We're Drowning in Plastic Pollution. Can We Actually Fix It?
One garbage truck holds about 10 or 20 metric tons of stuff we don't want anymore.
That's also how much plastic waste ends up here… every single minute.
That means by the end of this video, 16 more truckloads of plastic waste will find its
way to the ocean.
And by the end of this year, at least 550,000 truckloads will end up in the big blue.
That's not good.
Really smart people are trying to do something about this problem.
That IS good.
But what if I told you that 30 million pounds of trash is how much human beings put into
the ocean in just 15 hours.
Yeah.
There will be many numbers and statistics in this video that may shock or even scare
you, but the point is not to discourage you or anyone working to clean up this stuff from
our oceans, beaches, rivers, and backyards.
It's simply to put the unthinkable hugeness of the plastic waste problem into scale.
Because if we don't understand the truth of what we're up against, we can't fix
it.
And we CAN fix it, if we take the right steps.
And I'm just going to come right out and give away the ending.
Cleaning up plastic waste is a great thing.
And we should keep doing it.
But it's impossible to clean our way out of this problem.
So what can we do?
Titles Open Hey smart people, Joe here.
Plastic is everywhere.
It's more than just this.
It's everywhere.
It's all over this room.
It's in the phone or computer you're using to watch this video.
It's in my car.
It's in our clothes.
It's in our walls.
It's in space!
A world without plastic would be a world very different from this one.
"Just one word."
"Yes sir?"
"Are you listening?"
"Yes sir, I am."
"Plastics."
Plastic is a pretty loose term for one group of materials that can be molded using heat
and pressure.
They're polymers, made of long chains of repeating chemical units.
In plastics, those units are mostly molecules of carbon and hydrogen.
Plastic has completely rebuilt civilizationeven though it's only been around less than
two centuries.
The first plastic was made from a mix of natural and synthetic ingredients.
50 years later, we cooked up the first fullysynthetic plastic, and …. things got crazy.
WWII inspired the invention of new plastics, used in everything from military vehicles,
to parachutes, to radar insulation.
We needed strong, light, cheap materials that lasted a long time and plastics were perfect.
And the products we built with them made everyday items cheaper, more available, and… more
disposable.
Thanks to plastic we've been able to make and do all kinds of stuff.
I mean, without plastic, the world might never have had this.
I actually coulda lived without that.
Plastic has allowed us to make materials that are cheap, useful, and easy to replace.
With one catch: plastic doesn't biodegrade.
Which means even though it's really easy to throw away, it's really hard to get rid
of.
A plastic bottle in a landfill can take 450 years to break down.
Since its invention, we've produced more than 8.3 billion metric tons of new plastic.
In the form of little plastic pellets like this, that's enough plastic to fill more than
5000 Giza pyramids.
By the way, these little pellets?
They're called nurdles.
I just thought you should know that.
I love that word.
Nurdle.
If we keep making more and more plastic at our current pace, in the next 20 years we'll
make as much as we've made in the last two centuries.
And the amount of plastic going into the ocean could triple compared to today.
By 2050, the plastic in the ocean could weigh more than all of the fish.
We make an unbelievable amount of plastic.
But doesn't it just get recycled?
What are all those blue bins for?
Here in the US, just 9% of plastic gets recycled.
And only 10% of that gets turned into something that can be recycled a second time.
Globally, we're only recycling about 15% of the plastic that is produced.
In places like the US and Europe, a lot of plastic ends up in landfills.
It's out of sight, but will sit there for hundreds of years or more.
Before we go any farther, we need to talk about something we don't hear very often.
See, the plastic pollution problem isn't just
this kind of a problem.
It's also THIS kind of a problem.
Plastic pollution is more than just litter.
Plastic is made from fossil fuels, which means plastic is also a climate and greenhouse gas
problem.
Today, over 90% of plastic polymers are made from extracted fossil fuels like oil and natural
gas.
About 6% of all the oil we use on Earth goes to making plastic.
That's about as much as all of the airplanes in the world use.
