Elizabeth McCauley breaks down the ways you're being lied to about ocean plastic.
Category
🤖
TechTranscript
00:00When many people hear about ocean plastic, it's usually in the context of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
00:05The idea that there was this giant trash island in the ocean was
00:09one of the things that got so many people paying attention to ocean plastic in the first place.
00:13The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is in the open ocean. You cannot see land anywhere nearby.
00:17So when you see pictures like this, where there's clearly mountains or maybe islands in the background,
00:22that is obviously not the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
00:25And then when you start looking, you see that the majority of these are fake.
00:29Most of these are probably honest mistakes, but then there are other ones which are obviously photoshopped.
00:34Like this one, which is clearly just using a picture of a landfill or something.
00:37The question here is, what does this thing actually look like if it doesn't look like any of this?
00:42And why is everyone using photos of it that are of something else?
00:45These photos are just one example of all the things we get wrong when we talk about the patch and
00:50about ocean plastic in general. The plastic isn't coming from where you think.
00:54We're blaming the wrong people for it.
00:56And there are devastating sources of microplastics that hardly anyone is even talking about.
01:00I've spent the last few months diving into the research and interviewing experts,
01:04and I'm here to tell you that you're being lied to about ocean plastic.
01:10So what does it actually look like?
01:11Well, in short, news sites and blogs use fake photos because the real thing just isn't that exciting to look at.
01:18It's this giant swirling vortex of plastic. It thins out at the edges.
01:22It moves every year and plastic is constantly being added to it.
01:26It was talked about as another shame on us kind of thing.
01:28And it was assumed that it must be all of our daily household plastic that was in the garbage patch.
01:35It's called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
01:38It's mostly plastic pooling what we all throw away.
01:42Basically, the framing was like, we've all been bad and now there's this big patch here.
01:47A study from 2022 looked at the macroplastics,
01:50the stuff bigger than five millimeters in the garbage patch,
01:52and found that 75% up to 86% of it was from the fishing industry.
01:58I think a lot of news coverage probably thought there was no harm in laying on a little bit of guilt about plastic
02:02because we all do buy and use it every day.
02:04But guilt mongering like that can still be dishonest and making people feel defeated does not help.
02:10We've been doing that for a while now, and it has not addressed the plastic pollution crisis.
02:15When I first started talking to experts about this, I encountered one thing I really was not expecting.
02:19There's actually a debate going on over whether we should clean this thing up at all.
02:24Once it is in the ocean, it is connected with marine life.
02:31And it's too late to remove it.
02:35That's Martin Thiel.
02:36He might have a bit of a bold take on this,
02:38but he's not alone in thinking that at a certain point, plastic becomes part of the ecosystem.
02:43Once we throw away plastic, it's not ours anymore.
02:46And other life absolutely colonizes that plastic.
02:51Some studies have shown that nearly 100 species can live on plastic and make that plastic their home.
02:57And so being careful about how we clean that plastic up is really important to protecting and preserving the ecosystem.
03:04More research has actually come out about the garbage patch being teeming with life.
03:08And actually that coastal species are hitching a ride all the way to the garbage patch
03:12and then thriving there.
03:14Scientists have also found plastic-eating microbes that can turn polyethylene into CO2,
03:19although in small quantities.
03:21That said, it's not a settled question yet.
03:23Some plastic leaches toxic chemicals.
03:25Some of it gets eaten by animals and contaminates the entire food chain.
03:28We don't fully understand the trade-offs between leaving plastic in ecosystems versus taking it out.
03:35Anyway, back to those photos.
03:36If the pictures we keep seeing are not of the garbage patch, what are they?
03:40The two most widely shared images of the patch are this one and this one.
03:44A photographer named Caroline Power took those off the coast of Honduras in 2017.
03:49So this particular crisis was actually close to land, not far out to sea.
03:53In reality, the garbage patch is less polluted than many coastal zones.
03:57Which might actually be good news because researchers also think it's more effective to clean plastic from coastal areas
04:03than from garbage patches that are far out to sea.
04:05It's actually really interesting that the fervor over ocean plastic, the panic about it,
04:09started with the garbage patch because the garbage patch is kind of this exceptional thing.
04:13It's mostly fishing gear. It's far out to sea.
04:15It's difficult to clean.
