting to see moreand more plastic. more and more tires and pieces of metal, and just absolutely disregardfor the bottom, really. it's just junk everywhere.
fishing line is a really dangerous thingto see in a submarine. you can get entangled in it andstuck to the bottom. not a good thing. tanya, this is remora. we are right in front ofa pretty good-sized bundle of plastic. is there any chance that you can grabsome of it with the manipulator? [mike]that's exactly what we're going to do. [tanya] it looks like a lift bag.could it be a lift bag? it's a what? [men speaking in french]
[tanya]we saw unexploded bombs, old parachutes, and plenty of plastic rubbish. [machine whirs] our scientists commissioned a small,remotely-operated vehicle to travel over a mile and a half downto the deep trenches. the rov is coming down. - [popov] there they are.- [mike] which is kind of cool. [tanya]here, where the daylight never reaches, the eddies and currents havecollected scores of plastic bottles.
this plastic could remain here forever. you go down, you know, 350, 375 meters, hit bottom, start moving around,and immediately start seeing trash. - plastic?- plastic. where in the world can you go anymoreand not find plastic? [tanya] our oceans are driven by fivemajor circular currents, or "gyres." these are created by the earth's rotationand the resulting predominant winds. each continent is affectedby these massive systems. they collect waste flowingfrom our rivers and coastlines,
and over time,anything floating within the gyre will eventually movetowards the center of the gyre. [craig] our producer, jo ruxton,was familiar with the story about a huge, floating island of garbage twice the size of texasin the north pacific. jo joined dr. andrea neal and her team on an expeditionto this great pacific garbage patch. so, we're deploying the manta trawl, and we're going to lookfor fine particulates and debris.
this mesh here is 333 microns, which isin the size range of zooplankton. [craig] the manta trawlcaptures material on the surface. it will take anythingthe size of a pinhead or larger. looking out over the vast expanseof clear, sparkling water, there is no plastic in sight. [indistinct chatter] [craig] the contents of the trawlare emptied and floated. the tiny pieces of plastic thenreveal themselves to jo and dr. neal. [andrea] scientists estimatethat there are more than
five trillion pieces of plastic afloatin our oceans worldwide. [craig]there is no "floating island" of plastic. what exists is far more insidious. what exists is a kind of "plastic smog." these tiny piecesof plastic that are floating on the surface of the oceancome from larger pieces. over time, the sun's ultraviolet light,ocean wave action, and salt, break it up into smaller piecescalled "microplastics." microplastics have rough,pitted surfaces.
waterborne chemicalsfrom industry and agriculture stick to microplastics,making them toxic poison pills. there are five ocean gyres, and the south pacificis one of the least studied next to the indian ocean. i've been to three of the five gyres,so this will be my number four. - so, let's go fishing for plastic.- all right, let's do it. [bonnie] my first study was donein the north atlantic in 2009. we took a series of seven samplesand by weight, we then estimated
that the north atlantichad 3,440 metric tons of just microplastics. we're noteven including the larger plastics. seems really heavy. - maybe we caught a coconut.- [chuckles] - aw, that's... wow, look at that.- oh, yeah. [bonnie] you can seehow well this device works. - [craig] yeah.- it collects everything. [craig] they look likethey've just broken off something. - yeah, i mean...- they're very tiny. look at this.
michael, i think we've foundour first "nurdle." - exactly what that is.- preproduction pellets. those things float all around the world,don't they? - right. what does it look like to you?- it looks like a little egg. [craig] the sea at nightis one of my favorite times. it's when the ocean truly comes alive and you can virtually seethe food chain in action. zooplankton feed on phytoplankton.small fish feed on zooplankton. squid feed on small fish,
and so it goes on,up and up the food chain. - [man] there are some myctophids in there.- [craig] oh, wow. well, shall we get them on the tableand open them up and have a look and see what's in there? [man] we'll start with this guy. - that's something hard right here.- yeah, what's that? [birds chirp] this is the very first sample we did,and it was a night trawl, so we could catch lantern fish.
after i dried the sample,i handpicked the pieces of plastic. this is what we found. so, what this meansis the feeding that's occurring on the surface of the ocean has theseplastic fragments floating around, and is actually intermixingin the food chain. you know that plastic doesn't degrade. most of the time we say it breaks down but that's probably notan accurate way to say it. it actually breaks upso it's more, um, proliferated.
and when it's proliferated, there's moreopportunities for plastics to be ingested. many of the marine creatures eating thiskind of plastic are in our food chain. does that mean, then, thatthis plastic is getting inside of us? the problem is,these plastics adsorb chemicals that are free-floating in the ocean. so when the fish eat the plastics,those toxins then migrate from the plastic into the muscles or the fats,the parts that we like to eat in fish. building up in the fish thenas they eat more and more of them. and so, that's the part we like to eat,
and that's wherethese chemicals migrate to. [rooster crowing] [woman] big crab. nice. oh! it's a prawn, eh? [laughs] - hello, rosie. how are you?- hi. - hi, bula.- hi. bula, salota. dinner. what are we cooking?
we're having taro leaveswith fish in coconut milk. that's a very traditionalfijian village dinner. yes, it is. yes, it is. it smells really goodexcept for the smoke. - yeah, really making my eyes water.- yeah. - did you light your fire using plastics?- always, yes. and you do thatevery time you cook food? three times a day. instead of buying kerosene,
you use plasticbecause it's easier to burn. - much cheaper, easier to find, it's free.- much more cheaper. very much. and it's free. i'm feeling that in my eyes. do you feel [stammers]that affects you in any way? you start having problems in breathingand you have problems in coughing. and sometimes you can have headache.but we... it doesn't really bother us. because, like,we've used that for a long time.
