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[announcer] Here it is, the most amazing
food wrap ever developed.
-Saran-Wrap. -That's right.
There's nothing like Saran-Wrap.
It's a crystal clear plastic
that lets you see everything you wrap.
Now look at this, Saran Wrap clings like magic.
Just press it into place
over any bowl or dish and it stays.
You have a smooth, tight cover that keeps flavor locked in.
The problem of plastic pollution
in the seas is well known.
But new research suggests
there could be many more tiny particles
of the waste floating just beneath the surface.
[Helen] So most of the plastic is more dense
than sea water, so it eventually sinks down.
[man] Plastic that's produced is used just once
before being dumped again.
Plastic gets into the marine environment,
it breaks down into tiny little pieces,
and anything that eats in the ocean
will inadvertently eat plastic.
[anchor] In 2015, a marine biologist's video
went viral, documenting the painful process
as she removed a plastic straw stuck in a sea turtle's nose.
[Helen] [indistinct] Oh, man.
This is becoming more and more common.
It's-- it's not a one off anymore.
It's not just ending up in the ocean,
it's also ending up in the environment everywhere.
And recent studies have shown
that microplastic particles are even in the air
we breathe and the food we eat.
[Helen] They found now microplastics on mountains
because they get distributed by the wind.
So, yeah, I don't think
there's any place on Earth where there's no plastic.
[atmospheric music playing]
If you put your ear to a plastic bottle,
you can actually hear
what ocean it's gonna end up in. [cackles]
Too soon? I understand.
Well, unfortunately, what I'm about to share
with you is no joking matter.
Plastics, single-use plastics, particularly microplastics,
are here, there, they're everywhere.
And it seems likely that the production
of fossil fuel plastics
isn't going to stop anytime soon.
So amidst all the negative talk,
it's no wonder things are looking
a little grim for planet Earth.
But the world is starting to wake up and recognize
the dangers threatening Earth's health.
That's a good thing.
However, is it too late to reverse the damage?
More importantly, is there a better way going forward?
♪
Hey, Kylie, how was school today?
-Good. -Can I have a hug?
[Janice] Casey, did you have a good day at school?
My name is Janice Overbeck.
I'm married to a German husband
and we've been married for 14 years.
We have four children,
all girls, and we own a real estate company
here in the town that I grew up in.
All right, girls, so it's Earth Day today
and we are going to do
a plastic sculpture competition.
[girl] How much plastic is there?
[Janice] A lot. So, it's a lot of single-use plastic.
[girl] Is it washed?
Yes, of course it's washed. [chuckles]
I have a concern.
I was minding my own business, raising my children,
when I came across a video.
It was about a minute and a half long,
and it was absolutely
unbelievable to see
what was floating around in the ocean.
I'm looking at what's happening,
through the headlines and through the news
and through everything around me,
that the world is in crisis,
from climate change to the plastic crisis.
And it really concerns me.
[Rob] The United Nations Environment Program defines
our planet as being in a triple planetary crisis.
That includes air pollution, which kills around
seven million people every year,
biodiversity loss, as more than
one million species face extinction,
and climate change.
And guess what?
Plastics contribute to all three of those.
And they're at the heart of this debate.
There are more parts per million
of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere
than the Cretaceous period or something.
So, dinosaur time.
Starting at about 1850,
the amount of carbon dioxide
in the atmosphere began to climb.
Today, it stands at 419 parts per million.
419 is way more carbon dioxide than we've had
for thousands of years.
And the number continues to rise.
The current way the world produces plastic
consumes much more energy than is sustainable.
And the situation is getting worse.
Petroleum goes into polymers
because petroleum is carbon that you need
because polymers are routinely made of
carbon, there's very few that are not.
You had to have an easy source to make your carbon
and oil coming out of the ground was the easiest.
And when you have an easy liquid form of carbon
to utilize you can turn those into plastics.
["Plastic Man" by Red Meadow]
♪ Plastic man will save the day now ♪
♪ Fractured to the core
♪ Burned by bloody war
♪ There must be something we can do now ♪
♪ To bring down this charade... ♪
That's the popularity of petroleum plastics.
It is this super material
that is great on a commercial scale,
it's extremely inexpensive, it's very easy to create.
The problem is that it's designed to last forever.
And that is the problem that we are facing,
is all of this material
is just continuously building up
and becoming an even bigger problem
for the environment.
[Clay] Nowadays, people are looking for
alternatives to petroleum
because petroleum is getting harder to come by.
You know, you have to go and start fracking.
And then there's implications
around that mechanism of extracting oil
as well as all the oil that you bring out
of the ground is going to be probably turned into
carbon dioxide by the end of its life
whether it's burned or processed
or digested somehow.
The more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,
the more blanketing of the Earth you have.
The more sunlight that gets trapped on the Earth,
the higher the temperature gets.
If you do this in a different way
so, for instance, in the case of bioplastic,
you can make it from corn, you can make it
from sugar cane, you can make it from sugar.
And that sugar came from a plant,
and that plant used photosynthesis
to absorb carbon dioxide from the air.
And the difference between a petroleum based plastic
and a bioplastic is that
the carbon came out of the air for the bio-based plastic,
and the carbon came out of the Earth
for the petroleum-based plastic.
If you're doing it from the air
to the air, it's a circular process.
[Cole] Bioplastics are a bio,
or plant-based, derived plastic.
The beauty of bioplastics is it can actually replace
a lot of the petroleum plastics
that we have now, and there is a proper
end of life for that material which is the compost pile.
Whereas petroleum plastics, the end of life is
the recycling stream which we know isn't working.
It's actually being incinerated or landfilled.
Bioplastics is a word that is used
to describe two different terms.
I call it a term described
for beginning of life and a term for end of life.
[Rob] Let's break this down into simple terms.
Most plastics today are made
out of fossil fuels,
coal, natural gas or petroleum oil.
These are identified by the labels
PE, PP or PET.
They are considered non-biodegradable.
But plastics can also be bio-based,
meaning, they can be manufactured
from a plant source such as corn,
hemp, olive oil, sugarcane, among others.
And they can either be
non-biodegradable or biodegradable.
What we are most interested in are bioplastics
which are bio-based and biodegradable.
Common bioplastics in this quadrant
are identified with the labels
PLA, PHA and PBS.
These are some of the bioplastics
which may lead us to the solution
to the plastic crisis.
♪
PHA stands for polyhydroxy canoids.
PLA is the most commercialized
bioplastic out there currently and that's polylactic acid.
PHA is actually certified home compostable,
industrially compostable.
It's much more compostable than the others.
PLA is not certified marine degradable,
meaning, if it falls in the ocean,
it lasts a significant amount of time,
it doesn't break down naturally.
PHA is certified marine degradable.
It's actually been studied
as a fish food additive for aquaculture.
I mean, even just to prove a point,
Dane and I have eaten some... [both chuckle]
...like any good founders.
Uh, but it's entirely nontoxic.
It's basically just a microbe fat molecule.
Most of those materials under the PHA umbrella,
there's thousands of variations,
but anything under that PHA umbrella is
a true sustainable,
ecofriendly bioplastic.
And it can be done with coffee grounds,
sugarcane, corn, hemp, anything in between.
Instead of buying sugar or growing food crops,
we decided we would use food waste.
♪
We're living in San Diego
and we're body surfing every single day
and getting hit in the face with plastic pollution
that we decided to actually start to apply some of
these principles and see what we could do with it.
So, we decided to put our engineering degrees
to work to try and solve
one of these great issues, which led us to this solution
and then this company.
[Rob] Full Cycle Bioplastics has partnered
with one of the world's largest tech companies,
in Silicon Valley, California, to produce PHA,
and since has proven PHA to be a low-cost,
low-carbon alternative to fossil fuel plastics.
This is Full Cycle Bioplastics
where we actually take in food waste from the cafes.
They have a lot of cafes
throughout the peninsula here in the Bay Area.
We sort of did an inventory
of all of the ways PHA had failed.
PHA had gone through a whole industrial life
when sugar was cheap.
[Jeff] PHA was first discovered back in 1925
in a biological wastewater treatment plant.
In the 1980s,
people started to actually commercialize it,
so they were using sugar as a feed stock.
Now, the price of sugar went up in the '90s,
which basically killed
the generation one producers of PHA.
So, PHA became off the market.
It was prohibitively expensive and it was way more expensive
than what it was trying to replace,
which is petroleum plastics.
So, we looked at ways of sort of using
one problem to solve another.
Most PHA, PHP bioplastics, on average,
depending on the thickness of the wall
of the physical product that is produced,
will break down in six months or less in composting
in your backyard or commercial settings.
