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.

Princeton Environmental Film Festival

Yesterday Kyle and I went to see some of the events at the Princeton Environmental Film Festival, which is taking place at Princeton Library (though since she had to work, I saw some of them on my own).

The first was Tom Weidlinger's film "Swim for the River", which followed a guy called Chris Swain during his attempt to swim the length of the Hudson River in 2006. As part of this effort Swain comes into contact with the various communities along with the effects of industrial use of the river both in the past and in the present day. A couple of things that he discovers on his trip are pretty shocking, for example the massive amounts of industrial waste being pumped into the river from a factory at Glenn's Falls, and an underground oil spill leaking into the water at Newtown Creek. But equally depressing was the fact that none of this is particularly hidden, most people just don't seem to see it any more - they're no longer connected to the river.

I was interested in the film because it reminded me of the growing outdoor swimming movement in the UK which broke into the mainstream last year. The Outdoor Swimming Society is one example of many local and national organisations promoting the benefits of outdoor swimming while also campaigning for better public access and cleaner water. I think that there are similar problems in the UK to those highlighted in "Swim for the River", to do with people not feeling a sense of connection with the lakes and rivers around them. I think that you care more about something if you have to swim in it. After the film Jim Waltman of the Stony Brook-Millstone Watershed Association led a discussion and said that he was inspired by the film to do something similar here, so I hope that goes well.

The rest of the day seemed more focused on "trash". The second event I saw was a talk on "Garblogging" by Leila Darabi, who has a trash-related blog at everydaytrash.com. Much of her talk was a shout-out to various other "garbloggers" (who include artists, "dumpster divers", and people who are just trying to live sustainably) but it was also interesting to hear her own story of how she got into writing on the subject in the first place.

In the evening we went to see Bill Kirkos' film "Trashed" (warning: the website has a soundtrack so you may wish to turn the sound down on your computer before visiting it) which is broadly about the waste management industry in North America. The screening included a short Q&A with the director himself, and was followed by a talk by author Elizabeth Royte about her books "Garbage Land" and "Bottlemania". There was a lot to take in from both the film and the talk, but one of the general points that I took away was again just disconnected we are from both the production and disposal of things that we buy and consume. Where does this stuff come from? What's required to make it? Where does it go once we throw it out? We're so habituated to throwing things away that we're almost blind to the sheer volumes that we're disposing of. And why do we think of some things (particularly plastics) as being throwaway in the first place?

I think that "Trashed" had more immediate impact because as a film it was able to show things that are normally unseen - the size of landfills and the amount of rubbish being taken there. It's pretty depressing stuff. But there were some hopeful things too, like Ray Anderson's company Interface transforming themselves into a sustainable enterprise.

I won't say that I had any kind of epiphany or that I'm suddenly going to transform my life. I'm still processing what I saw and heard yesterday, and the main feeling I'm left with is that I'm pretty ignorant about the impact that I have on the world with the way that I live. I find myself wondering if the proliferation of blogs about sustainable living reflects the fact that it's neither obvious nor straightforward to make a big difference. But that's no reason not to try, so I'm going to check out what other people are doing (beginning with the advice on Sustainable Dave's site) and start from there.