- so you're used to it. yeah.- we're used to it. whereas i'm not, which is whyi'm crying right now. [chuckles] and i hope you're not cryingbecause of me. there's no chance. i'm cryingbecause i won't get to try this food. what i'd like to do is bring backa scientist if we can and do some measurements on the smoke and just see what kind of chemicalsare being released from the plastics as you cook. - [stammers] would you let us do that?- yes, of course.
[craig] we can have a lookat maybe some of the health implications of starting the fires with plastic. [rosie]yes, i think that's a good idea. [michael] people misuse plasticsfor a lot of things. but for cooking, i mean that's... for me, it's kind ofvery unusual circumstances. and we wanna have a baseline study to show what kind of chemicalswe're actually breathing in. because the lung is an interfacebetween that air we're breathing in,
plus the smoke and our blood system,and then we get it in our systems. [craig] what did we find today then with the experiment that you didwith this device? i'll show you. these filters are whitewhen you put them in, but... that's brown, almost black. - yeah.- this is a mini lung. this could be what - they're absorbing into their lungs.- yeah, pretty much. [craig] this can't be goodfor your health, can it?
[michael] what we knowspecifically from this p.a.h and a combination of thoseis that they are cancer-causing. that's one thing. but there are also maybe phthalates therewhich are evaporating from plastics which have a large percentageof the phthalates in there to give plastic its properties. if you breathe them, they have,um, hormone-changing properties, so-called"endocrine-disrupting properties." and all...lot of other health effects as well.
[craig]professor sue jobling is the editor of the recent world health organizationreport on endocrine disrupters. endocrine disruptionis disruption of the normal functioning of the body's hormonal system. they fool the body into thinkingthat they are hormones and then they either block or mimicthe action or production of hormones. and in doing so, they interferewith very many bodily processes... growth, metabolism, reproduction,and critically, early development. [craig] the majority of ocean plasticcomes from just six countries.
[woman] rthk news. [man] billions of plastic pellets have spilled into hong kong'ssouthern waters after several containers fell off a shipwhen typhoon vicente battered hong kong. [craig] six containers full of nurdles.all of them broke up in the storm and disgorged most of their plasticbags into the sea. [helicopter whirs] the vast majority broke openand the contents spilled out. run them through your fingers there. [tracey]just plastic pellets everywhere. yeah.
it looked like snow on the beach. [craig] on the neighboring lamma island,they found tons of this stuff that had come ashore. it seems the companythat made the nurdles has unwittingly puttheir signature on her. sinopec, a giant chinese oil company that makes nurdlesfor distribution worldwide. close by are some other sacks,also ripped open. the vast majority of themwould have been carried off
by the typhoonto disperse their contents far and wide. [gary] four of the six are here,so we've got the one on the top here. it's the one we foundat beaufort island. it's totally destroyed.it's a... it's a 40-foot container. we've been toldit carries a thousand sacks. - there's still one hasn't been found.- still one out there somewhere. there's a million pelletsof plastic in these bags. so, every single bagsaves thousands of marine species, so, every bag counts at this point.
every day, pellets aregetting washed out and trying to getthat sense of urgency across. [gary]we put a call to action out on facebook. "go to your local beach,this is what you're looking for." these are the bags,these are the pellets. you know,we came up with a rapid action plan. get a quick survey of the coastso we can see the bigger picture. and from that,then we isolated some hot spots. [craig] "which beach, cheung chau/mui wo,needs more people to help?"
uh, beach number 1. [gary] i set up the facebook page,"plastic disaster hong kong" and it went from 80 to a thousand likesin a few hours. and it became pretty much the one place where all the informationwas being posted by everybody. even the government were checking it.sinopec were checking it. [craig] sinopec sent down peoplefrom their head office. they had general managerson the beaches. [gary] they have been very responsible.they have been down.
we had an emergency meeting about it.they're very concerned and they're offeringall the assistance they can. thanks for helping, guys. um... there's some more concentrated pelletsdown the end there. [craig] once you let people knowwhat the problem is, people have their own ideas and can contribute their own ingenuityto help solve the problem. [gary] the people of hong kongrealized the severity of the problem and just came outin their masses to help.
and that is somethingthat i will never, ever forget. [speaks in foreign language] so, this is what they foundin the fish farm. pellets like this floating in the sea,and then they're found in the bags. we caught three fish. they cut them open and each fishhad five, six, seven pellets in it. [speaking in a foreign language] because they can't ingest anything?they can't take in any more food? [craig]even the supermarkets won't buy them.
so, it's completely destroyedthe local market. [tanya] in a recent study publishedin scientific reports, u.c. davis researchers examined 76 fishslated for human consumption in indonesia, and 64 in california. they found that in both groups,roughly one quarter had anthropogenic debris in their guts. the researchers found plasticin the indonesian population and plastic and textile fibersin the american one. when sampling blue musselsat six locations
along the coastlines of france,belgium, and netherlands, microplastics were presentin every single organism examined. when you eat shellfish,you're often eating the entire animal. so you're more likely to eat plastic. [birds chirping] [craig] lord howe islandis a world heritage site... and home to migratory seabirdslike the shearwaters. seabirds are incredibly helpful because they act like an armyof scientists.