If it were to land on the side of the road
or the ocean, you're looking at probably 12 to 18 months,
depending on the thickness of the material.
That's the beauty of the material is
without a long-term outside influence,
microbes, solar degradation,
um, the heat from the compost,
salt water, using it as a toothbrush
and getting it wet, using it for a few minutes
and it dries off and then you use it again,
won't have any effect on the plastic itself.
[Janice] And is it harder depending on the mix of food?
Like if you have a bunch of burgers compared to apples,
is that going to-- you got to change
your formula a little bit?
Yeah, absolutely.
So, not all food waste is created equally.
And the best way I can describe it is
anything that's going to make me really fat
is going to make my bacteria really fat,
which is really what PHA is,
PHA is a bacteria fat molecule.
It's an energy storage molecule, effectively.
So, if what-- your feedstock is 99% water,
you're not going to make much PHA out of that.
It's just mostly water.
But if it's pure bread waste,
for example, yeah, it's got tons of carbon in it.
It's really useful.
This is our onsite lab.
[Janice] So what is this?
This is just PHA that's been extracted
and melted down into this.
So showing it could be like a film.
Yeah, exactly.
Wow.
-[Janice] It's pretty cool. -Yeah.
This is a--
a-- a case for glasses, right?
And if you can make something injection moulded
like this big with how many--
is this maybe two millimeters thickness,
and you can, on the other end of the spectrum,
you can make a whole chair
out of one shot, then anything in between
will likely also be possible, right?
This is an example of a PHA fork.
And after you're done with it, it can home-compost
within a month, and it can be benign,
once we're finished with the development of it,
in a marine environment.
There needs to be a change in perception of the consumer
to say, "I don't need a fork to eat my salad
that's going to last 500 years."
Just have to be very careful when we say
bioplastics, we need to have better clarity
on what bioplastics are we referring to.
This might sound a little bit contradictory,
but something can be biodegradable
and at the same time toxic.
And this is, of course, not what we want.
♪
We're doing a study on oxo-degradable plastics.
Or, "degradable," let's say. [chuckles]
Oxo-biodegradable plastics,
probably the worst idea
that has ever come out from plastics.
It is traditional virgin polypropylene primarily
or any other type of one through six petroleum plastic
where they add special additives to it to allow it
to break down faster into micro plastics,
but only in specific landfill conditions.
And this type of plastic has actually been banned
by the European Union.
As scientists we were very confused about
what we are buying, um, but, yeah--
It's really bad when the scientists are confused.
[Lisa] So, a colleague of mine worked on extracts
of plastics they extracted
with solvents, all the chemicals
from both bioplastics
and also from conventional ones,
and then tested them on small plates
of cell organisms to see whether they are toxic.
One of the major finding was that from a toxicological
perspective bio-based and biodegradable materials
are not better than conventional plastics.
67% contained chemicals
that are toxic in vitro.
And another finding was that they contained
a really enlarged number and wide variety of chemicals.
One single product can contain several hundred
or thousands of chemicals.
[Cole] That is the problem for the average consumer.
There is so much misinformation or green washing
that is out there it's hard for them
to actually understand,
"What do I do with this product?
Is it eco-friendly or sustainable
as they say it is?"
The problem with those bio-composites
is they can say, "Oh yeah, we're using,
um, hemp for our plastic."
And it's actually maybe 10% hemp or 20% hemp,
or corn, or sugarcane, for example.
The consumer is not going to know that,
they're not going to do the research
either, unfortunately.
[Ramani] You cannot make general claims
on biodegradability
because unfortunately life is not so simple.
♪
When did you start studying microplastics?
I started lecturing on microplastics
and they didn't-- weren't called microplastics then
in about 1992.
So I've been exposed to plastic issues
for a really long time.
[Janice] That's a really long time.
That's when phthalates were a big deal.
They're still the most common contaminant in the water.
They're plasticizers,
they're probably known as plasticizers.
Yeah, they give different plastics
different properties, flexibility,
rigidity, um, color, stability.
Just different chemicals for different things.
But they tend to be very toxic.
[Janice] You're able to pull out and see
if there's microplastics in these?
Yes.
[Janice] If they're there.
[Janice] Right, okay, and are you--
[Greg speaking]
[Janice speaking]
Usually, you want to blend these materials
with other types of materials
in order to improve its material properties,
the stiffness, the tensile strength, and so on.
That way it can be used for industrial applications
such as plastic utensils,
and even medical devices.
[Rob] Almost 90% of polymer plasticizers,
commonly called phthalates, are used in plastic.
Phthalates have been found in most plastic containers,
water bottles, and many medications.
Substantial concerns have been expressed over their safety
and now have been classified
as potential endocrine disruptors.
BPA is obviously a big one.
It's not removed
from all types of plastic either.
It is mainly removed
from number one and number two.
The FDA has only banned
BPA in baby bottles.
It can be used anywhere else.
There's something like 40 different variants
of BPA that are being used
in products that are labeled BPA free.
But they're still toxic because they share
the toxicity characteristics
with bisphenol A.
[Rob] Endocrine disrupting chemicals
are found in many plastics.
One example of these are phthalates.
They have the ability to enter the bloodstream
and disrupt the sexual development in infants,
and impairment of fertility in adults.
Phthalates cause these and other effects
by suppressing the activity of male hormones
during the development of the fetus.
Research has linked exposure to phthalates,
to diabetes, breast cancer, obesity,
including child neurodevelopment,
among other disorders and cancers.
What's happening isn't that you have the wrong gene...
it's that the gene is misbehaving,
-which could be from-- -Endocrine disruption.
♪
[Janice] Ever since I saw your Ted Talk,
I-- I'm like, "I don't want the receipt."
Something as banal
as thermal paper receipts, which we handle every day
when we grab the receipt
at the gas station or at the ATM,
those are coated in dust with BPA.
And every time you handle one, it's transferred to your skin
and it penetrates and gets into your bloodstream.
I was thinking, "Gosh, I-- I'm really concerned about
having four daughters with the proliferation
of these chemicals in our bodies
and how it's actually growing more so in their life than me,
who was born in the '80s, um--"
It is-- it is growing worse.
[Rob] Professor Pete Myers was part of a team
that studied the chemical commonly used in plastics, BPA.
Thanks to Dr. Myers and his team,
BPA free plastics are labeled.
One of the chemicals that came out of the 1980s
to replace BPA was called BPS,
even though almost nothing
was known about the replacement's toxicity.
I'm curious. I'm drinking out of a metal water bottle.
Are there any toxins or chemicals
in there that I should be concerned about?
Well, it's hard to say because this is made in China.
Um, they have different rules.
It also says it's BPA free, but we know
that things that are labeled BPA free, in fact--
probably are BPA free
but they have another bisphenol,
BPS, BPF, BP whatever.
And we found that it was just as bad as BPA.
After testing BPS, Dr. Meyer's team found
BPS to be just as bad as BPA.
However, it has never been further tested
by the FDA or other approving regulators.
Many products, including aluminum water bottles,
have a plastic coating which lines the inside.
Because aluminum reacts to acidity,
they must have a plastic liner.
This liner may contain toxic chemicals.
Stainless steel containers are a much better option.
So why has the world not...
embraced and spread the knowledge enough
that we've gotten rid of BPS?
I don't know, because we've been shouting
about this for a long time.
There's a whole field in the--
in the area I work in called regrettable substitutes.
It chemically does what the chemical engineer needs it
to do, but there's nothing known
about the toxicity, and it's assumed it's safe.
[announcer] Petrochemicals in modern meds
have transformed our lives.
We enjoy a standard of health never dreamed of.
Most of our preventive and curative drugs have
petrochemical ingredients.
But what we know now, firmly based on
animal experiments, is that type two diabetes
and obesity can be caused
by endocrine disrupting compounds.
It's-- it may sound unlikely,
but I can show you photographs
of a morbidly obese mouse...
compared to the control mouse,
in which the only difference
is that that morbidly obese mouse was exposed
to a part per billion, a really small amount,
of an endocrine disrupting compound
just after it was born.
And it grew up to be morbidly obese,
even though it ate the same amount
and it moved the same amount as the control mouse.
[Cole] There are other chemicals,
and we're starting to find more
and more of them, just like DET,
we thought it was a good thing
at one point in time, and it's not.
When people talk about,
um, toxic chemicals and plastics,
um, first of all, they'll tell you that...
[sighs]
...polymers, the major component
of plastics, they are too large to fit into the...
the proteins and the enzymes and the mechanics of your body,
and they'll generally just pass through your body.
However, the additives are...
more capable of getting into
the molecular machinery of your body.
