(light rock music)
This story begins with a single plastic bag,
one bag that I got from my local grocery store
to carry home a single container of peach yogurt.
Once I got home,
I shoved the bag in with all the other bags,
next to another bag full of other bags
and I never really thought about it.
Maybe I tried not to think about it.
I mean, I'm an average guy.
I'm not what you'd consider a tree hugger.
I try to be informed, I try to do the right thing.
But I find that can all be a bit overwhelming at times.
I live in a small town in Colorado, and it wasn't until
my town challenged another town a few hours away to see
who could reduce their use of plastic bags the most,
that I first started to think about plastic bags
and what we do with them.
I mean, we all have a lot of bags, right?
Everybody does the same thing.
We collect them.
We shove them anywhere they'll go, like under the sink,
into closets, junk drawers.
We throw a pile away every now and then,
just to be done with them.
Because they're disposable, right?
They were created to be thrown away.
But let's face it.
There's a dirty little secret here, even if
we won't admit it.
Just because plastic is disposable doesn't mean it
just goes away.
After all, where is away?
There is no away.
It actually sticks around for a really long time.
That got me thinking about all the endless products made out
of plastic, a lot of them designed to be used for less
than one day.
In fact, less than 15 minutes a day.
Once I began looking around, pretty much everything seemed
to be made of plastic.
Could all this plastic in my life maybe even be bad for me?
So I started looking into it.
The way it doesn't go away.
The way it pollutes.
The way it flies and floats and drifts
and clogs and entangles.
The way it gets into things so big and so small.
The way we can't escape it anymore.
The way, eventually, we may not have any recourse.
We'll all just simply have to stand up and say,
bag it.
♪ We don't mean to kill ya ♪
♪ We come back to heal ya ♪
♪ Janglin soul ♪
♪ Edward and the ♪
♪ Magnetic Zeros ♪
♪ Baa baa, baa baa ♪
♪ Baa baa baa baa baa baa ♪
♪ Baa baa, baa baa ♪
♪ Baa baa baa baa baa baa ♪
♪ Baa baa, baa baa ♪
♪ Baa baa baa baa ♪
You know that thing when you learn something
for the first time,
and then it starts pop going up everywhere.
Like when you to meet someone for the first time,
and everywhere you go, there's that person.
That was what it was like for me with plastic bags.
They were everywhere.
(upbeat dance music)
♪ Bag it ♪
♪ Sack it ♪
♪ Plastic ♪
♪ Go on and forget about it ♪
♪ Bag it, baby ♪
♪ Don't be lazy ♪
♪ Throw it away ♪
♪ They make it so you'll take it home ♪
Let me just say this.
First of all, plastic is an incredible material.
It's lightweight.
It's moldable.
Durable.
Versatile.
Inexpensive.
You can do amazing things with plastic.
In the 1960s, the idea of plastic being the wave of the
future seemed like a bit of a joke.
I just want to say one word to you.
Just one word.
Yes, sir?
Are you listening?
Yes, sir.
I am.
Plastics.
Exactly how do you mean?
There's a great future in plastics.
In retrospect, this scene seems less like a joke and
more like a prophecy.
We were fed the concept of disposable living.
Life would be easier and more convenient.
Why do the dishes when you can just throw them away?
Plastic is an incredibly valuable resource.
It's something that really
has a purpose in this society,
and it needs to be used for that purpose.
Petroleum is way too scarce and way too important to us to
be thrown away as a plastic bag.
Plastic bags are made of polyethylene,
which is a polymer made of ethylene monomers,
which is made from,
well, actually, what they're made from is
are really good question.
The United States uses roughly,
estimates are about 100 billion plastic bags per year.
Takes about 12 million barrels of oil.
In North America, because we have an abundant supply of
natural gas, they're predominantly made out of
natural gas.
The key feed stock for making plastics is petroleum.
In North America, we don't use oil.
We use natural gas.
Plastic bags are made of polyethylene.
The building block is oil.
(rumbling)
So what is it?
Petroleum or natural gas?
The bottom line is they're made from fossil fuels,
which are non-renewable resources.
That means once they're gone, there isn't anymore.
(grand orchestral music)
World plastic bag consumption is estimated at about 500
billion bags per year.
So how do we learn to shop like our grandparents did?
I mean, we haven't always had plastic, right?
What if we shop using our bags over and over,
you know, old school.
It would be great to come up with the real cost of a
plastic bag.
Because that is the number one consumer item in the world.
We are not going to use those little plastic produce bags.
We have our own bags.
Here we go.
There we go.
I'm going to use my own bag for some deluxe salted nuts.
There we go.
It's my nut sack.
Ann is the creative director at a newspaper.
Thankfully, she's pretty much on board for all this.
I'll see you later.
I like her.
Plastic bags are being banned around the world.
