the ocean to me is it's my church it's my temple it's my synagogue it's my mosque it's where i feel the most spiritual it's where i go to work where i go for my enjoyment and where i go to think and it's also the environment that challenges me more than any other environment that i know i remember the first time i saw a picture of a blue whale which was in a national geographic magazine a drawing of the whale and then a tiny human standing beside it and as an eight-year-old i couldn't imagine that there
was anything that big i'd followed them since childhood with the absolute design to go and film them myself at some point and that was 40 years later [Music] we traveled up and down 50 miles off the coast for two weeks trying to get close to these animals oh look look at two o'clock and another blow four and it looks like he's going to fluke up look at him and dive so he'll probably be down for another 10 minutes or so [Music] it's the first time that we believe that anyone has ever filmed a juvenile pygmy
blue whale underwater [Music] they look like freight trains like enormous spaceships that just travel effortlessly what do you think it's from alex is it from a ship we were in the indian ocean off the coast of sri lanka where there hasn't been any commercial fishing because of the civil war the beaches have been closed for up to 30 years we thought this was a relatively pristine environment this is all some of the rubbish that we found in the floating jetsam and flotsam in the ocean and get ben to go through it but there's even a
pack of unopened biscuits you can see it's been there for some time with the mullets that are growing off it it's crabs there's a crab in there so quite extraordinary this is right in their environment they take in hundreds of gallons of water they express that water and and they feed off the krill and tiny fish but they can't tell the difference between krill and plastic i started to wonder what's happening in oceans elsewhere on the planet i didn't know that in the last 10 years we've made more plastic than we did in the century
before that half of those plastic products are considered disposable but think about it how can a disposable product be made of a material that's indestructible where does it go i spent my childhood in the sea growing up in grand cayman we didn't have organized sports after school we didn't even have a tv until i was 13. so the sea was my playground as a freediver it was the place where i proved myself to myself by traveling to the absolute edge of myself [Music] [Music] 525 feet is beyond the crushing depth of second world war submarines
[Music] i met up with filmmaker mike degree it'll be interesting to see just how far-reaching it really is to be this far offshore and see whether the plastic that we know is coming from that direction is is winding out up out in the depths out here yeah right i'm really looking forward to of course diving the sub but diving the sub in the med a place that has more fishing impact than most bodies of water on the planet hey mike it's tonya can you tell me what you're seeing down there so we're just under 400
meters now almost 1200 about 1200 feet in the plastic both see a plastic bottle exactly we're now starting to see more and more plastic more and more tires and pieces of metal and just absolutely this regard for the bottom really it's just junk everywhere our scientists commissioned a small remotely operated vehicle to travel over a mile and a half down to the deep trenches the rov is coming down which is kind of cool here where the daylight never reaches the eddies and currents have collected scores of plastic bottles this plastic could remain here forever about
8 million tons of plastic is dumped into the world's oceans every year more than 50 percent of marine debris including plastic sinks to the bottom of the ocean where in the world can you go anymore and not find [Music] plastic 63 billion gallons of oil are used every year just to supply the us with plastic water bottles in this year alone every single person on the planet will use and dispose about 300 pounds or 136 kilos of single-use plastic plastic is wonderful because it's durable and plastic is terrible because it is durable almost every piece
of plastic ever made is still on the planet in some form or another plastic production globally this year is expected to be more than 300 million tons half of which we'll use just once and then throw away by 2050 when the population explodes to almost 10 billion people it's expected that plastic production will triple the problem with that is is that today only a fraction of the plastic that we produce is recycled the rest ends up in our environment and it's coating our land and our oceans like a disease over 80 percent of ocean plastic
leaks from land-based sources even if you don't live near the ocean chances are your plastic garbage has found its way to the sea our oceans are driven by five major circular currents or gyres these are created by the earth's rotation and the resulting predominant winds each continent is affected by these massive systems they collect waste flowing from our rivers and coastlines and over time anything floating within the gyre will eventually move towards the center of the gyre [Music] our producer joe ruxton was familiar with the story about a huge floating island of garbage twice the
size of texas in the north pacific joe joined dr andrea neal and her team on a expedition to this great pacific garbage patch so we're deploying the manatrol and we're going to look for fine particulates and debris this mesh here is 333 microns which is in the size range of zoroplankton the manta trawl captures material on the surface it will take anything the size of a pinhead or larger looking out over the vast expanse of clear sparkling water there is no plastic inside the contents of the trawl are emptied and floated the tiny pieces of
plastic then reveal themselves to joe and dr neal there is no floating island of plastic what exists is far more insidious what exists is a kind of plastic smog these tiny pieces of plastic that are floating on the surface of the ocean come from larger pieces over time the sun's ultraviolet light ocean wave action and salt break it up into smaller pieces called micro plastics micro plastics have rough pitted surfaces waterborne chemicals from industry and agriculture stick to microplastics making them toxic poison pills [Music] the sea at night is one of my favorite times it's