♪
So, in addition to the monomer
and the additives, there are what are called
non-intentionally added substances,
NIAS, what are those?
When you make plastic you have a chemical source
never pure, particularly in cheaper plastics,
and the impurities interact with the monomer,
they interact with the additives
to make chemicals no one knows about.
We don't even know of all the NIAS...
substances that are in plastics.
And that's--
they are really challenging for their risk assessment
or it makes it impossible.
Like, you can't just take one chemical
and analyze the risks, on one hand,
because it's just too many chemicals,
and on the other hand, you have a lot of
different chemicals you don't know.
So, there you've got NIAS
as the third layer.
Then, particularly in the marine environment,
those pieces of plastics are rolling around
on the surface and it turns out there's a thin layer of lipids
over most of the surface of the oceans.
So, there's all these different mixtures
of chemicals that wind up in the plastics
that people are trying to recycle.
[Cole] Reclaimed ocean plastics is a great marketing idea.
Uh, the downside to reclaimed ocean plastic is
it is very labor-intensive
and chemically intensive to take
that already degraded plastic out of the ocean
and turning it into a usable product.
And they'll take maybe a good plastic
and they'll take another plastic
and they'll combine the two, and when you combine
a good plastic and a toxic plastic,
the result is a toxic plastic.
In Dante's Inferno,
the eighth and the ninth layers
are Fraud and Treachery.
And there's fraud and treachery in abundance
in the regulation and use of plastics.
They've looked at honey, they've looked at soda,
they've looked at water, they've looked at beer.
It doesn't matter what we're wrapping in plastic
if you're packaging it in plastic,
all of these studies have shown that it has plastic in it.
♪
Our lab was the first lab to do a global bottled water
assessment looking at plastic that could be leached
or make its way into bottled water.
93% were shown to have micro plastic
contamination, 100% of the brands.
And in fact, we had one bottle of Nestle Pure Life
where we found over 10,000 pieces
of plastic in that one bottle.
It's the act of opening the bottle
when you have plastic rubbing on plastic.
So when you open that bottle,
just that action could be contributing
a lot of the micro plastic
into the bottle of water itself.
You shouldn't have a water bottle sitting
in your car on a hot summer day on your dash
because it'll actually inject those chemicals
into the water itself.
And the same thing happens as it degrades.
I mean, it is a petrochemical, so it actually--
not only does it fragment,
it can leach chemicals into its environment
as it breaks down.
The water-- CamelBak that he uses to drink out of,
because you got to stay hydrated,
that's the most toxic of all the plastics.
-[Janice gasping] Really? -[Greg] You can taste those.
-[Janice] Yeah, that's right. -If you can taste it,
you know it's biologically active.
[Janice] That is so interesting because you're right.
That's not just one compound you're tasting,
it's a whole bunch.
So I should throw my CamelBak in the trash can?
-[Tom] I still use mine. -[scientists laughing]
But-- so, I mean, really, the safest thing to drink
-out of is glass, I guess. -[Dan] Yeah.
[Janice speaking]
♪
In the PHA resins that we make,
we don't use any phthalates, we don't use additives
that come from non-renewable sources.
♪
My wife and I started a biopolymer company
called Danimer Scientific.
We started that at our kitchen table,
you know, working nights with a computer,
trying to figure out how to make that all come about.
Initially, we were working with PLAs because at the time,
PLA was the only biopolymer that was available
in anything really close to commercial quantities.
So, in the early days of Danimer, we partnered
with Green Mountain Coffee and International Paper
to produce the world's
first compostable coffee cup.
In that journey of trying to take
a biopolymer that wasn't well-suited
for a broad array of applications,
we, you know, began to learn about PHA.
And we learned that PHA was
just an incredible material.
If you only had one biopolymer,
PHA would be a really good one to have.
The nice peach milkshake looking stuff,
that's the PHA being made in there.
So, that's what it looks like inside the big vessel.
If you think of this as the miniature version,
this is what's happening out there
in the production facility, just at larger scale.
We use plant-based oils
as our feedstock for PHAs.
Olive oils and canola oils and corn oils,
and all the wonderful things we do with plant-based oils.
And those polymers then go into food service
and food packaging and consumer packaging
and personal care items.
Ultimately, what we want to do is
really bypass the plant-based oil
and just use the CO2 directly from the atmosphere.
We have a laboratory technology now,
and over the next seven to ten years,
we're going to be working to convert
that laboratory technology
into a full-scale commercial technology.
And then we'll be able to be even more sustainable
because we won't have to transport
that waste cooking oil from wherever
it happens to be to our facility.
We'll just be able to turn on a big fan and bring the air
into our facility and use the CO2 directly.
-[fan whirring] -Hey, guys.
Hey, Cartez. How are you doing?
I'm all right.
[machinery whirring]
[Daniel] These machines take the different powders,
and then they're melted and combined and made
into these pellets that we send to the customer.
I'll show you how fast we're running.
We haven't even had time to paint our wall over there.
You know? [laughing]
There are many new materials
that are being developed
that are 100% bio-based.
They're completely nontoxic.
They're natural materials,
and you don't have to rely on
those older technologies.
So, in all of our materials,
we avoid, matter of fact, we don't let
any of those types of materials even come into our facility,
and it's just not necessary to use those.
If you wanted to make a paper cup, the--
you know, the paper board has to be
coated with a polymer lining
to make it waterproof or grease proof.
Um, and so in this particular case,
we supply a little bit different form.
It looks like, you know, just almost like house paint.
This is a fiber that was made from our PHAs,
and it's like a cotton,
-it's like a soft cotton. -[Janice] Oh, my gosh!
[Daniel] And that will be used
in both textile applications
and also non-woven applications.
So, an example of a non-woven application
would be like a face mask,
or a baby wipe or a baby diaper.
There are a number of other biopolymers out there.
One that's very exciting is PEF.
PEF is a great material
for beverage bottles.
♪ They got the fracking and the cracking ♪
♪ In your hands
♪ They got the whole world
♪ In their hands
[Rob] The news isn't anything new.
The constant campaigns by Greenpeace
about the beverage corporation, Coca-Cola.
As the numbers continue to show,
the company's plastic bottles
are one of the top polluters in our oceans.
Hi, everybody.
This is David Pinsky with Greenpeace out here
in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
We need to see companies like Coca-Cola
taking responsibility for this plastics crisis.
One of the first meetings we had
with the Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta,
the CEO of Coke saw this bottle
and said, "Look, this is great.
This is fully plant based. This is what we're looking for.
So, let's make sure we get it on the market
in two, three years' time."
Now, the timelines for bringing a new plastic material
to the market, they are much longer.
You know, this takes typically ten years,
if you're-- if you're doing it really well.
Coke invested in Avantium to actually give us the capital
to develop this new technology and to build our plant.
[all applauding]
♪
[Rob] Avantium was originally created
in February 2000 as a spinoff from Shell Oil.
As one of the early-formed biotech companies emerging
in the world, scientists from Avantium
discovered a new form
of bio-friendly polymer, PEF.
We are planning to build
a 5,000 ton plant
in the north of the Netherlands,
which will be the first plant in the world to produce this.
And that will enable PEF, which is this material,
to come to the market.
So, this is a PEF bottle.
It-- it completely looks like PET.
Uh, it's PEF, and it has
much better properties.
We've been looking at all kinds of partners
in the plastic supply chain to make it.
They include the Coca-Cola Company.
They include Danone from France.
But also Carlsberg in Denmark, from the beer side.
If you have carbonated soft drink or beer,
you don't want the CO2
to migrate out through the bottle.
And-- and they're also--
the PEF is-- is much better.
[Tom A] It has all the performance characteristics
that make it very suitable for packaging.
It's also going to be used for making fibers for apparel.
So, we use plant-based sugars
in the waste part of the forestry industry.
It's all the branches, all the things
that cannot be used for making wood products.
But if it ends up in nature,
it's going to degrade 100 times faster
than products like PET.
This is a paper bottle.
What is interesting about a paper bottle
is that if you have ten times better
barrier for oxygen, in principle,
we can make the plastic bottle ten times thinner.
So, if we can compete with a multilayer bottle
with a nylon barrier on price, and we can,
and now we have a material that in many aspects
is much better, so we can also compete on performance.
So, if you look at the need for change
to materials like you see over here,
it's climate change and it is concerns
over plastic waste that is really,
you know, clogging our natural systems.
All the drivers are pointing in this direction,
in renewable plastics that have lower carbon footprints
and that are not as bad for the environment
if they end up in nature,
but that degrade by themselves and that are recyclable.
So, it is going there.
The question is, how fast?