they travel thousands of milesacross the ocean. they pick up plasticoff the surface of the ocean, they bring it back to their rookerieswhere they feed it to their chicks. and that providesan incredible amount of scientific data in terms of where the plasticcomes from, its distribution, and how it breaks upon the ocean's surface. dr. jennifer lavers... she's devoted her life to studyingthe plight of seabirds. [shearwaters chirp]
shearwaters are incredible birds. they migrate thousands of miles,stopping only here to breed. all species of shearwaternest in the earth. their parents return from their distantocean feeding grounds by night to feed their chicks in their burrows. after 70 to 90 days, the chicksventure aboveground for the first time. they stretch their wings andbegin developing their flight muscles [jennifer] we're gonna takesome ambient temperature saltwater, like he would normally be fedby his parents,
and ian's just gonna holdthe mouth open here, and i'm going to, um, put the tubedown into the stomach if we can get himto cooperate for a moment. have you ever receivedserious injury from one of these? indeed. have i ever.more than i can possibly count. depending on how full his stomach is,we could be here for a little while. no, still nothin'. still nothin'. there we go. [craig] whoa! look at that.
[jennifer] need to get some of the oiland stuff out of the way. it's very thick with all that oil in it. - that's a lot of plastic, isn't it?- yeah, and some interesting colors. the red is quite, quite, uncommon. it looks like we've got quite a fewof the resin pellets, the nurdles, lots of microplastics. right. there's no way at 935 grams thathe would be able to take to the air. i'm gonna make a bit of a note, he's gotsome damage to his lower mandible.
forty-one point seven. [craig] garbage thrown away in the united statescan make its way to antarctica. plastic in our coastal watersis pulled into the center of massive, wind-driven, churning circular gyres. there are many other ocean currentsalso diverting the trash all around the surface of the ocean. in reality, it's just one oceanwith no boundaries. [jennifer] yeah,the stomach is very, very full,
and if we look here, uh,there's some very dark pieces, some very light white pieces, and if you see, you know, as ipush on this, it's absolutely rigid. completely... completely full of plasticall the way up. ah! look at that. absolutely no doubt that this bird diedas a result of that plastic. that is literally a gut full of plastic. - it's quite alarming, isn't it?- ah, it's awful.
range of plastic types and colors. we've got everythingfrom the blues and the reds, to... his stomach's just filled with it.big pieces too. big, sharp pieces. oh, wow, look at the sizeof that big, black piece. that is an enormous piece of plastic. unbelievable. look at the size of that. jen, i counted 234 pieces of plasticout of that one bird.
- is that a record?- not even close, unfortunately. so, for the species,the record is 276 pieces of plastic inside of one 90-day-old chick. and that plastic,when we weighed it out, accounted for 15 percentof that bird's body mass. that's a pretty scary statistic. if we translate that into human terms,it gets even worse. that would be equivalent to you and i having somewhere around six or eight kilosof plastic inside of your stomach.
it's equivalent to about 12 pizzas'worth of food inside of your stomach. [tanya] midway island is miles awayfrom any coastline but it has one of the biggest populationsof laysan albatross in the world. like the shearwater, their parents have traveled thousandsof kilometers to find food. it's quite a bit of plasticfor just one little bird. the parentswere trying to do the right thing. there's a lot of squid beaks in here and, um, this purple coloris evidence of the squid ink.
it's just a shamethat every now and then they got it wrong,and got it wrong in a bad way. [flies buzz] [jennifer] to try and wrap your mindaround the condition of this animal and the quality of its life,really, is quite an overwhelming thing. i do have some pretty rough days...have to go home and really wrap my mind around,"where do we go from here?" all week we've been cutting up birds and this is without a doubt the absoluteworst one that i've come across.
that is an incredible amount of plastic. [tanya] i've come to asinara, a small island off the northern tipof sardinia, to meet with cristina fossi a professor of ecotoxicologyat the university of siena. the turtle rescue center herehas just received a loggerhead turtle. [cristina] the animals come from corsica,right, so from france. and they have identified the animalsbecause they have a problem of floating. so, it was floating in a very unusual wayand then they have discovered that the cause is the presence ofa large amount of plastic in the stomach.