04:17And it's really not representative of the ocean plastic problem as a whole.
04:21Closer to shore, you see more of what you'd expect.
04:23Water bottles, wrappers, all kinds of consumer packaging.
04:26But how it actually gets there is often misrepresented.
04:29When you Google, how does so much plastic end up in the ocean?
04:32The main result you find over and over again is littering.
04:35To show you what I mean, here's an educational video from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
04:45Where does marine debris come from?
04:47Marine debris comes from many different sources and enters the ocean in many ways.
04:51Intentional littering and dumping are a big cause of marine debris.
04:56Sometimes the trash goes directly into the ocean, like when beachgoers don't pick up after themselves.
05:01And there are other examples of this all over the Internet.
05:04So this page, for example, it's called How Does Plastic End Up in the Ocean?
05:08And the number one reason it puts is that we're throwing plastic in the bin when it could be recycled.
05:13And number two is littering.
05:14Both of those are just not a majority of the problem here.
05:18This is the European Environment Agency, and it says poor waste management and careless littering on land are two of the main causes of the problem.
05:25Littering is responsible for a very small percentage of the overall plastic in the environment.
05:29Based on this graph from the OECD, you can see littering is this teeny tiny blue bar here.
05:37And mismanaged waste, not including littering, is this massive one at the bottom.
05:43Mismanaged waste includes all the things that end up either in illegal dump sites or burned in the open or in the rivers or oceans or wherever.
05:53The focus on littering specifically, it's an easy answer because obviously there's nothing wrong with discouraging people from littering.
06:00But it focuses on individual people's bad choices rather than systemic forces that are basically flushing plastic into the ocean every minute.
06:10Mismanaged waste includes everything that escapes formal waste systems.
06:14So they might end up dumped, they might end up burned, they might end up in the environment.
06:17We're not even talking about landfills here.
06:19If it's landfill, that's managed waste.
06:21According to the OECD, 82% of macroplastic leakage into the environment, that's land, air and sea, is the result of mismanaged waste.
06:30Putting so much emphasis on individual choices also takes the pressure off of the companies whose products so often become plastic waste.
06:37We know from beach cleanup data that Coca-Cola has been the number one plastic polluter for six years in a row, producing 11% of all the branded plastic pollution found on beaches.
06:46And just 56 companies are responsible for half the world's branded plastic pollution.
06:51So I read Coca-Cola's sustainability report, and most of the emphasis for their solutions is on recycling.
06:57So is recycling the key to stopping plastic from getting in the ocean?
07:01Spoiler alert, no, but it's more complicated than you might think.
07:07We know at this point that big lies were told about recycling and they were told because the plastics industry had a PR problem.
07:13In 1969, there was a quote from the American Chemical Society saying,
07:16it is always possible that scientists and engineers will learn to recycle or dispose of waste at a profit,
07:21but that does not seem likely to happen soon on a broad basis.
07:25And boy, were they right.
07:26Globally, recycling rates are less than 10% and they've been stuck that way for decades now.
07:31Keep in mind, the amount of recycled plastic we make globally has quadrupled in 20 years.
07:37We're recycling more than ever.
07:38It just can't keep up.
07:39I think we need to show a graph here.
07:41So if you look at what goes into the ocean,
07:45items that actually have a chance of being recycled are hard plastics made of just one thing.
07:50This report calls them rigid monomaterials, but you can see they make up just 18% of plastic leakage into the ocean.
07:57These other two massive categories, they make up a vast majority of the plastic in the ocean.
08:01And those are just not widely recyclable items.
08:04You might hear people say that they're technically recyclable, the technology exists,
08:08but it's just not economically viable and it's not being done at a large scale.
08:11So the industry has known at this point that mixing together different types of plastics makes them unrecyclable.
08:16They've known it for more than 50 years and they've just kept doing it.
08:19But either way, what we're looking at is less than a fifth of ocean plastic having even the potential to be recycled.
08:24So graphs like this really brought it home for me that this is one of the biggest lies about the ocean plastic problem,
08:29is that somehow we can recycle our way out of it when such a tiny fraction of what's going into the ocean is even maybe recyclable.
08:36We need to talk about different ways to solve this problem.
08:38Recycling was doomed to fail because it was given an impossible task.
08:42And the impossible task was to just keep up with limitless plastic consumption.