♪
♪ There's a place in the world where I want to be ♪
♪ I imagine it's [indistinct lyrics] ♪
[indistinct lyrics]
So what you see behind us now
in the containers and still on the ship as well,
is the 29,000 kilos of trash
that has been collected during the test phase.
It's really hard to imagine that
all that stuff just used to float out there.
This stuff is so persistent and that's,
of course, precisely the reason
why we have to go and clean it up.
[trash rattling]
[Rob] Plastic fishing nets are one of the biggest problems
with plastic pollution in our oceans.
It's estimated 640,000 tons of fishing gear
gets lost every year.
Called ghost fishing, this problem entangles
and kills hundreds of thousands
of marine animals unintentionally.
Some companies are currently testing
nets made from microalgae.
Other organizations are working on developing
biodegradable materials that will someday be able
to replace traditional plastic nets.
[ocean waves crashing]
♪
We built eight satellites that are in orbit now.
Originally, they were designed
to measure the wind and hurricanes.
But since we've been up there, we can measure
the roughness of the ocean surface,
looking at the behavior of the data,
and it turns out that there's
this very strong correlation between how much microplastic
is in the ocean at any particular place
and how much the wind roughening of the surface is suppressed.
And what we found, which is a new discovery,
is that the concentration of microplastics
in the big gyres, like
the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, varies seasonally.
That wasn't really known or appreciated before.
There's, um, a number of organizations,
and the biggest and most well-known one,
is the Ocean Cleanup people
in the Netherlands, and they have fleets of ships
that go out into the ocean to clean up the microplastics.
And this information tells them
when is the most efficient time
to go out and also where to go.
So, we've been able to zoom in with our measurements
on the mouths of major rivers around the world,
and what we've seen is that some of them have
much, much more outflow than others.
And, in particular, the one
that is much higher concentration outflows
than any of the other rivers is the Yangtze.
The one in the top left is just the average
concentration over an entire year.
So, you don't really see anything.
But then the other three around it
are isolated weeks where we see these huge bursts
of things coming out of the mouth
of the Yangtze into the East China Sea.
That gets sort of evidence-based attribution
where is the plastic coming from.
So, where is all this plastic coming from?
Well, the answer,
it turns out, is rivers.
1,000 rivers are responsible
for roughly 80%
of the world's plastic pollution.
Now, every one of these red dots
is one of the top 1,000 heaviest polluting rivers.
So, this global picture
of where river plastic emissions occur,
it's very useful for the Ocean Cleanup,
but I think it's
really powerful information for everyone.
To truly rid the oceans of plastic,
what we need to do is two things.
One, we need to clean up the legacy pollution, right?
So, the stuff that has been accumulating
for decades and doesn't go away by itself.
But two, we need to close the tap,
which means preventing
more plastic from reaching the oceans in the first place.
[Sherri] When you go to other parts of the world.
And the concept of-- of something
that doesn't decompose,
of something that is truly waste,
and they're doing the same behaviors.
♪
And that was fine a generation ago,
when waste, in this part of the world,
was basically 90% inorganic material.
But now, thanks to rapid economic development,
so much of that waste looks a lot more like
the waste you see back in the US or in Europe.
But investments in infrastructure
haven't kept pace.
You have one of three people in the world
that don't have proper waste management.
The single most effective thing
we can do to address ocean plastics is
to really help the developing world,
fix the gap in waste management
so that if the waste is collected,
that waste is not going to go to the ocean.
It-- it's not technology dependent,
it's just will.
How can we organize as a global community,
international collaboration companies, government,
develop one blueprint of where are
the areas in the world that are leaking
the most plastic to the ocean,
with least waste management, and fix that.
[Sherri] We really need
that infrastructure put into place
in a comprehensive and cohesive way.
That's infrastructure, man, that's infrastructure.
-Yes. -[director laughing]
-Make me the trash star. -[director continues laughing]
We know what we have to do.
We have to prevent this plastic from entering the ocean.
What if we could intercept plastic in rivers
before it reaches the oceans?
What we need is a product,
one integrated system that you can bring anywhere
in the world, installed within days,
and that just works.
That's the missing piece.
That's what we need to close the tap.
And it doesn't exist.
Until...
today.
[dramatic music playing]
[dramatic music stops]
[atmospheric music playing]
The Great Bubble Barrier in itself
is young social enterprise.
And what we're doing is, we are stopping plastic debris
from flowing from our rivers into our oceans.
And we do that
with nothing more than air bubbles.
The rising air bubbles will create
an upwards water flow,
and then together with the natural flow
of the river, it's going to be pushed all to one side
because the rubber hose is usually lying at an angle.
And then all that trash is going to collect at the side
in the collection unit catchment system
and then we can remove it from the water.
The main reason why we're using air bubbles
is because it doesn't interrupt the natural ecosystem
of the river and everything that's going on in the river.
There's a lot of commercial ship traffic,
but also recreational ship traffic.
And it wouldn't really go well
if we started blocking off
all those rivers with physical barriers.
So we had to come up with something that's,
well, non-intrusive in a way that could allow
all the other activity to just go on.
And that's what the bubbles do so beautifully.
They create a barrier for the plastic,
but they allow ships, and wildlife,
and fish to still pass through it freely.
[Anne] So, here in Amsterdam, it's a very unique location
because Amsterdam is really one of the pioneers
that is already focusing with their policy
on plastic pollution in rivers.
And Amsterdam is one of the cities that had that policy
already in place and really pioneers
on that aspect.
[Philip] There's a lot of governments that do want to do
something about it because at the moment,
almost everywhere in the world
no one is really officially responsible
for plastic pollution in the water.
Which is, of course, in a way ridiculous
because, I mean, I think
the whole society agrees that we don't want to have
plastic in our waters and that's bad. [chuckles]
But we're confident it will come and--
We see more and more cities joining.
-Yeah. -So, that's really nice.
So the good thing is, there's not much change
in existing infrastructure
needed to deploy our bubble barrier.
The only real physical object we have to place
in the waterway is the collection unit
to remove the plastic from the water.
But the barrier itself is literally
just a curtain made of small air bubbles.
[upbeat electronica playing]
We all can do something about it,
you know, we can make sure we consume
less plastic and if there's no one to collect it
then there will always be a spill into the environment.
You know, cleaning up the ocean is all fine
and good and, you know,
it's a good thing people are doing it,
but it's not gonna solve this problem.
The right way to solve this problem
is to get people to stop using plastics.
Realistically, we can't just keep running around
in the ocean cleaning up everybody's litter.
♪
"Welcome to the world of PulPac.
PulPac on a mission to replace
single-use plastics globally."
[Linus] We are an RND company.
We are replacing plastics
and helping the industry to do so.
And what we have is a new production method
that actually enables to replace plastics
with fiber alternatives.
So what we do, right, is that we convert it
into a fluff web basically
where we can actually mold it into the shape that we want.
We have these smaller lab cells
where we'd have a single cavity where we can do
iterations and verify a product basically.
Everything is how fast
can we actually get the machinery to move.
The products came out right, stiff and complete.
And if you compare that to plastics,
right, plastics you need to melt,
then form, then cool.
Everything when we do our DMF process, it's instant.
This tray is what you could use
to replace the meat trays in the grocery store?
Sure, absolutely, yeah.
We see them in the grocery store
for packing meat, chicken, fish sometimes, right?
I mean the Styrofoam, the EPS, the expanded polystyrene,
that's a huge problem.
And what we are set out to do
is to really make impact that scales fast.
Why haven't we used fiber for more applications?
And that is due to the conventional way
of molding it, I mean, it's too expensive basically.
I mean, the material is cheaper than plastics
so it doesn't make sense, right?
I mean, the material is cheaper but the production process
is more expensive and that is what we are trying to change.
Plastic is a little bit overqualified its purposes
and that is why we have fiber as an alternative, right?
Fiber as it is in its purest form
is truly sustainable, it's circular, right?
It's a renewable material
and it will degrade in weeks, months in nature.
I mean, that is the material that we have at hand
that really can replace plastics today.
Sustainable forestry is, of course, key here, right?
But in order for us to scale long term,
we need to find other alternatives
of resources as well, like agricultural waste,
straw-based fibers and that sort of stuff.
Fiber can actually be replaced 25 times.
It's circular, it grows, right?
But we need to have a sustainable forestry
and that's key here.
Here we have the material inlets
and it feeds into a mill
where we separate the fibers mechanically.
So we get this ductile, formable web of material.
And then we press the products, so we form the products.
And then we-- we get--
get items like this replacing simply
a plastic lid or paper tubes.
Set aside plastics for a minute.
Look at the statistics of any country.
50% is this biodegradable organic waste.
That's what this is.
What do we do with this today?