From New Delhi, India, and Bangladesh, where plastic bags
were clogging storm drains and were contributing to severe
floods, to the kingdom of Bhutan, where bags were banned
to better foster gross national happiness.
In 2008, China banned ultra thin plastic bags.
It's estimated that in the first year,
it eliminated 40 billion.
In May of 2009, the state of South Australia
banned plastic bags,
hoping to set an example for the rest of the nation.
Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Kenyon, Zanzibar,
and South Africa have all banned ultra thin plastic bags.
Many countries and cities in Europe have either banned or
placed fees on plastic bags.
Ireland placed a fee on plastic bags and reportedly
reduced consumption 90% in the first year.
(upbeat flute music)
What's the policy on plastic bags?
Like plastic carry-away bags?
They're 22 cents.
22 cents?
Yeah.
Okay.
The parliament's policy.
It's not actually the shop policy.
Yeah, all of Ireland?
Yeah, everywhere.
Do you find that most people,
do most people not take them?
They bring their own bags?
Yeah, most people won't take them.
How fast did you see a difference
from when the tax went in?
It was instant.
It was an overnight success, as a campaign.
If you want to find out what people really think in
Ireland, there's only one place to go, to the pub.
My good Guinness doesn't come in plastic.
Slainte.
(grand orchestral music)
In England, the village of Modbury became Europe's first
plastic bag-free town when the local merchants got together
and decided to voluntarily do something to help protect
their coastal environment.
We live four miles from some of the most beautiful
coastline in the UK.
You know, what legacy are we leaving?
It's really not to be quite selfish for the moment and to
think about the next generations to come.
In environmental news, a top UN official is urging a
global ban on plastic bags.
In part because plastic is the most pervasive
form of ocean litter.
Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment
Program, said, quote, "Single use plastic bags, which choke
"marine life, should be banned
"or phased out rapidly everywhere.
"There's simply zero justification for
"manufacturing them anymore anywhere."
So, what's happening in the United States?
30 rural communities in Alaska
have banned plastic bags completely.
In June of '09, Washington, DC, became the first US city
to place a fee on plastic bags.
California has been at the forefront of
the plastic bag debate.
San Francisco becomes the first city of the nation to
ban plastic bags.
San Francisco,
those ubiquitous plastic shopping bags
are being ordered to get out of town.
The predictions from the plastic industry
was doom and gloom.
San Francisco will grind to an absolute halt.
How can they live without plastic bags?
In the two years since we've had it in place, not one
single complaint in our office.
Not one.
Paper vs. plastic, right?
What do you do?
I guess tote bags are the thing that--
That's what I've heard from on the streets.
You can get a nice tote to go with your sweaters.
Well, once I get my bedazzler, I
can, you know--
Thank you.
After San Francisco, other towns in California
tried to pass their own bans.
The American Chemistry Council
and other pro-plastic groups' response was to sue.
They claimed it would just make people
use paper bags instead,
which would be even worse for the environment.
(birds squawking)
Often times the plastic industry will say,
when you're making a choice between paper or plastic,
plastic is the better choice, environmentally.
Plastic is very lightweight,
it takes fewer fossil fuels to transport plastic,
so what's left out of the equation, very conveniently,
is what happens to our plastic when it winds up
into the ocean.
If that were quantified
and if that became part of the analysis,
there would be no contest.
So who is the American Chemistry Council, anyway?
Well, the American Chemistry Council, otherwise known as
the ACC, with over 130 member corporations, basically
protects the interest of plastics and chemicals.
One of the ACC's branches
is the Progressive Bag Affiliates.
And the Progressive Bag Affiliates has formed groups
with friendly names, like the Coalition to Support Plastic
Bag Recycling.
And then there's Save the Plastic Bag.
You know, like Save the Rain Forest or Save the Panda
or Save the Manatee.
Yeah, Save the Plastic Bag.
(light acoustic guitar music)
♪ Save the plastic bag ♪
Thank you.
No bag, no bag.
No bag?
Thanks.
I didn't bring a bag, but--
Would you like a bag?
No, no.
No thanks.
I'm going to do it commando style.
All right.
You don't even need a bag for your produce.
Did you know that?
Yeah.
Are you sure you don't need a bag?
No, I think I've got it covered.
We have bags on sale for 99 cents.
I've got it covered.
I can do it.
Okay, great.
I can do this.
Thank you.
There you go.
Okay.
Okay, got it?
All right.
Thank you. -: Thank you so much.
Have a good day.
(suspenseful orchestral music)
People kept referring to plastic bags as this thing
called a single-use disposable.
Single-use disposable plastic.
Think about it.
Why would you make something that you're going to use for a
few minutes out of a material that's basically
going to last forever.
And you're just going to throw away.
What's up with that?
From things like yogurt containers, yogurt tubes,
plastic forks, plastic spoons.