08:46However, it's not exactly completely fake either.
08:50And that's something I'm encountering more and more in my everyday life when I talk to people about this.
08:54There's been so much coverage of recycling being a scam that people think it doesn't matter at all, that they shouldn't even try.
09:00The reality is that headlines saying recycling is a scam or totally fake are misleading.
09:05You know, it gets framed as an either or.
09:07Either we are only need recycling and only recycling will fix this problem or recycling won't fix this problem at all.
09:16We should absolutely give up on it.
09:18And I quite simply disagree.
09:20It is not an either or.
09:21It is a yes and.
09:23Yes, we need recycling and we need overall reduction.
09:27One of the reasons recycling hasn't worked so well is because of low collection and sorting rates and convincing people that it's totally fraudulent will just make that problem worse.
09:35So PET, plastic number one, and HDPE, plastic number two, are legitimately recyclable, though the rates of plastic recycling for like all plastics is less than 10 percent.
09:45For those two plastics, it's closer to 30 percent.
09:47And we could double that in the U.S. by just doing a better job collecting plastics.
09:51We just need to stop thinking that recycling plastics gives us license to consume as much as we want and stop accepting the industry line that is perfectly circular.
10:00It's meant to be a last resort for plastics we can't eliminate, and it still comes with some environmental tradeoffs.
10:06There is no hiding the fact that our recycling system is not working very well right now.
10:12But that doesn't mean we should give up on it.
10:15If anything, it means that we need to invest in it and make it work.
10:19As you can see, this is messy.
10:21We want magic pills and silver bullets, a perfect solution for all these problems.
10:26And that's just not going to happen.
10:27And it's about to get messier because we need to talk more about microplastics.
10:33So microplastics are incredibly hard to wrap your head around.
10:36They see numbers in the billions and they're measured in terms of particles, and it's just it's sort of impossible to envision what that even means or how bad it is.
10:43From Europe, so much microplastic goes into the environment that it's the equivalent of everyone in Europe throwing one grocery bag into the ocean each week.
10:51Then in the U.S., it's triple that number.
10:53Though microplastics are 11 percent of all the plastic that goes into the ocean each year, when you look at just high income countries, that number goes up to 62 percent.
11:02Scientists keep finding them in new places.
11:03And then that makes the news.
11:05And now it's in the news cycle so much that it's almost become kind of a meme with people joking about like microplastics for dinner and whatever you might see.
11:13So for a while, we were thinking maybe that maybe the main problem here was polyester and plastic clothing.
11:17But then we started having more data come out about tires.
11:21The tires on cars shed microplastics like crazy.
11:25Estimates vary, but tires can shed between 10 and 16 percent of their weight over their lifetime.
11:30That means each tire on a car loses a kilogram or two pounds of tire dust over its lifetime.
11:36We also know that the heavier a car is, the faster its tires wear down, which means the more microplastics go out into the environment.
11:43So that means like the big SUVs.
11:45Americans tend to drive really big cars.
11:47Those are creating higher numbers of microplastics.
11:49It's estimated that nine percent of all plastic pollution going into the ocean is from tires.
11:54And right now, there's just no way of catching it.
11:57So textiles remained a problem.
11:58Then we had a tire still list.
12:00But the craziest thing is that after that, a report came out that said that there was a new source of microplastics we hadn't been calculating correctly.
12:06And that if their math was right, it created more microplastics than all the other ones combined, more than tires and personal care products and clothing combined.
12:15And that source is paint.
12:17So according to this report, about 40 percent of paint ends up in the environment.
12:21And the craziest thing is that 37 percent of paint is plastic polymers, like the composition of paint is plastic.
12:28We're painting our walls with plastic.
12:30When I heard that lots of microplastics came from paint, I had assumed it was mostly from ships.
12:35But actually, marine sources were not even a majority of the microplastics that end up in the environment.
12:40And a lot of it is from buildings.
12:41About half the paint applied in European lower income countries will eventually leak to the environment.
12:47That is mind boggling to me.
12:48All these things are basically modeled estimates.
12:51It's really difficult to measure microplastics.
12:53So people end up doing this sort of complex mathematic modeling to figure out how much paint gets shed off of these everyday objects.
13:00Even if this estimate is wrong and it's half that or a third of that, paint is still a huge source of microplastics in the environment that's been wildly underestimated.