In the US and in the developed world,
we bury it in a landfill.
And because we don't want it to leak into the environment,
we line the landfill so that nothing degrades.
So we are creating what I call
uh, a hole in the ground
for preserving garbage, for posterity.
[Cole] The problem with that is nothing really degrades
when it's in an anaerobic environment.
So as they do that, all they're doing is basically
creating a lid on top of that day's trash
and then the next day they do the same thing and over
and over and over again, just creating these layers
and layers of airtight pockets.
They dug up landfills from 30, 40 years ago
and found apples and newspapers and hot dog buns
that were still in good condition
because it was in a sealed environment.
And that's what most landfills here in the US.
There are some active landfills
where they're actually pulling off
the off gas from that landfill,
primarily methane, for energy.
They may run the plant or they may pump it out
to a local facility that uses it
for power for the city.
Um, those are not widely available
here in the US.
And it's really not--
even though they are using the off gas,
we still don't want that same linear economy
of just throwing everything directly into a landfill.
In the emerging economies world,
the developing world,
they don't have landfills per se.
They're all open dumps, most of it.
And so in that case,
all this waste is just dumped
near the oceans or wherever they are.
So it produces methane.
[Cole] Recently, I'd say probably
within the last five years, there's been a big push
towards waste-to-energy
or incineration is basically what it is.
Uh, they are taking in all sorts of trash,
dirty recycling, dirty plastic, throwing it into a giant hopper
or pot and melting it down with intense heat
to either create, you know, recycled plastics
or create a new composite material
out of multiple different types of plastics.
Um, the downside to incineration is that
there's a lot of gases that are involved
and a lot of chemicals that come off
of superheating plastic.
♪
In Copenhagen, Denmark, engineers have taken
the waste-to-energy concept one step further.
♪
Amager Bakke, also known as Copenhill,
is a waste-to-energy plant that also serves
as a sports complex offering
hiking, climbing, and skiing.
The whole project about Copenhill started
when there was a waste-to-energy plant
over there that became too old.
And they need to either renovate it,
using a lot of money to do that,
or build something completely new.
The city's felt like when we build it,
it should be something that is publicly available.
It should be pretty, it should be usable,
so the roof should be used somehow.
Normally you wouldn't go this close
to a waste-to-energy plant
because the smoke coming out is polluting.
-Yeah. -But this is so clean.
There's so many-- Did you take the elevator up?
-[Janice] Yes. -So when you look in,
there's all these pipes.
So, the heat is used to heat up water that goes
to the district heating and used to run
a turbine that produces electricity as well.
And all of these pipes and tubes are used
to, uh, clean the smoke.
That's the real beauty of, uh, of this plant,
is that it's so clean that it's pure steam
that comes out of the chimney.
Oh, and if you look out this direction,
that's a climbing wall, so you have climbers
on the side of the building as well.
-[Janice] Oh, that's awesome. -[Christian] Yeah.
We have the world's largest artificial rock climbing wall.
It's 85 meters high.
[Janice] There's a stigma on waste-to-energy.
And I was wondering if you could tell me
a little bit about that.
There's a lot of opinions about waste-to-energy
and incineration in general.
I think a lot of it origins
from burning of trash that somewhere
it's just a landfill
that you-- you kind of make into a fire.
Other places, they burn it in a facility,
but they don't produce any energy.
And now what we have is like the last generation
of clean energy production,
uh, coming from waste-to-energy.
So it's so clean that we have pure steam
coming out of the smoke.
And people are sitting here enjoying their lunch.
Up here, there's a cafe.
You can get some snacks and Danish beer.
Your kids can hang out here and do some exercise.
And people can walk up here.
You can run because it's completely clean,
what comes out.
Kids coming looking into the waste-to-energy plant,
asking their dad, "What goes on here?
"That's where we burn all the leftover trash.
"And then we get hot water for our shower.
And you can heat the apartment right down there."
And they kind of get the mentality
from five years old, "Okay, that's what we should do."
And then 30 years from now, they will have
their own thoughts about how can we make
the world a better place, because they've been educated
about what's going on.
So an incinerator like this one has
a lot better carbon footprint than a landfill.
Cheers.
[Ramani] The way we handle waste is terrible.
Now compound that with the fact
that almost up to 50% of the plastics
which we manufacture is used for packaging.
It is going to be difficult, if not impossible,
to recover these thin plastic films
which are used for ketchup and other things
on soaps and cosmetics,
whatever have you, from that wastry.
I don't know if you've looked into it
or spoken with anybody,
composting is a very interesting subject.
♪
[Bob] Well, I think the value of compost is-- is primary.
It's the sustainable last chain in the loop.
We like to say eat it, compost it, use it, eat it.
[chuckles] It kind of goes in a circle type thing.
And in order to do that more effectively,
you need to make the plastics there
completely biodegradable.
Composting can be, especially on large scales
like that at sporting events, event centers,
and conference halls
where there's a large amount of people
at one point in time.
There is a system in place
where all that food waste will go.
They can use compostable plates and cutlery and cups
and put that into the food waste as well.
And that is more of a circular economy
as well, because that material that is composted
can then be sold to the farmers.
They can create more plants, which could then create
more plates and cutlery and straws,
which then they can reuse and just continue
that cycle of composting.
[excavator rumbling & beeping]
[Janice] So, if I put my hand
-in there, it would hurt? -[woman] No.
[Bob] No, it's 135 degrees.
It's going to be wet on the outside there.
See-- see that microbial action?
-That's-- -[Janice] The steam!
-[Bob] And the white-- -[Janice] Wow.
It is so warm. It's like a hot spring.
[Bob] So, you have wood and then you have grass leaves,
tree trimmings that'll come in
and we'll compost that.
[Janice] Wow.
[Bob] So you have a football stadium
and they want to send
all their food waste to compost it.
And they have bins where you can put
your food waste but don't put your package.
Well, then if they put it all in there--
or they have compostable packaging
and for us, what happens is we get
all packaging and no food waste.
You don't pay nine bucks for a hot dog and throw it away.
The compostable plastic design
is to create additional diversion
of food waste for a composter.
That's why we do it, and that's why
a lot of composters don't do it.
They haven't chosen to try to deal
with the contamination issue.
The composters want the food
more than they want the packaging.
So if it's food soiled, that food soil,
the grease on that package is no problem for them.
That's actually what they want, right?
It's the food residual material.
[Rob] Large capacity stadiums, such as Beaver Stadium,
located on the campus of Penn State University,
jumped on the bandwagon to give composting a shot.
Beaver Stadium seats over 106,000 people
during their home football games and is
America's second largest seated stadium.
The Penn State University's composting program has been
so successful, they applied the concept
campus-wide and now have compost and recycling bins
present at all of their other arenas,
buildings, classrooms, and even parking lots.
Our Beaver Stadium is one of the largest
football stadiums in the United States.
Our record crowd is 110,000 fans.
That's a lot of hot dogs,
a lot of water bottles and sodas.
And that means that there's a lot of waste
that we should be managing correctly
to keep away from landfill.
And so we have a very comprehensive
recycling program both inside the stadium and out.
And we made that within two years.
Zero waste where nothing was going to landfill.
Instead of sending material to the landfill,
we can send it to our own compost facility
and compost it there.
After it's composted, we take
the landscaping amendment, bring it back
onto campus and spread it out here.
Which means we don't have to buy any composted materials
to help our grass to go greener.
And then we also do materials management
of recyclables that get sent to our local county.
So, a big challenge is can we get a product
that is either compostable or recyclable?
This required us to start to purchase PLA
compostable food service items.
So, for example, if you're a caterer
from the local town and you want to cater
an event on campus,
you're required to use compostable PLA products.
♪
In an effort to add value
to the organic farm that I lived on,
I decided to develop
an organic dairy, got it started,
only to find out that we had to put the milk
in a bottle made from oil.
That was the wrong decision.
So, we actually selected
a brand new material of resin
called PLA,
polylactic acid,
which is sugarcane.
And so we made the first
milk PLA bottle in the world.
It was a pretty big deal for us.
We didn't realize how big a deal it could become.
And proceeded to bottle milk
for five or six years.
One problem, our first customer was Costco.
We quickly learned
we didn't have enough milk
to supply Costco, which was unfortunate.
So, we had to close that down
and shifted to bottled water.
This is what we're producing, guys.
This is a-- this is a preform. This is what we're making.
We're getting ready to go see the machine right now.
It looks like a test tube.
And it will get heated and blown out
into whatever form that you want into a bottle.
So this is what they--
all bottles start out as, as a preform.
We got some preforms coming off right here.
From-- from this it will become this
in the next phase of the process.
