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When the gods granted king Midas one wish, he wished that everything he touched would turn to gold.
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Midas was delighted. Trees, rocks, buildings all gold.
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But soon he found in horror that his food turned into gold as well.
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When he hugged his daughter to soothe his pain, he realized his mistake too late.
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The richest man in existence was starving, heartbroken and alone.
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Humanity got a similar wish granted when we learned how to turn brown stinky goo into magic - plastic.
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Cheap, sterile and convenient it changed our lives
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But this wonder of technology got a little out of hand.
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Plastic has saturated our environment.
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It has invaded the animals we eat and now it's finding its way into our bodies.
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What is plastic?
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For most of our history humans used stuff we found in nature to build the things we needed.
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But the invention of plastic roughly 100 years ago completely changed our world.
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Plastic is made from polymers - long repeating chains of molecule groups.
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In nature, polymers exist everywhere : the walls of cells, silk, hair, insect carapaces, DNA.
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But it's also possible to create them.
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By breaking down crude oil into its components and Rearranging them, we can form new synthetic polymers.
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Synthetic polymers have extraordinary traits.
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They are lightweight, durable and can be molded into almost any shape.
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Not requiring time-consuming manual work, plastic can be easily mass-produced
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and its raw materials are a vailable in vast amounts
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And incredibly cheaply, and so the golden era of plastics began
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Bakelite was used for mechanical parts, PVC for plumbing electric gears and cases,
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Acrylic is a shatter resistant alternative to glass and nylon for stockings and war equipment
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Today almost everything is at least partly made from plastic.
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Our clothes, phones, computers, furniture, appliances, houses and cars.
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Plastic has long ceased to be a revolutionary material instead it became trash.
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Coffee cups, plastic bags, or stuff to wrap a banana. We don't think about this fact a lot.
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Plastic just appears and goes away.
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Unfortunately, it doesn't
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Since synthetic polymers are so durable, plastic takes between 500 and 1,000 years to break down.
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But somehow we collectively decided to use this super tough material for things meant to be thrown away.
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40% of plastics are used for packaging.
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In the United States, packaging makes up 1/3 of all the waste that is generated annually.
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Since its invention, we have produced about 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic.
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335 million tons in 2016 alone.
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More than 6.3 billion metric tons of plastic have become waste since 1907.
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Piled up in one place, that makes a cube with a side length of 1.9 kilometers.
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So what did we do with all this waste?
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9% was recycled, 12% burnt.
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But
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79% of it is sticking around still.
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A lot ends up in the ocean. Around 8 million tons a year.
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That's so much plastic that it will outweigh all the fish in the ocean by 2050.
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Because it's everywhere, marine animals keep getting trapped in plastic and swallowing it.
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In 2015 already 90% of seabirds had eaten plastic.
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Many animals starve with stomachs full of indigestible trash. In 2018 a dead sperm whale washed up in Spain.
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He had eaten 32 kilos of plastic bags, nets and a drum
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While this is tragic and makes for great magazine covers, there's an even more widespread,
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invisible form of plastic.
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Microplastics
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Microplastics are pieces smaller than 5 millimeters
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Some of them are used in cosmetics or toothpaste,
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but most result from floating waste that is constantly exposed to UV radiation
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And crumbles into smaller and smaller pieces
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51 trillion such particles float in the ocean,
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Where they are even more easily swallowed by all kinds of marine life.
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This has raised concerns among scientists,
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especially about health risks from the chemicals that are added to plastic.
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BPA for example makes plastic bottles transparent
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But there's also evidence that it interferes with our hormonal system. DEHP makes plastics more flexible,
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But may cause cancer.
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It would be pretty bad if micro plastics are toxic, because they travel up the food chain.
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Zooplankton eat micro plastic. Small fish eat zooplankton.
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So do oysters, crabs and predatory fish and they all land on our plate.
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Micro plastics have been found in honey, in sea salt, in beer, in tap water and in the household dust around us.
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8 out of 10 babies and nearly all adults
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have measurable amounts of phthalates, a common plastic additive in their bodies.
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And 93% of people have BPA in their urine
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There is little science about this so far and right now it's inconclusive.
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We need a lot more research before panic is justified.
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But it is safe to say that a lot of stuff happened that we didn't plan for. And we have lost control
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Over plastic to a certain extent which is kind of scary.
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But just to make sure we should simply ban plastics, right?
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Unfortunately, it's a bit more complicated than that.
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Plastic pollution is not the only environmental challenge we face.
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Some of the substitutes we'd use for plastic have a higher environmental impact in other ways.
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For example :
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according to a recent study by the Danish government,
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making a single-use plastic bag requires so little energy and produces far lower carbon dioxide emissions
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compared to a reusable cotton bag, that you need to use your cotton bag 7 thousand 100 times
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before it would have a lower impact on the environment than the plastic bag.
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We're left with a complex process of trade-offs. Everything has an impact somehow,
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and it's hard to find the right balance between them.
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Plastic also helps solve problems that we don't have very good answers for at the moment.
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Globally, one-third of all food that's produced is never eaten and ends up rotting away on landfills where it produces methane.
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And the best way of preventing food from spoiling and avoiding unnecessary waste is still plastic packaging.
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It's also important to note where the vast majority of the world's plastic pollution is coming from right now.
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90% of all plastic waste entering the ocean through rivers comes from just ten rivers in Asia and Africa.
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The Yangtze in China alone flushes 1.5 million tons of plastic into the ocean each year.
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Countries like China, India
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Algeria or Indonesia
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industrialized at an impressive pace in the last few decades,
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transforming the lives of billions of people
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This development was so fast,
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that the garbage disposal infrastructure couldn't keep up with collecting and recycling all the new waste this brought
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If politicians in Europe and the US want to address this issue,
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investing in infrastructure in developing countries is just as important
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as fighting plastic pollution at home with campaigns and redesigning products to minimize unnecessary
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plastic production.
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The bottom line is, as long as we don't address plastic pollution from a global perspective, we will not solve it.
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Plastic pollution is a complicated problem.
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We found a magic material and we had a really good time with it,
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But we need to be careful or just like Midas, we'll end up in a world that we didn't wish for.
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Your individual daily actions still have a huge impact. What you do matters!
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Refuse disposable plastics. Convince your friends and family to do the same.
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Pressure companies and politicians to take the necessary steps to keep our oceans clean and our food safe.
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Together we can beat plastic pollution!
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This video was a collaboration with UN Environment and their clean seas campaign.
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If you want to take action to turn the tide on plastics, go to cleanseas.org and make your pledge.