For the next 24 hours I'll be on this tiny island, in a house made of only
wood and stone, eating only avocados and bananas, drinking only distilled water,
and spending my time sorting through salt under a microscope.
There will be no coffee. This is serious. Why am I doing this? Well, scientists
recently looked for microscopic plastics in human poo and they found it in every
single sample they looked at from people around the world. We swallow tiny little
bits of plastic every single day, and it adds up. Each week we ingest something
like a credit card worth of plastic. Every single week! So, to show you where
all of that is coming from I'm gonna spend the next 24 hours doing everything
I can to avoid ingesting plastic. And honestly it's pretty messed up just how
difficult that is. Let's start with what you eat. If your food is packaged in
plastic then little bits of that will rub off or leach their way into your meal.
And even if they aren't wrapped bottled or bagged, plastic might be in the foods
themselves. There's so much plastic in the ocean that scientists have found it
in the guts of shrimp, fish, and clams so we know that it can make its way through
the food chain - eventually to us. So just to be safe for this project I'm turning
to the very bottom of the food chain: plants. And just to make sure that no
plastics have rubbed off on those foods before they got to me I'm only eating
things that have a peal or a shell. So what I'm left with is avocados, oranges,
bananas, and un-cracked nuts. I'm sick of playing avocados. Salt is also a problem
since our bodies need it in small quantities, but again since the ocean is
so full of plastic sea salt is just out of the question for me. So, I've got
Himalayan salt that was mined from rock deposits that predate the plastic age.
And just to be sure that no plastic has gotten into it along the way I am
looking through each individual grain with a microscope.
I found one here that has a little blue fiber in it that's probably plastic that
one gets rejected. Water is a whole additional problem if you drink bottled
water you're sipping thousands of microplastics a year, and even tap water
has trace amounts. So, the only option for me is distilled water, which I had to get
at a special facility and it's actually unhealthy since our bodies need the
minerals in water. But I should be okay for a day. It's early afternoon and I
have a caffeine withdrawal headache, so... that sucks. The last question is why am I
here? And while this place is lovely, the answer to that question is the scariest
part of all. I'm here in this Cobb house made entirely of clay, sand, straw, wood,
and stone on a remote island because plastic is in the air we breathe.
Since our houses are so often carpeted and painted with plastic there was
probably little bits of plastic dust in the breath you just took since we so
often burn it to get rid of it and since there's just so much of it lying around
it's been collected in air samples in remote parts of the world, like the Alps.
So I'm still probably reading some of it in.
Sings: 'Its been 24 hours, dear coffee, I'll never leave you again.'
Aside from growing to dislike avocados a little bit this actually wasn't that bad.
However, I've got some good news and I've got some bad new. First
the bad news. The bad news is that we don't yet know what this means for human
health. The plastic crisis is just so recent that researchers haven't had a
chance to get answers yet, but preliminary studies suggest that it's
probably pretty unhealthy for us. The good news is that going to these
extremes is completely unnecessary. If you want to drastically reduce your
plastic intake you can get most of the way here just by eating less seafood and
buying fewer things in plastic packaging, especially bottled water and other
plastic bottle beverages. And the cool thing about that is that you'll be doing
something good for your health while helping to save the planet. In order to
do my part to help out I have disabled YouTube ads from this channel because
they are promoting a lot of plastic things that no one really needs. So with
that I have to say a huge thanks to my patrons over on Patreon for helping make
projects like this possible. Thank you.
I originally planned to do this project over four days because I really wanted
to send a sample of my poo to a lab and get it analyzed for microplastics, butt
for some reason I couldn't find anyone that was willing to look at my poo. So if
They do return my call be prepared for video number two and for now thanks for
watching!