00:00This is the story of three plastic bottles, empty and discarded.
00:11Their journeys are about to diverge,
00:14with outcomes that impact nothing less than the fate of the planet.
00:18But they weren't always this way.
00:20To understand where these bottles end up, we must first explore their origins.
00:26The heroes of our story were conceived in this oil refinery.
00:29Plastic in their bodies was formed by chemically bonding oil and gas molecules together
00:35to make monomers.
00:37In turn, these monomers were bonded into long polymer chains to make plastic,
00:43in the form of millions of pellets.
00:46Those were melted at manufacturing plants and reformed in molds
00:50to create the resilient material that makes up the triplets' bodies.
00:55Machines filled the bottles with sweet, bubbly liquid,
00:58and they were then wrapped, shipped, bought, opened, consumed, and unceremoniously discarded.
01:05And now here they lie, poised at the edge of the unknown.
01:10Bottle One, like hundreds of millions of tons of his plastic brethren, ends up in a landfill.
01:16This huge dump expands each day as more trash comes in and continues to take up space.
01:23As plastics sit there, being compressed amongst layers of other junk,
01:28rainwater flows through the waste and absorbs the water-soluble compounds it contains.
01:34And some of those are highly toxic.
01:37Together, they create a harmful stew called leachate,
01:41which can move into groundwater, soil, and streams,
01:44poisoning ecosystems and harming wildlife.
01:48It can take Bottle One an agonizing 1,000 years to decompose.
01:54Bottle Two's journey is stranger, but unfortunately no happier.
01:58He floats on a trickle that reaches a stream,
02:01a stream that flows into a river, and a river that reaches the ocean.
02:06After months lost at sea, he's slowly drawn into a massive vortex,
02:11where trash accumulates, a place known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
02:17Here, the ocean's currents have trapped millions of pieces of plastic debris.
02:22This is one of five plastic-filled gyres in the world's seas,
02:27places where the pollutants turn the water into a cloudy plastic soup.
02:32Some animals, like seabirds, get entangled in the mess.
02:35They and others mistake the brightly colored plastic bits for food.
02:41Plastic makes them feel full when they're not, so they starve to death,
02:46and pass the toxins from the plastic up the food chain.
02:50For example, it's eaten by lanternfish, the lanternfish are eaten by squid,
02:54the squid are eaten by tuna, and the tuna are eaten by us.
02:59And most plastics don't biodegrade,
03:02which means they're destined to break down into smaller and smaller pieces
03:06called microplastics, which might rotate in the sea eternally.
03:12But Bottle Three is spared the cruel purgatories of his brothers.
03:17A truck brings him to a plant where he and his companions are squeezed flat
03:21and compressed into a block.
03:24Okay, this sounds pretty bad, too.
03:26But hang in there.
03:27It gets better.
03:29The blocks are shredded into tiny pieces,
03:31which are washed and melted,
03:33so they become the raw materials that can be used again.
03:37As if by magic, Bottle Three is now ready to be reborn as something completely new.
03:44For this bit of plastic with such humble origins,
03:47suddenly, the sky is the limit.
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