- [tanya] these plastics?- these plastics. they produce gas and then the animalis not more able to go down, to dive. does he have to performa surgery to remove this? - no, no. he use very simple stuff.- yeah. this one was used to remove the gas from the intestinal tract,then he use... [man] metronidazole. it's, uh, an antibiotic,a normal antibiotic in order to save the animalfrom infection.
and then the last pointwas to use a fat, uh, diet. - treat the gas, get everything moving...- gas... - ...and get it out.- yes. [cristina] so, commonly plastic bagthat's floating on the surface can be misunderstood as a jellyfish. and then they can be eatingdays after days. plastic bags or other pieces of plastic, obviously the consequencecan be lethal for the animals. [tanya] cristina's name is well-recognizedaround the world for her stand
against the killingof whales and dolphins. [cristina]we use the approach of the skin biopsy in order to identifythe level of chemicals and the toxicological effecton these wild animals. today we are moving aroundthe gulf of asinara, try to see some bottlenose dolphin, thenwe collect some microplastic samples. [tanya] an increasing numberof dolphins and turtles in the mediterraneanare turning up dead. cristina's focusis to get to the bottom of this mystery.
and she has a very unusual wayof getting the information she needs. [speaks in italian] [motor revs] [man speaking in italian] [tanya]how can you get a tiny piece of blubber from whales and dolphinswithout hurting them? [tanya] the dart bounces off,taking a small piece of flesh with it, which the scientists useto conduct their research. it's very difficult.
it may be, i don't know, but... so, we can start to process the biopsythat was collected with the darts. the species is bottlenose dolphins. that's one of the common speciesaround the coast and we suppose alsoone of the most polluted ones. you expect that you're findingderivatives from plastics in the blubber of these animalsbecause they're consuming other animals that aredirectly consuming the plastics. exactly.
and so, if the plasticsare in the food chain for the dolphin, they're also in our food chain. [cristina] we have alreadyvery interesting result, but i would like to invite youinto the lab. [tanya] when animals eat plastic, they're also consumingthe toxins attached to the plastic. toxins pass into the bloodstream. there, they bio-accumulatein the fatty tissue and around the vital organs.
when animals use the stored fat,the toxins circulate around the body, interfering with reproduction, metabolismgrowth, kidney and liver function. [beeps] as we have seen this day, there is clear evidencethat plankton species and fin whale, for example,have a very high level of phthalates, that we considerone of the plastic derivatives. [cristina] but that data can representa real warning sign of exposureto the mediterranean environment,
including humans,in real toxicological risk. [indistinct chattering in the distance] [horn honks in the distance] [craig] smokey mountain i operatedas a two million-metric ton waste dump for more than 40 years. it closed in 1995. [craig] this garbage tipcontains so much methane which was producedby the garbage within it, that when it reachesa certain temperature, it catches fire.
that creates this smokethat comes out of the top of the pile and filters over the city of manila. so, sweet potatoes, corn, sugar cane, all growing on 40 years of garbage. - [woman] yeah.- [craig] you worked here as a 12-year-old. [woman] yeah. to earn moneyto support my family needs. and what would you collect up here? recyclables,like bottles, cans, and plastics. this, uh, local chap here is still
harvesting the plasticthat's in the ground. - yeah, lot of plastic.- it's just everywhere. - what's the most common disease here?- [leticia] uh, pulmonary. - pulmonary, such as tuberculosis,- yeah. yes, emphysema. emphysema, yes.my father died due to emphysema. no one knows how much plastichas accumulated in the sea in the last 50 years,but one thing is sure, the pace has picked up.
[film narrator] the world of plasticsis present everywhere, yet this presenceis but a premonition of a future world. our children will seea bit of that world and our grandchildrenwill not see the end of it. [craig]the smell is almost indescribable. it's kind of like a crossbetween sewage and oil, and it's everywhere. [metal clanking] [craig] the ground, to within two inchesabove it is covered in flies.
[man speaks in tagalog] - [men speaking indistinctly]- [chuckles] [children chattering indistinctly] [craig]i could see a child flying a kite. you could see the kitewas made from a plastic bag and he'd fashioned this himself and usedstraws as the mainframe for the kite. if you got behind himand looked towards the sky, he could have been any childanywhere in the world. [speaks indistinctly]
[chuckles] [craig] every time it rains here,every time the wind blows offshore, the sludge, the plastic from all of thatrubbish ends up straight in manila bay, and i guess into the stomachsof whatever marine animals are still able to survive in the bay. a lot of plastic here. i guess a lotof this is brought in by the river. yeah, it came from the pasig river. also it's been washed upby, uh, the ocean during typhoons and, uh, also people living here alsothrow their garbage in this area
because there are no garbage collectors coming into the areato collect the garbage. how much waste... plastic wasteis put into the waterways here? - do you have any idea?- uh, around 1500 tons daily. one thousand five hundred tons every day? yes. [man] one more, one more! - ready?- [man] you go now! [boys scream]
[boys laugh] [boy] one, two, three, four! thank you. well, i have to say, you're allmuch better basketballers than i am. - i'm so bad. i'm sorry.- again, again? i'm no good at basketball.you're very good at basketball. this guy. - thank you.- very good. - do you all live here? in pier 18?- yes. - and you play basketball all the time?- yeah.
do you go to school? - yes.- no. yes, you go to school?you don't go to school? no? - no.- no? - so, what do you do during the day?- uh, scavenger work. scavenger, yeah?what do you scavenge for? - this.- the plastic? plastic. ah! and what do you do with the plastic,once you...?
- go to the junk shop.- yeah? and what do theygive you for the plastic? - money.- money. is it good money? - what kind of money?- money. - he's asking how much we're earning.- it's 150 pesos. - [craig] yeah?- one day. - for one day?- yeah. and what do you do with the money? - i give it to my mother.- your mother.