[Bill] If we can place the bottles in what we call
a closed loop venue...
then three or four different things
can be done with those empty bottles.
So, that's why we are sticking very closely
to only placing our bottles
in venues where we can collect
90% of the bottles 90% of the time.
[Bruno] By replacing all the different products
by compostable alternatives, for example, in Holland,
there is a discussion going on,
okay, the composting industry
is positive towards accepting compostable coffee cups
on condition that all in the market are compostable.
So that the consumer cannot make a mistake.
Don't leave the possibility open to the consumer
that he can confuse, that he has to make his choice
no, there is only one option, it's only compostable.
[Bob] Plastics don't compost,
no more than they break down in a landfill.
And so how do we manage the food waste stream?
What kind of containers-- that you'll see compostable
packagings promoted and that's great.
We-- we're working on methods to make sure what we get
on the compostable side actually composts.
We aligned ourselves with an organization called
the Compost Manufacturers Alliance, CMA,
so we do field testing, actual field,
not on a laptop, not in a bucket on a desk,
but in the field.
♪
[Susan] In 2007, 2008 I took
the first compostable cutlery that we had
and I took it to a mayor's event so there was the mayor
and so they were taking the spoons
-and stirring their coffee... -[Janice] Yeah.
...and they pull out stubs then I was freaking out
and the mayor was like, "What?"
And so I'm chasing him around.
Well, six years later,
they're making it hot enough where you can put that
into a cup of hot chowder and it's fine.
This is what I love to show people.
This is how we get it wrong.
All the little pieces of plastic
from, you know, not using a compostable bag.
[Bob] That plastic contamination
causes us, and any composter that's doing it,
a lot of challenges and headaches.
We can't get it out, you know?
We do all kinds of techniques, and we've been
very successful in getting it minimized
in our finished product.
But what comes out is-- still we have to deal
with microplastic, small pieces of plastic.
[Susan] So, this is a portion cup
that's clearly plastic.
If we had a compostable version
it wouldn't be a contaminant.
You can see the plastic building up
-in it, right? -[Janice] Look over there.
[Susan] Well, see?
And at some point, it gets so entrained
with plastic that they have to throw away
-all the good organics too. -[Janice] Oh, [indistinct].
In the late '90s there were a lot of claims being made
around bio-based plastics, biodegradable plastics.
There needed to be standards and tests to make sure that
claims were responsible and made sense.
Food is the number one thing going to landfills today.
The fact that it's oftentimes intertwined
with plastic and paper packaging,
that makes it really difficult for composters to recover.
Packaging seems so simple to consumers.
But when you look at a little thin wrapper
around your snack bar, typically it's not one layer
of plastic, there are so many different layers
in there to get the right barrier properties,
food contact safety,
keeping it fresh, all these things.
And to redesign that to be compostable is possible.
And companies are doing it.
But the issue is,
like, they're also still wondering,
like, "Well, is this actually going to work?"
I gotta be honest with you, a large percentage
of what we test doesn't pass.
And that feedback loop has never gotten back
to those manufacturers.
So, what do we do with that?
We get to work with them and talk to them
about the pile science versus the design science.
And hopefully we can move those products
into products that will work in the piles
as well as perform in the field for the consumer.
[excavator rumbling]
♪
We have a team of almost 50 people working on
biodegradability testing and compostability testing
of plastics, of packaging of several applications.
Well, here we are doing
home composting disintegration tests.
So if we-- for example, if one wants to produce
a compostable teabag, there is a plastic fiber.
We check if the plastic will fragment
within a normal duration of composting.
So, home composting, the duration
is set at six months.
Uh, so these are all tests which are running
for six months, and in which we are testing
items to see whether they fragment
and they become crumbly compost
and they disappear.
Standards are being written how to determine
biodegradability in different fields.
So that you have, like, objective,
scientifically based tools
to prove what you want to prove,
which then lead, in the next step,
eventually to certifications.
We'd like to see the composting infrastructure grow
because there's only 500 of those facilities
that'll take food scrap
and we probably need closer to 2000.
[Susan] So, one of the things we got was compostable bags
in our state can only be green and brown.
You'll see brown cutlery, you'll see brown straws.
And that's where we need packaging companies
to work with us to come up with
a simpler system of coloring and marking
and make sure that we're not getting the wrong stuff.
We're seeing much less
remaining "compostable" material
that-- what didn't break down.
That's-- that's not occurring anymore because of--
because we're doing that certification.
[Rhodes] If food waste were a country,
it would be the third largest emitter
of greenhouse gases after the US and China.
If we're really going to get food out of landfills,
it's not going to work
unless we have people understand
what does composting mean?
Is composting always done in a backyard?
What does it mean when you collect it
and send it to a large-scale facility?
And I think that's where I get
really excited when-- as-- big brands are really starting
to investigate and invest in compostable packaging,
they're associated with food, right?
They help divert that food
and the packaging at the same time.
So, you're solving two problems.
♪
They've got whole research and development
packaging divisions at these big companies
and so they're already well equipped to analyze
new polymer types, come up with new structures.
And so I think that's why we're starting to see
this huge peak in increase
where companies are putting a lot of money
into understanding compostable materials,
end of life of their materials,
composting systems,
how they can help fund composting.
If we're going to get composting to work,
it needs to be all these big brands coming together
and agreeing on-- on sort of the ground rules
and figuring out, "Okay, how do we actually get this to work?"
♪
How long do you think it'll take them to do
what we've asked them to do today?
The six miles that we've asked them to do today?
Oh, I imagine we could probably
do it in a couple of hours.
Most of the litter that you pick up
uh, involves some sort of plastic.
The European Commission did-- they did a study,
the ten products which were most visible on beaches,
and they were almost all plastics.
Of course, cigarette filters were number one.
Drinking straws were also in the top five.
Lake Allatoona is
less than two miles from where we're standing
here at Hobgood Park in Cherokee County.
There are coves of this lake where you can...
literally walk on the garbage
and never get your feet wet in the lake.
In 2012, we conducted the first survey
for plastic pollution within the Great Lakes.
And the findings that we had were quite dramatic.
At that time, 75% of what we found
was less than five millimeters in size.
So, microplastics.
A number of those particles
we were able to identify as micro beads coming from
personal care products.
So, face wash, body wash, toothpaste,
and they're just like little balls of plastic.
And so that is, in fact, what led
to the Microbeads Free Water Act
of 2015 signed by President Obama.
They are still being produced, and in some countries,
they are still used.
And so you're washing your face,
it goes down the drain,
they make their way through
wastewater treatment plants and end up deposited
into local bodies of water.
Most often, this is rivers that flow
into lakes that eventually flow into the ocean.
I mean-- and--
You, know, that's a really important point.
Water connects us all to each other.
So, it doesn't matter almost if it's been banned
in the United States, if it's still legal in,
say, Indonesia,
because water flows,
we are all downstream from somewhere.
When you're talking about a water pollution issue,
it doesn't matter where in the world it is.
It's affecting all of us.
More than 95% of the plastics
and also of the nanoplastics is removed from the wastewater
and is ending up in the sewage sludge.
It's good news that they are removed
from the wastewater stream, but that also means
it's accumulated in the sewage sludge.
And then it depends what happens
to the sewage sludge.
In Switzerland, we exclusively burned
the sewage sludge, but looking maybe 20,
30, 40 years ahead, maybe burning sewage sludge
is not the best option.
Other alternative approaches which are used
all around the world, in the States,
but also in part of Europe, in France, in England,
is using the sludge as fertilizer.
So, the plastics that are removed
in a wastewater treatment plant
actually are just being moved.
[Ralf] You spread the sewage sludge
where you have accumulated
all the microplastics on agricultural fields,
that's not what you want.
[Sherri] And being applied to crops
that we are then going to eat.
And some really interesting study is showing
that microplastics are making their way
across root systems and making their way
actually into plants.
[Ralf] The better option is to have measures at the source.
Do not put any microplastics into the wastewater,
the first point, and then you don't have to remove it.
And then you don't have to deal
with the treatment options
for the sewage sludge.
[Sherri] People often ask is,
"Well, how can we clean this out of the water?"
And it's just you can't.
[somber music playing]
These particles are so incredibly small
and there's so much life in water.
You know, I don't think
people really fully appreciate that.
You know, we think of trees as being these
great oxygen generators.
They are. But phytoplankton in the oceans generate
more oxygen than all the trees.
They are the real oxygen generators.
These are organisms that live in the water.
So when you're talking about a particle that is
actually small enough that these phytoplankton eat them,
that's how incredibly small they are.
And they are eating this micro plastic.
There's no doubt about that.
And especially the microfibers are being retained by them,
impacting their ability to survive.
