Welcome to Extinction Update
an environmental alarm clock
today we bring you five stories of human stupidity
fucking up planet Earth
like
did you know there's a wall of shit covered wet wipes
blocking the London Thames?
Or that MDMA is killing trees?
Or that human DNA could be changing due to air pollution?
Our world is being ruined by
gross mistakes
terrifying hubris
and crazy people
who flush used condoms
into the sea
the dooms-day clock is ticking
but don't freak out
there's still time to save the world
probably.
In recent years, the coastal waters of Barcelona
have seen a major degradation
with waves of trash appearing in the sea
causing a public health problem.
I'm going to meet Ely who is a paddle surf instructor,
an environmentalist and member of a sea cleaning brigade.
This is disgusting.
- If this plastic was binned correctly, it could have been incinerated.
So we just bumped into a diver.
What's the worst thing you've found?
All of the crap from the sewers comes down on me
so there's plastic, sanitary towels, condoms.
Everything we flush down the toilet.
There are health consequences, right?
Especially E. coli bacteria
which can cause gastroenteritis, ear infections, conjunctivitis,
breathing problems and serious infections.
We spent 30 minutes in there and this is
how much rubbish we've been able to collect.
It's really disgusting.
You could see it everywhere and it stank.
Stop throwing condoms and sanitary towels in the toilet.
Just don't.
What's happening is because of
an outdated sewage system in the city of Barcelona,
so we end up with garbage from the drains together with our wastewater.
So we're swimming in shit. Literally.
We are swimming in shit,
pee, and all the products we throw down the toilet.
Bleach, hydrochloric acid. Everything we use for cleaning.
And they're products that are toxic for humans.
How does it affect the environment?
Marine fauna is dying.
In our part of the Mediterranean, you can't even find posidonia,
which is Mediterranean seagrass.
We don't have any type of seagrass.
What can we do? Both locals and tourists?
What we can do is lead more sustainable lives.
On a global level,
politicians and governments should prohibit single-use plastic.
And the EU should prohibit flushing wastewater into the sea.
It has to be an immediate change
and for everyone.
Globally every year
one million seabirds are killed
by the six million tonnes of trash
dumped into the world's oceans.
by 2050 there could be more plastic in the ocean than fish.
A lot of people aren't aware just how bad
the production of party pingers is for the environment.
This is only getting worse with MDMA consumption going up around Europe
and one kilogram of MDMA producing between six to 10 times
that amount into toxic waste.
I'm in the Netherlands
which is Europe's biggest ecstasy and MDMA producer.
Here in the southern region of Brabant drug gangs are dumping
toxic waste of illegal drugs production into the local forest.
I'm going on a patrol with Forest Ranger Erik De Jonge
who is at the forefront of fighting these illegal drug waste dumpings.
This road is one of the synthetic drugs waste dumping hotspots.
It causes a lot of damage to the environment.
This watercourse supplies the city's canals with water.
Synthetic drugs have already been dumped in it several times.
Here they dumped 10 large barrels containing hundreds of litres each.
The bend was full of dead fish.
Drugs waste flowed directly towards where people live.
And that's super dangerous.
One of Brabant's worst ever dumping of drugs happened here.
It was a huge barrel and 1,000 litres of drugs waste spilled into the soil.
In a large area, the soil was dug up, the trees died and were removed.
You can still see it. These trees have absorbed drugs waste
and the leaves curl up and they'll die in the summer.
The entire tree? -Yes, certainly.
We're at the second dump site.
Those hoses are often found at ecstasy waste dumping sites.
With hoses they transfer substances from one barrel to another.
How often do you receive an alert?
I've been here for an hour and you've received two alerts.
For synthetic drugs waste, it's a couple of dozen times a year.
Last year, it happened 50 to 60 times and that's only in my region.
Are there peak times? -Yes.
When there are festivals? -Exactly.
Do you notice that? -Yes, in the last three or four years
during the run-up to the festival season we see a peak in dumpings.
This year,
we suddenly had three, four, five drugs waste dumpings a week.
In the last 10 years, there has been such an increase
that it has become the main part of my job.
Ecstasy users are often intelligent, highly educated young people
who take a pill at a festival, but have no idea what's behind it.
The most important thing I can do about this problem now
is to demonstrate its effects on nature
and hope young people think, "Shit, we don't want this."
Depressingly
drugs aren't great for the planet
making MDMA
produces six to ten times its weight
in toxic waste
cocaine farming destroys
3000 km2 of Colombian rainforest
a year
and growing 1 kg of weed indoors
makes as much CO2
as driving across America 11 times
Everyone knows that burning coal is bad.
I'm in Krakow, Poland where they've got a deadly addiction to coal.
This is causing severe air pollution and smog to descend over the city.
This is so bad that 48,000 Poles die every year,
because of bad air pollution.
Since Krakow has some of the worst air pollution,
a study was conducted here on mothers and newborns revealing
that air pollution can even lead to DNA mutation.
62% of kindergartens in Poland
are in heavily polluted areas
and sometimes kids even have to wear masks to play outside.
I'm here to meet Teresa
who specifically designed this day care centre
to protect the children from air pollution.