13:07Ultimately, the disconcerting vibe that I get from all of this is that we know there are huge sources of microplastics out there, but we could discover a new one tomorrow that's even bigger.
13:17There are also a whole other type of microplastics that come from things already in the ocean breaking apart.
13:23A recent study found that the color of the plastic actually makes a big difference in terms of how fast that happens.
13:28So red, green and blue plastics become microplastics much faster than white, silver or black.
13:35Removing pigments from plastic would also make them much easier and more valuable for recyclers.
13:39But of course, mixing red caps and green bottles and all of that would mean brands giving up some of their brand power.
13:45So now we're getting to the really big questions.
13:47How do you compel massive institutions that benefit from plastic to change their ways?
13:55Over the years, we've seen both governments and corporations make pledges to reduce their plastic footprints.
14:00Over five years, there was a 60 percent increase in these pledges and in that same time, a 50 percent increase in plastic pollution.
14:08That's not a 50 percent increase in five years.
14:10These pledges simply haven't worked.
14:13Plastic use is still set to triple by 2060.
14:16At this point, it might seem hopeless, but we're actually in a pivotal moment.
14:21In 2022, UN member states passed a resolution very ambitiously called End Plastic Pollution.
14:27For the past few years, they've been working on a global treaty.
14:30I've spoken to independent scientists who are at these negotiations and they all talk about the same thing, reducing plastic production.
14:37This may seem painfully obvious, but we have to go through the data a bit because it's been weirdly controversial for a long time now to say that plastic production leads to more plastic pollution.
14:47If you map out plastic production since 1950 and map out the amount of plastic going into the ocean since that time, you get two lines that track each other very closely.
14:55And this is true even for individual brands.
14:58A 2024 study found that the more product that Coke, Pepsi, Nestle and other companies made, the more of their branded trash washed up on beaches.
15:05Even though making less plastic seems like a really clear answer, this idea is still tearing apart these negotiations.
15:12There is a big group of countries supporting the obligations to reduce plastic production.
15:19But we also have a very small group of countries that are stalling progress in these obligations.
15:26And this small group of countries are the petro-states.
15:30People think that we are negotiating a waste treaty.
15:34But in reality, we are negotiating the future of fossil fuels.
15:38The Center for International Environmental Law, where Daniela works, analyzed the guest list at these talks.
15:43They found petrochemical and fossil fuel industry lobbyists, outnumbered scientists at these talks, sometimes three to one.
15:49These industries are fighting hard because they're counting on plastics for their future growth.
15:53The fossil fuel industry is using all types of tactics to intimidate and to harass.
15:58So as soon as we landed in Ottawa in April, we started to see billboards all over the city defending plastics.
16:07And with kids in a hospital with masks of plastic for oxygen, which we are clear that we're not targeting this kind of elements with our ads for production reduction.
16:18Inside the talks, industry reps don't want to talk about lowering production.
16:22They want to talk about recycling and waste management.
16:25Of course, recycling is important and we don't want to say that we don't need recycling.
16:28But if we want to make recycling something that actually works, we need to bring production to more sustainable levels.
16:35There's no way that recycling is going to keep up with the levels of production that we have today.
16:40Every scientist and activist that I've spoken to about this issue wants two things to reduce plastic production and to simplify the chemicals that go into plastics.
16:49There are about 16,000 chemicals used in plastics today, most of which are not regulated by international law.
16:55And getting that number lower could not only improve safety, but also make recycling much more effective.
17:00I don't know how this is all going to turn out or if plastic production is actually going to go down.
17:04But I do know Dow, a chemical company and one of the world's largest suppliers of the polymers that go into single-use plastics, seemingly doesn't have plans to slow down anytime soon.
17:14Plastics right now, PNSP, silicones and coatings, I think we have a pretty good line of sight.
17:23Since 2019, we've seen a 20 percent increase in volumes in plastics.
17:29I think plastics is going to continue to see solid volumes and we've got cost advantage.
17:35The long-term trends for plastics say the growth is going to continue to be there.
17:46If you're wondering where I got all this information, check out the link in the video description.
17:50I'm sharing a reading list of all the reports that I used to put this together.
17:53And for more Truth Complex, subscribe to Business Insider on YouTube.