(relaxed house music)
- Oh hello everyone.
Good morning and welcome to breakfast
where I will be making hipster toast,
or as I like to call it, toast.
You've got the avocado, the eggs, the bread
and arguably, the most important ingredient, salt.
Let's get started.
Cue montage.
(relaxed house music)
(girl humming)
My favorite part, the salt.
And salt obviously comes in plastic
but people are telling me, and by people I mean my friends
and people I follow on social media,
are sharing headlines that there are little bits of plastic
in the salt that eventually gets into my body.
In fact, some studies are showing that 90%
of salt contains microplastics
which is a little disconcerting if you ask me.
I like the food that comes inside the plastic
but I don't really think that plastic
should come in the food.
All do say, it seems like we have a huge plastic problem.
I mean, everywhere I look there's a plastic problem.
There's plastic in the rivers, plastic in national parks,
plastic in cities.
There are thousands and thousands of pieces
of trash literally swirling
in the Great Pacific garbage patch
and now there's plastic in our bodies.
But how bad is the situation?
How badly are we addicted to plastic
and if it's that bad what in the world
are we gonna do about it?
(relaxed pop music)
Hey everyone I'm Erin and I'm curious
about what the future of the outdoors looks like.
(relaxed pop music)
Hey everyone so I just arrived in Chicago
and I wanted to see how plastics are affecting some
of America's greatest natural resources,
like the great lakes.
(relaxed house music)
It's challenging enough not
to use plastic when you're traveling
but even when I'm not on the road,
I'm learning just how much plastic
is involved in every single day of my life.
Our lives are inundated with plastic
which is extraordinary when you consider that plastic
has only been around for the past century.
This material that has incredible durability,
that is responsible for so much of modern life,
and that touches almost every moment of every day,
and sometimes we only use it for a brief moment in time
is causing some major problems.
And when you really start looking for it...
Guys, show them your plastic.
This is three blocks of plastic.
And we can't unsee it.
Three blocks.
Do you guys wanna get some lunch?
Let's talk about how much plastic we are using.
Turns out, it's quite a lot.
(relaxed pop music)
It's hard to quantify exactly how much plastic we're using
because it's such a broad category.
So let's focus on the biggest culprit:
single use plastic.
Nearly a million plastic beverage bottles
are sold every single minute around the world.
Humans produce almost 20,000 plastic bottles
every single second.
World wide, two million plastic bags are used every minute.
And in case you thought the US wasn't apart of this,
New Yorkers alone use 23 billion plastic bags every year
and across the US we use about one bag per person per day
which is crazy when you consider
that on average one plastic bag is used for just 12 minutes.
And our plastic rampage is only increasing
with over half of plastic ever manufactured
having been made since 2000.
Like I said, that is a ton of plastic use
which would be fine I guess, if recycling worked.
I hate that we're doing this.
(classical music)
Uh, okay, so the bag goes in the trash
and then the other stuff goes in the recycling?
Or can the stuff the food touch not go in the recycling?
I read this but I don't really know in the moment
what to do.
So I'm just gonna do my best
and try to separate everything.
Okay, we're gonna, food there.
Ooh, I hope this is right.
Straws are not recyclable.
Sorry.
This is, I'm gonna say it is recycled.
Oh okay this has some sauce on it.
This is recycla, is it?
Wait, yes.
What if I do this?
- [Man] Trash it.
- Isn't it like a percentage?
- [Man] I think you have to wash it.
- So I have to put this in the trash?
- [Man] It's better to put it in the trash
than recycle it.
(garbage crushing)
Hi we are at the great lakes today
with the Alliance for the Great Lakes
about to do a little trash pickup.
(hip-hop music)
I feel confident in reporting that the Great Lakes
are in fact great.
They account for one whole fifth of the freshwater surface
of the planet at six quadrillion gallons.
Because of the size, the Great Lakes are often referred to
as the nation's fourth coast.
But they're living up to that name in some unfortunate ways.
- I'm Jennifer Caddick, I'm Vice President of Communications
of the Alliance for the Great Lakes.
One thing that we consistently know after looking
at 20 plus years worth of data from our beach cleanups
is that consistently about 85% of the litter
that volunteers pick up is made wholly
or in part of plastic.
And so that's really important for us
to understand just the scale and size
of the plastic pollution problem that we have here
on our beaches and what ultimately can end up in our lakes.
- Let's see how long it takes us to find some trash.
We wanted to see how much plastic we could find
in five minutes in just this little patch.
And this was just the plastic we could see
with our eyeballs.
- I study trash, meaning all sorts of different things
that people throw away.
Plastic is a term that is really an umbrella
phrase that encompasses lots and lots
of different kinds of chemicals.
All the way down to the smallest bits of trash
that are microscopic.
- Most of the plastic in the ocean and the Great Lakes
is really hard to see.
