We're about a couple hundred feet, you know, horizontally under the city streets in the
sewer.
I want to show you where the trash comes from.
This is the end of the driest season for Los Angeles.
You can see it's building up with plastic trash.
Next big rain, this big metal door is going to open up, and this cup is going out to the
ocean.
What is that?
It's a Ziploc bag with a spider on it.
Here's a little gum wrapper.
I can see a red plastic bag in there.
I mean, every storm drain in the city is going to look like this.
So after a long dry season, that first big rainstorm is pushing it all out to the ocean
via these storm drains.
And I see all this stuff, and it doesn't need to be there, all this trash on those remote
parts of the world.
For six years I worked for Captain Charles Moore, the man that found the Great Pacific
Garbage Patch.
Went on a couple of expeditions with him, actually met my wife and got engaged to her
on Charles Moore's boat.
My wife Anna Cummins and I, we saw all this trash in the Pacific, and we knew the Atlantic
has the same issue.
The South Pacific, South Atlantic Indian Ocean, there was no one studying other parts of the
world.
So we went to the Five Gyres Institute.
When I did the junk raft expedition, when I took 15,000 plastic bottles, I floated an
airplane across the Pacific.
I remember in the middle of that trip on this funky homemade raft, I was starving, middle
of freaking nowhere, and I find this fish out of the stomach for 17 rice grain size
fragments of plastic in this fish's stomach.
The plastic is full of persistent organic pollutants, things like PCBs, DDT, PAHs, things
that are known human carcinogens and endocrine disruptors, things you don't want in your
body, but they're in the fish that we eat.
In the ocean you've got international waters, you can't identify a country, and the plastic
is so broken down you can't identify a product.
Closer to shore, here in the Great Lakes, if we found plastic, it would be fresh.
Here in Lake Michigan, we found these microbeads, little polyethylene and polypropylene perfect
little round spheres, one third of a millimeter, as big as a grain of sand, and we can match
them to some of the microbeads found in facial scrubs.
Those products that you put in your face, and you scrub your skin, you wash it down
the drain, well those products use plastic as the exfoliant.
We match those microbeads and products to the microbeads in the lakes.
So we know that plastics absorb all kinds of pollutants, what does that have to do with
us in human health?
So my wife and I were planning on having a child, we had her body burden analyzed.
So we just took about 60 cc's of my blood, we're now going to have it centrifuged to
be sampled for PCBs, DDTs and other chemicals.
And in her blood we found PCBs, we found DDT and other pesticides, when we found the highest
levels of flame retardants.
And what really concerns us is that we know that they're in her body.
And our child, the fetus that was growing in her body, as she grew up, she had this cocktail
of synthetic chemistry swirling around her body as she was developing.
And it really sort of angers us and saddens us that our little girl, born in the 21st
century, is a walking talking experiment of synthetic chemistry that was invented last
century.
And that's what really just hits us as deeply wrong, deeply immoral, that we allow that to
continue to happen.
There's lots of junk in here, Mississippi River stuff, I'm going to pick a box.
I don't know whose face this is.
That's the original of the young man from India, when I first made his cast.
So the originals I keep in here.
Oh yeah, here's a Japanese man, scientist, Dr. Shijie Takata.
He's well known for studying how plastic pellets absorb different toxins.
So this man has a program called International Pellet Watch, and if you find little plastic
pellets on your beach anywhere in the world, Hawaii or Timbuktu or Easter Island, you send
those pellets to him and they'll tell you what kind of toxin drawn those pellets.
So when I went to Japan, Tokyo, he sat for me for an hour and I cast his face.
And I asked the guy to smile, and that's his smile right there.
You can see his painful smile.
So in this part of the river, I mean I'm looking for plastics that sink.
So Sylvia Earl, the first woman to walk on the ocean floor on one of those big sort of
clumsy deep deep water seas.
What she told us is that she has seen this massive increase in amount of trash on the
ocean floor.
But it wasn't there 50 years ago, in a half a century, we've littered the entire planet.
So PET, polyethylene terephthalate is a kind of plastic that sinks, but half the plastic
man in this country is negatively buoyant, and you'll find it littering the ocean floor,
getting there via our rivers.
So this is a soda bottle, a two liter bottle, if you're perfect to use for Sylvia's mask.
I hope for your help to explore and protect the wild ocean in ways that will restore the
health, and in so doing, secure hope for humankind.
Health to the ocean means health for us.
Is that a shirt you really cherish?
No.
Okay.
It's expendable.
When I started to explore the ocean, there weren't any plastics, you think about it.
Go back to 1950s.
It's the pre-plastic ozoic era.
Did you know Sylvia Earl can hold her breath for hours?
I mean there were a few plastics, a few knobs on dish pans and things like that.
Now we're just drowning in it.
Okay.
There we go.
Okay, do you come forward a little bit?
Mm-hmm.
How's that feel?
Perfect.
That's your lipstick?
It does.
Is it really?
Oh my god.
That's perfect.
It's like half of the water out there.
There you go.
There you go.
There you go.
There you go.
There you go.
There you go.
There you go.
There you go.
There you go.
There you go.
There you go.
There you go.
There you go.
There you go.
Yes?
I'll catch.
If your lipstick is on it.
It is.
How beautiful.
It's pre-cosmetic.
And look, you see my teeth?
We invented plastic to be durable, resistant to cold and heat.
And we then make products that we throw away out of this amazing material.
And that kind of mentality, with not thinking of a good recovery plan,
has resulted in all these animals around the world.
You know, it's not just one bird.
It's 663 species. To date, we have documented interacting with our trash.
You know, I don't think with the microbeads that corporations necessarily thought about the impact that those microbeads would have.
I don't think that they, you know, went into it and said, oh, these are going to go in the water. Who cares?
It's not common right now in corporate culture to be doing life cycle assessments.
But I think we need to change that and require that and that becomes the norm that we think about.
Well, if we're going to manufacture something, what does that mean down the line?
And we really need to change what is currently a one-way path from extraction to disposal.
That doesn't work in nature. Nature works on cycles.
You know, and so our society, if we're going to sustain ourselves, also has to start working on cycles.
I'll melt it down and see what happens.
So that was a two-liter bottle or half of one.
It goes to show, you know, that much bottle doesn't have that much weight.
Waste pickers, recyclers, they'll pick up bottles because that has enough weight that's worth their effort to pick it up, bring it to another place, and then process it for recycling.
Plastic bags, not at all.
And if you took a whole plastic bag, melted it down, it might be less than one-tenth of this.
When I talk to waste pickers, and actually this guy here, you know, are from India,
I mean, even he that lives in a homemade shack with his entire family, living off the money, gets some plastic bottles, he would not touch a plastic bag.
And I said, why don't you pick up plastic bags?
And he said, well, you know, one plastic bag is dirty.
One pinch of sand in a bag, and the bag now doubles its weight.
And no buyer is going to buy dirty plastic bags from me, so I think I'm trying to cheat him.
And I can't risk that, because it won't buy my bottles either.
So no one touches plastic bags in India.
Even though the waste pickers of India will not pick up plastic bags.
So he's a great example of how design matters.
I would call this man not a waste picker, but a sanitation engineer.
I mean, he could tell me more about design than I can.
Designing for recovery.
He knows what recovery means.
Economics and his world matter.
Now I'm using PET flakes here, because PET is the kind of plastic that sinks.
So the Earl tells a story of plastic waste that sinks in the ocean floor that she's watched build up over her lifetime.
So meaning, I mean, it's integral to the piece, the subject and the material they go hand in hand.
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