- yeah.- yes? and what does she do with the money? - buy the rice.- the rice. right. so you can play, grow up,be healthy, play good basketball. show me. give me your shot. [craig] most of the wastecreated by the individuals within each of these villages,towns and cities generally ends up on the streetsor in their canals. it's easy to understandhow these sorts of places
become delivery systemsfor plastic into our oceans. [craig] i understand that thiswas ten feet deep in plastic. literally ten feet of plasticthat was pulled out of this canal. first we dredged, but we realized that we're diggingdown to china, we stopped. [roel] what we didwas to cover it up with, uh, good soil and garden soil, andthen we put up, uh, the coco-pillows. it's, uh, made from coconut husk. and then we spread it up until there.we vegetated it in the vetiver grass.
[craig] the plants takethe rest of the waste out of the water. - [roel] yes.- [craig] and now we've got fish swimming. - [roel] and turtles.- [craig] wildlife. [craig] it's clean enoughfor animals to live in now. [roel] it's clean enough, yes. - is it drinkable?- not yet. - not yet. working on that one.- working on that one. [craig] and so you're goingto do this project now throughout the canalsand river systems of manila?
yes, uh, with the same ideaof putting bioremediation and phytoremediation together. [rooster cackles] [craig] do you think that will solvethe plastic pollution problem here? the one that will solvethe plastic solution is the behavior of the peoplearound this area. so, maybe we'll start with that first and then we'll solveeverything else afterwards. [chants]
[tanya] i'm off to visit the tiny,isolated coral atoll of tuvalu in the south pacific, near fiji. as a mother, i care deeply aboutthe effects of plastic on our health. [sings in foreign language] tuvalu gained its independence in 1978. it began importing foreign goodsand food and with that came plastic. i realized just how tiny this nation waswhen i flew in over the atoll. tuvalu is a microcosmof the entire planet, and they have nowhereto put the plastic.
during world war ii,in order to build an airstrip for the allies in the pacific theater,large quantities of coral were dug up and carted off to be crushedand mixed for the tarmac. gaping holes left behindare called "borrow pits." they were never filled back in,and are now used for refuse. [fire crackling] [chickens cackling] [tanya] how long have you livedin this borrow pit? - [woman] twenty-five years.- so, you're 25 years old?
- yeah.- in your 25-year lifetime, have you seen the amount of plasticin your surrounding community increase? yeah. very increase. before, in my early childhood,i don't see any plastic because we don't usedto import packaging, plastics. [tanya] tell me what it was likegrowing up here as a child. we always, uh, swim at the borrow pit. [marao] we don't know that there is,uh, "affectiveness" to us. we just swim and then we go...we like fishing.
[tanya] you used to fish outof the borrow pit and eat the fish? but you don't do that anymore? no, we don't eat the fish.we just feed the pigs. - [tanya] you feed the fish to the pigs?- [marao] yeah. [pigs squeak] what kind of health problemsare you seeing people suffer from? flu. some people, they get cancer. and then some people,they don't get pregnant. people in the borrow pitare having problems conceiving?
if things don't changein the borrow pit, but the people stay here,what do you think will happen? i think they get disease.and they don't want to leave. like, this is a nice place, but because of the imported packaging,they destroy our paradise. and i want to give good futurefor my children. 'cause i love my children. [craig] how does a u.s. navyaircraft carrier handle its waste? with about 4,500 sailors onboard, justshy of half the population of tuvalu
the amount of waste generatedevery day is enormous. u.s. navy is looking for a wayto deal with shipboard waste without having to go into port. [brakes squeak] [craig]the belly of the latest aircraft carrier will be fitted with a gleaming maze ofsteel pipes to devour the ship's waste. pyrogenesis of montrealwas contracted by the u.s. navy to develop a green technology capableof processing the waste generated by these sailors.
at the heart of this technologyis a plasma torch that changes the molecular structureof whatever is put into it transforming it backto its core elements. better still, it has no detrimentaleffect on the environment, it runs off its own energy,and is affordable. if they could shrinkthe plant into the size of something that you can putinto a shipping container, take to small islands like tuvalu,set it up so that you can put in all of the rubbishthat's existing on the island,
and have it turn into inertor nontoxic substances, that's going to go a long wayto help solving the problems that exist on islands in the pacific. [speaks in a foreign language] [all singing hymn] [craig]if an innovative, workable solution like pyrogenesis is not implementedin places like tuvalu, the quality of lifewill continue to decline. the island will eventually be chokedby its own plastic waste.
combined with the rising sea levelcaused by climate change, tuvalu's habitabilityis under serious threat. [singing of hymn continues] one of the kids we've befriended here has developeda pretty bad lingering cough. we think his problems might be linkedto a hobby he shares with his friends, making jewelry out of melted plastic. [cooing] [craig] tanya is extremely protectiveof her children,
so she's incredibly engagedin their well-being, particularly where she has control. and she has controlover her environment. - [craig] this is charlie, huh?- [tanya chuckles] surprised he wasn't bornwith a face mask. [chuckles] - yeah, right? and a nose clip?- [chuckles] and a nose clip. it wasn't easy for me to conceive.i'm an older mom. i worked really hard for this. [tanya] all the time trying to conceivebeing really clean in my body.
went through my entire pregnancywithout taking so much as a tylenol. - throw the line in there, till.- okay. this is actually catfish corner. [tanya and till chuckle] [tanya] my kids make me really passionateabout the subject. annoyingly passionate. you know. ask my husband.he'll roll his eyes. he goes from this guywho is washing ziploc bags and i think, "oh, i'm winning!my husband is washing ziploc bags!" i see them drying in the sinkand i'm like, "yes!"