Don't even get me started on Snackables,
Stackables,
Lunchables,
pizza on a cookie,
to-go containers.
All kinds of packaging created to be ripped
off, then tossed off.
Sandwich bags, snack bags, candy wrappers,
drinking straws,
and of course, the big three,
the three things that we Americans love to use and
throw away the most,
bags, bottles, and cups.
So I just went in to a very well-known coffee chain, which
will remain nameless.
Let's just say that it rhymes with marbucks.
And everybody's sitting around drinking coffees and lattes
and chais and soy mochas.
And everybody has a to-go cup.
The to-go cup is for things to go.
Which coincidentally has a little lining on the inside
made out of plastic.
Did you know that?
Your cardboard coffee cup has a lining made out of plastic?
Let's take a disposable single-use coffee cup,
of which we use 300 million a day.
You drink the coffee in 10, 20 minutes.
If it's a Styrofoam package, that package is going to be
around longer than the Statue of David.
We just found out some very exciting news.
Yes.
Didn't we?
Yes, we did.
We're gonna have a baby.
We're having a baby.
Yay.
(sighing)
(laughing)
Why should we make a cup or a piece of cutlery that you're
going to be using for five minutes,
why should we make it out of a drop of oil that takes 70
million years to make?
It's not making sense.
In 1917, the United States was one of the
largest exporter of oil.
And here we are, in 2008, and we are the
largest importer of oil.
(light orchestral music)
This is the packaging rage.
An affliction suffered daily by millions.
(screaming)
Think about how ridiculous it's become.
We package everything in plastic.
Even things that are already perfectly packaged by nature
come packaged in plastic.
We package paper in plastic.
We even packaging plastic in plastic.
I've done several images on a
single-use disposable plastics.
One of them is an image of 60,000 plastic bags,
which is the number of plastic bags,
sacks, and wraps consumed in the United States
every five seconds.
♪ It's the way it goes these days ♪
Plastic water bottles,
that to me is another one of the most insane things
in our world right now.
There are 1.2 billion people,
almost 20% of the world's population
who lack access to safe drinking water
on the daily basis.
And at the same time as that is happening, we're spending
untold amounts of money and resources shipping tap water
from Fiji to Miami.
From the Alps to Los Angeles.
So us rich people can have a choice of which water to drink
out of a disposable plastic bottle.
It's insanity.
Bottled water has now surpassed
sales of beer and milk.
And analysts think that, within three years, it may
surpass soda sales.
We go through the equivalent of 17 million barrels of oil
making the bottles that are used in the
United States each year.
Making those bottles generates
two and a half million tons of
carbon dioxide.
They have hundreds of millions of dollars to spend,
telling us to drink more water.
They use celebrities and models, and use athletes so
that their product was linked with wellness.
Utilities don't have millions of dollars hanging around in
their budgets to spend on advertisements saying,
drink from your sink.
Our water will make you more attractive to
the opposite sex.
So the category grew and grew.
And in 2008, we spent over 12 billion dollars
on bottled water in this country.
It turns out, one of the biggest environmental
consequences of making bottled water is making the plastic
that makes up the bottle.
If you were to fill any bottle about 25% of the way up with
petroleum, that's the amount of oil required to make the
bottle itself.
But that's not the whole story.
On top of it, we then have to transport it.
If you're moving in a long way,
it requires a lot more energy.
Maybe as much as another quarter.
The energy content of the bottle is enormous.
And it's an incredibly resource-intensive process.
(grand orchestral music)
They don't necessarily do it this way in
the rest of the world.
Enter Germany, home of the bratwurst,
Beethoven, BMW, and Oktoberfest.
Oompah bands.
They also take the recycling of plastics very seriously.
I basically collect all the plastic bottles and just carry
them to the supermarket.
And you put them into this machine.
And you get a receipt back.
And this receipt, it's worth money.
This bottle is getting used a couple of times.
You can see the little marks on it, which says how often
this bottle is in this recycling circle.
And this one is 22nd times.
They're getting cleaned, refilled, relabeled, and
coming back into the circle.
So this is all the plastic that I've collected
this year so far.
This is Beth Terry.
Two years ago, she decided to stop using plastic altogether.
And whatever plastic she can't avoid, she saves.
These are like used spaghetti sauce jars.
And so I just take them with me to the store.
So there's sugar that I can get in bulk, and lentils.
I stopped using plastic bags, because I just hate them.
But Michael is a real conservation, use what you
have kind of person.
So he washes out the plastic bags that we already have.
This is our bathroom.
The easiest thing in the bathroom is just not to use
liquid soap, you know.
So we use bar soap.
Beth uses an antique all-metal razor.
She swears by it.
You need three blades.
Do you know why?
But you don't need three blades.
Because the first blade pulls the hair out.
And then the second blade pulls it out a little more and
smacks it around.