How did this preschool come about?
I have children myself.
I thought, "How is it possible that as a mother
I find myself in one of the most polluted places on Earth
with my children" and, "Is this all I can offer them?"
I thought it would be worth thinking about how to change it,
that there must be a way.
Over the years I've observed children
increasingly getting ill.
Various allergies and respiratory issues.
These are the main and often constant problems.
How do you teach children about air and climate?
When they ask questions, they get answers.
Why aren't we going out? Why do we need to put a mask on?
Which we encourage kids to wear.
The air is so dangerous here
they had to build an entire ecosystem
for kids to play safely.
We are able to remove 97% of all pollution using this machine
so the air coming in via this system is clean.
It's free from pollution, from germs, fungus, mould and other bacteria.
We also have a smog sensor
When they walk past it they look up
and check if it's a good day for a walk or not.
How many children do you have here daily?
Every day we have around 40 kids
Quite a big group of people has a chance to avoid
the destructive influence of the polluted air.
Presumably you have lungs
so you should be concerned that
90% of the world's population
live where air pollution exceeds safe limits
4.2 million people die from it
each year.
Smells like poo.
I'm in Hammersmith, London
standing on a massive fatberg of wet wipes.
It's over 170,000 wet wipes in total
and they're not going to dissolve in our lifetime.
So how do all of these wet wipes end up here?
Millions of wet wipes end up in our rivers every year,
because they're flushed down people's toilets.
They basically clog up the sewage system
and when the sewage system can't cope
it discharges that excess load
into the local river.
So the rivers are ending up coping with all this crap.
On this small site, in just a few hours
we collected 23,000 wet wipes.
And we know that it's grown in height by about a metre in a year.
You see lots of bird prints and you see lots of birds nesting in this
area which is composed partly of plastic.
And that worries me.
It's actually quite sturdy.
You could probably whack somebody with that.
Oh, it could have been on someone's bum.
The estimated time for a wet wipe to break down is 100 years.
They break down into tiny particles which are known as micro plastic.
Our water supply in this country largely comes from our rivers.
And so we will then be ingesting that plastic.
Why do the makeup wipes say biodegradable
and flushable on the back?
There's no real regulation of wet wipe packaging in this country.
It's like a Wild West of wet wipes.
They can really say what they like.
The government should ban inaccurate labelling.
We all need to move towards kind of reusables.
We all need to bin, don't flush.
And there's also a hashtag, #3Ps.
#3Ps means pee, paper, and poo.
That's all that goes down the loo.
They stretch out so much and you can see
how strong...
Oh god, I just flicked it in my face.
This is a ridiculous problem.
400% more wet wipes
have been found on UK beaches
this past decade
11 billion wet wipes
are flushed down the toilet
globally every year
why?
Stuck.
Oh.
Oh fuck.
Use a flannel.
I'm in Portugal, the most ravaged country in Europe by forest fires.
This is the area of Mação,
where these kinds of fires have been happening every single year.
This year of course was no exception.
Everything is burnt and still
people have to live here.
We're going to meet Maria Do Carmo
that lost her house in the fire.
You can see how the house used to be.
Do you remember the day of the fire?
-The fire was coming from there. -There?
The noise really scared me.
I'm 91, but I had never seen anything like it.
It was horrible. Very bad.
When the fire happened, didn't the firefighters come?
No, they never came.
They should come when we need them, right?
Yes.
Ah, yes.
We're going to inspect the area with António Louro, a forest engineer
that will tell us about the full environmental impact
of these fires in the region.
- About 50 villages were hit.
It's a complete disaster for the local economy,
an ecological disaster for the small animals, the birds,
the game, all the wild animals here, it's a complete disaster.
This looks like a tree cemetery.
The first big fires we experienced
were around 50 to 60 km2 big.
These lands were abandoned,
the 2000s unfortunately brought fires as big as 200 to 400 km2.
They have been getting worse continually and cyclically.
Will the fires continue to increase?
Yes, even more so with climate change,
longer periods with hotter temperatures, less moisture,
creating ideal conditions to aggravate forest fires.
The ecological impact is enormous,
[forest fires] lead to negative natural selection.
Forests take three to four decades to yield
politicians have four-year cycles, often they aren't interested in this
because the result won't be seen in decades.
We want this area back to harmony
with a more sustainable landscape.
As well as Portugal
forests in
California
Siberia
Greece
and elsewhere are burning
even the Amazon
the lungs of the earth
is on fire
the vast majority of forest fires
are caused by humans
Get your shit together
FFS
wild fires make up 5 to 10%
of annual global CO2 emissions
each year
when forests could instead
help absorb
your human greenhouse gas emissions.
Are you depressed yet?
maybe you should be
but there are some things you can do
to help unfuck the planet
probably the best thing you can do
is become an environmental maniac
who lives in a cave fly
but it's unlikely you will
instead
fly and consume less
recycle
eat less meat
and put a shit tonne of pressure
on your government and big businesses
to act less like psychopaths
maybe join a group
a protest
a boycott
anything
also
let's talk about wet wipes
why do they exist?
there is no need to treat your arse
like it's the Queen of England
just wipe it with toilet paper
like a normal person.