but then he'll forget and i see,you know, plastic wrap over a food, and i'm like, "no!" now, you've had a veryhealthy, uh, lifestyle. you haven't been able to controlevery aspect of it, so the likelihood is he may have plasticin his system. it's terrifying. it's awful. and it... you know, [stammers]it's made me question sometimes, "gosh, is even having childrenthe right thing to do?" i'm still very, very motivated
to obviously do the right thingby myself and my family, but also to try to incite change where i can as an environmentalist,as an activist. i'm optimisticbecause it beats the alternative. [craig] austin is a very cool city.it's environmentally aware. it was the first city in texasto ban the plastic bag. it's an oasis of eco-friendly people in a state that's headquartersfor the largest oil companies and petrochemical plants.
plastipure is wherewe formulate and test plastics for their physical characteristics. on the certichem side, where we are here,we test plastics and other substances, as well as individual chemicals, uh,to see if they have estrogenic activity. [machine beeps and whirs] a lot of plastics,perhaps the great majority, probably release chemicalsthat have estrogenic activity. [tanya] estrogenic activity, or "e.a.," happens when a chemicallike bpa or phthalate
leaches from plastic and enters the bodywhere it mimics the hormone estrogen. ninety-two point six percentof americans age six and older have detectible levelsof bpa in their bodies. the levels in childrenbetween six and 11 years of age are twice as highas those in older americans. [tanya]are all of those chemicals not regulated? [dr. bittner] no, the fda at presentdoes not have any regulations for how many chemicals and what levelsof chemicals having estrogenic activity can be released from plastics orfrom cosmetics or papers or silicones.
so, how is the general public protectedfrom that kind of thing? - uh, they aren't.- they aren't? [news reporter] from baby bottlesto sippy cups to food can liners to water bottles hydratingthe youngest athletes, consumers have been exposed to aroot chemical called bisphenol a or bpa. an artificial sex hormoneused as a core building block in close to seven billion poundsof plastic on the market today, because of its strength and resiliency. this isn't a weak, uh, contaminant.
this is a powerful contaminant and it's striking right at the coreof american public health. when something says that it's bpa-free,is that something i can trust? over 90 percent of all plasticsthat don't have bpa, nonetheless, uh, release chemicalshaving estrogenic activity. so, bpa is not the only bad guythat we need to be looking out for. bpa is only one bad guy. - like saying, "i've caught al capone!"- yeah. - "i've just handled...- yeah. [chuckles]
...the criminal problemin the united states!" we do quite a bit of this testingto see where the issues are but we also use that data tohelp manufacturers make safer products. right. the average consumer goes,"poly-whatta-whatta?" you know, "i don't get it. tell me what is the right one,what is safe, what isn't." when we look at baby bottles, we have to lookat all the different components that come in contactwith the milk or with the baby.
all of the hard and clear materialsthat we've tested leach these estrogenic chemicals. other things, like the nipple, aregenerally made from silicone or latex. latex, uh, always, from our tests,has come back positive for e.a. and silicone generally is positivefor estrogenic activity. and stainless steel is obviously,i thought, a better option. if it doesn't have a liner, uh, stainless steel, it tends to be fineand glass tends to be fine. the colorants, uh, tendto leach a lot of chemicals,
so we, uh, try to stay awayfrom colorants when we can. when we can't,white and black tend to be... - the least? okay.- the least. and we've started using a lot more foilin our house, rather than this stuff. - foil is a better option.- [tanya] okay. we use foil in the lab because foildoesn't leach these chemicals. and this, i know, styrofoam, isa personal, personal pet peeve of mine. the likelihood is estrogenic chemicalswill leach out of styrene products. cold foods, anything?
likely, hot fluids would increasethe amount of leaching, but it'd still be leaching something. [dr. bittner] the majority of plasticsincrease the release of chemicals having estrogenic activityafter they've been exposed, to particularly sunlight. [tanya] how do you not consume it? you can't go anywherewithout seeing food wrapped in plastic. you can't go to a restaurantwithout, you know, takeout boxes being in plastic,hot foods going into plastic.
my answer there is, well,demand safer plastic. so, what we're gonna dois go inside a couple of restaurants and ask them about, uh... we'll ask them for food and see if they can't give it to usin a non-plastic container. - hello, how are you doing?- good, how are you? i'm not too bad.can i get the, um, "power plant"? can i get a small "berry blast"? hello, there. um...can i get an orange juice, please?
what can i get you for lunch today? - i'm getting the blt.- [man] a blt. do you have anythingnot wrapped in plastic? - i have nothing to do with the food.- [craig chuckles] do you have anythingother than plastic to put it in? no. you can buyour giant little reusables. yeah, but that's still plastic. - this one's what we got.- without the plastic lid's fine. - is that paper? it is? great. yeah.- yes.