It's about the size of a grain of sand
and that's where we come back to the salt.
Remember, avocado toast.
And we start to hear more about that freaky thing,
microplastics.
Dun dun dun!
- When you take a quick glance it doesn't look like
there's a lot of litter or pollution here
but once you start looking people really do find a lot
and one of the biggest things people pick up
are microplastics, which are pieces of plastic
that are broken off of some larger plastic item
that has ultimately over time,
broken into smaller and smaller pieces.
- [Erin] Microplastics and microfibers come from everywhere.
They are broken off of car tires, fishing nets,
carpet in your home, and they are also washed off
of our synthetic and even our natural fabrics
in the laundry.
In fact, by some estimates, a single load of laundry
can release hundreds of thousands of what
are called microfibers.
- Researchers have found microplastics
in alarmingly high levels in all five Great Lakes.
And again, remember, these lakes
are our drinking water source
for 40 million Americans and Canadians.
But we don't know very much about what the impact of that
is on human health or on wildlife health.
So this is a really concerning problem.
- While we all may have seen terribly photos
of dead seabirds with plastic in their stomachs,
experiments are showing that even microplastics
can damage animals by blocking digestive tracts,
diminishing urges to eat,
and altering feeding behavior.
That means that even here where 40 million people
get their drinking water, and plenty others catch
and eat fresh fish, we're ingesting the same plastic
that is killing some sea life.
But is it harming us?
Well the research isn't quite out on that yet.
Some scientists say that it's a low concern,
saying there's no health risk to humans,
while others say we need more research.
- We wanna know what's out there,
where it's coming from,
where it's going,
and how it interacts with living things along the way.
I know we can't solve all of the problems.
But at least we can be informed about the various degrees
and nature of the problem.
And we're still at that step.
We're still in the beginning.
We wanna know what's out there.
The truth is, plastic comes with a whole assortment
of chemicals that can interfere with our health
and that's probably not good for us.
You could try to save yourself
by buying clean, bottled water,
but then you're just accumulating more plastic
and a lot of that water is pulled from the same source
and has just as much plastic in it.
So it just becomes a cycle of creating more of a problem
by trying to avoid it.
With plastic production set to keep growing
until there will be more plastic by weight
than fish in the sea, what do we do about it?
First, we could use less plastic,
and this is possible.
Starting personally, I could take a reusable cup
to get my coffee or use a reusable water bottle.
Obviously take reusable shopping bags
for grocery shopping.
I could even carry my own containers
for takeout or leftovers.
And if I do end up using plastic,
I can look up what's recyclable in my local area.
Check the label, get it into the right bin,
and recycle as much as possible.
Second, we could prevent plastic from making it
into the oceans and ultimately our food chains.
One example is this guppy friend bag.
It helps prevent microfibers
from leaving your washing machines
which is one of the main contributors
to microfibers in our water.
Next, we can make purchases from companies that care.
Some companies are starting to own up to their impact
and making big changes like evaluating their supply chain
and manufacturing practices
and committing to big goals like becoming zero waste.
When we support companies that care,
we are signaling to other companies that they should commit
to making a change as well.
And finally, if we want to fight this wave of plastics,
we can ask our policy makers to make a change.
For instance, many states are banning plastics
or charging for them, and those policies seem
to be working.
Even Nepal is banning single-use plastic
in the Everest region
after they recovered over three metric tons
off the mountain.
Little stat for ya,
Denmark uses four single-use plastic bags
per person per year, compared to the US, which uses 365.
So yeah, I think we could be doing a little bit better.
- It's very reasonable to look at this problem
and be overwhelmed
and to feel like you wanna throw your hands up
and say, "This is it.
This is a terrible thing, there's no solution,
the scope is just too big."
And I understand that reaction
and I think that that's what a reasonable person might think
when they look at the scale of the problem.
- Let's see.
Almost one pound! - But I think there's reason
also to believe that we can make improvements.
The momentum is building towards a consensus.
A cultural shift about our relationship to plastic.
Listen, worrying about your everyday environmental footprint
can be exhausting for some, inconvenient for others,
and downright unattainable for those who literally
can't afford to live without plastic.
And if I'm adding something more to your list,
it can just feel like a lot of pressure.
That's why we need to add some fun in the mix.
Thus I introduce you to my new hobby, plogging.
(laughs)
Originally called 'Plogga', it combines the words 'jogging'
and 'plocka upp' which is Swedish for 'pick up'
and is the newest fitness craze to hit the US.
This is real.
So let's go for a jog and pick up some trash.
(excited pop music)
Hey everyone, thank you so much for watching.
Obviously plastics is a massive topic
but hopefully this gives you an introduction
about plastics in general
and an introduction to microplastics as well.
And we know there's a lot more discussion
that needs to happen on the topic of plastics
so please head down to the comments below
and let us know what else you'd like to learn.
Hope to see you next time.