You're a product of marketing.
When I was growing up, we didn't have bottled water.
I mean, people make jokes about Evian being naive
spelled backwards.
I think that for me, it was the idea of harming other
living creatures
and other people and harming the planet.
That's what really woke me up.
So here's a recap of the basics.
The way I see it, bring your own bag.
Bring your own coffee cup.
Bring your own water bottle.
Oh, and bring your own brain.
Consider less packaging.
Go single-use free for a single day.
Start there.
Become aware of your habits.
It's not as easy as you think.
But guess what?
It makes you think.
Ice cream doesn't come in plastic.
(light rock music)
♪ More ♪
♪ We must have more ♪
It seems like, in this society, we like to consume.
And a lot of the stuff that we like to consume is made of
plastic or comes in plastic.
And once we're done with that, where does it go?
♪ And where do we get more ♪
We put our garbage at the end of the driveway.
And the sanitation crew comes and picks it up.
And it goes away.
Where's away?
(laughing)
You know?
There is no away.
Hi, welcome to Wendy's.
What can I get for you today?
I have a question for you.
I'm trying not to use packaging, and I brought my
own plate and my own cup.
Is it possible to get it served on my own plate?
Thanks.
Me taking their food
out of their packaging and putting it
on my own plate sort of defeated the whole purpose.
So I decided to try Taco Bell.
Oh.
Are you able to put a soda in my own glass, or is that--
Cross contamination.
Okay.
It's not exactly true that they can't take anything
through the window.
They're fine taking our cross-contaminated money.
It could have something on it.
I'm sorry.
You can't film here, ma'am.
Okay, I get this whole concept
of using less and producing less waste.
But with plastic packaging, can't we just recycling it?
I spent a lot of time in my book asking, is recycling
doing any good?
Is it worthwhile?
Should we continue to do it?
And the short answer is a resounding yes, yes, yes.
It saves enormous amounts of energy to make new goods from
old goods instead of continually pulling raw
materials from the earth and transforming them,
transporting them, and then sending them on this one way
trip to the landfill.
(car horns honking)
For every barrel of waste we put on the curb, there are 71
barrels of waste generated upstream in making all these
consumer goods.
And every time we recycle whatever we can,
we're chipping away at those 71 barrels upstream.
I have such a love-hate relationship with recycling.
Because I love recycling in that it's sort of an on ramp
or a gateway drug to bigger and better
environmental activism.
But what I hate about it is it lulls people into thinking
they're making a difference.
You buy this thing.
You know it's over packaged.
But at least you can recycle it.
You put it in that blue bin, and it's like, ah.
(light piano music)
Many plastics are difficult to recycle,
so a lot of our used plastic is going to Asia.
Shiploads of our plastic garbage is going over there.
And the reason it's going over there
is it's yucky to reprocess it.
It's technically impossible to really recycle it.
It's dirty and stinky and gross.
And we don't want that stuff here.
What they do is they take it into a big yard,
and they pop it open
and they have people working under very low wages,
with very bad working conditions.
And they will cherry pick out the things that they can melt
down and do something with.
But the human rights and labor issues related with that,
and the toxicity issues of some of the open plastic
melting that they do.
To me, those do not fit in a recycling model.
Buy less stuff.
That is the simplest thing that I can say to people.
How about not using something
that needs to be disposed of
or dealt with in the first place?
Use it up.
Wear it out.
Make it do, or do without.
You don't need it, don't buy it.
(light acoustic guitar music)
We think of a lot of plastic products
as being cheap and disposable.
But here's the thing.
Disposable plastic isn't really that cheap.
Someone has to pay.
Whether it's the cost of making it, transporting it,
or the cost of throwing it away.
And how about the unquantifiable amount it costs
when plastics end up loose in the environment?
Who pays for that?
So I recently found out that there is all this trash
sitting in the middle of the ocean.
And a lot of this trash is plastic.
And my first thought was, well, all right.
But that's, I didn't do that.
Where does that trash come from?
Trash gets loose on the land.
It blows into a river.
And the trash goes into the ocean.
So that is our plastic out there.
And there's a lot of it.
(light acoustic guitar music)
People ask me, why should I care about the ocean?
It seems so obvious.
The ocean is the cornerstone of Earth's life support
system, It shapes climate and weather.
It holds most of life on Earth.
97% of Earth's water is there.
It's the blue heart of the planet.
We should take care of our heart.
It's what makes life possible for us.
Please don't litter, please don't litter.
You still have a really good chance to make things better
than they are.
It won't get better unless we take the action
and inspire others to do the same thing.
No one's without power.
Everybody has the capacity to do something.
How bad is the situation with plastic in the ocean?
I think it's bad, because it's unnecessary.
It doesn't have to be there.
There are clear environmental consequences in terms of we
know that over 260 species are affected by plastic debris
through entanglement or ingestion.