Extracting, refining, and transporting fossil fuels to make plastic emits the equivalent
of almost 25 million cars worth of carbon every year.
And because we're using more plastic every year, by 2050 this stuff will account for
20% of total oil consumption.
In the next 20 years, plastic alone could account for 15% of the carbon we can safely
emit every year if we want to keep warming under 2 degrees celsius
Emissions from plastics will last decades or centuries, but the plastics themselves
will last much longer.
Scientists have found plastics in snow on mount everest, in Earth's deepest ocean
trench, and even in Antarctica.
Everywhere there is earth or ocean, we find plastic.
You may have heard about giant accumulations of plastic waste like the Great Pacific Garbage
Patch, a floating collection of garbage roughly the size of France.
Maybe you're imagining a big island of packaging, and styrofoam coolers, and fishing gear.
But in reality, this is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
It's mostly microplastic, pieces less than 20 cm across.
In the open sea, as larger pieces of plastic get pummeled by wind, sun, and salt water,
they're broken up into smaller pieces.
One 20 cm piece of plastic can become more than 60,000 pieces of microplastic.
And not all that plastic is at the surface.
Many small plastics are pushed by currents and hitchhike their way towards the ocean
floor with other waste, from poop, to animal parts, to other pollutants.
Some of our trash is even becoming part of living organisms.
Plastic has been found in the bodies of more than 2000 species.
That means everything from tiny plankton to ocean giants.
That plastic moves around the foodweb, and can even end up on our plates.
Of course, plastic pollution also ends up in places like this.
And just like ocean plastic, beach plastic is more than just bags, and food wrappers,
and that beach ball you forgot to take home from your last vacation.
This is Henderson Island in the south pacific.
It has one of the highest densities of plastic pollution on the planet.
Which is weird.
Because no one lives there.
Around 38 million pieces of plastic junk have found their way to the island.
Scientists have uncovered toys here from the ‘80s and ‘90s.
Plastic that got its start on every continent except antarctica.
And plastic isn't just on the beach here.
It is the beach.
There are around four billion pieces of microplastic in just the top five centimeters of sand on
the island.
If you live in a place where a garbage truck comes by once a week and carts off your trash
and recycling, it's hard to understand how all this happens.
70 to 80 percent of plastic waste that winds up in the ocean escapes from rivers and coastlines.
We used to think 10 or so major rivers were responsible for most of that.
But according to recent studies, more like 1,500 rivers play a part in dumping plastic
into the sea.
How?
To put it simply, about 2 billion people on Earth don't have access to waste management,
there are no fancy trucks coming by to pick up their waste, so a lot of their trash ends
up in the environment.
But the people in those countries don't generate as much plastic waste.
The U.S., where nearly everyone has access to modern waste management, is still near
the top ten when it comes to ocean plastic pollution.
That's because we simply use so much more plastic than the rest of the world.
Each year, an average American creates 130 kg of plastic trash, so although only a tiny
fraction of what we throw away leaks into the ocean,
a tiny fraction of a big number is still a lotta waste.
And we also ship a lot of our plastic trash overseas, especially to places where they
already lack good waste management so it has a high chance of escaping into the environment.
Just because your plastic trash is out of sight and out of mind, that doesn't mean
it's out of the way.
It's pretty clear we have to find a better way to deal with our waste.
So can we clean our way out of this?
I wanna say that I fully support ocean cleanup projects, but how much plastic waste are they
really picking up?
Well, 30 million pounds of plastic is 3 tenthousandths of the plastic waste made by just the United
States in a single year.
And it's just half of the plastic trash that's entered the ocean just in the form
of masks, gloves, and other medical waste solely due to the COVID pandemic.
What's clear is it's probably impossible to use nets to filter trash out of the ocean
without scooping up marine life too.
And analysis of one large ocean skimming project found that to clean up just 5% of ocean plastic
by the year 2150, it would have to run 200 big diesel ships 24/7 during that time.
That's… a lot of extra greenhouse gas emissions.
That's why many are focusing their cleanup efforts closer to shore, like on beaches or
in harbors or rivers.