when the ocean truly comes alive and you can virtually see the food chain in action zooplankton feed on phytoplankton small fish feed on zooplankton squid feed on small fish and so it goes on up and up food chain well should we get them on the table and open them up and have a look and see what's in there let's start with this guy i hand-picked the pieces of plastic this is what we found so what this means is the feeding that's occurring on the surface of the ocean has these plastic fragments floating around and is
actually intermixing in the food chain you know that plastic doesn't degrade and most the time we say it breaks down but that's probably not an accurate way to say it it actually breaks up so it's more proliferated and when it's proliferated there's more opportunities for plastics to be ingested many of the marine creatures eating this kind of plastic are in our food chains does that mean then that this plastic is getting inside of us the problem is these plastics adsorb chemicals that are free floating in the ocean so when the fish eat the plastics those
toxins then migrate from the plastic into the the muscles or the fats the parts that we like to eat building up in the fish then more and more of them and so that's the part we like to eat and that's where these chemicals migrate to in a recent study published in scientific reports uc davis researchers examined 76 fish slated for human consumption in indonesia and 64 in california they found that in both groups roughly one quarter had anthropogenic debris in their guts when sampling blue mussels at six locations along the coastlines of france belgium and
the netherlands microplastics were present in every single organism examined when you eat shellfish you're often eating the entire animal so you're more likely to eat plastic [Music] lord howe island is a world heritage site and home to migratory sea birds like the sheer water sea birds are incredibly helpful because they act like an army of scientists they travel thousands of miles across the ocean they pick up plastic off the surface of the ocean they bring it back to their rookeries where they feed it to their chicks and that provides an incredible amount of scientific data
in terms of where the plastic comes from its distribution and how it breaks up on the ocean surface dr jennifer labers she devoted her life to studying the plight of seabirds absolutely no doubt that this bird died as a result of that plastic unbelievable jen i counted 234 pieces of plastic out of that one bird is that a record not even close unfortunately so for the species the record is 276 pieces of plastic inside of one 90-day old chick and that plastic when we waited out accounted for 15 of that bird's body mass so that's
a pretty scary statistic if we translate that into human terms it gets even worse that would be equivalent to you and i having somewhere around six or eight kilos of plastic inside of your stomach it's equivalent to about 12 pizzas worth of a food inside of your stomach when animals eat plastic they're also consuming the toxins attached to the plastic toxins pass into the bloodstream there they bio-accumulate in the fatty tissue and around the vital organs when animals use the stored fat the toxins circulate around the body interfering with reproduction metabolism growth kidney and liver
function no one knows how much plastic has accumulated in the sea in the last 50 years but one thing is sure the pace has picked up [Music] the world of plastics is present everywhere yet this presence is but a premonition of a future world our children will see a bit of that world and our grandchildren will not see the end of it [Music] we gave in to the sales hype of the 50s that plastic was disposable that we could throw it away there is no way it starts with the individual and it starts with us
i think it's a shocking waste of valuable resources we actually have the answers now to recycling most plastics and the challenge really is to get everyone on board with those ideas and also to get the collection infrastructure going right so that we get big volumes coming concentrated in one place so that people can then have the confidence to invest in the recovery technology once sorted recycled plastics are brought into factories like this where they can become part of a circular economy cleaned of labels and processed into newborn nurdles ready to be sold once again [Music]
david katz and sean frankson founded the plastic bank they established a social plastic recycling system in haiti that exchanges plastic for solar cell phone charging sustainable cook stoves and cash through the plastic bank we make plastic waste a currency so people in developing countries can earn an income while preventing plastic from entering the ocean [Music] what do you do you can't possibly filter out these tiny particles from the entire ocean you can't filter the entire ocean in fact so much plastic is in the ocean now in a form that we really can't get to it
that i feel the emphasis needs to immediately shift toward stop putting it in we've treated the ocean as a place to throw things dispose of things that we did not want close to where we thought we lived the whole planet is where we live there is no a way that you can put things and expect that they're really away this this phrase not in my backyard the ocean is everyone's backyard or front yard or living space no matter how you look at it this planet is governed by the blue part the world truly is mostly
a blue place i want to go back to where it all started i want to go back to the wales i want to go and find the juvenile that we we first saw if wales could talk to us i imagine they would ask us what were we thinking every other species on the planet works towards the benefit of the ecology and environment that it lives in but us humans we just seem like passengers on this earth and i want to say we'll share this story because from knowing comes caring and from caring comes change [Music]
[Music] you