So just based on the statistics of production,
how we've gone from half a million tons of plastic per year
produced in the 1950s to over 260 million tons today.
To put that into context, okay?
The first decade of this century, by 2010, we'll have
produced more plastic than we produced in the whole of the
century that proceeded.
And most of that material is going to make throwaway items
that are then ending up in a landfill or the ocean.
You guys have been hanging out here on the beach.
80% of all marine debris actually starts from a
land-based source.
All drains do lead to the ocean.
We dump things.
They end up going down a storm drain
or into a wetland, going down streams
and rivers straight into the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean.
Kamilo Beach has a very white sand look,
and it's not really sand at all.
It's mostly white plastic covering the beach.
Sometimes up to a foot thick of plastic pieces.
Wait a second, this is Hawaii?
I've seen pictures of Hawaii.
This is not what a beach in Hawaii is
supposed to look like.
There's just far too much
of it in our ocean right now.
And what is washing up on our beaches is a small indication
of what's really out there.
Mainly, what we find are fragments of plastic.
Stuff like this.
And all this debris is coming from the North Pacific
Sub-tropical Gyre.
Or the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
There are actually five major gyres,
swirling systems of currents in our oceans.
One in the Indian Ocean, two in the Atlantic Ocean, and two
in the Pacific Ocean.
The gyre that has been studied the most is the North Pacific
Subtropical Gyre, otherwise known as the Great Pacific
Garbage Patch, estimated to be anywhere from twice the size
of Texas to the size of the entire United States.
Debris of all kinds floats into this gyre,
and there it stays, swirling.
Now, the problem is, when this debris is made of plastic,
it doesn't biodegrade.
It photodegrades.
That means that sunlight breaks it down into smaller
and smaller pieces, which marine life
can mistake for food.
So what exactly does this Garbage Patch look like?
We went to the Algalita Marine Research
Foundation for some answers.
They have spent over a decade studying plastic
in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
It's not a floating island of trash that can be cleaned up
or scooped out.
It's way worse than that.
It's tons of little bits of plastic floating underwater,
like a plastic soup.
We've been finding more plastic
by weight than plankton.
And the ratio keeps going up.
That's our concern.
Over the years,
they've seen in their trawls through
the patch plastic to plankton ratios that have gone
from six to one to as high as 40 to one.
What that means is that in some parts of the ocean,
there is now 40 times more plastic than food.
No bueno.
(dramatic ambient music)
This is Midway Atoll,
a tiny speck of land in the middle of
the Pacific Ocean, where plastic is having a direct
impact on the fate of the Laysan Albatross.
Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge is home to the
largest albatross colony in the world.
These birds are fantastic flyers.
They forage throughout the Pacific.
But because they forage so far, they're really good
indicators of the health of the Pacific and what's
happening out there.
In the 1950s, when people looked at dead albatross
at Midway, they didn't see any plastic at all.
And it wasn't until the '60s we started to see it at Midway
and in the northwestern Hawaiian islands.
Every dead bird at Midway has plastic in them.
The albatross that are surrounding us here today
face numerous threats over the course of their life
to successfully come back here and have chicks of their own.
They've got to fly hundreds of miles to find food.
They've got to survive for several years at sea.
And the plastics in the ecosystem are just another
hurdle in that path to come back here.
(dramatic orchestral music)
All the plastic that you see here
was brought to the island by an adult albatross
and fed to a chick.
We can calculate how much plastic is brought to Midway
each year by the adult albatross.
And it comes out to be five tons of plastic.
And that's every year.
Five tons.
What's happening to Midway will soon be happening around
the globe unless we change the way that we
operate as a people.
And he totally agrees.
He thinks that was very well stated.
I know.
It's not just albatross
that are feeling the effects of plastic in our oceans.
Over 260 marine species are being impacted by plastic,
either through ingestion or entanglement.
This 26-foot-long brides whale was stranded on a beach in
Australia and died.
It was found that the whale's stomach was packed with over
19 square feet of plastic.
In fact, it is estimated that plastic kills 100,000 marine
animals each year.
Just about every big animal in the
ocean is down 90%.
Animals aren't going to be fine unless we figure out how
to help them.
But imagine if every morning your breakfast was a bowl of
cereal, and half the stuff in the bowl was little Styrofoam
balls and half of it was cereal.
In some parts of the ocean, there's enough plastic out
there that animals are eating a lot of it.
And it's not good.
Sea turtles are fascinating animals that have been on our
planet since the time of the dinosaurs.
But now, all sea turtle species in US waters
are listed as threatened or endangered under the
Endangered Species Act.
They just eat what's out there.
And not that long ago, everything that they would
find was edible or at least biodegradable.
If you can envision what a plastic bag would look like
floating in the ocean, it looks like a jellyfish.
And many sea turtle species eat jellyfish.