Because if it's impacting the ability of phytoplankton
to survive...
it's impacting our ability.
And there's no doubt that this stuff is making
its way into us.
[somber music fades]
[tranquil music playing]
[Troy] Here at the Cherokee County Recycling Center,
we do single-stream recycling.
Single-stream recycling came about
because the biggest complaint about recycling is
it's such a hassle.
Because you got to separate the different plastics
and the paper and nobody wants seven bins in their house.
So they came up with single-stream recycling.
And what single-stream recycling enables you to do is,
with the exception of glass, everything can go together.
-And when you say everything-- -Your paper,
your plastic, your cardboard, cans.
-[Janice] Okay. -It can all come
-in one container. -[Janice] Okay.
And it all goes into the same container
out here, then it's taken to a separate facility
where it's processed, and that's where it's actually sorted.
The problem with recycling plastics
is that the polymer structure breaks down
after you recycle it a few times.
So after one or two times, maybe three or four,
depending on the type of plastic,
to the point where you can no longer
turn that back into a usable product.
So then what do you do
with all of that material as well, too?
Where does that go?
[upbeat string music playing]
I worked for a recycling program
in Pennsylvania in the '70s.
My daughter was about four years old
and I sent her to daycare
with a T-shirt that said, "I am the future."
Now I have an almost 11-year-old granddaughter
and we still have the same problems.
So, let's fix it.
We've got Graham Packaging right here.
York, Pennsylvania. So what they're doing is
they're taking it back,
we're selling our material to them.
They need it as a feedstock.
People are always going to need milk jugs.
They're washing it, they're pelletizing it
and they're turning it right back into
the same product from which it came.
The truth is, only a fraction of plastics are recycled.
Only 9% have ever been collected to be recycled.
And half of all plastic is designed
to be used only once.
So, while we do need to look at
how are we recycling plastics,
how do we reduce the number of
single-use plastics that we're buying,
and so on and so forth,
we really need to make sure
that what we're manufacturing can be either reused,
recycled or otherwise have
an end of life that is more acceptable
than either waste energy or landfilling.
When you look at consumer packaged goods today,
it's very rare that one of them
isn't looked at to say,
"How can this be more sustainable?
"How can we launch to market a better solution
that has a lighter footprint on the earth?"
[atmospheric music playing]
We founded Preserve back in 1996
to make products that were both lighter on the Earth
and fabulous to use.
And the biggest way we did that
was to use recycled materials.
So there was a lot of recycling going on back in the early '90s,
but the people who are recycling were wondering,
"Where does all this material go?"
There really wasn't evidences
of products made from recycled materials.
What Preserve wanted to do was use these recycled materials
and raise the bar up here
and say, "We're putting it in a toothbrush.
A product that we hope everybody uses
and one that you stick in your mouth.
We've got to be able to make excellent products
out of these recycled materials."
There are companies
that are really big companies,
in this consumer-product space,
that now are looking to make a difference.
Right now we're caught in a world
where we have a shampoo bottle,
a single-use plastic shampoo bottle
to get your shampoo, you know,
from through the supply chain to the market
to your home to use and then poof,
where does it go?
There absolutely is a lot of
great brainstorming around reuse systems.
We have reuse systems with reusable tableware.
There also can be reuse systems as it relates
to the packaging, particularly
of formulation products or bulk food,
where you're actually bringing the package back to the market
to be refilled when you need new product.
And that's a huge way to eliminate massive amounts
of single use plastics
that are currently used today.
[truck rumbling]
We are at a recycling station
in Gothenburg, Sweden where people can bring
all their big stuff
that don't fit into the household bin.
So, you can deposit anything from paint
to metal to bikes here.
-And it's free? -And it's free.
In Sweden we want to make it convenient
and easy to recycle.
So we have these facilities
all around Gothenburg and Sweden.
It seems like Swedish people are really good recyclers
Yeah, we are. And, um, it's--
we know that it's important and it's also driven
by peer pressure.
It's shameful to not recycle.
You shame yourself because you know
that this is important.
So this is something that you should
and could do for the environment.
The infrastructure to recycle all that
is still '70s and '80s infrastructure.
And what we need to do is invest
so that the infrastructure can take all packaging types.
So we need to upgrade not only the mechanical recycling
that we have that's decades old,
but we also need to invest
in what's called advanced recycling.
So, that's chemical recycling.
Chemical recycling can take
those products and break it down into its building blocks
so it can be remade back into new products
whether they're for packaging or for textiles.
[Rob] Chemical or advanced recycling takes
the various layers of plastic and breaks it down
in a way it can be recycled an infinite number of times.
It is therefore possible
to recycle used plastics
that are difficult or even impossible to recycle
with traditional mechanical recycling.
[upbeat electronica playing]
Licella, an advanced recycling plant located
in Sydney, Australia, is pioneering
the next generation of advanced recycling
that uses hot pressurized water.
Licella converts plastic to oil using water
under high temperature and pressure.
Once I've recycled physically a plastic bottle,
a milk bottle, two or three times,
that plastic degrades
where you can no longer physically recycle it.
What we can do, we can chemically recycle it
and convert it back to oil to make new plastics.
And when it comes back again, we can do it all over again.
So it's a true circular economy.
[Rob] Previously, non-recyclable plastics,
including multilayer packaging, can now be recycled.
♪
By turning hard-to-recycle plastics
into a reusable resource, this innovative solution
is helping create a better environment
for future generations.
Another innovator in the recycling space
is a company that has found a way to recycle
the polymers found in clothes.
I don't think most people realize
how much plastic is in our clothing.
There was a really interesting study that came out of UK.
Each individual article of synthetic clothing
was shedding, at a minimum,
15,000 microfibers
for every time it was washed.
And that's one article of clothing.
With textile recycling,
most people think it's already happening.
But in the United States, the reality is
that only 1% of clothing gets recycled
back into new clothing.
And the reason why is because most of the clothes
we wear is blended.
It's mostly polyester and cotton blended together.
Our solution is different because we can take
those poly-cotton blends and break them apart.
With this terry cloth,
you can see it's dark blue,
um, it has that nice feel.
And when it goes into the process,
we chemically break down,
we cut down that polyester molecule
and it goes into the liquid.
And then you're just left
with this beautiful, solid cotton.
-[whispering] Wow. -And you can see
where all the polyester was before.
-Exact same-- -And this is the after.
This is the same material.
-Same material. -Before and after.
Wow.
[Peter] I get asked all the time what to wear,
what is the right answer?
And unfortunately,
there really isn't one right now.
The best thing you can do is wear your clothing longer,
repair it or donate it,
or find somebody who can keep using it.
Or go thrifting.
Uh, but until we have new technologies,
we're going to continue down this path.
There's been a huge push for new solutions.
A lot of it's been natural fibers,
hemp or stronger cottons
or things like that, but they still don't quite have
the same performance characteristics.
There's been some new polymers coming out
that can be biodegradable,
some that come from methane gas.
And so I'm really excited to see what else is out there
because this is such a big problem
that we need all these solutions to scale.
Our solution focuses on recycling polyester
over and over again,
and other great technology startups
are working on filtration systems
in our washing machines in our homes
that can capture those microfibers
so they don't go into our waterways.
♪
[Rob] I'm originally from Michigan.
And I can remember
when Michigan roads
were absolutely horrible
and the biggest piece of litter on Michigan roads,
on the side of the roads were aluminum cans,
and they came up with this great idea
of 8-10 cent can deposit.
So when you buy a six pack of cans,
that six pack of cans
may be $4, but you pay $4.60
because you're also paying ten cents per can.
Well, when you're done drinking those cans,
you take the cans back, you get that $0.60 back.
And it was an incredible motivator
for people not to throw
ten cents out the window,
which is essentially what they were doing.
Not only that, but now you've got folks
who are actually walking the roads
picking up cans because, "Hey,
there's dimes laying all over out here."
Right, so Europe has had a lot of good policies,
one of which we call
the extended producer responsibility.
And that basically means you'll put a fee
on every single type of package.
But that fee goes towards infrastructure
to ensure that it is recyclable over time.
[man] So, you have ¢99 and then there's eight cents...
-[Janice] Fund -[man] Fund on it.
So, you're actually paying $1.07.
But if you bring it back...
you get seven cents times 24,
and put them in there, and get that money back.
[Alison] We see in Europe, Germany has done
a fantastic job, the Netherlands has done
a fantastic job.
Even Japan has done a really good job.
They have more reuse model and we're also looking at that.
[man speaking German]
When you return this in the machine.
[man speaking German]
[woman speaking German]
[machine beeping & whirring]
[man speaking German]
[woman and man speaking German]
[gong crashing and drums pounding]
[Rob] In 2017, China was
the world's largest importer of plastic waste.