But there's also the question of what to do with the plastic we DO collect.
Because most plastic we harvest from the water is so contaminated we can't recycle it.
And remember, a lot of the plastic that is recycled just becomes more single use, unrecyclable
plastic stuff.
That's sorta solving one problem by creating another.
So how do we solve all of this?
Here's the bottom line: We have a complex relationship with plastic, and there is no
silver bullet to solving the plastic pollution problem.
Experts say that, really, the entire system of how we use and dispose of plastic needs
to change.
Here's 8 things we can start doing today to change our plastic future:
Reduce how much plastic we make and use.
By getting rid of unnecessary plastic stuff, not overpackaging things in too much plastic,
and offering more reusable and refillable options.
Substitute plastic with paper and compostables wherever we can, particularly when it comes
to food packaging and flexible plastics like bags.
Design more products to be recyclable.
Because not every type of plastic is equally recyclable, we need to make more stuff out
of the types that we can process into new stuff.
This would also make recycling cheaper and more economical.
Today, almost a quarter of the world's plastic waste isn't collected.
So we need to scale up waste collection especially in lower income countries, which means giving
4 billion people access to waste management by 2040
Today only 20% or plastic enters the recycling pipeline, and only 15% actually gets recycled.
So we have to expand recycling capacity by double.
And we have to make recycling cheaper and more profitable than putting stuff in landfills.
We also need to use chemistry to figure out how to convert one plastic type to another
plastic type, or even convert plastic into other useful hydrocarbons like fuel.
Of course, we'll never be able to recycle everything, so we also need to build places
to safely dispose of the rest where it can't escape into environment
Finally, we need to reduce the amount of waste we export to lower-income countries where
it can more easily leak into the ocean… because shipping your pollution to someone
else's backyard?
That's just not cool.
Your parents raised you better.
And, um, I did too.
These are big steps, and each has their own challenges and tradeoffs, but if your goal
is to stop putting plastic into the ocean, and to reduce the amount of greenhouse gasses
you put into the atmosphere along the way, these are the things that experts say we need
to do, soon.
By reducing, substituting, recycling, and disposing of plastic in these ways,
we can cut our total plastic waste by 90% by 2040, and
lower ocean plastic pollution by 80%.
That's 125 million metric tons of plastic waste that doesn't make its way into the
environment.
Cleanup projects are great and they bring attention to the problem, but It's pretty
clear that most of the real answers are much farther upstream from oceans or rivers…
literally.
The only way to clean up the oceans long term is to clean up how we live on land.
If you were on a sinking ship, you wouldn't try to mop up the water without plugging the
hole first.
And that's why experts agree we need to stop making more plastic in the first place,
and recycle more of what we do make.
The more I think about it, I can't get over how bonkers it is that we use one of the longest
lasting substances ever invented for some of the shortest possible uses we can come
up with.
We've been to the moon, people.
We can do better!
It can sometimes feel like these big global issues are out of your reach, like you live
in a system where you can't make any change, but this is a place where maybe some of it
is actually in your hands.
You're armed with this knowledge, so share it, people!
Talk about it with your friends and family.
Tell your local government this stuff is important to you.
Your voice matters and there are places where your choices will actually make a difference here.
Whenever you can choose something that isn't made of plastic, or at least a plastic item
that can be used over and over, do it, if you can afford it.
When it comes to your clothes, your food, whatever you buy on Amazon at 2AM, support
companies that are producing alternatives to plastic.
And tell companies that aren't that you'd like to see them try harder.
But it's not up to any one of us individuals to solve a problem this huge, even if you're
MrBeast or Mark Rober.
Governments gotta do their part too.
I mean, come on.
I mean, c'mon.
"Well . . ."
"We're waiting!"
If we're going to get out of this hole, we have to work to stop digging the hole deeper.
The best part of this is we've got almost all the tools we need to solve it.
We don't need to wait for some new earth-shattering technology.
And now you've got the knowledge.
All that's left
is to do it.
Stay curious.