When scientists are conducting necropsies,
which are animal autopsies, they're finding
that sea turtle stomachs are full
of tiny little pieces of plastic.
Some sea turtle species, like the Pacific Leatherback,
it's estimated that they could go extinct
within the next couple of decades.
We're really in a position where every
dead sea turtle counts.
And we need to do whatever we can to keep them alive and to
recover healthy sea turtle populations.
We need help from industry and people involved in product
and packaging design to help with material reduction.
Reducing the quantities of plastic that we use for
single-use, one trip items and then they're thrown away.
And that's to my mind, you know, a third of all the
plastics we make,
that's what we're using them for.
That's the area really needs to be targeted if we want to
help to reduce the problems of contamination
of the marine environment.
(light acoustic guitar music)
Nature solves its problems.
And if we're a problem, nature will solve us as a problem.
To be an environmentalist, to be a conservationist,
it's really a question of self-preservation.
We're really working to make sure that we survive.
The Earth will survive.
But if we don't learn to live in harmony with its ecosystem,
then we will simply disappear.
Even though we can't clean up
what's already in our oceans,
we can make sure that we do all we can to
not add more to it.
Can I use my own container?
Yes.
Okay.
If plastic is affecting our oceans so dramatically,
could it be impacting human health?
And what about our child?
I'll take the free-range chicken.
Free-range chicken?
All right.
You know, I've never been one of those people
that worried about chemicals and toxins and stuff.
I thought it was a little bit overboard.
But when you're gonna have a baby, you do start to worry
about that kind of thing.
And you start to look around your house at the
stuff that you have.
The stuff that's for your baby, that's going to go on
your baby's skin.
And the stuff that people start giving
you for your baby.
I don't even know what kind of chemicals are in this stuff.
All day long, you're getting exposed to very small amounts
of many different things.
And each industry will say,
oh, it's just a little bit of our chemical.
But the problem is, we think the cumulative impact
during that whole day is what's causing that health
effect in the human.
Basically, there are no requirements for testing
chemicals for health and safety effects.
The current regulation is so weak that the EPA tried to use
this law to ban asbestos and they failed.
There's something like 125,000 chemicals registered
for use around the globe.
And very few have been tested for their
effects on human health.
The Europeans put in the program REACH, where chemicals
had to be proven safe instead of the reverse,
where in our system, first they have to be proved harmful.
So a chemical is innocent until proven guilty.
In this country.
Yeah.
Maybe we shouldn't give chemicals the kind of rights
that people get.
(laughing)
The chemicals we're testing for now include phthalates,
which are chemicals that are used to soften plastic.
Bisphenol a, which is a chemical
used to harden plastic.
Phthalates and bisphenol a
have been getting a lot of attention lately
because they're both known as
endocrine disruptors,
meaning they disrupt or inhibit our normal hormone function.
Let's start with bisphenol a, otherwise known as BPA,
which is a synthetic estrogen.
BPA is the main component of polycarbonate, the hard,
clear plastic sometimes used
to make such items as water bottles,
food storage containers, sports equipment, and electronics.
But wait, there's more.
So you think you'll avoid plastic and you'll do the
right thing and you'll buy something the comes in a can.
And then you find out that the can is lined with,
guess what?
You've got it.
Plastic.
And this plastic that lines this very can
contains bisphenol a.
Which means it also lines soda, juice, and beer cans.
And guess what else BPA is in?
Infant formula can liners and baby bottles.
That's right.
Baby bottles.
Bisphenol a exposure at phenomenally low doses during
the early period after birth when babies are drinking
infant formula laced with bisphenol a
out of baby bottles made from bisphenol a.
What you get is animals that are hyperactive and show
learning impairment.
Remind you of the human condition called Attention
Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder?
This is a poster chemical for that.
Basically, we have released a lot of chemicals into the
environment that can interfere with the way our children are
constructed from the moment of fertilization
until they're born 38 weeks later.
Not only health-wise,
but also in the way they behave and in their intelligence.
Academic and government scientists are showing
an array of harm of bisphenol a that is frightening,
to the brain,
to the reproductive system.
And one of the things you see happening with bisphenol a
is gender neutrality.
That means our boys are becoming feminized
and our girls are becoming masculinized.
And furthermore, many scientists believe that BPA
exposure is linked to prostate cancer, breast cancer,
hypospadias, low sperm count, early puberty, uterine
fibroids, miscarriage, polycystic ovary disease,
obesity, type two diabetes, ADHD, and autism.
Right now, it is predicted that one out
of every third child,
and if you're in a minority,
it's one out of every two children born,
is going to develop diabetes sometime in their life.
Autism, one in 150 children.
This can't be genetic, because it's happening too fast.
And in most instances, they were rare
disorders before the 1970s.
Of the more than 200 government funded studies,
92% show harm related to BPA exposure.
