Pacific Plastic Ocean

Our world is plastic-our food comes packaged in it, most of our stuff is made of it and now our environment is becoming composed of it. As demonstrated in Garbage Island, a documentary film on vbts.tv, plastic is now a major component of our oceans. In the documentary, Thomas, Jake, and Meredith spend three weeks at sea traveling to, and collecting samples at, the giant Garbage Island in the Pacific Ocean. What is striking is that instead of great piles of plastic bags and bottles, the crew find that the plastic has mostly broken down into tiny little pieces that are ingested into the food system up and down the food chain.

Thomas, in Garbage Island:

I came out here expecting to see, like, a trash dump- pieces in the water that you could pull out, but instead what I got was an even ruder awakening. Looking out right now you don’t see the garbage; sometimes you see shit float by; most of the time you don’t, you just see water; but what’s in that water is a fucking thousand times worst than a coke bottle, because what it is, is every part of a coke bottle busted down into a little digestible morsel.

These little plastic morsels act as sponges and sop up Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) in our environment, making them extra harmful. POPs are chemicals, like DDT and agricultural pesticides, that have seeped into our environment and cause adverse health effects.

An extra piece of footage appending the film is an interview with Vom Saal at the University of Hawaii, Hilo. He discusses the health affects of our new plastic world, namely the affects of Bisphenol A, a synthetic compound produced for use in plastics:

If you look at the incidence of diabetes and the production of Bisphenol A, they parallel each other identically.

Not only does plastic corollate with the diabetes epidemic, but also with obesity, infertility, breast cancer and many other diseases endemic in modern society. Watch the film and say no to plastic whenever you can. Do your veggies really need that extra plastic bag for the trip home from the grocery store? Re-use glass jars for drinking, or get a re-fillable water bottle that won’t seep dangerous chemicals into your beverage. We all need to do our part to keep ourselves and the world healthy.