Plastic Fantastic: "Addicted to Plastic"

On Friday evening Kyle and I were back at Princeton Library to see the "US festival premiere" of "Addicted to Plastic", as part of the Princeton Environmental Film Festival. The previous evening's events had drawn quite a crowd (see my previous posting) but for this event the room was packed, with people even sitting in the aisle and along the walls.

"Addicted to Plastic" seemed a bit more focused than the "Trashed" film, in that it concentrated solely on the manufacture, use and disposal of plastic products. It begins with a trip to the North Pacific Tropical gyre, a region in the middle of the Pacific Ocean which due to the action of ocean current systems has become an enormous "garbage patch" of discarded plastics.

Essentially anything that gets washed out to sea eventually ends up in the gyre. As the film points out, for a material that is supposedly disposable plastic is incredibly durable - it doesn't break down naturally, so every piece of plastic ever made still exists somewhere. In the gyre large pieces of plastic can be seen floating on the surface (some now homes to marine life like limpets, mussels and crabs) but mostly the plastic objects are broken into smaller and smaller pieces which are either eaten by fish and birds which mistake the fragments for food, or eventually become so small that they form a "soup" of plastic particles that are absorbed by filter feeders such as jellyfish.

This is bad news in lots of ways - at a macro level, the birds ingest large amounts of plastic products which fill their stomachs and kill both them and their offspring, while at a micro level the plastics also bind toxins at much higher concentrations than the surrounding seawater. So animals at the bottom of the food chain which consume the poisoned plastics contain high levels of toxins which are propagated up the food chain (ultimately to us).

"Addicted to Plastic" uses the state of the gyre as a starting point to investigate the origins of modern plastics (initially a way to use the waste products of fuel production), the reasons why we now consider them to be disposable (the very ubitiquity of plastic products makes us blind to them), the effects that large amounts of plastics in our environment has on us physiologically (for example, via the leaching of chemicals from plastics into our water and food), and what the future might be (for example, better recycling efforts and the development of "bioplastics" which are biodegradable).

After the screening the director Ian Connacher got up for a lively Q&A session. He was a witty and engaging speaker and I think gave some great answers to the questions that came up, as well as elaborating on some of the things that in my opinion weren't covered so deeply in the film. His feeling was that the solutions should include better recycling of plastics along with increased use of the new environmentally-friendly plastics. He touched on some of the frustrations of current recycling efforts, and in particular the distinction between "true" recycling (where for example used plastic bottles could be recycled into new plastic bottles) and "downcycling" (where the recovered material is lower-grade and cannot be used for the same products).

(Interestingly though the one potential solution that he didn't seem to talk much about was that of reducing consumption. I don't know why, as it seems obvious that the less we consume the less there should be to discard.)

"Addicted to Plastic" was a really great documentary. Afterwards I think I realised again how ignorant I am about the origins and effects of the plastic products that I use and that I throw away, and I'd recommend the film to anyone that is interested in learning more after reading this. In the meantime, it's pretty easy to find out about the state of the North Pacific Tropical gyre, which is the principal image that stayed with me after watching it - just type the phrase into Google - but here's a 2m:40s film on YouTube about the garbage patch anyway, just to get you started.