In 2018,
China stopped taking most plastics.
This left many countries scrambling
on what to do with it.
Suddenly, the world was faced with a problem
that seemed too big to handle.
As a result, the country's 2018
plastic import volume dropped
99.1%
compared to 2017.
This massive global industry basically ended overnight.
That was a big change to the recycling industry.
What it did was
all of the recycling facilities
that once shipped off those less valuable materials
and made money on them-- and they then
had to say, "What am I going to do with these?"
Most of them had to then say,
"I can't take that material anymore."
[Cole] The city of Greeley, here in Colorado,
closed the recycling facility,
and do not plan to open another one
because it's not making any money.
It was kind of a big deal because up in Greeley,
it's, like, northeastern Colorado.
So the next closest facility is a landfill.
The city of Waleska just recently put out
that they are no longer doing recyclables.
[atmospheric music playing]
Well, I had the idea, this crazy idea,
9th May, 2013, really looking for a solution.
I went looking to see what I could do,
if I could do something, about what was unfolding
in the ocean.
How might we create a platform for the world
where the world's disadvantaged,
the areas where 80%
of land-based debris is entering the ocean?
It should be no surprise
that most of that plastic is entering
from areas that don't have solid waste management.
They throw it in the river, they throw it in the canal,
they throw it outside, they burn it.
They suffer cardiopulmonary disease.
They suffer, you know,
clogged waterways, flooding.
"Okay. It's poverty, well--
okay, there's no solid waste management.
Okay, got it. There's no other alternative
than just throwing-- Oh, hold on a second.
What if there was an alternative?"
You know, I use this, um, a metaphor.
If you were to walk over a field of diamonds...
and you were to see rubies, diamonds,
gold sitting on the ground, and you looked at
it like, "Oh, my goodness, wealth everywhere."
But you wanted to pick them up
and simultaneously like, "Well, hold on a second.
There's nowhere that I can take
diamonds or rubies or gold to,
There's no bank that I can take them to,
there's no store that I could spend them at.
No one would barter with me for them at all.
There's nothing I can do with rubies, gold, and diamonds.
Nothing. Do you pick them up?
No, because they're like rocks.
They're worthless to you."
And diamonds are carbon, same as plastic.
Plastic Bank ultimately is an agreed upon exchange system
that operates around the world
where the bank accepts plastic waste as a currency.
So, now when they look below their feet,
they look at it and go, "Wait.
That's school tuition for my children.
That's the end of poverty.
That's clean water. That's the end of sickness."
We've revealed the material as a currency for the world.
That's what we've done.
We're operating in Haiti,
the Philippines, Indonesia, Brazil, Egypt.
We're about to enter Thailand and Cameroon next year,
Tanzania, Kenya.
We continue to expand globally.
All that material we collect,
we sell to great companies in the world.
They want to use that as a feedstock
of their manufacturing
so they can connect it with a conscious consumer.
We sell to great companies like SC Johnson,
or Henkel or Hugo Boss or...
Gillette, or so many others
that use that material.
You see, we're a solution that provides a platform
for every single person in the world
to not even have to change.
They just have to shift maybe a little bit.
So we're just making it easy for the whole world
to participate in being a part of the solution
and no longer a part of the pollution.
♪
[Cole] The problem that we're facing
is what do we do now
and how do we fix it?
Is there anything more vital
to address than trying to keep
the Earth alive and vibrant?
I don't know anything more important.
I really don't.
[Cole] The climate crisis is already happening.
It-- it's in our face right now.
[Bill] Are we addressing this soon enough?
I know we need to address
the issue now.
[girl] Dear Mother Earth, it has been recently brought
to my attention that my parents
and my grandparents and their friends
have not been taking care of you very well.
Maybe I shouldn't blame them because they didn't know.
Who could have known that my plastic sandwich bag
or fruit cup container could ruin the world?
I have a future ahead of me and someday if I have children
of my own, they too will be using this planet.
I like to make you a promise right now.
I promise to keep your land as clean
as possible but also tell my friends to do the same.
Your Earth is a gift and I've learned
that this is the most valuable gift
I can ever have.
[Janice] So while we're working on the solution part of it--
It's just so complicated.
There's so many brilliant people--
It is complicated. This is a wicked problem.
I'll tell you a story.
My granddaughter was born
two months premature.
She spent the first two months of her life
in a neonatal intensive care unit.
Plastic tubes, plastic bags all around her.
Those plastics saved her life.
I know that. NICUs need plastic.
But I also know that there are downstream hazards
that are created by exposure
to those plastics that we need to solve.
[Cole] Walking into a store and picking up
a bottle of water is convenient and easy.
And we don't necessarily see the entire impact
of that purchase decision either.
There are three key pieces to solving this problem.
One is to rethink.
Do we actually need to use plastic to do that?
Second, we've got to reform
the regulatory process so that it really tells us...
[clicks tongue] ...what's safe and what's not.
But the third thing, and for me the most hopeful,
is we have to redesign plastic.
We can design safer plastics.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about this
and working on this with colleagues, with chemists.
So why not?
It turns out, why not,
it's because the first step
is to test what you have.
As you design something new, you got to test it.
If you don't test it, you don't know.
Okay? It's that simple.
And testing at that stage in the process costs more money.
So, if your goal is to get a product out
as quickly as possible,
you're going to be deterred from doing the testing
that you need to do, even though in the long run,
you're going to save money because you wind up
with a safer product
and you can sell it as a safer product.
And hopefully, the consumers
who want safer products will reward you,
which they are now doing.
[Daniel] Large global corporations
are publishing commitments that they're making
to their environmental performance.
So, you can pick up an annual report
of just about any large global brand owner
and they publicly say, "These are the things
we're going to do," and they put a date on it.
Businesses are and need to
play a key role in reducing
our greenhouse gas emissions
and creating systems within their business
that allows them to be net zero,
or to be carbon negative.
And along with that, is absolutely
finding ways to reduce
the amount of waste
reduce the amount of emissions that they're creating
and transporting their products to market.
Consumers are looking for more sustainable options.
They're asking for sustainable packaging.
So, Disney is removing a lot of their plastic
from their packaging so there's no clear windows
or anything like that on their packaging anymore.
Barilla, the pasta maker, is about to remove
all the little plastic windows from their cardboard boxes
as well, too.
Um, Samsung is doing the same thing.
They're removing plastic from their packaging
so when they send you a new computer the insert
may be made out of the gas
which is a byproduct of the sugarcane industry.
Around 2005 it was very rare to--
for anyone to have ever heard of
a chief sustainability officer
and now every major corporation has one.
So, a lot of these companies are starting to eliminate
plastic as well which means
the fossil fuel industry, again, is having that wall
that they're going to be meeting.
[Daniel] You recognize that there is a global effort
by really large,
global companies that's all being driven
by consumers for better environmental performance.
It's either adapt or die. At this point in time.
[cheerful music playing]
There's British Petroleum
who really doesn't even call themselves
British Petroleum anymore,
you know, they changed to BP.
At-- at one point in time they were saying it means
"Beyond Petroleum," and now they're moving
even further away from that to talk about
how they're going to shift the business
of their company away
from using petroleum-based resources
to using annually renewable resources.
The topic of plastics can be confusing and debatable.
The solutions to the plastic dilemma,
it's not easy.
Scientists agree though that we can't wait
any longer to change.
We can all help, though, by making smart choices
and keeping our environment center-focused.
We all can, individually and collectively,
make the choice today to better our world for the future.
I'm gonna go get that bottle.
♪
Petroleum plastics,
will the technology advance that eventually
bioplastics could get us there?
I hope so.
["Freedom Mile" by Ziv Moran playing]
♪ I got my bags packed, timeline on track ♪
♪ My winter coat stuck in the closet way back ♪
♪ I won't be needing that, I won't be needing that ♪
♪ I'm ready to fly down 65, hit the coastline ♪
♪ In the sunshine I'm going to find my new high ♪
♪ Hit the coastline in the sunshine ♪
♪ Freedom Mile
♪ I'm free
♪ Ooh, ooh, ooh
♪ It's only blue skies on my horizon line ♪
♪ So far from the hurt and the bad times ♪
♪ I'm feeling so alive, I'm feeling so alive ♪
♪ Yeah, yeah
♪ I'm ready to fly down 65
♪ Hit the coastline in the sunshine ♪
♪ Freedom Mile
The most amazing food wrap ever developed.
The Bio-P film.
That's right. It's a biopolymer film.
And it's the film of the future.
It's safe for everyone. Come get yours today.
[whooping and laughing]
[music fades]