00:00When the gods granted King Midas one wish, he wished that everything he touched would turn to gold.
00:07Midas was delighted. Trees, rocks, buildings, all gold.
00:12But soon he found in horror that his food turned into gold as well.
00:17When he hugged his daughter to soothe his pain, he realized his mistake too late.
00:22The richest man in existence was starving, heartbroken and alone.
00:29Humanity got a similar wish granted when we learned how to turn brown stinky goo into magic.
00:35Plastic.
00:37Cheap, sterile and convenient, it changed our lives.
00:42But this wonder of technology got a little out of hand.
00:46Plastic has saturated our environment.
00:49It has invaded the animals we eat and now it's finding its way into our bodies.
00:55What is plastic?
00:57For most of our history, humans used stuff we found in nature to build the things we needed.
01:02But the invention of plastic roughly 100 years ago completely changed our world.
01:08Plastic is made from polymers, long, repeating chains of molecule groups.
01:13In nature, polymers exist everywhere.
01:16The walls of cells, silk, hair, insect carapaces, DNA.
01:22But it's also possible to create them.
01:26By breaking down crude oil into its components and rearranging them, we can form new synthetic polymers.
01:33Synthetic polymers have extraordinary traits.
01:36They are lightweight, durable and can be molded into almost any shape.
01:41Not requiring time-consuming manual work, plastic can be easily mass-produced
01:46and its raw materials are available in vast amounts and incredibly cheaply.
01:51And so the golden era of plastics began.
01:55Bakelite was used for mechanical parts.
01:58PVC for plumbing, electric gears and cases.
02:01Acrylic as a shatter-resistant alternative to glass.
02:04And nylon for stockings and war equipment.
02:08Today, almost everything is at least partly made from plastic.
02:11Our clothes, phones, computers, furniture, appliances, houses and cars.
02:17Plastic has long ceased to be a revolutionary material.
02:20Instead, it became trash.
02:22Coffee cups, plastic bags or stuff to wrap a banana.
02:25We don't think about this fact a lot.
02:27Plastic just appears and goes away.
02:30Unfortunately, it doesn't.
02:34Since synthetic polymers are so durable, plastic takes between 500 and 1,000 years to break down.
02:41But somehow, we collectively decided to use this super-tough material for things meant to be thrown away.
02:4840% of plastics are used for packaging.
02:52In the US, packaging makes up one-third of all the waste that is generated annually.
02:58Since its invention, we have produced about 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic,
03:04335 million tons in 2016 alone.
03:08More than 6.3 billion metric tons of plastic have become waste since 1907.
03:15Piled up in one place, that makes a cube with a side length of 1.9 kilometers.
03:21So, what did we do with all this waste?
03:249% was recycled.
03:2612% burned.
03:28But 79% of it is sticking around still.
03:33A lot ends up in the ocean, around 8 million tons a year.
03:38That's so much plastic that it will outweigh all the fish in the ocean by 2050.
03:44Because it's everywhere, marine animals keep getting trapped in plastic and swallowing it.
03:49In 2015 already, 90% of seabirds had eaten plastic.
03:54Many animals starve with stomachs full of indigestible trash.
03:58In 2018, a dead sperm whale washed up in Spain.
04:02He had eaten 32 kilos of plastic bags, nets, and a drum.
04:07While this is tragic and makes for great magazine covers,
04:11there's an even more widespread, invisible form of plastic.
04:18Microplastics are pieces smaller than 5 millimeters.
04:22Some of them are used in cosmetics or toothpaste,
04:25but most result from floating waste that is constantly exposed to UV radiation
04:30and crumbles into smaller and smaller pieces.
04:3451 trillion such particles float in the ocean
04:37where they are even more easily swallowed by all kinds of marine life.
04:41This has raised concerns among scientists,
04:44especially about health risks from the chemicals that are added to plastic.
04:48BPA, for example, makes plastic bottles transparent,
04:51but there's also evidence that it interferes with our hormonal system.
04:55DEHP makes plastics more flexible, but may cause cancer.
05:00It would be pretty bad if microplastics are toxic
05:03because they travel up the food chain.
05:06Zooplankton eat microplastic. Small fish eat zooplankton.
05:11So do oysters, crabs, and predatory fish.
05:14And they all land on our plate.
05:17Microplastics have been found in honey, in sea salt, in beer,
05:21in tap water, and in the household dust around us.
05:25Eight out of ten babies and nearly all adults
05:28have measurable amounts of phthalates, a common plastic additive, in their bodies.
05:33And 93% of people have BPA in their urine.
05:37There is little science about this so far, and right now it's inconclusive.
05:42We need a lot more research before panic is justified.
05:45But it is safe to say that a lot of stuff happened that we didn't plan for,
05:49and we have lost control over plastic to a certain extent,
05:53which is kind of scary.
05:55But just to make sure, we should simply ban plastics, right?
05:59Unfortunately, it's a bit more complicated than that.
06:03Plastic pollution is not the only environmental challenge we face.
06:07Some of the substitutes we'd use for plastic have a higher environmental impact in other ways.
06:12For example, according to a recent study by the Danish government,
06:16making a single-use plastic bag requires so little energy
06:20and produces far lower carbon dioxide emissions compared to a reusable cotton bag,
06:25that you need to use your cotton bag 7,100 times
06:29before it would have a lower impact on the environment than the plastic bag.
06:34We're left with a complex process of trade-offs.
06:37Everything has an impact somehow, and it's hard to find the right balance between them.
06:42Plastic also helps solve problems that we don't have very good answers for at the moment.
06:47Globally, one-third of all food that's produced is never eaten
06:50and ends up rotting away on landfills where it produces methane.
06:54And the best way of preventing food from spoiling and avoiding unnecessary waste
06:58is still plastic packaging.
07:01It's also important to note where the vast majority of the world's plastic pollution is coming from right now.
07:0690% of all plastic waste entering the ocean through rivers
07:10comes from just 10 rivers in Asia and Africa.
07:13The Yangtze in China alone flushes 1.5 million tons of plastic into the ocean each year.
07:19Countries like China, India, Algeria or Indonesia
07:23industrialized at an impressive pace in the last few decades,
07:26transforming the lives of billions of people.
07:29This development was so fast that the garbage disposal infrastructure
07:33couldn't keep up with collecting and recycling all the new waste this brought.
07:37If politicians in Europe and the US want to address this issue,
07:41investing in infrastructure in developing countries
07:44is just as important as fighting plastic pollution at home
07:47with campaigns and redesigning products to minimize unnecessary plastic production.
07:52The bottom line is, as long as we don't address plastic pollution from a global perspective,
07:57we will not solve it.
08:00Plastic pollution is a complicated problem.
08:03We found a magic material and we had a really good time with it.
08:07But we need to be careful or, just like Midas,
08:11we'll end up in a world that we didn't wish for.
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