Of the less than 20 studies funded by chemical
corporations, 0% show harm.
A Centers for Disease Control study detected BPA in the
urine of 95% of adults sampled.
Those with the highest levels
had more than twice the risk of heart disease and diabetes.
Scientists have measured BPA in the blood of pregnant
women, in umbilical cord blood, and in the placentas,
all at levels demonstrated in animals to alter development.
The American Chemistry Council
says BPA is safe.
I'm calling Rob Krebs from the American Chemistry Council.
(line ringing)
Hey, Rob Krebs, it's Jeb Berrier from the Bag It movie.
I emailed you a few weeks ago.
We're doing a documentary.
Okay, no problem.
I'll email you again.
Thanks.
Honey?
Yes, dear?
I'm doing the dishes.
Thank you.
Because you are so pregnant.
(laughing)
There's certain plastic containers
that we stopped getting.
We kind of cut back on can usage altogether.
We stopped reheating anything in plastic.
The other chemical we're concerned about,
phthalates, is actually a family of chemicals.
Phthalates are commonly found in polyvinyl chloride plastic,
otherwise known as PVC.
Phthalates are plasticizers that are
used to soften plastic.
They're used in a wide variety of products.
Anything from vinyl flooring and all other things vinyl,
to personal care products, to children's toys.
(car horns honking)
You take a rubber ducky.
In order to make that brittle material seem like rubber,
you actually have to have more phthalates in it than you do
polyvinyl chloride.
When a baby puts that in its mouth, it's like
a phthalates lollipop.
Phthalates have been linked to rhinitis,
eczema, asthma, allergies, premature birth,
obesity, premature breast development,
thyroid dysfunction, insulin resistance,
lower sperm counts, decreased sperm
motility, shorter anogenital distance, undescended
testicles, and smaller penis size.
It's not just our Johnsons that are suffering,
it's our swimmers as well.
Over the past several decades, scientists have found that
sperm counts have been dropping dramatically.
♪ There's a shadow hanging over me ♪
What we found with a human study is that the moms that
have greater exposure to phthalates were more likely to
have sons with feminized reproductive organs
was that those were at every day levels of phthalates.
Those were not unusual exposure levels.
Those were the levels that people are being exposed to in
the US today.
You're constantly being washed in
phthalates every day.
That chemical is not required to be on the label for any
personal care products.
So if you see fragrance on the label,
that is often phthalates.
Basically, it's an industry loophole that prevents the
consumer from finding out what
ingredients are in the product.
Fragrance can be a collection of hundreds of chemicals,
or it might be just a handful.
We really don't know.
The University of Washington
tested dozens of babies' urine
and found the more of these baby products they used,
creams, lotions, powders, shampoos,
the higher their levels of man-made chemicals
called phthalates.
Phthalates are used in baby products to help the fragrance
stay on the baby's skin.
This was pretty shocking news for Ann and me.
I mean, wouldn't anyone want to err on the side of caution?
Peter Coyote is a well-known actor.
What most people don't know is that he's also a committed
activist and has been for many years.
He is one of few people in this country to have had his
body burden tested.
That's a test that identifies and quantifies hundreds of
chemicals present in your body.
When the results came, I was really shocked.
And then I was angry.
Because I had, in my body,
stuff that should not be in a human being.
I decided to do my own body burden experiment.
I wanted to see how much my levels of BPA and phthalates
would go up simply by using normal, everyday, supposedly
safe consumer products.
I did a pre-test to find out what my normal levels were.
And then I spent two days in a friend's apartment,
eating canned food, microwaving in plastic, using shampoo,
lotion, deodorant, air fresheners.
These were all products that will supposedly
be safe for my baby.
You know, this place just kind of needed a little,
(can spraying)
something.
Air fresh.
Freshen it up.
About to shampoo with kids' shampoo.
This is all stuff that people use pretty much every day.
This is my last supper.
I don't get to eat like this very often.
I don't feel good.
At the end, I got tested again.
By the way, whatever the levels are,
they're reversible.
So it's never too late to stop ingesting, absorbing,
and inhaling these chemicals.
And now, we're just waiting for the results.
Hi, Catherine.
It's Jeb Berrier calling you back from the movie Bag It,
the documentary about plastic.
And I'm really hoping to get an interview with you about,
specifically, about BPA and phthalates.
We are keeping chemicals afloat in our environment
in the face of overwhelming scientific
evidence from other countries.
Because the information is being systematically
withheld from us.
Who are the people that allow this?
They're supposed to be our leaders.
They're supposed to be mediating between the needs of
the citizens and the needs of the corporations.
Not giving the corporations everything they ask for and
asking the citizens to pay the bills.
If you don't want a deadly poison in the biosphere,
you don't make it.
Period.
End of story.
Okay.
I finally got my results.
It's 144 pages of numbers.
