The real lung of the world is everywhere Spread by 70% of the surface of the planet. More than half of the oxygen we breathe comes from the small vegetables that absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and photosynthesize it. Like grass in a pasture, these small beings, the plankton, are the basis of the feeding of all marine ecosystems.
80% of life on the planet lives in the oceans. And it depends directly on plankton. Almost half of the world's population lives in coastal areas and their food depends directly on the food the ocean gives.
But in recent years, a new threat has emerged for the whole cycle. Something that is only now beginning to be understood and which puts at risk all the ecosystems of the whole world. And I'm not talking about global warming.
You may not notice looking from above, but plastic is so present in the oceans that only in the Pacific there's an island sixteen times the size of Portugal, made only of plastic. It's killing millions of marine animals and if we do not change our consumption habits, we will have more plastic than fish in the oceans by 2050. In this series you will understand with me the size of this problem and, of course, the ways to solution.
We have to act now. This journey is just beginning. Thank you.
This scene is so common that most people don’t even realize that this straw will be used once, for maybe five minutes, but the plastic of that straw will stay here for decades, perhaps hundreds, of years. And in the United States alone, 500 million straws are consumed every day. This is the kind of plastic that is going into the oceans.
The ones that we use once and throw away. But make no mistake, there is no "away. " This problem is very serious, indeed.
So I have traveled to two international conferences on the oceans and marine debris to see up close and hear the greatest experts, scientists and activists answer the question that does not want to shut up: are we surrounded by a plastic ocean? We usually think that a tree produces oxygen for us to breathe and that a farm produces food for us to eat, but actually an immense part of what we need to live comes from the oceans. And from this huge place, which produces the essential things for our lives, we are making a great dump.
You know, I think that for many, many years we think of the ocean as this amazingly vast expanse, right? It’s outer and away from us and couldn’t possibly be impacted by us tiny humans, but in fact we've seen over the years that we take too much out of the ocean in terms of fish and we put way too much into the ocean. Global estimate is that there's 8 million metric tons of plastic going into the ocean every year, which amounts to one city garbage truck full of plastic every minute going into the ocean.
We knew years ago fishing gear was impacting the oceans. We then knew that big plastics that are on beaches and in the ocean are harming animals. We now know that those plastics break down into smaller plastics, in the microplastics, which are the most abundant form of pollution out there.
It can really impact animals from the smallest organisms in the ocean all the way up to the great whales. Today we know that in the last 70 years more than 8 billion metric tons of plastic have been produced. Of these 8 billion, more than 6 billion have become trash.
And of that trash, only 9% was recycled, which does not mean that, after recycling, this garbage will not turn into trash again. This whole plastic ends up into landfills or in the oceans. And there in the oceans, this plastic breaks into small pieces that are confused with the same plankton that is at the base of the food chain of several marine animals.
And that's just the beginning of the problem. The concern is that plastics in the ocean can absorb contaminants. These contaminants can transfer into the tissues of animals, across their blood barrier into organs, and they can bioaccumulate up the food chain.
What impact did this have on these organisms? What impact does this have on us? The truth is is that we don't yet really know, but according to what we called the precautionary principle, when we look at this information, that should be enough to say we have a problem.
We need to start working on solutions. We don't need to wait until we have all the science completely done to know that there's a big problem in the world and we need to take action now. The amount of plastic that we're using is increasing.
The number of people on the planet is increasing and if we don't stop this, the amount of plastic in the ocean could double within the next 10 years. In 2016, more than 350 million metric tons of plastic were produced worldwide. This is equivalent to the weight of all of us, humans, added.
And the oil industry has invested more than $180 billions to grow that output by 40% over the next 10 years. And think that 90% of all this today is not recycled and that most of this plastic you will only use once, for up to twenty minutes. From the time you started watching this video until now, 2.
2 million straws have been discarded in the United States alone. And more than 6 million plastic bottles worldwide were discarded too. Even if you live far from the seas, it's likely that your plastic ends up there.
Every year, about 2. 5 million metric tons of plastic comes into the oceans from rivers and not from coastal regions. As an environmental engineer, I had worked in solid waste management.
And it was actually in 2001, when I heard about our trash ending up in the ocean, that I said to myself that we're probably doing something wrong on land for our trash to be ending up in the ocean, that's not where it's supposed to be. And when we made this estimate of the actual input of plastic in the ocean, it kind of shifted the conversation to kind of upstream. Going how can we turn off this tap?
What can we do upstream to stop this problem from the source? People are becoming aware of this issue. They know it's a problem.
They know there's plastics in the ocean, they've heard about these things and they immediately want to know how do we fix that. And that rapid change and kind of public awareness is really amazing. To shift, maybe, the mindset of not only, maybe, citizens but also companies and governments around the world.
The conversation between all of those three has begun and I think even though there's a challenge, it's happening. We are getting to a place where the public demands more, they want to understand more and they want solutions and that's going to be a catalyst for change and so, I'm optimistic. I think that the big challenge, not only for us, but for many other countries, is to find market solutions to solve the problem of plastic pollution.
Both solutions that allow us to reduce the consumption of disposables wich have a very fast cycle, such as the damned plastic straws, but also solve more complex problems, such as recycling taxes. We need to find ways to stimulate this circular economy that is just beginning in Brazil and can employ millions of people, generate billions in wealth, instead of it just being treated as the junk that kills our marine wildlife. The situation is serious, but the solution is super within reach of our hands.
This series is for you, who, like me, wants to understand what we can do to turn this game around. And in the next episode you will understand where these many trash comes from and what it has to do with our daily lives. And if you want to get involved in the Clean Seas campaign, I'll give you a challenge: say no to the disposable straw in the next two weeks and count how much trash you've stopped generating.
To know more, there's a link in the description below. And to engage your friends just share it with the hashtag #MaresLimpos. And if you enjoyed it, give us a like and subscribe to the channel.
See you!
