(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
This is one of the scariest movies I've ever seen, and I'm not easily scared.
Plastic is everywhere. There is no news. Microplastics are everywhere. It's not news either.
But the extent to which microplastics are inside our bodies, our organs and our bloodstream – now even beyond the blood-brain barrier and into the gray matter – is not widely known.
And this microplastic is full of dangerous chemicals – and compounds that can change our DNA and cause cancer, inflammation, tumors and dementia. Death.
Microplastics
Microplastics are found in infants, fetuses, mother's placenta and breast milk.
There is almost nothing we can do to avoid getting it in us.
And the truly terrifying thing about this microplastic that is everywhere in our environment – from Everest in the Himalayas to the Mariana Trench in the North West Pacific – is that there is almost nothing we can do to avoid ingesting it.
It's in the plastic we buy our food in, the bottles we drink our water from (and it takes a huge dedication to never drink water from a disposable bottle, even if the most conscientious of us try). The very food we eat – and the everyday objects that we can no longer function in the 21st century without.
Plastic people – Ben Addelman and Ziya Tong's call to action to reverse the trend – serves up the bad news first, before offering some glimmers of hope at the very end of this engaging and moving documentary. The film is presented by Ziya Tong, a science journalist from Toronto. Viewers are engaged by her dogged determination to get to the bottom of the problem of microplastic pollution – literally when she gets a sample of her own faeces analyzed. "The crap I do for science," she says before later giving some of it to a special study in the UK learns that – yes – her poo is full of microplastics, and so is her blood.
The film also shows a Dutch mother who is worried about her unborn child. And experts who make comments such as "microplastics are the most serious type of pollution our society has created", or "babies are already polluted when they are born [...] we will only know in a generation what damage has been done [...]" . The film is an emotional punch in the gut.
What happened?
So how did we end up here?
There are some known culprits: War is one of the most important. After the development of early plastics such as cellulose and Bakelite (which we have previously written about), the demands of wartime military production, particularly in the USA, led to a massive increase in plastic production of 300-400 percent.
The use of plastic in clothing is today a ubiquitous source of microplastic pollution.
The big oil companies also wanted to find a use for by-products from petrol and gas production, and the laboratory technicians were given free rein to experiment with substances for which there was no use or demand. The only thing that was in demand was nylon stockings. But nylon could also be used for other clothes – and the use of plastic in clothes is today a ubiquitous source of microplastic pollution.
The big oil companies that owned all the big plastic producers realized that there were limits to the markets, and came up with a new, brilliant idea: disposable plastic.
In the 1950s, the use of plastic exploded – it was used in cars, consumer goods and durable goods, furniture. But soon the big oil companies, who now owned all the big plastic producers, realized that there were limits to these markets. So they came up with a new, brilliant idea: disposable plastic. The throwaway society was a child of the plastics industry – detailed in a 1956 industry document quoted in the film – and popularized in a Life magazine article entitled Throw Away Living.
At first, people had to be persuaded to throw away the new single-use plastic – those who grew up in the tight times of the 1930s tended to take plastic cups home from drink machines to reuse. So the plastics industry used advertising to get us to think differently. In the 1970s, when visible plastic waste became a major environmental problem, the plastics industry invented the concept of plastic recycling – right down to the small numbered recycling symbols we find on plastic bottles and other objects. Very few plastic materials are actually recyclable, and less than ten percent are recycled today. Doing so on a large scale remains an unattainable goal.
As global demand for oil begins to decline, the plastics/oil industry plans to triple plastic production over the next 20 years.
As Ziya travels the world and learns how plastic waste is exported to poor countries far away, it becomes clear how the petrochemical industry literally gets away with pumping plastic waste into our water sources. And it is becoming increasingly clear that microplastic pollution is fundamentally inseparable from today's late capitalism, and the immoral global corporations that lack any kind of conscience or responsibility.
Unbridled corporate greed
Plastic people doesn't say it himself, but capitalism and corporate unbridled greed are the real villains here. And the only real answer to plastic pollution is the same answer to so many of the problems of the 21st century – to restructure the system so that we live to support and satisfy the majority of people, not a group of vulgar billionaires.
As the film rounds the final corner of its global investigation into the dangers of microplastic pollution, with a shocking examination of how tiny remnants of plastic dyes are found in the human brain, inside brain tumors, prompting a Turkish scientist to dryly note that we are no longer Homo sapiensbut A plastic man, a few straws of hope are offered:
In Paris in 2023, a UN-backed global treaty to reduce plastic pollution is introduced, with 189 countries participating in a conference; and countries like the Philippines have managed to clean millions of tons of plastic waste from rivers; sawdust filters have been developed that can remove 99,9 per cent of the microplastics from water, and there will be water purification and equipment for home use; washing clothes on "gentle" cycles reduces microplastic emissions from fashion clothing by 70 per cent. In addition, hundreds of countries have introduced bans or partial bans on single-use plastics.
The film ends with a call to action. Join the resistance via: Plasticpeopledoc.com and @plasticpeopledoc
The documentary was shown at the festival Ji.hlava IDFF in the Czech Republic this autumn. Translated by editor.