- do you have anything other than plastic?- we have that one in a cold press. it's actually exposed to less oxygen,so it's way better juice with twice the amountof vitamins and nutrients. - that sounds really healthy.- yeah, it's the way to go for the balance. - yeah, that sounds great.- cool, man. but do you serve it inanything other than plastic containers? we have them made, uh,at our central kitchen every morning, and they bring 'em to uson the cold press juicer, so it's ready to go,bottled for convenience.
but that's in plastic, yeah? - do you have something not plastic?- no. and you serve all your drinksin plastic cups as well? yes, sir. keep the straw 'cause that's plastic. - i'll have to leave it then, i think.- yeah? - yeah.- okay, that's okay. - yeah. okay. well, thanks very much.- yeah. all right, what can i get you?
yeah, i felt like i wasa bit of an eco-warrior. tell me, what's my food wrapped in?it's not plastic, is it? [chuckles] i'm going to die of something. - yeah, but do you wanna die early or late?- [man chuckles] my boyfriend actually tells meevery single day of my life to not be drinking water bottlesfrom my car but if i'm thirsty, i'm thirsty. you know what? he's right.and you've got that wrapped in paper. that's good.
that's impressive for a takeaway place. take the salad and stick 'em inlike, a few of these. yeah, that'd be betterthan sticking it in plastic. if you could put it maybebetween two paper plates. it's just all the chemicalsin this that get into the food. you've made such a great sandwich,by the look of it. [tanya] we gave in to the sales hype ofthe '50s that plastic was "disposable," that we could throw it away. there is no "away."
it's so very hard as a parent,as a mom, as a woman, to feel like you can do the best thing, you know, that you can dothe right thing anymore. every day, you know,we're contributing potentially to a dreadful health problem later ondown the line. no. there's nothing else to put it in. beep, beep, beep. what this white stuff is,is like the worst of the worst. [craig] like a rubbish bin,the earth is filling up with the stuff.
there is nowhere else to put it. [tanya] that's why, as much as possible, we choose foods and drinksthat don't have plastic around them. [craig] it starts with the individualand it starts with us. what do you do?you can't possibly filter out these tiny particlesfrom the entire ocean. you can't filter the entire ocean. in fact,so much plastic is in the ocean now in a form that we really can't get to it
that i feel the emphasis needsto immediately shift toward "stop putting it in." [craig] mike degruy is right. but how do we get to the pointwhere we can stop putting it in? - hi. that's me.- i'd like to speak to the manager. i notice when i came in hereand ordered, uh, my sandwich and my drink,they both came in plastic containers. our cups are a hundred percentplant-based so they can be composted. you're one of the first places in austini've come to that has an alternative.
is that right? best alternative optioni've got for you today. that's perfect. i appreciate it.least you've got an alternative. - exactly.- thank you very much. appreciate it. - have a great weekend.- you too. find me some gala applesthat are not in plastic. [craig] demand that your supermarketdeliver your food products in paper or just as they come. they don't need to be wrapped in plasticand if they are, take the plastic off
and leave it with them and say, "you dispose of itand dispose of it properly." because once it becomes their problem, you'll find that they will dosomething about it. don't put your plastic rubbishin a dumpster where you know it's going to landfill. [craig] in 1991, germany becamethe first country in the world to pass packaging lawsforcing plastic manufacturers to be responsiblefor the recycling or disposal
of any packaging material they sell. the industry set up a company to oversee plastic waste collectionrecognized by the green dot. when i was a kid,we used to run around the neighborhood collecting glass bottlesto take to the store to collect the 5-cent refundthat we'd get. plastic packaging pretty much killedthe bottle deposit system. but here in germany,they've reinstated it. you can take your plastic bottlesto almost any supermarket
and put them in this machine.and what it does is it reads a barcode which tells the machinethe kind of plastic that it is, that it's recyclable,and which retailer it comes from. so the consumer getsa 25-cent deposit off every bottle, the retailer gets the plastic, which they can sell to recyclersfor a lucrative amount of money. and on the streets of germany, you very rarely see these things anymorebecause everybody recycles them. [craig] the germans demonstratedthat there is profit to be made.
today, recyclingis a lucrative industry. pressure your government. tell them that you do not accept thatplastic should be in the environment. the manufacturers of plastichave their own lobby groups and they'll lobby the governmentto get the best possible deal for them to get their productsinto the marketplace for the least cost,and the least cost means that they don't haveto be responsible for it. if they manufacture it,they should be responsible
for its collectionand for its proper disposal. [tanya] we will all be better offif less plastic is manufactured in the first place. scientists are already callingfor governments to reclassify plasticas a hazardous substance. because then, existing lawsabout hazardous substances will already be in effect. plastic bags and water bottlesare the worst single-use offenders. what if we ban them outrightto stop that vicious cycle?
rwanda is one of the very few countriesthat has banned plastic bags. [woman]rwanda being an agricultural country... whereby we don't havea lot of industries we have tried to assessthe impact of plastic bags [man] i think it's a shocking wasteof valuable resources that these materialsare being put in the landfill. they're so much more valuable.if we put them in the landfill, the cost in europe is roundabouta minus 100 pounds a ton, $150. but as a useful plastic, it could beworth plus $1,200, $1,500 a ton.