So I am at the house of Dr. Theo Coleborn,
world-renowned environmental health analyst,
and she is going to help me
decipher what my test results mean.
Your results were very interesting.
Why don't we start with bisphenol a?
Okay, so my BPA level went up 110 times.
Yeah, that is high.
I'll be quite frank with you.
You really spiked.
Now, these are the phthalates.
This one went up 53 times.
Okay, now, here we are.
This one went from 2.7 to 143.
So if you summed this overall and then take the difference,
you had about 11 times increase of phthalates.
If Ann was pregnant,
had those levels,
what would that mean for the baby?
Well, it could mean that
that baby would be partially feminized.
In other words, reduced anogenital distance.
Maybe a smaller penis.
Wow.
Yeah, I always feel uncomfortable
talking to people who are expecting children
or claiming to have children,
because this is the critical period.
From fertilization to birth.
As a citizen--
Yeah.
Don't you feel that we have enough evidence now to say we
should not be using this product?
Absolutely.
I don't want any of these in my body.
I don't want any of these in the mother of my child's body.
I don't want them in my child's body.
No.
They're gonna be.
When you reach the point where it becomes a public
health issue, and this is a major public health issue
at the population level, the government has to step in.
But I will frankly say, government is no longer government.
Its corporate control.
What we're asking for
is for a law that will make sure that
chemicals are tested before they go into products.
We want to be able to the store
and buy any product.
The products on the shelf should be safe for us.
We have lost a whole generation of children
already, because we haven't even begun to take action on
one of these chemicals.
Though you may feel
that going up against corporations
is impossible and the government moves way too slowly,
what we cannot forget is that we are the government,
that we influence industry.
Thanks to the outcries of concerned parents, a law was
passed in 2009 banning six phthalates
from children's toys.
And due to consumer demands, Walmart and Toys R Us decided
to remove all baby products containing
BPA from their shelves.
This led six different baby bottle manufacturers to
completely remove BPA from their baby bottles.
I'm trying to find if people in town would support a fee on
paper or plastic shopping bags.
I'm trying to find out if people in town
would support a fee--
A fee on shopping bags?
Yeah, to try and reduce the amount
of people use disposable bags.
Go big or go home.
Here's what we're doing.
I hate bags.
Would you guys support some kind of measure in town?
(light rock music)
Remember that part about how we were expecting a baby?
Well, it's happening.
♪ One love ♪
♪ Ah ♪
♪ It is all ♪
♪ Ah ♪
You did it, look who's here
♪ The sun ♪
♪ Gimme gimme, oh gimme gimme ♪
♪ Just feel ♪
♪ Gimme gimme, oh gimme gimme ♪
♪ Love me ♪
♪ Gimme gimme, oh gimme gimme ♪
♪ The sun ♪
♪ It's ♪
♪ The resolve ♪
One more time, one more time, one more time
that was good.
(light acoustic guitar music)
Well, I did start out
making a movie about plastic bags.
But like any journey, things developed and
changed along the way.
It became about so much more.
I still think plastic is an incredible substance,
but it's not supposed to end up
in our oceans or in our bodies.
And just to make sure I really, really got all this,
Ann got pregnant and it became about the fate of our child
and all our children.
I'm still an average guy.
But even average people can make changes.
You know, everybody keeps asking me, so what can I do?
Well, here are some things we've come up with while
making this film.
Things you can do, too.
Starting today.
Right now.
You can cut way, way back on single-use disposables.
Don't drink bottled water.
Choose products with less packaging.
When you need something, buy it used.
Think outside the bag.
Bring your own container.
Buy less stuff.
Remember, recycling comes after reducing and reusing.
And how about volunteering in your community to do
litter clean ups?
But most important, you can simplify your life.
I keep coming back to how my grandparents lived.
They didn't have all this plastic in their lives.
But that didn't seem to make them any less happy.
When it comes down to changing your life
and living with less plastic,
it's gonna take some effort.
And look at that?
Foam cups.
Stay back.
We just have to rethink how we do things.
It all comes down to common sense.
(light rock music)
Well, there you have it.
The end of one odyssey, the beginning of another.
We've decided to live life with a little less plastic.
How about you?
Is your life a little too plastic?
Because if it is,
there's only one thing you can do about it.
Bag it.
All right.
I think I got it that time.
Think you nailed it.
Yeah.
♪ Alabama, Arkansas ♪
♪ I do love my ma and pa ♪
♪ Not the way that I do love you ♪
♪ Well, holy moly, me oh my ♪
♪ You're the apple of my eye ♪
♪ Girl, I never loved one like you ♪
♪ Home ♪
♪ Let's make our home ♪
♪ Home is where wherever I'm with you ♪
♪ Home ♪
♪ Home, home ♪
♪ La la la la, take me home ♪
♪ All the love coming home ♪