so, it's a huge difference in value. we actually have the answers nowto recycling most plastics, uh, and the challenge reallyis to get everyone onboard with those ideas, and also to get thecollection infrastructure going right so that we get big volumes comingconcentrated in one place, so that people can then havethe confidence to invest in the recovery technology. [craig] once sorted, recycled plasticsare brought into factories like this where they can become partof a circular economy,
cleaned of labels and processedinto newborn nurdles, ready to be sold once again. as recyclers,we think governments could do more to encourage developmentof circular supply chains. a lot of recycled plasticscan be used back, as we say, in "closed loop,"back in the same products. and that's happening a lot with bottles and pots, tubs and traysfrom the packaging stream, but there are plenty of other outlets
where a short-life item,like a piece of packaging can go into a long-life application. for example, in construction products, uh, in automotive,in making cars and trains and airplanes and things like that where you can get the performanceof the recycled polymer just as good as virgin materialthat's come out of the ground. you can take it from a bottle one dayto a shirt the next day. from that shirt, then it can becomea component in a vehicle.
it can become somethingthat's sent to space. through the plastic bank, we make plastic waste a currency,so that people in developing countries can earn an income while preventingplastic from entering the ocean. [craig] david katz and shaun franksonfounded the plastic bank. they established a social plasticrecycling system in haiti that exchanges plasticfor solar cell phone charging, sustainable cook stoves and cash. [shaun] it's like a fair-trade plasticwhere it's ethically sourced...
and it's above-market rate incomethat they earn. the people in need can goand collect the plastic and create a microeconomyaround recycling. this is something that we can scaleanywhere in the world. [craig] this is a self-sustainingsocial enterprise. all of the plastic collectedthrough the plastic bank goes through the recycling processand is sold as "social plastic" to be used in manufacturingby values-aligned brands, or it can be used to 3d print.
they're using it insteadof virgin plastic. if you're choosing between two products and one's madeof social plastic and one's not, you're really choosing between,"do i help or do i hurt the planet?" social plastic is really our way that we can create an organic,global infrastructure. [tanya] new technology means that wastecan now be converted into energy. in europe alone,there are 15 million tons of end-of-life plasticgoing into landfill every year.
cynar, a waste-to-fuel company, designed a machinethat turns end-of-life plastic like candy wrappers and snack packets, which aren't usually recyclable,into diesel. using a heating processcalled "pyrolysis," it turns an environmental probleminto a valuable commodity. each machine can processabout 20 tons of plastic daily, making about 18,000 liters of diesel or the equivalentof 113 barrels of oil a day.
[car engine revving] [craig] islands like lord howemanage their plastic waste with solutions that matchthe way they live. there is no burningand there is no landfill on this island. food waste, the garden waste,paper and cardboard gets composted. all the recyclablesare baled and sent back to the mainland, and currently the island'sdiverting 85 percent of all their waste from landfill. this is the recycling sorting facility.
we can separate, we can bale everything. you can galvanize a communityto do amazing things. [rattling] [woman] the whales are divinginto a sea of plastic bottles and the bottles were collectedfrom the bristol 10k race. [tanya] it was important to the artist,sue lipscombe, to make this sculptureout of sustainable materials. she used recycled plasticsand locally-grown willow. [tanya] there are 70,000 bottles.
that means in some way, up to 70,000 peoplehave contributed to this art. i kick off by telling the kidssomething about whales and the reaction is just fantastic. they love hearing about how bigthey are. they really get it. they ask youall sorts of perceptive questions an adult might not think about. and i really just lovethe enthusiasm of the pupils. wouldn't it be greatif politicians 40 years down the line
still had that same enthusiasm that schoolchildren showwhen they come here? wouldn't the world be a different place? [woman] we've treated the oceanas a place to throw things, dispose of things that we did notwant close to where we thought we live. [craig] in 2015, natural historybroadcaster sir david attenborough, met with president barack obama. obama, who spent his boyhoodin the natural splendor of hawaii, grew up watching attenborough's films.
what we're seeing is global trend,uh, that... depend on the entire worldworking together. - [david] yes.- my daughters, i find malia and sasha... they're much more environmentallyaware, this generation... - i believe that.- ...than some previous generations. they think it's, uh, self-apparentthat we've got a problem and that we should bedoing something about it. i absolutely agree.and the young people, they care. they know that this is the worldthat they're gonna grow up in
and they're goingto spend their lives in. but i think it's...i think it's more idealistic than that. they actually believe that humanity,human species, has no right to destroyand despoil, regardless. - they actually feel that very powerfully.- right. they do. the whole of the ecosystems of the worldare based on a healthy ocean. and if that part of the planetbecomes dysfunctional, goes wrong, then the whole of lifeon this planet will suffer. the whole planet is where we live.
there is no "away" that you can put thingsand expect that they're really away. this phrase "not in my back yard"... the ocean is everyone's back yardor front yard or living space. no matter how you look at it, thisplanet is governed by the blue part. the world truly is mostly a blue place. i'll be just as worriedabout tilly and charlie when they're... [chuckles] in their 70s and 80s and i'm long gone. i still want them to be healthyand certainly not suffering
the effects ofany decisions that i made. [craig]i wanna go back to where it all started. i wanna go back to the whales. i wanna go and find the juvenilethat we first saw. if whales could talk to us,i imagine they would ask us, "what were we thinking?" every other species on the planetworks towards the benefit of the ecologyand environment that it lives in, but us humans, we just seemlike passengers on this earth.
i want to sayto the parents of the juvenile, "i'm sorry.i'm so sorry, on behalf of humanity, for putting plastic into your home." and i want to say,"we'll share this story because from knowing comes caring and from caring comes change."